Back-to-brick renovations · Oxford Street, Stoke-on-Trent

Back-to-brick renovation — Oxford Street

A neglected terrace stripped to the brick and rebuilt room by room

Location: Oxford Street, Stoke-on-Trent

A finished room at Oxford Street with fitted sage green wardrobes and dark painted doors

The brief

A neglected terrace needing a full back-to-brick renovation. Floral wallpaper over crumbling plaster, an old gas fire in the chimney breast, ceilings that needed taking down, and a roof needing attention.

The challenge

Almost nothing was salvageable internally, which sounds like bad news and usually isn't. Stripping to the brick means the new plaster goes onto sound substrate, the wiring and plumbing are all new, and nothing gets hidden behind a skim coat to reappear in two years.

The result

Rebuilt room by room, with full-height fitted wardrobes in sage green and dark painted joinery. Drag the slider above — it's the same room.

Before & after

Drag the handle.

Same room, same angle. This is the part that's hard to argue with.

The room finished, with full-height fitted sage green wardrobes and dark painted doors

The same room before work started — dark floral wallpaper, an old gas fire and bare floorboards

What we actually did

Back to brick means back to brick

The strip-out photograph shows the point most people find alarming: ceilings down to the joists, walls back to masonry, the original tiled floor exposed.

It’s the right way to do a house in this condition. Once it’s open you can see the wiring, the joists, the state of the chimney breast and whether the damp is coming from where everyone assumed it was. Every one of those is cheap to fix at that moment and expensive to fix once the plaster is on.

Fitted rather than freestanding

The finished room has full-height wardrobes built into the wall rather than freestanding furniture.

In a terrace with chimney breasts, the alcoves either side are dead space that freestanding wardrobes never quite fit. Building into them gives more storage, keeps the floor clear and makes the room read as bigger than it is — and it costs less than good freestanding furniture.

Outside

Scaffold went up for the roof and the front elevation. Doing the outside at the same time as the inside is more disruptive for a fortnight and considerably cheaper than scaffolding the same house twice.