House and Garden

When I moved in to my house I knew it would need a fair bit of work doing, and last year I got the majority of the indoor work done, with a new boiler, insulation, and lots of redecoration.

This year, it's time for the outside, and on Monday morning, 4 blokes and a JCB turned up to get started.

pre work

At the front, the previous owners had tarmaced over the front garden, leaving it open to the road, and I've wanted to turn that back into a garden, (hence the JCB)

Apparently they took out about 18 tons of tarmac and rubble.

After which they laid topsoil, and built me a fence and a couple of gates.

I am of course partial, but I do think it looks rather nicer now! 

And I shall be starting to plant stuff at the front in the coming months.

At the back of the house, the previous owners had laid patio and gravel over most of the garden, and again, I wanted a bit more garden. In addition, at Christmas, the back fence succumbed to the weather.

The death of the back fence

pre-work back garden

So I decided that I would keep the patio but increase the amount of lawn, and of course replace the back fence.

new back garden

The new turf looks very neat and bright compared to the old grass (or it did..)

Because, having finished the work on Thursday, the heavens opened on Friday evening, and we had phenomenal amounts of rain in a very short space of time, which resulted in a very brief but spectacular flood.

Which was just a bit annoying :( I mean, the turf care instructions I have been given do say to "keep the new turf well watered" for the first couple of weeks, but I suspect this wasn't quite what they had in mind...

New New House!

Back in May, I moved all my furniture, and myself, out into the shed / garden annex / converted garage,  in order to allow a whole string of builders and plasters and electricians and decorators and carpet fitters to transform my house.

The living room. Note the lovely stone-cladding, and the artex ceiling

It was in great need of it. 

These are some of the 'before' pictures. The house has literally had nothing done to it for decades. 

I assume the wallpaper went up in the early 80's, and nothing had changed since. Not shown here: the lovely curtain poles, which were screwed to untreated bit of wood which were, in turn, glued to the wallpaper.

My Bedroom. With woodchip wallpaper everywhere

I can be quite certain that they were glued on, because whoever glued them on did not clear up afterwards, so there were lots of blobs of white pva glue sploodging out around the wood. 

Spare room. More woodchip. 

It's actually quite inspiring to think that there is someone out there who is even more clueless about DIY than I am...

The 'before' pictures of the bedrooms are less dramatic, because you cannot really tell that the walls (and ceilings) are covered with lumpy wood-chip wallpaper, and the carpets so thin that every floorboard could be seen. 

And these pictures don't show the black, sooty plaster, loose around the sockets and where the airing cupboard used to be. Or the lovely holes where the previous owners had TVs on the walls, and all kinds or random bits of wire everywhere...

Living room. 

Also not shown: the peeling artex ceilings in the kitchen and the bathroom. They were not fun. 

So, I moved out, and the builders moved in, and made dramatic and messy changes. 

It is very strange to come home at the end of the day and find that you can see all your brickwork, or can learn what your loft insulation looks like from the underneath. 

My bedroom. No more woodchip!

(Yellow, mostly, in case you were wondering!)

Also my bedroom. No more ceiling

But mostly what I came home to was dust. Black dust. Lots and lots of black dust. 

And then some more black dust. 

And did I mention the the black dust?

It was also a little worrying to see just how much stuff was ending up in the skip outside the house. I started to feel as if I might get home one day to find the entire house was gone, with nothing left but skip after skip of rubble.

Fortunately, things then started to improve.

I would return each evening to find plasterboard, and then plaster, and new skirting boards, and new electrical sockets, and all sorts of things.

Living room

And then came the decorators, and the new, non-black, walls went from pink, to  white(ish) to the colours which I had chosen.

Then, last week, after the decorators had finished, the carpet fitters arrived. I had not, originally, planned to replace all of the carpets but in the end, I decided it was easier than doing them bit by bit, plus they really, really needed to be replaced...

Bedroom

And so now I have new carpet everywhere. 

And it does, I think, all look rather nice.

The carpet fitter finished on Friday morning, and on Saturday morning two blokes with a van arrived to move all my furniture back indoors, so I am now, officially, moved back in.

spare room

And I feel that I now have the house which I 'saw', when I first looked around the house last Spring, before I bought it.

It is not quite finished:

 I don't have any curtains yet, and all of my books are in boxes (the third bedroom is, literally, half full of boxes of books right now.) 

Bedroom with furniture!

I am stalking a couple of carpenters with a view to getting some bookshelves and cupboards built into the living room, and one day I want to have a wood-burning stove in the fireplace, and some better quality furniture.

The books, awaiting unpacking.

And outside, the garden needs work.  But for now, by new house is all shiny and new, and I am very happy with it.

Now, I just need to get the books unpacked ...!

In which there is a Lot Of Dust

When I moved house last year I knew that the place was going to need redecorating, and it was fairly clear that this would (unless I were willing to live with painted woodchip wallpaper for ever) also mean lots of plastering. 

Before starting work

 It took a while to get quotes, and to work my way up to taking the plunge, but I did, so this weekend just gone I spent a lot of time putting things into boxes.

End of day 1

Then on Sunday, watching while 2 removal men carted virtually everything I own out to be stored in the garage. 

And on Monday morning, work started.  I went off to work, leaving the house to the tender mercies of the builders.

It turns out that if you are to have new plaster on your walls and ceilings that this means that the old plaster all gets removed. Which I knew in principle, but that had not really prepared me for coming home to discover that my bedroom walls were down to bare brick. 

End of Day 2

Or to the new experience of seeing the loft insulation from underneath.

It is all rather alarming.  And they haven't even started on the living room yet. (when they do, that will be even more dramatic. 

End of Day 5

The bedroom decor looked OK from a distance (or in a photo). The living room will probably look better even at the 'bare brick' stage, than it does now!

In the past day or so they have started putting the new walls on, and I am sure that the extra space where the chimney now isn't will be nice, once the room is finished.

Meanwhile, I am getting used to sleeping out in the garden shed, (which is, I should add, built of brick and has electricity and light, so is fairly comfortable for a shed. Especially as it currently contains all my bedroom furniture) I find that I am remarkably efficient at getting up in the morning, due to a terror of being caught in a state of undress by the builders (they arrive very promptly in the mornings, and the bathroom is,despite dust, still in use. (Except for that one morning when they turned off the hot water and forgot to tell me, or to turn it back on afterwards, which resulted in my having an extremely fast, and bracing shower!)

I am, however, looking forward to my trip to London next week, when I shall get to sleep indoors, and will almost certainly not 

Now, if only I can find a reliable local painter and decorator..

'Twas on a Tuesday morning that the Plumber came to call..

This house is solidly build, but very little has been done to it for years, so I knew I would have to Get Stuff Done.

The first bit of Stuff I got done was the electrical Stuff - replacing some sockets, moving some light switches (I am baffled as to why someone would think putting the light switch 3 feet into a room, rather than, y'know, next to the door so you can turn it on as you go in, and off as you leave) The electricians also checked everything and did a couple of things to improve safety, which seems like a good idea. And put the TV ariel where I wanted it, so I don't have to have wires trailing all over the living room. Which is nice. I mean, I had got about 3 channels, by hanging a little ariel off the end of the curtain pole, but I missed BBC 3 and 4. 

Oh, and they installed a doorbell. Which is good, as I sometimes have visitors who I want to let into the house, and that's hard of they can't attract your attention.

The next (and so far biggest) bit of Stuff I have had done is the Plumbing Stuff, and specifically, replacing the boiler. The boiler which was here was an extremely elderly back boiler, behind an extremely elderly and unattractive gas fire. It had two settings - 'on' and 'off' and was probably at least as old as I am. Maybe older. 

Before

So, I searched for 'boilers least likely to explode and take your house with them', and then got a few plumbers/heating engineers round to quote and to make recommendations, then on tuesday the chosen plumber came to do all the actual work. 

going. . .

As well as removing and replacing the boiler, they took out the old hot water cylinder, and the airing cupboard it was sitting in, the removal of which makes the spare bedroom feel much bigger - it's now possible to have a bed in there *and* open the door!

There was a slightly worrying moment when it became clear that removing the airing cupboard left me with rather less than the recommended amount of floor, and indeed ceiling, in that corner of the room, but happily, a lot of bits of plasterboard later, everything was sorted!

..gone!

While the plumbers were here, I also get them to put a hand basin in in the downstairs WC (hurrah for hygiene!) and a raditor (hurrah for not freezing!) and they also cleaned out all my gutters for me, and moved my fridge, so I know have a fridge and freezer which both work, in the kitchen, and the one which came with the house, which only works intermittently, is out in the shed as a spare. 

All my radiators now have proper thermostatic valves on them, and I have a new widget for controlling the heating, which is very exciting - it has 7 day programming, you can tell it when you are going on holiday so it will turn the heating on the day you come home, and it even has a little button you can push if you are having a day off work, which causes it to substitute Sunday's programme for the normal one for the day. Those of you who have modern heating systems probably don't find this very exciting, but my last house had a very very old system (options were to have the heating on, or off) and the house before that didn't have any hearting, except for a gas fire in the living room, so it's all new and exciting to me!

For reasons which I do not entirely understand, changing the boiler means I have lots more water pressure than I had before, which has had a very positive effect on my shower!

I was very favourably impressed with the plumbers, who were fantastic about clearing up after themselves, both as they went along, and once they had finished. 

The next project will be to get insulation into the loft (and into the wall cavities, which I suspect are not currently insulated, although I need to check) and then to get the dreadful stone-cladding out of the living room, and removing the equally hideous  charming  wallpaper there, with a view to them getting the whole room re-plastered and redecorated. I need to start getting quotes for all of that to work out whether I can afford it now, or whether I shall need to save up again, first!

In the meantime, I thought this little gem from Flanders and Swann, might be appropriate . . 

Moving!

As some of you know, I've been wanting to move for a while - to have more space for my books, and for guests, and a bit more garden, and more space generally. 

So, in September, I put the house on the market. It's been a rocky ride since then. I found a buyer, found a house I liked, got surveys and such and was hoping to move, if not quite in time for Christmas, at least shortly after that. Then my seller pulled out, for no apparent reason. 

I started looking again, found another house just before Christmas and had an offer accepted, paid for more surveys and so on, and was hoping to be able to move in by the end of February. Then my buyer went on an idiotic spending spree and, as a result, got his mortgage offer withdrawn. So I had to put my house back on the market. I did find another buyer, but obviously it was very stressful. I can cope just fine with change, but I don't do so well with uncertainty. 

And with all that uncertainty, and so many setbacks, I've been reluctant to talk too much about it in case it all goes Horribly Wrong, and despite that, things did go a little bit wrong what with my oven packing up on Monday, (I wish I'd decided against using up the stuff in the freezer, and had simply cooked something on the hob. That way, the oven would have gone bang after the house belonged to the new people, and it would have been Someone Else's problem, but such is life.

The New House is bigger than the old one, but more importantly has a real garden (and as quite a bit of the garden is currently patio / asphalt for parking,  it should be possible to turn more of it into garden, over time) and fewer neighbours, and more space to put bookshelves.
Of course, it also currently has the Decor the 80s forgot, (yummy peach and yellow stripes, with coordinating borders, in the living room!), but again, it should be possible to change that.

Some of the books are boxed up

And there will be a whole lot of unpacking to do. The removal guys have packed everything, but I have to unpack stuff for myself. I'm looking forward to seeing all the books I put in boxes to declutter when I started to market the house!

Hopefully, by the time you read this, I shall be in the new house, (probably in the middle of a vast stack of boxes, with a glass if wine in one hand..)

(Oh, and it'll be about a week before I have the internet in the new house, so it may go a bit quiet around here for a while)

Plumbing again

The plumber came again today, and I have I new pump in my boiler, and less gunk in places where there shouldn't be gunk, and radiators which get hot. In fact they get hotter than the did before, which is nice.

I haven't had the bill yet, I'm hoping it won't be too horrendous.

And this weekend my parents are coming to visit, so I'm hoping I will be able to get my dad to accompany me while I look at more cars - for moral support as much as anything else.

I do wish it would stop raining, though.

Small Things

I'm still mostly busy with things which are probably not very interesting to anyone but me - I haven't been to any gigs or museums or shows recently.

I'm still moving on with the de-cluttering, and am making visible progress, which is gratifying!

This morning I ventured up into the loft to get down my *good* boxes (they are archiving boxes, so are strong enough to hold books, and small enough to be movable when they are full, so I have kept them ever since my first move) and to check what else I have up there.

I don't go into the loft very often - I'm not fond of ladders and in going up there I'm always convinced that I shall either fall (and lie for days with a broken back), or that I shall put my foot through one of the bits of floor which isn't fully boarded over, or knock the ladder over and end up trapped in the loft. However, there's no-one else to do it for me, so up I went.

I have been storing some boxes for my sister, from when she and C were living on the boat, and needed to check how many there were, so we can work out how to get them back to her. I found that other than her boxes, I only have a small number of boxes of my own stuff, and I brought a couple of the smaller boxes down and have been looking through them.

 I've been able to throw away some stuff (mainly very old financial documents) and have been looking through some of the rest- one box is mainly full of photographs, including old ones of family holidays, with my parents looking very young!

I also found some pictures from University, including one from Graduation, which I think is actually much nicer than my official graduation photo, in which I was sitting down, in the pose demanded by the photographer, and look like a large black tent  (albeit a well educated large black tent)

There were also some group photos from graduation, full of people I didn't recognise. (and some I did)  I also found various old letters, including cards from my grandparents (none of whom are around any more), which made me smile (and sniffle, just a little!)

I've reduced the amount of stuff to keep into one box, from two, which gave me a nice feeling of achievement. The next task to move some of the books which are currently into heaps into the good boxes, (which will then go into the cupboard under the stairs, as being easier to access than the loft)

I've also made yet another trip to the tip, with various junk, old cardboard and a couple of old very old and obsolete bits of electronics, including the radio/CD player which I bought to take to University.

It's progress, of a sort. Still some way to go, however.