piapiapiano

She is wonderful.



( More pictures and lots of words under the cut. )

I'm sorry I haven't updated in a while. I've been so busy with teaching, the music festival, the allotment, and babycare, that there hasn't been time for me to write a post or for Matt to really do any significant renovations. Work on the house is still proceeding, but at a glacial pace. The latest improvements you can see in the photos above: the landing/balcony door is now sanded and waxed (River thinks it's her "chair"), and we have a lovely mirror hanging up on the wall next to it.

We have plans -- and the materials -- to put blinds up in the downstairs front window (privacy! I can't wait), to paint the stair risers white, to sand and re-paint an old dressing table I found at the tip, and to put shelves up in the living room alcoves. Shelves! Shelves means books! Books! BOOKS! (I'm very excited about this.)

The weather doesn't help, of course. Who wants to be indoors doing DIY when it's like this outside?

I hated the front bedroom most of all when we first saw the house. It's on the north side of the building, so hardly ever gets direct sunlight. The previous owners had painted the walls a shiny, cold, lime green and had painted the wooden trim bits glossy black. It just felt sinister. Also, the electrics didn't work, the light fittings were hanging off the walls, and there were two ugly built-in cupboards filling the alcoves on either side of the boarded-up fireplace. Here it is:



( Lots of pictures under the cut )



Jobs left to do: put up rest of skirting board, stain and wax skirting board, door knob on door, buy and insert cast iron fireplace to fill hole in wall, curtain pole and curtains before the winter.

It's currently my favourite room in the house.

River continues to delight and amaze in equal amounts.

She can run, walk on tip-toes, spin "round-and-round", climb the stairs, dance, clap hands, feed herself with a spoon.

(link to video clip of running)

Her language skills seem to be excellent: we're starting to get short sentences ("I want down", "Where daddy?") and adjectives (various colours, big, nice, ace, tasty, dark, scary, happy, sad). She loves knowing the words for things, and the names for people. And seems to be understanding that verbs have "-ing" at the end (eg. "Grandad clapping").

We have a very basic game where we say "what does the cat say?" (or any other animal or object -- lights say "ting!", flowers say "smell me *sniff sniff*" etc). She started to play it on her own, so she was saying "cat say... miaow! cow say ... moo!" and so on.

Then she said "daddy say..."

We leaned forward, curious to know what sound she'd choose.

"... hello baby!"

After our initial amusement had worn off we discovered that she thinks everyone says "hello baby". I suppose it is the first thing we all say to her.

What else? She's a little vain. Taking more interest in her clothes. Very keen to show them to visitors. She often welcomes people by showing them her cardigan ("cardi!").

She has no fear of the sea, but will not go under the table.

She has imbued her toys with life. They have tea parties, sit on the chair, fall asleep, go missing, ride around in the 'pram' (actually a little wooden trolley), hug and kiss, dance, feel sad or happy.

She likes to eat what we're eating, thank goodness. Except she'll spit meat out in disgust once she notices the texture. Rather too fond of cake and raisins.

On the four mornings each week where Matt looks after, she will pester him to take her outside. "Walk? Daddy? Coat! Shoes! Shall we? The sea! Come on. Shall we?" etc. He cannot resist this. Who could?

She is trying to sing! No actual tune yet, but quite a different tone of voice from speaking, and often the correct rhythms.

Still not sleeping through the night. I try to console myself with the notion that her brain is just too busy to bother with sleep.

One of the first problems we found with the house was that there was no wall long enough downstairs to put my piano against. Or rather, there was one stretch of wall just long enough but it was appallingly damp and I refused to put my precious (and expensive) piano anywhere near it. So we had to think of a way of restructuring the layout to accommodate it. There were lots of discussions -- all right, heated debates -- all right, arguments -- about this. Matt did not want to box in the stairs as he rightly thought it would reduce the light coming into the room. I couldn't find anywhere else to put the piano. We agreed that we didn't want to have two downstairs rooms, so filling in the 1970s archway with more wall was not an option. I got my way, in the end, and the stairs have been boxed away.

( Lots of pictures under the cut )



You have to admit it's a big improvement. From this useless, ugly thing, hidden behind an unfortunate archway:



...to this beautiful piece of oak engineering, doing exactly what it's supposed to, where everyone can see:

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. We've moved into our house (!) and it took a while to get the broadband connected.

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One of the weirder "improvements" imposed on our house by the previous owners was the hideous paint/varnish/tile job they did on the living-room fireplace. Here it is, looking absolutely horrible:



Not just a nasty set of tiles stuck to a sheet of hardboard (presumably to stop draughts from blowing around the ugly little electric fire that was in there). Not just an ill-advised coat of varnish* on the stone (making it look permanently wet). Not just a sloppy example of inappropriate cement re-pointing over the original lime mortar.

But they'd also randomly painted some of the stones black!

And it looks like they sliced off a bit of stone down the right-hand corner. We're guessing they wanted to make room for a big TV screen in the right-hand alcove.

Awful.

After a long delay while he got on with more pressing structural things, Matt made it all better. Varnish and paint stripped off, cement hacked out, re-pointed with new lime mortar, and he even built a stone hearth so it's all ready for a little multi-fuel stove before next winter:



Lovely!

The only problem is that the hearth isn't safe with a toddler running around, so it's currently covered in cushions.

I can't wait until we have a stove! It can't go in until the chimneys are swept, which can't happen until the chimneys have been repaired, which can't happen until the roof is replaced, etc etc. Every job in this house has depended on 10 other things being fixed first. But surely we'll get it all done before the winter.

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* The varnished wall was indirectly the source for at least part of the toxic VOC stench that permeated the house whhen we bought it. Whoever was varnishing the wall left the tin open on the concrete floor. A neighbour's child accidentally knocked it over (the child told us this a while ago). The responsible adult then spread the spilt varnish out all over quarter of the living-room floor and waited a day or so for it dry. Then they re-laid the carpet over it. But because they didn't leave it exposed for the total 8 days that are required for varnishes and waxes to cure properly, it never truly set and just continued to smell. So they taped a sheet of plastic over it. And then we discovered it all. I suppose if we hadn't had ro deal with the varnish-contaminated concrete we wouldn't have found the oil leak, but that's a story for another day...

The landing is one area of the house that's been through some satisfyingly big transformations. Here it is in its primal state:



The one thing we liked about the landing when we first saw it was the light streaming in through the back door. It leads out onto the kitchen roof, which acts as a little sun-trap balcony. But we didn't like the door itself. The back guttering was in an even worse state than the front, and years of splashing had caused the door and frame to swell up. Yet another door that had to be karate kicked to open, and you had to really slam it to get it shut. Also, the handle was broken. And the glass was single-glazed. And the frame was a flimsy thing, designed for indoor use. As with every other home "improvement" inflicted on this house, corners had been cut and the end result was a total mess.

( Read more... )



Quite a transformation from when we first saw it!

There are still jobs to do: skirting boards, cleaning up the back door, waxing the doorstep, waxing the handrail, putting up door frames for all the upstairs doors, and finishing off the understairs cupboard. Matt's going to be very busy for a while yet...

I can't remember why we wanted to buy this house now. In the end we will have changed everything, except the stone walls, the number of rooms, the wooden floor joists, and the location. Surely we liked more than just those bits though? It was definitely love, I remember that. We saw it, loved it, dithered about putting an offer in, discovered that someone had beaten us to it, were devastated, found out that it was back on the market, and were filled with joy.



Looking at the front of the house as it was then, I can't believe I liked it. I think the quirky bay-ish window may have attracted me. I remember really liking that. But on closer inspection it was, like most of the other windows, rotten. All the windows had been slotted in between the internal and external sills, so rainwater could just dribble straight down into the wall space underneath. A recipe for rotten window wood and saturated walls.

The guttering was leaking directly above the front door, and splashing up off the front step onto the door itself. It sounds like a trivial problem, but it had been left like that for years and the frame had gone rotten at the bottom. The door had swelled up so much that you had to karate kick it to get it open. Not good.

When Matt and our geochemist friend removed all the internal plaster, we discovered that the original front window had been a lot wider. There was a vertical course of bricks running up each side, totally at odds with the uneven rubble stone walls. It should have been obvious, in retrospect, as the house next door (a mirror image of ours) had a big, wide, double-fronted sash window.

Of course, as with every other discovery made in this house, we uncovered a problem too. The lintel in the external skin of the wall was enormous and badly rotted along its underside. Several professionals suggested that we'd have to replace it, which would've been a huge undertaking, and one we hadn't budgeted for. One builder said it'd be fine, though, if we just treated it with some wood hardener. We chose to follow his advice in the end (for obvious reasons), but it was a hairy couple of days there.



What a huge big hole in the front of our house! Poor Matt had to spend a week working on the interior with nothing but a sheet of flapping plastic between him and all the random people wandering down our street.

All the new windows went in during a very fraught couple of weeks between the external cement render coming off and the new lime plaster going on. Matt and the lime plasterer nearly came to blows over those windows and windowsills (oh, the windowsills! That's an episode that requires a whole post just to itself. The drama!). The end result is rather lovely, though.



Once Matt and his dad had replaced the guttering (on the day I went into labour!), a local carpenter sorted out the door and little window above it for us. I wanted something solid to shut out the world, but still have a bit of light coming in. It's hardwood, like the windows. We'll paint them eventually. Probably...

We bought this little coastal cottage two years ago, and are about to move in. At last! To celebrate the almost-finishedness of the renovations, I've decided to start blogging about it. I've never liked it when people start blogs that promise to depict wonderful transformations and redecorations and repairs etc, and then peter out after a few entries. You never get to see the end product. But I promise that we really are nearly at the end now, so I feel it's safe to start this blog.

Pictures will be appearing once we've actually moved in -- some time in the next couple of weeks.

So excited!

To get things started, here's the cottage when we bought it in February 2010:



Ugh. Covered in cracked cement, some kind of "weatherproof" plastic lumpy stuff, and hideous green paint. Rotten old windows that did nothing to allow air to flow through on hot days, and were single-glazed so did nothing to keep heat in during the winter.

And here's how the outside looks now, with guttering that doesn't leak, lovely lime render, and hardwood double-glazed windows in a style more appropriate for when the cottage was built:



Aaahhh, that's better!

Ultimately we're going to paint it bright yellow, with cream window frames, and possibly a spring green door, and maybe a black strip along the bottom of the wall.

We bought the yellow paint over a year ago, but are waiting until the scaffolding goes up for the roof work before doing the re-painting. I've got quite attached to the colour of the render, though. It's going to be difficult adjusting to a bright yellow house...

(I love this picture -- she looks like a Hollywood starlet from the silent movies era. Not sure if I've ever mentioned here how lucky we've been with generous friends, but pretty much all River's clothes are secondhand, including this fabulous coat and hat. Same goes for toys, books, cot, bedding, towels, car-seats, prams, etc. We've really been incredibly fortunate.)

( More photos under the cut. )

2011 wasn't the easiest year for me and Matt. Because of the house renovations taking up all his time we ended up taking turns to look after River instead of being a team. So we were both acting like single parents. A typical week during term time went like this (recorded here because I know I'll forget how awful it was): ( This was longer than I expected. You really don't need to read it. )

Anyway. It could've been a better year. But it was ace a lot of the time too. Watching River grow and develop and blossom into a funny, confident, happy little girl has been wonderful. Watching the house become a home, when it started the year as a building site, has been very exciting. I'll post photos once we've moved in, I think. It's so nearly finished now that it'd be a shame to spoil the Big Reveal.

I did a lot of knitting in the run-up to Xmas. We were simply too poor to buy many gifts so I delved into the wool stash and spent time instead of money. Will post photos of finished items once I've managed to photograph them. Didn't have time before Xmas, alas.

It's been an interesting and eventful year. Lots of good and bad family developments, some of which I've mentioned here.

I have no idea what's going to happen in 2012, and that's exactly what I wanted. A little bit of unpredictability!

I hope you all get what you want in 2012 too. :-)