West Ham — a freehold terrace rebuilt for a future family

Adam and Louise bought a five-bedroom freehold terrace from a small developer and found that the work behind the walls didn’t match the marketing — rising damp, a rotting ground-floor structure, and historical leak damage upstairs. Rather than paper over it, we reset the ground floor back to structure and rebuilt from there: the home they had been sold, made real — and ready for the family they were planning for.

Project at a glance

Location	West Ham & Temple Mills, E15
Property type	Terraced house
Project type	Ground-floor refurbishment and rear extension
Programme	60 working days
Investment	circa £94k (guideline)
Architect	Reza Parizi — Price Parizi

The brief

Louise is a special needs teacher. Adam is a banker. They wanted a house their future family could grow into — kids, cats, the long view. The property had been sold by a small developer who had finished it cosmetically but not structurally; the ground floor in particular was failing.

On the survey we found rising damp at the party wall and rotting timber across the ground-floor structure. The bathroom upstairs had a historical leak that had damaged the joists below. The brief expanded once Adam and Louise saw what they had actually bought.

The build

Ground floor was taken back to structure. Existing reception 2, kitchen, plumbing, drainage and electrical all stripped out. Three external doors and two internal doors removed to give us the geometry for the new layout. A new opening between hall and reception 1 opened the front half of the property.

The rear extension added a new kitchen, utility room and bike storage. Excavation and foundation work was sequenced carefully around the party wall — we added a damp-proof membrane and inserted a damp-proof course into the existing party wall before the new external walls went up.

Coordinated with the architect throughout. The damp solution was the load-bearing decision — without it the new ground floor would have failed within five years.