I have been so quiet on here, this is the first post I've done in 2018, but we've had so much going on, and the focus on the house had totally shifted during the cold weather. Steve has been doing a lot of overtime at work, and we've been busy with friends and family over the christmas period, so instagram and this blog has taken a backseat.
But, we have hired a company to design the roof, and do the calculations for us. This is pretty exciting. Steve now knows what kind of roof design we are going for, and what size beams we need (and probably lots of other things I don't fully understand. Who knew you had to calculate snow load for a roof?)
We are doing purlins, rather than trusses. It turns out we need 3 steel beams for the two sections of roof (garage and main house are seperate, with a gable between them) The beams cut across at the front, under the windows, on the top, and across at the back below the velux windows. The same for the garage section, too. It all sounds very expensive to me.
Although we will not have a finished house by the end of this year, it should look something like, at least from the outside. We are hoping to have the roof on this summer, and on our way to moving into the new upstairs space. Which will then free up space downstairs to begin the knocking down of walls, and generally making a mess!
Once we have the roof on, I expect the inside to take somewhere between 2-3 years to fully complete. This is because we will run out of money after paying for the roof, and so each room will be a save up and complete one by one kind of job. We don't want to get into debt doing this house, and we plan to stay here for the next 6-8 years, so hopefully we'll have some time to enjoy it once it's finished (and before we get the itch to start renovating again!).
Our priorities for the upstairs are the girls bedrooms and a bathroom. Our current bathroom is obviously downstairs, but will have a supporting wall built in front of it as part of the new roof structure. Fun times! We have knocked the wall down between the toilet and the bathroom, making it into one big space which is nice as it gives us an idea of how big the utility room will be eventually.
We made such a mess!
It looks a bit better now though (we have a floor in and the tiling is finished, too)
We have also knocked out the old internal porch, as the front door wouldn't open properly. This is to make way for the kitchen work which is next on our hitlist...There is a strange porch off the side of the kitchen, which we use as our main door. This leads to a plastic roofed-utility...both the kitchen porch and utility room need to be knocked down for the garage build to progress. The only issue is, that the majority of our worktop space and cupboards are inside this porch, so we needed to add more in, which meant the large larder units had to go so we have some worktop space.
This is only temporary, and luckily we know someone who fits kitchens, and he was ripping this one out.
We also welcomed a new little addition a couple of months ago. Dexter the Labradoodle. We've been wanting a dog for such a long time, and kept waiting until the 'perfect time'. Then we realised there is no such thing really, and took the plunge. He is such a lovely, chilled out little puppy. He is settling in well so far, and the girls are so in love with him! In hindsight, I'm glad we got him now whilst we have dark brown carpets ;-)
