Our Forever House - Reality bites!

by Roz

As this is my first post of 2014, I feel the need to wish you all a Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a lovely time over Christmas and New Year.  I've not written many posts in the last few weeks, with Bex keeping the blog posts coming on Christmas and birthday fun and now joining in with the January Joy prompts suggested by Rebecca at Florence Finds.  

As the title of this post may suggest, this isn't a regular house update post, despite there having been many more jobs ticked off the to do list.  We are now, thankfully, almost at the point of maximum mess in the house, which is actually a good thing as far as I'm concerned as hopefully we'll turn the corner soon and it will start to resemble a house again instead of the building site it currently is.  The knock throughs are all done, with the downstairs rooms finally laid out how we want them.

This is the current view from the living room looking in to the kitchen

 

 

You wouldn't believe just how much mess knocking down supporting walls causes, unless you've actually done it yourself.  Everything is covered in this thick, rust coloured sand / dust.  You can see it in the air in the photo below...I didn't realise when I was taking the photos that it was quite so bad.  It also doesn't help that we've lifted the plywood floor in the kitchen, so we can put in the power and water runs where we need them, and there are no floor boards so the think layer of ash (which is used as sound deadening between the floors) is exposed and adding to the mess.

 

And this is the view from the kitchen back in to the living room

 

We also have quite a collection of bricks stacked up in our hallway if anyone needs some??  As to create the door to the pantry we also had to knock through a supporting wall.

The sprinkler system is nearly installed, or rather the pipes and sprinkler heads are nearly all fitted, again this is the really messy part as when the holes are drilled in the ceiling it brings down a rain of ash and lath and plaster in to the room below.  The sprinkler heads don't look anything like a thought they would.  The heads themselves are fully enclosed, all you can see is a white coloured disc, smaller than the palm of your hand, flush in the ceiling.  It's just a shame that so much disruption is needed to get them there.

We spent nearly all of our two weeks off over Christmas and New Year working at the house, B even wanted us to work for a few hours on Christmas Day!  It's fair to say we earned a day off by that point but there still seems so much to do.  B is also doing the majority of it now due to him having twice as much time off as me and the added benefit of not growing a set of hands and feet in his belly ;)  We also had our own dramatic start to 2014 when we popped round to the house on January 1st to measure some doors and update some paperwork and were greeted by dripping water in our hallway.  The leak was coming from a broken overflow pipe from the second floor bathroom...you do not want to know how much water had leaked through the two ceilings and floors above to get to our hall :(

We spent the next couple of hours ripping up sodden carpets, removing soaked plywood and trying to dry out the main staircase which is thankfully concrete.  As with most water damage, it hopefully looks worse than it really is.  Luckily the damage to the cornice work in the hallway is minimal and right at a area that would have needed a little bit of work to be carried out to repair a crack in the plaster but at the time all I wanted to do was cry.
 

As I write this on Monday night, the roof is still not finished (originally it was supposed to be complete at the end of November / beginning of December, thanks weather!), the cupola has none of the new glass installed and we still haven't finished the wallpaper stripping.  Only 3 rooms to go!  But this week does see the window refurbishment start and hopefully we will be ordering our kitchen before the end of January.

I really hope when we finally move in to the house that we can look back on all this effort and feel proud of all the hours we have spent doing up the house :)

Roz xx