We’d initially decided to wait until the morning to do any more but one thing lead to another and we just started having a look.

Dad with his trusty lump hammer as a crow bar started to “gently” peel off the start of the wood. We could see behind it what looked like a white plastered wall and with any luck we’d have a nice smooth wall behind. However this wasn’t to be.

On removing the wood cladding we were faced with a wall of uneven and some what damp plaster. Since the plaster was wet when we removed the wood and battening had small chunks of plaster were falling away to reveal what looked like a very nice natural wall. At this point we really could have gone on all night pulling off the wood and picking out the plaster but I knew if we finished all of this on the first night then Dawn would kill the pair of us. So around 11, getting a bit tired and somewhat cold it was time to come back in the morning with Dawn as a re-enforcement.

Dawn the really got stuck in and as you can see from the below pictures and got the 2nd wall done in the kitchen.

At the end of all this we realised we’d got our first surprise with the house. We’d hoped we’d have walls like this hidden away but expected it to be hard to get back to or hard to find. The fact the house was giving itself up so easy to work on was a total joy.

At present we’ve left and will leave the walls bare while the renovation happens however the plan is to point them in a natural lime mix to keep with the colour and seal them leaving these two walls on show. For now we’ve stopped peeling back the walls as we had another wall to pull down and the roof on the out building to tackle. Since we were only here for a few short days we had a lot to do and we couldn’t stop and admire all our handy work, but this wa a really great job to get us motivated for the rest of the house.

Date of Job : April 11/12 2008 (will add to build diary shortly)

The overriding desire for our renovation is to keep as much of the old house as we can where possible and where that isn’t possible we want to restore the section in the same style, after all we fell in love with the way the style of the house when we bought it however we’ve already had to take the decision to remove a part of the house for the safety of the rest of the house.

Failing Roof!
Along with the main building we have two out houses attached at the end of the house where the kitchen and chimney currently are, however over time the moss that has grown on the roofs of these outbuildings has bought down one of them due to the extra weight of the water that is held in the moss. At some time during the empty period of the house this extra weight has moved a beam attached into the wall of the house causing a major crack in the house and this is why we decided to remove the roof to release the weight and stop any further damage.

As you can see from the photo on the right you can see the amount of moss on this roof and due to the weight of this and with the added rotting of the wood there was going to be no way I could save all the tiles as putting weight on the roof to retrieve them all was not an option.

Removing tiles
We allocated a whole day to take the roof down as we didn’t want to just smash away for a few reasons.

1. The safety of myself, my dad and of course damage to the house
2. We want to reuse the tiles
3. Respect for the house, just plain respect!

So armed with a ladder, gloves and a whole load of naivety ( I didn’t have my boots on) we started. I realised pretty early on that we were only going to save half of the tiles as many were cracked already and you would remove one tile and two would fall through and smash. Armed with this knowledge it was time to “gear up”. Boots and gloves on away we went getting most of the roof cleared within an hour. We were amazed just how the house continues to just give itself up and the roof was coming away and soon we were down to bare beams with a clump of unstable tiles and we just had to come to terms with they weren’t going to be saved. Before this it’s time for a cup of tea and in I went.

Then came the crash!
The tea hadn’t even boiled and there was an almighty crash. Looking around I could see Dawn but I was missing my dad. Running out I found my dad standing there looking guilt with a big stick in his hand! He’d gone and pulled on the main rotten roof beam and everything came down.

Now I know I’d resigned myself to loosing those tiles but this was NOT the way I wanted to do it, but this time luck was on our side and everything came down clean.

Overall

Overall I’m happy with the result as removing the roof means we have stopped it coming down in a (more) uncontrolled manner and damaging he house further.

The great news is the crack on the outside is just superficial and will be repaired as we restore the house, the tiles we saved on this roof means that we can restore another roof with them without things looking out of place, I’m sure we could have saved more tiles and going forward it’s time to be a little more patient and with another roof next to this to remove we’ll soon get to see if we learnt the lessons.

The 2nd roof if due to come down next time we are out there, this we’ll be doing on video