A HOME cinema room had long been on my husband’s wish-list when I met him in 2004. Such was his obsession with all-things movie related, the first thing he ever bought me in the early days of our relationship was a DVD player from Tesco  –oh the romance – because I had readily given mine up in a divorce settlement a few years earlier and he simply could not believe I didn’t own one.

It’s fair to say audio-visual equipment has never been a big passion of mine. My priority when we got our first house together was to sell his extensive collection of speakers-on-stands on eBay and to dispose of a highly-veneered Hi-Fi cabinet at the tip. He did manage to hold onto a pair of absurdly large subwoofers that I insisted had to sit on the floor, behind the sofa, where, allegedly the sound was muffled. 😊

Fast-forward 15 years to our current home which we bought primarly because it had a basement flat offering potential to expand the main house’s living space down into the lower floor and maximise our investment. My husband’s cinema room dream was about to be realised, but it was not without its trade offs.

TODAY THE KITCHEN is at the heart of the home but in Victorian times it was well ‘below stairs’ - quite literally in the bigger houses.

In our house, the kitchen was originally in the basement. According to the 1861 Census, the house’s original ownersThomas & Elizabeth Daws had a cook and two servants in domestic service preparing their food and waiting on them hand, foot and finger.

I’m lucky if one of my kids will make me a cup of tea.

It was just over a year ago we picked up the keys to our third and most definitely final fixer-upper in our ‘Forever House’ renovation trilogy ‘The Victorian Forever House - This Time We Mean It.’

Unlike our previous two Forever projects, this 1860s heap had already been updated over the years, but we believed still offered investment potential and - billy bonus - it backed onto the river.