The Ugly Before & the Gory Demolition - in pictures
Hi there !
You have made it through those previous three long sappy posts full of old family stories and fig-tree drama, and you're still reading? Congratulations! This is where the fun stuff begins!
You have just arrived and know nothing about said stories and drama? Looks like you've dodged a bullet, hah! Feel free to go back and feast your eyes on way too many old photos of my ancestors and the overgrown garden, but also feel free to just keep reading, because as I said before, this is where the fun stuff begins: before & demo pictures.
But first, here are the floor plans of the existing house:
And now, without further ado:
As you can see from the white stains on the floor, the biggest, most obvious problem we were facing was humidity. Water was seeping up from the ground through the downstairs floor, and eventually the porous, pink granite walls were destined to crumble. Not good, right? So we had no choice but to go for a drastic measure: insulate the house from underneath. The floors were removed, the ground dug, a sheet of plastic laid down, and a new concrete slab poured over. Or something (I'm not an engineer, but you get the idea!). And obviously the whole ground floor was gutted in the process, and a wall actually did crumble anyway... (sorry for the shaky drawings!)
The other huge task related to the kitchen: it's a large, deep room but it only had the one window, and as a result was really dark, so we decided to create a wide opening with french windows leading to a terrace (where the garage used to be) on one side, as well as a narrow fixed window in the back wall, looking out onto the garden.
Upstairs, the walls on the right side of the stairs were removed because they were too thin, and because we really needed to gut these two bedrooms (3 & 4) to insulate them properly, to make the bathroom slightly bigger and to repair the windows and roof (and mostly to get rid of that awful panelling!) In the other two bedrooms, we only doubled the exterior walls but kept the partition walls as they were.
One thing I'm really happy about, is that I managed to convince my father (who is supervising the work because he is a civil engineer) (more on why this was a very, very bad idea later) to keep the stairs, yay! (To keep the house basically but that's a story for another day)
I originally wanted to keep the fireplace but it also pretty much crumbled when the floor was dug, and its structure was really unsafe, so it will be replaced by a wood burning stove.
As I mentioned before, we decided to tear down the garage so that we could create a terrace on the west-facing side of the house and bring more light into the kitchen. Of course this is going to be a lovely setup, but it also meant giving up on a lot of storage space... we briefly considered keeping half the garage as a utility room, with a door to the kitchen, but it meant making yet another opening in the thick stone walls, and ultimately we couldn't make the design work in a really satisfying way. The gardening tools will go in the garden sheds, and there might even be room for a jam jar or two in there as well!
This was almost a year ago now, and it took a while to get over the shock of seeing the house in such a state, and to mourn the old version of it that was associated with so many memories... (the "before" photos were taken right before we emptied the house, when it hadn't been lived in for a while and was in a terrible state, but back when my great-grand-mother and grand-mother were still alive it wasn't that bad!)... But it's also very exciting to see the changes, especially now that it's almost finished!! The furniture goes back in in July, and I can't wait to decorate!
Stay tuned!
