Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year.
We had some time off over the festive period so have picked up the pace again on the house.
The plaster boarding of the conical section is now complete! Hurrah!
Before getting the plasterer in, there's a few more areas of rotten render to take down and we need to block up the doorway.
We took two corner sections from the lock up, where our eBay kitchen currently lives, to see how it was fitting with the Rayburn. It's not a bad fit, needs a bit of adjusting to ensure there's enough of a gap between the combustible cabinets and the cooker.
We have also been putting up wood beams on the conical roof:
These have two jobs. Firstly, to provide some additional support to the roof. Some of the rafters are not in good shape and we are adding extra weight to the roof with the insulation and plaster board. And the second is for decoration. A sort of exposed beam effect.
We've also sanded the existing rafters in the other section and painted them. I only took a picture after I did 1! I will put more on next time.
Because it is soft wood, we have to use the proper outdoor wood paint. Luckily, these days they have an array of colours so we've gone for a muted grey! The colour theme of the kitchen and dining room will be light and lots of grey variations and creams.
Here is a look at my scrap book page for the Kitchen if you're interested:
The East Garston Parish council will be meeting Wednesday 7th Jan evening to discuss our plans so Andy and I will be attending with our fingers crossed!
West Berks council have said they will be advising us of their decision on 3rd Feb. I've been keeping up to date with the responses from the various other parties they write too (archeology, conservation officer, the bat people etc) and so far the responses have been sufficient. I don't want to jinx it though!
Life in the caravan is having ups and downs. We went away for a weekend and returned to find a mouse hole had been chewed from the section where the gas cylinders live to the inside of the caravan. To add serious insult to injury, the little bugger nicked our advent calendar chocolates!
We took the awning out of the front, which the little darling was using to get up to the top to chew through, and left a humane trap and blocked up the hole with expandable foam. Heard him mooching around one night, but he avoided the trap and he can't climb up any more to get inside so I think he's got bored and left.
Him and his family obviously had a merry bloody Christmas feasting on our advent calendar chocolates. And they were Mars chocolates too!!
Other than that, we're keeping warm and are having hot showers by recirculating the water into the tank and hen hooking it up to the shower which doubles the heat. It's actually not a bad shower!
