Apologies for the gap in posting, I’ve been getting husband back on his feet, dealing with lambs, making hay, keeping Ethel’s clean and tidy with back-to-back guests and, finally, getting a bit of work done on the Coldbackie house!
The new windows went in last month and look great.
The Aga was sold to a couple just up the road from where we live, who are off-grid and are going to convert it back to solid fuel. Their son came up to help them take it out and it left the house in three pieces, but it’s made the room look a lot bigger.
I got stripping in the front bedroom – love it when the wallpaper just peels off in easy strips 🙂 I need to measure up that fireplace – I’m hoping the Victorian-style metal insert that we took out of the bedroom at Ethel’s will fit in there, allowing it still to be a feature, but getting back the floor space that the tiled hearth takes up.
And I couldn’t resist a little peel back of the wallpaper on the landing. My bedroom was that colour yellow when I was tiny!
Then it was time to get demolition-happy in what will be the kitchen-diner. It’s going to be a lovely big room when we’re all the way through.
And just to show what a difference aspect makes to warmth of light – both the room I’m standing in and the room I’m knocking through to are painted the same colour, but one has a north-facing window and the other south-facing.
New beams being exposed. This is going to need treating for woodworm.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was to find a brick wall here. Everyone, even the surveyors, thought this was stud. We worked out, with some help from Ralph next door, that this is where the original house’s staircase would have been and the Hoggs would have put this wall up to create the maid’s room. Therefore it’s likely not to be load-bearing, which is backed up by not all the beams resting on it, but I’m going to get Pete to come and check it out before I take a sledgehammer to it.
RDI were starting this week, putting in insulation, moving the oil tank and moving the radiator in the maid’s room, so I thought I’d better have a look at the wall the radiator was going to be moved to (the Aga wall), just in case there was a fabulous stone fireplace hiding behind it. Sadly all that was left was a lintel, the rest appears to have been bodged about with in the 1930s.
I wasn’t expecting that wall to be tanked. As we were planning to make the wall on the left of the picture above a bare stone feature wall and there was a bit of damp in the top corner, I thought I’d peel that back as well. Turns out it’s also tanked, so game over for bare stone (why would you tank an internal wall??), but I think I’ve found the cause of the moisture – old plaster had flaked off in chunks and wedged itself between the wall and the plasterboard, bridging the air gap and allowing moisture to cross through into the plasterboard. All this will come off, the wall will get cleaned up, picked and pointed as necessary, and then have new studwork and plasterboard. On the plus side, it means the radiator can now go on this wall, which is a much easier move in terms of pipework.
Our final job at the weekend was to cut back the area where the oil tank’s going to go. Lots of blackberry and blackcurrant bushes in with the honeysuckle, so I think I’m going to make it an edible garden. I think I’ve found a border at the back of the living room which would make a perfect herb garden, but I need to go back and rip out a load of weeds and grass and see what’s actually under there. We’ve found quite a nice old concrete edging to the lawn under the grass as well.
