Guest Bedroom

We've had a real go at the guest bedroom. The house has 5 bedrooms, so although we have the eaves room, our main spare bedroom (sounds very grand!) is this one. Here it is:

Clearly the 'before' shots. This is 'as viewed' before we bought.

I haven't got many 'during' - there was a lot of 'during' on this room. Here it is, still in 'during' state, but getting there:

And then with the final clour coat:

This shot taken from the door into the room. It's a kind of deep cream colour. Might sound a bit boring, but there's lots going on the walls of this room.

The new en-suite for the room. We took some of the space from the main bathroom to create this.

View out from the corner of the room. We're waiting for a door for the bathroom, but apart from that, it's carpets, furniture and pics and stuff....

Play Room

We're nearly done in the play room. It's in proper 'use' mode now. It's kind of annoying, but I don't have a 'before' shot. Anyhow, a few pics:

Stripped out

A during shot

A 'now' shot. This is from the entrance to the room, dead in front is the doorway that leads to a small lobby. Left out of the lobby is a back door, straight on is the laundry room.

Another 'now' shot from the doorway that leads to the laundry room.

The picture on the floor on the left blocks the view of our little stove. So here's a pic of that:

It can be seen that this is the same vintage pic as the 'during' shot above. There's no architrave on the window etc. All the 'cosmetic' work is done by my family, with my father-in-law being particularly helpful and long-suffering!

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.