We have three children and live in a rural area, down a track. This means we have lots of muddy wellies, waterproofs and other assorted country living paraphernalia! We only have a tiny hallway cum porch at the moment, which is right next to our kitchen. This means that all our coats and things get bombarded with cooking smells, which isn't terribly pleasant. It's also a bit of a nightmare trying to dry all our things when they get wet. So we needed a bigger hallway.
We are also attempting to rid the dining room and front room of child chut. Despite all our best efforts at trying to offload old toys/games/books onto other people or charitable establishments, hell hath no fury like a child that sees you removing a precious possession from the home. So we also needed a family room/playroom, where I might also beg a small space to do my sewing. These two rooms formed the basis of our extension plans.
The size of these rooms was dictated by an electricity pole we had in our driveway. Due to our rural location - and the fact that our house dates from 1845 - no electricity was laid underground, it went straight into the side of the house. We really wanted this pole removed, as it was very ugly, and not terribly reliable when it came to electricity supply (to us, or our neighbours). We vaguely knew that if the pole was interfering with our building plans, the electricity company would be obliged to move it for free (because the supply goes from our house to our neighbour's house). We also knew that we might stand a chance of getting the supply routed underground, instead of another dirty great pole, if we could give a good argument (mainly the fact that the wind is so strong up here). After several months of wrangling, we eventually agreed to dig the trenches and they agreed to remove the pole and lay the cables underground.
As we were building quite a large extension onto the ground floor of the house, we decided to put another two bedrooms on top. We needed another bedroom anyway, for Jasper, so one more meant we could have a spare room too. We currently have three bedrooms but the girls share one and the other is used by my hubby for working from home.
We eagerly agreed to begin the extension in January of this year, having saved up almost all of the funds we required by then. Unfortunately, this coincided with the arrival of the biting winds, sleet and heavy snowfall. Undeterred, our builder merrily arrived each day and just worked through it. What dedication! We've also had a nightmare with the footings - we've had so much rain over the last 7 or 8 months that the water table is really high. As you can imagine, high water table, ice, snow and really, really soft ground is not terribly conducive to trench digging. To say it looked like the Somme outside for a few weeks is an understatement! Even the digger sank overnight!
We should be getting the roof on by the end of next week, so things are progressing quite nicely, despite us only having one builder on site (although his dad did come and help with the footings).
Here are a few pictures of progress so far...
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| The sunken digger! |
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| Our intrepid builders |
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| Look how high the water table is! |
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| All the rubble and topsoil has been temporarily dumped in the back garden. It will be used to level this out later on |
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| We had a lot of snow! The girls are standing up... |
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| The concrete finally goes in for the footings |
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| Blocks are starting to emerge from the chaos! |
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| Terry, the builder, overseeing the concrete for the floor slab |
