Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it. Margaret Thatcher

And so it came to pass...

That we managed to get the walls and ceiling plastered, dried and painted,
The builder was an angel and should have been sainted,
The plumber fitted the shower, sink and the loo
and blow me down, he even managed the central heating too!


The power was connected to the switches and to every light,
I'd speak with the Queen to ask for the electrician to be made a Knight,
My chippy, sawed, planed, sanded, screwed and nailed.
Without these guys our grand plan would have crashed and failed.


But guess what? We got it done!
We met our deadlines, we actually won!
So here's to hard work and the sense of achieving,
it is just a matter of planning (and an awful lot of believin').




Below you will be inundated with photos showing befores and afters from every angle and sometimes the several steps too. In truth there are still a couple of snags that need fixing like the missing skirting board in the en-suite but this did not upset our guests who just gushed with praise for the room... very heart warming it was too.

There are still areas to complete, the downstairs cloak room is close to completion and the new family bathroom on the landing but these are decorating issues and I'll post these as they are finished.


So here we go then, We present you with the Grand unveiling and present THE 2nd GUEST ROOM..........

1. This wall was knocked down to open up the room to the size seen in the next photo

2. Taken from exactly the same position as above,the wall now removed, you can see the stud work of the new en-suite

3. And here is the finished article with the en-suite in the far corner

1. Once again we start with the pre-works view this time from the landing looking into the two rooms. All the walls and doorways are to be removed.

2. By comparing these two pictures you can see how the process has opened up the space to one large room.

3. The smaller room and old doorways gone meant that we could now place a King-size bed into the new room.

1. This is looking in the complete opposite direction from the last photos. One wall removed I am working on the next. You can see the wall is an original one made from lath and plaster but the doorway is a newer addition, no matter it all had to go!

2. Same view as before, just a little work has been carried out since. The black beam in the ceiling is the only indication to the position of the old dividing wall.

1. From this stripped down room missing a substantial portion of wall and a door to the room below....

2. The pine cladding was a late idea of ours to give the room an interesting twist.

1. Another view shows the wardrobe that would become the en-suite and how the configuration changed.

2. The new loft hatch at the top left of the picture marks the position of the old landing area.

1.

2. Top right of this photo you can see the old loft access. This was so small that I couldn't even get my chest through it, which was worrying really as one of the electricians climbed up through it several times!

3.

1. Planned en-suite position.

2. En-suite doorway

3. A peek into the new en-suite.

4. En-suite

So there we have it. It was very close indeed and we have had two days of guests since completion. The first guests came prior to us having the new pine wardrobe built but everything else had to be ready for them and to show you how tight it was in getting the room ready for them the photo below was taken the day before their arrival. You can see the electrician and the plumber working their socks off and we had not even made the bed yet. By making the bed I mean constructing it not the soft furnishings.

The guests arrived the next day and loved the room.

Then the next guest was due and again the photo was taken the day before she came whilst my chippy (carpenter) and I considered the question,"How do we fit these two cabinets into the space next to the chimney?".
They are both 8' tall and made to fit to within 1mm tolerance and by Jove was that a squeeze!

All I could do was put my faith in the carpenter and allow him the use of my 16 stone body weight.

We feel the end product was worth the wait, time and effort and hope it meets with the approval of our guests. The next blog will look at some details within the room, the finishing touches, if you will.


Happy New Year everyone.








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“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love... and then we return home.” Australian Aboriginal Proverb

This house seems to attract visitors. Which is fortunate when you run a B&B. But it also attracts other visitors. Mike has mentioned the mouse nests and he also removed five bin bags of old bird nests from the attic before the roof insulation was put down earlier this month.

But the visitors I am referring to are the human kind who come on a sort of pilgrimage. Regular readers of this blog will know that we've managed to trace back the history of the building going back more than 250 years and we know the names of the previous owners and have three photos on the dining room wall of the house when it was a shop with all the employees outside at three different times in the last century or so.

What we have less detail on is what happened here when the property was owned by Percy the retired vicar and his first wife. Although we have some written artefacts (a book of photos and prayers for the village), a few copies of letters amongst the deeds which were often copied onto the back his sermons and the letter to his former parishioners; we don't know much else about what happened here.

And this is where the visitors will come in handy. Some months after we moved in Mike and Claire where here when Percy's son and his wife called at The Old Bakery whilst on a visit to the local churchyard and they were pleased to see how we were restoring the house. But nothing particularly unusual about a family member visiting us.

This summer we had a knock on the door late one morning as we were in the middle of a changeover between guests and outside stood an elderly man and woman. Initially I thought they were Jehovahs Witnesses and was about to politely tell them I wasn't interested when the gentleman explained that he was Percy's best man many years ago and was on holiday in Norfolk and had wanted to take one last look at The Old Bakery.

We invited them in and sat and chatted to them both over a cup of coffee in the garden and learnt that both they and Percy and his wife had been on missionary work in Africa in their younger days and that Percy had bought The Old Bakery as a holiday home in the 1970's before retiring here. He mentioned that he was going to try and find Percy's memorial plaque in the local churchyard. This is something that Claire and Mike had found so Claire drew him a map and Mike lent him Percy's garden shears so that he could neaten things up a bit. They returned a short while later, pleased that they had found the plaque and even happier that all around the plaque the grass has been neatly maintained. Which was just as well as the shears were rather blunt and his best man joked that he would be having a word with Percy about that when he next saw him. His best man is 90 and felt that this would be his last trip to The Old Bakery and he was quite emotional about re-visiting the place where Percy had been so happy.

A couple of days ago the phone rang and an elderly lady asked it if would be possible to pop in and see us that morning as she had lots of connections with The Old Bakery. We invited her over for a cup of tea and she explained that she now lived in Norwich and as she no longer was able to drive she had persuaded her son to drive her over to the house. She had been part of the healing groups that met here in the 1980s and had taken part in lots of services in the chapel (now our office). We gave her a guided tour of the house and talked about the changes we had made, the letter that we'd recently found (we gave her a copy) and have promised to send her some photos of the house. She had bought her camera with her but after taking one picture she discovered that she had run out of film.

Over a cup of tea we mentioned that we had no idea what Percy looked like and that we would like to have a photo of him if she had one. She thought about who she knew that might have one and then remembered that there was a video of Percy taken at The Old Bakery which was about the work that he was doing and that had been shown on a local t.v. programme.

We have extended an open invitation to her and her friends and hope to learn more of Percy and the life of The Old Bakery in due course.

The thing always happens that you really believe in;and the belief in a thing makes it happen. Frank Lloyd Wright

Meanwhile back in the main bedroom work has started to build up the new walls for the room and the en-suite.
In the following photo you can see the window to the left that is to become the new family bathroom (on the landing), the cupboard above the stairwell (behind the stud work) which is where I found the letter and a mesh of old and new stud work timber frames. This framework has a layer put up by the previous owner (in the 1970's) and the newer looking wood is the framework put up by my builder to thicken the depth of the original wall which would also allow us to fit acoustic rock-wool to make a more robust sound barrier. At the far right you can see the beginnings of the formation of the new en-suite which has been added to the old built in wardrobe.

The loose timbers leaning up against the stud wall are just some of the many timbers that I salvaged from the areas that I demolished.












The following two pictures demonstrate the way in which the wall was then created and the door to the landing positioned. At last the room starts to take shape.

Over in the en-suite the plumber was struggling once again with the copious quantities of flint tearing out enough to make a rockery just so he could seclude two pipes for the shower's feed.

The white pipes in the last photo come up from the landing floor and hidden in both that cavity and under the floor boards next to the chimney breast I found two old, but quite large, mouse nests. They appeared to have made them from the large amounts of newspapers that Percy (the previous owner) had used in his renovations. All were very faded....

The builder then erected stud work on the existing wall that separated this room from the next one and also filled this with acoustic soundproofing rock-wool. I had asked for this as the lath and plasters hollow 4" seemed inadequate to me and so that wall is now some 8" thick which on testing has seemed very effective.

The wall at the far end now 8" thick

Throughout this episode the electricians and the plumber were working around us and most days we were having to carry out some decorating job ahead of their next days work which really restricted what we could do. We were scheduled to have a guest in this room in just 10 days time and we had no plaster on the walls, the ceiling was still to be plastered (and then )painted , the electrics were still a long way from being completed, there were just pipes in the en-suite and a shower tray. The two radiators had also yet to be fitted.

 The room was still full of building materials and chunks of skirting board missing. Furthermore we had decided to give the room a special 'feature' wall behind the bed covering it in pine tongue and groove just to give ourselves added pressure. Oh, and of course we had to buy the carpet, get it laid, paint the walls (before the carpet came of course), order the bed (and build it), furnish the room and rub down the windows and repaint.


Then there was the en-suite......


This was missing a toilet, a sink, a shower cubicle, some floor boards, the floor covering, the lights, the extract fan, the heated towel rail and oh yes a door would be nice too.

Of course we couldn't even start the painting of the main room until 2 to 3 days after it had been plastered.

The 10 days also included 2 weekends so that meant of those 10 days we had no trade people doing any work on the place for 4 of them!

The pressure was most certainly upon us.

All this time we had B&B guests staying with us in the other bedroom and we were having to keep things running quite normally for them as if none of this was going on.

Now the guests that had booked in this second room were aware that the room may have been of a poor décor because they had been so desperate for a room to see the big Christmas show at Thursford they took what we had. We thought that we would have had this room done by early November and they thought they were getting the old existing set up. So whilst they were prepared for poor décor, they certainly were expecting a minimum of plaster on the walls and a bed!!


Would we achieve?

Would we have to put them up in a hotel?

Would they have to have our bed??

Would we have to sleep in the tent??? ...... In November!!!!

At this stage even we didn't know what the outcome was going to be.

TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED..............









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A shower, A shower.... My landing for a shower.

The problem with having ambitious ideas is that there is a great danger that you may also have the will power to try attempt to carry them out. The expression biting off more than you can chew would probably be one of the more apt sayings for phase 3 of the Great Old Bakery renovations and 'so called' improvements.

Here are a couple of photos of the upstairs landing. In the first you can see through a door way into one of the smaller bedrooms. The second photo shows the same landing with the same bedroom door on the left only this time it is closed.    

 

It is here that we planned to squeeze in a new bathroom. We would demolish the wall with the fire exit sign on it and rebuild the same about 4' further back into the room. Then we would build a wall effectively partitioning off a room size area on the bigger landing and creating a small corridor. Again, have a look at the two plans on my Blog of the 14th December. 

  

Once again I had to commence the project with my sturdy hammer and an old screw driver by attacking the wall that had to be demolished. As before the wall was made from wood studs covered with chipboard that clung to the studs with a passion. I bashed, I crashed and smashed and slashed. I banged and twanged and clanged and I humped, thumped, cursed and grumped and yet another wall came tumbling down. 

We were now ready to commence the re-build and to create a new bathroom. Well actually we would not have a bath in there just a shower, loo and sink.

The small black pipe just visible, on the left hand side of this photo, that disappears into the floor was later to cause  my kitchen ceiling to incur a small seismic shift but more of that later.

With the wall now completely removed the bedroom became an unusually long 'galley' bedroom and just a little exposed.               Under the old carpet and underlay there were several pages of newspapers dating back to 1976. A copy of the Sun had a photo of Jim Callaghan and a headline "Jim declares war on Maggie!" I wonder who won?   Below these some 1970's style lino lay stuck with some bitumen like substance which is practically impossible to remove.        I was 16 back in '76 and had just moved to Birmingham with my parents. My exam results were horrendous and I did an extra year in college to try to improve the situation finishing just months before the Winter of discontent started to blow in.
To me this was a dark and gloomy era being turned down for job after job, it seemed to me that every single person in the country that actually had a job was on bloody strike!    Even Pans People were to leave Top of The Pops, it was indeed a dark time.  However we still had the iconic Bohemian Rhapsody blasting us into '76 and of course my hormones were being prodded by the stunning girls of Abba. Corrrrr...  It is also easy to forget that despite the strikes and financial crisis we had Concorde make it's first commercial flight in that year and even more amazingly the first prototype Space Shuttle, The Enterprise, was rolled out for us all to see. Here is a great Pup quiz question... to the nearest 5 how many times did The Enterprise go into space?
So anyway the world was, at that time, a hub bub of crazyness just as it is now and just as the retired vicar was renovating The Old Bakery then so we are doing now. I am resolved to hide some little time bombs of our own for the next foolish person to work on this building.


I came across another of these time capsules when I pulled a piece of wood from a cupboard above our stairs.

I noticed a piece of type written paper sticking out from the filler and it seemed to have a drawing of The Old Bakery on it not too dissimilar to the ink drawing that I had done. On closer inspection It was clear that this was a letter and so I attempted to extract it but it tore in half and was obviously a letter from the Vicar to his parishioners on his moving away from his old parish to his place of retirement here in The Old Bakery. It was missing half the page which was still embedded in the plaster. He had used this old letter to fill a gap by carefully folding the paper, concertina style, then stuffing it into a gap so he could fill the rest with a filling agent.

It was tantalizing that there was a letter filling in some more unknown information with regards to this building but I could only get the left half of the page. I looked to the right of this and saw another bit of paper tucked even further into the gap but with less filler around it and so little by little I eased it out, finally managing to remove it fully intact. I then unfolded the paper to find I could read the whole letter.






This is it's contents with just a few redactions (a word I had not heard of before the MP's expenses scandal) for the privacy of those involved......

This place is for ever giving up bits of the jig-saw which is its history.

Now with a blank page from which to work my builder began to form the room from wooden beams and plasterboard. Carefully placing the wall as per my plans,,,, gulp!

The plumbers and the electricians started their habitual burrowing under the floor boards to lay their relevant pipes and cables and soon the poor old floor boards had started to give up their ability to function as sturdy floor boards. It quickly became evident that I would need to lay a more solid floor if I was to prevent any movement of the shower tray when in use.

So my builder kindly took on the job of removing the knackered old boards and replacing them with some sheets of sturdy plywood. (The old boards were only half an inch thick).

I was washing up at the kitchen sink when I felt a little spray of dust hit my nose. Instinctively I glanced up to see from whence it had come only to find myself staring at a chunk of ceiling plaster about a foot long hanging about half an inch lower than it should, forming a distinctive crack as it did so.

I went upstairs to inform the builder who was not expecting such news. He carefully continued to remove the floor board that he was working on and then we quickly saw the problem.

It turned out that sometime in the last several decades someone had cut a floor joist right through but had made a make shift 'fix' by tying the sawn through joist to its two neighbouring ones. This in itself appeared to be a very foolish thing to have done. Skip on probably another decade or two and another person had been given the job of placing a waste pipe from my bedroom all the way through to the back of the house via this floor cavity. Well it appeared that this person worked out where the joists were and knocked a hole through the exterior wall. He then stuffed his waste pipe into the hole expecting it to run parallel to the joist but suddenly it became wedged as he fed it through. Unbeknown to him he had met the new cross joist that numb nuts had created previously. So what did he do? Well he chose to use brute force and ignorance and smashed his way through this reinforcing piece of timber which simply splintered into kindling wood! His pipe fed through, the reinforced timber compromised it was now only the crumbling floor boards that kept any form of integrity to these joists.
Another couple of decades and along comes my poor builder whom whilst replacing the dodgy floorboards inadvertently  lights the blue touch paper to this booby trap in the making for some 30 years and whoomf the lath and plaster ceiling takes a fall.

He is, however an excellent builder and has made a brilliant long term fix to the problem, however he has still yet to return to fix my ceiling which is planned for January.


Now we are getting close to the installations of the sinks, loos, showers and the hours of decorating all of which are the subject of the next blog....

WATCH THIS SPACE.


p.s.  It was a trick question as they never launched the Enterprise (named after the StarTrek space ship) into space at all. They had planned to do so but decided it was too expensive to refit the prototype ship and mothballed it instead cannibalising equipment from it for use on the subsequent shuttles, like a guy at a car scrap merchants salvaging an alternator for his VW Polo.

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Are you gonna try an' make this work Or spend your days down in the dirt - You see things CAN change - YES an' walls can come tumbling down! Paul Weller.

With so much to do and so many contractors involved I adopted the same methodology that I used in phases 1 and 2 drawing up a detailed plan on graph paper with fairly accurate measurements. I then used this to write a full specification that I needed from each trade and put them out to tender. Then having organised all this I did the 'look at me I'm a real builder' thing and stuck the before and after plans to the wall in the main room that was to be converted so they could refer to it if required.....

I'm not boasting that this plan was perfect, far from it but I used the techncal drawing skills that I had gleamed from my secondary school to draw something half decent. In truth my Technical drawing classes were not the most successful as half the time the fire alarm would be set off by the metal work classes (in the same block) and we'd all be evacuated. Or I'd be interrupted by flying pencils, flicking rulers or boomeranging set squares. I near enough gave up trying when right infront of the teacher (who was paying no attention) my nemesis and unrelenting school bully stood behind me and head butted me sending me plummeting to the floor. This school was on a route of decline at this point with a Prefect being stabbed for not letting another student in during break time and they even set fire to the school. Sadly the arsonist was so thick that they just set fire to the tuck shop run by the students for the students! I blame my brothers as they were both Head Boys at the school just ahead of me. Following in their wake I was a severe disappointment to the teachers who found it hard to believe that I was related to them.
"Andrew and James' brother! Are you sure? We are talking about the same lads are we? The last two Head Boys?"
"Yes sir", I would answer rather meekly. 
They'd look me up and down with an eyebrow raised, "Mmmmm", they'd consider for a moment and finally I could see them coming to terms with the disappointment knowing that they would have one less University candidate to their name.
I think it was only as a result of my brothers reputation that I made it to the dizzy heights of "Sub-Prefect", not even a full blown "Prefect". More a sub-standard version, of course as I walked around the school with my shiny new badge pinned to my lapel I would be greeted by being called a sub-perfect twat.        Life was not easy at school.

My builder was to start the work by removing the walls that separate the study from the main room but unfortunately he had squeezed our job in and so cold not start in time for this task and so I had to do it with some help from my father.
We had barely started before coming across these polystyrene tiles nailed to the interior of the stud wall, I assume as an insulation material. This material is classed as highly flammable or "Easily Ignited" and as such a little concerning that some of my walls were stuffed with it. There were 5 tiles in a stack held to the wall with a single nail but all very loose and I don't think they were that effective.

The photo above is just to illustrate where the wall was in the photo below.

 This wall put up a bit of a fight, most of the timber beams had super-size nails but it was mainly constructed from a covering of poor grade chipboard. Whilst I was tackling this I had a plumber and electrician crawling around lifting floorboards and chiselling out chunks of wall as they started their first fix. As we worked, my father and I, found ourselves trying to unravel the last alterations to this portion of the house. As I said most of the wall was chipboard stud and we already knew that the stairs had been moved sometime in the last 30 years. We found an old door layout formed in the floor boards that had been hidden under the stud wall and then as we moved onto the next wall more of these changes came to light. The next wall had a large amount of lath and plaster removed which had been replaced with chipboard and a doorway.

Slowly but surely we began to see back a couple of hundred years and formulate an understanding of how the room would have looked originally.

The old lath and plaster was clearly very old as the struts were attached to the attic rafters and ceiling.
Bit by bit I carried on dismantling this room. It might seem like heresy to true building historians but the willow laths would go on to make excellent kindlng for my fires.
This is going to be a cold winter, so cold that I would quite literally be burning the walls of my house to keep warm!

Here you can clearly see where at some point a chunk of lath and plaster had been removed in order that a door could be fitted. The small room ,we surmised, had been located in this position previously but was originally accessed from within the old bedroom only and was probably a wash room come dressing room.There would have been a jug of water and a bowl for them to carry out their ablutions.
As you look at the photo you can see the landing at the back of the picture. Well we believe that the stairs used to ascend right under the newer door and reach the top right in front of the brown door in the view.  This would make entry via the new door that I was dismantling impossible previously. Therefore the white wall to the right never existed and the original door to the main bedroom was beyond that which is now the new relocated position of the stairs. Does that all make sense to you? I hope so.
I continued to tear the place appart....

Here you can see where the newer stairs have been repositioned to.Well that hole is where we believe the original entrance to the bedroom would have been.
I was concerned that this stud wall was too thin and therefore not going to make a good acoustic barrier. This meant that I had to remove the covering and lining so a thicker stud could be created with special acoustic rock-wool filling the void.
Having peeled off more of the chipboard I once again found a shed load more of the polystyrene tiles nailed on as insulation.

Now just to remind you this was how the room looked prior to us starting the demolition......

And this is how it looked a week later....

.........Work in progress

This had taken the best part of a week to accomplish but I had removed every nail and screw from every piece of wood as I removed them. I now have a garage full of wood either for use in my allotment (for making netted cages) or for use elsewhere or indeed as fire wood.

Apart from the built in wardrobe to the right, which will end up being the en-suite, I had now completed the demolition in the main bedroom and it was ready for the builder to move in.

I however had not finished destroying walls, no, now I needed to go to my daughters bedroom and remove a wall, something, I instinctively sensed, that she will not be happy about!




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