Nearly finished a room!

Latest mortgage update yesterday, for all those crossing their fingers, is that the forecast is currently being considered by head office.  However, they’ve confirmed that it is the final hurdle, so if it’s approved then we’ll be given a mortgage offer in principle.

I’ve been trying to forget about it and get on with the painting.  It took two and a half hours to get into all the little pockets at the top and bottom of the tongue and groove with a tiny brush.  (Sorry, I am still unable to get WordPress to display portrait photos in portrait – I can go to Edit and Rotate and then they refuse to save.  They’re the correct way up before I upload them!)

And then it still needed another coat, damn it!  But it was worth it – I reckon it looks pretty good.  Colours, while I remember, are Crown – Milk Bottle on the ceiling and woodwork, and Crown Period Collection – Promenade on the wall.  It’s a pretty good Farrow and Ball imitation and while it doesn’t have quite that same depth and warm that F&B does, it makes up for it by being £18 for 2.5l instead of £43.59(!).

Certainly a vast improvement on a year ago!

All that’s left to do in that room now is (a) touch up the spots where the masking tape took the green paint off; (b) Dougie to fit the smoke alarm and TV/phone socket; (c) David to fit the door; (d) get carpet laid and furnish it (including a blind for the Velux).

In other news, one of Mick’s colleagues was selling an oak coffee table, did we want it for £100?  Yes please, especially since the drawer handles match the ones I’m using in the kitchen!  (I know where it came from and I think it cost him closer to £300.)

Mick’s big week off

So my lovely husband decided that he needed a week off work, since he hadn’t had any time off yet this year, and last week he put in a massive effort to get the house more or less ready for the trades to start.

He got a little over-enthusiastic in the bathroom – we’ll have to rig up a sheet for some privacy!  Pete, Dougie and David all know each other well, but possibly not THAT well!!

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Bedroom one – wall ready for raking out and repointing.  You know that the hot water cylinder was there a long time when there’s a perfectly circular dent in the floorboards.

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Studwork removed between the rooms upstairs – that’s standing in bedroom one, looking through bedroom three/the landing to bedroom two.

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Lime plaster coming off downstairs.  Still waiting for the final verdict on supporting that lintel, which means it’s not a ‘No’ yet!

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Living room lime plaster coming off.  I’m sure there are probably better, safer and faster ways to do it than knocking it off by whacking it with a hammer, but I did that wall in the second and third pictures (and about a wall’s-worth in the kitchen) and it’s bloody good fun!  On a more practical note, I am a lot happier with my balance on a stepladder than I was before I started.

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He really did pick the right week to take off – we’ve enjoyed some stunning weather here over the past 10 days.

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So we are more or less there on the stripping out part of the job.  Upstairs has now been swept up and is ready to go.  Downstairs we still need to bag up and remove the lime plaster on the floor, but decided that a better breathing mask were required first – the filters for it arrived today, so we should be able to get tidied up downstairs by the end of the weekend, particularly since the Rayburn was rehomed today to someone who’s prepared to give it some TLC and restore it (and he very kindly brought us a bottle of whisky to say thank you!).

A good week’s work

Mick and I have been cracking on with more panelling removal and we’re making slow but steady progress.  Pete the Roofer was going to bring David the Joiner round for a look this week, but Pete’s wife (who works with Mick) passed on a message that David has the lurgy that’s going round (or man-flu, as she put it!), so hopefully he’ll be recovered soon and able to come round and size the place up.

One of the nice things about spring starting to spring is that flowers are popping up all over the place outside:

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Inside, we’ve depanelled the dormer window in bedroom two and found this – I think the initials may stand for Harry Macdonald, Ethel’s husband’s uncle (if I remember correctly), who left the house to her husband.  (EDIT:  Thanks to my friend Elizabeth, it may also be Hughie Mackay, her mother’s cousin, a joiner who worked on a lot of the houses in the village.)

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It’s amazing how much more space there is with the panelling taken out of the top of the dormer window alcove – that thin piece of wood was only to fix the panelling to, so hopefully we can leave it open and maybe put a small armchair in there for a quiet reading spot.

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One unwelcome find in this room (and it’s not very clear on the picture, but trust me, it’s there) was woodworm.  Lots of it.  On all the roof beams on the west-facing roof.  It’s live as well, a bit of sawdust came out of the holes when I banged the beams with a hammer, so that’ll all have to be soaked with treatment stuff.

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It was when I was working in this room and Mick was working in the little bedroom next door that we realised we could hear each other so clearly that we could have a conversation in normal voices, despite being in separate rooms.  As our target holiday guest is a family with young to teenage children, we thought that Mum and Dad might not appreciate the lack of soundproofing at bedtime (for any number of reasons!), so we stripped off some of the panelling on the internal walls to see what was inside.  Answer?  Sweet nothing – that wood is the back of the panelling on the other side, so we can’t take down both sides or we’ll remove all the internal walls!

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The only other thing we’ve done this week is break into the living room fireplace – Mick has done a great job and it looks like it’s been filled in with concrete and bricks, so we should be able to enlarge it for the woodburner fairly easily.

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Whoomph!

Mick took the day off work yesterday, as he’s away for the long weekend and wanted to get some more work done.

Actually, scrap that, what my pyromaniac husband wanted to do was light the big pile of panelling and since the wind was coming from the south and not too strong and he was going to be outside repairing some of the fanks so I can dose the sheep tomorrow, it seemed like a good time to do it.

I’m not quite going to say ‘I told you so’, but I did express my reservations about setting light to something nearly as tall as the house in fairly dry conditions with both peat on the ground and an oil tank in the vicinity, so I did have a quiet chuckle when this appeared on his Facebook timeline:

Today’s job – rebuild and hang the gate on the fanks. Took me a while but got there. Also ran round like a looney with a bucket of water throwing it everywhere as the old wood panelling took to an inferno………

We’ve been working mainly in the second of the bigger bedrooms this week, stripping out more panelling.

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Old nails left behind from last time the roof was worked on.

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That’s one heck of a big stone!  Sitting just over the fireplace in that room.

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Back wall of the house.

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This fell out when I took the skirting board off.  Wonder what happened to the rest of the deck?  We also found a lot of hair grips!

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And finally, I had a quick look under the tiles in the living room fireplace.

Good news on that front though, Pete the Roofer says that David the Joiner is on board and he’ll be bringing him over early next week to have a chat.

Budget Day

Not just for Mr Osborne, but I thought I’d add up how much I’ve spent to get here so far, as the solicitor’s bill arrived this afternoon.

The only two expenses I’ve had (not counting the running costs for my sheep – I’m keeping my crofting budget separate) are the interest on the money I’ve borrowed from my family and the legal fees, so the accounts so far look like this:

Difference between money borrowed and purchase price – £70.51
10th Nov – Interest – £96.68
10th Dec – Interest – £276.88
11th Jan – Interest – £276.88
10th Feb – Interest – £276.88
10th Mar – Interest – £276.88
16th Mar – Solicitor’s bill – £766.00
Total:  £2,040.71

So it’s cost me a little over £2,000 just to get the keys.  In fairness, that’s not bad – I had to sit down when I opened the solicitor’s letter, as I was expecting that to be four figures and possibly starting with a 2!  I shall drop in and pay it tomorrow and leave a large Easter egg for Jane, my solicitor 🙂

I had a call back from Dougie the electrician this afternoon – he was up the road in Melvich, could he come and have a look?  Sure.  The good news is that he’s agreed to quote for it, so I need to think about what I want in each room in terms of lighting and sockets (I don’t need to finalise positions just yet), think about where I want the TV and the phone, as he’s going to hide all the cabling currently tacked to the front of the house for those, and decide whether I want the power to the byre to be on a separate meter to the rest of the house.  He’s also going to move the position of and seriously upgrade the heating controls (it’s a cheap clockwork timer and the noise is really annoying) and move the meter and fusebox etc. – he’d seen that the main power cable into the house is chased into the harling down the outside wall and then goes through a wooden panel above the front door, which isn’t ideal, so since we’re getting the door replaced and we’ll have someone patching the non-harled bits that will be revealed when Pete takes the fascia boards off, it’s going to go through the wall at the height of the connection and all be hidden in a little cupboard on the landing.  Mick has suggested that we ask him to also quote for putting in outside lights, particularly one to illuminate the fanks (sheep handling system), and also for wiring in a back-up generator so that if we do have guests in and there’s a power cut, it’ll cut in and take over.  We actually have a generator here, but it’s not wired in, so it can go down the road.

Another two hours stripping out panelling and bedroom one is very nearly ready for work to start.  The priority over the next few days is to get the surfaces with the Veluxes/proposed Veluxes bare so that if Pete wants to start cutting holes in the roof next week it’s all ready to go.  I uncovered a MAHOOSIVE spider which I thought was dead, but turned out not to be.  Mick really Does Not Do spiders, so I had to dispose of it out of the bedroom window.

Inside Ethel’s House

No, I haven’t completed and got the keys already, but I have finally made time to get some pics I took when we viewed it off the memory card and onto my PC.

The kitchen – needs some work and sadly I don’t think that range will make it.  However, the washing machine’s new and there’s another range wrapped in bubble wrap in one of the outbuildings – I’m waiting to find out if it’s included in the sale or not.

 

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Kitchen ceiling – we were slightly alarmed by this until we went upstairs and found a nearly new immersion heater above it!

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Bathroom – also very new, much of this can be kept.

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…though I might want to fiddle with the layout a little.

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Wiring – newer than I was expecting, but still going to be redone.

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Love this little cupboard in the panelling in the second bedroom.

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Standing in the second bedroom looking across the landing to the first.  The third is a tiny single off to the right.

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Original fireplace in the first bedroom.  The whole of the upstairs is panelled like this and much as I would love to keep it, it’s going to have to come off because the house isn’t insulated at all.  I’d hoped we’d be able to save it and put it back on, but a friend who’s renovated more than one of these says it’s impossible – if it doesn’t split when it comes off, it’ll split when you nail it back on.  May see if I can save enough to do the lower half of one room and glue it back on…

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New skirting board needed for the landing!  The home report did note woodworm, so one of the first jobs will be to seal up all the windows and doors and pump in some bug-killing chemicals.

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Holiday let – half home, half hotel

I’m writing this lying on the sofa in a hotel suite in Vienna (my husband’s been working out here, so we were able to access a corporate rate that made it less expensive than a tiny hotel room in London) which is my home from home for a few days and it’s got me thinking about what I can learn in terms of furnishing my holiday let from how this four-star hotel has decked out one of its best rooms.

Firstly, the shower.  I LOVE it.  It’s a combination shower with a fixed waterfall head and a separate hosed shower, a bit like this:

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(that one’s on sale at Victoria Plum at the moment).  Since I don’t have much space to play with in the bathroom and I’m not a fan of over-bath showers, I think this is a fab idea – we only have a rainfall head in our shower at home and it makes it a pain in the behind to (a) clean and (b) wash the dog!

In fact, the bathroom in general has been done beautifully – not quite enough space for his & hers sinks, sadly, but they’ve provided top-of-the-range toiletries and flannels for us, enormous white fluffy towels, enormous white fluffy bathrobes and there’s a separate loo.

They also score points for having HD Samsung TVs in both the living room and the bedroom and the pod-system coffee machine is a nice touch too (not that I drink it, but my husband is enjoying a morning caffeine jolt each day!).  The sofas are comfortable, there’s air conditioning and there’s a small balcony with a table and two chairs on it with stunning views over Vienna.  All things I can take and use (well, I can’t magic up views of Vienna, but I can manage stunning sea views instead).

What don’t I like?  Some of the furniture positioning is a little strange.  For example, there’s an enormous desk in the bedroom, but the wardrobe is in the living room – I’d have swapped those around.  Also, no mirror in the bedroom, the bed is two singles pushed together rather than a double/king (with two single duvets on it) and I’d have liked a sound bar/music system I could dock my MP3 player into.

Talking of beds, I stayed in a Travelodge in London on my way out here and got one of the new beds – they’re not kidding, they really are incredibly comfortable, though the edges of the mattress are quite hard and I caught my leg on it more than once walking past the bed to the bathroom!  I’m prepared to overlook that, given that I didn’t wake up with my normal stiff back (I tend to fall asleep on my side and over-curve my lower back – or, in less posh terms, I sleep with my bottom sticking out!).  Apparently you can buy them – I’ve just had a look and mattress-only is £399 for a standard double, so they’re definitely going on my list.