Hanging around

Our own custom designed and fabricated traditional sliding barn door system. We managed to resurrect the old back door and with plenty of sanding, love and beeswax we are stoked with the end result. So nice to upcycle original parts of the building.

Scary times

Excavating to establish the extent (or not) of foundations always makes me have a few sleepless nights. The good weather predicted gave us the courage to get on with it and we hope to get everything reinforced and sound before we see rain…

Renderplas EB12

Sometimes you can spend hours looking for a solution to a complex detail that is going to make a things so easy and elegant. We wanted to create an uplighting LED strip channel in the family bathroom vaulted ceiling. This involved overlapping the plasterboard the problem was how to finish the board edge.

After much searching I found the Renderplas EB12 drylining board stop bead.

Having tried all their stockist i got in touch with the company direct who couldn't have been more helpful. Look forward to posting pics of the solution sometime in the near future.

Roof

Not happy with out roof. The structural engineer has advised us that it has to come off and be seriously beefed up if we want to return it to a traditional slate one and get insulation onto it. It is pretty much made of matchsticks and lots of them are rotten!

It’s unplanned things like this that really are the terror of renovating, but on the plus side we can put in a new set of rafters and this should make tying into the new extension much easier.

Laying bare

The scary bit – ripping out all the old covered up walls and ceilings and laying bare the fabric of the building.

In this case there were some nasty surprises – but more of that later!

Oak post

We needed an oak post to make the corner window something special, so i went to Winkleigh Timber and after a scrabble around the yard found the following…

With a bit of sanding and oiling it has made the corner a beautifully organic addition to the eco-extension.

   

Fire pit

Just a little idea of mine that went against everything our stone mason had been taught… Wanted the border of the fire pit to look like it was breaking through the ground and reaching up…