A Converted Village School

Of the many thousands of people who’ve cycled through the famously picturesque Yorkshire countryside over the years, it would be fair to say that the majority have done so simply to enjoy the view — rather than to end up buying a piece of it. However, when Andrew Yeats and Lucy Nelson passed through 15 years ago on their bikes, they ended up taking an unplanned, and lifechanging, detour through the tiny village of Harton, just a few miles outside the historic city of York.

Set in front of a backdrop of rolling green fields dotted with coppices, the couple’s eyes were both immediately drawn to the Victorian schoolhouse located on the very edge of the hamlet. A single storey, one-room structure with a porch and cloakroom set to the rear, it must have been a fairly unassuming building even in its heyday. Now abandoned for years, the Victorian structure had reached a truly sorry state of neglect: masked in board and swathed in chesthigh nettles, the brickwork was beginning to crumble and clumps of weed were erupting through the cracked asphalt in the surrounding schoolyard.

“Lucy and I felt a magnetic attraction to this place from the first moment,” Andrew recalls. “Plus it fitted the bill on several important practical levels. We’d just returned from living overseas for six years and we didn’t have a lot of money for a home back here, so we were looking for a cheap property that needed work — this place had character and period charm as well.”

“But we were under no illusions as to how poor a state of repair the place was in,” continues Lucy. “A lot of people thought we were mad — and that was without us mentioning that, with no electricity here and all the windows boarded up, we’d returned to view the interior by the light of a couple of candles!”

Despite the fact that the vendor was advertising the old school simply as a plot for redevelopment, the couple were convinced that saving the 75m² Victorian space would not only be the most environmentally sensitive course of action, but also a cheaper option than tearing it down and starting from scratch.

“It also meant we got an incredible amount of support from the residents of our new community, many of who had fond recollections of the school when it was open and were delighted to see it being preserved, whatever the context,” explains Andrew. “In fact, although we were planning to live in a caravan on site during the project, we even got an invite from an enthusiastic neighbour to house-sit for her, rentfree, as she was going away for a while.”

With the village on side and planning permission swiftly granted for the property’s conversion to a family home, Lucy and Andrew felt convinced they’d made the right decision. However, there was still the issue of the sheer scale of the undertaking they were now committed to, as well as some major pragmatic obstacles to overcome, not least of which was their fundamental lack of budget and skilled labour.

Fortunately the couple were not complete novices when it came to homebuilding and design. Andrew was already a qualified architect lecturing at several universities, and the couple’s pioneer spirit had also led them to become involved in one of the nation’s very first ecologically sound community build projects up in the wilds of Scotland some years earlier.

“Back then there was a real frisson of excitement about doing something that challenged conventional wisdom,” explains Andrew, “and that immediately generated a huge sense of camaraderie amongst the participants that helped the project go smoothly and made the experience a pleasure. We felt if we could generate a similar situation to that here then it could be really beneficial to everyone involved, so we basically offered architectural students the chance to come and join us, and trade free labour for invaluable hands-on experience in constructing to design.”

“We’re delighted to say that people did actually take us up on the offer!” Lucy adds with a chuckle. “In fact, we usually had up to a dozen or so volunteers working here at any one time, which was fantastic — even if I did spend a large chunk of my day catering for them all!”

With a free and enthusiastic workforce at their disposal, the internal ceilings were soon stripped out to reveal the pitch of the roof, which had thankfully already been re-tiled and repaired a few years earlier as part of a youth training scheme exercise. The collapsing façade was painstakingly dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick while, inside, all period fittings needing initial removal were just as meticulously catalogued and numbered so they could be returned in situ later in the build.

New internal elements such as the staircase and floating upper floor were fitted, the original windows were repaired and refitted while new Velux windows went into the roof, and the whole building was insulated and dry-lined. Meanwhile, the couple had truly gotten into the swing of carrying out a conversion on a shoestring, sourcing reclaimed doors from a remand home to tie in with originals and even managing to build their own kitchen for £200, including an Aga, which Andrew accepted as payment for his architectural services on another project.

The initial layout of the property was as straightforward and practical as Andrew and Lucy’s approach to renovation, with a new front porch centrally placed in the façade that leads directly to the hall, with a spacious kitchen and living room located either side, and a central staircase leading to a bathroom and three bedrooms upstairs. The old toilet block and cloakroom extending from the rear of the building was converted into the couple’s dining area and a utility room, and by October 1994, almost exactly a year after securing planning consent, the couple’s new home was completed — standing in freshly landscaped grounds where once there had only been ruptured tarmac.

This, however, is only half of the family’s homebuilding story. After nearly a ten-year period of consolidation while living comfortably in the converted school building, the couple decided it was time to embark on phase two of their project, by building a rear extension that would provide a larger living/dining area linked to guest accommodation and a spacious light-filled ground floor studio room that would become the home-based office for their thriving architectural practice.

“It was all a little more straightforward this time around,” explains Andrew, “as we decided it would now be more cost-effective for us to employ skilled trades, such as bricklayers and joiners, to undertake the work while we carried on with our full-time jobs. We had designed the new section to a specification that exceeded the minimum requirements of Building Regulations at the time, so this time around it was rather a thrill to watch the builders arrive every day and turn our plans into reality.”

“The only scary thought is that, all in all, it has taken us more than a decade to get to the point where our home has been completed in the way we always wanted,” concludes Lucy.

Repairing Old Sash Windows

Where good examples exist, it is always better to repair original sash windows than replace them. Dermot Cooke, founder of Sliding Sash Solutions (0800 731 5905 slidingsashsolutions.co.uk), explains: “Sash windows were designed to last hundreds of years, and with regular servicing (every 15-20 years) that’s just what they will do. All 15 of the elements that make up the windows can be repaired or replaced. It’s possible to renovate a window yourself and most good DIY shops and timber merchants sell the parts. When it comes to draught-proofing, the best systems are those hidden within the beading of the windows — some are so discreet they don’t need listed building consent. A sash specialist will be able to advise you. It’s important to invest in a good lock, ideally the restrictor type that prevents the window from opening more than a few inches. These help keep intruders out, and guard against children falling through open windows.”

Further reading:

• How to Repair Period Windows
• A Stone School Conversion in Lancashire
• How to spot the best conversion opportunities