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Category: Story

Posts that add background and story to the renovations

Kitchen/Diner clearance

Published by Charlotte on 21st January 2021

The room intended to be our kitchen/diner is already set up as such – it does need a little updating though!

Kitchen as purchased

The good news is the table and chairs seem in good shape, and you’ve got to love a chaise longue, so they’ll be put aside for future use! The flooring may be salvageable, so may end up elsewhere in the house. Everything else goes, including the subfloor, but we’ll talk about that later. Before we could start on the renovations, the whole room had to be emptied.

You can probably tell that it was much slower going than the garage clearance. We discovered a lot of crockery. A LOT. Along with the many ornaments, we were left with boxes of items we didn’t feel we could just take to the tip. We’re hoping we can find some crockery and ornament enthusiasts locally to take them off our hands.

You may also see a jump where it gets pretty dark outside. No, we didn’t need a rest; given the upcoming storm, we took a break to clear the overflowing gutters out (with a spoon, of course) and shake the 30cm+ cylindrical plugs of gunk out of the downpipes. One of these cylinders decided to escape fairly explosively and spray directly into Ethan’s boot. But he soldiered on.

Ethan demonstrating correct usage of a standard metric gutter spoon

Now that we’re completely decluttered, this renovation blog might start featuring some renovation! Sorry.

Garage #1 clearance

Published by Charlotte on 18th January 2021

Despite being a 3 bedroom house with only a single living area, our property excels itself in having TWO garages. Now don’t get too excited for us. Firstly, both contain many items that will be no use to anyone, now that they have sat in the cold and damp for 10+ years. Secondly, the external garage is predominantly made of corrugated iron sheets, so might be a bit more accurate to refer to it as a very large shed. In any case, our first full day of being homeowners was spent working on the integral garage.

The integral garage as purchased

This room is to be our cosy living room. Hard to imagine that this could ever be the case right now. When I pictured our living room it did not include any amount of dried leaves, flowing water (that pesky drain) or a chest freezer so old that it boasts having 50% less CFCs. To take this room even a step towards our ideal cosy living room it needs a door to the rest of the house, a flat and level floor, oh, and mustn’t forget a fourth wall. But for right now, time to declutter…

If you didn’t catch them, here are some of the treasures we found:

  • A lifetime supply of rubble sacks!
  • A fancy umbrella
  • Booze?
  • FREE TYRES!!
  • Horns
  • Jug
  • Sheep
  • Unidentified yellow

So now after two tip trips, and a little transferring to the shed, the before and after are as follows…

Before
After

Having to wait for people to take certain items away leaves us a little unsatisfied with the after photos, but there’s a lot less in the way now for when we want to start on renovations.

Final thought: I am so glad that Ethan got us thermal rubber work gloves. Not only do they keep my hands from freezing in this unheated, uninsulated stone box, but they make me feel invincible against the cobwebs, dead insects and (probably rat) droppings that we have come across. Which feels like a win.