Work starts at last!

It has been 21 months since I last posted to this blog. I will explain the reasons for my long absence – but not until the work is over!

Today the builders started on site. The firm we are employing are D J Melsome & Son of Bisley, near Stroud, home since 1982 to Jilly Cooper.

They have started at the top of the house and will be working their way down. The first room to be tackled is the main attic room, on the second floor, which is to become a huge master bedroom, with space for my office.

 

 

This morning I took some “before” pictures to show the work involved.

The walls to be replastered and the window surround to be rebuilt.

The water tanks to be boxed in.

The crumbling inglenook chimney breast to be rebuilt.

And the elm floorboards to be restored.

At the end of the first day’s work the walls are already looking much better, having had their old lime mortar raked out.

And don’t you think the builders are impossibly neat?

I’m looking forward to putting pretty objects in the fireplace once it has been restored.

Your Starter for 10 - Kate's Bedroom

This is the bedroom which my daughter, Kate, uses when she visits from London. Sadly, I don't have a "before" picture but suffice to say that it was decorated with woodchip wallpaper, painted orange, and had an orange carpet. The beams were covered in thick black paint.

Having stripped off the wallpaper, we used traditional lime plaster to repair the damp damaged walls and finished them with Farrow & Ball's Casein Distemper in All White, which enables the lime plaster to breathe.

We carefully stripped the beams back to the old oak, using repeated applications of non-caustic paste, and then fed the beams with wax:

We removed the carpet and the rotting underlay and found layers of chipboard nailed to the floor. We were delighted to find the old elm floorboards underneath, but they were in very poor condition. We had them carefully restored and waxed by Hicraft Wooden Flooring in Bristol. We also replaced the modern double doors on the cupboard with a new single door made from tongue and groove, with black strap hinges and latch. The new door was specially made for us by K T Home Improvements.

With a new oak bed, rattan lamps and bespoke artwork from May Queen Designs, today this is my favourite room:

Your Starter for 10 - The Outside

I recently dug out the estate agent's details from when we bought the house back in late 2004. Looking at the photographs, I realised that, although our big restoration project has yet to begin, we have actually made considerable progress during the past 6 years. So I thought I'd document what we started with and how far we have come.

This is how the outside of the house looked in 2004:

During the past two years we have repainted the whole of the ground floor, using Farrow & Ball's House White (a pale yellowish off-white) to replace the black and white paint. We've also removed the ugly fake burglar alarm box which sat between the two windows on the first floor. The front door was repainted in blue, as suggested by my mother - thanks Mum, a good choice - and the black 1970s door furniture replaced with brass.

This is how the front of the house looks today:

The concrete render on the back and side of the house was in very poor condition. It had cracked and damp had penetrated and was dissolving the lime mortar which holds the stone walls together.

The walls were sodden with damp and plants were growing on them underneath the render. The stone was beginning to crack and spall. We removed the render from the worst places and repaired and repainted the window frames, which were flaking and rotting:

Finally we removed the gates to the driveway, which dated back to the 1970s and were on their last legs:

We replaced them with custom made gates from Country Style Supplies in Wickwar, once again painted in Farrow and Ball's House White:

All the work was done by an excellent local firm called K T Home Improvements.

If I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here

There's an old joke about the man who asks for directions and is told "If I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

I mentioned it to our architect this afternoon, as we tried to make sense of the tangle of beams, supports and odd bits of wood which is currently holding up the roof over our staircase, and investigated the changing levels and voids of the staircase space.

How on earth she will turn all that into a workable new staircase design is beyond me, but I'm jolly glad we've hired a professional to take care of such headaches for us.

I hope the old joke won't be a metaphor for the project, which is an ambitious and exciting one. We're planning to do major restoration work on our home, which dates back to the 17th century and is a Grade II listed building. It was modernised in the 1970s, in a way which was unsympathetic to the building's character and damaging to its fabric, but fortunately almost all its period features survived.

Our plans include rebuilding part of the kitchen, replacing windows, removing rendering and pointing which is preventing the building from breathing, and turning two attic rooms into a new master bedroom suite.

This blog will record our progress as, hopefully, we "start from here" and do indeed "get there". We'd be delighted if you'd join us on the journey.