The first week

Goodness... it's hard to know where to start. We spent last week gutting the house, preparing it to be treated for damp and timber beetle. The weather, up until the weekend, was glorious - weather for alfresco picnic lunches, weather for digging new vegetable beds and making friends with the neighbour's hens (as well as our lovely neighbours!). It really has seemed, despite the hard physical work, like a week in heaven. We have been ripping up carpets, stripping wallpaper and struggling to remove ancient paint from the treads of our staircase. Here are some pictures to get us started:


The room that will be our master bedroom was covered in a patterned black wallpaper. The entire upstairs was carpeted, but the removal of the carpets revealed the most beautiful old floorboards throughout. We knew it probably had floorboards, but we had no idea what condition they would be in. I nearly died, they were so good. They are a bit patchy in colour here and there, and there are random spots of red and orange gloss paint all over, but we are not going to cover them up again with carpet, oh no!


This is a different view of the same room, with some of the paper stripped and a glimpse of the floor.


This is the somewhat cavernous sitting room. It's so big I am starting to have panic attacks about how to use the space, and the fact that we have hardly any furniture. We are going to rattle around in this place!


The stairs, we discovered, seem to have been used for some kind of painterly experiment in orange and yellow. They are going to need some work!


One of the local girls bothered the husband whilst he was digging out the turf. She must have eaten about fifty worms and grubs in one go, the fatty. That said, I've also eaten an enormous amount of food this week, including some delicious scones from one of our neighbours. They have all made us feel really welcome there and I can't wait to move in in three weeks' time.

More next time!