Even in its unfinished state though, its nice to have the whole room looking like a room. We've also been able to move the kitchen wares and food out of the bedroom and into the cupboards, so the bedroom is now a bedroom rather than a bedsit.
We have a kitchen! Okay, its not quite finished yet. It doesn't have a sink, the plumbing is in but we decided the sink we brought with us didn't quite look right and looked better in the utility room so we still need to go get a new one. The hob isn't yet connected to the gas, so the worktop isn't fixed (you can see the edging cover strip is still on it) and the oven isn't connected as the gas fitter will need to move them for access. There's also a door missing due to a change of plans with the tall cupboard.
Even in its unfinished state though, its nice to have the whole room looking like a room. We've also been able to move the kitchen wares and food out of the bedroom and into the cupboards, so the bedroom is now a bedroom rather than a bedsit.
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Its still such a luxury to have a consistently warm house and hot water whenever we want. We've had a series of storms sweep past which have upset the open fire so much we have had to put it out a few times, but the stove has burned perfectly all the way through.
Looking at it now its hard to remember what an unstable, tarry mess the fireplace was when we first uncovered it behind the rusted out range, so I've put together a sequence showing the transformation. This is the view from our garden, looking out over the lake. We knew when we bought the house that we were quite close to a turlough (a lake that dries out in summer), but this winter it has come even closer than normal. The common is now part of the lake, including a few of our smaller and unfenced fields around its edge. The lake attracts a lot of birds, geese and swans particularly.
Meanwhile the plumbing is now complete on the stove meaning we have central heating and a constant supply of hot water, and a much lower electricity bill! We have a wood store (a converted old animal trailer) full of sycamore that Brian cut down when we first moved in so its practically free. We have hot water again! After a year relying on a tea urn for bath water it is amazing to be able to simply run a bath whenever we want without any complicated preparation. Its also rather nice to be able to fill the bath right up, the new hot water cylinder is bigger than the one we had in Somerset and makes a really decent bath. I spent last week in Dublin on my induction week for my new job with SoftCo. I'm now back home and remote working from The Hub @ Headford. This is hopefully the best of both worlds, with a short commute but an interesting job with a really good company. Its a very international and mixed gender team, over half female now I've joined which is quite a change! It's early days but fingers crossed it works out.
I posted in March that Brian was starting work on the layout changes, well the work is now finished. With the block walls up you really get a feel for how the main room will look when finished. Probably the biggest job was knocking down the old (one metre thick) back wall in the bedroom area to add a doorway and make room for an airing cupboard. Rather than lug all the building stone out and then back in later, Brian used it as he removed it to repair and heighten the wall tops in the other rooms so the majority of these are also now complete and ready for either pointing and painting or plastering.
Brian has started work on re-arranging the layout around the bedroom, bathroom and fireplace area. This involves knocking down part of the original back wall shown below (now internal due to the extension) and building various small stretches of block work wall. We didn't originally plan to do quite so much to the internal layout, but the more we lived in the house and uncovered the original structure so we could understand what was going on, the more our plans changed. This is the layout the house had when we moved in: There were a few major issues with it, the most noticeable one being the lack of a kitchen or bathroom! Another problem was the number of doorways off the main room (five) meaning it had almost no wall space (where would you put the sofa?). Finally, the one metre thick original back wall was taking up a lot of internal space. Although there was some quite nice stonework at the pantry end at the bedroom end it was of poor quality and had been topped with some badly done poured concrete. The planned new layout is: We have already knocked through the middle bedroom to make an open plan living room / kitchen area which we are very happy with. The problems with this new layout are that the second bedroom is in an awkward location and the front door opens straight into the main room. The longer term plan is to add an extension onto the side giving at least two more bedrooms by the current bedroom and the bathroom. At that point the "ex-parlour" second bedroom would return to being a second reception room, which works much better. Also to knock down the current porch and add a larger enclosed one.
You can get a better idea of the planned layout with the furniture in, and I have also included a 3D view. The daffodils are close to flowering, the horses are moulting, and .. its snowing. Heavily.
Meanwhile Brian has dug out the bottom of the bedroom fireplace prior to blocking it up, which has given us our first look at the foundations under the old stone walls. As we suspected the walls have been built directly onto the bedrock, so no worries about unstable foundations.
The view from the new ceiling joists over the fully insulated roof is now an impressive sea of silver. We've had a period of settled weather, so Brian has taken the opportunity to get the second half gable done. He did the first one some time ago, as that was even more unsafe looking (and closer to the area we were living in). The half gables were the only really scary structural problem we have uncovered so its great to have them both done with no incidents. When the new roof was put on (about 20 years ago) the extension roof was switched from a flat roof to a pitched one coming down from the apex of the main roof. Of course, this left the builders with a gap between the top of the extension wall and the new roof (a half gable). They filled this in with concrete blocks, which was fine where the gap was above the main wall. For the triangular section over the main roof though, they simply put a piece of wood in as a support and carried on with the blocks, pouring a lump of concrete in at the bottom as additional support. Obviously these bits of wood were not sufficient and had bent and flexed, causing the concrete blocks to move and the render to crack. Also, the concrete lumps were poured up against the old thatched roof and once this was removed we were left with some scary lumps of concrete hovering above the wall, supporting a load of heavy concrete blocks balanced precariously on a bent piece of wood! Brian has removed the wood, the concrete blocks and the concrete lump back behind the wall line so only the supported blocks remain. He has then filled in the holes with concrete board, which we are planning to clad with timber cladding this summer. The second one still needs some tidying up and insulating, but its great to not have the blocks hovering overhead anymore.
Advanced warning - this is going to be a long one as I haven't posted for some time. Having missed almost three weeks of work with the flu over Christmas, Brian and I have both been working on very time-consuming jobs which are still not finished. Pretty much all we seemed to do last year was take stuff out of the house and throw it away, so it is a great feeling to finally be putting some stuff back. Brian has been working on the roof internals. Since the roof was originally built around the old thatched roof it didn't have (or need) anything "inside" to brace it and stop it spreading or dropping. After getting advice from our engineer, Brian has added collar ties across the top and rafter restraint straps to every other rafter. He has also added, moved, or replaced support props on the purlins and done some work on the joins in the purlins. The big job has been insulating the roof, which has proved to be much more time-consuming (and physically challenging) than we expected. The woodworm treatment was fine, and fixing the spacers to maintain the ventilation air gap went very well thanks to the bench saw and nail gun we bought. The basic problem is that the rafters may look evenly spaced, straight and parallel, but they really, really aren't! Brian has to measure and cut each piece of PIR insulation board perfectly, and even then it still may not fit perfectly along its length because of the variation in the rafter timbers, meaning it has to be carefully pushed in and often trimmed. I have since found that this is a very common complaint amongst builders who are doing this job, but add in the fact that Brian is balancing off a ladder and it is really challenging. As you can see from the picture we have begun to put in the ceiling joists, partly to make it easier for Brian to get to bits of the roof. These are serious bits of timber as we've over-specc'd our ceiling joists to floor joist spec so we won't have any problems with flexing / cracking ceilings from people walking about in the loft. Finally, I am still grouting the walls. Whilst not difficult, this is a pretty soul-destroying job as you don't see any signs of progress at all until the bit you are doing is finished. Even then there isn't much to see. It is also a bit like trying to fill a colander with cream! You can read why grouting the old walls is a good idea here Brian has been making good progress with the main fireplace. He has cleaned off and out masses of tar, dirt etc. including three mice nests. He's replaced, repaired and cleaned the voussure stones. He's done loads of re-pointing, lined the flue and is currently infilling around the liner with vermiculite concrete.
Even so, we are still not yet ready to install the big 21kw+ boiler stove that we are planning. In the meantime we have put in a little pot-bellied stove which lets us heat up the main room enough that it is possible to keep working in cold weather. |
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Laura Nash and Brian Brett's blog about our move to Ireland. Archives
December 2020
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