It’s been a Long Time

My apologies for the very long gap between postings to the Blog, there are two main reasons for this – firstly the difficulties of working with a dial-up connexion and secondly the fact that we have been working incredibly hard on the house. Below, headed “Real Progress”, is a posting I composed about a month ago in which the position was hopeful.

I can now report that some of these hopes have been realised. The bedroom and en suite bathroom have now been fully completed though not without some problems on the way. Most notably the shower had to be moved out of its corner as a consequence of a flexible hose developing a leak. This led to tiling and paintwork being damaged, an irritation rather than a major difficulty.

The temporary kitchen/diner is now fully operational though not yet absolutely finished. We have a working sink, new cooker and a range of kitchen cabinets and drawers with a complete set of work surfaces. Notwithstanding the need to finish off the work we have been able to move out of the caravan definitively – just in time before the weather begins to chill down in autumn.

Above this kitchen/diner a space has been created where a bedroom can be made. It has only a rather small window as a consequence of an error by the builder, but it should suffice for a bedroom. The next steps for this room will be to complete the wall linings and the ceilings and this will then become useable.

Elsewhere Jean Claude has cut the hole through and placed a window in the downstairs shower-room. There is still much work to be done to the walls and ceiling to complete this, but for the moment it provides a downstairs loo and wash basin. In the very large salon he has also put in the French doors which gives us easier access to the back of the house and the garden – this is a hopeful word to use as at present it is a weed-filled jungle for the most part.

Jean Claude has also commenced on the difficult task of ‘rescuing’ the very fragile wall at the western end of the house – you may remember, and can look back in the blog to see, the very large crack there was, and is, in one corner of the house affecting the stability of the wall. There is a long way to go to finish all that he plans to do to ensure that this wall is fully stabilised but once he has done it we shall commence to work in the large salon as we want to arrive at a point where we can put in the wood-burning stove to start providing heat inside the house.

There’s still a long way to go before we are at a point of true comfort even in terms of just the half of the house we are now aiming to complete. But real progress has been achieved and to be able to ‘abandon’ the caravan is a major step forward.

Real Comfort!

The progress alluded to in the last posting has continued and we now do actually have a functioning bathroom which is complete in terms of the facilities and only a little decoration needs to be finished. The bedroom is also fully formed with its cupboard in place but there remains quite a lot of finishing off to do before we can consider the work in it to be completed, but it is not ‘heavy’ work at all.

Work has commenced on the smaller, back room which will eventually become a study/sitting room. But for the moment it will be used as a kitchen/dining room. The concrete floor has been laid, a new doorway has been cut in to the room off the hallway and the existing two window holes enlarged and new windows mounted. A start has also been made on putting in a first floor so that we shall be able to form a bedroom above.

Given the problems in the British housing market we shall call a halt soon to the work. But the aim is to have sufficient of the work completed such that we shall have two bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen/diner and very large sitting room. Much of the building work required to get this finished will have to be done by us rather than our builder, but then we haven’t much else to do!!