A month of bathrooms

by In Ethel's House, Renovations, Tiny Cottage Tagged 1 Comment

I seem to have spent about a whole month thinking about bathrooms. We don’t have much space in the current project, but I’d been sent into William Wilson by my plumber to choose some wet wall for the bathroom in Ethel’s and saw this layout while I was in there, which I really liked – so I borrowed a tape measure off them and sent this picture plus measurements to our architect to see if we could do something similar.

Grey and white bathroom layout, William Wilson, Thurso

As it turned out we didn’t have quite enough widthways because of the stairs, but using that as inspiration he came back with three different layout options, two with a bath, one without, but warning me that if I had a bath in there, it was going to be pretty tight to get a large enough electric water heater in under the stairs. We ended up marking out the bathroom dimensions on a site visit and what looks like quite a large space on graph paper actually isn’t when you’re standing in it.

So I mused on it and while I was musing I had a weekend away in Inverness with Mr J in a hotel room with the biggest bathroom I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. As in you went down a staircase inside the bedroom to get to it.

Bathroom in Room 1, Rocpool Reserve hotel, Inverness

And yes, that bath was gorgeous and I soaked in it up to my chin in hot water, but it took about half an hour to fill and I did get a bit fed up waiting for it. (There was also a TV on the wall to the left and the loo was hidden round the corner behind the basins). We did love the shower, however, so as soon as we got home I called my business partner and suggested we went for the big walk-in shower option – it would save about £1,000 on not needing the hot water cylinder as well. He was up for that, so back it went to the architect to find out just how big we could make our shower tray.

We’ve ended up nicking a bit off the living room alcove, but we’re going for a 1500 x 800 shower tray with wetroom-style shower screens and a top of the range electric dual-headed shower. I think it’s going to look fabulous and as we’re pitching this as a romantic hideaway (hence the idea of having a double-ended bath in there in the first place) it’s big enough to get two people into it.

And that wet wall I was choosing that started all this off? That’s been installed, along with a new shower (all of it: tray, enclosure and mixer), new loo, new basin and the floor under the loo that had started to rot thanks to condensation running down the underside of the bowl has had the rotten bits removed and replaced with spare bits of flooring we had left over – I still have a whole unopened box of the stuff, so we’re okay for repairs for a while. It looks absolutely great and the first guests to use it haven’t reported any issues (they’ve been here 10 days now and there are four of them, so it’s had a good workout!)

Bathroom, Ethel’s House, Armadale

We have drawings!

by In Tiny Cottage Tagged , , , Leave a comment

The drawings for the tiny fisherman’s cottage are back from the architect and we’re impressed. He has really, really listened to us, taken into account my layout drawings, and given us lots of notes explaining his reasoning for where he’s done something differently to our thoughts.

We have a site meeting with him next Wednesday to go through some decisions he needs us to make and then hopefully it’s time to send an application off to the planning department and cross our fingers very hard.

I’ve been thinking about how to furnish this place and while I know I’m going to have to get new sofas and a new bed because of the laws about flame-retardant upholstery, I’m seriously considering going round the local auction houses for some of the rest. Modern furniture isn’t going to look right in this building, it needs a few genuine antiques or good reproductions mixed in to give it the right feel. I’ve been watching the antique furniture and collectibles sale online from a near-ish auction house today (near-ish as in I can get there with my van in about three hours) and although the Georgian mahogany serpentine chest of drawers I had on my watchlist went for £1,650, the Georgian console table went for £85 and a really beautiful carved oak sideboard for just £2! (I’m sure there must have been something seriously wrong with it, but it looked okay from the photos). Next time they have one of these, which is roughly quarterly, I’ll nip down and have a good rummage round on the viewing day.

Also interesting this week was the online conference the holiday cottage agency I’m with (Awaze) did for all its owners, culminating in an hour’s chat and Q&A with Sarah Beeny. Lots and lots of good ideas and I’m particularly intrigued by the possibility of using Tesla Powerwalls to build a modern house that’s completely off grid. One to think about for a future project…

Project 3 is moving forward

by In Projects, Renovations, Tiny Cottage Tagged , Leave a comment

I can’t believe it’s now over a year since the idea of going into partnership with Pete was first brought up, but we are finally there and setting off on building our business together. We have a limited company and a business bank account and our solicitor is now getting going on transferring the fisherman’s cottage into the company while I transfer the cash across into the account.

We also have an architect on board, which is a relief, because they’re all incredibly busy up here at the moment. Architect number 1 came to have a look over the summer when we took advantage of an offer he was running for a two-hour site visit and some advice, but was too busy to take us on. He recommended Architect number 2, who said he was delighted to be recommended but felt that because it’s a Grade A-listed building we needed someone with conservation accreditation and he didn’t have it, so he recommended Architect number 3, who came out, had a look and happily bonded with Pete over a love of motorcycles, so has agreed to do it.

(I’m well aware that a love of motorcycles is not one of the key criteria you look for in an architect, but in this case it turned out to be helpful!)

He came back last week and spent five hours on site taking measurements and notes, he’s tied up this week and next, but with a bit of luck and a following wind we should have some initial drawings by the end of the month. He does have a very blank canvas to work with, the house was stripped out decades ago, long before it was listed, and has been used for storage. And when I say stripped out…

It doesn’t even have staircases at the moment, there are entrances at ground floor and first floor level because it’s tucked into a bank, but we’re on ladders between the first and second floor and the ground and first and I HATE ladders. I’m getting better at going up them, but I still hate climbing onto the top of one to go back down. Fine if I’m on the middle floor, I can wimp out and go outside and walk round, but it’s a little bit more of a problem if I’m right up top.

This is what it currently looks like from the outside. It’s a row of three terraced cottages, ours is the one on the right with the cream block-built porch in front of it, which is where the front door is. Lots and lots of work to do here, but it will be beautiful when we’re done.

Tor Aluinn – the costs

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When I did the post last year on the costs of renovating Ethel’s House, I knew at some point I was going to have to be brave and do one for Tor Aluinn, and I’ve been putting it off because I absolutely knew I’d overspent on it. Well, I can’t delay it any further, so here we go.

Tor Aluinn was purchased officially for £110,000, but because the problem with the garage being over the boundary was only discovered after this price had been agreed, our solicitors advised that keeping a retention of £1,000 to be paid back to me after I’d produced an invoice for creating parking space was the easiest way of sorting it out, as it wouldn’t affect my mortgage. So essentially we paid £109,000 for it.

Bills – £10,025.57
This was a very, very big ouch and most of it came from 200% council tax on a high band house – that was £6,893.08 over the renovation period. Insurance and heating oil were roughly £1,000 each and the rest is made up of electricity, insurance broker fee, boiler service and keeping the garden in check.

Interest – £5,329.44
As, technically, what we were doing counted as a light refurb (new kitchen, new bathrooms, update the wiring, decorate) we were able to get a mortgage on it from day one.

Materials – £12,231.16
Amazingly, not as high as it was for Ethel’s, although if we’d gone back to brick on all the external walls instead of just the kitchen gable and the front walls in the kitchen and living room it would have been a lot, lot higher.

Tradesmen – £67,121.80
And this is where I start sobbing! The biggest costs in this were new windows throughout £14,199, a full rewire £7,928, plumbing £9,949, roof insulation and oil tank move £3,543, painting and decorating £3,345, carpets and flooring £7,818 and a few other bits of general building work and tree surgery. To be fair, I could have done the decorating myself and saved here.

Subtotal – £94,707.97

Furnishings – £24,904.41
A much bigger bill than Ethel’s, as in nearly £10,000 more when they’re both three-bed houses, but I had three bathrooms instead of one, plus a utility room and we were going for a five star grading, so we needed dressing tables in all bedrooms, a spectacular dining table, more kitchen equipment, champagne glasses, whisky decanter and so on.

Total spend – £119,612.38

And the valuation? Well, by the time I was ready to remortgage in May last year we were in lockdown, so instead of getting someone to come out and tell me what it was worth, I got a desktop valuation done and it came back at £200,000. My plumber, who is also a property investor himself, reckoned that was rubbish and it was worth at least £220,000 if not £240,000. With the way the market here has boomed post-Covid it would be an easy £240,000 now and possibly a bit more – so result somewhere in between a loss of £28,612.38 and a profit of £11,387.62, depending on which figure you take! That’s with furnishings left in, if you take those out it changes to between a loss of £3,707.96 and a profit of £36,202.93.

I’m honestly pretty happy with that entire range, it’s a beautiful house, guests are leaving it great reviews, and over the years that overspend will be inflated away.

Ethel’s House – the costs

by In Ethel's House, Finances 2 Comments

I’ve just realised that I never did a post about what it actually cost to renovate Ethel’s House. And this one is only happening today because I’m procrastinating about doing one for Coldbackie, because I know I’m not going to like the result!

So, Ethel’s wasn’t a traditional purchase in the sense that we were buying two croft tenancies that happened to have a house on one of them, rather than buying an actual house. We paid £95,000 and at the time of purchase the croft with the house on was valued at £75,000 and the bare croft at £25,000.

Our first purchase on the project was in October 2015, two months after our offer was accepted but four months before it completed, when Mr J got a bit overexcited on Tooled Up and bought himself a pair of plasterboard props. We finally got the keys at the beginning of March 2016 (nothing involving crofts ever happens fast) and the spending started in earnest. We had our first guests at the beginning of March 2018, so the figures below cover pretty much exactly two years.

Bills – £3,311.02
Two years of electricity, oil and council tax when I ran out of exemption time.

Interest – £9,933.31
You can’t get commercial lending on a croft tenancy unless the house site has been decrofted, which it hadn’t. We were exceptionally lucky in that family members were prepared to lend to us, but we agreed it was only fair that interest should be charged.

Legal – £766
Fixed-fee conveyancing from our lovely solicitor.

Tools – £618.94
Mr J was relatively restrained here, for him! (This is a man with many, many sheds…)

Materials – £16,648.76
Now the numbers are getting bigger. This covered things like insulation, flooring, plasterboard, internal doors, carpets, the kitchen units and so on.

Tradesmen – £56,349.27
Wallop! This was the painful one, although it does include a lot of tradesman-supplied materials as well. Top of the list, a brand new roof in slate, £19,367.80. £9,000 for totally rewiring the house, £8,300 for the underfloor heating system (and that didn’t include a new boiler) and £9,300 in total for joinery work.

Subtotal – £87,627.30
I’m subtotalling here because if we’d decided to sell the house, this is where we’d have stopped. When we bought it, the croft Ethel’s stands on was valued at £75,000, that included the stone byre outbuildings and about 6 acres of fields. We got a £5,000 discount from asking price, so take £2,500 off each croft, bringing it down to £72,500. When we got a mortgage on it, in May 2018 (after doing all the required paperwork to decroft the house and a very small piece of garden ground behind it), the house and little bit of garden were valued at £165,000. So add, say, another £10,000 on for the rest of the six acres and the four stone outbuildings to give a finished value of £175,000. Subtract the original £72,500 and the £87,627.30 spent and you end up with a profit of £14,872.70. Not a lot for two years of hard work if you divide it up by the hours we put in, but at least it was a positive figure!

Furnishings – £14,627.95
But of course we didn’t sell it and I underestimated how much it costs to kit out a house from scratch! Furniture and white goods were, of course, the major part of this, coming in at £11,105.78, but then you’ve got cushions, duvets, pillows, pictures, curtains, table lamps, log baskets, all the kitchen equipment, cleaning stuff and three complete sets of bed linen and towels (one in use, one in the wash, one ready for changeover). Take all that off and the profit comes down to a tiny £244.75.

But we now have a wonderful warm house that guests love to stay in and in non-Covid times it’s producing a decent income, which was the ultimate aim. Looking at local prices, I would say it would now value £10,000-£15,000 more than it did in 2018, so as long as we keep it well-maintained it’s acting as a savings account for my retirement.

Side project – the village hall

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Another thing that’s been keeping me occupied for the past year or so is our village hall.  Our village had an old hall, built by subscription in the 1920s, and in 2018 a newly-formed committee decided to try and raise some money to renovate it for its 100th birthday as it was looking a bit sorry for itself and was barely being used.

We’re lucky in my area that community projects have the opportunity to apply for money from SSE’s windfarm funds, thanks to having one a few miles away.  And we did some fundraising ourselves, including a very popular bingo and cake night that proved to us there was a demand for bringing the hall back into full use (any health and safety officers, please look away now!).

We were awarded an initial £11,500 to employ an architect to do a feasibility study for us and he came up with a plan of taking down the kitchen and toilet extensions and the porch and then building a big steel-framed building over the top of the hall itself, retaining the original heart of the building and putting new loos, kitchen and an entrance hall around it.  Then one day we turned up to a meeting to find him waiting for us, wearing a boiler suit, with a pile of floorboards lifted, looking rather ashen.  This is all that was holding the main floor up – the whole length and width of it was propped like this.

It could obviously take some weight, as evidenced by the amount of people at the bingo, and many people in the village had fond recollections of how well-sprung the floor was at dances, but from a public liability point of view, as well as building standards, it was a non-starter.  So after a lot of drawing and re-drawing and an unexpected large legal bill when we found out the hall actually belonged not to the committee but to six trustees appointed in the 1930s who were all dead, meaning we had to apply to the High Court in Edinburgh to confirm new trustees, the old hall was carefully taken to pieces and taken away to start a new life on a nearby croft as an agricultural shed.

In March this year, the builders started on the groundworks.

They were making great progress – in three weeks they had the foundations complete and inspected by the council, poured the slab, laid out the pipework for the underfloor heating system and poured the screed over the top.  The day the first half of the kit frame was delivered to site, Nicola Sturgeon shut down all construction sites due to Covid.

It was three months before we were allowed to commence work again, but I’ll say this: a kit frame building goes up flipping quickly!

Currently we have the roof on and we’re waiting for the exterior cladding, which has made it as far as Inverness and hopefully will turn up on site this week – it’s large sheets and nobody wants to be fixing them in winter winds, which can gust to 100mph here and may reach 45-50 as a base speed.  The guys have been sorting out the inside in the meantime and it looks amazing – just look at the new main hall.  Doors at the back lead to storage area and a green room which will also double as a drinks serving area for functions etc. (if and when we’re ever allowed to do them again!)

We’ve got a bigger kitchen with yards and yards of storage space, plus the island in the middle to plate up on and a serving hatch through to the main hall.  A double Rangemaster is going into the blank space on the right of the picture next to the door.  The kitchen has a separate handwashing sink to comply with the council’s environmental health standards and we’re exploring the option to let anyone locally who wants to have a crack at starting a food business use it for a while to test their market, so they don’t have to get their home kitchen certified straight away.

The entrance hall has an office with a ticket window, the loos are to the other side and we’ve also got two shower rooms – being on the North Coast 500 we get a lot of passing tourists and the hall is opposite the path down to the beach, so we’re hoping to raise some income from opening the loos and showers to public use every day.  Initially it’ll be on a donations system, but we have the option to add pay-per-use locks at a later date.  (I have no idea why this picture has come out so small!)

It’s been my first involvement with a new build and it’s been FASCINATING.  Whilst old buildings are always going to be my first love, this has really whetted my appetite to do a new build of my own in future.  Or two.  Or three.  Or more…

Project 3 – the tiny cottage

by In Tiny Cottage 3 Comments

This is going to be an interesting one.  First joint venture, first listed building, first one that’s been offered to me as a project rather than me trawling through property listings.

Those of you who have read this blog back when I was doing Ethel’s and the start of Tor Aluinn will have seen me mention Pete the Roofer.  As we came to the end of doing Tor Aluinn, he was over giving Mick a hand with re-laying the slabs at the back (translation: showing him how to do it properly!) and casually mentioned that if I was interested, he’d be interested in working on a project with me as a joint venture.  He owns a Grade A listed (Scottish equivalent to Grade 1) tiny terraced cottage, which is just a bare shell inside, and wondered if I fancied helping turn it into a holiday let.

So I pottered over one afternoon to have a look at it.  It’s gorgeous.  A tiny fisherman’s cottage on the edge of a tiny harbour, very private (five buildings down there, only two of which are currently lived in) and a totally blank canvas inside, which means hopefully the listed buildings officer will be relatively generous in what we’re allowed to do with it, as long as we remain sympathetic to its origins.  Yes, there are a couple of areas where I think we’re going to struggle with the layout and I suspect we’re going to have to spend a bit of money on getting an architect experienced with working with listed buildings to help us get approval, but it should end up being a little gem of a romantic hideaway for two.

Pete had the building valued and the surveyor came up with £60,000, which I think is fair.  The idea is that we create a limited company, he will put the building into it and I need to come up with £60,000 in cash to put in to pay for the renovation work.  This may be slightly problematic, as it’s not the easiest time to go to lenders and say, ‘Hi, I renovate old buildings into lovely holiday cottages, please give me a lot of money unsecured against anything.’  Ethel’s is due for remortgage in May next year and I’ll be able to take about half of it out of that, but I’d rather get cracking before then.

Anyway, there aren’t going to be too many photos of this just yet, because there’s still a small chance it may not happen, but just to whet your appetite, this is what you see when you stand outside the front door.

Project 2 – Coldbackie – FINISHED!

by In Renovations, Tor Aluinn Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment

Oh my goodness, it’s been a year and eight months – where did that go?  To cut a very long story short, we planned to open Tor Aluinn to guests in May this year, got scuppered finishing it off by Covid and finally welcomed our first visitors at the end of August.

As a small memory refresher, this is what it looked like when we bought it:  https://househoarder.com/project-2-has-lift-off/

And this is how all those rooms look now.

Living Room

The window seat ended up not getting put back in because it turned out the three-seater sofa fitted so perfectly it could have been made-to-measure, so we just ordered another one.  We didn’t go for a woodburner in the end, they make a lot of mess and there wasn’t really anywhere to store logs, so we left it empty (I’m looking for a vintage fire screen to go in front of it, like the one in Ethel’s House’s bedroom) and picked a wall colour that would make the fireplace disappear a bit – this is Sulking Room Pink, originally this room was going to be dark red.  I’m still not 100% convinced I’ve got the colour right, because there’s so much blue in the rest of the house, but as soon as I change it the fireplace is going to start hitting you between the eyes again.

Downstairs bathroom

We ended up not doing too much in here.  Kris the plumber took one look at the floor and the wetwall and advised (a) it was about £2,000-worth of work and (b) it had been done extremely well.  So we took the shower seat and surround out, got some contrasting wetwall to make a feature of the shower and cover up the screw holes, replaced the loo and Kris had a rummage through his shed and found the shower screen.  The storage unit was bought second hand from someone at Mick’s work.  We did put a big chrome heated towel rail in here as well, which is to the right of the loo, and then the little white towel stand was £20 from Argos and is surprisingly sturdy.

Kitchen/diner

This is where we knocked the study/bedroom 5 into the dining room.  The old Aga was on the blue wall.  And yes, I know the blue kitchen is fashionable and might well date badly, but I love it.  David built the shelves on the island from some offcuts of worktop, so they match perfectly and are really sturdy.  The island isn’t actually fixed to the floor, it can be moved about if we ever need to access the electrics underneath it (the fridge is built into it on the other side).  The blue velvet curtains are the ones we bought with the house 🙂

Utility room

After a bit of a mismeasure with the units (they forgot to take into account the concrete skirting) we had to ditch the separate tumble dryer and get a combination one – and then had a mad panic when I thought I’d better test it the week before the first guests arrived and found it didn’t work!  We ended up frantically swapping it out for a new one the day before the guests were due and the one in the picture is now in my house after a warranty repair.  Glad I found a spot for my impulse bench seat buy and the seat holds all the dog-drying towels, dog poo bags and dog treats.

Hall and landing

Blue, blue and more blue – I didn’t exactly keep to my neutral plan.  Chris the electrician was convinced the feature light was going to be too big for the space, but it works just fine, although changing the bulb in it is a two-person job and you have to lean out rather perilously over the stairwell.  We put an LED bulb in it though, so hopefully it’ll last the advertised 15 years.  The cupboard downstairs has the vacuum cleaner and lots of spares (glasses, bulbs, handwash, loo roll etc. etc.) and the upstairs one is the linen store and has two full spare sets of sheets and towels.

Master bedroom

I LOVE this room.  I know that Hague Blue makes me a walking middle-class cliche and I really don’t care.  Mick had serious doubts about the peacock until he actually hung it on the wall and then he had to admit that it fits in nicely.  The shop actually had two, the other one faced the other way, and I was so tempted to get them both and hang them in the dining room instead, but Mick veto’d that in favour of a really big wooden clock he’d fallen in love with (not shown in the kitchen picture because it hadn’t arrived).  The window seat cushions were made by Just Wright Crafts, who did all the lampshades and cushions for Ethel’s House.  We also cut a hole in the wall in here and put in a little en suite shower room.  If I could change anything about the way we did this house, it would be to put another 10cm onto the en suite, but hey ho.  We went for new doors upstairs in the end, rather than reusing the ones removed from downstairs, as David said too much needed cutting off them and they’d have looked wrong.

Upstairs bathroom

Bit of a difference from the old bedroom.  Because we put the en suite in we decided not to put another shower in here, just the hand-held shower attachment on the taps and a screen to stop the splashes.  The old window seat is the perfect height for a glass of wine and a book.  Kris and David made the boxout to hide the pipes and the bath surround from wet wall.  Again, the radiator was swapped out for a big chrome towel rail.

Front bedroom

This ended up having to be the twin after I couldn’t make the space work for it in the back bedroom.  A shame to lose the fireplace, but we did really need the space.  The bells are all still on the walls, but sadly the wiring couldn’t be revived.  The cupboard in here has had a rail fitted and is acting as a wardrobe, which saved a few hundred.

Back bedroom

The wallpaper in here was such a sod to get off that Magnus ended up papering over the whole thing with lining paper and painting that rather than scraping.  We had to move the bell push, it’s just been glued back on.

Garden/outside

The old asbestos garage, half-built over the boundary, got removed by specialists, and we created a gravel parking area at the front.  The garden was hacked back, a really big tree too near the house was taken down completely, and Pete and Mick spent four very hard days levelling the broken flagstones and laying new patio stones around the back of the utility room where the garage used to be.  There’s now a rustic wooden table and benches in the rectangle area where the wall is and the double sink is at the back door as a planter, with mint and chives in it.  Fencing David (he has the same name as David the joiner) came and replaced the remains of the old metal wire fence with a beautiful wooden one with handmade gates at either side of the house, which Magnus then stained with creosote – we have not yet had a dog escape!

And that’s it, job done!  Is there another project?  Well, yes, there is, but more about that another day.

Colours

by In Tor Aluinn Tagged , , 4 Comments

Magnus was at our house this week, as we had a blocked septic tank outlet pipe, and that got me thinking about colours again, as he’s going to be doing the painting at Coldbackie.  Last week I bought a painted wooden towel rail from a lady in Halkirk for Ethel’s and we were talking about how we both loved Farrow and Ball colours, but winced at the prices.  ‘Did you know they can mix to the Farrow and Ball colour chart in W&D Ross in Thurso?’ she said.  ‘It’s not identical, but it’s very close and it’s about a third of the price.’

Talk about a perfect fit:

So off I trundled when I was in Thurso on Friday and sure enough, yes they can.  The base paint is Johnstone’s Trade and it’s £34.90 for 5 litres compared to £103 for 5 litres of F&B.  So this afternoon’s job was to sit down with the paint chart and How To Decorate and rethink all the colours.

The hall, the stairwell, the landing and the downstairs corridor are all going to be Stiffkey Blue with Wevet on the ceilings.  The kitchen and utility room units are all a dark blue and search as I might on Pinterest, I can’t find anyone who’s done anything other than pale walls, unless they’ve painted the cabinets themselves and done the identical colour on the walls.  So I’ll carry on the Wevet on the walls in both those rooms and between the beams on the ceiling, but the wall where the Aga was in the kitchen/diner, which is opposite the door coming in from the downstairs corridor and will have the dining table next to it, will be Stiffkey Blue – it should balance out the blue units at the other side of the room.

I’ve ummed and ahhed for ages about the living room.  It’s a big room with a high ceiling and, of course, the very dramatic fireplace in the middle.  The floors are going to be a rich warm wood, the sofas are going to be brown leather and I want to make it feel cosy in the evenings rather than vast.  A strong colour should bring the walls in and I’m going to be brave and paint it in Blazer to the picture rail and then Wimborne White above the rail and on the ceiling.

 

I bought actual F&B Cooking Apple Green and James White when the Homebase at Wick closed down.  It was going to be for our bedroom at home, but I’m going to try it out in the back bedroom here first.  That room overlooks the garden, so it’ll bring the green inside the house.

 

The front bedroom overlooks the sea, so I’m going blue in there with Skylight on the walls and Wimborne White again on the ceiling.  Both these bedrooms will open up off the dark blue Stiffkey landing, so it should make them look brighter than they actually are.  The paint chart makes it look more blue than it is in this picture.

From that landing there’s an archway through to the corridor leading to the new bathroom and the master bedroom – the corridor will be Wimborne White and then I’m going darker in the bathroom and bedroom.  I’ve ordered bath panels and a loo seat in graphite grey, so I’m going to have a classic stone-effect floor, probably Karndean Clip Fiore:

And then Plummet on the walls with Ammonite on the ceiling.

In the main bedroom I’m going darker again, with either Moles Breath on the walls and Ammonite on the ceiling (I know it looks the same as Plummet on screen, but it is darker!) or Hague Blue and Wevet.  Moles Breath was my initial choice, but looking at it next to Plummet whilst writing this post, it does rather look as if I’ve just given up and gone grey in that section of the house.  I love Hague Blue, but am not quite brave enough to use something so dark all through the hall, landing etc. etc., so it might be nice to turn this bedroom into a cocoon of a room.

Whichever of those I go for, to prevent the room being too gloomy, I’m going for furniture from Riverside Interiors’ Tister range, which will contrast nicely against dark walls.

Next job: get the room measurements out and calculate how many cans of each I’m going to need at coverage of 12-14 square metres per litre!

 

 

Timber!

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Colin the tree surgeon (or Celtic Firs, to give him his official business name) came out and did his stuff, and it’s made a big difference to the amount of light in the garden and coming through the windows at the back of the house.

We have a nice load of firewood to take home and season 🙂

The trees at the back also got a trim.  The lower branches from the other big evergreen were extending around 6ft into the garden and once I get all the output from the chipping machine cleared away (could be a while…) it’s going to be a pretty big space.  All the brambles and blackcurrants have been cut back to the boundary as well.

Inside, Pete and Al have been hard at work.  The rest of the wall is down in the kitchen, all bricks and wood have been removed, and it’s swept out and tidy.

Upstairs the little fireplace has been removed.

If the little Victorian-style insert from Ethel’s doesn’t fit into this space, then I’ll get David to take that bit of plasterboard off, re-frame it and cover it over completely.

In the master bedroom, the hot water tank cupboard is gone.  Now there’s space for a 5ft double and two bedside cabinets.

Other news from the last couple of weeks – the boiler at Ethel’s stopped again, the day before the guests were due to arrive.  This time I consulted Google and found that the overheat light was coming on.  After leaving a message for Jeff on every form of contact details I have for him, including Facebook, I went down the road to feed the horses and saw his van parked outside a house further down the road.  He came and had a look and said that there were three usual causes of what was happening – 1) pressure drop (which I’d eliminated by resetting it the other day), 2) the pump had failed, meaning the water the boiler was heating up wasn’t getting moved out of the boiler and around the system (the pump was fine), 3) dodgy thermostat.  He found that the sensor for the thermostat had come slightly out of its insulated pocket, so re-seated it, fired it up and told me to monitor it.  Thankfully it’s been fine ever since, but I think we’re going to have to budget for a replacement boiler in the next 12 months, as even though Jeff said it probably had another two or three years in it before things started going wrong, I’d rather do it a bit early and not have any pissed-off guests.

We had a half-decent amount of snow here last week and sod’s law, one of the days with the heaviest fall overnight was the one where I had to go out to Coldbackie for a site visit with the plumber.  Yes, I finally have a plumber!  He has keys and will get started as soon as he can.  He’s made all sorts of sensible suggestions about bathroom layout and saved me an entire shower cubicle.  We’ve measured out the en-suite width upstairs and I’ve written on the wall to show David where the new stud wall needs to go.  I was going to do all the ordering through his account with the local plumbing merchant in Thurso, but while I was browsing through the Heritage bathroom catalogue, looking for an appropriately-period-style suite for the new bathroom, I found a website with a January sale on the entire range.  Kris told me to order from it, as he wouldn’t be able to price-match, so he’ll get all the en-suite goods and the replacement downstairs loo and shower through his account, and I’ve got £800 off on the upstairs suite, which is 10% of the entire bathrooms budget.  The one I’ve picked is Granley Deco, which is 1930s, same as the extension.

RDI went back out yesterday and got the heating working again.  I need to give them a ring to find out where we are, because they were going to do the radiator move as well and I can see today that they’ve moved the temperature control to the new position and put the two isolation valves on, but there’s a big wet patch on the concrete floor and the radiator is still under the kitchen window, so I’m not sure whether they simply ran out of time, as I know I was down as an afternoon job, or if they hit a problem.  A relief that the house is warm again though, although I’d turned the water off as a precaution while it was off.  It doesn’t half look pretty out there in the snow though, even if driving around snowy unploughed roads is a bit hairy – view from the front bedroom last Tuesday.