The Dining Room

One of the last rooms to be completed as we can easily use the space in the kitchen for sitting down to eat with a reasonable number of people. The first picture shows it just after we had started taking out the original concrete floor which had formed an animal pen. The doorway to the right of the picture leads into what has become the kitchen. Across that back wall we have created a corridor to form the wall for the dining room and it connects to the hallway in the first half of the house. That corridor is still awaiting a coat of plaster as can be seen through the doors in the up-to-date picture. Originally there were two large beams supporting the floor above but they were in a very poor state and had also bent downwards. We decided that the simplest thing to do was to replace them with new oak beams and you can see these in the up-to-date pictures. As with the kitchen beam it was quite an effort to get them up into place. Note the floor tiles are exactly the same as in the rest of the house.

Where the shelves are in the up-to-date picture was originally a doorway into the other half of the house. We retained the recess to give a bit of interest to the room which would otherwise have been a rather plain rectangular box.

The table was quite a find at a local 'Troc' – it means swap, and is a warehouse where people put items for sale and the owners take a commission. The table is solid oak, impossible to take apart and enormously heavy. We had to engage the assistance of a friend who has a large trailer to get it back to the house and then getting it into the room was a mite difficult to say the least, it only just got through the double doors.

Last month we were visited by members of the book group which I still communicate with in UK and we were able to sit eleven of us round the table for very convivial meals.