The Chequers Renovation

29/09/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Part 13
The Groundworks Nobody Sees

After the diggers, demolition and concrete pours, we thought the next stage might start to look a bit more like building. In reality, a huge amount of the next work involved digging holes, climbing into holes, laying things in holes, filling holes back in, and then hoping nobody would ever really need to think about those holes again!

We needed to consider drains, soakaways, water mains, retaining walls, inspection chambers, pipe runs, cables and services.

Not very glamorous, but absolutely essential.

One of the first hidden things we had to deal with was the collapsed manhole cover for a soakaway under the main car park entrance.

Because The Chequers had once had a huge car park, it also had a huge soakaway to deal with all the surface water.

We knew that once the main works started, there would be diggers, grab lorries, delivery vehicles and heavy materials coming and going across the front of the site.
What we did not want was for any of them to discover the soakaway the hard way.
So before we had even properly moved in, we rebuilt the brickwork under the manhole cover and made sure it was safe.

It is difficult to explain quite how big it is until you see someone climbing down a ladder into it. Of course Mark did exactly that!

In fact, Mark climbing down ladders into large underground chambers has become more of a theme on this project than either of us expected.

The drainage was another big part of the hidden work. A lot of it involved working out what existing infrastructure could sensibly be reused and what had reached the point where replacing it was the better option.

Some of the old drainage was ceramic pipework. It had clearly done its job for a very long time, but compared with modern plastic drainage the internal surfaces and joints were much less forgiving. Rough sections, old joints or small changes in level can give debris somewhere to catch, and once that starts happening, blockages become much more likely.

So we spent quite a lot of time examining old runs, checking where they went and deciding what was genuinely fit for purpose.

As with so much of the project, there was a balance.

Reusing something that was perfectly serviceable could save a huge amount of digging, time and money. But there was little point saving an old pipe if we were then going to bury it underneath a newly finished house or garden and spend the next twenty years wondering when it might cause us a problem.

One Sunday morning rather reinforced that point.

We discovered water backing up into the old gents’ toilets inside The Chequers, which clearly required fairly immediate action.

Knowing that, on a weekend, we could be waiting hours even if we managed to find a drainage company willing to come out — assuming anyone came at all — we borrowed some drainage rods from a friend and lifted the manhole covers with some trepidation.

I won’t go into the details here, but suffice to say I do not want to deal with another blockage any time soon.

Luckily, it turned out to be relatively simple. We rodded what we suspect was old debris in the pipe between the house and the main drain in the road, and the blockage subsided.
We then spent quite a while running plenty of water through the system to make sure whatever had been causing the problem had properly cleared.

And just like that, drainage unblocking was added to our steadily growing list of DIY experience!

The new water supply was another major job.

We had a lot of new plumbing and service runs to install, including a new water main running from the front of the house round to the back, where the new air source heat pump and hot water tank are located.

Normally, that would have meant another long trench around the front of the house.
Luckily, while investigating the old services, we found an existing pipe route that was no longer connected to anything. Rather than dig up the whole frontage again, we were able to reuse that old route to carry the new water main through. It was one of those rare moments on the project where something old actually made the new work easier.

After so many discoveries that had created extra work, it was nice to have a win.

There was also the power supply.

The overhead line needed to be buried, which of course meant another trench.

By this point, almost every new improvement seemed to involve digging another hole somewhere!

The retaining wall was another major part of making the site work properly.
It was not just a wall in the garden. It was part of making the new levels work, holding back the ground and allowing the extension area and the old building to sit together properly.
The internal floor had already been poured, then the foundations, and a few days later the external retaining wall followed.

For a while, the whole site seemed to be made of trenches...
Trenches for drains.
Trenches for water.
Trenches for power.
Trenches for services.
Trenches that seemed to cut across other trenches!

Far from making The Chequers look more presentable, we seemed to be making it worse by the day; the grounds looked better suited to trench warfare at times!

There were piles of spoil everywhere, open holes, chalk, mud, pipes, cables and uneven ground wherever you tried to walk, but at least it was dry.

For a while, it genuinely felt as though we were living in a moonscape.

Getting from one side of the site to the other meant constantly negotiating shifting piles of dirt underfoot and trying to remember which route was still passable that day.

We have been incredibly lucky with the weather. Most of this work has happened through a remarkably dry summer, which has meant the dirt has mostly stayed as dirt rather than turning into acres of mud.

We are very conscious that will not last forever.
Fortunately, bit by bit, things are now starting to go back where they belong.
Pipes are being laid, cables are disappearing underground, drains are being connected, trenches are gradually being filled back in.

But there is still plenty to do.

The retaining wall still needs to be faced with something rather prettier than its current industrial concrete. The path around the house needs paving. There are still piles of soil to move and levels to sort out.

And ideally we would like to get quite a lot of that done before the autumn rain arrives and turns the route around the house into a quagmire.

So we haven’t quite escaped the moonscape yet.

But at least we are gradually filling in more holes than we are digging.
And that is the strange thing about groundworks. They are noisy, muddy, expensive, disruptive and absolutely everywhere while they are happening. Then, eventually, most of the evidence disappears underground.

Nobody looking at the finished house will see the soakaways, drainage runs, new water main, buried power cable or most of the plumbing that consumed so much time and effort.

But all of it has to be there before The Chequers can stop being a building site and start functioning properly as a home.

24/09/2026

I've set up a YouTube channel as a home for some of our videos that we've taken during this project. So if you prefer watching rather than reading, you can still join in with us as we renovate this building! The first video is up now.

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We've bought an 18th Century pub that's been lying derelict for 7 y...

17/09/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Part 12
A Garden in the Margins

While most of the attention at The Chequers has been on planning, rubble, concrete, rotten timber and things that may or may not be holding the building up, we have also been working on the garden in the background.

Partly because I love gardens. And partly because I would quite like next year not to involve quite so much ivy, bramble, nettles and mud!

When we moved in, the outside space was still very much an old pub car park, with a lot of overgrown edges and paving bricks. There were brambles, nettles, ivy, broken bits of old fencing, hidden borders and muddy spaces that did not yet feel much like a garden.

But there was also space.
And after years of smaller gardens, that was exciting.

We have been trying to work out how the outside should function once the house is finished. Where we might sit in the evening. Where the children will use the space. Where we can have colour and interest. Where we need privacy. Where the practical things will go. And, also importantly, where we can grow food.

Growing fruit and vegetables has always been part of family life for us. Our parents and grandparents have always grown their own, and now we finally have the space to do the same for our own family.

There is something very appealing about the idea of being able to walk outside and pick something we have grown ourselves.

At the moment, though, that involves quite a lot of imagination!

So in and around the main building work, I have been planning borders, moving plants, buying cheap plug plants, collecting perennials and shrubs, and accepting kind donations from parents and new neighbours.

One of the first more permanent things we have done is plant traditional hedging along the front and rear borders.
We have put in yew and two rows of copper beech, which should eventually give us structure, privacy and colour without feeling too formal.

This was made much easier by a very helpful returned favour. Some landscape gardeners working nearby asked if they could use our driveway to unload materials for their project. We were happy to help, and in return they drove their digger round and dug a large trench for the hedging.

That made planting the yew and copper beech so much easier than it would have been by hand. They even came back afterwards to fill it in and smooth the garden over! Legends.

We have also started planting the steep 45-degree bank at the back of the old car park.
First, we scarified it, which was not quite as straightforward as it sounds on a slope. The arrangement involved me holding the front of the machine steady with a rope while Mark pushed it along the bank.

We must have looked a very odd sight!

It was back-breaking, but it worked.
We have now planted two rows of grape vines and a row of fruit trees. It will be a few years before we get any fruit from them, but at least they are in, starting to establish, and helping the garden feel a bit more like a garden.

More importantly, it means we can start to see the potential of the different spaces, rather than just looking out at rough ground, w**ds and building-site mud.

The less fun ongoing challenge has been the brambles.

Imagine around 300 square metres of brambles, often 3 metres high.... That is a lot of digging, pickaxing, yanking out and burning.

On the upside though we've reclaimed a lot more garden space! These cleared areas have been planted with the new shrubs, small plug plants, sunflowers and kind donations.

I had been bringing the plug plants on in the old conservatory, which, even rotten and falling down, did at least manage to serve as a temporary greenhouse for my baby plants! Quite effectively as it turns out!

I have used w**d matting in some areas to try to tame the brambles and nettles into submission. I know it is not everyone’s favourite approach, but I also know I do not currently have the time or energy to w**d an entire garden every few weeks while living on a building site.
The hope is that, once the plants and shrubs get established, they will start to provide some of their own w**d suppression and the borders will become a bit more self-sustaining.

I have also been trying to understand the site properly.
The soil, the drainage, the aspect, where the sun shines, where the wind comes from, which areas stay damp, and which parts are going to bake in summer. It is one thing to draw a nice garden plan. It is another thing entirely to work out what will actually survive, particularly after a hot summer like the one we have just had.

The garden has also been showing us what was already here.

Over the spring and summer, all sorts of things have appeared. Some welcome. Some less so.

There have been wildflowers that the bees and butterflies seem to love. There were swathes of oxeye daisies too, which I have always wanted, so that felt like a win!

There were also nettles....

Very committed nettles. Very stingy nettles. It is a special treat after working in the garden all day to come back inside to cook dinner and find your ankles and wrists are still tingling.

I am determined to win, though.

And then there are the recurring brambles, which are not giving up easily either. We clear an area, and a few days later new little shoots pop up.

But hidden among the chaos were good things too. I have found and saved several small oak and walnut saplings, probably planted by enthusiastic squirrels. And some self sown young ash saplings. These are being moved into a corner where we hope to create a small, more naturalised woodland area.

We also discovered what seem to be damsons or naturalised plums. They are smaller, with yellow flesh, and they taste incredible. That was one of the nice surprises!

The wildlife has clearly been enjoying the site while the pub was closed. We have had night-time visitors including badger and muntjac, and we have seen bats, moths, butterflies, bees and stag beetles. There were plenty of signs that nature had quietly got on with things while the humans were elsewhere.

So the aim is not really to “bring wildlife back”.
It is already here.
The aim is to make space for us to live alongside it.

That means more planting, more flowers, more cover, hedgehog gaps, bird boxes and bat roosts. It also means trying not to turn every corner into something too tidy. Which, given the current state of the site, is not an immediate risk!
And in any case, I haven’t got time for that.

The garden is going to take years. We know that. It will not suddenly appear fully formed once the builders leave. There will be mistakes, failed plants, things in the wrong place, and probably several areas where the brambles attempt a comeback.
But it feels good to be starting.

After months of dust, concrete, rubble and structural surprises, there is something very grounding about planting something and hoping it comes back next spring.

The house is still a building site.
But slowly, around the edges, the garden is starting to grow as well.

06/09/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Part 11
Making It Level

After months of waiting, chasing, planning, propping things up, investigating and generally wondering whether we would ever be able to properly start, the diggers finally rolled onto site.

This felt like a big moment…a “Right, this is really happening now!” moment.

The first job was to remove the old conservatory at the back of the building. It had definitely reached the end of its useful life, and taking it down was not quite as simple as gently lifting out a few panes of glass....The frames were rotten, and the panes of safety glass came out in huge sheets. Some of them felt alarmingly like guillotines waiting for gravity to make a decision.

So before anything else could happen, it had to be made safe, stripped out, bagged up and taken to the tip.

Bags of safety glass are heavy! To save costs and time, Mark and I had decided to do a lot of the ordering, collecting and waste disposal ourselves throughout the project. An added bonus is that neither of us has needed a gym membership recently. I’m also now on first name terms with the team at our local tip!

Then the groundworks team discovered what was underneath the conservatory.

It had been sitting on concrete foundations around 60cm thick, with two layers of steel rebar. This seemed like fairly extreme engineering for a timber-framed conservatory!

The 3-tonne digger was not big enough to break through it, so a bigger digger had to be hired.

Of course it did.

There was also the small matter of the old water main spur.
This was discovered in the traditional way: by the digger accidentally knocking the end cap off!

Cue a slightly frantic scramble to find something to plug it with before it filled the foundation channels, which turned out to be an old broom handle.

Why there was a capped-off water main spur around the back of the house, we may never know. Perhaps it was future-proofing from one of the many previous extensions or refurbishments. Perhaps someone once had a plan that was never finished.
Either way, it was another reminder that building work at The Chequers rarely follows a straight line.

Then came the digging.

Tons and tons of soil, rubble, chalk and flint came out. The spoil went onto what had by then become “the mound”, and the cleaner soil went down to the other end of the garden, where Henry has already found a temporary use for it as a personal bike jump.

The hot weather started at about the same time, which made everything feel dustier, heavier, and much more of an endurance event.

For a while, the back of the house looked like a massive crater.
But it was also the first time we could really see how the extension was going to sit against the old building. Until then, it had all just been lines on drawings and conversations about levels. Once the earth had been scraped away, the shape of it started to make much more sense.

Inside the old building, the floors also had to come out.

Some areas had old tiles and layers of rough concrete or mortar. In other places, there was very little between the floor finish and the earth underneath. It was another reminder that this building had grown and changed over a long period of time, and not always in a way that made sense for a modern home.

If we wanted the house to be warmer, drier and more energy efficient, we needed a proper base.

That meant digging down, taking out the old floor coverings, and creating a stable concrete plinth so we could add insulation and underfloor heating before finishing the main building with traditional tiles.

Under the old bar area, beneath two layers of tiles and rough cement, we discovered five layers of bricks backfilling a huge hole.
It was slightly worrying when we first uncovered them, because they seemed to go down and down. For a moment we wondered whether they were hiding something underneath.

A forgotten b**r cellar would have been exciting!

Sadly, there was nothing quite that interesting. Or perhaps fortunately. We have had plenty of surprises from this building already, and I don’t think we are done yet!

From what we could work out, when the original ground floor extension was added, rather than digging trench foundations just for the walls, the whole area had been dug out and backfilled with bricks.
So that became another area where we had to stop, think, and come up with a plan to make it stable, level and suitable for the next stage of the build.

The internal floor and foundations for the walls were poured first.

Three days later, the main plinth and external walkway was poured.

Three days after that, the external retaining wall followed.

It was a relief to finally see major physical progress being made. The kind of progress that would start us on the road to building the extension and living in our new house.

Admittedly we were now surrounded by mountains of mud, chalk, flint, concrete and a layer of dust over the whole site, but it was progress!
The old house and the new extension area were finally starting to come together. One step closer to being a home.

01/09/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Part 10
Permission, Eventually

Planning permission is one of those milestones that sounds as though it should come with a big satisfying celebration.
In reality, by the time ours finally came through, I think we mainly just exhaled.

By that point we had already moved onto site, survived the first few months in the caravan, peeled back enough layers to understand the building a little better, found some fairly alarming structural issues, and received listed building consent.

But full planning permission had been dragging on and on in the background.

It turns out that applying for change of use to a derelict Grade II listed former pub in a Green belt is not for the faint-hearted.

Mark had spent months preparing documents, reports, drawings, statements, revisions and responses. We had engaged an architect to help guide us through the process, consulted conservation officers, involved structural engineers, gone through pre-planning in the hope it would make the application smoother, had bat surveys and ecology reports carried out, and calculated things like biodiversity net gain, carbon offset and sustainability figures.

We had researched similar conversions and learnt a great deal about historic buildings, renovation techniques, modern energy targets, and how best to adapt old buildings to make them more efficient. We also spent a lot of time checking that our plans fitted with the Cookham Village Design Statement, the local neighbourhood plan, and the character of the surrounding area.

By the end, our application had 54 associated documents on the planning portal.

We have learnt a lot about the planning process along the way. Mainly that it is not always easy to understand what stage you are actually at, that there are not always fixed deadlines for the next step, and that some parts which sound straightforward on paper are anything but straightforward in practice.

We also found ourselves doing a lot of our own research, trying to understand the process, work through what information was being asked for, and make sense of the gaps when the planning websites were not especially clear.

That became one of the themes of the whole process. Decision deadlines came and went. Questions appeared late. Clarifications were answered quickly. Then we waited again. And chased again. And escalated again.

The final hurdle was the Section 106 agreement.

This was the legal agreement needed before the decision notice could be issued. By early June, it had been agreed, signed and physically delivered to the council. Our solicitor even drove it round to the council offices herself.

We understood it then needed to be logged, published for the required period, and then the planning officer could finalise the report and issue the decision notice.

So we waited.

A few days passed and nothing appeared on the planning portal.
We asked whether it had been received.

Silence.
A few more days passed.

Eventually, with help from our councillors, we discovered it had not been logged on the register at all.

Then came a request for another two-week extension.

By that point, we had already had to delay builders, the groundworks team, deliveries of large items and materials, as well as everyone’s expectations more times than I want to think about.
The signed agreement had already been delivered, the funds were ready, we had trades lined up for a mid-June start, and we were already beyond the previous extension date.

So we said no.

An out-of-office reply came back....Which perhaps explained the request for another two weeks.

Our councillors escalated it, and almost immediately the final report appeared.

On 15 June, after months of delays and one last escalation, full planning permission was finally granted.

It was a huge relief.

Not quite a ch*****ne moment. More the feeling of someone finally taking their foot off the brake. We finally had more control over the programme and the timescales ourselves. It felt like a weight had been lifted.

And once permission was in place, things began to change very quickly.

Floors could come out. Foundations could be dug. Drainage and water mains could be run. The extension could move forward. The dormers, windows and doors could all move from drawings and discussions into actual work on site.

Our builders had been incredibly patient. They had been ready, delayed, partly involved, asked to wait, and then asked to wait a bit longer. Once permission came through, there was a definite sense that everyone wanted to get moving.

It was not the beginning of the project. By then, it felt as though we had already lived several chapters.

But 15 June was the point where the brakes finally came off.

And almost immediately, The Chequers became a much more serious building site.

21/08/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Side Story 2
The Sewage Plant

We keep discovering things about The Chequers.
Some are lovely: Old signs, forgotten stable walls, pub bits, old lights hidden under the brambles. Some are less lovely – at least at first impressions...

One of those was a fenced-off area in the corner of the site. It was overgrown and half-buried under soil, brambles and years of rubbish that had been thrown over the fence. All we could really see was a large arched fibreglass dome covering something underneath. Neither of us had ever seen a sewage treatment plant up close before, so at first we were not entirely sure what we were looking at.

It looked as though the cover should just lift off, but the edges had been buried over time. So before we could open it, we had to dig around the whole thing to free them.

As we uncovered the edges and saw how big it was, we began to realise it was not just a small tank or inspection chamber.
It was an old sewage treatment plant.

And it was huge.

About 15ft long, 7ft wide and 9ft deep.

Less like a tank, really, and more like a small underground room.

From what we understand, the old treatment plant dated from the period before mains drainage reached this part of Cookham Dean. A neighbour even has a photograph of it being craned into the hole, and we have heard a few local stories about how unpleasant it could be when it was in use.

When mains sewage was eventually run through Cookham Dean in the early 2000s, many nearby properties connected to it, and it seems The Chequers did too. The old plant was then left behind, fenced off, covered over, and slowly swallowed by ivy, brambles, soil and years of forgotten rubbish.

We opened the lid with some trepidation.

Peering into a long-unused underground sewage plant could have been a very different experience… but luckily, it was largely empty. One small section had water in it, which we suspected was mostly rainwater, and to our great relief, there was no smell.

Unfortunately, while it was mostly empty of anything truly unpleasant, it was still full of machinery. There was an industrial engine, a huge perforated drum, gantries, pipework and a lot of metalwork that clearly was not going to come out by hand.
For a while, we were not quite sure what to do with it.

Then, rather helpfully, a scrap metal dealer happened to be passing. We had a few odd bits of metal lying around, so we asked if he wanted them. While he was on site, we showed him the pit and asked whether he thought he could remove the machinery.
He said he could crane it out and take it away, but only if we could detach it first.

So Mark headed down into the pit with an angle grinder and started cutting away as much as he could.
There are definitely more glamorous ways to spend a day!

The scrap metal dealer came back with a grab loader, craned the machinery out piece by piece, and took it away.

Once the metalwork was gone, Mark drilled drainage holes in the bottom, and the old sewage plant found a new purpose: rubble storage.

At the time, it looked like a huge amount of space.
It was already nearly full by the time the builders properly arrived on site!

It is amazing how much rubble a building like this can produce. Digging out the downstairs floors, removing layers of old tiles and partition walls, taking off broken roof tiles and installing new drainage all created far more waste than we had expected — and that was before the new foundations were even dug.

From the foundation digging, we have kept the topsoil separately so it can be reused around the garden. Henry has already found a temporary use for some of it as a bike jump in the corner!

The broken concrete, hardcore and rubble, however, have all gone into the old sewage plant, which has saved a lot of trips to the tip. Since the main works began, we have had three grab loads removed from what was originally “the pit” and is now known as “the mound”.

Once the main building work is complete, the plan is to level the area off, reuse some of the old paving bricks from the former car park, and create a smaller, more practical parking area beside the house.

So, as renovation surprises go, the old sewage plant has turned out to be not exactly romantic, but unexpectedly useful!

13/08/2026

Letters from The Chequers – Part 9
The Things Holding It Up

By the time listed building consent came through, we already knew renovating The Chequers wasn’t going to be as simple as just fixing what we could see on the outside.

What we didn’t know yet was how many hidden challenges we were about to face involving things that were supposed to be holding other things up.

The earlier work had been about understanding what we had bought. Full planning permission was still dragging on in the background, because, as we were learning, very little in this process moved forward without a good deal of chasing. But with listed building consent in place, this next stage allowed us to make some real progress on making the old building safer.

Now we could start to make decisions about structure: what could stay, what needed support, and what had slowly and quietly stopped doing its job some time ago.

We had already had one warning sign, mentioned in an earlier post, when brickwork moved above an altered doorway and we had to prop it up quickly. That was the first of many moments we realised Richard, our structural engineer, was going to become a very familiar voice on the phone!

Another one was the chimney at the back of the building.

Our plan had sounded quite straightforward at first. We were going to remove the modern bricks that had been added around it, reveal the old brickwork underneath, and hopefully make a feature of it.
Well, that was the plan...

As we started taking the modern bricks out though, it became fairly obvious why someone had covered it up in the first place.

Underneath, the old bricks were patched, crumbling and no longer doing the job they were supposed to be doing. They were not properly supporting the chimney above. More worryingly, they were also no longer supporting the ceiling joists.

In a few places we could see daylight through the brickwork to the conservatory beyond, which is rarely a reassuring discovery inside a house.

Richard, our structural engineer, was calm about it, which was helpful! Instructions came through to get the builders to quickly form a concrete jacket around the chimney, which would stabilise it and support the weight of the ceiling and chimney stack above.
So the idea of lovely exposed old brickwork disappeared quite quickly.
But so did the worry that the back of the building might fall down, which felt like a reasonable trade!

The windows and doors were another major part of the project.

We had planned very early on to replace all of them. In fact, it was part of the planning conditions that they should be replaced like-for-like, to preserve the style and character of the old building.
The existing windows were timber and had long since stopped doing anything useful towards keeping the weather out. Some had large holes. Some had so many layers of paint that the paint seemed to be doing more work than the wood. Some were painted shut, and others had warped so badly over time that they no longer closed properly.

The years had not been kind to them. The wood was badly rotten in places, and some of the frames had bowed under the weight of the brickwork above.

We also discovered that, in parts of the building, the old heavy timber frames had been doing more than simply holding glass. As can happen in older buildings, they appeared to have been providing some structural support to the masonry above.
That might have worked when the frames were sound. But after hundreds of years, rot, movement and weather had left them in no fit state to carry on doing that job.

So replacing the windows was not just about appearance, warmth or keeping the rain out. It also meant introducing proper modern structural support where the old frames had been doing the work for far too long.

It is amazing how quickly the phrase “replace the windows” can turn into structural propping, concrete lintels and a lot of people looking upwards slightly nervously.

Upstairs had its own list of issues.

The walls were bowed, and once we started investigating properly, we found that some of the old lath and plaster walls were no longer intact. There was dry rot. There was woodworm. Partition walls were hanging from joists that were no longer attached to the roof joists. And there were many timbers that seemed to have given up long before we arrived.

One of the main beams along the back of the house was also bowing, which is the sort of thing that makes you suddenly very interested in the ceiling above you, and not standing under it for too long!

The solution from our ever-patient structural engineer involved strengthening it with something called a flitch beam, which is basically a steel plate sandwiched between timbers. It sounds and looks reassuringly serious, which is good, because the problem also felt fairly serious.

This was not the end of the structural work — not even close — but it was the point where we properly understood that the project had moved from careful investigation into serious repair.

Very little was as simple as it first appeared.

We could not just remove a window without first checking whether it was helping to hold the wall up. We couldn’t simply open up a chimney breast without checking whether the bricks behind it were still doing their job. And we couldn’t take down something that looked damaged without first working out whether it mattered, whether it could be repaired, and whether it was quietly holding something else together.

That has been one of the hardest balances with The Chequers. We want to save as much as we can, but the building also has to be safe.

There is no point preserving something if it is riddled with rot and no longer doing its job. Equally, there is no point ripping things out just because they are old, awkward or inconvenient. We’ve done a lot of investigation into dry rot treatments and woodworm products!

The aim now is to make sure the old building is properly supported, repaired and understood before we ask it to carry another hundred years of family life.

As it turned out, this was only the beginning of the structural work. But it was also the point where we stopped being surprised that every “simple” job seemed to uncover another one behind it.

By then, we were starting to understand that this was fairly standard for The Chequers!