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Renovation round-up week 4

Work's been going on the best part of a month. I think it feels like it might have been longer, and that every morning has been grey and damp and cold and muddy. But maybe that's just the winter blues talking. Week 4 saw the corner properly turned, and whilst demolition continues, stuff is also being created. The underpinning of the kitchen walls proceeds in sections, and now about 5 large concrete blocks have been cast at various points around the wall. The team also managed to excavate the footings for the newly enlarged porch, digging a trench probably a metre deep in a short space of time. They managed to pierce the water supply heading into the house, leading to some rather panicked rushing around trying to find the stopcock. I largely ignored the panic, figuring I'd only need to start worrying when half the garden slumped down the hill. Fortunately it was resolved long before that point, but I did get to witness the trench mostly fil...

The great (wood) wall of Walnut Tree House - Renovation Day 15

More faces on site (I've been told, I wasn't at home). Wayne stood down, but new grounds people on site. And more pertinently a pair of carpenters. The carpenters spent their day erecting a large wall that runs through the lounge, hall and playroom. They removed the entirety of the playroom door and surround, and walled off a whole set of shelves. From the inside it's an impressively monolithic construction. And they took care to route light switches so that we can control the lounge and playroom lights, albeit at about 6 feet off the floor so that Keir has no agency at all. All so that they can keep digging lumps out of the kitchen, and knock down walls and so on without too much impact on the rest of the house. And with the wall in place the demolition continues. Three full grabber lorries of dirt have gone from the driveway, and there's at least two more still to go. The pantry is mostly gone, although the floor remains. And they'...

Through the mud - Renovation Day 10

It was grey and damp and dreich almost all weekend. Which coincided in a mucky way with the excavations of the kitchen. Wayne and Chris had spent most of Thursday and Friday with the digger and dump truck in the kitchen, with the result that about three quarters of the kitchen was a metre lower and all the earth that had once been beneath our feet was mostly on the driveway. I say most of the earth was on the drive way, because of course, there was a thin patina of mud all the way across the patio and around onto the drive. Such that every time someone, or a pet, walked into either of the external doors we were using, they tracked some mud into the lounge or our teeny new kitchen. Upshot: filth. And a never-ending tide of it too. We snapped on Saturday and spent the day cleaning the house, dusting and hoovering and tidying to make it feel slightly more pleasant to live in. We managed to keep muddy pawprints off things for all of about 20 minutes...

Digger! Renovation Day 8

Demolition has moved up a notch this week. Last week seemed mainly to be about artisanal, handcrafted demolition, carefully removing and dismantling lights and cupboards and doors and shelves. This week is much more about the power tools to remove the floor tiles in the kitchen and start to break up the concrete slab. Then yesterday, the big tools arrived on site. Our kitchen now contains a digger, and a dump truck and a big hole in the back corner, starting to nibble under the wall between the kitchen and the toilet. Said wall will be either demolished or rejigged to turn that space into a pantry. Obviously diggers don't get into kitchens through doors, so half of the back wall has now been removed and the stable door and window are, er, somewhere. On pieces on the drive I think. I have a suspicion that Wayne and Chris (the ground workers currently cheerily breaking everything up) salvage and presumably re-sell what they can. All po...

Renovation Day 5

We're a week in then. Stuff has happened, but I always crave more. Let's list out what's happened in the last seven days. The Aga has gone. The porch has gone (well, it's now in the form of a pile of rubble on the drive). The kitchen ceiling has three quarters gone. All the kitchen units and the sink have gone. The downstairs loo has gone. There is a fine layer of dust on every flat surface through the rest of the house. We have some asbestos. Or maybe not. It's unclear. We've moved our cooking and eating operations to the South Wing, which is only reachable from the rest of the house by walking outside in the grey and rain. I spent the weekend rearranging stuff to make the little lounge we have in the South Wing a bit more comfortable, primarily by rigging up a TV and an XBox. That made the boys happy, and they enjoyed social gaming sessions in the small room. It was all remarkably convivial. The penny dropped with...

Renovation Day 3

We're only on Day 3 out of what will probably be at least 200, and already it feels like the new normal. I don't think I'm exceptional in this regard, I think this just illustrates how adaptable people in general are. I know I will soon get fed up with clutter and the lack of space, but one day at a time. Anyway, yesterday saw the total demolition of the porch, all that remains is the concrete footing, and strangely a substantial pile of rubble on the drive next to the skip. It's not clear why rubble isn't going in the skip, and is therefore starting to restrict parking space on the drive. Perhaps the plan is to fill in the holes that will soon be dug with the hardcore, but there's definitely a volume issue here - it can't all go back in! Also the downstairs loo has been removed, so now if you're in the South wing (the location of our mini-kitchen) and need the facilities the options are either to walk outside the house, step inside via the conservat...