This is what happens when an engineer and a crafts-person buy an old house.
A blog of notes, images and inspiration for the renovation of a 1935 Flemish townhouse. Except for the new roof (and solar panels), new windows (in three phases), and having the gas and electricity approved, we have done and are still doing all the work with our own hands. The house needed total renovation, only some of the outer and some of the inner walls (the rest needed to be covered with insulation), all remaining doors, staircase, some ceilings and the original ground floors remain, but had to be repaired. This includes all electrical wiring, all plumbing including heating for the whole house, changes to the structure (around some windows and doors, removing or creating walls and ceilings), flooring, plastering (and painting!) and adding insulation on all free-standing walls and roofs. Years of work!
We bought our house in 2013. It was built sometime between 1932 and 1935, there is no exact date on the record. The house is built with bricks, partially over a small basement and partly directly over compacted ground. It is a narrow row house with a very narrow driveway which opens into a small court to the back, and a long ribbon-shaped garden behind it.
There is a main building with a footprint of approximately 4.6 metres wide and 8.2 metres deep. This part has three stories, the ground floor, the first floor and the attic. The attic has a small portion with a flat roof, the rest is steeply inclined.
Behind the main building there are two extensions that are only one story high (as per zoning regulation, after a certain amount of metres from the street, buildings can only be one story high). The first is the living room (previously kitchen), which is as wide and 4 metres deep, and it has a flat roof. Further on, the building narrows to a little over three metres (making space for the court on the outside) and continues for nearly 9 metres, and it has a gently inclined roof. This is the best roof for solar panels due to its orientation. This part was divided in three (washroom, bathroom and shed) when we bought the house.
The house has kept many original features, like most of the doors and the terrazzo tile floors, which I fell in love with:
And sadly lost others, like the original wooden windows. This is the façade at time of purchase, with single glass PVC windows, none of which could be opened on the ground floor. Luckily the original main door was painted white (and several other colours underneath!) but preserved:
After the original owner of the house died, his nephew, who inherited it, had it rented out for decades, then sold it to us. Minimal updates were done, the house has never had central heating until we installed it, and only a few metres of electric cable installation supplemented the original 30’s wiring.
There was zero insulation. The attic, which had been a hayloft to store hay for the donkey back in the day, was just some ancient roof tiles over rotted wood, closed from the rest of the house by a thin, ill fitting wooden door at the top of the stairs.
The house had three chimneys with 6 mantle pieces. Originally, 6 coal stoves must have heated the place: in the parlor (still parlor!), dining room (now library), front bedroom (now double bedroom), back bedroom (now bathroom), kitchen (now living room), and washroom (now loo and kitchen).
In what seems like a turn for the worse, during the time the house was rented out it had only two gas stoves, one installed into the parlor mantle and another in the kitchen chimney. they must have used electric heaters for the rest of the house (I hope!) although all heat must have swiftly escaped from… everywhere.
I suppose the house originally had an outhouse. A very poor bathroom had been installed in the 70s or so adjacent the shed, possibly over some of the, by then, washroom, originally probably a stable. I can imagine the night trips to the very cold and humid back of the ground floor for a pee in winter. Probably a chamberpot was preferred! This had to change of course. We brought utilities to the first floor and built our main bathroom in the back bedroom, but the floor had to be reinforced first… read the saga here.
Another main piece of work has been the back building:
