Our house: Former GP surgery could be ideal tonic!

Dec 15 2009 by Emma Davison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

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WHEN Tony and Angela Bennett were searching for their new home they knew exactly where to look.

The couple were living in Fixby but had their eye on a particular road in the area.

Tony, a structural engineer, said: “We had always loved Dorchester Road. The houses are all individual with different stonework and it was the one road we would go past and say ‘that's where we want to live’.”

The couple were delighted when a house on their dream road did come up for sale, five years ago. But the aged bungalow was far from ideal.

The property had previously been used as a doctor's surgery and there were remnants of a working practice still there.

Says Tony: “We could see where the waiting room had been and the rooms had glass doors.

“There must have been thousands of medical books scattered around the place, which we made sure were removed before we moved in!”

The couple also had the problem that the layout of the house wasn't suited to their needs. But they knew the potential was there for them to create a great family house.

Tony says: “It was not ideal. It was an old bungalow and the way it was laid out wasn't suitable for us; but the potential was there and it came with a decent plot of land so we knew we could make it work.”

The couple were so determined to get it right they lived in it for two years before calling in the builders.

Tony says: “Our original plan was just to change the front of the house to make it more appealing – nobody even knew where the front door was – and everything just expanded from there.

“We wanted to create some space upstairs and ended up taking the roof off and putting a great big canvas tent over the top, which stayed there for six months.

“In the end we created a whole two-storey house. The ironic thing though is that we never even touched the front!”

The transformation of the couple's home took 10 months and was a mammoth task.

The downstairs space was re-jigged, with a huge new kitchen dining space created together with a sun room.

The upstairs was completely built, going from just a small box room to full working bedrooms and en suite bathrooms. The rooms were crafted to mirror the same sense of space given to the large rooms downstairs.