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The bog, still standing. It’s the only thing still standing.

It’s two weeks into the action now and (sorry for the lack of updates) the house looks quite a bit different. The main problem so far has been the builders have been far too keen - working 7 days a week in their “demolition” of the property and annoying the neighbours with the noise. Since we need these neighbours to sign our important 3rd party wall agreement, this is not the start we were looking for - and now have to come back from holiday and sweeten them up with presents from Sicily. The progress is quite impressive. Every room is back to either plaster or brick (depending on whether the plaster was good or not) and the floor is slashed with holes where the rewiring is going on in Earnest. We have a new electrical switchboard and a lot of new sockets already in. Upstairs, the rear chimney breast and some of the roof around the chimney is totally removed (making the back rooms feel bigger) and the most progress is in the old bathroom which has a new wall some 3 feet better off as per our new design. It’s dirty, dusty like a building site really and outside there are piles of rubble and clutter to be eventually removed. We went for a sneaky peak yesterday morning (for me between coming back from holiday and flying out to the US) and looked round while the builders weren’t there. It is strange to see our “new” house forming from the ashes of the old. One quite surreal room where the builders are having their tea breaks contains a wierd female mannequin with ginger hair and red nipples… we’re not entirely sure whether they found her in the attic (which would be possibly more odd) or in a skip somewhere but the mystery of the “strange woman” is still to be solved…

You’ll remember the kitchen range which we found hidden behind a load of old cupboards in the kitchen of the old house? A nice man from Wales came to remove it and we sold it to him on eBay Well I’m pleased to say that it’s now been restored, lovingly, having had all of it’s rivets and screws replaced and retapped and re-painted (currently in primer). What he’s going to do with it I’m not sure but I think he just likes restoring these (now quite pretty) things.

More photos of the current state to come soon!

So bang on time, 5 chaps turned up on Monday morning at 8am and proceeded to knock seven bells out of the old shack. Only two of them are actually working there this week but they’ve already made some good progress - stripping out all the old junk and piling it in the garden until a truck arrives at the weekend to get rid of it all. Photos to follow…

Peter, our Polish foreman and his team arrive on site tomorrow morning at 8am. With the building company we’ve commission acting as our “independent” project manager during the process and supposedly making 2-3 visits per week, we are hoping this will be as smooth as can be expected. It’s difficult to know what to expect - and also because it’s a “one-off”, we are also pressurised to succeed. We’ve done as much preparation as we can - detailed drawings, schedules and designs should mean everything is ready to go. We’ll be detailing the day-by-day progress right here.