I hope, (if anyone is still reading this) that you didn’t assume the worst. I had my operation last November and it’s been steady progress since then. Our ‘little’ lurcher has grown up to be a rather big boisterous boy who likes chewing stuff up, aww bless…

On the house front we’ve moved on a bit since last October. The fire was installed the week before my heart op. It was a bit of a god-send really, we got through so much wood but the house would have been uninhabitable without it.

All thanks to Dad for doing a stunning job restoring it brick by brick:

So now we have come out of hibernation, we agreed on a winter quote for underpinning, rather depressing as that was money we had earmarked for elsewhere. Rob came back to dig out 7 skips of mud which costs a fortune, turns out we could have saved £50 a skip before the latest budget. Ho hum. Now the back ‘garden’ looks like The Somme.

I put in an application to building control and last month the builder started work…

And then stopped…

He’s found some fairly hard ground under our high foundations, in fact he needed a kango to make any impression on it. So he duly called round the building inspector who has declared that the ground is so hard we don’t need to underpin. I think the builder was almost as relieved as we were. That’s about £9000 we have saved and he doesn’t wear out his shovel…

So now we are in the fortunate position of being able to recommence the internal knocking down of walls, buying a bathroom, and planning heating!!! HEATING!!! Hooray!!!

I am sooooooo sorry, it’s been 2 months since I updated the site. A lot has happened in the last two months. Particularly with the fire. In fact today is a big day for the fireplace, more on that later…

The reason for the absence of posting is that something big has come up, I am about to go for an operation which will take a bit of getting over. Also, work has gone a bit mental so the thought of hammering away at the keyboard when I get home doesn’t really fill me full of joy!

Some good news though, we now have a dog! A great little Greyhound Lurcher called Paddy who was abandoned a couple of months ago and picked up by a local pub. I will try to post a photo, he really is gorgeous, you’ll see
Back to the fireplace, as I type this our new wood burning stove is being installed. A Harmony 23, slightly larger than our room needs, I’m hoping that it’s not so big we can’t run it efficiently…

 Anyhow, gotta run. I promise to post some pics this weekend…

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.

Click on the arrows on the pictures or use the cursor keys to scroll through the gallery.

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.

Not much to report apart from I’ve managed to open the window in the diningofficehall. Kind of wish I hadn’t, the lower hinge is a rusty solid lump that has pulled out of the frame.

Predictably enough, it now doesn’t shut properly. Tomorrow I’m going to nail it shut until we get them replaced/repaired. I’ll be more careful with the windows in the future.

Went to yoga yesterday after work so no time to work on the house. Today I managed to fit in another hour of chipping away at the dining/hall/office wall and have found some interesting things:

Some of the bricks are really soft - softer than the render I’m taking off

Two random bits of wood which disintigrate at the touch

A long piece of soft, woodworm riddled wood that runs across the width of the ceiling

I’m worried that this bit of wood will need replacing, I haven’t found the end yet so I don’t know how far into the living room it goes. I wonder if the window is salvageable.

This looks like it may cost a bit to sort out. I’ve also just realised that I’m sitting in the office, immediately above this mess.

Got a pretty awful hangover from a friend’s wedding. Had a great time last night but today we’re taking it easy. Or that’s what I thought at the start of the day anyway. We actually ended up doing rather a lot.

Arrived home in the afternoon and decided to remove the bench from the ‘dining room’, mostly because it was wet underfoot and we felt like we need to at least start drying the walls out. We call it a dining room because it’s where the previous occupant used to have family meals. It’s a small room at the bottom of the stairs. The absence of a front door at the end makes it a pretty useless hallway, it’s a bit small for a proper dining room and we’ve already got an office… hmmm

Either way, the bench seat has to go so we set about ripping it out, its C’s first go with a power drill so I give her the low down (righty tighty etc.) and set her to unscrewing the bench.

Meanwhile I’m in the bathroom working out what to do with the floor. The dehumidifier has failed to dry the carpet (it sucked up another 3 ½ litres) so I’ve decided that the carpet has to go along with the bad smell. It’s now in our carport.

The bench comes off and reveals a rather large crack in the wall; further investigation reveals that it goes all the way up to the roof. We’re a bit worried about this.

James pops round to say hello so we immediately give him a hammer and set him on to the remains of the bench which yields to him pretty quickly.

He then sets about ‘investigating’ the wall with a hammer and chisel. That’s the great thing about James. While we will look at something and worry and think about it for a bit, James will set about it with great gusto and conviction. He’s definitely more of a ‘dooer’ than us, especially if it involves a hammer.

5 Minutes later and we have a plate sized patch of exposed brick next to the window. The brick is very damp and soft, as is the mortar, the render is actually harder. When we get all of the render off it will start to dry out and we can get it re-pointed. It looks pretty good though, nice old red brick so we may yet leave it exposed.

James disappears to the pub; the poor chap has a wetter house than ours and has been battling with the torrential rain all weekend. Definitely deserves a pint or two.

I tap away for a bit longer and expose some more brick, it’ll need a bit of tidying up but I think it will look great in the end.

Everything is wet.

Was supposed to have a gig tonight but it’s been cancelled. The singer is stuck on an island in Wantage and all the trains have been cancelled from London too. Disaster. Actually, all trains except one. C managed to hop on to the only train that went to Didcot all evening and managed to get in half an hour earlier than usual.

Got stuck in a traffic jam getting home as everyone was using our village as a shortcut. Parked the car and went to the pub for a pint.

Got home and the floors a bit wet. Water has been soaking through the back and side wall, deep enough to splash in the bathroom.

We got the quote through for the building work, the letter landed on a dry bit of carpet which was nice. The quote seems to be very reasonable and, given that the other builders we’ve contacted haven’t bothered to call back, is in the running.

I do feel like we should get at least 3 quotes for work each time though, better chase them up.

Builder came round at lunchtime to asses the jobs and give a quote. He seems like a really nice chap who’s done a lot of work on old properties before. Result.

After the drainage is sorted we need to get the bathroom moved. It’s currently next to the kitchen so the idea is to knock the adjoining walls down and have a kitchen diner. The bathroom will move to the room above the kitchen.

The walls are currently holding up the ceiling, se we need to replace them with a support, steel or oak will both do it. Oak looks best so that’s what we’re going for.

There’s one small problem though. There is already a beam traversing the kitchen resting on the bathroom wall, we would love to get rid of this. After a bit of umming and ahhing our friendly builder worked out that he could hide a steel in the ceiling void and rest it on the new oak beam, sort of a T shape. This should be invisible.

Overall he’s enthusiastic and seems like a ‘good bloke’

He says he can get our 1960’s fireplace taken out too. It’ll be nice to open out the inglenook to its formal massiveness.

A day of rest, also our wedding anniversary we go out for a nice meal. In fact we’ve been looked after since Saturday afternoon by C’s Mum which has been a real treat.

A friend came over to look at the drainage at the rear of the house. The problem we have here is that the garden is 4’ high where it meets the back wall. This means that all of the water that travels through the soil soaks into the wall and then into our kitchen.

Before we bought the house two separate damp experts recommended chemical injections and tanking the back wall. Everything I’ve read about doing things properly says that modern methods lock moisture in walls. This is bad for old houses. (Bad enough to warrant the use of italics at least)

So the ‘sympathetic’ plan is to line the back wall with a DPM (damp proof membrane) and insert a French drain at the bottom which will lead to a soakaway. Quite a big job. Rob reckons he can do it in a week so we ask him to do it for us. I was quite looking forward to driving a mini digger, it looks like I won’t get the chance now

C says I would have knocked the house down anyway, how difficult can it be?

Joy of all joys; we now have a cooker and can cook stuff. Celebrated by having some friends over on Friday to watch a film, cooked a nice stew which everyone says is nice

It’s been a good week, I discovered Freecycle, which has enabled us to get rid of the unusable bed base and some computer bits. Very handy. It’s also the source of our cooker.

Glad we got the dehumidifier; it fills up twice a day, that’s 7 litres a day of water just out of the air. We are getting used to living in the house and are managing to avoid cluttering up the place too much.

We spent the weekend at my Mum’s, looking after her as she has had a foot operation. It’s a good chance to recharge our batteries. C went to see Shrek the 3rd on Friday and on Saturday I went to see the Hoosiers in Oxford.

Things to purchase:
Dehumidifier
Cooker
Heaters

It’s cold and damp and a bit tricky cooking our usual gourmet grub in the microwave. God knows how I used to manage eating from the microwave in my youth. We have no idea how to get even a semi decent meal from the thing.

Paid £150 to Mr Argos for a dehumidifier; could have got a cheaper one but this thing has bigger numbers on it so it must be much better, right?

More unpacking, have sorted out the kitchen and bathroom cupboards, the computer is now on but has no connection to the outside world. It’s odd that it seems almost useless without the internet. That’s coming in a week or so.

We huddle round the fan heater and watch TV eating rubbish. We really need a cooker.

Waking up in a light airy bedroom is a treat. Proper windows, decent wardrobe space, all good. The bathroom is a very long way away, in fact it’s the furthest it couple possibly be from the bedroom, something we intend to change.

Time to take stock of where we are today, there are some things that we have but don’t need and other things that we need but don’t have.

The biggest absence is a cooker; we sold ours to our buyers and haven’t sorted anything out yet, microwaves and camping stoves for us then.

We vow that nothing that isn’t absolutely required will be repacked and put back in storage or got rid of. Something we learn from our last place is that we are both terrible hoarders, we need to keep on top of the urge to gather ‘things’.

We go to my work to use the internet to get some stuff sorted (like an internet connection) and also to apply for a gas connection. We do a trip to the unit to exchange boxes of stuff.

The storage place is a bit funny, you bump into people coming and going and we all nod and smile, it’s a bit like a private club. There is something fascinating about what secret things people keep there, it can’t all be as mundane as our boring house stuff can it?

Wake up, exhausted. 4 days of constant packing, box shifting and junk food has really taken its toll. Looking around the house in despair, the neighbour comes to the rescue us with moral support and lots of help shifting things. What a legend.

We get the keys to the cottage at 10.30 so race round with the van to offload. Come back to the house to get the last bits, certain that we’ll forget something. C has been cleaning for days and is quite rightly fed up with it.

Leave the house in the care of its new owners at last and race round to the cottage. Looks great, feels bad. Very cold and damp, they’ve turned off the heating since we last viewed it. It feels like a dank cave.

Takes a while to work out why the heating isn’t working, couldn’t get it to turn on at all, checked everything, very frustrating. James pointed out that they are night storage heaters and it all becomes clear.

A closer look at everything reveals that the previous owners hadn’t been as kind as us as to clean the place before leaving, C is almost in tears as we set about cleaning everything again. We’re that tired.

Still, it’s an exciting day. A few people pop round to say hi and take a look. Everyone is very kind about the damp smell.

As most of our stuff is in storage it doesn’t take long to unpack the things we do have. Our bed doesn’t fit up the stairs so we just put the mattress on the floor for now and the rest of the bed in the car port. It’s very handy having a couple of spare rooms too.

We’re knackered, a quick trip to the unit to drop off some stuff and we decide to go for a bite to eat. C is driving and manages to clip a car in the car park, there’s a bloke in the back seat that was nice as you like. It wasn’t his car but we didn’t hear back from them. I think we looked a bit of a sorry state. Went to the Italian, ate in a daze, went home.

By the end of the day, we’re sitting in our living room grinning at each other. I think we know that it’s not going to be easy, it certainly hasn’t been so far. The house we are sitting in needs a lot of work, major drainage, knocking down walls and chimney, new bathroom kitchen, central heating, gas. Plenty of people look at us like we’re mad or stupid or something. It’s OK though, we love the place.

I’m at work all day, C has the day off, she cleaning and packing. I pick up a van on the way home and a couple of friends come over to dismantle the shed and help load up the van. We’re exhausted but the van is full and the house isn’t empty. So we take the van to the unit, it’s finally completely full. Back home we refill the van and bid our friends farewell with a few beers.

Buying process is taking forever, their agent is a nightmare, doesn’t seem to have sold a house before. Constant hassle with paperwork is really doing my head in. Looks like we may be able to move at the beginning of June which is good, I’m off to France for a long weekend then we’re immediately off to Glastonbury.

Have rented a storage unit and started filling it up. Hire a van to collect some old carpets from a flat in London. Takes all evening to get them down all the stairs, we’re covered in dust and carpet burns. Not the most fun way to get carpet burns really.

Looks like we’re not moving in the beginning of June after all, not sure why but it’s dragging. There are only 3 people in our chain and it should be quicker. Go to France, help fill the cracks in a friend’s old barn and fill up with wine, good practice with Polyfilla. Not such good practice at Risk though, I get trounced every game.

Get a call from our mortgage people, forgotten to send back the signed mortgage offer. Oh, that’s why it’s taking ages.

Glastonbury - got a call from Paul our long suffering agent. Problem. Standing in the mud as he breaks to us the great news that the solicitor has lost our contract. Solicitor calls, says he can sort it. An estate agent friend tells me that he’s only heard of it once before, when the solicitors’ office burnt down. All very frustrating.

Looks like we’re all set for the 29th June, we leave Glastonbury early to get the most out of our time off, barely 5 days to move our whole house into storage, its going to be tight. The rest of our friends leave Glastonbury the following day, it takes them most of the day to get just out of the parking field.

Packing is a nightmare. A never ending stream of boxes, junk, packing, cardboard cuts. 2 hours to empty the loft into the living room. It’s 95% junk and 95% of the junk is mine…

All in all, six full car loads to the dump and 3 to the charity shops. Amazing amount of crap that needed to go. The house still looks depressingly full, as does the storage unit, starting to panic a bit.