Sinking Bath?!

Over the past few months we have been using the small sloped ceiling bathroom in the cottage side of the house. Sitting in the cast iron bath I noticed you could see the sky through a beam on the side wall! Also I did think the bath was perhaps a little lower. Everyone in the house hold seemed to think that I was mistaken!

This week we stripped out the bathroom and the loose plaster. There was not much left!

Revealed Beams 

In between the ancient original beams of the building there is brick infill. This brick is very loose and in places slumping. The old lime plaster falling easily away. The floor is sloping away to the wall on the right...so I was right...the bath was indeed sinking slightly.

Going below to the Cottage Kitchen, we discovered a hardboard wall behind the kitchen units. Once this was removed it revealed a rather rotten timber framed wall. Interesting this had been filled with brick and old glass bottles just stuffed in. 

Back Kitchen Wall

Detail Of The Rubble Infill

Original Timber Frame 

We will now have to put supporting block work inside the wall and to the floor above. This will have to be plastered over...but not too smoothly. 

One lovely feature of this new large entrance hall that was the kitchen is the side wall. Again the woodchip paper and plaster work has been stripped off  to reveal a patchwork wall. The builders could not quite see the beauty in it and thought I'd want to plaster up to the beams. We have however just repointed and will seal it to make it sound. I just love the different brick work. This will be a feature when you walk into the entrance hall.

Lovely Exposed Wall!

Bashing Down the Walls

I'm back!

Sorry it's been a while. The whole moving out of the house seems to have been long winded and quite stressful! Between running all our businesses and the demands of family life it's been an interesting few week.

The barn conversion we have moved to is beautiful, though it was rather full of furniture and vintage I buy for Tea & Roses. I have never been happier than to own three retro kitchen units and a huge pine table which are now serving as my kitchen in the barn, though we have no sink so my water boiler is making do for now. We have no curtains but rural living and a screen of furniture from the farmhouse means that we are quite private. No tv and no wifi for a while has meant that we have had some wonderful family time, talking and playing together!

So after a few days of sorting those final boxes and deciding what we can live without, we are comfortably living in the barn which faces the farmhouse, giving us a grandstand view of the work going on.

Since we have moved out, work has carried on a pace inside with the poor old house being stripped away inside and laying bare it's secrets.

The farmhouse has at sometime been split into two dwellings making the internal layout rather confusing. We have had plans drawn up to put the house back as one which means knocking back doorways which have been blocked and removing stud walls that were never there originally.

Hallway Wall

The first job was to actually check that the walls that we wanted to remove were actually later additions and not supporting! We made some test holes to check what was underneath and the advice of a structural engineer.

One of the first walls to go was the wall in 'The Cottage' side of the house that created a narrow entrance hall separating the kitchen. We now have an impressive entrance hall and with the kitchen stripped out and Lino removed, a lovely old wooden floor is revealed. However it has had quite a bit of repair so I may have to paint it to disguise the new wood.

Master Bedroom

Our Master Bedroom, in the farmhouse side of the house, also had a narrow corridor along its length, serving no real purpose. This is the room that originally had a doorway through to the cottage side....now it's open open! It feels so right! In this bedroom there is revealed the most beautiful oak floor and luckily the divide wall was only nailed down in a couple of places. We hope to put an ensuite on this room with Jack and Gill doors allowing access across the length of the house.

Huge Back Bedroom!

The pretty back bedroom in the cottage has always been one of my favorite rooms. It has a lovely view over the back of the farm. On the side of this bedroom was a tiny box room bedroom, big enough only for a single bed and side table. Now the stud wall has been removed to reveal a massive space! It's going to be an exciting space to furnish!

The week ahead sees the roof being completed and the ceilings inside being stripped....and I can start to take off all the wood chip wallpaper. I can't wait.

Back to it!

The gales have blown, the rain has rained and Christmas has been and gone. Now the builders are back to it on the roof........and we still haven't quite moved out!

How can one family amass so much 'stuff'. I guess that there are five of us here and rather too many animals. Life always seems too hectic with Tea & Roses and the farm, to really get to grips with sorting 'stuff ' that we gather. So over Christmas I've been going through long forgotten cupboards and drawers that have contained the most delightful old photographs of the children and trinkets kept for, 'just in case'.

Blue Skies

The roof is coming along well. The tiles are now going back on around the front and some new tiles are being blended in with all the old, where we have lost some due to breakages. The roofing work does knock through quite a lot of grit into the house, as there are years worth of grit up there! A fine layer of dust covers the beds at night and a few nails appear through the ceiling. Can't wait to be out.

We took advantage of the fine weather today and took a view of the farm from the scaffolding. The children enjoyed peaking in the upstairs windows and seeing the roof closely. They also enjoyed getting their sister out of bed by knocking on her bedroom window and then watched her climb out to join us! 

We do plan to move out by next weekend....so lots of work to do this coming week.

Viewing the Roof

Wake Up!