October 07

It's now October 2007 and Warren Cottage is ready and we've moved in!  It's brilliant! We've got a kitchen,  a water supply that provides drinkable water from the tap straight away!  An electric shower means washing in the morning isn't a problem and a small hot water cylinder holds enough hot water to fill a bowl for washing up.  The toilet is new and is now accessed from inside the house, thanks Guy for all your handwork there, that was a really grim job, I am forever grateful!  Here are some pics of us and Warren Cottage ready to move in to!

Guy's gran Ethel, came to visit for a cuppa to see how the renovations were going

It's lovely to have a kitchen with all modern appliances fitting in to it; fridge/freezer, dishwasher, hob and oven, washing machine and tumble dryer,  what a result, I'm happy with that!

We had to get four-wheel drive vehicles, the Audi TT and my lovely lovely Karmann Ghia  were replaced (that was a sad day when I saw her being driven off!)

The ground was fine in the dry, but as soon as it rained you couldn't get off this drive even in the four-wheel drive, the wet chalk is ice-like when wet and on this slope with regular road tyres it was a comedy to watch!

Old furniture left behind by the previous owners had to be cleared, we loaded it all up and Guy took it away!

Guy is very happy his pick-up is coming in so handy!

"MOVING IN DAY!"  It took a while with only the pick up!  Guy's swapped his white pick up for a stealthy black one!

The new toilet area and Guy installed a sink for us.  OK, it's freezing in here in the winter, the window has ice on the inside, but it is luxury compared to going outside to get to it!  The wall opposite used to be the door from the outside!

A new front door was needed as we had to make the house more secure, break-in's had been attempted on the last one!

Living room with a bay window looking out to the view!  The snug area is just to the right of shot with the sofa under the window.  The kitchen is through a door off to the left of the living room

This is the snug, the warmest place in the house, where we spend most of our time!

This is the living room, the photo is taken standing in the snug area, the shower room is through the door to the left of the fire.  We don't use this area very much because it's chilly and this log burner isn't as good as the small one in the snug, also there's no TV to tempt us here!  It's good to have this second burner in the winter when it's freezing!

Sofa in the snug and the dining table in the living room

September 07 - October 07

It is September 2007 and before we moved in we had lots of DIY to do!  Warren cottage is a going to be a great place to live!

This is going to be the kitchen

A new floor to replace the rotten one in the kitchen area, think it must have got really damp over the years

Replacing some wall that had rotted gave us a chance to put in some insulation, the house doesn't very much!

More rotten floor to replace.  Wow, no wonder I can hear the mice, they're right under my feet!

More structural work and a bit more insulation, this will be the only warm room in the house!

Guy in the living room with the snug area behind him and a door through to the hall on his right

The old pump, 20 pumps would get water from the outside roof collecting tank to inside the house, it worked really well....I didn't like the look of the water though!  We used bottled water until we had the borehole sunk and water attached to the house!

Kitchen door and entrance to the house

Living room snug area, pic taken from the door to the hall

The hall, a REALLY chilly area

This would become our bedroom it looks out to the view

The door to our bedroom off the hall and the lovely fireplace

The chimney needed some mortar and a new pot, Guy's climbing skills and head for heights came in handy!

Guy's homemade scaffold worked a treat and made for a very safe job!

Guy's got his harness on because those old asbestos tiles and wooden roof didn't look too secure, but looking at the chimney stack he's attached too isn't that reassuring either

The scaffold wasn't cheap to make, but it sure was good!

That old pot had to go, but I re-used it as a bird bath!

Guy's working out how to tackle it, it was a heavy pot and his perch wasn't that steady!

Pot removed and it was time to get the chimney liner installed, this wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be!  I was downstairs in the living room shoving it up and getting showered in sooty bits! It was sharp at the end and a bit unwieldy!

Guy put duck/gaffer tape on the end of the chimney liner where it's really sharp, good idea!

Guy mortared in a slab and set the log burner on top of it, attached the flue and then we had, at last, as source of heat!   This log burner is Guy's best ever purchase in the last 10 years he said!

My Dad, Chris Hodgson, he helped with so many things; kitchen installation, putting in a consumer unit, wiring up the house,  putting in electric heaters and all the lights, lots of woodwork, there wasn't much he wasn't involved with, Guy and I were very grateful for all his help, it made for a much quicker job.  Many hands make light work!

Our first electric socket

First electric lights!  Oil lamps were installed on the walls when we arrived, but they weren't practical for our needs, so we had to take them down, which was a shame, but, living in this house was temporary after all, eventually the whole house was going to have to be replaced as it was mortgageable!  We had to keep this thought in mind with all the DIY, there was no point in going OTT, in a couple of years it would all be gone!

Curtains are now up in every room, thank you Mum for your hours of ironing there!  It's also time to try out the second log burner stove!

The hard workers, Guy and Dad!

Dad's installing a heater in the shower room, Guy and I are forever grateful for this idea as there's ice on the windows in this room during the winter and in the morning it makes all the difference to turn the heater on whilst we're in that space

Renovating the existing cottage Sep 2007

In September 2007 Guy and I had access to the cottage, prior to that a family were still renting it, they loved it too. They lived in a very natural eco friendly way, "off the grid" as people like to call it and they had been very happy there for the previous eighteen months. Since January 2007, when we first met the owners of the cottage and they agreed to sell it to us, Guy and I had been finding it hard to curb our excitement, literally having to force ourselves not to go driving up the track to see the cottage or go walking past it at every opportunity. We both felt that we would be happy living at the cottage, (albeit with a little modernisation!) and we were keen to move in, but, we had mixed feelings about it. Our moving in, meant the rental family moving out and we knew how much they loved being there too. Our reaction was similar when we thought about the couple that were selling to us, afterall the cottage had been in their family for a very long time and they had many happy memories of their times spent there.


As soon as we had access we made a start, first thing..... Getting a borehole dug!

Borehole drilling rig arrives

Rig erected....let the drilling commence!

Borehole rig

2 weeks later and the first water from borehole, it was a bit gritty!

We needed to get a running water supply to the house. There was a rainwater collection tank on the land, installed a longtime ago, that could be used for loo flushing, we weren't sure it was a good idea to use it for drinking from either, we decided that without a backup mains supply to cut in when rainwater levels were low, a borehole would be a good idea. This meant drawing our water up from underground, from a natural water supply right beneath our feet! I'd never given too much thought to water running deep underground, but as it turned out, alot of the people in our area were using boreholes and they were really happy with the 
results.  

Good enough to bottle it!

Guy's happy with the first bottle!

The borehole was pretty expensive to drill out and being quite high up on the hill might not have helped, would it have been cheaper if we hadn't been 400' up, and does the water table vary in height I wondered, anyway, we needed to go down about 180 feet to tap into a reliable (in times of drought!) depth of water. It took two weeks of boring before we got to the water supply, it was definitely a eureka moment! The rig used for the boring was a straightforward structure, the frame looked like a big sturdy version of a frame for a childs swing. Then hanging in the middle was a long tube of heavy metal, hollow, it was being suspended by a cable that was attached to a winch, which had it's engine attached to a big generator. The metal tube would be dropped down and because of its heavy weight it would pummel the ground and earth would be rammed up inside its hollow core. This was a repetitive process and noisey too, most of the time I escaped to work and left the two chaps on the job to it.  The water comes into the house and into a pressure tank which always indicates about 3.5 bar, from there it goes through a U.V. filter to kill off any nasty bugs and then out of the taps, tastes fine!

First water from the borehole into the house!  You can see the pipe running under the house, but as we had no plumbed in sink I had to send it straight back out the window!

We needed a holding tank for the water to sit until we turned on a tap to use it and this is it!  The tank maintains a pressure of 3.5 bar, if it's ever less than this it is an indication to us that there may be a leak out of the pump at the bottom of the borehole!  This isn't a hot water cylinder tank!

The long mirrored cylinder is a UV light.   When it is connected up to the blue holding tank (below out of shot)  by pipework, all the water will pass through this light before it goes anywhere in the house,  it kills the DNA in the water and as a result any potential water carrying nasties that could make you sick!

This  will be the shower room.  It was like a closet space before, we found a single mattress in it but no plumbing.  There's space to turn round on the spot....but not to swing a cat!  Ahead will be the sink and to the right is the shower cubicle.  Guy had to raise the floor to allow the shower outflow pipe to have enough fall

We're off mains drainage up here, which is hardly surprising! Some pongy whiffs led us to the septic tank about 20m down hill from the house. It was pretty well hidden in the thick of the surrounding undergrowth, a single chamber made of brick with a dodgy lid on the top which allowed the stench to leak out!  Lifting the lid was an unpleasent business and not far beneath it was a crusty layer of waste, Mmm....that really needed some urgent pumping out before it all spilled out, we had no idea when it had last been done, years maybe. We were just hoping that beneath the crusty layer was a liquid layer and beneath that, at the bottom of the tank, the solid waste that we would need to get pumped out, that's how it's supposed to be. Pumping out will happen annually, the heavy solids sink to the bottom of the tank and the bacteria breaks it all down...nice eh!