improvements?

translation

private tuition

language school

holiday home

www.english-house.net

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and out of the reach of most wallets" - famous words just like "it needs nothing doing to it." I don't know who is responsible for the first quote but the second loops through my head every time I look at another half-finished room in the house. They words were said by Mum and Dad when they first saw the house. They were right too, in a manner of speaking. If you like flowery wallpaper, fake walls and ceilings, then the house needed nothing changing. I don't and so my nerves, bank balance and sanity are suffering as a result. But once you have started, it's very hard to go back. Here are some examples of 'improvements' - and in case you are struggling to see them - the before is usually on the left!

After I bought the house, it took a couple of coats of orange paint to cover the flowers on the left, but apart from painting, there wasn't a lot else that needed doing. A pity the picture doesn't really do it justice - sorry!

Again, not a lot that had to be done-it just all needed brightening up a bit, so a nice fresh yellow was ideal. This is a really pretty room with a wonderful view of the brook and valley. The cupboard to the right is blocking off a window,

so in the future I'll open up the window again and let a bit more light through. Again, sorry about the photo, when I'm next in France, I will take some better pictures!

I was in France for a month this summer and one evening, got talking to one of the elderly neighbours who walks her dog, Sammy, round the village. She told me that the house had been bought in the late 70s by a stonemason who'd restored it for his father to live in - hence the good quality of the rooms in the front part of the house and the date 1979, on the outside front wall. His father never lived there however and the house was sold on, along with an adjoining barn, thereby doubling its size. Unfortunately, the builders (English) who were responsible for the back of the house (the barn part) didn't do a great job and this is where I have the most to do. It's all working, but they've hidden the original stone with fake walls and ceilings and these are what I'm taking out when I've time - however time's always been a bit lacking in my life!


		When you see the film "I know what you did last Summer" then think of me! I spent most of it in this room. The photos above show the sitting room when I bought the house. The photo above left shows the door through to another room, now 'double bedroom' on the plan. Last December, Micha and I came down and ripped out the fake ceiling, exposing the beautiful wooden beams, and then we took out the fake walls, revealing the original stone wall of the barn. We put in electricity cables and some concrete around the edges and left for somewhere warmer - Berlin!




		The photo on the left shows the room more or less as it was when I got there this summer. The beautiful stone walls have been exposed but they all need filling and re-pointing. If you look at the wall in the top left corner of the photo, you can see how the walls were originally plastered, with a mixture of mud and dung. This can be seen more clearly in the photo below of the view from within the side room.

The photo below shows the contrast between stone that has been re-pointed (on the right in the photo) and that which still has to be done. Taking out the false walls revealed this original fireplace, with the huge stones and smaller firebricks below. Pointing has been done below right.

I also had a bit of a Churchillian moment when I had to re-build a corner wall. This was not a job I really wanted to do having never tried it before, but the professionals were either too expensive or did not bother to come round and take a look.

The photo on the left shows the missing part and the breeze blocks that the English builders had put up plus the back of the fake wall in the spare room. On the right is a work in progress. And below, the finished result.

Once you start, you just can't stop and so I decided to take out the fake walls in the cubby hole. It went from being this below.....

via this below.....


	to finally the picture below - a new double bedroom, complete with brand new wooden floor. Trouble is, there is about a year between the photos. Now just needs the bed assembling!


	The sitting room is also now finished - a little bit more welcoming!

It would be nice to say that was it! But the problem is that once I'd found how beautiful the original walls were behind the plasterboard, then I needed to do all the rooms, and there are two more upstairs! Logically, I should've started upstairs, as the 1970s 'builders' had cut the floorboards to fit the new walls, which meant that there were gaps between the floors, through which cables were hung etc. However, I'd only originally meant to do the sitting room and had not thought about other rooms. This meant that my two finished rooms downstairs could not be used as when I was working on the rooms above, all the muck and earth fell through into them. It was heartbreaking! To have spent all my holidays over 2 years renovating a house, only to have the finished rooms looking like a building site again. Still, there was no way round it, but next time - if there is a next time – I'll work from the roof downwards!

I decided to tackle the smaller room first, which had yellow walls and a green floor. I was responsible for the yellow walls but not the floorboards!


	The photo on the left shows the room with the window to the left and the skylight above. On the right is the view of the room to the door. The room has just enough space for two single beds.


	As usual, I started by ripping out the plasterboard which then gave a clue as to why the house had felt so cold - there were two holes, which were letting in the wind, which would then go around behind the wall. Stopped the damp, but let in the cold and the wildlife! I had not noticed them from outside as they were so high up.


	One of the holes can be seen to the right of the photo, partially blocked by stones. The other is hidden by the plasterboard on the left. The clay/earth covering the stones can be clearly seen in this picture too and this is what falls through to the newly renovated room below! There were also creeper plants growing through the window frame!

The easiest way to clear the plasterboard was out of the window! It then all had to be transported to the tip, five kilometres away in the next village. Plasterboard is not really the right word - it is more like polystyrene which has a film of plaster on one side. So it was quite good at insulating the house, but as the outer wall was full of holes, it had to be. The only problem was that when it is taken out, it tends to disintegrate and leave white polystyrene bits everywhere, both inside and outside - horrible stuff!

After the surprise of finding two windows behind the plasterboard and plants growing around the window, I should have been prepared for what was behind the wooden ceiling. At the front of the house, there is a loft space, which I have insulated to keep the front of the house warm. It seems a shame to lose the space but the house is hardly too small and making the house as energy-efficient as possible is a priority. It is still really cold in winter as it is not being used 365 days a year, but at least the heat from the fires is not being wasted. However, when I took away the wooden ceiling expecting to find the floor of another attic above, I was not prepared for another 2 metres of wall up to the roof of the house!

The picture on the right shows the height of the room. On the one hand, such a high ceiling meant that the room had changed from being rather small to becoming a good-sized bedroom! However, it put all the timing out, as every stone has to be cleaned and then have its edges filled in. The room took me the whole summer to do and it wasn't all that nice standing at the top of a wobbly ladder. Trouble is that I had to go back on the ladder again later as the ceiling needed insulating. The 'window' on the right goes to the adjoining barn and the stonework proves that it was intended. I can't make out its function though as why have a window between two barns and it is too small to be a door?

After a lot of work and just as much cement, the room was finally ready and all that remained was for (Dad) to sand down and oil the floor, which he has now done, but I took the photo before this. Unfortunately this is now the third room to have been renovated but to be unused as I have had to pile it up with all the furniture from the main bedroom in the back of the house, which was next on the list to be renovated.


	The last room was the most complicated. It was a large bedroom with an en-suite bathroom and I had never liked the room because it just had no atmosphere. The picture below on the left shows how it used to look. The bathroom door is closed

and to the right. The bathroom was well-equipped with a bathtub but was very narrow and so felt very cramped. It also seemed pointless having a house with two bathtubs when the hot water comes from a tank that has to be heated electrically and if two people decided to use both bathtubs at the same time, that would use up all the hot water for the house So I decided to put in a good shower instead and also to move the bathroom, so that it could be used by all the people in the 4 bedrooms upstairs and not just by those in this 1 bedroom. That sounds easy enough, but I wanted to move it to the back of the room (where the bed is in the photo) which meant raising the floor, to allow the pipes to have enough slope for the water to

drain away. Added to this problem, I also wanted to build a storage room between the bathroom and the bedroom as I need somewhere to keep all my tools and also to minimise the noise between bathroom and bedroom. This also meant making a hallway so that all the rooms could be reached through individual doors. So out of a bedroom/en-suite bathroom, I was going to build three rooms and a hallway. And try and do all this in my holidays. So it was time to call in Dad! Up until now I had done the bulk of the work on my own, partly as I like it that way, and also as it was not too complicated. But the last room was a father-son project.


		As ever, it began with removing the plasterboard and the fake ceiling. This time there were no really nasty surprises, only nice ones! To the right of the photo, next to the water boiler, can be seen three windows which were professionally blocked up. I might one day open them up again, but the room has a lot of light, so for the moment, I have left them as found. The roof beams were nice but not that interesting, so we decided to plasterboard the whole ceiling, after insulating it, and just leaving the the main beams exposed. The stonework was in pretty good shape, except that there was some cracking to the left and the builders had just hacked a hole for the window, so that had to be tidied up. Before and after shot below.

Facing the other way, I found that this room did have an attic but with chipboard, so I decided to put a nice floor in, which would then function as a ceiling for the hallway, bathroom and storeroom. We later decided to plasterboard the bathroom though, in order to stop the wood from getting damp (we used marine plasterboard which is incredibly heavy as it has been treated) and to insulate it, but in the hallway, where you can see the ceiling, it does look good!


	The photo on the right is looking up to the attic ceiling above the storeroom, bathroom and hall. To the left, part of the old wooden ceiling has not yet been removed. We took the beam in the middle as the edge of the bedroom wall, and the bathroom was to run along the back wall visible in the photo.


	Hopefully by scrolling up the page, you can get an idea of the before and after effect. In the photos, the chimney from the sitting room fireplace can be seen on the right.

Firstly, wooden frames were made for the bathroom/storeroom wall and the storeroom/bedroom wall. This took an awful lot of measuring and worrying, as if they were not straight, then the walls would later look odd. The problem is also that none of the original walls are anywhere near straight, so we were measuring off the ceiling! We are still not sure if we got it right but there again, Dad is a perfectionist and I am my father's son!




				The photo on the right is looking into the bathroom from the hallway. A piece of plasterboard is in place on the left, which was later to be tiled to form one wall of the shower. The wall behind the frame in the centre of the picture was first insulated and then plasterboarded and tiled to form the other shower wall. It needed to be insulated as the wall is an outside one to the barn.


	The photo on the left shows the view from the corridor, looking into the bathroom. The wood beginning on the left of the photo is the frame for the bathroom/storeroom wall and then on the right of the photo, you can seen the frame for the storeroom/bedroom wall, beginning at the chimney.



			This photo shows the bathroom starting to look more like what it was intended for. The toilet is just resting in what was to be the base of the shower and you can see the raised floor to allow the grey pipe to the left of the photo (connected to the white U-bend) to have hopefully enough flow angle. The two walls of the shower are in, plus tap connectors and the sink is in position and the wall has been cleaned and filled. Dad later spider-proofed the gap between original and new floor as the thought of all those beasts nesting in there was equally horrifying to both of us. The photos below this text shows the nearly finished bathroom, just the shower doors need some adapting.


	The strange light is because I took the photos without flash and the left one reflects the green paint of the plasterboard wall - seen in the mirror. You can also see the plasterboard ceiling and the original beam. Unfortunately raising the floor meant that the shower doors would not fit as the manufacturer had intended, but after a lot of head-scratching, weve got them in and functioning!

The large photo above shows the view from the bedroom, looking at the back bedroom wall. The hallway can be seen where the stones have been cleaned and grouted and to the right, part of the storeroom shelves are visible where the plasterboard has yet to be fixed in place. If you look along the grey pipe, you can just see the step down from the bathroom floor. Above the grey pipe, in the foreground, you can make out an original doorway/window through from outside.

This is a similar view but now all the plasterboard has been fixed in place and the door has been mounted, shutting off the bedroom from the hallway. The stonework has also been finished although bits around the beams need grouting. The gap to the attic above the bathroom/storeroom has been closed off and all that remains is for this wall to have the plasterboard joins filled in and then to be painted.

The photo below shows the bedroom ceiling. We decided not to expose all the beams, just the three main ones. The rest were covered over with insulation and then plasterboarded. It just remains to fill in the gaps and then paint the ceiling. This is where Dad has been a huge help as I just do not seem to have the patience for this kind of work. The green on the window is because the shutters are closed.

This summer, I was of course back in the house. I concentrated on finishing the bedroom first. The main problem was filling in all the gaps between the plasterboard used in the ceiling. It is really frustrating work as you are sanding above your head and you have to get the filler as flat as possible, otherwise the light catches it and any imperfections show up as shadows. It is certainly not perfect - but will have to do! I also painted the plasterboard wall, and Dad and I put in the new wooden floor, which was the easiest one to do so far - guess it is true, as my piano teacher used to say, practice makes perfect! Then some blinds were put up in the skylights as the room faces East and so can get extremely hot in summer. It means that you cannot see the stars through them at night, but there is a window opposite the bed, and when the bank agrees, I will get some blinds that can be opened. The room is nearly finished, but unfortunately my carpenter (Dad) got the Flu and so we were unable to find the time to box in the pipe that runs along one wall. It has now been done, but no photos taken! The photo below shows the finished bedroom from a similar angle to above.


		And two other views of the same room. The one below shows the pipe which has now been boxed in.


	Once the bedroom was finished, I turned my attentions to the hallway. This caused lots of problems as the builders had knocked through the wall from the front of the house, into the back area, which must have been a barn. To support the hole through, they put retaining breeze blocks and it would have been just too much work to have taken these out and put in limestones, so I decided to cover up their work with plasterboard. I also took away the wood that was covering over the stone floor and rebuilt it. Again, I ran out of time and so finished this off in the Christmas holidays, when I didn't have my camera with me to take finished photos. Before is on the right and after below.




				The shower in the bathroom was a huge headache as I made the mistake of assuming that the original floor was level! Nothing original in the house is straight! So when Dad and I built the new floor some 30cms higher, to allow for the pipework to run under the floor, we followed the lines of the old floor, which has meant that the bathroom floor slopes! Which led to problems with fixing the glass doors of the shower, but this was all sorted at Christmas and the bathroom is now finished.

I had been intending to insulate the roof of the twin back bedroom, but in the end decided that I could not bear to hide the beautiful beams and wooden ceiling, so I insulated between them and put in wooden planks between the beams to hold the material in place.

Downstairs, I made some small changes to the kitchen - moving the fridge meant that I could put in a workspace - and built a step through from the sitting room to the back bedroom. This was quite tricky as this part of the house is built on the bedrock, so this had to be removed first and then the large (and very heavy stones) put in place.

And that, apart from some work in the garden, was it for yet another holiday!!

It's now September 2009 and the good news is that the house is finally finished!

I was in France for two months this summer, which gave me plenty of time to finish off the small things left in the house and to do the outside. The front of the house was fine and the wall up the outside steps, but the other three walls all needed pointing. This wasn't too bad on the two small sides as I could do this with a 4m ladder, but around the long side of the house, it was a lot harder as I had to put up scaffolding and then stand on planks of wood placed on two ladders for strength. It was all somewhat wobbly and narrow and quite high up with the sun beating on my back. In the picture below you can see the part of the wall yet to be done on the left and below me, and the completed part to the right.

I then took the opportunity to build a small patio area in front of the sitting-room door/window as I have always hated the paving slabs that were down there and visible in the photo above left. I had wanted to change the patio area to the right in the photo above right, but ran out of time and to be honest, the energy to load the 15cm square bricks individually into a trailer - there would have been about 400 of them! So instead I rebuilt the wall next to the well, which took a lot longer than I had expected. Come the autumn, it should have a few plants growing in front of it. Before and after.

I also started on the small barn area at the side of the house. This was three barns, all different sizes and joined together. Unfortunately, when I bought the house, it was already too late to save two of the barns as the roof of one had completely gone and water had got into the stone walls of the middle one, so all I did was to have a roof put on the remaining good one and left it until this summer. The picture below shows the good barn on the right, the one with the wooden doors has a damaged roof and walls and to the left, hidden in the jungle is the third one. Here I have just started clearing out the middle barn.

I decided to make the middle barn into a sitting area, and leave the roof beams in place and plant vines or two kiwis to grow over them, to provide a lovely shaded area. Unfortunately, while clearing out the barn I managed to get hit by a beam which swung back onto my head and I ended up in the local hospital, where they stitched up my head. The photo below left shows the barn before I took the tiles off the roof and below right, how it now looks. It took 2 very long days to carry all the tiles down a ladder off the roof! I didn't want to throw them down as they are really old (handmade) and beautiful.

Hopefully Christmas 2009 will be quite mild and not too wet as I have a month off and so I would like to make a start on taking down part of the walls to open up the area. This would then mean that you could sit out and look over the valley, like in the photo below, which is taken from the 'roof' of this barn. I also want to clear the barn area to the left of the photo and make a herb garden that can be accessed via the middle barn. And put in some sliding glass doors where the wooden door is, in the photo above right, to access the barn with the good roof.

Although a month goes really quickly, it would be nice if I could sort out the walls in the good barn and put some windows in, as it is still a bit open and exposed above the half-ceiling in the picture. It could also do with new floors, but as it is really only used as a store room, that might have to wait!