The big clean continues

My good friend Jo and her other half Chris came round to help today with the big clean.

They had just come from a kids birthday party and came with helium balloons.

This turned out to a be genius idea in getting rid of the massive spider web at the top of the conical ceiling!

The big web containing the big dead spiders is gone! Yippee! Andy will be pleased when he returns and sees that gone!

Jo and I spent a couple of hours dancing and singing to the iPod as we cleaned and Chris went into full demolition man mode and started taking down the big wooden divide.

It's nicely opened up the room :-)

Still finding traces of woodworm....there is a wooden ornamental picture type thing in the bathroom which has been attacked and can't be saved.

Thankfully the oak divider doesn't seem to be have been affected. I suspect it's been treated or maybe because it has a varnish on it? Who knows.

Chris reckons the top of the pipe from the wood burner is made from asbestos. I think it could be clay (purely because the surveyor didn't mention it).

The weather was rotten but we had fun! Big thank you to Jo and Chris for their help, and for the hone made fajitas afterwards :-)

1 week till Andy is home!

Finally, Here is a photo of the cigar box I mentioned in the last post.

Bank holiday well spent.....not!

The only time I did some work on the house was this bank holiday Monday. Which is a bit rubbish of me...but if he's away for 2 weeks, I think I deserve at least 3 of my 4 days off! ;-)

My mum came and helped me take out some cupboards from the kitchen. Bad news is there is clear signs of woodworm in the house....some of the units just fell apart when you pulled at them. I just pray they didn't get into the rafters or that's more time and money replacing those! 

We did struggle a bit as many of the screws were painted over and we just lacked the strength. Mum had a puny electric screw driver but it didn't do the job. Found Andy's screw drivers but no screw heads or battery...boo!

Found some interesting things hidden away. The old chap who lived there had nailed a cigar box to the back of one cupboard, obviously hidden away!

Managed to get most of the...."retro" tiles down in 1 piece. I thought I'd walk them on gumtree and see if anyone would give me anything for them. Retro is in after all (although look at them....they are not pretty...)

Met some more lovely neighbours too. Everyone really is friendly! I'm a bit embarrassed though as I am really bad remembering names and faces for the first few times so some of them I may have already met! 

I'm going to do a letter drop at some point this week just to say hi and to let people know they can pop round and take a peek any time they like.

Anyway, mother and I started de-spidering the "bedroom" which took a while! I breathed in a lot of dust so am coughing a bit at the moment. Perhaps I'll take a mask next time.

A lot of spiders didn't survive the clean....but some buggers played dead then ran off into a hole. I'll get you next time....!

Not sure what I will do or when I will go this week. Mum is off on holiday so I really will be on my todd. 

The junk collectors are coming tomorrow - I just hope they can fit it all in!! 

Shed week

This week has mostly been spent breaking up and sifting through the stuff in the shed.

When we had a survey done, the surveyor mentioned that the shed had woodworm. And he wasn't wrong! Everything that was wooden and not treated in that shed disintegrated as soon as you picked it up. There was about 3 inches of wood dust on the floor. We found about 10 whole roof tiles buried in the wood dust which was great as some of the roof tiles do need replacing so it will save us trying to find some reclaimed hand made tiles. 

We found some old chests and it was such a shame that they were rotten as they were really nice and had the names of the previous owners on. It would have been nice if we could have recycled them. There were old maps of Italy in one of them, but again they couldn't be saved.

Instead of hiring a skip, we have someone coming in a van to take away all the junk as it worked out cheaper. 

We managed to get a sort of organised pile for the chaps to come and take away.

Andy left to go on his solo holiday today (he's turning 30 on the 23rd and as a present to himself he wanted to go away on a bike trip to Western Sahara) so my jobs in the 2 weeks he's away is to try and de-spider and clean up the inside.

This will include taking the cabinets out of the kitchen.

Also this week, we met lots of our neighbours. Everyone is incredibly friendly and has wished us luck with our project. We had a voicemail from Freddie Tulloch (the chap who owns the field) in response to a letter we sent asking for permission to walk on his field to fell a couple of trees. He said that was fine and also wished us luck. That same day when we went to the house, we noticed the council had chopped down a couple of trees near a pylon which has opened up our view even more!

I've also made some signs to put either side of the bend to warn motorists there is a works access on the bend and that there are open man holes. Better to be safe than sorry (or sued)! I'll put them up this weekend.

If any friends and family are reading this and would like to assist over the bank holiday, get in touch! If we get a gang going one day, I'll bring a BBQ and some food as payment :-)

And finally, I found myself one day just staring out at the view as the moon started rising. The picture doesn't compare to the real thing at all. 

We are very lucky :-) 

Inside tour

And as promised, a tour of the inside!

Good start!

Blessed with beautiful weather this weekend, we took full advantage and began clearing the garden.

After a lot of the small trees and over grown shrubs were cut down, we unearthed many man hole covers.

Andy's two friends Jason and Ben were round helping and Ben and Andy decided to pull up the man hole covers and take a peek. 

Then Ben decided to explore our old cesspit....

Obviously something to do with the old pump system to the Gooding's estate, they worked out it wasn't anything to do with our current septic tank after all...

Andy wanted to leave them uncovered to show the architect we are meeting on Tuesday, and thus began a debate about if people could sue us if they trespassed on our land and fell down one. 

Jason looked after our fire (oil drum with holes and lid cut off - 23 quid off eBay!) and I continued to chop. It really is amazing how much room there is now. Don't get me wrong, it's still a small plot, but so much was covered by trees and shrubs that actually, it's not a bad sized garden for the size of the house.

All in all, it was a productive Saturday  ending with Andy, Ben, Ben's fiancée and my good pal Lottie Booth and myself going for dinner at the local.

Sunday it was just Andy and I and we decided it would be a good idea to take the shed down. With the digger. Andy's little face when he was smashing that thing up was like a kid at Christmas. Bless him.

 

Everything in it was either eaten by Wood worm or just rotted away. We just need to get a skip now to put it all in. Not sure how a skip lorry will fit down the lane though....we will let them worry about that when they deliver it.

Before the day was out, Andy thought it would be a good idea to attempt to take a tree down with just the two of us. 

Half way through his cut, the chainsaw packed up and he had to go all the way back to Newbury to get some tools. So I stayed behind and tried to dig the roots of the bushes up. Which was bloody hard work!!

Got some visits from some mice and a pheasant and then 2 different sets if locals stopped to chat to me (that weekend, about 6 different people stopped and chatted to us over all - all very friendly and excited to see the place being worked on).

Then my Mum and Jack came over with a flask of coffee and some biscuits!

Jack helped Andy cut down one of the two trees which I was relieved about.

Andy chopped it up and moved it off the field as we were starting to lose light.  Well sort it out in the week, and attempt the felling of the final tree!

All in all, a back breaking but successful weekend! Thanks to everyone who came and helped. Same again next weekend, yeah? And it's a double whammy bank holiday! 

Outside tour

I need to re-do the inside grand tour as my phone had a funny blue flashing screen moment half way through. 

For now, a tour of the outside! I'm sorry I filmed it in the wrong rotation but lesson learnt for next time! 

We've been clearing the over grown bushes every night this week. The video above I shot before the clearing so I will do another one to show you what it looks like when we finish "de-bushing."

It's amazing actually how much more room there seems to be!

A little background info...

On Monday 7th April 2014, we picked up he keys to our new home :-)

We have been renting for the last couple of years in semi rural locations and have loved being in the countryside. We never thought we would be able to afford a home of our own in the country, at least not anywhere near the Berkshire / North Hampshire area.

But, we noticed that run down and derelict houses were in our price range! Andy is a very practical chap (I will tell you more about his racing car he built another time), and I will always have a go but I do lack brute strength! So we decided that it was either that, or a house on a street with hundreds of other houses around and looking the same. People said we were fussy, and it shouldn't matter as its only your first home and not your last, but we wanted to love our home, not tolerate it.

We searched for over a year. We saw many houses and made offers on a few. And each time we lost them all to cash buyers from London who wanted a weekend home. We were gutted each time. On one occasion, we had put in an offer on a lovely thatched gate house in a place called Conock near Devizes and were told it was pretty much ours by the estate agent. Then at the 11th hour, a chap from London put a cash offer in as his wife wanted a project. I remember being gutted and thinking we will never find a place. As the housemarket started to pick up and with house prices going up, we thought we would reach the point where we would have to settle for something after all.

Then, in October 2013 this odd little house came up in our search.

With an asking price of less than £200k, we decided to take a look.

It was built as a "pump" house to serve the Gooding's estate house opposite. I won't bore you with the history, but if you are interested then take a look at this link:

http://www.east-garston.com/site-content/

history/the-goodings/the-goodings.htm

It was a small house, and hadn't been lived in for a long time.

But what a view it had!

We were told by Tony Nye, the estate agent (who, by the way, of all the estate agents we dealt with was the nicest, most honest and down to earth), that the owners had used it as their weekend home but became too elderly to keep making the trip.

We went back and saw it again and then decided to make an offer. The house had not been on the market for long so the owners wanted to wait. We were told that there had been a lot of interest but not many offers.

Then, we got the news in late October that our offer had been accepted (I remember it well, it was during The Burkett endurance race that Andy was participating in).

We got a mortgage agreed pretty quickly and easily on the property, which surprised us as we assumed they would deem it as uninhabitable. 

The wait came because of a piece of land that was unregistered but was fenced off as part of this property (where the shed sits in pictures). That needed legal work and registering with the local council who aren't the quickest and that took a little while to resolve. But it happened and everything else went quite smoothly.

The garden is over grown and the house is covered in spider webs but its ours!

So now begins our adventure and many evenings and weekends ahead of hard graft to make this place our home, and to restore and renovate this lovely little place to its former glory. All eyes are on us from the village and local area to do a good job. No pressure!

We wanted to document our journey to to share with friends and family, to have something to look back on and maybe even inspire someone else to give renovating a go (although I imagine along the way we might even put people off).

Keep checking back for regular updates as the work has begun! :-)