Category: preparations (Page 2 of 3)

Enter the Artichoke

February 23, 2017 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

We finally admitted it: we have no clue what we’re doing. We can’t even decide where to put the stairs into the attic, and how to arrange the first floor.

So today, we invited an architect round to have a look.

I’m not sure how encouraging it is when you ask, “So, do you think we’re mad?”

And he just looks at you for a moment before replying, “I think you’re brave.”

He’s going to cost us a small fortune… but it’s going to be well worth it, because without expert help we won’t end up with the home we want, and it’ll probably cost us much more in mistakes in the long run.

We’ll be getting started with him in the summer. After we’ve sorted the oak beams and the new window.

We’re already really excited: there’s talk of a two-storey oak-frame extension on the back to house the new kitchen and possibly our main bedroom – positioned so we can look out up the garden.

There’s also talk of possibly pushing the banks back to give us more space behind the house. Which will be epic, and is an idea I’m coming around to.

Can’t wait to see what he comes up with…

Railway sleeper raised beds filled with mulch — All ready for topsoil

Diggity

February 12, 2017 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

As the weather has been awful for the past couple of weekends, we thought it’d be the perfect time to get out into the garden. And we’ve accomplished quite a lot…

Not least, getting very muddy.

We also failed to buy a chainsaw on a stick. Instead, we bought a hedgetrimmer on a stick. So we need to get a small chainsaw attachment so we can prune the fruit trees.

The long-handled snips let us do some initial pruning, though, so we’ve made a start – and now the old apple tree by the mower shed has a lot less mistletoe on it, and we’ve identified the vertical branches and rubbing branches that must go.

But the main progress was Joe and his new machete: he’s cleared a whole load of brambles from the house-end of the bank, so we can see the whole hazel tree and conifer now. If we can do a couple of hours of that every weekend, we’ll manage to reclaim that bank fairly quickly. Apparently the way to go is wait for the bramble stumps to start sending out shoots, then just dab weed killer onto it for a targeted extermination.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Joe with machete clearing brambles by the hazel tree

We now have a hazel tree free of brambles, and a big scrubby space on the bank

The plan is to get the bank back to grass — or possibly wildflower meadow — and also plant snowdrops, crocuses, and daffodil bulbs so we have beautiful spring flowers.

While Joe was doing that, I was prepping the second raised bed (I did the first one last week). I covered the grass with a layer of cardboard — old cardboard boxes — that will mulch down. Then I gathered loads of wet, dead leaves from the Bridge of Significant Peril, and from the hedges and banks and around the fruit trees, and spread them on top of the cardboard.

There’s also newspaper, paper towel, straw, and chicken droppings spread all over the raised beds:

All ready for topsoil

I’ve just ordered two bulk bags of topsoil to be delivered on February 23 – and I’ve got some garlic on the way to go in asap.

We haven’t got a greenhouse or anywhere to propagate seeds at the moment, so I’m buying in young plants to plant out throughout the year. Easiest way to learn is by doing as I’m told, so I’m using Rocket Gardens on recommendation of a friend. I’m really excited about this.

Also, we’re planning a little fenced area for our allotment, which may help to keep the chickens and cats out…

Inside the House

Inside, we’ve not made huge progress — but the new oak beams are going in to reinforce the attic floor mid-March, same time as the new winking window at the front of the house.

We’re seeing an architect next week, who’s going to help us plan the whole project out — because we keep stalling and don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t.

Watch this space…

Like Giant Drunken Jenga…

October 26, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

I love living here. The Sunday before last, we were in the pub having a pint, and I mentioned I was looking for railway sleepers to make raised vegetable beds. Farmer Leddy asked how many I wanted, and how long.

“Ooh, 16, about 2.4m long. Know anywhere?”

“Yep. I’ll ask.”

~ Fast forward to Monday morning ~

A tractor pulls up outside with a farmer hanging off it waving manically…

“I’ll be along in about an hour with those sleepers, alright?”

“Erm… Okay! Brilliant!”

A couple of hours later, and these are in our backyard:

All ready to move up the hill…

Not too filthy, and all ready to move up the hill. Except they’re about 100kg each. Joe and I moved two of ’em, then decided it was a bit lairy. Slippery hill and potential broken legs and all that. It would have been okay if it was just moving them around on the flat.

So, last Saturday night, we were in the pub. Again. Three drunken farmer lads.

“We’ve got these sleepers…”

“Aye…”

“There’s plenty beer in it for you if you fancy helping us move ’em tomorrow please…”

“Tomorrow? Ha! Tomorrow is for WIMPS. We are men. We shall move them NOW.”

Joe goes off with three drunken farmer boys, and I wake up to this. If I hadn’t had an awful gin hangover, I would have laughed more loudly. As it was, I chuckled to myself quietly, then went back to feeling sorry for myself…

It’s like a giant had enough and threw his toys out of the wheelbarrow…

So later on that day, when the woe had receded, Joe and I and my Dad created two raised bed masterpieces:

Not too shabby…

I’m going to line them with polythene so we don’t produce poisonous carrots and whatnot, then dig out all the grass and weeds, and fill ’em with topsoil and chicken poo.

I’m also going to create a border around them, either of gravel or wood chippings, so the grass doesn’t get all mashed up and muddy.

Next spring, we’ll be producing all manner of delicious goodies.

We Have No Walls Upstairs

October 25, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

It’s been all go here at The Dingle over the past couple of weeks. We’ve finished installing the eco-friendly insulating boards in the attic

~ (and, by the way, the professional lime plasterer who came around to give us a quote today said, “Who did this? It’s absolutely excellent. Some of the best I’ve seen.” *proud*) ~

and got Fish our joiner around to make a decision about the floor.

We didn’t so much get on with the floor as rip out everything on the first floor. From this, with the not-original dodgy stud wall:

Before, with the dodgy stud wall…

To this. A big mess:

Just a wide open space…

Now we’ve got all that space, we’ve got more options. So, here’s what we’re definitely going to do before we move up into the attic:

Take out the two beams supporting the attic floor. They were never meant to support a “proper” room, and according to the buildings guy who came round with Fish, were probably wall timbers supporting struts for lath and plaster before they became our ceiling.
Install two 8in x 8in oak beams to support the floor.
Knock out the “winking” panel so we can install said beams, and put in a new oak-frame window at the same time.
Maybe install new oak floor joists – the buildings guy said it’s not essential, but if it were his house he would do it. So we’re going to get a quote and see how much it’d add to the bill. We’d like to do it proper-like.
Move the stairs. The new hand-made oak stairs were going to go in the same place as the old ones, but it makes more sense now we’ve opened up the space to have them go up from the corner, more or less where the downstairs stairs come up.

So that’s all structural stuff we’ve to do, to make the building sound. All good, and it means we get a window into the Wonky Room so we’ll have more light.

Fish suggested we could put the bathroom into the Stone Room, which has given us something else to consider… It’d be an amazing huge bathroom, and I could put a roll-top bath right in the middle, as well as a big walk-in shower…

We really need to sit down with pen and paper and decide on the layout upstairs – and how it’s going to relate to downstairs when we build the new kitchen at the back.

Anyway. In the meantime, we’ve discovered some treasures:

Old papers lining the plasterboard between the ceiling joists – from 1949 and 1950

I’m going to save a couple of these panels, the ones in best condition, and varnish them and turn them into a little treasure. Same with some of the crazy wallpaper we’ve lost with the stud walls. I’d like to keep a little reminder of what was here before us.

And a rats’ nest:

Thankfully they moved out…

Okay, so perhaps that’s not a treasure. And thankfully it’s an old abandoned nest. No rats here. But you can see the horizontal slots in the ceiling beam, which are odd – hence the idea they were once wall supports. And the beam itself isn’t sturdy enough, really, to support a floor. It’s like a trampoline up there…

There’s a bit of a bend on this one…

We’re leaving this timber in place. Partly because it’s so wonky I don’t know how we’d replace it. It’s aces. But mostly because when you jump up and down on it, it barely moves. We’re going to replace those supports with something beautiful though.

We had a quote today from a lime plastering expert, and it looks like we can get the attic plastered before Christmas which will be brilliant.

He’s solved the freezing wall problem – there’s some insulating lime plaster that gives you a “pillow” effect, so we can expose the timbers but still keep some of the chill off the wall. Looks like we’re looking at about £50 a square metre, which seems pretty standard from what I can find out.

Exciting stuff 🙂

The Attic is a Squirrel-Free Zone

October 1, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

So, yesterday was a super-productive day here at The Dingle. First thing, we utterly failed to go to parkrun. In our defence, it was raining…

But we did go to Kent’s in Hereford because Ronnie the builder from the pub told us it was the place to go for soffits.

So off we went.

Having no idea about these things, I figured we’d probably be shelling out a couple of hundred quid and it’d be a bit of a ballache fitting the things, because of drilling holes and putting vents in and that.

But on arrival, the helpful young man pointed out soffits with vents already within them – and we got 15 metres of the stuff, cut up small enough to fit in our car, plus a box of pins to fix them.

They’re not going to be visible at all, so we didn’t have to worry about what they looked like. And they’re not really true soffits anyway, they’re simply there to ensure no critters get into the cavity behind the rafters and set up shop there.

After a sustaining meal of boiled eggs and soldiers and a cuppa, we dragged everything up into the attic and got started.

There was a hazelnut in the middle of the floor. Like some kind of dire warning from the squirrel posse that this was their territory. Not to be deterred, though, we pressed on. Keeping a weather eye out for terrorist squirrels…

First job: removing all the bricks loosely fixed to the top of the dwarf wall. The previous owner had put them up there to make it less draughty – here’s what they looked like before we removed them:

Under the eaves with bricks…

And without. This is the front of the house:

Draughty…

And the back of the house. As you can see, there is no soffit here. We got a good view of the chickens bockling around in the courtyard…

Looks like there is actually a soffit on the front of the house

Fitting the soffits was actually really simple, and only took us a couple of hours. We got a system going: Joe would measure all the distances between the rafters. I’d saw the soffit into the right lengths. Joe would nail them onto the timber.

Here’s the result – front of the house:

Tidy.

And the back of the house. Much less draughty:

Dusty.

A job well done. Not authentic, perhaps… but we’re beginning to realise that if we do everything exactly as it “should” be done, we’ll need a bottomless pit of money. So we’re concentrating on doing the best for the house – making sure it can breathe, making it as authentic as possible – but not bankrupting ourselves or driving ourselves crazy in the process.

We do have to chip out all the concrete that’s in contact with the timbers, though, because it rots the wood. Not breathable, see.

So that’ll be a fun job over the next few weekends.

We’re pleased with our progress today. Tomorrow (Sunday) we’ll be starting to fit the breathable, eco-friendly, insulated plasterboard.

Jobs still to do before the floor goes down:

Fit the plasterboard
Decide on lighting and wiring
Decide on plumbing locations for the shower room
Chip out concrete adjacent to timbers
Plaster the ceiling and walls
Paint the gable end wall for a textured look – or do we lime plaster it? Yet to be decided
Probably a bunch of other stuff we’ll discover later on…

Perhaps the most difficult job today was cleaning up afterwards. Up until now, the attic had been strewn with rubble, piles of dust and sand, old nails and tacks, and tools scattered everywhere. Now, the tools are neatly packed away, all the crap is gone, and the place is swept and tidy. Still very dusty, but it’ll stay that way for weeks, I’m sure…

Sandstorms in the Attic

September 25, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

We’ve been quiet for a while, mostly because we’ve been on holiday, but partly because we’ve been dithering.

There’s quite a lot to do. And we’re beginning to realise how clueless we currently are about, well, everything.

The oak flooring for the attic is arriving sometime in late October (we’ve put the dates back a little because of the amount we have to do) but before then we have tons of stuff to get on with. Here’s what we’ve done since the last update:

Joe and my dad – Adrian – stripped out seemingly miles of cables and nonsense from the attic. Strangely, the porch light and one of the lights in the Rayburn Room no longer work. Makes perfect sense.
Pulled out an uncountable number of tacks, nails, and cable ties from all the timber.
Removed the final bits of cladding and random battens.
Had some more sandblasting done.

To Sandblast or Not to Sandblast

One of our dithers was over whether or not to sandblast the timbers in the attic. We have enough cash to do the floor and the staircase before Christmas, but other than that, it’s getting a bit tight.

In the end, we decided to go for it because as Chris, our Super Sandblaster, pointed out: if it looks crap when we’ve done the rest of the room, we’ll be gutted. And it’ll be a right mess to do later.

We’re really, really chuffed we did because it looks ace. Here’s the before:

Attic space with original beams and pine cladding

Pre-sandblasting

And here’s the afters:

Stone end, after sandblasting (plus Hole of Doom)

He did the bricks as well, which is ace because they were a right mess, and we couldn’t tell what state they were in. As it turns out, there are many types of bricks in all manner of states.

End wall of the house, sandblasted

So we’ve just treated all the timbers for woodworm. We need to buy some more stuff to do the top beam and the floor. It’s odd stuff – it made Joe and I sneeze continually…

Concrete Nightmare

Once we’d done that, our next job was to tackle the panels between the floor and the ceiling slope. Interestingly, we found one panel that was still – we think – the original lath and lime plaster:

Original building materials

I wish we’d realised before we knocked a chunk out. We’re leaving the rest of it in situ, obviously, and we’ll repair the hole we made…

Bad news for the other panels though. They’re concrete, and what looks very much like random lumps of cement. We honestly don’t know what we’re going to do with these, because if there’s no brick in the walls and we take all the concrete out, we might end up rebuilding that whole section of wall.

And it’s not just the top bit in the attic – the wall continues down into the Wonky Room below.

Any suggestions and advice welcome!

We did start chipping away at it, but it’s super-hard and it’s going to be a nightmare.

Original panel in the middle, concrete on either side

And the yukky concrete one – do we chip it all out and risk a hole in the wall? Or skim it and ignore it? I don’t want to leave it there, but neither do I want to rebuild an entire section of wall…

Concrete wall woe

There’s another one of these on the other side of the original panel. And two more at the other end of the room.

What’s Next?

So, what do we have left to do before the floor arrives?

Put eco-friendly, natural plasterboard up on the rafters
Skim and paint the ceiling
Skim the walls? Or leave the bricks bare? Probably skim them, because they’re quite gappy
Put new wiring in (maybe – maybe after the flooring is done)
Soffits between the wall and the ceiling to stop birds nesting up there again
Cut out the new stairwell and remove the old stair gubbins

And probably a bunch of other stuff too…

Save

Stripping The Attic Part II

August 2, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

What with all the sunny weather we’ve been having, we’ve been a little lax about getting on with the vast pile of indoor jobs…

But on Sunday, we ventured back upstairs to finish the pine-cladding destruction.

It went much as before: pine removed, many dust generated, nails removed, rafters exposed. And we discovered the ridge beam is not so much a beam as an entire tree trunk by the looks of it. We need to inspect it more closely, but so far it looks sound.

Actually, that’s another job we have to do: treat all the timber in the house for woodworm. That’ll be fun.

Anyway – you can see the progress we’ve made below. It’s pretty much bare now. We need to remove the cladding corpses and as much dust, nests, and dirt as we can, then we’re ready to look at the actual improvements.

Hurrah!

Bare rafters

And the ridge beam:

Mahoosive oak (we think) ridge beam

We still need to pull all the electrics out as well, so we can rewire properly.

In the meantime, Fish – our floor man – is coming along on August 12 to look at the horizontal softwood timbers and advise on what we can do.

The oak floor is arriving on October 17 to sit for a few days…

And we start laying on October 24! Exciting times.

So before October 17, we have to:

Strip out all electrics
Clean out the entire space
Make sound any gaps at the base of the roofline and ensure the wall is cool
Cut out the area where the stairs will go
Blast and treat the exposed timbers
Lath and lime plaster (we think) the sloping walls/ceiling

Suddenly that seems like quite a big list, considering we’re having a holiday in between now and then…

Attic or loft? And Lots of Dust

July 11, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

We’ve done a lot of garden maintenance over the past few weeks. Mostly mowing and viciously attacking the nettles (and we’ve not made much of a dent in either, if we’re honest).

What we haven’t done much of is make progress indoors. That’s been frustrating me (Vix) because there’s so much to do.

So, this past weekend, we decided to Make A Dent In The Attic. Literally.

Here’s what it looked like before. The sleeping end:

Joe contemplates the sleeping end of the attic - pre-destruction

The sleeping end (and a prisoner on day release)

You can see there’s fibre-board laid between the beams and over the rafters. And there’s a whopping great big ridge beam that looks original (hurrah!).

And here’s the other end – there’s going to be a dressing / sitting area in the middle, then a shower room at the far end. (It’s a huge space.)

The other end, complete with dodgy sauna cladding

You can see at this end, there’s pine sauna-esque cladding running up to the “ceiling”, which has been lowered. We’re going to remove all this and expose the original ridge beam.

Where the paint line is, is where the old train set ran around the room. The chap who lived here had this amazing train set. He’d built an entire landscape, and it must have been quite the thing when it was going. I love miniature stuff, so I would’ve loved to have seen it. It was mostly disassembled when we moved in, so we took the rest out and gave the train tracks to Joe’s niece’s friend.

Anyway – the weekend task was to rip as much of the cladding out as we could. We’re stripping it right back to the rafters and then starting again.

We’re also considering putting new oak beams in to support the roof, because the white ones you can see in the photos are cheap softwood. They’ve also been bodged in and are a right mess where they join at the truss. We’re not boxing them in because we want the space, so we’re considering replacing them with oak, which will look amazing and will last longer than we will.

Watch this space.

This is the old staircase opening, which we’re removing. The staircase is serviceable for occasional attic use, but no good for regular use.

Old staircase opening

We’re having a new solid oak staircase built by the same chap who built our friends’ beautiful new staircase. We’re widening the opening at the top and it’ll look amazing. We’re also thinking we might have stairs built up to the truss so we can climb onto the beam easily then faceplant into bed from a height. Fun!

Here’s the plans drawn up by our master craftsman. It’ll be in before Christmas…

Our chosen stair plan.

In the meantime, though, here’s how far we got with the destruction…

Exposed rafters and one of many wasp nests

This is pretty much what the sloping walls look like now. We uncovered three solitary queen wasp nests, beautifully built. And a full, gorgeous paper wasp nest. All abandoned.

And bird nests. Not so much nests, actually, as an entire bird housing estate… I think that was mostly responsible for our roof insulation. Thankfully, the roof and the weatherproofing are in really good condition.

There is, however, a random course of bricks that has been placed beneath the roof where the walls join, so we’re going to need to look at that. Not least because they all move alarmingly when you at them hard. I think a soffit should be there. We’ll dig into that.

We haven’t uncovered the ridge beam yet – that’s next weekend’s dirty task.

In the meantime, here’s a beautiful wasp nest that resembles The Scream…

The Scream

Next up: finishing the destruction, then installing new horizontal beams and starting the plastering.

Electrickery

May 2, 2016 / Joe Fraser / 0 Comments

There are a limited number of things I know about the chap who lived here before us. He was well thought of by the village. People liked him, and enjoyed seeing him thrash his motability scooter at unprecedented speeds down the high street. As a younger man he’d run the local scout group, and there’s quite a few middle-aged chaps I’ve met in the pub who knew him when they were a child. These facts have been gleaned in the local pub. There’s only really one thing I know about him that comes from the house itself.

I know he had no fear of electricity.

I know this from the junction boxes, from the randomly placed pullswitches, from the wrist-thick bundle of cables that encircle the house at gutter level.

So, in an attempt to untangle the facts, we spent some time a few days ago finding out which MCB does what at the main consumer unit (which is halfway up the stairs)

So, here’s a rundown of what we found:

Main switch – nothing to report
RCD, 63 Amps. Somewhat unbelievably, this immensely complicated tangle is protected by a 30mA RCD. I find this both reassuring, and amazing.
MCB1, Type B32. Label: Cooker. Connected to.. the cooker. we’re off to a good start.
MCB2, Type B20. Label: Ring Circuit. Here is where I’d expect all the wall sockets. Turns out it’s only the sockets in the attic, and one socket on the gable end bedroom.
MCB3, Type B20. Label: Stairlift. We don’t have a stairlift, so I was expecting this not to be connected to anything. However, it runs the washing machine, the kitchen sockets and lights, one hall socket, the stone extension bedroom sockets and the immersion heater.
MCB4, Type B16. Label: Sockets. This one’s not connected to anything.
MCB5, Type B16. Label: Sockets. This supplies half of the sockets in the living room.
MCB6, Type B16. Label: Sockets. Nothing. Nada.
Another RCD, 63Amps.
MCB7, Type B16. Label: Outbuilding. This supplies a bunch of external lights and the shed, which has it’s own consumer unit and more wiring than we can wrap our heads around.
MCB8, Type B16. Label: Sockets. This supplies a random smattering of sockets throughout the house, plus the lights in the stone extension ground floor.
MCB9, Type B20. Label: Sockets. This powers the electric toothbrush.
MCB10, Type B32. Label: Water Heater. Not connected to a thing.
MCB11, Type B6. Label: Lighting. This supplied lighting to 70% of the house
MCB12, Type B6. Label: Lighting. Lighting for one bedroom only.

Photo 25-04-2016, 19 39 29

So there you have it. I’m no expert, but should lighting and sockets be separate? Isn’t 20A a bit much for a toothbrush?

Looking at the cableruns, it looks like any time they wanted a new socket, light, or switch they simply looked for the nearest piece of wire, whether it be above or below, for lighting, sockets, ring or spur – and cut into it to splice a new bit in.

It’s not really salvageable. The house will need a complete rewire. But it’s awesome fun!

We’d have loved to have met the previous owner. He seems like he was a real character – everyone has a good word to say about him. And he’s created this crazy, wonderful, quirky house – which looks insane, but everything works. I suspect he was something of an eccentric genius and I wish I’d known him.

Imminent Chickens!

April 25, 2016 / Vicky Fraser / 0 Comments

So, it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to keep chickens – and now we’re in The Dingle, I can finally do it! Hurrah!

So on Saturday just gone, we headed over to Wynne’s of Dinmore, which is just a few miles away, and wandered around their farm.

They have, as well as everything chicken-related, alpacas for sale. Look at this dude! They look like 80s pop stars, they’re ace. But they’ve got batshit-crazy eyes and they just kinda stare at you, so we’re not getting alpacas.

A ginger alpaca and a blonde alpaca giving us the hairy eyeball

We might, however, get a couple of pygmy goats because you’ve never seen anything so cute as a baby pygmy goat.

Anyway – we’ve ordered a chicken house, all the gubbins to get us started, and three Calder Ranger hybrid hens. I’m expecting a call today and I’m ridiculously excited. We’re hoping they’ll all arrive before the bank holiday weekend so we can get to know them.

In other news, here’s what else we’ve accomplished so far:

Settled in nicely
Cooked two meals in the Rayburn, which were delicious (lasagne and a tagine)
Let the cats out for their first explore (nervous, us?)
Taken out a dead stump and a dead apple tree
Planted our three trees: a Victoria plum, a conference pear, and an apple
Mowed the lawn many times
Got broadband sorted
Planted a miniature herbery (mint, oregano, curry, parsley – we’ll see if the mint goes mental)

We’ve not done much in the way of, well, anything yet. We’re going to live in the cottage for a couple of months before we make any big decisions… but we are going to start stripping wallpaper and Getting Stuff Done over the bank holiday weekend.