Summer 2016

I think that the main thing that attracted us to the house, or perhaps it was the thing that tipped the balance in terms of "do we buy it, or don't we?" is the garden. So a few shots of that in the summer!

This is Souvi and Caesar pecking away.

Pointlessly pseudo arty blackberry shot.

The view looking back at the house from the top right hand corner of the garden (you can see where we had a bonfire earlier this year). You should just be able to see the house.

Looking over the hedge to the new jetty.

The woody bit - view up the garden. The gate you can see is where the shot 2 up from this was taken from.

Facing back the other way. It's been a dream of mine to have a garden with full size trees in it.

This is where we bought the first row of trees from the neighbouring orchard. We had the grub the trees as a condition of sale. The idea was to square off the house's plot. There's 136 metres of hedging here on the left!

It's like buses....

You wait 8 months for a post, then three turn up at once...

Back in June, we were burgled. The sods cut through the fence, squashed our sapling hedge and broke into the sheds. They took basically everything with an engine. Ride-on, chainsaw, strimmer, jet wash etc. Sickening.

Cut the fence, squashed the hedge.

Where the locks were too good, they cut the bolts.

Made a nice mess. Cut the hasp off this one.

Glove prints. The copper who dusted these said 'the sort of people who do this were born with gloves on...' 

Cut the lock off this one.

The next thing, then, was to spend some money on more locks, more doors and some alarms.

And paint it green, obviously. The alarm box can be seen, as can the warning sign on the front of the building. Bit of a mess up this end of the garden. The stable block is right at the far end.

Again, you can see the warning signs. It's kind of annoying that this is in our garden - it's not supposed to look like some sort of industrial estate.

Again, more security. The lean to was open before. Doors on now, with locks and paint, and warning signs. The alarm covers the shed to the right, the lean to, the workshop and the garage (below).

 Haven't quite painted all the garage. You can see the alarm box on the wall. And the herb garden. Which isn't a herb garden really - that's where the hard standing is going to be. Concrete man comes tomorrow!

It's like buses....

You wait 8 months for a post, then three turn up at once...

Back in June, we were burgled. The sods cut through the fence, squashed our sapling hedge and broke into the sheds. They took basically everything with an engine. Ride-on, chainsaw, strimmer, jet wash etc. Sickening.

Cut the fence, squashed the hedge.

Where the locks were too good, they cut the bolts.

Made a nice mess. Cut the hasp off this one.

Glove prints. The copper who dusted these said 'the sort of people who do this were born with gloves on...' 

Cut the lock off this one.

The next thing, then, was to spend some money on more locks, more doors and some alarms.

And paint it green, obviously. The alarm box can be seen, as can the warning sign on the front of the building. Bit of a mess up this end of the garden. The stable block is right at the far end.

Again, you can see the warning signs. It's kind of annoying that this is in our garden - it's not supposed to look like some sort of industrial estate.

Again, more security. The lean to was open before. Doors on now, with locks and paint, and warning signs. The alarm covers the shed to the right, the lean to, the workshop and the garage (below).

 Haven't quite painted all the garage. You can see the alarm box on the wall. And the herb garden. Which isn't a herb garden really - that's where the hard standing is going to be. Concrete man comes tomorrow!

More steps backwards...

It feels like sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. In fact, that's nearly all the time.

We're living without 10 of our doors, as they've gone off to the dipper to be stripped.

In other stripping news, we've also stripped the hallway:

It makes the house really dingy looking! Plasterer comes this Friday, so will look better then.

You can see the stairway going off up to the right. Which now looks like this:

Fair bit more to do!

Been a long time, I shouldn't have left you....

Can't quite believe the last post on this blog was 8 months ago. It has to be said that the push towards Christmas 2015 kind of blew our wad so to speak, and we lost the house mojo a bit. However, there's been more progress than has been reported here, so I'll have to get my finger out and post up some other pics and stories. But for today, this probably looks like we're going backwards!

We decided we needed to have a bit of a push - we'd got 'kind of' comfortable living the way the house was (in that we'd got used to it, and living with it seemed preferable - just - to doing something about it).  So we cracked on a bit. The things we needed to do were finish off some of the more boring bits (CAT5E wiring & intruder alarm wiring), and one of the things that was really annoying me about this was that the floorboards were not secured down, and therefore clunked all the time when you walked on them.

This shot shows the plumbing more than anything. The central heating system has two zones, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. The underfloor heating for the kitchen I suppose counts as one more.

I took this shot just as we'd torn some more wallpaper off! You can see the CAT5E cable disappearing off to the left. That's going through the ceiling of the office where I'm writing this. The master bedroom is through the door at the end. There's a few floorboards up in there. I'm leaving some cable coiled up under the floor in there. It will allow me to close up the floor in the hallway, but carry on in the bedroom later.

And there's the completed floor. Not really, but every floorboard is screwed down solid. This view is looking out of the master bedroom along the same hallway as the picture above. That coil of cable on the left is going up to the loft. There'll be a stud wall about where it is. That will make a small dressing room just outside the master bedroom.

A close to finished room and a nearly finished room.

You might remember 'Eve's Room'. Well, because it is so self contained, and because Christmas was coming and we needed a guest room, we decided to press on with that one.

We'd decided to go a little larger with the dormer and when we'd left it in October, it looked like this:

So not exactly in a terrible state, but a long way to go.

Between then and now we got it to this:

Which I'm sure you'll agree (apart from the rather scruffily made bed - the cat managed to gain entry dammit) is a big improvement. It fits a king sized bed (just), and with decent underlay and carpet, it's very cosy. Not much room for the soft furnishings, so just pull-down blinds. Lots of work went into this - I put skirting boards on, and sorted out architrave and doorway, and hung the radiator, my wife did the rest of the decorating. Mark the floor man did the carpet. Nice. A big difference from the single dormer that was there before is that now you can see out into the garden from the windows as you come into the room.

Because we had guests, we had to crack on with the main bathroom. We've had to go from this:

To this:

I can take some credit - I mounted and plumbed in the bath and the sink, and I'm nearly done with the shower (scuppered only because the waste was broken by our usually very careful tradesmen), but mainly the work was done by Mark the tiler and floor layer. He's been doing work for us for over 10 years - top man. Although it looks done (apart from aforementioned shower), the floor isn't the one we're having - Mark sourced some lino and put it down to get us in business before the in-laws arrived. We've ordered a black and white Amtico effort, which I'm sure will look great with the rest of the black and white theme.

Kitchen pt. 459

..or that's the way it feels anyway.

This is how we were at on the day after boxing day. The granite is on, the appliances are all in, the electrics are all done etc.

This is standing by the bi-fold doors, looking toward the back wall of the kitchen.

Here's a few more of the kitchen units themselves:

There's more to go. The pantry needs its door rehanging, the kitchen door needs glazing, there's tiling round the alcove where the hob is, there's skirting boards to go on and a bit more architraving to do here and there. Plus there's still a snagging list from the kitchen fitters to go.

Still, we're pleased so far. When the whole thing is done, I'll have to do a 'special' post to take us from where we started with the kitchen until now.

Here's a gratuitous 'during' shot to whet the appetite:

Next post - a room gets finished! (Nearly).