Renovations stalled

Wow, the world has certainly changed since my last update 11 months ago on work to renovate and restore our old cottage. Little did we know then how the world was going to be turned upside down in 2020, so it’s not surprising that there’s not been much progress on the house.

Although we had planned to focus on the garden this year we still had work lined up for inside, most of which we’ve had to re-schedule for next year. Even little things like plastering the bedroom weren’t possible as supplies of plaster ran out and our builders, still working, had difficulty getting materials and juggling a number of jobs.

At the start of the year it was strange and lovely having the house to ourselves after nearly two years of almost continuous building work. Although it did mean that all the jobs for me could now come to the top of the to do list.

First was finishing painting the dining room. We’ve gone for brilliant white which can be quite harsh on the eye but we plan to create an art gallery effect with our pictures so it will provide an ideal background. The challenge will be deciding which pictures go where and which ones we ditch, something we still haven’t got round to sorting despite two lockdowns!

Next was the sitting room. I could only tackle the walls and not the ceiling at the smithy end of the cottage as it is too high for our ladder. Even then I struggled with reaching the top of the gable end wall as I don’t like heights and occasionally suffer from vertigo. I was so determined to get it done, though, that I put my fears to one side and did it anyway. It’s great now it’s done although I still need to get someone in to do the ceiling.

With the walls painted we could start dressing the room. The window on the smithy end wall is off centre so we decided to have the curtain pole made by our local blacksmith to span virtually the whole width of the wall and we hardly notice the greater width of curtain on the left than the right when drawn back. The black cotton velvet curtains that I bought in Greenwich market years ago came from an old manor house and look just perfect adding to the feeling of a baronial hall.

We’ve almost forgotten what this room was like before we started the renovations. It was very much a room of two halves with one part – the smithy end which is in what was the blacksmith’s workshop – 50cm higher than the other part in the old cottage. The two spaces had been knocked through in the 1960s and no one could work out why they didn’t level the floor then.

In my last blog in December I mentioned we were hoping to have a real fire in the sitting room fireplace which was opened up as part of the renovations. Good news, our insurance company approved it at no extra cost and early this year we agreed what needed to be done with our HETAS registered installer. Then COVID-19 happened. Finally, a couple of weekends ago with the scaffolding up and after a couple of false starts, the guys were able to get the chimney lined and a metal hood installed to minimise the risk of fire to the thatch.

Finally, on the Saturday evening, we were able to have the open fire we’ve been dreaming of for years. It’s a nice way of completing the renovations for this year.

One of the major pieces of building work for this year had been to get the last wall of the old cottage re-built in the spring. Our specialist restoration builders were unable to fit it in when they were doing the other walls last year as they ran out of time to get all the lime rendering done before it turned cold. Lime and frost do not make happy bedfellows. They were working throughout lockdown but we couldn’t guarantee that they would have isolated access to the site as the wall in question is between our bathroom and the room with the stairs leading up to where we work.

So we have had a year of temporary covers on the outside with gaps letting the fresh air in – fine in summer, not so much fun now as we head into winter. It has also delayed us sorting out replacement heating. We took out the old gas boiler and central heating as part of restoring the timber frame and wattle and daub planning to replace them with electric infrared panels, but not until all the walls are finished. So it’s temporary electric heaters and thick woolly jumpers for another winter.

We met with our restoration builder last week and went through the list of remaining work which is now booked in for next April. It sounds a long way off but there are a number of things we’ll need to do before they turn up on site including clearing the affected rooms and getting the old wooden beams stripped, a very messy job. It is nice to get back into the groove of renovating and hopefully, if all goes well, we may actually finish the project next year.