It is with great regret that I am posting less blogs than I used to. This frustrates me because as I have said before this is my diary, or my account if you will of the events that constitute our first years in setting up our first and possibly not our last business. I publish via a blog so others can tune in if they wish and when I have more time I like to look back at the oddities of the historic events which Alison & I have encountered that finally culminated in the opening of this small business.
The infrequency of the blogs are actually for fairly good reasons in that we are simply just so busy and have been for the last 3- 4 months with our holiday cottage being booked up virtually solidly from June through to December and the B&B really busy right up until we took a 2 week holiday late September driving from Norfolk to Copenhagen..... We cannot stand holidays which for the most part involves sitting on a beach drinking a cocktail and only getting up to feed. No we like a little adventure, nothing major or too far away just getting out there and seeing a small part of an ever fascinating world.
Before we left we had several tasks that needed action one of them being to organise and make more habitable a room off our kitchen which we tend to use as a dinning room come lounge. It was clearly an old barn or stable at one time but along the line it has had a door knocked through from the main house and consequently thereafter used as extended living quarters.
When we first saw this room it was very dark and had a row of chairs lined up as a meeting house might, it was called the refectory and so was likely used as the dining area previously.
This is the only photo I have of the original look to the room. The stonewall at the end of the room is fairly new (i.e .some time in the last 30 years) and it effectively cuts the length of the barn in the middle allowing more rooms to be made behind it and above it in the eaves.
This results in the ceiling beams only being about 6' from the floor and as I am 6'1" tall they represent a constant challenge which Alison does not have to suffer.
The walls are painted white but there clearly is no damp-proofing and so there is a small level of dampness in some places but nothing that is a cause for concern.
The floor like so many in this house has been covered in concrete probably hiding some really interesting old cobbles or flagstones and on top of this some rather nasty old 1970's carpet tiles have been well and truly stuck down, totally impossible to remove without a blowtorch or something.
The challenge here was not a major one we simply want to be able to sit in the room, eat and be able to watch TV.
We chose not to repaint the walls as the white was the most obvious choice to lighten the room anyway and it was in quite good nick. The floor however made the room feel dowdy and gloomy and so we decided to buy an off cut to lay ourselves. The thing was though, this room is 18' long and about 8-9' wide so remnants were generally too small. Luck would have it that Alison's father was replacing a carpet in his main living room and also in his dining room so we asked if we could have it as it was still in a reasonable condition and certainly good enough for our 'den'.
The carpet was so big that we lay it out on the garden lawn and drew the shape of our den with a felt tip marker then with a knife I cut hard and deep. When I had finished and taken the carpet away you could clearly see the shape of the refectory outline in the lawn and lots of fluff everywhere. We had to use strips of parcel tape face down to pick up the bits of fluff by sticking them to a strip until it was full then cut another and lay it on the lawn picking up more. I was very conscious that we had guests in the cottage whom could return at any time to witness us seemingly giving our lawn a Bikini waxing thus further advancing Norfolk's reputation for oddity amongst the London socialites.
As in many other rooms in the house the light fittings had been handmade from carved and chiselled wood, whilst this was all very clever they were now dirty, hard to clean, loose and cumbersome and so I removed them all swapping them for some more contemporary spot lights.
The final thing was to place the TV in the room and the most obvious thing was to wall mount it. I had chosen a wall that appeared to be all brick and as a perfect position to be viewed. Well 3 wall mounts later and more disagreements with the by now infamous flints hidden behind plaster I affixed a wall mount to a wall. I managed to get it reasonably level and 3 of the 4 screws securing it well embedded into the wall. the final hole for a screw was never going to get deeper than an inch into the wall and rather than see this empty hole on the bracket winking at me I elected to stick an inch long screw into it. Now this plays no part in the support of the bracket but it just made me feel better that I could see a screw head in it's correct place, my Yin and My Yang were in harmony and I could move on with my life.
So now the room is complete and we make regular use of it, another of those To Do tasks ticked off the list only a hundred more!
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