We consider ourselves very lucky that we seem to have great neighbours in our new house. M and A on one side with their three young boys and J and J on the other with a boy and girl. We went to meet J and J for a drink on Friday night and got on so well that we stayed for four bottles. Next morning it felt like we’d been poisoned but we have resolved the party-wall decisions one needs to get right with new neighbours and found out a ton about the local residents, what the previous owners of our house were like and got another set of lessons in how to renovate these houses. Can’t wait, basically, to actually live there so we can enjoy the community even more.

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

Unfortunately, some images from this post are missing - they were sadly lost during the blog migration.

So our house comes with some nice things and some fairly horrible things. 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 an 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 it turned out to be the original Victorian (or is it Edwardian?) cast-iron range cooker. This is one period feature we won’t be keeping in the house, but perhaps someone on eBay might want it. Amazing!

Also, behind a 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