Next

Until quite recently our (that's mine and Janine's) bedroom has been the major upstairs repository for all the furniture and other rubbish that's been cleared out of everywhere else. It is now substantially empty again. Much of the stuff went back into Arne's room, but as for the rest.... Don't ask me, I've lost track.

First of all, just painting it a different colour would be far too simple. We have to go making a blooming great mess again by stripping all the plaster off the chimney breast to expose the bricks which we think will look nice.

The fireplace was bricked up and full of rubble.

Clearing that lot out was no fun.....

As you can see, the dust mask which was my first and only line of defense against the clouds of black filth which spewed out every time I so much as poked a cotton bud into the mess, did not stop all of it from reaching the parts I would have preferred it not to.

Nothing for 3 weeks, then two come along at once....

This is our bedroom. Looks like we won't be sleeping in it for a while...

Mess

I thought I should share our chaos and discomfort with the wider world. Why should we have to suffer alone? We are doing all six rooms in the main part of the house (3 bedrooms upstairs and 3 reception rooms downstairs) so we're having to keep moving from one to another, and most of them have a pile of furniture in the middle, and all of them are covered in dust, and none of them are remotely nice to be in yet.... This mess is like no other mess we've ever experienced. It is the uber-mess, the mess to end all messes.

The mess in the spare room...

The mess in our bedroom....

The mess in the study.... That's another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Demolition squad

We're going right back to the brickwork. Luckily the plaster practically leaps off the walls if you just give it a dirty look. It's also lucky the dog gets through lots of Chappie so we've got plenty of bags to put the rubble in.

This morning Arne and I formed a highly effective demolition squad and destroyed all the stud walls, thus opening up the entire space. Luckily, it appears that the bloke who did the plastering also built the stud walls, so they more or less fell apart too.

Mess

Getting properly started on the bathroom at last. The first thing was to get the disgusting ancient smelly carpet up, to which end a wardrobe and some other stuff had to be moved out. Here's the contents part of the wardrobe. I can't believe that at some point or another Janine or I have actually bought all this stuff!

Up comes the ancient disgusting smelly carpet. Perhaps I should save a piece in case there is a new life-form growing in it somewhere...

Rubble

Not much to show today, Rich did a lot of spraying for woodworm but you can't really put a smell on the blog. But I know how desperate everyone is to enjoy a new picture, so I thought I'd put up a little reminder of how far we have come. This was the state of the place just a few short weeks ago.

Mess

Another shot of the clutter which illustrates nicely the working conditions around here. Somewhere deep down I know that once I have all that extra space its going to end up looking like this again, but until that happens, I'm going to carry on kidding myself.

First post

There's lots going on here at Pleamore House (also known as Stately Wig Manor). And I'm keeping so many people abreast of developments I have settled on the really bright idea of posting a blog. Wow, what a brainwave!

Anyway, in case anyone should visit who doesn't know, I'm an illustrator working from home. I don't have enough space in the room containing my "studio" or "mess" as my partner Janine calls it, and some time ago we decided that I could spread into the back part of the house which has the space I need and a nice view of the garden (I look at a wall now). This was formerly our guest quarters and had a large but aesthetically offensive bathroom, and was in any case in need of total floor to ceiling renovation. The floor and walls suffered from damp, and due to a layout of monumental stupidity, about 80% of the space was simply wasted. So about a month ago, I began demolition work. After ripping out all the fixtures and fittings, work started on taking down the stud walls and removing all the plaster, most of which fell off with minimal persuasion. My son Arne had a "once in a childhood" opportunity to swing a club hammer and smash a big hole through a stud wall, which he accepted with relish! The fact that he was laughing so much he could hardly swing the hammer didn't stop him making a darn fine hole in the end. Everything had to be stripped, including taking down the ceilings with the insulation and three tons of dust. You have a choice when doing this: Wear protective goggles which steam up instantly because you're sweating like a pig in a marathon and not be able to see a thing, or get three tons of dust in your eyes. Perhaps surprisingly for someone whose living depends on his eyesight, I chose the latter. The concrete floor also suffered from damp, so that had to come up too, which of course has the added benefit of being able to install under-floor heating later on. This was all a few weeks ago, and much has gone on since. Under the floor we found the original brick floor laid by Victorian craftsmen. In what was the guest bedroom the floor was much lower and sloped down towards a central drain, which we know was used when pigs were slaughtered on the premises years ago when the house owned land and was a pig farm. History? We got it!
There will be more soon, and I'll try and update every day once we are up to date.