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 First Attic Level

Current layout of 2nd floor

Now it's getting interesting. As a farmhouse, the attic levels were certainly used for practical storage, and there's plenty of evidence for this still. However, on the western side there is one room that was a bedroom, probably originally intended as such, as here the windows are relatively large (compared to the eastern gable) and, like the living room below, there are layers and layers of old paint on the walls. This room will remain pretty much as is, including the extremely low ceilings just about 2m high. The partition walls to the north and south, which are original half-timbered, will be opened up somewhat, to let light from the dormer window to the south, and roof window to the north (or at least we have applied to do so). It seems that most people with such low ceilings want to raise the height to modern standards, but we're happy enough to leave this as is, although it may seem a little claustrophobic. It makes sense, as if the ceiling is raised, it has a domino effect on the level above.

Existing bedroom in attic.

Top of the main stairs to 1st attic level.

The two landings/halls on this level continue to reflect the former division of the house into two halves. The current access up leads to a small landing, and a door to a further rustic staircase up the the next level. We plan on opening this up, again for light reasons, but more or less leaving the layout as is. The former hall on the Eastern side is already opened up. Here, it is clear from the floorboards where the former staircase from the level below originally came up. To the North of this hall, the second set of stairs to the next level up also remains, and on the northern side, the extension housing the current bathroom extends out through a hole in the original roof trusses. Until recently, a smoking cabinet was here(I almost kept it), as evidenced now by sooty stains on the woodwork and walls, and a metal plate on the ceiling to protect it. The plan here is to remove the stairs up to the next level, reintroduce a partition, and site the new bathroom in the northern half, with a decent sized window in a dormer gable construction (if permitted). To maintain access up to the next level on this side, a smaller, perhaps spiral staircase will be inserted in the southern end of the hall.

Former hallway, proposed site for new bathroom.

Door to old grain store.

The remaining two rooms on the eastern side are dark and full of character. Here, nothing has been touched for a long time, and the timbers and clay-based plaster are still exposed (see photo below). Three small windows look out onto the barn, and a fourth one is hidden behind an original partition wall to the south. This, and one of the others, no longer let in light, as the gable was clad in corrugated iron(?) sheets some time ago, leaving only two of the windows functioning. One of the window frames look original, and we'd like to keep that and reuse it elsewhere in the house. The large box (and it is pretty large, as it could not be taken down stairs when clearing out the house) is a flour box, divided into two compartments, one for wheat flour and the other for rye flour. There's still some in it. The smaller room to the north was a grain store. It's paved with clay tiles, just about visible through the door in the picture to the right, though not in a great state of repair. The plan here is to turn this into a bedroom, open the wattle and daub panels between the rooms and, like the bedroom on the other end of the house, remove the partition to the South to allow light in from the proposed dormer window. I would very much like to restore the tiles in some way, and they will probably have to be removed and reset in lime-based cement (I'm still learning the terms!). The major proposed change here is to partially open up the ceiling to form a gallery with the next level up. It's an idea we are applying for, but have yet to fully decide upon.