WOW

• Bathroom now finished & painted, there’s even a toilet roll holder to add some luxury to the experience
• 2nd kitchen sideboard & cupboards installed ready for new appliances
• The rear bedrooms new ceiling is up & plastered
• New lights & power sockets run into the new bedroom
• 1st wall totally pointed ( this is VERY time intensive )
• Old electric, phone & data points replaced & secured
• 4 new windows ordered to replace the current rotting ones
• 1 new stable type door ordered. Delivery & fitting the windows & doors should be 4/6 weeks
• Roofs on the grange & the house repaired (again)

I’m sure i’ve forgot something but i’ll be speaking to dad in length tonight when he returns from his mammoth renovation trip (it’s Good Friday today), the write ups, photos & podcast will be hot on the heals of this post.

There’s at present no further work planned for the next 4/6 weeks until Dawn goes to the house to supervise the windows being fitted but we are on the cusp of achieving what we wanted to for this year and IT’S ONLY APRIL

A quick recap :
While we are finalising the plans for the house we are working on a “Petit Renovation” first. The house in it’s current layout had somewhat of a  “livable” area consisting of Kitchen / Lounge, Shower room and 2 bedrooms both approx 11ft x 10ft each, however given the actual state of disrepair to all of them we really needed to fix up these area’s so we can comfortably stay in the house for holidays etc etc, and that by itself is no small task. Welcome to our “Petite Renovation”

The plan for the week is quite ambitious and we have a LOT to get through. This is actually Renovation Week 1 of 2 with the next week we are out here being Easter however this is the week where we must try and get things done to the bathroom as the wife can’t be without a toilet or at the very least a toilet door. Me and my father can just resort to being Neanderthals when needed

Plan for the week:

Bathroom
Remove and replace the bathroom. Everything in it from the WC to the 1/2 Bath / Shower need to be replaced. There is the option to level the floor and retile as well as remove and replace the awful foam square polystyrene ceiling and insulate.

Kitchen
Fit a kitchen of use! The “kitchen” as it is right now is a sink and a mobile gas cooker. A small kitchen has been purchased along with a new sink, natural gas hob and work top. This will enable us to have a functioning kitchen so we actually stop eating items cooked in one small saucepan and one small frying pan.

Plaster
The walls in the house are either covered in yellow stipple pain / artex or wood cladding. You by now have already seen the images of the walls we bought back to their original stone, and the plan is to finish this off where we can and then plasterboard, seal and paint the rest to create a clean space.

Fireplace
Rescuing the fireplace is one of the items that is on the top of my list that really shouldn’t be. This house has stood for over 300 years and the fireplace is very big, functional and the large stones used to create it have been painted over in yellow stipple paint and it angers me every time. While this is not urgent (as the fireplace works) this is on my hit list.

Rewire
I could write about the electrics in the house all day. Needless to say that they are badly done and very unreliable. While we re-plaster we’ll be relaying cables & adding data cabling as well. Given the ease of the French system of “Spurring” and the small size of the “Petite Mason” this actually sounds harder than it should be.

Plumbing
See above -  but just replace electricity with water! Everything is either bursting, pained or ready to rot. I’m looking forward to this as it gives us the chance to replace it when we fit the new bathroom and sink. Also some isolation values would in the past have been great as at present the water is either on or off to everywhere.

So you can see there is a LOT planned for 1 week, however we do have another week here in 3 weeks time but this is the week of long days, dirty work and no doubt a bit of swearing. Oh and of course I’d better let you know my budget: €2000 sounds fair

Drop in all week for running updates and photo’s ( there will  be LOTS )

Account issues sorted so please if you see adverts that interest you give them a click and enjoy where they take you.

If you’re wondering how much of a help to us a click is it’s easy to explain:

In the few months the adverts were up you’re clicks earned us $71.10 (£47.50), this would be enough to by all the wood for the new bathroom wall frame and some of the plaster board. And for that we thank you, thank you for helping us start to renovate the bathroom.

It now seems after Dawn looked at the bathroom furniture that I have purchased she thinks my measurements are out and the items aren’t going to fit.

No problem we have plans right, after all the architect did finally delivery them. OH that’s right we don’t have any with internal measurements on them and the bathroom isn’t on there at all!

I still need to write a report on the architect disaster we had and it’ll come soon, but until then it looks like I’ll be driving to France next weekend just to measure the 6ft x 6ft box that we are using as our temporary bathroom.

To be honest i was in the mood to go tonight, you know an impulsive adventure, that was until we see the price of the P&O / Sea France ferry crossings. The good news is that to leave the UK is only £22 however it is £210 to come back in!

I guess that with the kids starting back at school on Monday the Ferry companies have decided to rape these people for crossing fees (best festive wishes to those people).

Incidentally next week the full return journey far is £60 (way to go P&O Ferries) so it’ll be a real splash and dash to get to the house, get measured up and then leave the next day.

There is only one problem if my measurements are right then it’ll be REALLY hard not to start knocking the old bathroom down and that WILL NOT please the wife.

Lets see shall we… I’m not promising anything

On doing so i selected their Barcelona range and dropped items in and then got a nice surprise when i hit the price list button to find all the items were either half price or less!

So what could i do? I hit the buy button and all is on it’s way. Now i know i have to get it to the house but since we need to take a lot of materials over soon we’ll just load this in with us. The plan never was to buy items here and ship but the strong € against the £ now makes it far cheaper to by items here and then take them with me especially at the time of the sales.

Prime example is this sink :

Was £75 now £37.49 . One that i have seen in France €130 and at todays rate thats a saving of £86.25 or €90. That’s the diesel paid for in one item alone ( and the WC the saving was much greater ).

There are of course things that people need to check before buying and shipping these items abroad. Make sure the pipe sizes are the same and that you buy the waste gates with the items so you know everything fits.

Now i normally wouldn’t suggest this but i must admit the way things are right now with the exchange it’s much better to buy all the plasterboard, tiles, grout and wood for the new wall frame it’s going to be about 50% less to create this bathroom.

UPDATE ALL CHANGE: Unfortunately for me however while I’m raring to go and get this started with the Honeymoon coming up I’m not able to get to the house until end of Feb / March. That said with it being sub zero at the moment maybe that isn’t a bad thing.

As usual it’s all change. I’m booked on a very early ferry Jan 10th to go check all is going to fit. Report as usual.

Lee

Now it’s no secret that our plans for the major renovation will have to wait due to the awful €/£ rate so we’ve decided to rip out the terrible bathroom that is there and replace it with something we’ll be happy using in the mean time while keeping in mind that it is a short term fix.

While trying to work out if we have enough space for a good sized shower, toilet and sink we came across the UK site for B&Q ( a UK based DIY store ) over at www.DIY.com , once registered you can use a ton of online tools from kitchen designing, to bathroom designing all for free.

All you need to do is set the size of your room, chose a furniture style and wait while it loads all the info and then it’s just drag and drop till you’re happy. If you want to buy the items them you can simply hit BUY NOW or you can change the style to try different sized items.

I’ll have to admit to not ever seeing myself buying these items from B&Q as these 3 items came to £900, but it certainly does give me an idea of the size of the items to buy.

Get yourself over to www.DIY.com and register and use all the FREE tools, very worth while.

UPDATE: I’ll link to the full post shortly, but the tool actually works as i designed a bathroom to see if it would fit and then i purchased the suite. I so got sold to by the “free” app