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Moving into the Well Cottage - May 2006

At last we had working electric and water and we even had plastered walls in some rooms so we were now able to move in!

     

 External pictures of the front of the house when we first moved in


     

 Some pictures of the front of the house taken more recently


I can only describe living in the house as a bit like camping for the first couple of weeks.

The electricians Tony and Craig and Phil the plumber has all pulled the stops out for us and managed to get the basics working in just the rooms that had been plastered whilst leaving the unplastered rooms which were still breeze-block and at first fix stage safe so that there were no live wires in them or open water pipes.

     

 Here is the bathroom, basic but functional!

 

     

Electrics, a peek at the unfinished master bedroom through the door with the first fix wiring in there and I particularly like the creative wall light fittings in the hall.


Even with everyone working as hard as they could we still ended up cutting it very fine, the electricians were still finishing up on the afternoon we had moved in and once they had finished at 5pm we then started clearing up and trying to set out the basics of our home in the kitchen and bedroom.

Because we were moving in before all of the electrics were fitted throughout the whole house the underfloor heating was now working but the thermostats had not  been fitted yet so the heating was either on full in each room or off. It took us a couple of days to get the hang of how to work this temporary set-up so that it was not on full in every room all of the time and all I can say is for those first few days we were very very toasty indeed.......probably too well done, but at least we weren't cold.

At this stage the flooring was still just screed (a bit like crumbly concrete which is put down on top of the underfloor heating pipes), unfortunately no matter what you do dust permanently comes up from the screed flooring even if you try and vacuum it so we put rugs and some carpeting down to try and keep the dust down and gave some semblance of a home and not a building site.

The rooms that were ready were:

In the kitchen the AGA was working so we could cook on it and we used a desk
from my old music studio as our kitchen worktop and we bought some plastic
stacking storage units for storing boxes and tins and kitchen utensils in.

         
         

The hallway


2nd bedroom which was to be our temporary bedroom


3rd bedroom which because our temporary lounge

 

Main bathroom which had a working bath, sink and toilet but the shower
was not yet installed because it would need to be tiled first.

Utility room which also had a working sink in it so it acted as the temporary kitchen
 

There were actually no doors or door frames in the house when we first moved in so I ended up buying some plain cottage style pine laced and braced doors, making the door casings in each opening throughout the house and fitting the doors in them.

This was supposed to be just a temporary measure but it may well become permanent now.........

  

 One of the "temporary" doors which I fitted


The rooms which were not finished so unusable were:

Lounge which was the main storage area for building timber and tools
 

Cloakroom which was just full of stuff?

Master bedroom was full of insulation board and all of the big building materials we had nowhere else to store
En suite again was just full of stuff? (probably bags of building rubbish).