I thought it would be nice to show the progress Dad has been making with the fireplace, uncovering lots of lovely, old (and slightly knackered) brickwork.  He found a bread oven too, this looks lovely. I’m not sure we could have asked for a better fireplace behind all the 60’s cr4p.

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Sorry it’s taken so long to update the site, there’s been a lot of stuff going on…Rob has had to stop work in the garden early and the general impression is that the back wall does need to be underpinned.

B*ggerBecause the ground levels are so high; what would normally be a relatively straightforward job, is suddenly very difficult. This is not good news.

So we rang the builder who was due to start work knocking down our bathroom walls and asked him to come round to look at/quote for the job. We decided that the job should also include mending the leaning garden wall and roof tiles while he’s at it.Meanwhile, Rob has had to just stop what he’s doing, apart from a little tidying up there’s not much left to do. He can’t build the steps up to the garden as these will need to be changed after the underpinning so I asked him to install a TV aerial for us. Not exactly in his remit as a landscaper…

Since then the builder has sent us a quote that has the bank manager rubbing his hands with glee, we won’t get any change from £10K - That’s probably knocked the underfloor heading on the head then.On the plus side, the fireplace is coming along very nicely. Dad has been chipping away at it on and off for a couple of weeks and he’s exposed some lovely brickwork behind the crummy 1960s stuff.

On the left is a bread oven, where the pipe comes out. The pipe will have to go obviously; we’ll need to move the fridge on the other side of the wall to get at the other end. We also received something quite exciting in the post, it’s the old documents pertaining to the house. There are lots of interesting things like copies of wills and mortgage documents. The oldest document goes back to 1786! I hope to have some pictures of them on the site here soon - probably in their own section.That’s it for the moment, we’re planning to get some groundworks people in to get more quotes for the underpinning and also some fireplace specialists too. Everything seems to be slowing down!

Had a fantastic day today, rode my bike up to Lincolnshire to visit some fellow Period Property members and house restorers. Got a complete guided tour, which was fascinating.

The sun was beating down as we poked and prodded our way around the house. Notable features are the grand entrance, limecrete floors and underfloor heating, moat! (only when it’s raining), many many oak beams and loads of really nice carved mouldings - carefully replicated and restored.

In all it’s taken them 12 years to get this far and it looks truly amazing. It’s very very inspirational and makes me realise what level of commitment you need to treat an old house properly.

Thanks for the very warm welcome. It was a 320 mile round trip but worth every mile (and the numb bum).

What a difference a day makes…

Today is a mixed bag of good progress and unwelcome surprises - sort of a ‘good news/bad news’ kind of day.

The good news is that my Dad and Rob the landscaper are both round to help out, so first thing I set about clearing the living room of everything that isn’t necessary and putting dust cloths everywhere. Rob turns up soon after that and we discuss the job ahead. The first thing is to sort out access for the digger and somewhere to put the skip when it arrives next week.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for weeks is talk to the four neighbours who share the garages and yard at the back of our house about this but, as its a sunny day, they are all out enjoying themselves, damn them.

Throughout the day Rob hacks at the concrete at the back of the house where we’re going to put the french drain. It’s thick concrete but Rob is very persuasive, pretty soon it gives in. He also removes the turf where the trench and the soakaway are going. The soakaway needs to be five metres from the house so the garden is only just big enough.

I’m working on the South wall of the living room to remove more of the render with my trusty hammer and wood chisel. When Dad arrives he gave me a special render removal tool that has removable blades. This starts to eat through the render much more quickly so I’m very pleased.

Meanwhile, Dad starts carefully cleaning the chimney of soot. We had a chimney sweep round the other day but he took hardly any soot away complaining that the chimney was too big. I’m not sure how but Dad manages to get rid of 99% of all of the soot without painting the room black. He’s definately looking a little darker than when he went up there though.

Now for the bad news; Rob’s inspection holes near the wall reveal that instead of a regular, flat wall below the concrete path there’s a mixture of mud, loose wet lime and rubble. It seems that this wall was built into the earth in a ‘chuck a bunch of stone on the floor’ kind of way. This is a problem. There’s no way we can comfortably dig down the four feet we intended to without underminding the whole North wall and causing the house to fall over. Not sure what to do here but I will ask the friendly PP people, they will know for sure. This makes damp control here much more difficult.

Back in the living room, Dad has started removing bricks from the fireplace, it’s good to be making progress here as the inglenook is really going to be the centre of the whole house, we still have no idea what the modern brickwork is concealing.

Rob lends me his rotary hammer drill with an sds attachment. This is a new tool to me, it’s like a very small jackhammer and I gingerley wave it at the render in the living room. I’m a bit worried about damaging the soft brick underneath. With a little care I manage to get the ‘knack’ of removing render really fast without damaging the bricks too much. C has a go too.

Under the render we find:
Another strange wooden brick
The 2 windows in here are in much better condition (yay!)
Some hospital style paint - 2 layers down (tasteful)
The ring main (didn’t mean to go quite that far)

All in all a very productive day, although We’re extremely worried about the back wall.

Bought some cheap new chisels (wood) to chip away at the cement render but didn’t get much done. For some reason, the lower foot of wall is really tough to clean off. It takes twice as long to cover the same area as the easier bits.

Got rid of the sofa bed last night on freecycle. There’s now lots of room near the living room wall, this is our next target with the chisel.

Had two interesting calls today. Firstly, the Gas bloke is coming to inspect our site and proposed meter position. Once he’s done that they’ll give us a quote for connecting us up. The other one was from Stuart our builder, he reckons he’s free on the 20th to start work on the bathroom. That’s only 18 days time! We need to find a new bathroom suite asap so we’re ready to install it as soon as they have finished.

Our neighbours acros the road have offered us the use of their loo and shower while ours is kaput. They really are ludicrously nice people.

Rob arrives on saturday to do the prep work for the drainage work, I bought some of this oldroyd gtx membrane to line the outside of the house with and stop the water coming through the kitchen wall.