Work begins!

We have covered the before photos here, so lets get into what happened in the first week of us owning the house. It was certainly all go and we got a lot of the prep work out of the way. I will lump all of it in together now and in the next few posts in week or two week blocks to give a timeline and an idea of what the process was, but I will do some more in depth posts later about different parts of the renovation.

To start with we started stripping what felt like about 5 ton of wood chip wallpaper from the walls and the ceilings. It. Was. Everywhere. Why you would take the time to wallpaper a ceiling is beyond me, but the previous owners did. So here we are, stripping the ceilings. We were both working on this for the first few weeks on and off between other jobs, in the first week we were both working so we went up in the evenings to do this and meet with people for quotes and plans to be made. Here are some photos, lots of the paper had been layered over other paper, and then painted a few times. Its never ending, we have now got it off most of the rooms except the downstairs toilet, the spare room and the loft room.

So the house looked really marvellous for a few weeks with wallpaper half stripped, or all over the floor, or ceilings half stripped. To be honest it doesn't get better for many posts to come!

We got professionals in during this time (i.e. my dad and brother Sean) to look at what it would take to get the kitchen in. Dad confirmed that we could take down the walls we had planned to and put in a steel beam for support for the upper floors, and my brother Sean could put in the counter top plugs and the kitchen lights. We wanted to take down the archway shown below and the wall it was attached to back to a certain point to open up the kitchen space. We wanted to keep the downstairs toilet (which is the door you can see on the left in the photo below) but not have it opening into the kitchen so we wanted to take the wall on the left back to create a door way out to the toilet and utility room so that they could be closed off from the kitchen.

We went and designed and ordered the kitchen (we used B&Q and the whole process was reasonably simple), and booked in kitchen fitters who would also do some other jobs like building the door frame out to the loo and utility, box in the boiler and plumb in the sink and dishwasher. 

We got a local window and door company out to give us a quote, the front door didn't work and some of the downstairs windows were single pane wooden framed which are not very efficient or secure. We considered repairing some of the upstairs windows as they seemed OK seal and structure wise but the locks or latches were broken. However the price for all of the windows (for all new energy efficient ones vs saving the at least 10 to 15 year old ones) was actually less than we thought it would be so we went for it and did all of them. It seems that about 15 years ago the previous owners decided to get double glazing but just left out some of the windows like the one in the photo below in the kitchen, which was knackered and damp and cold, so we knew some of them definitely needed doing right away but the price was right to just do all of them together and it has made such a difference to the energy efficiency and noise from the playing field behind us.

We got a gas engineer booked in to service and check the boiler and gas fire, remove the radiator in the kitchen and the airing cupboard and check a leaking radiator in the bathroom. 

So we were all set with people booked in to start work! We didn't have to move in for 4 weeks after completion as we had somewhere to stay so our main objectives for before we moved in were to get the kitchen as usable as possible and as much of the messy work like wall removal, plastering, electric work etc done as possible. I will post some more detail on how this all went in individual posts for each part of the prep work, but we did get there (mostly) before we moved in, except for some unexpected hiccups or delays.

Next post on week 2, lots more visible progress and demolition work went on then so there will be some progress photos!