renovation

Leading You Up The Garden Path

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Each day For the month of May Becky is hosting a square format photo featuring one or more of the following themes: move forward, burgeoning, reconstruct, renew. And so here, on all those fronts, is the kitchen-window-to-be with a view on another ‘work in progress’ – the garden. The hawthorn tree over the hedge is doing the burgeoning.

The house extension has been forging ahead too, and while super-builder Alan has been putting up the inner timber frame, I have been digging up the lawn. I started doing this last summer, soon after we’d moved into The Gables, but got no further than two beds along the garden path. Even so, they are already looking promising, bursting with spinach, Swiss chard, coriander, various kales and cauliflowers. (Everything has to be netted against pigeon plunder).

But then came the wet and frigid winter, and so the digging mostly had to stop until March.

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Our garden ends at the fence behind the greenhouse, and I’m now expanding an existing narrow bed along the entire fence-line. First on my list has been rooting out the ground elder and phygelius seedlings, followed by making a well composted trench for runner and butter beans. The trench is done and the bean row will run parallel to the greenhouse, but with space enough for some outdoor tomatoes beside the greenhouse.

Against the back fence are a few field bean plants (mini broad beans), now busy flowering, and next to them is a small plot of sprouting broccoli and green Romanesco cauliflowers for late summer cropping.

It’s a pity everything has to be netted, but the pigeons are remorseless foragers, including testing things they don’t really like and leaving lots of shredded leaves – the rotters.

Meanwhile the kitchen is looking like this:

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A brick-skin with parapet is next on the agenda. There will then be double doors filling the open space, and a roof lantern illuminating the cooking department. The further half of the back house wall will then be knocked through to the main sitting room to create an open L-shaped living space on a roughly east-west axis.

But for now it’s all blue-sky thinking, and not least some serious musings on how the new roof lantern will affect the interior light. Hmmm:

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#SquaresRenew

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Operation House Renewal: Moving Forward

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I’ve not said much about the house renovations. For one obvious reason, it’s been a touch stress-inducing. But the roof has been restored (re-battened, felted and insulated), the chimneys re-pointed and leaking elements fixed, the bedroom gables made secure, and the rear conservatory demolished and removed, and so we’re on the upward trajectory. Or so Graham assures me.

We’re pleased with the roof. On the house front the original Welsh slates have been re-used wherever possible, with reclaimed vintage ones making up the shortfall. The back-of-the-house tiles were all asbestos and had to be removed by a specialist company. They’ve been replaced with Spanish slate, new Welsh slate now being too expensive to contemplate, which is a great pity. But then back in 1922 when local builder George Nicholas was roofing the house, he likewise thought Welsh slate was too expensive to use on the rear elevation. The house then backed onto fields, with only cows to know the difference.

With the roof done, super-builder Alan Morris has been forging ahead, even as he shivered in biting winds and rainstorms re-pointing the chimneys. On top of that, it’s not an easy site: street access is problematic (narrow road), and the new rear kitchen extension, mostly on the footprint of a conservatory, is hemmed in by house, hedge boundary and a terrace wall.

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New tiled roof and old conservatory

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Demolition begins:

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Bricks from the inner skin of the conservatory to be re-used on new exterior walls.

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Shifting the debris and digging out new foundations

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We filled three skips which required some nifty delivery and retrieval. Large vehicles can only reverse into the street. There’s not enough road width to exit at the top of the hill.

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Builder Alan explaining some finer points of construction to Graham

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And this is where we are now: waiting for the floor to be insulated and the concrete laid (Tuesday)

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Gables

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#squares-renew

For the month of May, Becky is hosting the daily posting of a square format header photo. The themes are renewal, burgeoning, moving forward, reconstruction. I’m thinking our renovation works are pretty much covering the lot. And finally, most importantly, we have a moving forward with the weather: sunshine and some warmth. I think we can now say (fingers crossed) it is actually spring here in Shropshire.