Restoring our 17th century house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border had many extraordinary moments. Perhaps one of the most emotive was when we opened a doorway in the upstairs of our Town House once we had purchased the cottage behind, and went through a doorway that had been bricked up since 1851.
Every house has its history, in the same way that we as people have a history through our family tree. Most people will find many surprises if they explore, as millions do, the extraordinary story of where we have come from.
If houses could speak, or carried with them a potted history of their owners and the lives they have seen, it would be an extraordinary story, especially for a house as old as the one that we found ourselves restoring.
The small cottage behind our house was built in about 1740, and was therefore about 50 years later than own house, fronting on the street.
We pondered much over the history of the house. When we had purchased it, we had been told that we still technically had planning consent to be able to use the room into which our front door opened as a shop.
I looked into this in a small way, and found that in the 1940s, it had been an upholstery shop. I know nothing more than this about the commercial uses of our house, but I am sure it would be fascinating to discover more.
There were some features of our house that made us think that the original owners must have had some ambitions beyond the typical scale of a country town house.
Simply the staircase, which could be dated almost exactly to the date when the house was built in 1690, from the shape of the balusters which formed part of its construction.
It had unusually wide steps for a local house, and was constructed in the way that would be described as a floating staircase, so that there was no obvious support for each tread, and it rose three storeys to the attic on the top floor.
When I showed it to someone who had some understanding of historic houses, they said that they thought it had been adapted for this house, and perhaps had been salvaged from the great Fire of Bungay, which had taken place in 1688, and had destroyed much of the older wooden houses in the town.
And what we imagined was that our house had been originally owned by a merchant, and that the house next door had been built on the site of what once had been his storehouse, perhaps wooden built, in which his stock would have been safely stored, and which he could have accessed simply through a connecting door on the first floor.
This all fitted in with the fact that the house was just one hundred metres from the nearby River, which was navigable to the sea until 1932, when sluices were installed to control the flow of water.
Until that point, the shallow draught vessels typical of Norfolk, the Norfolk Wherries, would have traded as far as the Baltic and Holland.
Our house was roofed with Dutch Pantiles, which may have been used as ballast for the return journey from Holland, and Baltic Pine wall boarding was used for the internal room divisions downstairs.
In the days when security meant having a close eye on your own property, it made perfect sense for a merchant to have his warehouse secure behind his own house.
The fact that we had doorways between the two houses meant that we did not have to get planning consent to combine the two, we simply had to create the openings which downstairs had been cobbled together rather simply, and upstairs had been bricked up.
When we removed the bricks, easily done because the cement used was soft mortar typical of the time using lime, sharp sand and horsehair, so that it was easy to remove the bricks undamaged.
In the frog of each brick was the unmistakable cross that identified them as having been handmade in the 19th century at the St Cross brickworks, only half a dozen miles away.
More interestingly, we found a scrap of newspaper, from which we were able to ascertain that it had been bricked up in 1851, because there was a small article about the Great Exhibition on this scrap of newspaper.
It was 2001 when we removed the bricks and opened this ledge and brace door for the first time in exactly 150 years, perfectly preserved behind a neat wall of bricks.
Perhaps the first clue to the previous use of the next door house, had been the fact that there was almost 2 feet difference in height between the existing floor level of the upstairs room into which we stepped.
In other words, the ceilings for the downstairs rooms were much smaller than the height of our own, which again gave a strong indications that the owners had ambitions which required taller ceilings in a world where scale was often an indication of status.
So for example the staircase in the cottage we had bought was a more typical vernacular style of staircase, where you simply opened a door to find a steep narrow staircase to the next floor.
Quite different to the floating treads of our house.
We kept the ancient ledge and brace door, not even removing its ancient paintwork, that had remained preserved behind brickwork for more than a century.
Later, I discovered and rescued an old copy of The Art Journal, which contained the entire catalogue not of the Great Exhibition, but of the Paris Exhibition held in 1867.
The Art Journal was published annually in a volume, although I suspect was also published monthly and contained wonderful mezzotints and engravings, often of old Masters.
The edition that contains the catalogue for the Paris Exhibition is an extraordinary document, showing examples of fine furniture and furnishings beautifully reproduced for this special edition.
We called our house Merchant House, because of our sense that it had once served the purposes of a merchant, but we do not know any further details. The current owners of the house have retained this name.
The street on which the house sits was in the 19th century, and no doubt earlier, very much a Commercial Street, as I found described in a volume written by Lilias Rider Haggard, the daughter of the famous Victorian writer, who had lived just outside of our town.
She ghost wrote the memoirs of her gamekeeper, and in one of the volumes, The Rabbit Skin Cap, there is a description of Bridge Street and the businesses that thrived in the street in those times.
All of these things are unspecific to our own restoration project, but throw some light on the romance of our house's history.
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