Have you ever built a house or done a major remodel? Do you enjoy This Old House and similar house makeover shows? Do you like a funny book? Then get a copy of Bricking It by Nick Spalding and get ready to relive your shudders and that horrible feeling as the costs creep ever up.
Danny and Haley Daley inherited a derelict farmhouse deep in the Hampshire countryside from their grandmother. (Their parents got cash.) The house had woodworm, critters, critter droppings, mold, sagging walls and floors, an attic floor that’s so rotted Danny falls through, plus the to-be-expected damaged kitchen, bath, subsiding foundations, overgrown shrubbery, and so on. Neither has any money or any home Do-It-Yourself skills.
But… Haley found from the local realtor that the house would sell as-is for about 160,000 pounds or – get this – if renovated for about 600,000 pounds. They could expect to pay about 160,000 pounds for the renovation work (and we who have been through this know that will inevitably increase), but they stand to make over 300,000 pounds when selling the house. That’s a big amount, enough to make anyone reconsider.
They agree to proceed. Bricking It is not This Old House or Rehab Addict in written form and it doesn’t cover all the work hammer nail by hammer nail. Instead it touches on what Danny and Haley do and feel. Some of the vignettes are pretty funny as when Danny burns a bunch of big green weeds in the back corner and gets high on the marijuana smoke; some are gross as when Danny has an internal emergency while up in the rafters; some are fun as when Haley realizes she is more concerned with her house than with the bomb disposal squad that’s removing the WW2 bomb in the yard.
Overall the book does a reasonable job on characterization, both Danny and Haley grow and manage to get out of nasty personal ruts. Danny even discovers that a girl’s beautiful outside doesn’t make up for a boring inside! Spalding does good job on minor characters like Gerard who is filming this as part of a British home improvement show, Fred the contractor and of course Pat The Cow.
It does not capture the horrible feeling one gets when trapped in a sea of construction debris and debt; instead the characters and episodes are positive and the ending is a bit over the top. I didn’t care for the coarse language and potty humor – there is plenty of ordinary humor in any building project that Spalding didn’t need a couple of the potty events – but discovering their grandmother had run a brothel for a few years was priceless.
Overall I’d give this 4 stars. Bricking It is easy to read and rather fun. I didn’t enjoy it enough to look for more by Spalding but this was worth reading if you have a couple spare hours – and are considering whether to remodel or just tear it down and move.
I got a copy of Bricking It for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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