This renovation task is to finish off making one large liveable bedroom out the the two tiny, dark and damp rooms that were there before. Below is a picture of when Dad and myself could hide our pleasure making these two rooms into one and this is the 2nd push to rebuild this room to make it an enjoyable space.

Dad wasted no time today in getting stuck in to ripping down the old ceiling as we need to rewired the room, replace the insulation and put up some plaster board plus we had an idea things were living up there, and unfortunately we were right.

While removing the wood cladding (that we hate so much) it soon became apparent that the old roof above this ceiling wasn’t sealed at all and every animal seemed to have taken a chunk of the old insulation for bedding and some wildlife had taken the liberty of just moving right on in and were living up there, breading up there and of course crapping up there. Yes unfortunately that black stuff you see in the photo is rat faeces (ewww). I am so glad we’ve never spent months living in this room

Finding what we have, we are so glad that we are now at a point to renovate this room and especially with the new windows coming can really start to make this a fantastic, liveable, cosy & clean room.

I’ll be updating this page through the week as there is progress on this room so check back regularly but here is todays instalment of Dads hard work with some before and after pictures.

Don’t worry the wallpaper is going as well as the wood.

We’ll be opening up this to have a nice big window overlooking the garden.

Making solid progress.

Oh my! Is that what we think it is?

All down time to remove the insulation now.

Here are some before, during & after photos with the bigger sets below.

With the roof now cleared you can really start to get a sense of size of the space we will have available to us. The timbers that we removed we are offering for free to anyone who wants to collect them (see HERE) and the cattle feed rack on the left we’ve given to Jean Luc our farming neighbour so he’s got use out of that. We are also trying to rescue the trough (at the bottom of the picture) that has a water irrigation system still fitted but given the time it’s stood unused and the rust its infested with it looks like it’ll only good for junk, which is a shame. Also not sure what we’re going to do with the old tiles as yet but i’m hoping i can at least crush them down and use them as hardcore rather than taking them to the dump.

Below are the remaining photos from the work carried out by Dad and I, unfortunately the two photos which would have proved popular if we’d captured it we don’t have…

These were :

1. I slammed my head off the main roof beam
2. One of the beams rolled and slammed the side of my head…

How i wasn’t knocked spark out is beyond me, but more to the surprise of Dad i didn’t lose my rag.
There must be ZEN in them bits of wood

And that’s it. That’s where we are at the moment, we’ve got the wall to remove of course but i need to figure out what to do with all those bricks we’ll remove. There isn’t such a thing as a skip hire company around here and taking it all to the municipal dump is going to take many many trips with a car and a trailer so I need to get my thinking cap on!

Do you have any ideas?

Now we already know that a lot of the old mortar here has aged very badly and part of the renovation is to re-mortar and point everything to strengthen the house and give it a nicer finish but little did I know just how bad some places were. The above video shows just how easy the stones come apart from each other as the lime mortar is now just powder.

Don’t worry these stunning stones aren’t going to waste, we be rebuilding the outbuilding using new materials & bonding however the stones are going to be placed on the outside of the new structure so it keeps the original look.

Update 1 : Gallery now online HERE
Update 2 : Video update below

With the water off, the wall trimmed by 8 inches and the sink gone it was time to start to putting up some carcasses and see how it all starts sitting together. One thing to note is that due to plumbing issues on the opposite wall the kitchen is now in this location as opposed to it’s original place of against the main wall. I say this because this was a last minute find and this explains why the kitchen DOESN’T BLOODY FIT!

Originally we purchased the kitchen units to fill up 2500mm made up of 1 x 1000mm carcass for the sink, 1x600mm carcass for the gas hob and 3x300mm small cupboards to allow for storage and by having to flip the kitchen it was 500mm over which meant I had to lose 2x300mm cabinets. Not the start i wanted.

Luckily the solid wood (untreated) work top was 2000mm long as was always going to be cut down, so with a small layout change we had something looking like this now.

1x1000mm, 1x600mm, 1x300mm and a 250mm gap between the last cupboard and the uncovered stone wall. This wasn’t the end of the world as I now have room for my 200mm wine cooler so it was time to assemble the parts and cut the worktop.

The work top appears to be the best priece of wood in France. Seriously it was solid, so solid it took 2hours to cut the holes into the work top for the sink & hob. It really was a case of measure once, measure again, and again and then once more then cut. Things were slowed down by the fact the hob didn’t have any sort of cutting template so a lot of patience, swearing and team work between my father and I and we had the wholes in and cut to size. Finally a bit of a breakthrough.

After sleeping on it for the night and feeling positive it was now time to tackle getting cabinets built, leveled and joined together. While I built the cabinets, Dad sorted out the waste and the pluming to the sink while making sure the final cabinets were lined up and then we finally dropped the top in and got our first look at what we could expect the kitchen to start to look like and we liked what we saw.

As we put the doors on to complete the kitchen there are a few small jobs outstanding that needed to be done. Firstly the work top needed to be sealed to protect it against water, oil and usual cooking wear and tear. This was done later but due to the cold there was a 12 hour wait between coats as the sealant wouldn’t go off. This typifies everything that is happening with the house at the moment, one step forward two steps back.

Talking of two steps back – the gas hob is missing a fitting (am I’m still trying to find it on sale) and the wall needs to have a tiled splash-back fitted and then the sink sealed.  However with the doors on, the water on and the waste working there was a huge sense of pleasure and relief that the main part was now finished and what we almost had was a fixed position and working kitchen, but I can’t underplay how nice it is to have hot and cold running water on tap again…

And without further ado ladies and gentlemen here is our temporary kitchen, almost ready to go but the fruits of some solid work in zero degrees. Personally I’m extremely happy considering the kitchen location had to be flipped at the last moment and of course a chunk of the wall fell down.

There is a full set on flickr HERE with all the images from the kitchen build in it’s various stages that you might enjoy seeing and of course not forgetting PART 1 of this eventful bit of DIY.

Small Update: I found a picture that shows the amount of wall we had to trip off to compensate for the bits that fell down. The bit that actually fell off was on the right hand side of the picture but to the left of the sander as you see it you can see a bit of wall we’d not yet trimmed off. Personally while the wall top may not be super smooth, when you have to trim 6 to 8 inches off a plaster brick wall this isn’t too shabby at all. Dad & Me 1 – House 0

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