Progress

The attic shaped up quickly.

Rebecca by the window





Soooo much light and another window yet to come
 

The only way is up

I have always dreamt of having a garret to dwell in, make art, think, sulk, cry, dream. And TJ always said he wanted to live in an attic. Rebecca wants a basement, but there's none in this house. But there is a big attic. So we got chatting in the pub, as you do, and found that a mate of ours who lives down our new street, a taxi driver called Brian, has his attic done without lowering the first floor ceiling. So we went to have a look, and liked what we saw. Long story short (too late!) we got cracking. Well, not us, but our tame builder. Now Brian had told us it was messy; he'd gone on a foreign holiday for a fortnight while he'd had his done.  But nothing prepared me for the mess this made. A century of soot. Wow. It went EVERYWHERE. But the space it's made is beautiful. But I'm just going to show you some teasers today;



The landing cupboard is gone and a hole is made in the ceiling

Stacked flooring

Rebecca plays in the muck

Tony is sooty



decapitated sparrow

Wood glorious wood

 Imagine my delight as we lifted the carpets in the study. Wood. Real wood. And good, real wood at that. The master bedroom floor is just as good. I want carpets mostly, but in the study I'd love a restored wood floor with a HUGE rug, amongst walls of bookcases. Some of the floorboards in the study have been sawn into sections to access the central heating pipes below, but there's plenty of full ones we can pinch from elsewhere in the house. I don't want them sanded pristine, though. I want to keep the texture, and just clean off the muck before I varnish them.

There's a concrete (?) hearth in the study that is cracked in places and is proud of the floor. There won't be a fire in the study so I'd like this dug out so I can run the floorboards all the way to the wall.
Do any of you have experience in stripping and sanding floors? You can comment on the blog without signing in.

Revealing the study

Tony in his element

I'll go get the bin bags

With adrenaline still high we moved onto the back room which we've decided will be the study. It's not that we hated the wallpaper, but we were eager to see what the walls were made of and what might be hidden.

The kids get stuck in



The purple paint underneath has a sheen and the paper came off easily. Mostly.



As usual I was left to bag up the rubbish. Truth be told, I love every single task. Nothing is a chore. Well, not yet anyway. Maybe time will tell. But for now I'm still riding on happy juices and excitement.

After the kids had done their best, I recruited my good friend Lesley to finish the job. She's a good foot taller than I am, and we have great, weird, arty conversations whilst working so time flies by. I bet (hope) she'll appear a lot in this blog. She's already promised to design an Escher mural for TJ's room.

Just for the record, here's a built-in cupboard to the right of the study fireplace. We're not sure if it's staying or going, but the doorframe seems to be an original feature, though the door is new and rubbish. In fact the only original doors in the house are to the cupboard on the first floor landing and the cupboard under the stairs. Maybe they'll have been kept and stored in the roof space. Fingers crossed.

Wood is good

Using a blunt chisel I've attacked a door frame, window frame and window panel, chipping away decades of paint and varnish to see what's underneath.

Cupboard door frame in study

Under the layers of rubbery gloss I unearthed a wood-effect painted layer. This was as far as the chisel could strip away, and I don't want to damage the wood underneath, so I'm going to experiment with paint stripper gunk, and a hot air gun to see what effects I get. I'd love a mix of old and new in the house; I'm not after re-creating period interiors.

Panel under the landing window

If we do build an upstairs bathroom above the kitchen then this window will be removed but we'll keep the frame which runs from the floor, up, and use that as a framed entranceway to that part of the house. In that case these panels would be removed, but I'll keep them in case they can be used elsewhere.

Window in the study

strip away, a strip away

You know what curiosity did to the cat

Now we had the house, we wanted to get down to the bones. See what was underneath all that paint and paper. So Tony found a peeling bit in the hall and pulled. Weeeeeeeeeee, all the way to the ceiling.

This is toooo easy

TJ is making short work of the stairs

"Kids, do your worst!"  They couldn't believe they were allowed to do this, but soon cottoned on.


Rebecca in her element

Minutes later, the hall floor and stairs were awash with yellow paper and the kids had grins all over. Now it felt like it was our house, we had control. We could change stuff, do stuff. DESTROY STUFF!! And this would only be the beginning.



 



How it was when we said yes

This is our new house. It's only two streets away from our current house as we wanted to stay in the neighbourhood.
It's a Victorian mid terraced, single-fronted house, with no front garden. I would have liked a garden, but for the size of the house and the other features inside I was happy to relinquish that idea.

Here's the view of the inner front door from the ground floor. I loved the curved wall, the original newel post (though I think the acorn cap is a replacement) and the beautiful height of the rooms in the house. This is the décor when we bought it, much of which has been stripped now, but I just wanted to post some photos of what we saw when we fell in love with it. And I am in love with it.

The sun pours in through the windows at the back of the house, which is south facing pretty much, and even over winter, with no heating turned on, we only needed jumpers to not feel chilly. So even though it's a bigger house than we currently have, I'm hoping the heating bills won't be too much bigger.

Standing at the top of the stairs, looking down onto the landing, I felt like I was in Amy Pond's childhood home (from Dr Who). Tony visited the house before I did and he said he instantly had a feeling of home there, which he'd not felt in other houses we'd visited. When I first visited it was dusk and very dark. I spent a sleepless night that night as I was very tempted but not convinced. It seemed small, even though we knew the square footage was big. So Tony rang the agents first thing the following morning and arranged a daytime viewing. Wow, I'm so glad he did as the light was totally different. We also visited the house two friends of ours are renovating, which is an exact mirror image of this one, and I was again wowed at how much space there was and what the possibilities were.

Also, when the kids visited, they ran round it, shouting which rooms they wanted, tearing up and down the staircase with glee. Kids convinced, me happy, Tony feeling at home. The deal was struck and now it's ours.