We have a temporary kitchen and we are still cooking on our camping stove! It’s been too long so we have to move on to the ‘interim kitchen’.
The long term goal is to locate the kitchen in the barn for open-plan cooking and dining. The current temporary/interim kitchen space will then become a boot room and new entrance doorway into the house instead of walking straight through the existing front door into the lounge. With two dogs and muddy paws, the lounge will get too filthy in winter, so we’d rather relocate the front door entry to a boot room. How luxurious!
The first job is to remove the loose plaster and fill all of the holes created when ripping off the plasterboard. This wasn’t well fitted, was causing condensation from thick cold walls and making an ideal rat run for rodents. It had to go. We spent a winter break here in 2018 ripping the plasterboard off the walls.
There is a little window or should I say open hole that needs pointing and lining with wood and glazing. The long term exposure has rotted the wooden lintel but the granite stone lintel above it is fine. For now, this is blocked up with some double thickness Celotex insulation board to keep the draft out.
There is a little bit of damp at the bottom of the exterior back wall. This is one of the reasons why the plaster has blown off. The house hasn’t been lived in for over 30 years. The back wall, lacking any heat and over a meter thick has a lot of earth piled up against it. The job for spring is to rent a digger, remove the earth and point the exterior walls.
Here’s the before video and progress in pictures in November. Oh my, I really do sound like that don’t I. Bonus footage watch until the end!
