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!

A Little Piece of Christmas

I need some Christmas at home, I decided this weekend! Despite the building rubbish everywhere and the hectic week in the shop, I picked up the Hoover and attacked the mess that seemed to cover the whole house in a fine film. I could draw some quite interesting patterns with the Hoover in the dust! So, I managed to salvage one room so we can have some sort of Christmas Day. The children don't seem to mind, to them it's all a great adventure.

A Little Bit of Christmas

The building work this week has been rather stop start with the heavy rain and showers making working on the roof difficult. The builders have continued to strip and save the tiles, carefully stacking them on the scaffold. I took a trip to see the old roof first hand and it's quite amazing to still see the old lath and lime mortar plaster, bound with hair, on the ceilings beneath.

Lime Mortar and Lath Ceiling

Of course there was no insulation between the tile and the ceiling and that doesn't give us much space to add any in. I think in the long run we will have to take some of these ceilings down to adjust the height and also because the roofer have put their feet through it in a few places!

The view from the top of the scaffolding across the farmyard helps to put the farmhouse in perspective as it is the heart of this ancient site.

The Old 17th century Barn and Walled Yard

This week will see the building work winding up before Christmas. We will hopefully have a sample window to look at and we will have to plan just how far we strip this house back.....oh yes, and we have to do that little job of moving out.....! Joy!

Rotten Roof

The winter weather continues to batter the house, rip the plastic sheetings off at night and seep into the roof. I had rather a cold shower of rain water from the roof accompany me in the shower at the weekend! Refreshing!

I also had a day of light relief away from the house attending an upholstery course at Annie Sloan Interiors in Oxford. I'm hoping learning new skills will help me when tackling the interior of the house. A night in a warm hotel was lovelier than ever!!

Lovely ladies on the Annie Sloan Workshop

The roof work continues with stripping back and insulating. In one section at the back of the farmhouse the timbers had completely rotten and it was only the tiles that were knitted together holding it! Good job we hadn't had a heavy snow fall or a section of the roof may have gone completely. 

At the rear of 'The Cottage' side of the house. The raking out of grout has begun. Water over the year has run down this wall and penetrated into the brickwork. The hard grout held the water in and this in now being removed and replaced with a lime based, softer mortar. 

 

Replacement Lime Mortar

Today I began to look at how we are going to heat this heat house after the new roof. At the moment we have a couple of ancient oil fired boiler and two rather lovely wood burners. We have a 'free' supply of wood on the farm and we are keen to perhaps look at pellet wood burners. There's also a part of me that love a gas guzzling Aga! Though I think this option is seriously outside our budget!

Today I visited Ludlow Stoves to investigate and I fell in love with this pellet boiler that also acts as a cooker and water heater! I think we will have to visit Ludlow Stoves home where they have one working to view. I just can't decide which colour I would choose?! Red or cream!?

Barney!

This week for me has rather been taken over by Christmas at my Shop, Tea & Roses. On Tuesday customers and staff kept telling me we were in for a storm. Having not watched the weather forecast being caught up in my little world, I failed to take much notice!

By the end on Tuesday the gusts of wind were getting rather interesting down Bridgnorth High Street.  Needing food supplies to feed a hungry family and leaving work late after painting a rather large gingerbread house, I popped into Sainsburys with the children. I could hear the wind in the store and my thoughts turned to my house.

We quickly loaded the car and were buffeted by the wind and avoided branches on the road on the way home. We pulled up outside the house to see the black plastic on the front of the house billowing in the wind madly. This black plastic flapped to reveal the missing wall in the front of the house exposed to the elements. With the removal of the wall, all that supports the roof was the props... Each gust of wind into the house just made me wonder if the roof would be lifted off!

I pretended not to be alarmed and hustled the children into the other end of the house. The noise from flapping scaffold board and farming buckets etc. being blown around outside made the children quite interested! Thank goodness for ready cooked chicken as no sooner had we unloaded shopping than the electricity went out. Candles were found from the exposed end of the house and dad arrived home making the children feel happier because of his presence! I think must have thought he could hold the roof up if the wind was too strong! I slept in the safest room I could find!

Morning revealed a beautiful view through the front of the house, literally! The black plastic was gone showing the bare bones of the house but, we were in one piece. I think the builders were releaved that we were in one piece too.

The rest of the week we have had to think about where we will position new windows at the front of the house and what type of insulation to lay in the roof. Not too exciting to me but it makes a difference with what height the internal ceilings will be inside. We have chosen to go with a thin insulation roll option, though more expensive, there is less waste and it will allow our ceilings to stay high. This will be important as we have many potentially low ceiling height.

The front wall is being being bricked up quite quickly so we are secure by Christmas. The window maker is going to make us a mock up to look at, this week we have to decide the position.

Now the shop is ready for Christmas, my attention has turned to the fact we are 'moving out' the house in a few weeks.......better start planning that too....not sure how I will have time, but I expect in my normal fashion, I will just go and make a few cushions instead!

View of our stair case after the storm!

Roof still standing after the storm! 

Anyone Else?

It seems like the whole world has been here today. We've had some electrical cable work done here at the farm. I counted at least fourteen vans, JCB's let alone the builders vans, deliveries and collections.  Though I felt like I was in a blissful, isolated, dark cocoon. No wifi, no radio, no TV, no lighting as the power has been off  all day. It was quite refreshing apart from the fact I really could have done with a cup of tea.

We've had to make decisions about our windy windows. I've grown quite used to sitting in our bathroom watching the curtains billow in the wind....even when they are shut. I can't decide whether I will miss that if we replace them all with double glazed new ones. I guess that is the whole point of renovations but I'm keen to keep character.

Bedroom 4, my sons room, has a hole for his new window already. It sits in the gable at the rear of the house and isn't quite central to the gable but as it's at the back aesthetically it won't be a concern. To balance this though we are making a small triangular window in the bathroom to help balance the windows on the second floor visually. We have a small triangular window in 'The Cottage' side of the house. Both will look really cute!

In Bedroom 5 today, contrary to our drawings we decided to brick up the small side window and add a conservation Velux. We have drawn out on the ceiling where it is to go with a trusty felt tip pen. Best laid plans always look different once you start to knock things down. 

New Window in Bedroom 5

New wall rising up at the rear of Bedroom 5

Small triangular window in the Bathroom

Room with a View

Room With a View has to be my favorite film. We are blessed that from our Farmhouse we have the most beautiful view of the Corve Dale....now we have the most beautiful view of the Corve Dale from our bathroom too! Not quite what we were anticipating at the start of the week!

Room with a View

After close inspection of the timber frame and the second opinion of a structural engineer it sadly

became inevitable that the timber frame on both sides of the house was rotten through. Previous repairs to this timber frame construction consisted of plywood, foam, wire mesh with rendering over.

All the lead flashing that had been used drew in more water causing everything to get sodden. Such a shame. So everything has to come out, though we will save the oak beams for some something somewhere! I like to romantically believe that they might have come from some other ancient building locally. There was a monastery at Morville or perhaps the 12th century mediaeval fortified 

house that sits opposite the farm, by the village church? Many of the beams have holes and notches 

from a previous existence.

With this gable end extending into the bathroom it means that we're wall less until the rebuild, so we're up in good time to shower these days. If we leave it too late we may have an audience! I'm sure in a couple of weeks time when the weather changes we won't be hanging around in the shower for long!

It's the same in the back bedroom, stripped back to show the most beautiful view. The window at the 

moment is at floor level. I think that we will now take advantage and make this window bigger and higher.

View from the Back Gable

It's all happening so fast! But having had young children, I know that it's much easier to tear down a Lego tower than it is to build it up again! 

Having caused so much devastation to the rooms we will probably raise the ceiling height to roof level and pack it full of insulation. There was no insulation in the roof, or any roof felt either....it's been a very drafty, cold house to live in....though with the holes in the walls it's not going to get much warmer for the while! Anyway the cat is enjoying it, having freedom to come and go through the plastic sheeting with furry gifts in his mouth for us. Delightful, I do love a dead mouse on the stairs greeting me in the morning. 

It made me chuckle this evening, as my husband pulled the front door curtain to keep out drafts. In the background I can hear the black plastic sheeting flapping in the ever increasing wind, like the sails billowing on a ship heading towards a storm....