June Monthly Update
Trying something a little bit different this time, by adding updates each week directly to one post throughout the month, rather than collating everything at the start of the next. That means that although this will be posted on the first weekend in June (theoretically, if time allows), it will be added to week after week until the month is complete. Essentially, it’s kinda like a journal. As always, I’ll add the good, the bad and the ugly!
June Week 1:
A lot of prep moves this week. Dan had to measure the entire farmhouse for the first time to give me a hand-drawn map with measurements on it.
When I say that this sketch was tough and not pretty, I mean it. However, he did a great job getting all the weird bits of walls, nooks and crannies for me to use moving forward. Then, I made everything up to scale in InDesign to provide a starting point for what was about to happen next.
This does mean that I can share floor plans of the current house, which you can see here:
Downstairs, around 250 square metres in total.
Upstairs, with a similar footprint.
You can sort of see from these plans that the farmhouse is split into three sections. The section on the far right-hand side is oddly the oldest and the newest, because of dormers and bathroom pods added on fairly recently. However, the bones of this part date back to somewhere around 400 years ago. Therefore, we refer to this part of the house as the “old section”. It’s quite dark, built partly into the hill, and has some weird brick bits and flat roof sections. Remember her now?!
The middle section of the plans is, as the name suggests, the middle bit!
This consists of a whopping great box added onto the oldest section somewhere in the Regency era (late Georgian; 1812 is our best guess).
Finally, the left-hand side of the plan is the “newer” section in our naming terms. This appeared somewhere in the late 1800s, Victorian era, likely circa 1880, but it’s difficult to say for sure.
I explain all of this to provide a fuller picture of June’s main focus - the middle section. For illustration purposes, the middle section is highlighted in pink on the plan.
If you remember from strip out, this section had to be ripped right back to stone upstairs with mammoth roof works to plug about 30 different leaks. That’s further than we went with the other two sections, and it leaves a gaping hole in our house looking livable (a mortgage staple in terms of valuations). The surveyor we enlisted said to focus all energy on this part of the house, and patch up the rest, as soon as possible. Therefore, that’s our working plan.
The actual floor plans were needed because we have a team of builders joining us on site from the 16th of June. This whole section will need to have nothing but stone walls left, and the electrician needed to know where the future sockets (power outlets) and light fixtures would all be beforehand. To work that out, we need to know roughly what will go where in each room, so my InDesign map had some furniture on it to give us all a guide (see blobs on map, these are colour coded for sockets vs lights).
If you’re familiar with the house from previous videos or updates, you’ll perhaps notice that the “snooker room” is labelled up here as the kitchen, that the kitchen is now the utility, and the dining room is now my office. Although this will not all happen this year, or even in the next year, this is the end goal so that the kitchen diner is a very light, airy and open entertaining space with garden access (to a garden kitchen, of course), The oldest section of the house then becomes our “messy bit” downstairs – where our 5 dogs reside with a doorway reinstated for office access for the pawed family members, a utility for mucky boots, some horse stuff, and dog beds, along with a wet room for muddy humans, and more.
Upstairs, very little will change thanks to the 2-3ft deep solid stone walls everywhere, but we’ll add an additional family bathroom (losing a small bedroom in the process), and create a self-contained master suite with walk-in wardrobe. This is quite personal stuff and I feel it’s very much TMI, but at the same time, what happens next won’t make sense without the context!
Back to the plans, I also had to map out radiator locations for heating (going with rads in here to test if they'll do ok, if not, the other sections will be a more expensive underfloor heating job... we don't want that just yet!). To do the radiator planning, I needed to know how many radiators were needed, which means we needed to work out the rough BTU of each room, then work out which radiators gave that output. Some YEARS (it felt like years) later, the map was complete. Everything is to scale, so we know what can fit where, and I hyperlinked the radiators on the PDF to the exact ones to purchase later 🤓
Dan and I finished moving everything we have stored in the middle section to the one remaining room in the house, so it's all ready to strip next week. We still have some of our own living stuff up in the bedroom (ALL our clothes, my dressing table, etc, etc), but the electricity gets cut on Monday, and then it's game on.
June Week 2:
The electric was indeed cut. Kenny came to lop off the fuse board because it resides in the middle section upstrairs. He fixed a reno board with a couple of sockets to tide everyone over placed loosely where the future fuse box will be (in a cupboard, hidden from view).
In the middle section, all the walls are off, all the ceilings are off, and all the internal walls are also out. That means this 100msq (50 down, 50 up) section of the farmhouse is currently split up solely by the 1st floor joists and the floorboards. A week of discoveries that have consistently changed the floor plan over and over again, which is exciting, but also not great when there is no available time to keep re-drawing plans 😣
The main find was this stone-arched hearth that was completely hidden behind a plastered wall:
Located in my future office, it houses a smaller fireplace that had been inserted at some point within the opening, but it is basically a dead cert that this arch is original and dates to before 1820. Sadly, at the decommissioning of the smaller fireplace inset into this wall, the chimney stack was removed at the top, so although the fireplace will still have a flue (probably), it doesn't have a chimney or opening at the roof line. This leaves us with a conundrum because we simply can't afford to reinstate a chimney (legit just paid for that roof to be re-done!), but not having a fire in something we'd like to leave exposed as stone carries an incredibly high risk of wet stonework, damp and mould if every other surface is well insulated.
We need to consult with the builders, but it may be that she's hidden for another 10 years or so and makes an appearance down the line when funds allow 😔
The other main find was that the actual giant archway in the library is fake. This was quite a surprise, but there was a wall opening here at some point, and it was bricked up with red brick then framed out in very recent modern soft wood battens. Therefore, it will not be protected, and the floor plan changes to put a solid wall there instead, to insulate against the single skin bricks and provide useful furniture space.
That decision meant a whole room shake-up in the library (our living room), and we're now operating on a "lets leave it open plan" vibe by not re-installing the hallway wall at that side, which will allow for a true libary wall, balistaude entryway and a "grander" entrance to the property. We may live to regret this decision, and I have less than a day to figure out if we can put a pocket door over the hallway arch to provide a "door" that isn't a normal hinged door to this space. This archway is 135cm wide and 215cm tall, and so far my searches for suitable doors have drawn a blank. I'll continue during my lunch break today (from the future, I found it)!
We also reopened the previously blocked-up door (that was a serving hatch beforehand), to create that utility/office link for future me. (It’s the one on the right-hand side here.)
Today, Dan has to clear out the last of the rubble and take it to the skip before taking up the downstairs floorboards. At that point, we'll then have a view of whether we can steal some space for the living room or not from the floor heights (they change!).
A lot up in the air, a lot of re-drawn plans, a lot of "ifs" - by the end of next week, all will be solved!
Exciting though 😊