The first day of work has, I think, thrown into sharp relief the scale of work to do. The house, at least in parts, now very much feels like a building site but the realisation that I have months of mortgage payments on a property I can’t even live in yet is now quite stark.
The father in law and I got in pretty early with our tools, and I got to work right away reuniting the two flats. The previous owner had divided the house in around 1981, and in doing so had thrown up a studwork wall down the middle of the spine corridor.
I was expecting to make light work of this — I’ve knocked down quite a lot of studwork walls in my time but alas nothing is so simple. One of the sides of the wall is double layered to make it fireproof — 1980s fire regulations — making it more than twice as hard to break through with my trusty hammer and crowbar.
The ceiling heights are also well in excess of an ordinary modern home, and truth be told I’m not much enamoured of swinging a hammer about at the top of a ladder. I’m too ungainly to do it comfortably. Better get used to it, I suppose.
Meanwhile, Mr H was working on the upstairs kitchen — one day to be my study. It is the room right at the top of the stairs and quite out of the way, so it has been chosen as a store for all of our boxes that need to get out of the cottage while we do the works.
This led to one awful moment, as I stood in the downstairs kitchen making the tea and listening to the foul storm blowing outside I was thinking to myself how it was so loud, it sounded like it was raining indoors. And then my head got wet. You’ve never seen me move so fast.
Turns out the stopcock for the upstairs flat was pretty crap and Mr H hadn’t noticed that after unplumbing the sink in the upstairs (now former) kitchen, the pipes were still running at a moderate pace.
Realising we didn’t have the tools or end caps to stem the flow. It was a screeching drive to the builders merchants — thankfully on the end of the road — to pick up the parts. The sleepy clerk who served us, as friendly as he was, probably didn’t realise how close he was to getting a punch on the end of the nose for delaying our return by processing the payment slowly.
That disaster ended, I set to work with a mop and bucket below while Mr H lifted the sodden chipboard floating floor upstairs to assess the damage that this sink, which it seems had been leaking for quite a few years, had done.
I finished knocking through a way between the two flats, and we cut up and lifted a whole bunch of carpets. The original boards below are very nice — very paint splattered and stained but all broad and handsome nonetheless. Also uncovered some hearthstones below the bricked up fireplaces, which I shall be knocking through in due course.
Just as we were getting tidied up for the day, another flood. This time rainwater — one of the gutters outside isn’t working properly and has actually been directing rainwater to form in a big puddle along the external wall of the house all day rather than sending it to the drain.
I suppose it eventually reached a certain height as it was able to quite quickly — as it was there one moment and not the next — able to pour into our spine corridor with some speed.
Indeed, it was coming in faster than I was able to mop up. Eventually, I learnt a sheet of chipboard against the outer wall to redirect at least some of the water into the drain, which helped.
Talking to the neighbours to warn them of the trip hazard I’d created in the passageway over which they have right of way, I was invited to a community meeting that evening to discuss the new housing developments proposed for the fields around the house.
Presently the house does enjoy wonderful views, over rolling meadows to the rear, and a distant Georgian farmhouse afore. They want to plonk 1,000 houses down over those two wonderful sightways.
The meeting was heated, and I admit I joined in, pointing out the foolish nonsense the representative of the developer was spouting. Good to fit in with the community…
The Young Revivalists 