It's a Green House

The kitchen is the room that saw the most dramatic transformation early on in the year because there was no kitchen in here at all when we moved it so it was priority number one to get this sorted. Here are the before and now photos, sometimes I forget how different it was and its mad to see it so much improved! Excuse the state of the garden and the floor in the after photos, we are having work done on the large oak tree and the hedges all trimmed so the garden was a mess and I didn't hoover as we were traipsing in sawdust etc all day. I wanted to take the opportunity to get some photos as current as possible (and while the kitchen was clean) though. The kitchen started as this, just a cabinet and a sink within this little archway and then a large empty room which probably would have been the dining area. The sink wasn't even in there when we viewed the house but in order to get a mortgage a property has to be habitable and needs to have some sor...

I realised the other day that it may be hard to picture the layout of our house and what walls we have removed etc if you haven't seen it in person, so thought I would share the floor plans, what has been moved and what will be moved. You can see all the before photos here to show the photos of the full house. Also I love a floor plan, it was my favourite part of house hunting and even now I like to look at listings for houses and look at the floor plans...I'm a weirdo ok... The floor plan started out when we bought the house as the below (this is from the listing). The blank area next to the room labelled "kitchen/diner" is under the archway in the original "kitchen" and they missed off the door from the living room to the kitchen on here but it went out of the top left of the living room into the hallway. It generally had a nice flow and plenty of space, but we wanted to adjust the kitchen a bit. The first phase of the wall removal (...

This is where the week by week rundowns will likely end, as it breaks down into single projects after we moved in at the end of week 4. We had to focus in on finishing things or progressing them rather than having 500 unfinished things and also having to live in the house! Through week 4 there was less progress by us as we spent some evenings packing up our stuff and moving it in gradually and some evenings working on the house. At this point we just needed to get it reasonably habitable and make room for our furniture. Moving in was relatively uneventful, we don't have masses of stuff to move and had been able to move smaller things into the house in our cars already so really only had the larger furniture and the last few boxes to move. We even managed a pub lunch halfway through the day :) We had a skip delivered and loaded this up, clearing the rubbish and rubble from the back garden and also putting the old carpets in there. From a waste reduction point of view we t...

Week two is where it started getting real and walls started coming down. The first weekend we had the house my dad came over and fitted the steel support beam, and started taking down the kitchen walls! As a reminder this is what it looked like before This photo shows the start of the work and where the beam sits in relation to the living room, there was another hole on the opposite wall for the beam to slot in. Once the support system was all in place the wall started to be knocked down! We were left with it looking like this after the main demolition work was done (that hunk of concrete was taken off I just snapped this picture while we were waiting for someone with a larger cutting tool to come and do it!) You can see where my brother had started on the electrical work in these photos, as the room that we were going to use as the kitchen had been a dining room before it had no counter level plugs (and actually only one double socket for the whole roo...