We don’t know if we sold it for a song or not, but we managed to get our range sold to a nice man in Wales for £120. Most importantly, he’ll be coming round to extract it from the house (which could have cost us £100 itself). So all is good with the world. Can’t help feeling that maybe we could have got more for it – on ebay we had surprisingly high number of “watchers” it’s just it didn’t turn into the bidding frenzy we’d expected. Then again, it is just a big block of cast-iron after all.
We’ve also arranged for National Grid to come and put us in a new gas supply (the house doesn’t have one) – so things are starting to happen.
And we have our surveyor coming round today to start the drawing/planning process once and for all. Apparently we expect the drawings to go into the council n the next couple of weeks.
And the “boys” who’ll strip the house back to it’s bare bones are starting mid-September still, led by a nice Polish chap called Val. Val seems optomistic about a around-Christmas completion date for the building works (not the decorating) so this gives us hope we might not be waiting as long as we thought.
Here’s hoping.

We have a builder now, LoftRooms. Now we’re waiting for them to start. Mid-September seems to be a long time away
Patience is a virtue

So our house comes with some nice things:

and some fairly horrible things:

But we went there this morning to measure up properly and take photos of everything for the “before” pictures. But we found some things we weren’t expecting:
Behind this old battered looking cupboard, full of betamax videos:

we found what, at first, we thought was a postbox with the word Lambeth on it,

but turned out to be the original Victoria (or is it Edwardian?) cast-iron range cooker:

which is one period feature we won’t be keeping in the house, but perhaps someone on ebay might want it.
Amazing.
Also, behind this horrible 70’s electric bar fire,

was another original fireplace, in need of some love:

We made our choice and have commissioned LoftRooms as our builder for the big renovation project.
They’re busy and won’t start on site until mid-September. Hopefully the planning, surveying and drawing process will start in the next few days – that’s the longest straw.
So the waiting game begins. And meanwhile, as if to make us immediately wary, we saw a friends house who has had a shocker with her builders – they’ve done some very poor quality work and are refusing to fix it.
In other news we saw the beautiful house of S and A in Cambridge – they are having similar volume of work done – loft, rear extension and refurb and have done a great job.
So all of which makes us want to plan, design and plan before any work begins.
Watch this space