 | Front outside. The house is stone built (2-3 ft. thick stone walls). Exterior walls are rendered. The front wall is also pebbledashed. |
 | Back outside. Plain rendered stone wall. The house was originally detached (probably about 100 years ago) and half the size - the whole kitchen/dining and bedrooms 3 & 4 and the bathroom are in the extension which was added many years ago. We can tell it was detached because we found old windows and doors where next door's walls were. It's quite common here for terraces to build organically a bit at a time rather than all at once. |
 | The next lot are from before we got started on the ripping out...kitchen and dining room area, last redecorated in 1979 - where instead of fixing the problems they simply studded the walls and put beauty board up (beauty in this case being a euphamism for ugly!) The main issue on this side of the house is damp. Not difficult to fix during an overhaul. |
 | Looking from the kitchen into the dining area. |
 | Lounge. Note the lovely polystyrene ceiling tiles... |
 | Looking the other way in the lounge. |
 | The other room (across the hall from the lounge). It was used as a bedroom by the previous owners (who rented it as a 5-bedroom student house - there's a marine biology research lab in Port Erin) |
 | Looking the other way in this room. |
 | Nice tiled fireplace. We're keeping that (but the fake electric fire is going!) |
 | Upstairs - view out of one of the bedrooms. |
 | View of the whole bedroom. |
 | Other small bedroom upstairs. We are moving the wall of this one a little to enlarge it. It'll probably be a guestroom. Or a study. Haven't decided yet - I may well use the loft as the study/computer room. |
 | Bedroom 1 - the master bedroom. Where the hideous cabinet made out of MDF stands, a door is going - there's a storage room behind there that I'm turning into an en-suite. |
 | Looking the other way towards the door and bathroom. Notice more hideous polystyrene ceiling tiles. |
 | Bathroom. 1970s green suite... |
 | Bedroom #2. |
 | Looking the other way in bedroom #2. |
 | Loft space. Instead of the usual drop-down ladder affair, the loft has a proper staircase going to it. Note the traffic cone. No self-respecting student house lacks a traffic cone! The loft is high enough to stand up in in the middle. One half will become a darkroom so I can do all my B&W photography myself, and since computer stuff tends to be seated, I'm considering using this as a computer room too to keep the other rooms for guests, lodgers etc. |
 | Looking down the stairs. This will change a lot. In the 1970s, there was a misplaced obsession with boxing in stair railings. That will change. The handrails are the original rosewood, and we're going to try and restore them. |
 | My back yard. You can't quite see it, but over in the right is a stone-built shed. Once the house is done, my next project is learning to ride a motorcycle. The shed makes an ideal motorbike garage :-) |
 | Four hours later, stripping down is well underway...my Dad is in the foreground, and Duane is chipping away at the back. |
 | The kitchen...in the back yard! |
 | Another view of the crap we removed (in case you're wondering what beauty board is, it's that fake wood panelling that is so popular in Chinese takeaways). |
 | A couple of weeks later. The kitchen is completely stripped, new joists are in to replace some rotten ones we found, wiring is coming out. So far no less than 7 skiploads of rubble and 3 7.5 tonne truckloads of rubble have been removed! |
 | Lounge and adjacent rooms not just stripped to the walls, but the walls gone too :-) I'm changing this room to open plan so the walls aren't going back in either. On the far wall, we uncovered a huge fireplace that had been blocked up. |
 | Looking down the stairs on the middle floor halfway during wall removal. Note the construction of the interior walls - lime and lats. Hideous stuff to get off - lots of dust... (The ceilings were definitely the worst, especially one of them downstairs which had vast quantites of soot that had fallen out of the fireplace in the room above). The wounds on my hands from falling lumps of lime are still healing... |
 | New floor in one of the back bedrooms. More joists to go in. |
 | Closer view of the old interior wall construction. It must have been very labour-intensive to put all that stuff in - these days we use plasterboard! |
 | Another view of the downstairs. |
 | Another view of the kitchen area once we'd filled yet another skip... |