First floor bathroom.

Oooooh look. We've got a timber frame first floor extension. This is where the bathroom's going to go. I must say, despite saying I wasn't bothered about an upstairs bathroom when we bought the house it has been very handy with all my night time visits this pregnancy - that's right, these photos are now about 9 months old - I'm not weeing in a bare timber frame.

 

This will be our new view from the bathroom window.

 

That's the back wall. Sad there's no bathroom view over the allotments but that's planning!

 

Isn't it tall!?!

 

New bathroom ceiling.

Cats

With a then tiny child and digs in South London, we weren't able to be on site as much as we would have liked. Luckily the neighbour's cat, Whiskerdoo, was on hand to keep an eye on the work.

 

When only the crappy outhouse had been demolished, she inspected the old drainage

 

 

I'd rip that out if I were you. 

 

She was a bit disappointed to loose her sun roof and moped around the space where the outhouse was for a while.

 

 

Of course, as soon as the new concrete floor was laid she went and sat right on it - important to stake her claim. And what eyes! 

 

She was in her element when the scaffold went up.

Steel

It's satisfying to get a nice big bit of steel in the house. And we get 2!

 

This used to be our bathroom. Soon it will be our kitchen.

 

Our new kitchen taking shape.

Big bedroom

It's normal when spending lots of money on a house project to add more bedrooms right? Wrong, it's much better to go from 3 to 2 bedrooms. BUT what about if you lose 2 crazy small useless bedrooms and instead get 2 proper double bedrooms? That's what we've done. The sewing room/spare room/music room/nursery have been smashed together to make one big room for me and Jon.

 

Eventually the current entrance on the left of this photo will become a big walk in cupboard (future children's box bed?) and the new door will come through the current cupboard on the right.

 

You can see where the nursery used to be with it's nicely painted floor. Dot never even slept in it!

 

Some nice floor space in our new bedroom.

 

And two nice big windows which get the morning sun - quite glad Dot isn't on this side as she wakes up early enough as it is!

Internal walls

Come on, be honest, am I the worst and laziest blogger you ever have known? I suspect I am. Still, I will persevere and continue to document our house even if I do it 9 months out of date. In this post, I share some pictures of our new internal walls being put up.

 

New doorway to the main bedroom (used to be a cupboard in the sewing room).

 

New cupboard in Dot's room.

 

New walls for Dot's room (which used to be our main, back bedroom)

 

This is a bit of the original kitchen, but will eventually be a handy under stairs storage area for the bikes.

 

New kitchen wall. You can just see the old fridge cupboard in the far right of the photo.

Old walls

One of the nicest things about having buidling work done is seeing what's behind the walls we have already. In the case of this house there's brick, and there's wood and there's mud and hair. Let's face it, there's probably some dung too. 

I'm actually quite sad that we've lost these walls now; it feels like we've pulled a bit of the soul of the house down. I know it's only one of a million Victorian terraces but seeing all the holes for all the nails that held all the wood strips that held all the mud and hair somehow reminds me of all the people who've lived here. It's a good ittle house, that has worked hard for lots of families for many years. And now us three are here, making it our home too.

Digging a hole and filling it with money

Once you've spent all the money in the world on pipes you will then need to find more money to pour into big holes.

Pipes

Before you can start choosing paint and tiles and curtains and all that fun stuff you think you care about, you have to spend all the money in the world on pipe work.

 

A soil vent pipe, the placement of which I beleive is at least 2 years of your standard architecture degree. That's what Tim said anayway (or maybe I just made that up, but we have discussed SVPs!)

 

 

New drain. It's apparently a public drain becuase our neighbours stuff also flows into it. I don't really understand but I believe it's a whole world of other pain with Thames Water.

 

Fancy your water coming through lead pipes? No us neither, so we had this fancy blue one fitted instead. Who wants money for shoes when you can spend it on pipes you'll never see instead?

 

I don't even know what this is for. But it's new and is under our florr.

Digger!

Question: How exciting is it to see a digger in your small terrace garden?
Answer: Very!

Demolition

Before anything else can happen, they needed to gut the kitchen and pull down the old bathroom. So that's what they did.

 

 

 

Our bathroom used to be on the left

 

Looking down what used to be the corridor to the bathroom

 

Behind our old cooker

 

Thin Victorian walls - why our house is so cold.

 

surveying the rubble

yes, that right, no foundations - better order some concrete (and find some extra cash) 

 

Got a bit excited at all the holes but I had to remember that it's been over 10 years since I've done any archaeology and I wasn't very good at it then anyway.

 

Ooooh, look what our internal walls are made of - lath and plaster (mud and horse hair). I bet yours are too.

Trying to avoiding the inevitable

One of the reasons I post so much about the garden, and increasingly little about the house, it that we're starting to come up against the big projects. The things we're a bit too lazy to do, or can't do, or can't afford to do. Unfortunately these projects just seem to multiply.

The big one of the moment is our windows. Whilst I'm not that bothered about living in a faux-cottage for the time being (we're here for the long-haul and anyway we can't afford to do everything at once) the downstairs window needs replacing. This brings up lots of ugly questions about what to do with it. The only thing I'm certain about is that I don't want little panes of glass anymore.

1. Shall we get all the windows done at once or should we spend all our savings on making the bottom window better?
2. Should we go all out and get a bay reinstated? Did our house even have a bay? Could we even afford this, ever?
3. Would the house look funny with a flat window on the ground floor?
4. How will installing new windows affect the pebble-dash?
5. Why do we care about the pebble-dash?
6. Is patchy pebble-dash even worse than normal pebble-dash?
7. Which quote should we go for? 
8. Can't we just spend the money on something fun like a holiday and some new shoes instead?

Just to add to my worry, I found a funny growth on one of the windows the other day. It didn't have anything growing in it, just brown powdery stuff. Arrrrrgggghhhhhh!!!