We're In!!!

[shelli]

Guess what ? - We're in!! - (well partially - you know how it is)

slept in the house for the first time last night. The joiner was surprised when he arrived this morning!! - this emotion turned quickly to pleasure however when he realised that he now gets a morning cuppa and there's the outside chance of a bacon butty!

And just to say that the bacon butty on this morning ranked very high on my "best bacon butty of all time" scale.

Although almost nauseus with extreme exhaustion and feeling stretched and aching like I did after running marathon I am a very happy bunny today!

Just wanted to share

Love and peace
Shelli XX (now officially the lady of the house actually)

 

[MdB]

Congratulations. You must be very happy.

I've promised the wife we will be back in before Christmas which I still hope to achieve. Unfortunately, I do know that we won't be finished by then but hopefully it will be liveable in. Can't wait though - I have had enough of the caravan already and I've only been in it since April.

 

[skier-hughes]

Excellent news.
Bacon butty............. the smell wafting round the house, along with the extreme elation feeling....

Superb.

graham

 

[Lime]

The first few days in a new home are always special.
Savour them.

 

[DaveBrigg]

Congratulations. It's so much easier to straighten things out when you live there, and don't have to travel back and forth every day - or do you still need to commute for a shower? :wink:

 

[shelli]

Congratulations. You must be very happy.

I've promised the wife we will be back in before Christmas which I still hope to achieve. Unfortunately, I do know that we won't be finished by then but hopefully it will be liveable in. Can't wait though - I have had enough of the caravan already and I've only been in it since April.

But you're in a caravan, in Cornwall, in (apparently) summer, - that's what we save up for every year to do for our holidays!! 8)

okay, I know it's not the same when you have to live real life in a caravan - but still!

Dave - re shower - Just to update from previous post - we have managed to get the house bathroom sorted enough to use the shower in there - although OH was being a bit precious about his new travertine tiles and warned me this morning "not to get them too wet" :roll:

I wasn't too worried about the shower situation though because apparently now we live in the country we don't need to wash any more -we're to just let the muck build up and protect our skin

 

[FamilyWiggs]

Shelli - many congratulations - very pleased for you. We expect more "PPUK porn" pics soon! I hope there was a suitable liquid celecration last night?

Of course, you're all wimps if you move out or live in caravans whilst the work is ongoing, ( :roll: ) We've just come through 8 months living in the dirt/dust as the works progressed, all 4 of us in one bedroom, all the furniture in the spare room, no stairs (but a ladder!) for some of it, no floors in some upstairs rooms, no lounge/dining room, and for long periods no water or central heating as my 5 minute plumbing jobs took a fortnight.

And whilst it has been very hard at times, there is nothing like it to bring a family together. There's also no finer contraceptive than sharing your bedroom with your 8 and 5 year old sons! :evil:

 

[Pford75]

Congratulations - I still remember the feeling of waking up for the first time in our house. As Lime says...savour it and recall the feeling when things start to get you down (as they inevitably do at some stage with period buildings).

I wish you all very happy times in your house.

 

[Penners]

Whahay!! Congratulations! It's the best feeling in the world, isn't it?

One of my most treasured memories of our very first restoration project is - believe it or not - having a bath in the house after a long and exhausting moving-in day. I sat in a bath that I had installed, in hot water from a boiler and pipework installed by me, lit by electricity ditto... and so on. I know it all sounds very "me, me, me" but it really was the moment that four years of caravan living and hard graft paid itself back.

Do enjoy the moving in process. It may be tiring, but leave enough time to give yourself regular hugs of joy.

 

[Penners]

5 minute plumbing jobs

There are four words that won't often see in the same sentence.

 

[shelli]

Am still floating around the house with silly smile on face - nothing seems like too much trouble - the whole stress of last 18 months has miraculously vanished and it now seems possible that what were very recently disasters and the stuff of nightmares could soon become amusing dinner party anecdotes.

Everything else is going right too

Got the BT landline organised in 5 minutes with someone courteous and helpful, i was not held in a queue or put on hold and we dont have to pay a connection fee of £120.00 -

it is so quiet at night too - I had perfect night's sleep. - This countryside living is the bee knees - feels like we're on holiday

More pics soon

 

[Lime]

it is so quiet at night too - I had perfect night's sleep. - This countryside living is the bee knees - feels like we're on holiday

Yes, when I moved to quite "deep" country (nearest town 9 miles away) it was very quiet.
After a long Friday evening drive up from London I switched off the car engine and the silence made me think I'd gone deaf.
The night sky was something to stay up for too.
From horizon to horizon blilliant stars and a jet black sky....first time I saw the Milky Way.

Then Monday morning came and the farmer parked his tractor in the road at 5 am.
He and the neighbours got up early in those days.
I had a knock on my door just before 6 and was met with my neighbour waving a huge bunch of carrots he'd just dug up as a gift.


The tractor engine was still running until it moved off at midday.

 

[Penners]

Got the BT landline organised in 5 minutes with someone courteous and helpful, i was not held in a queue or put on hold

Sorry - that clearly can't be real life. Are we hearing about a dream you had on your first night in the house?

 

[irina]

Congratulations, and an idea for a little opinion-polling: is it better/worse, or tougher/easier to rough it living on site or crammed into a caravan for months? Idea came when I read

FamilyWiggs wrote:
Of course, you're all wimps if you move out or live in caravans whilst the work is ongoing, ( )

Apologies for jumping in rather late on this thread, but that's because I've spent the daytime at the day-job, and the evening rigging up a kind of plank or duckboard system to allow us access to the bathroom - our sole water supply at the moment - while the levelling compound spread over kitchen/ breakfast room floor is drying. And since we only have one ground floor bathroom, we're sort of stuck with it.

Seriously, it made me wonder if the roughing it vs caravan might represent two different philosophies with regard to "doing up" a house. If you're in a caravan you have somewhere to escape to, but it's cramped and probably cold (no idea, since never stayed in a caravan myself). Living on site, as FamilyWiggs wrote, and I can only whole-heartedly second, is dusty, at times depressing, and always chaotic. But you develop a feel for the place, and start planning rooms and what goes in them from the vantage point of having experienced changing light levels according to time of day, season, weather; or see how the apparent damp patch changes with the prevailing weather conditions; or which walls get particularly hot/cold, so where best to place radiators etc etc.

We've been "on site" for 18 months now, not all of which was spent working on the house, obviously. There will be weeks or months where nothing happens (because life takes over in the form of job demands, family events, school holidays) and then there will be bursts of activity, with many an evening spent burning the midnight oil doing things like painting walls, or hanging lining paper - I save any tasks involving power tools for daytimes, less because of concern for the neighbours but more to do with self-preservation. During those 18 months we've taken the "Tetris" approach to doing up a house (Tetris, I think that's what it was called, was an early computer game where you had to stack boxes that tumbled off the top of the screen...) whereby the contents of one room are totally emptied into another room. I have become a world-class expert at how to stack things vertically to maximise storage space. Getting the place completely re-wired was one of the worst jobs, as there was dust everywhere, in every single room simultaneously, since every room had its plaster hacked into somewhere or other. Getting the lead pipe water mains replaced was also pretty grim, since the drill for the new pipe hit the old lead pipe in a place where the man from the water board said it would never be. The resulting flood inundated our ground floor, but also left 25cm of water in the neighbour's basement.

Mention of the neighbour brings me on to the final thought with regard to caravan vs on site living: if your period property is in an urban area (as ours most definitely is) you rarely have the option of plonking a caravan in the garden. We don't even have a front garden, as the place is pavement-fronted, so all building materials in and rubble/debris out has to be manually hauled through what is one of these days going to be our living room and is currently our eating/cooking and TV area.

Anyway, just some random musings while sat in "the sanctuary" (= the one rooom that is virtually finished and relatively dust-free)...

 

[Pford75]

water supply

Water?!? Luxury!

In my day, my wife had to take the kids swimming as this was the only source of water we had for 2 weeks.......I meanwhile was working abroad in a hotel - and strangely got no sympathy for the long hours and jet-lag :wink:

 

[Penners]

it made me wonder if the roughing it vs caravan might represent two different philosophies with regard to "doing up" a house.

You don't always have the choice of one or the other.

Our first restoration project was a listed 15th century timberframe cottage that had lain empty for decades, was almost falling over and had a closing order on it - this meant that we weren't allowed to live in it.

So we bought an elderly second-hand 30ft caravan for £300, which we stationed in the back garden and lived in for four years, with two kids, two dogs and variable numbers of guinea-pigs. Friends and family said we were mad, and warned that our marriage would suffer, the children would be ridiculed at school and we'd be roughing it beyond endurance.

In fact, although I wouldn't describe it as idyllic, none of these dire warnings turned out to be true. It was, as you suggest, a sanctuary to retire to after a day at work, followed by a heavy evening's work in the cottage. It was never cold - in fact the little solid fuel stove was so efficient that we often used to have to door open to cool off in the depths of winter! It had a small kitchen, tiny bathroom, bedroom with bunks for the kids, and my wife and I slept on a sofa-bed in the sitting room. I hooked it up to mains electricity, water and drainage, so we had all "mod cons".

And the children loved it. The caravan was always full of kids, because all their friends used to want the novelty of coming to play in a caravan. The day that we moved out and the caravan was taken away on the back of a lorry, our daughter cried.

So choosing the caravan route doesn't necessarily mean roughing it.

 

[skier-hughes]

The day that we moved out and the caravan was taken away on the back of a lorry, our daughter cried.

Pity I didn't know that snippet when I saw her :wink:

 

[shelli]

it made me wonder if the roughing it vs caravan might represent two different philosophies with regard to "doing up" a house.

So choosing the caravan route doesn't necessarily mean roughing it.

I think Irina thought that living in the house would be roughing it - and the caravan route the comfortable one!

Our personal experience leads me to think living off site is a bad idea when you are renovating - if you are on site either in a caravan or in a couple of rooms in your project you are on hand to make decisions and push things along - I know that those weeks where proper jobs took over and the OH could only get to the house once or twice were much less productive than when he was on site working alongside the builder and his monkeys (sorry but always thought of them that way - it was the way they swung around on the scaffolding and scratched their heads!!).

We will always wonder if we could have done it faster/ more efficiently (and hence saved some labour costs); did we manage the renovation well or badly; were we too laid back with the workmen; did they take the p*ss when we weren't there all day (we know the answer to that one!)

So while the dust and dirt would have been difficult we could have prevented a lot of it by being around stopping them from tipping out mixes onto the garden,making them wipe the windows and skirtings after plastering - or better still sheeting up properly beforehand, making them move things (tools,garden equipment, rolls of insulation) out of the way before knocking down walls or cutting stone! - (I can laugh about it now, HA-HA-HA! - did that sound insincere? :wink: )

Love Shelli X

 

[glayzell]

congratulations!

We are hoping, no, will be in by the end of the month.

I cant wait, but plenty to do before then.

 

[Penners]

Our personal experience leads me to think living off site is a bad idea when you are renovating

Being right there on site certainly has some great advantages. It enables you to keep an eagle eye on everything that's going on, answer any (if you have them) builders' queries immediately, and makes it less likely that you'll suffer material thefts.

It also means that the building can loom over you, and nag you to get on with the work, if you try to sneak a day off.