Learning Patience From a 400-Year-Old House

The strange limbo of owning a home you can’t yet touch

Patience has never been my strongest point.

It’s something I’ve been learning - slowly, repeatedly - mostly from my children. The deep breaths it takes just to leave the house; dressing one child while the other undoes everything you’ve just done. Negotiating shoes onto the right feet. Trying to convince a three-year-old that it really is time to get out of the bath, now the water is completely cold.

They move through the world at their own pace, unhurried, and entirely indifferent to mine.

And just as I feel like I’m getting better at finding that patience, this house arrives and asks for more.

We got the keys in September and spent the first couple of months getting organised. Surveys, drawings, conversations with architects, builders and specialists - trying to understand what we were actually dealing with and what needed to happen first.

Because the house is Grade II listed, pretty much everything requires consent. Not just structural changes, but things that would normally feel minor - replacing broken guttering, choosing materials, even certain finishes.

By October, we were spending most evenings after the boys were in bed pouring over spreadsheets, plans and schedules, pulling everything together for our Listed Building Consent application.

Just after Christmas, it finally went in.

We wished and hoped we might be the exception and that things might move quickly.

It’s now April, and we’re still waiting.

Building consent, as everyone told us, and as anyone who’s been through it will know - is a slow, incremental process. You wait months for your application to be looked at and then come the questions, more clarifications, adjustments. Then periods of silence and more waiting.

At first, I found this wildly frustrating.

We’re used to things moving, to making things move. This is especially true for Will; he makes a plan and acts on it, multiple voice notes and a few early-morning emails later and you start to see progress. Even if it’s slow, it’s visible, and feeling like you’re (even a little bit) in control is always nice.

But with this, most of the work is happening in the background, and on someone else’s timeline. We’re waiting on people we’ve never met to shape what happens next. And as we’ve discovered, they’re in absolutely no rush.

Maddeningly, there is no way to speed it up.

What a much wiser and more experienced friend pointed out on a recent walk around the house, is that this phase isn’t a separate hurdle to the project - it’s an important part of it. The same system that slows everything down is also the reason houses like this still exist. The level of scrutiny feels excruciating at times, but it forces a different kind of thinking.

You can’t just decide to change something because it’s easier, cheaper or what you want. We’ve been forced to really slow down and understand what’s there first, and make a case for why any change is appropriate.

Our first test of real patience hasn’t been the renovation itself, it’s been owning a house we can’t touch yet.

And so, like with the children, I am learning (again) to adjust my pace and lean out a little. To accept that not everything responds to urgency. That some things require time, care, and a willingness to wait without knowing exactly how it will turn out.

We’re still waiting for final decisions but it feels different now than it did even a few weeks ago.

Less like being stuck, more like being shown - that if we’re going to do this properly, we’ll have to do it patiently.