The Cottage - The Finished Bathroom

So it has been ages since I have written an update about the cottage and that's because all of a sudden it was finished and we had a one week slot when Joe was free to get everything moved back in and it's all been rather surreal. The finished cottage is absolutely beautiful and I can't believe I ever doubted our decision to extend the bathroom. What we have now is a gorgeous family bathroom that is actually fun to be in, with a huge bath and enough room for the little boys to have a full-on fun bathtime rather than squeezing in one at a time.

So here is what it was like before...

This is taken standing in the doorway

Taken from the same angle as the above photo

The whole bathroom from the new doorway

It is so light and airy now. I'm particularly pleased with the flooring which is Unnatural Flooring in Savannah which we also have in the downstairs bathroom. Incredibly easy to wipe clean/dry, warm and comfortable for bare feet or for babies to lie on and really smart looking and (supposedly) long wearing. I also love the long brick shaped tiles which make the bathroom look as big as possible.

The Cottage - November 2013

One room that has been causing us head and heartache is the downstairs loo. Although I hate the expression, The Cottage was my late mother-in-laws 'baby' and the downstairs loo is completely wallpapered by her in pictures and postcards. Like this...

The first thing all friends and relatives have said to us is 'you're not going to change the downstairs loo are you?' To which we immediately responded 'No'. But the further we got with the building work the more we realised that not only would it look very outdated when the rest of the house was finished but there was a damp problem.

I jokingly suggested I take all the (super-glued) pictures down and put them back... and was taken up on that offer. Yikes. Thankfully my mother-in-laws goddaughter works in film continuity and offered to help. So we spent a very cold but therapeutic Sunday in November doing what we could to preserve as many pictures as possible. We've mapped out where everything was and removed what we could and I'm actually quite looking forward to patching the holes with pictures and postcards myself. This is how we left it...

The rest of the cottage is looking fantastic - the floorboards are beautiful and we're almost ready to start doing the stuff that involves me making a decision - like the kitchen and the bathroom but here's where we are in photos...

The dining room and kitchen

Sitting room through to extension/study

The sitting room from the extension

The new bathroom

As you can see from the last photo we decided to make the bathroom bigger (you can see the previous posts about the bathroom here).

And just in case you wonder why we are doing this Joe climbed up on the scaffolding and took some pictures of our view from the house and then from the seawall back to the cottage (which you can see as its the one with the scaffolding).

At the end of the garden is the seawall... then technically the sea. But this is Norfolk so it's a marsh

The Cottage - October 2013

As soon as I stepped out of the car I realised that from now on I'm going to have to label these posts with their date. It's all moving so fast and so dramatically that you need a timescale to be keeping up with everything.

We'd been on holiday, we'd had work, we have a baby so it took a while but I eventually managed to get up to Norfolk to meet with the builders and to see the progress. And my god what progress - I stepped out of the car and saw this...

Please note lack of roof! I'm now reliably informed (by the builders) that the roof was off for only a couple of days but it was pretty shocking to arrive and see (even though I knew it would be happening at some point).

The builders have not only been moving at a fast pace but their work is AMAZING (they are not reading this) and they pretend not to mind that I can't make a decision about anything.

So... they've gutted the place (as instructed). There is no roof, no plaster in the whole of the upstairs, all the lintels have had to be replaced and we've discovered that the extension is basically not attached to the rest of the house (thanks previous-builders-that-husband-won't-let-me-name). Decision on bathroom layout still to be made but had a great meeting about the kitchen and think we have something decided that will make it a lot more usable but I need to go away and think about it all (obviously).

The back...

The dining room into the hall

The main bedroom with new lintel

View from the third bedroom

Middle bedroom

The kitchen...

To see a layout to help get an idea of where these pictures are then see here for the floorplans.

The Cottage - Everything Out

My god having said I would be updating you on how our cottage in Norfolk is going I haven't... But I am now and I'm splitting it into two posts rather than one HUGE one.

The whole idea of doing the cottage up was quite difficult to manage. It was Joe's dad's cottage and he was very unwell and not keen on changing anything... at all. Still we made plans and agreed that work could go ahead from the beginning of September 2013. Then sadly on 4th August 2013 Joe's father died which not only stopped us in our tracks but made money issues very murky in terms of probate and our plans for the cottage get a whole lot bigger. When we initially made plans it was to do what was necessary, freshen everything up and yet keep it as close as possible to what it had been so it wasn't too strange for my father-in-law. Now that he has gone we are able to completely re-do everything and ensure that we can bring the cottage up to rental standard.

We were so shell shocked that we only managed to pack half the cottage up before we had to leave it all to movers to do the rest for us. It was very strange - we were there for the funeral, then went away for two weeks and the next time we saw it, it was... well you'll see in the next post what it was like but when we left we hadn't made any decisions. Now, we are decisions a-go-go...

Dining room and kitchen in the process of being emptied

Sitting room

Sitting room into the office extension

The Cottage - Bathroom decisions

The first major decision we have to make about the cottage is the bathroom. Although there is a loo and sink downstairs there is only one actual bathroom and it's not very big. We definitely want to put a shower over the bath but apart from that there's not a lot we can do with such a small space. Eventually we may make the downstairs loo a shower room but for now our builder however has come up with a rather clever idea to extend the upstairs bathroom. It seems to be the most sensible option for giving the bathroom more space but would mean losing a bit of the character of the cottage which I'm reluctant to do.

So I need your help. I've put pictures and a diagram of the current layout below and after that is a diagram of the proposed layout. What do you think - should we change it? If you need more in depth floor plans you can see them here). I will post pictures up asap.

Current layout of the bathroom - the blanket box is in a small corridor and has hooks over the top for jackets.

Proposed new layout - incorporate the corridor area and put a sink where the blanket box is

The Cottage - Floorplans

I thought it would be helpful to put up the floorplans of the cottage should you feel inclined to follow this thread. Having spent a rather wine fueled evening last time we were there making Joe take every measurement in the house and making our own diagrams, the builders then sent us ones that they'd made...

Ground floor - kitchen at the top with aga in the middle, downstairs loo, stairs, drawing room and office

Kitchen with Aga in the middle

First floor - from top - third bedroom, second bedroom, bathroom and master bedroom

The Cottage

My family like things to look nice, my sister is the messiest member and she's an artist, so you see even she wants things to look nice. This means we hoover, we clean, we um and ahh about interior decoration, we sleep for weeks with curtain fabric swatches pinned to the old curtains to see how we feel about them, we update paintwork and maintain exterior walls, upgrade boilers and bleed radiators. My husbands family, who I adore, seem to exist more on the idea that they'll be dead long before anything drastic happens so why bother. This is not to say that their houses don't look wonderful, they really do, but I'm not sure that there's much room for property maintenance in their rather academic brains and they are the base-camp for shabby chic.

Rather scary damp patch over the stairs

My father-in-laws bolt-hole in North Norfolk is the worst hit by this lassez faire approach to home owning. When I first met my husband, nearly a decade ago, it looked rather aged and worn and there were a few cracks. Nothing was done and now ceilings are falling in, carpets are removing themselves and one end of the house is threatening to fall off altogether. Being from a family who likes everything clean and working and I suppose, being a girl, I have been making noises about 'doing the place up' for some time. My husband agrees with me in person, then speaks to his father and they both agree that really I'm just looking for another outlet from which to spend money. Up until now I have been all but patted on the head and told to run along.

The bathroom... my nemesis

That is until the ceiling started to fall in an a rather scary looking drip appeared over the stairs... right where the pipes from the bath run. The bathroom is my bete noir. I hate it. It hates me. It's ill flushing loo, the carpet that shows evidence that this is a mans house and runkles up to shut me in whenever it feels like it. I have had designs on this bathroom for sometime. For my 30th I would like a few quiet minutes with it and a sledgehammer. I may get my wish. These rather scary new developments mean then men in my house have had no choice but to call in the builders and I have persuaded them that there is no point doing things by half. This cottage would be fantastic for renting out some day and doing it up to rental standard is the most sensible thing. This means not only structural maintenance including fixing the roof, but new kitchen, new bathroom, new flooring and completely new paintwork.

Where the ceiling's started to go... over my bed obvs

I have put myself forward as project manager and, because of the beauty of the cottage and it's location, the size of the job, and the wonderful outcome of all this work that I am hoping for, I thought I would blog it occasionally. I've been round taking my before photographs and doing measurements of most of the rooms so I can do costings and have references from London (the fact that all floors need redoing and all rooms repainting make it not ideal for staying long with a baby... that and radiators not working). I hope it's interesting - I'll try to only blog the interesting bits - and that the transformation is successful. Right now, waiting for quotes, it all seems quite daunting, especially as it's not my house. But the only thing to do is jump in feet first so here I go...