Week 9- Up to the first floor!!

Well in two months we are up to the first floor! Feels like things are really picking up pace now! This is Nigel at the start of the week....

This is the kitchen diner with the ceiling on. We were really worried about the ceiling height in here at one stage but it seems to be fine!

Below... a bit blurry but where we are up to now... - that is our bedroom wall you can see! ...and another "juliette" view. I almost got vertigo taking that one... it is much higher than I imagined!

Roof could be going on next week!

Having some fun with the pretty stuff...

Ok so enough of
bricks and concrete...

when does the pretty stuff start?

Well have been starting to think more about stuff this week. I have designs some railings for the balcony... James is going to see if the budget can stretch to something like this.

I tried to buy a back door on ebay but got distracted by cheese and biscuits and missed the moment! But I did buy a lovely copper bowl that I'm dreaming about turning into a "vessel sink" or "sink bowl" as they are known in the Baker family.

I also spent a lovely hour in Mandarin Stone in Cheltenham sighing at a few millenia of crushed fish and other sediment. We are partly swayed from our original terracotta kitchen floor intentions... especially by some travertine cobbles layed in a herringbone pattern- much like this lovely brick floor....

Week 8 - Rooms taking shape and scaffolding goes up

More of the same I'm afraid... but with every week that passes you start to get a bit of a better idea of the rooms. You can now see where the kitchen window is, the downstairs bathroom and the big french doors. The brickwork looks beautiful.

On Saturday morning (much to our surprise) the scaffolders turned up to do their stuff. We were still in our dressing gowns... I'm glad we were in though otherwise they would have completely blocked next doors right of way etc.. its fine now though.

It is funny how it immediately looks like a building site once scaffolding goes up.

Tonight Nick and I climbed the ladder and sat on the planks contemplating for the first time what will be our view from our juliette balcony on the first floor... bliss!

Week 7 - Downstairs cloakroom and utility.

Most of last week was spent doing the "raft" foundation and retaining wall for the downstairs loo and utility room. We solved the change in level problem by putting the raft under the soil pipe rather than on top of it.

Unfortunately we have still lost a bit of the width of these rooms as if we had followed the plan the toilet would have been in the middle of the back path. As it was we had to shave off a few inches off the path to ensure the width was sufficient for the sink and washing machine, provoking a more than a few frowns from our dear neighbours. As Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) once said "The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch..." Keep fighting guys! ;)

We love Bricks!

I love bricks! There is something about their texture, tangibility, what they represent as little pieces of something wonderful.

Our brickie Nigel is very talented. I love the way he is tying in all the brick work to the existing building.

The guys even managed to save an old victorian air brick which we reused in the back wall to take the ventilation through to the old part of the house.

On Wednesday last week the "new" reclaimed bricks arrived. The building site is now "choc-a-block" quite literally with bricks everywhere. They look a bit lighter than the original house but I think once we wash the dust off them and mingle them in with what we saved from the old kitchen they will do just fine.

Week 6 - What a difference a day makes...

Well, we are back from a lovely holiday in Zakynthos. We got about half way through and I thought this is great- I hadn't heard from James so everything must be progressing nicely. I sent him a quick text to check everything was ok, only to be phoned back an hour later. Apparently in a few days we had managed to loose a foot off our downstairs cloakroom (which wasn't exactly huge to begin with) and some problem with yet another drain meant that I (and I quote James) "will be needing a ladder to get to my washing machine". So James suggested they leave that bit until I get back.

What happened in practice was they left everything until we got back... partly because of wanting my expert opinion... ;) and partly because the builders had a big falling out with each other!

It took a few days but on Thursday and Friday I managed to get a bricklayer on site and happily within a few hours I had the beginnings of some walls! It is really starting to take shape now.