Project Money Pit Week 12: Happy birthday to me!

With Miss P’s furniture being delivered in less than 2 weeks time now, we have set about finishing off all the little jobs that we have putting off for weeks. As a result we have spent most of our time filling, painting, sanding and generally making the house tidy in preparation for an influx of flowery chintz, wooden hearts and the odd table and chair. Meanwhile, in the kitchen Mr P has begun the tiling (now that we have finally been over to Bristol to collect them) and the kitchen is slowly but surely beginning to take shape.

Work over the weekend was somewhat curtailed though by the birthday celebrations of yours truly. After last year’s rush of 30th birthdays, the possibility of celebrating being 31 was somewhat of an anti-climax. However with the fateful day falling on a Saturday this weekend, it did mean the opportunity for a mini celebration was too good to miss. We were joined by the Bartletts, Kemps and Scott/Hawkins’s for a fine barbecue and much grilled meet was consumed (see below!!). I was also very fortunate to receive a rather whazzy bureau from Miss P which has now taken up pride of place in our stately dining room. The books on the top were a present from Mrs P and has now set me off on an antique book collecting mission which will certainly keep me busy at our car boot sales for the not too distant future. Perhaps that library I have always dreamed of will become a reality now?!

Project Money Pit Week 11: Getting green fingers

With the dining room nearing completion (the carpet is being laid on Tuesday) I was finally allowed back out in the garden to try and stop it resembling a builder’s yard. With the weather on our side, I was ably aided by Mr and Mrs T who paid their first visit to the money pit since week 4. Back then, the house was a shell of what it is now – no flooring, no painting and no kitchen – so to say that they were amazed at the progress was an understatement! They were almost as awe struck as the first day that they came to the house back in June, albeit this time in a positive way, rather than in one of complete horror!

Following a very nice lunch in the Mill at Rode we set about tackling the dandelions and various weeds that have taken over the back garden in recent weeks. They had soon cleared half the lawn of dandelions [and grass!] and then moved on to the gravel at the back and within a few hours had the place looking very ship shape. They also encouraged us to make the most of the tiers of the old pond and so we decided to utilize the brick work rather than destory it and so have created a rather nice raised bed (and unearthed plenty of nice top soil). Hopefully next time they are up to visit we will have been able to finish off digging up the lawn and might even have re-seeded it by then.

Despite our best attempt to economize our effort and not just demolish everything in sight, once Sunday came around I couldn’t resist another wield of the sledge hammer. There a few nice, easy wins with the remaining red bricks and then set about working on the breeze blocks. Unfortunately, once I got down to the bottom, I soon discovered concrete foundations – well why wouldn’t there be foundations – and so the easiness of my job soon became less. A couple of hours of Time Team style excavation soon revealed the extent of the problem and the small, inconsequential wall which I thought I would knock down in a few minutes was eventually removed. This now separates the pond from the ‘raised area’ and will hopefully make the demolition easier going forward. However the fact that the pond is now full to the brim with rubble may life that little bit more tricky. Perhaps it is time to order that skip after all!!

Project Money Pit Week 8/9: A stately home

It’s been a quiet couple of weeks in Project Money Pit, however with Miss P and I finally having a weekend off at the same time, we thought it was about time we started to attack the dining room with a real force. With the kitchen all but done, it means that the dining room is actually in an empty enough state that we could start decorating. Priorities were the removal of the oragen cornicing and ceiling rose, hammering off the diddley-dos on the wood panelling and the last but by no means least, paint the whole thing a nice neutral beigey colour. As you can see from the picture below, the transformation has been quite spectacular and Malc the carpet man will be arriving before we know it to finish the room off with another nice bit of oatmeal carpet. As Miss P says, it looks like a grand old stately home, and all we need now is her furniture, but that is still a couple of weeks away from happening.

To celebrate our achievement, we fired up the barbecue and took advantage of the good weather with plates of meat and other lovely munchies which enjoyed with the Cleavers and the Phins (who we invited to make the long journey across the Wilthsire border from Bath).

Project Money Pit Week 7

It’s been a relatively slow week in the house this week. With the living room taking shape and our new housemates settling, it means that we have been doing lots of little jobs, which alas don’t make for interesting blog posts. The most interesting thing that has happened this week is that Dan the carpenter has been to fit the worktops in the kitchen, which make it look very swish indeed. As a result we have been able to put the handles on the drawers in the kitchen and actually start to use it like an actual kitchen.

Project Money Pit Week 6: Lounging in the lounge

This week has seen a big push to get the lounge finished as we are soon to be joined by some house guests (Hannah’s friends, the Cleavers from Bristol) and it seemed only civilized to offer them one working room! We have also been joined this week by Mrs P again and as such the Passmore work ethic has been in full effect, meaning that the target of a fully working lounge has been more than easily met over the last 7 days.

As you can see from the picture, the lounge has undergone quite the transformation in the last few weeks and I have to admit, the lounge is probably my favourite room in the house right now. If you consider that when we first saw the house it had manky carpet, no floor, woodchip wallpaper that was peeling off and cottage cheese  mould all over the walls, the transformation is astonishing. The addition of the fireplace has turned the room from a fairly mediocre space to a really eye-catching room. We were fortunate as Mr P found us some really nice tiles at a reclamation  yard in North Dorset, and Mrs P has done a fantastic of treating the grate with retarded rust paint. Add to that the fantastic surround, which fits almost perfectly and you have a pretty stunning focal point for the room.

With carpet down and the whazzy wallpaper that Miss P has been umming and ahhing over for the past 2 weeks, then you now have a room which is a genuine pleasure to spend time in. Unfortunately, with the sofa and cordoroy armchair now in situ, there may be even more distractions than ever to put us off finishing the rest of the house!

Project Money Pit Week 5: Comings and goings

It has been a week of coming and going this week at Project Money Pit, as the pond and scaffolding finally left us and a few new additions to the project made an appearance!

First the departures… the scaffolding came down on Thursday and the house now looks like a proper house again! RTC and Fred have done an amazing job and after last weeks little paint-a-thon, the place looks better than ever. With the scaffolding disappearing at long last though, this also meant the last appearance from RTC (to collect his cash) however not before he took away the gigantic breeding pond from the back of the garden. In order to get it out, they had to remove the back fence and then Mr P, RTC, Fred and myself could slowly lever it out and into Ross’ van. Alas the measurement were not quite right and we ended up having to fetch a trailer and all sorts of other tom-foolery before we got rid of it once and for all!

Once that had gone, it was time to concentrate on our new arrivals. Now, maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Kirsty’s Home Made Home, but I was determined that if we bought a fireplace that it should have a story behind it, and today I finally got my wish! Bright and early Feiday morning Miss P paid a visit to the centre of the mighty Bridge of Trow and while perusing a second hand shop called The White Elephant, she spotted 3 rather fantastic fireplaces. So she returned home, waited for Mr P to arrive and we embarked into town. After a bit of umming and ahhin, we decide to try a bit of haggling and low and behold the lady in the shop let us have them for a bargain! This means we can now have a lovely fireplace with tiles in the living room, but also some lovely ones upstairs in the bedroom. And all this without having to fork out £400 like the ones we saw in Cardiff last week!!

Inevitably, with demolition work to be done, Mr P was soon taking apart the wall of the living room -  well it had to be done before we could decorate after all  – and I thought you should see our new fireplace in all it’s glory!

*UPDATE: After saying that everything must have a story, well we managed to develop the tale of the fireplace a little further this weekend by buying a surround from an auction in Devon. We really are living the middle-class, house renovation dream now!!

Project Money Pit Week 4: Easy wins with Operation Bash-Off!

We’ve been living in the house for just over a week and now and everything is beginning to settle down nicely. Even Tim has settled in to his new home, albeit there was nearly an escape attempt on Sunday, but this was more than certainly aided by somone who shall remain nameless leaving the back door open and letting him out – whoops!

Before the big move, we had all these grand plans of doing lots of work once we were actually in residence, alas this had not totally come to fruition as work, house work and life in general has stopped us progressing at lightening speed. I say this, however Miss P has been hard at work the last few days painting the kitchen while Mr P has been building units and getting everything lined up. We also had the oven fitted  on Friday and so the kitchen can actually be used as that and not just a big biege storage area. All that we are waiting on now is for the worktop to be fitted, however that is a couple of weeks off now, so we will have to continue work on the inside of the house instead.

Work outside is also progressing nicely, with RTC finally finishing off the quoine stones and also staking a claim to the big pond at the back of the garden, so it looks like that could be leaving us soon as well! Speaking of things leaving, with the quoine stones being completed that means the scaffolding will be taken down next week and we will finally have the house looking like it is supposed to – well, almost! Before we do that though, the quoines need painting and what better way to do that than recruit yet more cheap labour, in the form of Daver and Piran. So, with the promise of a barbecue and bash at the pond with a sledgehammer, I sent them shinning up the scaffold like a pair of Victorian  urchins, while I ’supervised’ from ground level. As expected, they couldn’t resist putting some graffiti on the house in their own inimitable style, but hopefully that won’t show through now the final coat of paint is up!

With that job soon out of the way, I let them loose with the hammers and commenced Operation Bash Off (Although once they started smashing, it took some stern words to stop them moving on to the lean to as a quick and easy demolition win!). As you can see, the pond is now filling up well and everything is beginning to settle down nicely. However if there will be any room for top soil, is still a mystery and fingers crossed we won’t end up with a spongey lawn with a big pond shaped dip in it!

Project Money Pit Week 3: Moving in

After the stresses and strains of last weekend, all has been calm and serene in the house this week with Mr and Miss P progressing along at pace. They were ably assisted on Monday and Tuesday by Dr Steven Bartlett who valiantly stepped in the job of sanding and was soon left a broken, dusty man. But a broken dusty man with lovely sanded floorboards! Thanks to his valiant efforts (which were rewarded with a bottle of something Scottish and malty) we were able to get varnishing on Monday and then Miss P managed to finish the glossing and we actually had a room that was virtually complete.

Which was a good thing really as this would be the last week that we would have my flat and so the priority for this week was to get packed up and moved in. Boxes were sourced and filled and car loads of stuff was taken over in the evening and deposited in the boiler room, or which ever room we could find a spare square inch in. We’d decided to allocate the pink room as our main bedroom for now, the blue room would become the living room/snug seeing as it was to be carpeted towards the end of the week and then everything else would go in the boiler room.

The move was planned for Saturday and, alas, all my life long friends happened to be ‘busy’ this weekend with varying plausibility of excuses and so it was left up to myself and Colin (my Man With a Van) to completel all the hard work. And what a day we chose to do this as a mini heat wave hit the south and we chose to move sofas and chests of drawers out of my lovely top floor flat! Needless to say it was exhausting and I don’t think I have ever sweated that much in my entire life. However at the end of the day it meant that we could put together an actual working bedroom with furniture and everything in it and as you can see it is all looking rather fantastic…

This meant we were all clear for Operation Transfer, which would see the arrival of Timothy Passmore to the mighty Bridge of Trow and with a bed set up he had somewhere ready prepared to hide under! Fortunately with Miss P returning from work, the transfer went without a hitch and so this now means the whole of Team TPT are resident at 14 Frome Road and 18 Kensington Court is just a dim and distant memory (until we go back and clean it on Monday that is!) As you can see, young Tim is settling in well, however he appears to be most perplexed by all the strange new smells and is determined to explore as much of the house as he can -  no matter how much we try and stop him!

Project Money Pit Extra: Happy days!

For those wondering about RTC, we thought we should post a picture of him to give you an idea of just who we’re going on about. Here is, with dad Fred, taking a break from his usual shenanigans to pose for a photo. Although we have been a bit cheeky about him on here, he has done an amazing job and if you ever need any damp prooding done in the Trowbidge area, then Complete Preservations are your men!

Project Money Pit Week 2: Stripping isn’t always fun!

The return to work has, inevitably, had an affect on productivity in Project Money Pit and as such the progress updates have slipped by the wayside a little bit I’m sorry to say. Therefore, I have made the executive decision to move my updates to weekly ones, instead of daily ones!

It’s been a real case of finishing off jobs this week in anticipation of actually starting some home improvement at some point in the not too distant future. We’ve continued stripping and sanding the walls in the kitchen, prepped and painted the two ‘dry’ bedrooms and begun stripping wallpaper in the damp rooms in order to prepare for carpet, so the house is beginning to take shape, albeit slowly.

After many a long discussion with Malc the carpet man last week, we have had a bit of a change of heart when it comes to the bedroom flooring and a lot of that is down to yours truly. Having removed the laminate flooring and the disgusting carpet in the two big bedrooms, we have actually uncovered some rather splendid floorboards and so we have decided to get them sanded. The Passmores were both very reticent at the thought of doing this on another house (having done it on 2 of Miss P’s houses already), however I boldly declared that I was up for the job and was duly dispatched to the Trowbridge Tool Hire centre in order to get a floor sander for the weekend. Returning with it on Friday night, I soon discovered why the Passmore’s were so reluctant to do this particular job again, as it is dusty, noisy and back breaking work. Gradually moving my way through the course-ness of the belts, while filling my lungs with sawdust (despite wearing the necessary protective face mask!) it soon became clear that this was much more than a ‘couple of hours’ work and I could see my weekend vanishing before me! Not even the breaking of McDonalds embargo (chicken nuggets and strawberry milkshakes taste so good but so morally bad!!) could help cheer my mood at the prospect of a very long weekend ahead of me.

Fortunately, we we were joined yesterday by more recruits to the cause as Mr and Mrs T and Cousin Sally joined us at the house, and so set about their assigned tasks. Cousin Sally and Miss P began stripping the wallpaper in the bedrooms, while the Thomas’ worked away on the corner of the garden than had been left un-weeded by Mrs P last week! Meanwhile, I was upstairs sanding.

As you can see, the girls did a fantastic job and soon had the bedrooms looking ready for painting – albeit with a few holes in the wall which weren’t their fault. Meanwhile outside, Mr and Mrs T did a great job clearing the back of the garden, revealing the back wall and making the garden feel open and much more spacious in the process. I was upstairs sanding.

With a very productive Saturday under our belts, we returned today to continue prepping everything and with the girls planning on beginning some actual decorating – most notably the kitchen ceiling. I was to continue sanding. However, fate was not to be on my side today as the sander decided to stop working with the starter motor cutting out every few minutes and then refusing to start again until I had given it a nice long rest. Inevitably of course, this happened as I was half way through the second bedroom floor and my patience was severely tested. Alas, I was to fail this test and left the sander propped up in the upstairs bedroom and exited the room with the air turned blue by a very generous collection of expletives that were aimed in it’s general direction. So much for a productive weekend then. Back to the tool hire place tomorrow for a refund!