Beechcroft

We are coming up to our 30^th anniversary of moving here. Our house search had taken us all over the district. Centred on Brownhills where I was working we ranged north past Rugeley and east  past Tamworth. We didn’t look to the west at all as this was deeper into the Birmingham conurbation or south where the higher prices around Sutton Coldfield were a barrier.

Strangely I did a lot of preliminary searching on my own as mother still lived at Polesworth and I had opportunity in the evenings. We were coming from a large house with a large garden at Wilmslow and I was anxious to find something similar. The Wilmslow house had been a bargain because of its problems and we had done a lot of upgrading so I wasn’t overly optimistic.

On my first visit to Beechcroft I mentioned my gardening interest and the then resident Cleaver family immediately said they would show the garden first. It was apparent the garden was large and had been a source of a lot of pleasure for them. However it was running down and the Cleavers, who were moderately elderly, were clearly no longer able to keep it up.

Beechcroft was a rather deceptive house. It looked quite large but was in fact quite small being wide but mostly just one room deep. The original had been built as a 3 bedroomed house in the twenties and then extended into the house we inspected. In fact we also inspected a neighbouring house the next weekend when Annette could accompany me but the gently sloping southward aspect of the garden easily persuaded me to favour Beechcroft.

We had a major hiccup in that our surveyor obviously confused his notes and his report stated the house had old fashioned solid walls. I was furious because I knew this wasn’t true. I had learned enough about construction techniques to know it had cavity walls and it must have been one of the first to be built this way. I refused to pay the full surveyors bill. As one of the first things we did was to install cavity wall insulation I felt fully vindicated.

We had sold our previous house, Annette and the children moved in with her parents and I camped in our new empty property. We had the house rewired and renewed the lounge fireplace with a back boiler installed connected through a balancing tank to the main central heating.

The dining and lounge areas had old style suspended floors. I was able to access the underfloor space and put in insulation between the joists. On a hot afternoon this was a sweaty and dusty job. This was before the consolidation of DIY stores and I recall buying the insulation at Great Mills in Brownhills, a name which has disappeared.

We discovered just how small the house was when we moved in. We had difficulty fitting things in particularly outside. I had the intention of keeping part of the garage for a car but that has long since been lost has we have packed the garage. To ease our storage problem I bought a shed . Arthur Cleaver had bequeathed a shed base along with well constructed paths. I learned he had “acquired” a lot of materials during his work.

Not so good was the large lean to greenhouse at the side of the house. This had obviously been magnificent at one time but it was now almost falling down. We patched it up for a while as useful storage but it is now the site of our first major extension. This houses my home office and a small lounge extension.

Rather later we added a large conservatory which has proven immensely useful. We also had a small extension to the master bedroom and incorporated an en suite toilet and shower

While we have preserved the general garden layout we have made a lot of lesser changes. In particular we eliminated the fussy lawns with rose beds from the lower terraces ( the whole garden being a series of shallow terraces, four in all )

Annette was not at all pleased when after about a year I decided to re-join Castrol near Reading. She soon said that the kids were established at their new schools, she had found a job and no way was she moving again so soon. Initially I rented a flat and then bought another house on the outskirts of Oxford. This was fairly convenient for weekend travel; Annette to me or vice versa. The person most disrupted was Frances who moved to Cheney school in Oxford. She was persuaded because it had two comic shops on her school route which had back copies of her favourites such as Deathless.

After I had a stroke we thought of selling Beechcroft. I’m very glad we didn’t.

This is a view of Beechcroft from the rear