I don't know what it is, but I love it. The Story of the Boiler Cupboard

One of best jobs we've done so far, and most satisfying, was take out the cupboards in the kitchen. These cupboards were basically small rooms, with serious stud walls and door ways. While they are potentially very useful for storage, we decided having the space was more useful to us.

Once the boiler had been condemned and disconnected by the plumber, Mat took it out and so we could completely remove the cupboards. We might be cold and without hot water for a while, but it did give us no excuses not to completely gut the kitchen.

As seen previously in the early stages

Once the boiler was out, the wall rest of the wall came down. It also became apparent the plaster board on the right had side didn't actually have anything behind it in certain places

Mat arrived with the crow bar.

After a bit of a poke I found there was a gap in the wall behind. We knew from the other side that it certainly didn't go all the way through, so we suspected another fireplace, which would take our current total to 5. Mat was immediately handy with the crow bar (I suggested something a little more delicate than the sledge hammer might be a good idea whilst we still didn't actually know what we were dealing with behind there!) Turned out there was a hole, complete with some very rusty fire tongs.

The fully gutted version. 

We have yet to work out what the inset in the wall actually is. It has what is clearly an original arch at the top so not a fireplace. Any suggestions anyone? I don't know what it is, but I love it.

A night out and I still find something house related

As I mentioned, we had my 'little' brother Richard to stay for the weekend. It seemed cruel to put him to work on the house for the entire time, so one evening we headed into Cambridge for dinner and some drinks. Mat and I don't know the restaurants in Cambridge as well as we should. My excuse is "I'm not from around here" even if I have been living in the area for 4 years now, I'm not sure what Mat's excuse is. However, anyone who lives near Cambridge will I'm sure agree that getting in and out is a nightmare! The roads are just stupid. Roll on the new house being finished and us getting to make use of the guided bus route.

So we went to this place we have found, Bills (bills-website.co.uk) its a really nice, chilled, friendly place, our kind of place. I'd never noticed until we went in that night, although it is probably one of the reasons I like it so much, that the décor is very similar to what I had in mind for our little Victorian place. Basically, its an old building, but with a very industrial feel. Lots of old angle poise lamps and metal shelves that my Dad used to have in his workshop, that kind of thing. I think a mix of classic old and industrial can look absolutely brilliant. We're going to have to be very strict with ours - possibly more strict with myself - the types of design we love are endless, so there's a chance for things to become very eclectic and interesting, but also, especially in the new, smaller house, a risk of becoming very cluttered. So classic Victorian and stripped back Industrial is the plan.

I thought it was a good opportunity to get some snaps of things I particularly liked that would be helpful for later ideas.

Sorry about the focus, but I still thought this chair was great. After spending 5 minutes trying to get my camera on my phone to focus, I noticed the girl sitting next to the chair giving me some very unimpressed looks. I stopped taking photos then.

I love these stairs, I know its extreme but I think this look would be amazing in our house.

Obviously a somewhat smaller version.....these ones would fill most of the downstairs in our house!.

A Willing(?) Volunteer Arrives

In my last post "Making a Mess" I mentioned - other than how much mess we'd made - that we needed a strong, manly volunteer to help Mat and I excavate the bath from the house since I have become weak and frail in my old age. Joking aside, I am not impressed with myself for this, somewhere in my very colourful CV it mentions my cement mixing abilities and hauling of rubble (I might not have used those exact terms in my CV) on a landscape design project. I'm stubborn. I'm just not the sort of girl who can't lift a bath for goodness sakes!

Anyway, enough grumbling. I'm a girl, I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.

So my little brother came to visit for the weekend. I should interject myself with a few bits of background information here:

• I'm originally from Kent, right on the South coast, about 2 and a half hours from where we currently live. And one of the reasons was want to be closer to the main roads in the new house (I might have already mentioned this in an earlier post, I apologise for repeating myself if so). Its not that far, but far enough that people visit us rather than just turn up for coffee whenever they fancy.
• My little brother isn't very little. He's 6 foot 5. Not very little at all. (and incidentally single and on a plane to Canada for the next few months at this very moment, in case anyone's interested!). But I always refer to him as little because he's 7 years younger than me. He used to be little.

So Richard (that's my little brother's name by the way) came to visit. Whilst saving for his latest travels, he's been working on a building site. Handy eh! So we put him to work. This sounds mean, it was actually only a couple of hours. And we fed him very well all weekend. First of all he drained all the water from the heating system. A plumber had been out the week before and condemned our boiler. We'd been trying and failing to get it working for a while, all the lights came on, but alas no heat. Turns out he found some big rusty holes in the pipes when he took it apart......good job we couldn't get the pilot light to light after all!!! So we decided the best thing was to drain the system down for the winter, so there was no risk of frozen pipes, take the old boiler out of the way and survive without water until we were ready to put the new one in. Mat took the boiler off the wall in pieces, leaving a nice big space ready for me to remove the rest of the surrounding cupboard at a later date.

Lovely double-denim again.....I'm so going to buy him a matching shirt.

Meanwhile I showed Richard the bath. "Hmm" I think those were pretty much his words. He took the door off the bathroom, took the feet off the bath, to make getting it around the corner easier. This didn't make it any lighter. And to be helpful, and because I plan to put it on ebay with "Free delivery: collection only" so someone else can come and take it away! I took a photo while it was turned on its side. Not my best photographic work I'm afraid......

See, cast iron, very heavy!

 Mat and Richard man-handled it out of the house. There was a fair amount of swearing on Mat's part I think. Richard's more the gritting of teeth kinda guy. Just to make it interesting the angles on the doorways (it had to  go a full 90 degrees immediately out of the bathroom) meant that not only did they have to lift, carry, turn, it also had to be turned on its end as well.

I realise now I've written 3 whole paragraphs plus a mention in a previous blog about moving a bath. I know I wanted to make the point that it was heavy and awkward and all, but even I can see this is a bit much waffle. Sorry about that.

Mat continued with the boiler demolition and Richard and I headed to the sitting room. I had previously also been trying to remove the old fireplace from the sitting room. Its a gas fire that had originally been a back boiler. Obviously fully disconnected now by the plumber when he condemned the boiler. Much like the bath, this thing was a Cast Iron Beast! This gas fire seemed to have endless attachments to other tangled parts of itself and the wall. I'd already spent a previous visit attacking it and had managed to remove the wooden surround, the front cover and various other bits but it was still putting up a fight. Richard stepped in to lend a hand and found more pipes behind it that fed inside the wall and through to  under the kitchen floor. Just to show off he decided the simplest form of attack was to haul it part way out, bending the pipes. I helped! So much so in fact that the part I was pulling broke off and I went flying backwards landing in the tool box. There was a lot of noise, Mat came running, the dogs panicked, it was very exciting. Richard held up the broke piece of metal "that's how strong Lana is you know".

He may be tall but it turns out he actually folds up quite neatly!

Then he chopped off the left over pipes and he and Mat were manly and carried it outside to join the bath.

I put a bucket underneath to catch some of the ash and dirt. It overflowed pretty quickly

Making a Mess

Encouraged by the fun of exposing fireplaces (or holes in the walls which lead out the chimney and will eventually become fireplaces), we pretty much decided that making a mess was fun, and made us feel like we were making progress.

So here are a few of clips of the next couple of rooms we started causing havoc in. Rooms which until this point were (relatively) clean and tidy.

The bathroom.

As previously seen in "the beginning of the befores" the bathroom consisted of a very bright aqua suite, white (well they were at some point in history) tiled walls and black and white plastic tiled floors. Call us heathen's if you will, but this just isn't our tastes. After removal of the random extra bits of bathroom furniture - a free standing shower and glass doors all tidied together with a lovely blue rope and placed inside the bath, shelves, heater/light etc - Mat commenced attacking the bath. By bath I really mean cast iron beast, for all its friendly, delicate (?) aqua blue qualities, it weighed at least 5 times as much as me, or maybe Mat, I could just about lift one end half a centimetre off the ground - enough to decide it was far too heavy for a bath to be. I'll take on most heavy jobs, but this one was quite beyond me. So Mat manhandled the bath-beast trying to wrestle it away from the wall. Incidentally the waste pipes were cemented into the wall and the inlet pipes with discoloured enough to compliment the colour of the bath very nicely indeed, so detaching it from the wall wasn't the easiest task. After a good deal of wrestling and swearing ( For those of you that don't know him, about the only time you'll hear a swear word come out of Mat is when he's doing DIY or programming (he's an IT manager when not bath-beast-wrestling) oh, or when a telesales person calls, since I'm rarely around for the programming, I find the split personality who appears for the other 2 very entertaining)....anyway, after a good deal of swearing and wrestling, the bath was freed from the wall, and battled up against another wall where it would live until we could find a strong manly volunteer or 10 to help us move it further. I have decided that the removal of this bath-beast is going to be via ebay - anyone who likes can have it for free if they will just come and take it away!!

Meanwhile I ran around removing tiles from the bathroom walls. A very satisfying job since the walls have been so damp in the past (probably due to the lack of any kind of insulation whatsoever in the room) meant I didn't have to do much more than poke them and they fell straight off. I concluded I got the better deal this day. Mat concluded the same thing.

So we went from this......

.....to this. I think we did an impressive job making the bathroom look even more awful!

The kitchen.

Buoyed by the bathroom, but unable to progress further until more space/tools could be acquired and the bath removed (any volunteers out there?) we moved onto the kitchen. As seen in the plans, the kitchen has 2 big built in cupboards, one a pantry, the other, another pantry but currently housing a boiler. Which we've yet to get working - plumbers booked for next week. As also previously mentioned, space is a massive premium in this place, so although we want to keep lots of the original walls and layout of the house where possible. Its very clear that making these cupboards part of the room will be hugely beneficial.

Mat finally got to bring out the sledge hammer. Very happy Mat.

Apparently lime plaster (plus tons of accrued dust) has carcinogenic properties (doesn't everything???) so on with the lovely masks again.

With shelves removed and a bit of mess, I tried and failed to take a photo before Mat had made a start with the sledge hammer......

......my turn to look very elegant whilst......

At this point it was a horrible dark rainy evening. And then Mat nudged (and I really do mean nudged) a wire leading into a light switch. Instant no lights! After a short attempt to work with just a desk lamp we happened to have to hand, we gave up and went home.

......the next day, the sun comes out and shows just how much mess we'd made......

....and some more mess, oh, and the handy lamp and scaring light switch just visible

The next day arrived lovely and sunny so work continued. Mat dismantled the light switch (with electrics turn off thankfully!) to discover the wires weren't actually attached to the switch - there weren't even any screws available for their attachment. Which wouldn't have been quite so scary had it not been for it also becoming apparent the light switch was in a metal surround. Cleverly encased with cut-outs from an ice cream tub for insulation.

Unwilling to live life on the edge, Mat went and put a new plastic switch on. I did not marry the ultimate wild child perhaps.

....unfortunately it was later noted that clearing up the messes was a lot less fun and took longer. Fair? I think not. But I think we can safely say it will still continue to be the case for a long while yet.

Fireplace Hunting

 One of the many items on the tick sheet of what Mat and I wanted in our new house was a fireplace. Its just one of those things. Its not essential, we know that, but they're just lovely things to have. And since this house was about finding a home to fall in love with, on the list went a fireplace.

So when we first saw this house and saw the huge chimney stacks and what appeared to be no less than 5  covered up fireplaces it was definitely an exciting sign. As soon as we had a chance both of us were itching to take a sledge hammer to them and find out what was underneath.

The lack of any other obvious original features around the house meant we weren't getting our hopes up too much about finding anything other than a brick hole under the coverings, but it was still good fun. It turned out a crow-bar was more practical than a sledge hammer (sorry Mat!) and if anyone tries this at home, make sure you wear a mask! My (phone)camera struggled to take a photo through the dust! And for the observant among you, although Mat doesn't have one on in the photos, we soon donned them when we saw how much debris there was. 

Here are some photos of the unveiling of the first two, which were in two of the bedrooms and back onto the same chimney stack as each other. This were just covered by a couple of bits of wood nailed in front, some hardboard and then wallpapered over.

Before - If you look carefully the seam around the edge is just about visible

Cue the arrival of a scary man with a crowbar, you can see the avalanche of debris waiting.

With dust - and Mat very pleased with the mess he's making!

After a bit of a tidy up.

The second one, just after the board had come off, no wonder the seams of the paper were starting to give.

Now all I need to do is find a couple of cast iron fireplace plates to stick on the front. Simple!!!

Job No.1 Contain the Dogs

As previously seen in blogs, "The beginning of the Befores" and "Why this House?", my husband and I have 2 dogs in our lives. Finn, the rather large German Shepherd/ Husky and Bella, the not so large, but still by no means small Australian Kelpie. Both have great times taking over our lives and making pretty much everything we do all about them.

As far as house renovation goes theres a general need to be continuously walking in and out of a house, so the first job, had to be completely unrelated to actually renovating the house and all about the dogs - putting a gate on the garden.

As jobs go, we thought this would be pretty straight forward, but still it managed to take longer than planned. After some research we discovered it would be a minimum of £200 to buy a decent 5 bar gate, then we still needed the required posts, hinges, latches etc. A quick call to some local gate/fencing companies and we found it would be around £400 to buy a gate and have it installed. However due to the slope going up at the entrance to our drive, the gate would either have to be hung about 18 inches off the ground (not so practical for keeping dogs in) or we would have to dig up the concrete drive way. The latter we are planning to do eventually anyway, but for the duration of building works it makes more sense to keep the very dilapidated concrete in place.

So we elected for the cheap quick fix. Buy the cheapest gate we could find and only expect it to last until we dig up the driveway. Apparently the cheapest option is Wickes wooden flat pack gates (about £25 each) we needed 2 because they were only just over a metre wide. This also solved our issue of how high to hang them, because of the shorted length they didn't need to open as far into the drive.

Mat sporting his dashing double denim work look to model with the new gate, while Finn looks on. He was very pleased to later find his head fits perfectly through the holes to check on passers by.

Fortunately our dogs are great at realising a barrier there to make a point, even if it doesn't actually stop them. Which is handy because Finn previously demonstrated his ability to jump 5 foot without hesitation. As by the time we were done the result wasn't particularly pretty or dog proof. But it was cheap, and by the time we've grown some additional hedge around the edges it will do for now.

Why that house?

After showing various photos, which give some idea of what we're dealing with - and hint at what work we have to come - I thought I should show something about why we decided this was the place for us.

At this point I also ought to give a little back story. Although it may currently be mid-December, and if you live in England, you may have been enjoying all the miserable weather that has been bringing us lately. Lots and lots of rain (in our area, whole villages have been closed), freezing fog, always a joy at 6.30am, and half hearted snow, which very rapidly becomes icy brown slush.

It is an ongoing threat of ours to move to another country for the winter!

Anyway, my point is not to grumble about the English weather, more importantly, that wherever you are in the world, it is mid-December, regardless of what good or bad weather that brings. However, when we bought our little Victorian number it was actually July, and when we first saw it, it was May. We were in the process of selling our previous project, a 1 bedroom flat just around the corner from where we currently live. We'd bought it as a repossession, dirt cheap, and (with an interim of my younger brother Richard, living in it for a while) sold it for a bit of a profit. Between that and nearly 3 years of desperate saving we managed to upgrade the flat to the new place.

The aim of the new place was primarily to upgrade our home. We currently live in a terrace house which, once we're in the door, we love. Its outside that's the problem. The door opens directly onto the street, which is no big deal, but annoying. We also only have a small garden, again, not a big problem, but having acquired 2 large dogs (spotted in last post photos) a bigger garden would be a major bonus. The location is in a village, about half an hours drive along ever degrading country lanes before reaching any kind of sensible sized main road. Very frustrating when we have a 3 hour drive to my family in Kent. Also its in the fens, serious fens, or as I like to put it, the black desert. I'm very sorry to all those fen dwellers out there, but its just not my cup of tea. Too damp and too flat. I'm afraid Mat bought it pre-me for all the practical reasons, but frankly I'm just not always that kind of a practical person. Oh and we spend the entire winter doing battle with rising damp. So that is a practical reason to move!

So, as I digress some more, the point was we wanted a new place, with a better location. We'd heard great things about the village, its 5 minutes from the main roads and much more direct to Cambridge city centre. I wanted a project, and Mat insisted it have 4 good walls and a roof (again with the practical!). So although in terms of footprint the new place is actually smaller, its merits made it a brilliant option. And of course it was at the top of our meagre budget.

 Since we were also due to be getting married in September not a lot happened beyond making the purchase until after the wedding. And with it less than ideal house renovation weather. Not that I'm complaining, I love it in all weathers! However, whilst the weather was still good we did get over there a bit, and managed to take some more attractive pictures of the local area and orchards around the corner. Perfect dog walking territory. So, since it may be a while before I am posting beautiful house photos, here are some lovely countryside ones.

On your marks, get set..........