Ruined

I had a bit of a shock last week when a memory popped up on Facebook informing me that a year ago we’d been busy laying the slates on the roof. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since the roof was being finished and the inside was nearly untouched. Who know where we’ll be in another year’s time!

The weather is starting to turn autumnal, and our many houseplants are getting to the point where being inside in the dust is probably better for them than being outside in the cold. For now they will live bunched together in the least dusty rooms, but hopefully one day they can claim their rightful places.

Sometimes big jobs make little to no impact. Painting the big staircase wall took three coats and a lot of clambering around, and yet in photos it’s hard to see the impact, particularly when the colour almost matches the bare plasterboard in the doorway.

And then again sometimes little jobs make a huge difference. We ordered a blind for the bathroom window, aware our neighbours can see in (if they really wanted to) at night. Though it’s only a small thing, somehow the room looks much more complete now it’s in place. Because of the sloping ceiling Chris had to spend a good while cutting an angled piece of wood to attach to the ceiling to make a flat surface.

With that done the lintle needed covering with insulated board, which then had to be filled and finally the whole thing will need a coat of paint. Jobs always lead to more jobs.

One job we didn’t have to do was replace our garden fence, with our neighbour kindly paying her gardener to take out the old one and put in something new. It takes me itch to get on with the garden, but with winter coming there’s still a lot inside the house that needs prioritising.

This weekend I did my first bit of plastering on dry wall. So far I’ve just been doing the stone wall plastering, which in an old house can be much rougher without being judged. Chris was very insistent on the need for perfect smoothness on the drywall, so sofar I’ve left it to him, as I lack the skill to do a perfect job. However, having done a lot of drywall plastering now, Chris has a growing hatred for it and decided perfection wasn’t as important afterall. I started off on the odd pieces here and there, that still needed doing, in order to get used to the technique, before tackling the utility room. I agree with Chris that it’s not a fun job, but it’s at least very satisfying to see the transformation.

While I was plastering Chris was busy shopping, spending a whopping £500 on wood for skirting and architrave, among other bits and pieces. We’ve been very lucky to be able to reuse so much wood throughout the project, because whenever we go to buy any the price is horrifying.

With new wood purchased Chris was finally able to hang the other door on the wardrobe, which will hopefully help keep more dust out of the bedroom.

And finally Chris continued with the laying of the utility floor. The floor can’t be fully completed till the backdoor is replaced, something we need to do sooner rather than later, as you can currently feel the wind rushing through the gaps in it.

We met a distant neighbour while out on a walk yesterday. He’d seen me dumping rumble in the garden when we were busy digging out the kitchen floor and asked if he could take a look inside. Meeting us out and about he asked how things were going. On hearing how far we’d gotten since he’d last seen us he said ‘oh I do love a happy ending!’ Perhaps not quite the end yet, but it certainly feels a lot closer.

There are big satisfying jobs and then there are the bits and bobs that seem to take forever, yet never provide as much satisfaction as the big jobs. With busy weekends these last two weeks we’ve seemed to be plodding through a big list of little jobs. Great to get done, but not particularly inspiring.

The first little job I got on with was putting insulated board along the top of the doorway into the kitchen/diner. The insulated board will prevent cold leaking in from the external wall.

Chris, in the meantime plastered the ceiling in the utility. Once dry I sanded it down and did the watery coat and two subsequent full coats of paint.

The ceiling done, Chris got on with laying the floor. Annoyingly it can’t be finished until we replace the external door and build the doorway into the kitchen. However, Chris grouted and sealed enough so that the washing machine could be installed.

While Jude had done a great job getting most of the big wall plastered, there were lots of little bits left to do around the house. With the heat it became even harder, with the plaster cracking incredibly quickly. I had to soak the wall first and then keep brushing over it to keep it damp. Even then there were plenty of cracks to fill once it was dry.

Beside the chimney in our room we’re going to install a cupboard, in order to cover over the bricks I used expanding foam to stick a piece of plasterboard over the side.

I finally got round to grouting the tiling on the bathroom windowsill.

One big job that did get done was the installation of the washing machine. With the tiling done, we moved the machine into place and Chris rigged up a platform for the drier to go on top. He reused a part of the old worktop that was once the main kitchen work surface.

While Chris was installing the washing machine I spent an annoyingly long-time building a bookcase in the lounge. In theory it hadn’t seemed like it would take very long, but with wonky walls, and several width changes for the shelves, it took forever to complete. The bottom of the shelves will become a cupboard in time.

The final bigger job was getting the shower door and shower installed. Chris is particularly excited about this, as he isn’t a big fan of endless baths.

One thing I like about writing a blog is it helps remind me how far we’ve come and how much we’ve done. With things constantly moving it’s easy to forget how much we’ve achieved. Looking back can certainly help remind us of that.

This week has possibly killed us, just a little bit. Not only did we have the deadline of family coming in to help with the garden on the Saturday, we also had a last minute visit from some friends from Germany on the Friday night, meaning our deadline was a little more truncated.

With the lounge ceiling plastered, I got to work repainting. Having decided not to strip the beams it was an effort not to paint over their edges. Of course I failed, however I’m hoping a good scrub with a toothbrush at some point will resolve this clumsiness without too much hassle.

A glutton for punishment, Chris’s cousin Jude returned and thankfully tackled the second coat for me, leaving my evening free to paint the remaining wall and give the rest a second coat of red.

Jude then finished off the plastering on the lounge wall. In my lunchbreak I then went over the older plastering, using filler to smooth out some of the cracks, ready for painting.

Lounge now painted I rolled out a rug donated by my mum and dad, to add a little coziness until we finally carpet. Due to the general dirt and grime of DIY this will be the very last job in the house. Idris is certainly a fan, enjoying having something comfy to lay on.

We then moved various items of furniture in to make a makeshift living space, with most of the items destined for the dining room long-term.

It was particularly lovely to get the piano in under the stairs finally. However, while it fit perfectly lengthways, we realised that Chris couldn’t sit at it without hitting his head on the stairs. We’ll have to get a smaller radiator and move the piano out a little, which is a shame, but it’s at least a solution to the issue.

Having moved the boxes of books from the kitchen to the space under the stairs, we were finally able to reach the rest of the kitchen ceiling, so as to finish the plasterboarding.

And then the family descended! The aim of the day had been to clear out the larger section of the front garden, which consisted of trailing ivy, bramble, an overgrown box hedge, and various bits of scrub. Oppomistically I’d thought the ivy was just a relatively thin carpet, which could easily be pulled up, but I was wrong. It turn out the ivy was nearly a foot deep in places, with thick tangled stems that wove their way through the old stone walls. Trying to pull it up was impossible, and reaching the soil beneath seemed a mammoth undertaking. I’d clearly made the right decision bringing so many people together to tackle it! We filled 12 bulk bags in the end, and the ground is still a mess of ivy roots.

At the front of the garden, next to the road, we knew we had several huge slabs of slate, stood upright as a kind of wall. What we didn’t realise is in one corner of this wall there is a humongous tree stump, which must have been the reason for the walls current jaunty angle. There were also a number of tree stumps in the rest of the wall along the path, which may be a bit of an issue if we want to widen the drive. Still, good to see what’s there.

Although the house is still a building site, it was nice to have a semi-finished lounge for people to sit in. For the first time the house felt a little more welcoming to visitors.

With the crowds departed, we spent most of our Sunday lugging bulkbags of ivy to the recycling center, before moving on to interior jobs.

With the tiles all in place, Chris spent some time grouting them. The glass bricks were a bit of a nightmare in the end, but I think they make a big difference to the space, keeping it from feeling dark and unwelcoming.

On the bank holiday Monday we focused on the utility room, lugging everything out once more, and preparing the walls for plastering by cutting off the excess expanding foam, curving the corners and applying PVA. It’s amazing how quickly the house descended into chaos once more.

With the machines out of the way we added insulation to the ceiling and attached the plasterboard. We’d decided to sacrifice the beams in this room, so as to make it possible to hide the pipework in the ceiling. As we didn’t need to attach batons to screw the plasterboard to, the insulation kept falling out, meaning we had to resort to gaffer tape to keep it up.

I continued with my plastering on the stone wall, now able to reach the areas that had been hidden behind the machines.

Finally, the utility is ready to plaster, just in time as we’ve had our delivery of limestone for the floor, an end of line offer from a reclaimation yard. On delivery they agreed to take our unwanted ridge tiles, which had failed to sell online.

Once the plastering is finished we can lay the limestone and then finally install our washing machine, which will be the first of our white-goods luxuries to come into use. Exciting times.

Personally, I work better with deadlines. The latest deadline is a visit from my family to help clear some of the front garden. In order to offer some comfort we want to get the lounge finished. It didn’t seem too much of a challenge when we first set it…

I started by filling the holes in the ceiling, leftover from installing the steel straps. We’d been putting off the repairs for ages as we weren’t sure how best to go about replacing the plaster and lath. In the end we decided just to screw plasterboard to the ceiling and plaster over, we may well find that was a mistake.

Chris then grouted between the glass blocks.

Ta da! I finally got the paint the walls. I should probably have waited till the ceiling was done, but I figured it didn’t matter too much as it’s only the first coat.

We’d ummed and ahhed for a long time about whether to strip the beams. I don’t like painted beams, as wood is so much nicer left exposed, but stripping is a painful job. But now the colours on the walls, I think the beams don’t look too bad, so we’ll be leaving them as they are and saving ourselves a job.

Next we needed to empty the room, ready for leveling the floor. This included taking apart the understairs cupboard. It feels like this is the one last reminent of what the house was, cleared away to make space for the new.

Finally the floor was washed and levelled, a job Chris got on with while I was out at my volunteer day.

His other job while I was out, was installing lights in the bathroom, which feels like luxury after weeks of washing in the gloom.

Next came the filling, with Chris plastering the holes in the ceiling, while I tackled the holes in the walls.

For the first time in what feels like a long-time we’ve acquired a helper.

Chris’s cousin Jude was looking for some work over his summer holidays and offered to come do a few days for us while he was free. He did his first day’s labouring and finished off plastering the tall stairway wall, which has been a job that’s kept slipping down the to-do list. We’ve decided to leave it with a relatively rough finish, both for a textured look and to avoid driving ourselves mad smoothing it out.

While Jude tackled the mammoth wall, and I busied myself giving some previous plastering a first coat, Chris stepped into the magic cupboard and continued the annoying fiddly tiling. That’s the problem with a big fancy shower, it takes an age to finish tiling.

After sending off for a wide range of tile samples, we eventually agreed on a dark blue set for the shower. In order not to make the room feel too intense we chose a grey tile for the windowsill. We managed to get these second hand, buying enough that they will also do the shower in the shower room, once that’s underway.

I set to work tiling the windowsill. It was surprisingly difficult as the base put in by the contractors was nowhere near flat, and larger tiles are aways more tricky. Finally having finished, Chris in his usual complimentary style stated that it wouldn’t be particularly obvious once there were things on top of it.

Next I started on the shower, which was much easier given the plasterboard was fairly flat. Having reached the shower pipework I handed over to Chris, as I wasn’t sure how to drill through the tiles to get the pipes through. I like the blue tiles with their starry pattern, however I can’t help be reminded of a magician’s trick box, like we might walk in and then reappear in another part of the room.

Downstairs, Chris started on plastering over the wiring in the lounge, tagging me in once he went up to sort the shower.

Having completed the lounge I headed round to the utility room to plaster over the exposed stone and brick.

Next I sanded down, filled and painted the new plaster in the lounge with watered down paint.

With our first guest arriving in a few days we then spent an evening ‘tidying’ and ‘cleaning’ the house. The reality is that any real kind of clean or tidy is impossible at the moment. The best we can do is minimise the chaos, not eliminate it.

As there’s no space in the other bedrooms at the moment we condensed our pull-out bed into a single, and pushed it against the window, setting up our old double in the middle of the room. As a final effort to make the room a little more accommodating Chris attached the radiator back onto the wall, after its long holiday on the floor. It’s the little touches that give us our 5 star rating.

For me the most exciting thing this week has been getting the first bit of colour on the wall. Even though the rooms aren’t finished a little bit of paint seems to bring them to life. For Chris, the most exciting thing has been getting our shed up. The shed is a short-term storage solution, as we went from having a garage for storing all our tools and bikes, to not having one and storing them in the garden. Long-term we want to repurpose the old toilet block into a shed, but that’s a whole other project, so this will have to do for now.

I’m really pleased with the green we chose for the bedroom. It wasn’t the original green we’d decided on, but one of the cheap end of line colours we were able to get half price.

Similarly the yellow for the bathroom wasn’t the original yellow I wanted. This one is called buttercup yellow and needed two white coats before I could start on the yellow paint. It’s brighter than I originally planned, but I think it will mellow once the room has more in it to break up the intensity of the colour.

On Saturday, while I was out with my volunteers, Chris had a frustrating time installing a toilet and sink. The toilet is now in and functioning, while the sink still needs a little more work.

On Sunday I set to work putting up insulation and plasterboard on the dining room ceiling. It’s always exhausting working above your head, and ideally I needed about six pairs of hands, but still most of the room got finished. The last few bits need the stack of boxes gone to be reached, and then we’ll start on the kitchen side.

Meanwhile Chris busied himself plastering the lounge wall. Originally we’d planned to finish the upstairs first, but Chris pointed out that a large amount of the stuff taking up room is destined for the lounge, so with that room complete we can make more space to work elsewhere.

It’ll certainly be nice to clear this room out and set it up properly, as throughout the renovation it’s always been a bit of a dumping ground. Not long and I’ll be able to head back to the paint shop.

A week after we moved in we went on holiday. While this was a nice escape it also meant we returned to utter chaos. Aside from halfway through the roof rebuild, I think this is the most overwhelmed by the job either of have been. At least when we didn’t live here we had somewhere to escape the mammoth list of tasks, here they’re staring us in the face every minute of the day.

Prior to packing our bags we tried to move forward with getting our bedroom done. Sleeping surrounded by dust and dirt is no fun, and we felt we needed one room as a sanctuary. I pushed on with filling all the gaps in the ceiling with cork, and repainting.

While Chris got to plastering.

He also finally fixed the downstairs toilet door, for a little more privacy.

And put the final coat of plaster on the adjoining wall.

On our return I set to work repointing the chimney brest in the bedroom. Chris hadn’t been keen at first with the idea of leaving it exposed, but I wanted to reveal a little of the history of the house. Repointed, he now sees more of it’s good side.

With a good clean the room was then ready for the floor to be varnished. I did two coats, and Chris thinks it needs a third, but we agreed that could wait till later, given that we wanted to get the room more comfortable for now.

With the floor done I did the first coat of watered down paint on the bare plaster, having filled and sanded the remaining holes.

Chris is desperate to get the shower finished, so he concentrated and moving that along. Getting the shower tray in was a faff, because of the thick stone wall beneath it. He then got the pipework in place and attached the plasterboard.

Our last job of the weekend was lugging the wardrobe and chest of draws, that had been clogging up the lounge, up the stairs and into our room. The draws were fine, but the large wardrobe was an absolute pain, given it’s width, height and slippery surface. Still it feels incredibly luxurious to be able to open a door and pick out clothes, rather than rummage in a dusty bag.

Finally we were able to look at wall colours. We went with eco paints for most of our old house, and really liked them. The brand we went for was quite expensive, but Chris found someone selling end-of-line tins at half-price online, so we selected a green for our bedroom and a yellow for the bathroom. It was important the green went with the old reclaimed doors we’re using for the cupboard, which I think it does. The yellow needs two coats of white under it first, so we’re yet to see how that one turns out. With the yellow awaiting it’s first coat we’re ordered some tile samples to match against it. It seems a little bizarre to be getting onto finishing touches when the rest of the house is still dust and disasters, but it’s easing our stress to have a little sanctuary in the corner of the house, away from all the mess.

We have moved. This was our first proper house move, having previously moved into our first house with very little of our own stuff. Cleaning out the house, it’s been slightly horrifying how much stuff we own. Even trying to donate and recycle we still seem have accumulated enough boxes that we could simply build them into a house to live in.

With my mum and dad to lend a hand we loaded the van in a day with the vast majority of our stuff. Even though we’d agreed to leave behind many of the larger pieces of furniture we still filled the van to the brim.

Uploading was even particularly straightforward. Even though we’re moving into a significantly larger house the problem is that none of the rooms are ready. So to avoid too much moving around we’ve piled everything in to two rooms. To say the place feels cramped and chaotic would be an understatement.

At least the surrounding countryside remains peaceful – even if everything within the house is confusion.

As we had the van for the weekend we tried to make the best use of it by going to collect the second-hand piano I’d been offered.

Chris’s brother came to lend a hand and thankfully it wasn’t as heavy as we’d feared. I didn’t do much on this one I must admit.

We also wanted to pick up some of the larger pieces of furniture we knew we wanted. We’d kept a look out on marketplace but struggled to find what we wanted not too far away. However, I realised there was a warehouse nearby for house clearance goods. We dropped by and managed to find a suitable sofa, wardrobe, table and Welsh dresser. All stuffed into the house it now looks like we’ve become a storage warehouse.

With furniture lugging finished for the day we returned to our old house to finish clearing the garage, clean the house, and to dig out any plants we wanted from the garden.

While taking out some of the pond plants Chris spotted a southern hawker dragonfly exuvia. The exuvia is the skin the larvae leave behind as they emerge from the water and become adults. Ever since digging the pond we’d been desperate for dragonflies to come live in it, so perhaps this was a final gift from our first home.

With the old house finally empty and as clean as we could get it, there’s no turning back. It does feel a bit like getting out of the frying pan and into the fire… but the view and the peace and quiet will keep us going a bit longer, until hopefully soon the dusty and chaotic house metamorphosises into a home.

With this being our last weekend before we move, we were keen to try and get as much done as possible. However, though we’ve got plenty done, most of it was small and fiddly. It therefore doesn’t look like we’ve moved forward very much, yet the house is significantly messier. All the cleaning carried out to impress the valuer has been buried under a thick layer of dust and grit.

We took the opportunity to move several crates of our houseplants. There’s a risk that if they get stacked in the moving van they’ll end up crushed. For now, they’ll get the enjoy a bit of time in the wild, left in the garden till the house is less dusty.

My main focus for the weekend was finishing the ceilings. I started on the bedroom ceiling, which myself and my mum had already given one coat. With the second coat on it now just needs cork adding to fill in the remaing gaps, a final coat, and the edging adding.

Next I moved on to the study, where I managed to sand down the wood filler and add two coats.

The bathroom needed filling, then sanding, and finally I managed to get one coat on. This leaves just the second bedroom, where I’ve painted the screws with the oil-based paint, but still need to fill, sand and paint.

Chris got on with plastering in the bathroom, calling me in to follow him round smoothing out the plaster surface with a trowel, and rewetting it so it didn’t dry out before the second coat.

He then started sorting the adjoining wall with our neighbour. On the bathroom wall a simple piece of insulated board stuck on with some expandy foam has done the job. In the second bedroom there’s the added complication that the chimney seems to have pulled away from the wall, so Chris added a leftover steel strap to add a bit of stability.

He then used a bit of insulated board for the part of the wall close to the exterior wall. This will prevent heat loss, while the rest can simply be lime plastered.

There are very few missing plasterboards now, but those left haven’t been done because they are fiddly and annoying. I tackled a section in the shower room, while Chris worked on the bedroom cupboard.

In order to get to the shower room plasterboard I had to reattach the plastic torn down by the builders, which Chris had to help me with, as it takes at least two sets of hands.

We don’t yet have enough wood to do all the doorways, but Chris did another couple and hung the bathroom door.

Chris’s last job was then to prep more walls ready for plastering, painting PVA across the surface of the boards, and adding scrim tape to all the joints.

Having planned to stay the night again, we upgraded our accommodation by moving our spare bed over to the new house. An Ikea bed that reduces to a single when not out as a double, it’s been great for our spare room, where there isn’t a lot of space. We normally keep it as a single unless we have guests, and then open it out for them. While you can’t walk around it in our current spare room once it’s open, as it spans from wall to wall, it’s nearly lost in our new spare room.

Our fancy wooden bed is now trundling across Europe heading to its new home. Amazingly a lady in Poland contacted me over Marketplace and had it collected by a courier. Hope she’s happy with it when it arrives, it certainly was a fancy-looking bed.

Now, we have a week to finish packing before it’s moving day. Chris is planning to get back to finish some plastering, but I think I’ll be home filling boxes most evenings. It’ll be nice to moved, less nice to be constantly surrounded by dust. But at least there’s plenty of beautiful places nearby to escape the build site/our new home.

The contractors have returned, and finished nearly all of the window reveals. Though they take up a relatively small area within a room, it’s amazing how much more it makes the rooms look finished. One of our requests to them was that they put our curved corners back, and we were delighted to see they are starting to smooth out the corners of the plasterboard to make a curve.

Chris spent an evening building the remaining piece of wall for the showerroom, meaning all our studwalls are in place now.

With the house valuer now booked in to return, we wanted to make the house look as finished as possible. I therefore continued with plastering, starting on the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge.

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Chris spent some time putting back in a plug socket in the bedroom closet. He’d asked the electrician to remove this, as he thought we didn’t need it, but then remembered this was where the broadband was going to be wired in.

Feeling like they were having too much fun in their spare time, my mum and dad came up for the Saturday to lend a hand.

I got mum helping me with the old wooden ceilings. First we had to paint all the screws with an oil-based paint in order to prevent them from rusting. Next we started filling all the holes with wood filler.

Finally the ceiling had a quick sand and then a paint. It needs another couple of coats, but I already feel justified in my previous insistence that the old, recycled ceilings would look nice when painted.

In the meantime dad helped Chris to move all the tools and other items out of the three rooms that needed the floors sanding.

Nails then had to be banged back into the floor, and everything swept and hoovered. We’d hired an edge sander, and a larger floor sander. Dad got to work on the edges, while Chris began sanding the main floor.

Both of the two bedrooms came up really nicely. We aren’t too bothered about sanding everything off, as the darker areas create a nice texture… plus it would take forever.

Chris had a go at sanding the bathroom, but the paint was so thick it gunked up the sandpaper within seconds. Instead, we brought some paint stripper and tried to scrap the worst off. Once washed and dried I gave it another go. It took an absolute ages, and I constantly had to change the paper, but in the end the worst came off.

Spending another night at the house, we decided to build the old wooden bed we’d found in the house when originally selling off things that had been left behind. Chris had been keen to keep the bed, but when we put it together we realised it was actually a superking, far too big for us to use. So onto Marketplace it goes, for someone else to enjoy.

Having to take the day off to meet the valuer and broadband installer, Chris spent a bit of time filling in the gaps around the glass bricks, and plastering.

Thankfully the valuer agreed that our house was worth the value of our mortgage, so this has now been transfered. With that done we’ve set the moving day as the 27th June, so two weeks time. Currently, our evenings are spent packing up our old house, but with only half a room plastered, we’ll be spending the coming weekend trying to get some more rooms ready to move in to. We’ve decided to try and unpack as little as possible once we move in, living out of one room, till the others are more habitatable. It’s not very appealing leaving our comfortable and dust-free home for a building site, but it’ll be nice to have the sale done, and be able to work on the house without a long commute to eat up our time. Lots of positives… but also lots and lots of dust.