THE perils of over-ambitious renovation have been brought to bear on a new homeowner after his painstakingly restored country cottage collapsed.
Keith Dawson bought the two-bedroom Grade II listed property in Oxfordshire for a price believed to be £180,000 and then added at least £50,000 to the value of his country retreat with extensive building work before it toppled to the ground.
Investigators were examining the possibility yesterday that a botched renovation job might have been to blame for reducing the once-pretty 18th-century cottage to a pile of rubble and thatch. Neighbours heard a whooshing noise but did not immediately realise the building had imploded.
Ann Lewis, who has lived in a mid-18th-century thatched cottage next door for ten years, said: “I was very tired at the time and and just thought, ‘What the hell was that?’
“I thought one of the mechanical diggers in the back garden of the cottage had slipped.” She discovered the full nature of the calamity only when she got up and looked outside.
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“I was a bit bleary eyed. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was really quite a shock,” she said. Mrs Lewis, who is in her late sixties, said that the cottage’s previous owner, Florence King, had kept the place “spick and span” until she died in February 2003, aged 94.
It subsequently lay empty until the new owner bought it and started renovations work last October.
Mrs Lewis said last night: “The chap has been working in there, taking out quite a lot of the fabric to do it up. I don’t know whether he might have done something to cause it to fall down.”
No one was hurt by the collapse, which happened in the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Harwell, near Didcot, on Sunday morning.
Trevor Cox, a firefighter from Abingdon fire station, said that he thought renovations could be to blame for the collapse.
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“It was a very old building. There was always the possibility that the weight of the thatch was too much for it — or that work had been undertaken on it which weakened something.
“We got a call from a neighbour who just rang saying the roof had collapsed,” he said.
“We went around there to see what we could do, just expecting a localised bit of damage — but the whole thing was on the floor. Now it’s just a big pile of thatch and the remains of the walls.” The building, which he believed was owned by a couple, slumped forward into the front garden. Firefighters searched for signs of life before the owner arrived to confirm that no one was inside.