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Disaster
Spoke to Soon
Month Five
The story so far
The Fireplace

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Disaster

What a day we had yesterday!
It started with the dog ( 8 month old Lou Lou ) being sick every where, which followed by us discovering an attempted break in, and terrible weather. The weather is significant as since we bought the farm the prevailing wind has been from the west, but not yesterday it was coming in from the east.
A cold day Tom decided to get the house warmed up and lit the open fire and the multifuel stove which does the central heating. The bigger the fire the warmer the radiators get, so he made an enormous fire up and got it going, the next thing we had blow back down the chimney and smoke plumped out of the stove filling the room.

Spoke to Soon

Poor Tom has had quite a bad cough and cold the past week and has felt wretched, and been dragging himself around trying to get some of the plumbing done. We have decided on a multi fuel stove with back boiler to do the heating and hot water. I was quite confident about it until the water cylinder arrived and its over two meters tall, that will take some heating! A trail was done on the stove and thats managed to heat up ten radiators, about half of what we will have on completion, test to be done on the water yet!

Month Five

I have to say thatI am in awe of Tom he just keeps going whilst I am feeling exhausted, he really is amazing. This week the pile of debris that had been piled up in front of the house he has flattened down into the base for the patio.  I could not believe he did it as there was so much building rubble I was certain that we would have to hire in several dozen skips. The scale is amazing as the patio is the size of the average garden in a new build, our garden furniture is going to look quite lost on it.

The story so far

 Four and half months in and we have pretty much blown the budget! Lots of sleepless nights thinking about how we are going to finish the job with the little money we have left. Its quite depressing, but then when I think of what we have achieved and what we have done to Maud ( the house) its really quite astounding. Maud has had three flat roofs replaced, the large section of pitch and tile roof replaced, floors lifted where they had dropped and steels inserted. Thirty concrete lintes half a dozen steels, floors leveled, the old veranda demolished and replaced with a new swish conservatory.

The Fireplace

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Four months in

Well its four months since we started work on this project and whilst we are still enjoying it both Tom and I are very tired and our budget is very depleted!!
Tom and Brian spent last week getting the chimneys ready, we have had to rebuild two and the other two which had been capped had about 100years of Jackdaw nests. It took all of Tom and Brians strength to get the nests out and there must have been around 6ft in each chimney, which is astounding when you think each nest was brought in by small birds.
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