Our man from Wales came to collect the range. He arrived after a 5 hour drive from Rithin, and after having lugged his son’s university clobber up three flights of stairs into a Kings College bedroom, so removing a cast iron Victorian range from it’s 100-year position in our old shack was a walk in the park.
I knew he must be an enthusiast for Victorian ranges when he first saw it he called in the “Beasty” – like a beetle lover seeing a prized specimen for the first time. His son, who joined him on this expedition, said they’d developed rather an obsession for such things and tracked them when they appeared on the internet.
I suspected they wanted to extract it, renovate it and then sell it for an enormous profit, but it seemed that this exercise was for their own personal benefit and he admitted to already having two of them in their own house. Quite what they do with them I’m not sure – but he did say they liked to get “snowed in” and put on a nice rice-pudding.
Our range had the dubious honour of being a rather “late design” which meant a novel fender around the firebox and a modular design which let’s you choose whether to have the firebox on the left or right and an option to use it as a water heater. In fact it turns out the range was part of the original “heating system” for the house and is connected to the strange water tank which I thought was a cistern for the outside lav.
The pair of them made me smile – reminded me of me and my dad doing similar things – especially carrying my junk up three flights of stairs each time I turned up to college.
Two hours later the poor man looks like he’s been down a coal mine for that time – as a 100 years of soot had descended upon him and our “kitchen” floor. The range is in pieces, in separate green bags and there are a dozen broken bricks lying around on the floor.
I’m hopeful that the builders (who start in just a couple of weeks… delayed again) will be able to clear up the mess – they’ll be removing a lot of bricks from there anyway.
And so our house is range-less for the first time ever. It feels both constructive (getting our plans to modernise underway) as well as de-structive (changing the house from how it was). But on balance, it’s a good thing that this wonderful old bit of cast-iron has a good home to go to (not ours) and that we can get on with the process of making a contempory and exciting place to live out of this old shed.
Your man has promised to send a photo when it’s all in good working order – I look forward to it. And hopefully so will our house be, by then.

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

We’ll be documenting the refurbishment of our house from shed to finished article here.

At this stage of the project (before anything has happened) it’s time to think about major alternatives and question some of the obvious choices one makes… for example we’d like to make the house energy efficient…
(from the Energy Saving Trust)

There are some grants and subsidies for doing good energy-saving stuff with your home.
So we should go for lots of insulation (between the floors and in the roof)
We should wrap our hotwater tank carefully

Could we consider a sustainable heat pump or will that be too expensive?
Should we go for underfloor heating so we don’t have to use radiators throughout?
How should we arrange our plumbing to get the best water pressure and hot water?
We should definitely renovate the sash windows
Should we have long-drop toilets with compost outflow (joke)
Lots of choices.

We are now the proud owners of a house (well, shed). A shed which needs months of work to make it habitable but one which we will one day be very proud of.
Amazingly (and in contrast to my previous experience) buying this house was pretty much painfree – this was mostly because we knew up front that buying it would be like opening our wallets and emptying the contents every day forever – so we put caution to the wind and worried not about tiny details. Actually it’s structurally sound – it just needs a lot of “internal modernisation” – and since we plan to do everything to it – it’s current state was unimportant.
So now we’re holding talent shows for builders – so we can pick the right man for the job. The list of work is long: rewiring, replumbing, new boiler, new central heating, plastering throughout, wood stripping throughout, new windows, loft extension, kitchen extension, new patio doors, new bathroom, new kitchen, new flooring, new tiles, refurbishment of fireplaces etc etc
This is the kind of thing we’re hoping to achieve within:

Walking into the place on Thursday we felt a mixture of relief, intrepidation and joy – there was a bit of jumping around on the dirty carpets and peering into old drawers, still containing a few trinkets from their previous, now-dead owner – but mostly we went around bashing things with a hammer to see if there were “period features” behind. We found two original fireplaces, in the front and rear bedrooms, long since boarded up with cheap 1960s wallpaper on hardboard – and other places where the fireplace had been completely removed.
It’s going to be an adventure.

More renovation information

Some interesting advice on refurbing environmentally: http://www.msarch.co.uk/ecohome/

Since we’re at the start of our renovations of our house, here’s some advice taken from http://www.how2pull.co.uk/

Always get at least three quotes and insist on paying against specific jobs completed to your satisfaction. [Yup, we did this]
Always check past workmanship. [We phoned previous clients]
Trusting a single-line quote is a recipe for disaster. Quotes should be detailed. Break the job into logical components. [We were told to be aware of this from our friends]