The House
The house (or houses as it should be) is old. The date above the door says 1808, which means that the left hand house is 200 years old. The right hand house was constructed later (we reakon around 40 years later).
The eventual aim is to turn these two separate houses into a single three bedroom property. Currently there are two makeshift rooms, no dining room, a tiny kitchen, two toilets and a large family room. But in order to pass between rooms in each of the houses you need to walk outside.
The houses come with a barn and a large amount of adjacent land which will be extremely nice come summer.
This holiday was all about making the house comfortable to live in while the loft space was renovated. We needed to improve the kitchen, the bathrooms, the living spaces and the do some maintainance on the overall grounds. Thanks to this trip i can now…
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Install shelves - using brackets and compression installation. Basically i had to mess about with drilling through hollow bricks, inserting expanding steel plugs, and adding the brackets on.
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Install a toilet - <insert shuddering here>
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Lay a path and remove turf - christ my bloody back hurt after that.
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Install sink fittings - <yet more shuddering>
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Trim bushes and hedges - Yeah, so i could do this before, but it was fun!
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Wiring
Fun!
The Toilets… the drainage… and the goddamn plumbing
This is the toilet that proved to be an eternal frustration. Not only did it take an age to remove the old toilet (which was blocked and sat directly over the pipe), but I had to drill the fittings for the damn thing twice due to the screw plugs not working; we had to visit the DIY store 5 separate times as the pipes either didnt fit, or fitted wrong. It was a farce… yet oddly fun. Only bad thing is that it still doesnt work perfectly. Last time it was used (after L had a rather bad morning and had to flush three times ) it backed up due to the volume of water and sprayed all kinds of truly nasty things everywhere.
The kitchen sink was fun too. Previously it worked, but drained very badly. So we removed the sump fittings and replaced the plumbing into the drain.
Hang on a minute, both the toilet and the sink not draining well? Wonder what this could mean? As it happens, the houses rely on septic tanks to drain the water from the toilet and the sinks. And at the time of our visit, it had rained quite consistantly for a week (and would continue raining until the day we left). This meant that the water could not drain from the tanks, and that they were backing up. This means more fun in the future as we look to replumb the septic tank.
With the rain and the poor drainage, the grass outside the houses was getting trodden, muddy and in overall poor condition due to us walking on it. To stop us from getting mud in the house the decision was made to build a path from the right house to the barn through the really muddy bit. As i discovered when i was digging up the turf, the reason why the grass was sodden was because the septic tank’s impermeable membrane was just three inches below the surface and was ponding water. Great. Several hours and a good soaking later the path was laid.
After all this, I am still faced with plenty of work back at home in the UK. I have to prepare several engineering drawings so that the planning authorities will approve our plans for the loft conversion. Lots of AutoCAD drawing and planning for me… woo!
