More mindful destruction

It's has felt like a long week. Monday was a holiday, and although it seems to be generally frowned upon to work on such days, I took the opportunity to remove the last of the wattle and daub walls that need to go while we have a container to take it away. Now we have the start of a new hall which will give access to the new guest bathroom and the bedrooms on the first floor. Well, after a bit of work with a chainsaw (which I am not licensed to use, so I don't have one).

New doorway at top of the first stairs.

From the bedroom. The old door, left, will be closed.

Doing a couple of hours every evening after work meant that small tidying jobs quickly added up till the 7 cubic metre container was filled to about 4-5cu.m. Yesterday, we added a bit more as we began to clean down loose clay plaster from the ceilings. In some rooms, we'll leave the beams exposed, meaning the whole fine-coat of plaster has to be removed. Considerably more challenging that I originally though, in terms of the labour and energy needed, scraping away with shovels. A channel was then cut on each site of the beam to allow for nailing in a mesh to support a new layer of either clay or lime-based plaster.

Dirty work, but looks great after.

The kitchen, see below, also needs to be done like this. The clay here looks burnt, so we're not sure is this from a fire in the past, or if it is simply from decades of open fires in the old bakehouse.

Kitchen ceiling. Not looking forward to doing this.

In those rooms where the beams will be plastered over again, we simply removed the loose material, leaving most of the fine clay layer. In a way, it felt sad to be scraping away this stuff. The decades, or even centuries (at least 1.7 of them!) have left a mini stratigraphy of lime and paint, all taken away in minutes.

Ready for meshing or reed matting.

Having tired of this work on ceilings, which was tough on the shoulders, Joerg and I switched upstairs, where one final, large piece of clay had to go. The bit of ceiling above the new bathroom. This was going to be easier, as we could remove it from above, exactly like I removed the floor of the top attic levels. First step, remove the floor boards above the bathroom. An internal wall will later surround this hole, unfortunately taking a chunk from the room above.

Floorboards gone.

Once the clay and lathes were removed, it gave a nice aerial view of the future bathroom below. Most of the beams running vertically in the photo below will be removed (except those that play a structural role), leaving a bathroom with a 3-4m high ceiling, a real contrast to the low headroom in the rest of the house.

Looking down into the bathroom.

Looking up to the apex of the new gable dormer.

Feels like we're getting really close to actually start putting things back into the building, rather than ripping out!

Introducing the Landing(s)

At some time in the past, the house was split into two separated halves. We're not sure when, exactly, but we were told that one half was used as a post office at some stage (and there were rumours of a guest house). The evidence shows that this split was most likely designed into the house, though it seems unusual to us. The layout is almost perfectly symmetrical, and the two central doors would have been the two main entrances to each half, with each hall containing a staircase to the living level, and a second level of stairs up to the first attic level. This is pretty clear from the truncated beams in the ceiling of the first-floor landing and the side-room (see photos below), which was once a landing. Above this room, it is also clear from the floor boards that there used to be an opening between these upper levels.

Main landing.

The current staircase from the cellar to 1st floor is "modern", and not to our liking, however it is not essential to change it at this stage. Our hard-earned cash is better spent on other things. The remaining staircase from the 1st floor to the 1st attic level appears to be original, and will hopefully retain its rustic feel after a cleaning down. The walls here have been dry-lined on all sides, and there is a metal cabinet for the electricity meter and trip switches, which we want moved to the cellar. The picture to the right just about shows the stairs down to the cellar level, at the top of which is the door to the kitchen.

The side room/former landing (visible through the door on the right in the photo above), is an odd room, playing no useful role in the current layout, merely being an antechamber to one of the rooms on this level. The walls bulge here, showing the tell-tale signs of the large timbers that form the supporting structure of the wall, layered with wallpaper over the colourful remains of paint from the past, and under that, thin plaster, just about covering the timbers and wattle-and-daub panels.

Former landing, future guest toilet?

Planned layout.

Quite a lot of work is planned here. We are proposing that the existing doors in and out of the former landing be closed, and new doors inserted to form a passage through from the main landing to the two rooms on the eastern side of this level. This would then leave the front part of the former landing to be used as a guest bathroom (in the American sense, otherwise a toilet/shower room). We weren't sure about this at first, but it was a pretty good suggestion from our architects, and would make better use of the space here. Other ideas had been to try to open up the wall between the two landings, but as the central wall supports the stairs, and other things, it was a bit impractical. In any case, this is subject to approval, and examination by a structural engineer.

Today is also a milestone, as we signed the planning application. It'll be dropped into the town hall in the morning, then it's time to wait (around six weeks, hopefully) and see how our plans go.