The beginning...

We now had keys to our new home but we still lived and worked 200km away. We decided that changes needed to be made to the layout of the house and the best time to do it was while we were out of the house. We travelled down every weekend to keep an eye on what was happening. The first thing was to get running water (hot) to the kitchen.

So we had a very basic boiler fitted with the view to getting a solar water heating system at some stage in the future. It sounds very silly but it was just the best feeling to be able to turn on a tap and have hot water!!!!

We knew that the bathroom had to be moved, hygiene and all that! We also knew that walls had to come down and new plaster board ones built. We wanted Kev to be able to move in at the end of June so we needed the messy work done before then. We cheated, and got a builder in. It took him 4 weeks to get everything done.

 

This was the main bedroom leading from the livingroom.

 

 

 

We had the bedroom made smaller with a plasterboard wall, door on the left for the bedroom, door on the right for the new bathroom.

 





This is bedroom 2. Where the doorway is bricked up used to be the old hallway but the bedroom was too small. We knocked out the wall to make the bedroom bigger.

This is from the livingroom into bedroom 2. Had to have a new wall built. We used the old doors until we decided what we wanted to replace them with.

Alongside this work we also had no electricity (other than the generator) and so bought a second hand system and had that fitted too.

 

We didn't have a clue about solar systems, all we knew was we needed electricity. That weekend we left 2 lights on all weekend to see if it would drain the batteries. It didn't! We were in seventh heaven.

 

 

 





This old fireplace was lit every night when we arrived at the house. We had no furniture (as it was all 200km away) and so sat infront of the fire on deck chairs with a glass of wine. We used these old deck chairs from April to June until we moved the furniture down!