Owner spends £125,000 transforming house into a luxury haven – but wait until you see what it used to look like
A HOMEOWNER spent £125,000 transforming his cluttered house into a luxury haven.
Grant Brotherton's property was overflowing with empty cider and beer bottles, as well as discarded pizza boxes in the living room.
The kitchen was also stacked high with litter which covered the worktops and spilled over into the doorways.
But he transformed it for a family-of-six who moved in last month.
The loft space has been built upwards which turned it from a three-bed into a five-bed home, as well as having a new kitchen and bathrooms installed.
Grant, 39, of Ashington, Northumberland, said: "It was a tough project.
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"The guys who cleared it said it was the worst property that they'd cleared in 34 years of doing it. The whole ground floor had so much rubbish and fluid that it was rotten.
"Also discovering the floors were rotten was something we hadn't budgeted for but it's now an amazing space for the family living there.
"I have done 61 properties now and most of them are colliery houses which I'd like to think are mini palaces done to a high standard.
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";I tell the tenants that I own the bricks and motor but they own the home so I purposely do them with neutral colours so they can choose what they want.
"This is the biggest refurbishment I've done. Normally I get a team who are in and out in eight weeks but this took six months.
"But it's a happy ending now as there's a great family in now and the neighbours are happier as it was boarded up for so long."
He said there was a lot of issues with the property and the family that lived there. The neighbour had been trying to sell her house for five years but couldn't because of the next-door property.
Grant added: "The neighbour had been trying to sell her house for five years but she couldn't because the state of the property next door.
"There was damp coming through the walls and loads of flies because of the smell so she contacted me to see if I would buy it and do it up.
"I bought the property just before Christmas last year and I got a local removal company in. It took them two weeks and 64 trips to the refuse centre just to remove the rubbish.
"I could only guess what was behind the doors as I could only get in once I had the keys but once I did, the smell was horrific.
"The worst thing was the spiders' webs that would get on your face.
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"During the two weeks of clearing it, one of the guys became poorly with Weil's disease which comes from rat urine.
"It had been lived in for the last 25 years up until March last year. The mess was clearly due to poor mental health and lots of alcoholism."
