madelinekelly

We've finally got other people doing big jobs at the house. The scaffolders arrived on Monday -- two days late -- to put the scaffolding up. This is after they phoned me on the Saturday to say that they didn't think they could do it after all because the road was so narrow, despite having seen the road when they first agreed to take the job on. We spent the rest of the weekend feeling really depressed about potentially delaying everything by a few weeks while we waited for permission to close the road, only to find on Monday morning that they were halfway through putting it up! All the wasted tears. Oh well.

I can no longer hide that I'm pregnant:



( Words and pictures under the cut. )

We've kind of fixed the entire first floor now. It's not plastered, and it hasn't been re-wired, and the floors are still horrible saggy chipboard, but other than that it's basically habitable.

( Pictures under the cut! WARNING: HUGE POST. )

Well, I don't have much of a bump really but someone has already approached me on the street and touched my stomach without invitation. I don't think I'm going to handle this kind of thing with much grace or charm, based on how I reacted. Also, people I hardly know are feeling the need to tell me that I'm very small and my baby will probably be underweight. From my point of view I've never been so huge, and have in fact gained 16 pounds since February! Oh well. I'd be cross if they were telling me I was enormous as well, I suppose. It's the apparent need to comment on my size that I find annoying, really. [/grumble]

Good news, though: WE'VE MOVED IN! YAY!

Yes, indeed, precisely one room in this house now has intact, re-pointed, lime-washed walls. Pictures of the transformation under the cut.

( Lots of pictures, oh yes. )

Cosy, no?

We don't have any heating in there. Or electricity -- but we've got round that by running an extension cable in so that the lamp can work (there's only one plug socket in the whole house that seems to work, if you don't count the ones on the left-hand side of the kitchen). Mum and her husband gave us some unused strips of carpet, which Matt cleverly jigsawed around the bed so that you can't see any of the bare floor. Various people supplied us with furniture: the lamp and sofa are unwanted items from Matt's aunt and uncle, a chest of drawers from dad and his wife was destined to be taken to the tip before we took it off them, the bed-frame was superfluous to Matt's sister's new house, and mum and her husband bought us a new mattress. I'm learning to not mind being a charity case.

Mum and her husband also gave us some unused lino that I put down in the bathroom so that we can walk on clean-looking floor rather than the old pee-stained hardboard that we uncovered a few months ago.

The shower works, half the kitchen works, we have one relatively dust-free room to sleep and sit in. What more could we need?

Maybe just a complete night's sleep...

1. Matt passed his driving test on Monday! First time! YAY! I am so proud and so delighted and so excited for him. I remember the way my life changed when I suddenly had independence and could go wherever I liked (very important when you live in a rural place with a rubbish bus service like my rock) without having to ask for a lift. Oh joy. It's going to change his life.

2. Baby is kicking like crazy, every four hours. Not sure what this means, but I'm hoping it's an indication she'll be easy to settle into a routine once she's out in the open air. Also, I suppose it means she's going to be one of those wriggly, active babies who don't like being held, ie. nothing like me. Oh well.

3. House continues to be an entertaining train wreck. We tried to get the chimneys swept last week, but the sweep couldn't do it because it turns out that the visible pots on the stack actually belong to our schizophrenic neighbour, and our flues have been capped with concrete paving slabs. I really wish I could go back in time to the 1970s to watch the crazy builders who did so many awful awful things to this house. They must've been easy-going, happy chaps, really.

4. I still have insomnia. Boo hiss.

5. Trying to do a bit of yoga every morning, which is fun and lovely. Matt joins in sometimes.

6. Might be moving into the house this weekend! Eeeeee! We've got a bed and everything (and by "everything" I mean "sofa and chest of drawers"). I shall post photos once the room is set up to my satisfaction.

7. My bump is impossible to ignore now. A photo will be forthcoming once I've stopped freaking out. :D

8. We've thought of names! ( NAMES! )

Things have got exciting at the house recently. Well, exciting to me, anyway.

For the first time ever, instead of removing rubbish and horrible stuff and ghastly mistakes from the house and heaving it all to the tip, we are putting good things back onto to the house and beginning the process of making it a beautiful, stable, dry, well-made home once more.

Dad's builder friend came for two days this week and patched up one of the chimney stacks, which means the stairs wall will no longer run with water when it's raining. Hurray! He would've done it sooner but his other job is filming for the Formula 1 racing so it's difficult for him to find enough spare time. Anyway, chimney stack and nearby roof tiles repaired.* And the horribly ugly, rusty radio mast thing that had been bolted to the side of the house has been removed at last.

And we got a nearly new washing machine for free, so that's one more expense I can stop worrying about. HURRAY for Freecycle! I've been watching the list for weeks, hoping that one would come up. When this one did, I emailed within the hour, but it had already gone. For some reason that deal fell through, though, and we were next on the list. Turns out the couple who wanted rid of it had bought one of the houses that we'd looked at last year. So we had a nice time chatting about renovation, and all the awful things that we'd spotted about their house. And then we made them happy by explaining that the house we eventually bought was in fact much worse. FREE WASHING MACHINE!

The structural engineer finally turned up to assess the sagging joist -- after forgetting to visit for a second time. I think he's senile, because after that visit he then forgot to send us the measurements that we asked for (and also because he's old, and he kept weirdly changing subject in the middle of the conversation when he visited the house). When I phoned him to remind him, he started talking about drawing designs for supporting walls and pillars, at which point I asked how much he charged and then died a little inside when he revealed the huge hourly rate. So I'm girding myself to be obnoxious about it next week. All we asked for, on the phone, and in person, were the measurements for a steel beam and for a timber beam. We didn't want designs. We didn't want clever ideas. And our time costs money too, so I'm steeling myself to say something about a discount on his presumably very high bill for the times he kept us waiting.

Matt started on the repointing this week, in the bedroom that had originally been the ugliest room in the house (north facing, with shiny lime green walls, black woodwork, ugly built-in cupboards, and no working electrics).



The above picture shows the fireplace, which has been thoroughly raked out (ie. all the loose mortar between the stones has been scraped out, chipped out, raked out and washed out), and the alcove to the left hand side (which used to be an ugly cupboard). Before re-pointing with lime, you have to totally soak the stonework and mortar joints, which is why it appears darker. You can see a patch of newly re-pointed stonework about two-thirds of the way up the alcove. That was how much Matt had done by Wednesday night.

I joined in yesterday (to the chimney guy's delight), and this is how much we've done now:



It's all done apart from the bottom foot-and-a-bit!

It's going to take longer than I thought to do the whole first floor. After doing a few sums, we realised it would be more cost effective to buy a cement mixer and then sell it on than to continue renting one. So we did. It's shiny and lovely and is going to be a right dirty old mess by the end of the week. But the walls will be pretty, and that's the main thing.

After buying the cement mixer we trudged up a hill with our chicken-keeping friend to steal a lot of little stones from a beautiful old quarry. But I'll write a post about that (with pretty pictures) later this week.

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* One slight hitch with the chimney stack repair: a seagull's nest on the other chimney stack. When the builder man climbed out onto the roof on Thursday morning, the seagull mother on the nest did some kind of panic call, and within minutes he was being dive-bombed by twenty seagulls. After some debate (kill them? Wear protective gear? Just leave the work until the chicks have left the nest?) I phoned my chicken-keeping friend and he volunteered to come over with a ranger from the forestry board to kill the chicks and remove the nest. It took only a couple of minutes, and after that everything was calm and lovely on the roof once more. Matt's dad thinks we did a bad thing (this is a man who eats meat for nearly every meal...) but our need was greater than the seagulls', and there are still hundreds of them wheeling in the skies above our village.

And that was the drama for the week.

More progress -- both forwards and backwards -- with the house.

BACKWARDS: we got excited and bought some lime from a nice lime guy. Turns out we both should've been paying more attention to the things that he was saying, because what we thought we could do with the lime is not at all what he told us we could do with the lime. We wanted lime that wouldn't set in water. We ended up with lime that WOULD set in water. And didn't realise until after Matt had mixed a whole expensive bag of it into a dustbin full of water. Oops.

Also, the man who was supposed to come this evening (to assess the size of wooden beam we'd need to support the first floor) never turned up -- we waited an hour-and-a-half for him to no avail.

Also, the man who's supposed to be fixing our chimney stacks still hasn't been in touch.

Also, we missed the conservation grant meeting deadline because the scaffolder was slow in posting his estimate.

Also, the nice lime guy turns out to be too expensive for us to use for the external works, so we have to use the other lime guys (who are also nice, but incredibly slow at getting things done).

Also, the shiny, cheap patio table set had a tiny little rubber bit missing that meant I couldn't put it together. So I had to go to B&Q and persuade someone to cannibalise another patio table set so that I could have my tiny little rubber bit.

FORWARDS: we got depressed about the lime, then I did a bit more research and discovered that there's a cheaper, better option available. And today, we got that kind of lime and Matt successfully mixed it all with water. So after it's had a week to cure, we'll be able to get on with the re-pointing!

Also, we've borrowed a cement mixer for a couple of weeks.

Also, I bought some sand.

Also, we cleaned the oven. Finally. Had to use washing-up liquid, bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, liquid soap, a scrubby sponge thing, and a small plastic ruler -- but most of the cooked-on brown goo has gone! YAY!

Also, I swept the house and tidied away all the tools.

Also, the gas man is coming tomorrow to see about moving the gas cylinders somewhere safer (currently squashed in between a window and a drain, which is totally against current safety guidelines, and actually really in our way for the external repair works we need to get done).

Also, I assembled the patio table. We sat out on the kitchen roof to have our dinner today.

Also, the chimney-stack guy (who hasn't been in touch) claims he'll charge us a quarter of what the other chimney-stack guy quoted for the repair work. This means that we'll have some money spare from our savings to maybe pay for the replacement beams and lintels and floorboards that the house needs.

As you can see, it's ups and downs, ups and downs.

Still pregnant.

I've just reached 16 weeks and, amazingly, almost don't feel queasy at all anymore. Hurray! Overwhelming fatigue also mostly gone, except for the general daily tiredness caused by my insomnia. This is good. I've managed to prepare a few more meals, and have stood in a kitchen while food was being fried. Progress, my friends, progress.

Had a mild freak-out over the weekend about the reality of this situation: that there's a little living thing squirming around in my uterus. Weird. Feeling quite apprehensive about the 20-week scan.

It's time now to get on with sorting things out. For a couple of months it felt like I was sleep-walking through my life. Important things weren't getting done, and even picking up the phone felt like an impossible task. Now, I'm phoning people every day (house and teaching stuff), drawing scale diagrams of windows, arranging to go out and see friends, pratting about with Matt. It's good to feel like me again.

As for the house, progress has been slow. Matt's been up there a lot while I've been teaching, but the task he's taken on is a fiddly one: raking out all the loose mortar from between the stones. The amount of dust he's created is phenomenal. I had to go and buy him a special gas mask! Various implements have been used in this job: knackered old chisels, screwdrivers, paintbrushes, cheap dustpan and brush, bristly broom, knackered old vacuum cleaner, bicycle pump, hair-dryer. His ingenuity in the face of disintegrating implements is impressive, I have to say.

And this is the result:



That's only a bit of it. He's also done all the other walls in that room. We were hoping to repoint and move in during the next couple of weeks, but our lime putty supplier has let us down so we're going to have to make our own, which apparently takes two months. Oh well. The new plan is to wash all the surfaces down to get rid of as much of the persistent dust as possible, and then move in anyway. I'm sick of living in other people's houses.

Over the weekend I bought an outdoor table/chair set so that we'd have somewhere dust-free to eat our meals (on fine days). I'm beginning to feel excited about the project again!

Before the house progress pictures, just a bit of good news: mum's tumour hasn't changed size at all. So she's got the all-clear for another year. (The issue with the tumour is that if it grows another 2mm they'll have to remove it, and the operation will leave her completely deaf in one ear, and probably paralysed down one side of her face.)

Okay. Onto the house.

( A LOT of pictures under the cut. )

Oh well.

But doesn't the wall next to the bottom staircase look pretty now that Matt's taken all the cement off it?



And no trace of an oil leak anywhere. I suspect that's a mystery we're never going to solve.

Ladies! A top tip for hair-styling. If you get a sufficient quantity of concrete dust in your hair you will no longer need to wash it. Also, it will eventually form a kind of squidgy mass which you can sculpt into any shape you like. Also also, apparently concrete dust doesn't just brush out. Feel free to imagine how stylish I've looked during the last week or two.

( Progress notes, plus photos of wood, stone, and the kitchen roof. )

Finally got internet access again! I also remembered to take a picture of the front of the house:



Some detective work (ie. scraping at the wall with a paint scraping thing) revealed that the house used to be yellow, peachy yellow, and just plain peach. Not sure what colour we'd like it to be in the end, but I know it won't be this ugly shade of minty green.

( More pictures under the cut. )