Renovation

Feb 11th, 2010

Our builders arrived in our house on 1st December 2009.

First job was to install a makeshift kitchen and bathroom in the diningroom. This enabled us to continue to live in the house throughout the works, and thus, throughout Christmas.

Day 12

Then to gut the old kitchen and bathroom and start demolishing…. the flat roofs were removed first, before work started on the walls….

Day 17

Then, on Day 17 (Dec 17, 2009), the snow started….

Day 21

and it snowed

The Snow

and snowed

Day 44

and snowed

and it stayed below zero for 4 weeks… some nights were as cold as -17ºC

It was the coldest Scottish December and January since records began in 1914

Thus (unsurprisingly) the building work ground to a halt

Of course, our life carried on through this…. celebrating our Wedding Anniversary, Christmas and New Year right in the middle of it all.

Christmas Dinner

Our waste pipe froze several times and on one occasion, during a bout of sickness and diarrhea with both E and J, our waste pipe froze and we hopped in the car and escaped to my Sister’s place in Fife for a few days.

Building work recommenced proper on Jan 21st, 2010

Day 52

The foundation digging caused another major headache as the ground was very clay, a notorious grounding for any building apparently, and so foundations needed to be wider and needed to be bedded in in a little differently…. holding us back a further 2 weeks.

Day 53

Day 65

But, they are in, and, as of just today (day 73) we have 2 courses of blockwork on the foundations too

Day 73

and the frame should be going up soon….

So until the next update I’ll leave it there

Oct 16th, 2007

We have been here before once, in a flat in Glasgow, but back then we were young and daft.

So we knew what we were letting ourselves into, however, we did not know that it was all going to start within 6 weeks of moving in… and we did not expect this level of work.

We knew that the house suffered from a rising damp (it 150 odd years old -what else do you expect) We also had a report saying that it had suffered from dry rot in the past, so we thought, “ahh, it’ll need some work but it’ll wait” WRONG…

For those of you reading this who don’t already know this  – Always deal with dry rot immediatley, I cannot overstate this enough, deal with it IMMEDIATELY.

This is a photo that I took the day that I found it, growing on the wall head.

The dry rot was along the full length of the front wall of the cottage. So we got a specialist company in to do the work for us,

Remove all interior plaster of front wall

Replacing all of the lintels of the front windows,

Removing 1m of the ceiling to expose beams

Remove 1m of roof to expose rafters

Replace 12 rotten beam and rafter ends

Ontop of this work we had to have the roof replaced, we decided to have the full front of the roof re-slated in the original slate and the rear we will patch up for just now in the hope that our extetion ideas will, one day, be realised.

We did some silly things when we bought this house, we bought it because we loved the idea of it, we loved the huge garden and the wonderful village. So we are still young and daft, but I’d rather be young and daft than old and cynical any day.