The Donated House

THis is ages ago, but you know how I am these days. Anyway, for those stalward friends who still come back here now and again to see what’s going on, here’s what was going on, like, over a year ago…

Andrew , Sal and Jo came round, and then there was music.

And here is the last in our series entitled Shit I Forgot To Actually Publish Even Though I Wrote It Like Six Months Ago. Actually, I just amended it with the actual recent progress, so it’s kind of almost up to date. Also, I promise to post properly about the new office which I’m literally now procrastinating about finishing by doing this post instead.

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As part of the preparation for getting signed off as a legitimate dwelling house (as opposed to a perpetual building site) we needed a proper, legitimate staircase. Ben to the rescue as usual.

The hole in the floor needed opening up and the floor itself making flat and level-ish.

Ben’s expert 3D imagination figured out how to insert all the necessary turning steps and hold everything up from existing sturcture.

We started out with a stack of four steps at the bottom, but the headroom was a problem, with a very immovable beam above the bottom two steps.

So in the end we ditched that system, moved the whole staircase down and added two kite steps at the top and two at the bottom.

It was utter chaos, of course.

But before I knew it, I was running up and down a proper staircase.

There are plans to clad them in the Canadian Maple flooring I have lying around, but those have fallen by the wayside in the traditional way, to be picked up, um, sometime.

Meanwhile, I tidied up and plasterboarded the wall and ceiling around it and stuck in some temporary safety slats.

And of course, for temporary, read long-term temporary, possibly permanent.

…except, here we are today with the actual banister made from that rowan tree you may remember me stripping the bark off a few posts ago.

This bit was so great, Julian and I just went to Vermont to visit my parents and when we got back there was a banister and the steps were covered in the aforementioned Canadian maple floorboards.

As usual, Ben did a lovely job and was pleased to be left alone to make as much of a mess as he liked while doing it.

I love the zig-zag stair pattern.

I love the organic, local (like 30 meters away local) newel post and banister.

And I super-love the acorn carved on it by Ben.

Right, I’m off to paint that ceiling.

Here’s another post I wrote last summer and then actually, for real, forgot to post. That’s how little I think about this project these days. Honestly, it’s very refreshing. One day I will have recovered enough to drum up actual enthusiasm again, so watch this space. Meanwhile, in old news:

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The old Wendy House, which was one of the first things I built, was lovely, but it was not well built. It was under-engineered to the tune of being unsafe (held up by a wooden post hammered into the forest floor, and therefore rotted through in 5 years) and over-engineered to the tune of being really, really hard to take apart.

But with enough brute force, even rusty 6 inch nails can be taken out of 2×4, and with enough willpower, I can strip out glass fiber insulation that has had generations of squirrels nesting in it. And two actual live mice looking very bemused at being evicted. God, it was awful.

Anyway, lots of lessons learned. So I set about stacking up all my reclaimed wood, some of it on its third or fourth use now.

And some of it quite fresh from a batch Anthony gave me.

And some of it an old telegraph pole (aren’t english names quaint, Americans?) or internet pole as Julian calls them.

The pole I cut up for the front legs of the structure, using all my chainsaw sculpting skills. And I creosoted them within an inch of their lives, hoping they’ll last a long time.

This time nothing’s getting sunk into the forest floor, it’s all going to stand on padstones which are set into that wonder-material MOT (what is that even called in America? Graded gravel probably…)

I made the floor structure super strong for the extra 2 feet in either direction I’d added to the floor area.

And recycled most of the old building’s roof to make the floor.

At that point, I had, like, two days before it rained, and I really didn’t want my dead-level plywood floor delaminating, so the race was on.

Well, it would be on the following morning, anyway. I was done for that day.

So, walls were constructed and erected…

…temporarily braced…

… posts and purlins, meaty as you like to hold up the cement tile roof…

… rafters which all had to be custom cut because recycled wood…

… but it was all coming together at the end of day one.

And with Julian’s help, we got the siding on and everything else that needed to be done before the roof went on.

And it was all looking great.

And then I had to go to Sheffield and teach a course. So Julian, Lisa and Ben were left to put the roof on in my absence.

Good thing Julian knew what he was doing from the last time he put a roof on a building.

With the three of them helping it was all on in a day.

Honestly, thank God for Julain and Lisa and Ben. I took a short break after that marathon. But soon it became clear that the job would not finish itself. It did offer a great opportunity to use up those 5 sheets of kingspan I’d had littering up the garden for ages and the three last sheets of plasterboard from the house.

Walls got covered in a mix of reclaimed plywood and deconstructed pallets. The beds were constructed from bits of the old beds, plus some other reclaimed stuff from The Collection.

With a paint job and a couple of maps wallpapered to the ceiling, it was looking very smart indeed.

Couple of curtains, bit of bedding, very homey. Anthony provided some vinyl flooring. Honestly, I texted him and said “don’t suppose you’ve got an offcut of vinyl flooring about 8 foot by 3 foot?” and he did!

The wall murals are a bit of wall paint and a sharpie marker. The maps are one small scale and one large scale of the area.

Naturally Julian and I had to spend the night in it to try it out.

The floor from the old building became a deck out the back of this one, complete with railings and a little door because I figured anyone seeing how close the rope swing reached was just about guaranteed to try it, whether I accommodated that level of adventurous spirit or not.

It is altogether a charming little house now, I am very proud of it, which strikes me as a little bit odd, in juxtaposition to my slightly “meh” feelings regarding having built en enormous house, but there you have it. We can’t control these things.

Well this is awkward. Here’s a post from last summer that I wrote and everything, and then… forgot about.

There’s another one to come as well. But I’ll give it a day. Heh.

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The assault on the garden has been more or less a case of wandering around it until we have an idea that is good enough to constitute inspiration and then hacking away at that bit. It had been years (many of them) since a digger piled up all the nice dressed stone that had to be moved the foundation works and piled it all unceremoniously at the far (awkward, difficult to get to) corner fo the garden. And there it lay untouched until it was so covered in weeds that it was difficult to identify individual stones. It was becoming more of a small hill.

The whole area was a bit of a dump, with the old shower looking shabbier and shabbier and lots of piles of old crap we were vaguely saving to use someday.

Lisa took it on as a long term task to dig out the stones and move them around so we could actually see what we were dealing with. We managed to extract most of the large paving slabs and lay them, but we were left with a large number of smaller stones and no plan. And more awkwardly, a small number of larger stones that were way too big to move.

Once again, Anthony to the rescue. I hired a mini-digger and he came and drove it for a weekend, completely tranforming the whole area.

He managed to move the big stones and build a sort of retaining wall of them behind the apple tree, shoring up the planned lawn area above.

Sarah, Steven, Julian and I went round and collected up a lot of the rubble that needed losing and chucked it in behind the stones before some soil went on.

And Julian started building a raised bed in the corner from all the stone.

Naturally it became a race against the weeds as spring turned to summer.

But we were determined and inspired and progress was quite quick.

Both of us had aching forearms for this entire period. Those stones are really heavy!

We managed to use a pretty solid proportion of them, and along the back where there had been a low wall anyway, it was just a matter of re-setting the original stones.

By the end of a very hard working weekend, we’d finished the raised bed.

With a fair amount of leftover stone which will be used to form steps and borders between various areas back there.

I was meant to be planting it up this week, but here I am blogging about it instead. However, I’m not even going to publish this one for a few weeks, so I will very likely add to it and all you have to do is keep reading.

Wherein I whitter on about general stuff that’s been achieved lately.

Chapter 1: A Shelf for Games

As we were building the staircase frame, it made sense to build the recessed games cupboard in what will one day be the games corner of the living room.

Here it is plasterboarded, filled, painted and full of lovely plywood shelves.

And full of lovely games. Actually I need a few more games, from the look of it. Recommendations welcome.

Chapter 2: The Push To Get The House Signed Off

Here is a picture of the safety railings we put in in order to pass a basic check on building regulations. I mean, it was about time anyway, really.

Note the absence of the spiral staircase. In a two storey building with an attic, you are not allowed to have a proper staircase up into the attic.

Chapter 3: Meanwhile, In The Bedroom

I filled, sanded and painted the ceiling and walls.

Julian chose the colour. I love it. It’s cozy AF.

Chapter 4: Just Nice Pictures From Around The Place

Here’s the state of the landing, which was a junk pile for ages and is now nice.

Here’s a general view of the nicest bits.

Here’s a corner of the cloud mural and a nice corner cupboard with nice plants on.

And here’s the view, in the best bit of spring when it’s going green but the leaves haven’t yet blocked the rest of the valley from view.

Here’s Jack enjoying his catnip bed.

Here’s a hellebore I really thought was going to do nothing and then it burst into life and was the most beautiful thing for months.

Chapter 5: FINALLY

After years and years, we finally moved our electric boxes onto our own damn land.

Chapter 6: Baskets

I took a basket making course. Because of course I did.

I made two baskets. I took to it as you would expect I would take to a new craft. I will undoubtedly make more baskets, but really what I was after was experience in willow weaving so I can make cute little hurdles and other garden structures. Apparently dogwood is good for that and best used green. Next spring then…

Chapter 7: The Hogwarts Wall

A million years ago Anthony gave me a bunch of oak kitchen cabinet doors he’d taken out of some rich people’s kitchens. I finally got round to using them to make a wall of removable panels to hide the under-eaves storage.

Chapter 8: Julian’s Triumph Garden

I’m not sure what prompted us to get on with this area, aside from that we wanted to move the bees, but anyway, Julian took it upon himself to dig it over, and one thing led to another…

Sarah and Steven were here at the time, and Sarah, who is stronger than her tiny frame would have you think, took shovel in hand.

Before he knew it a wall was being built.

And the whole slope remodelled and planted with dogwood for future hurdle-making.

The bees did get moved and that compost frame collapsed, but I haven’t taken a picture, sorry. It looks amazing though.

And finally, Rick-Next-Door found this photo of the gardeners working in the garden of Stansfield Hall down the hill (of which our plot used to be the walled garden) The slanty wall in the background has the long stone staircase behind, for those who’ve climbed it. And the curvey wall and gatepost are the same now. I reckon this was taken in the 1860s, when Stansfield Hall was extended and remodelled. I also reckon it’s possible that stone roller on the left is the one I’ve got outside.