Our House (in the middle of our street)

I could hear you all singing that great madness tune.

So, this is our house. as we bought it.

Quirky, and a wealth of stories to go with it. Some bad and some very cool and interesting.

It is lovely as our neighbour was born in the house, her parents were married there. I love hearing those stories and want to keep that history going that memory for the house.

The house is a funny one, an 18th century farmers cottage and a 10 year old new build. The original cottage walls are made from mud. Thick and solid and I love that about it, but you have to know what you are doing to do any works to them as they could collapse. Both properties are joined together rather haphazardly. There were reasons for this, which we found out at a later date.

Previously planning permission was given for a single storey building to be attached to the cottage. An extension I guess. However they went on to build a detatched 4 bedroom house which you see on the right of the photo.

Planning hadn`t approved the detached property so a join was made to the 2 houses. In the first picture you can see the discrepancy in the roof line.

Not having planning made the upstairs not legal to use as bedrooms. We knew we would have to apply for planning for this and if it wasn`t to be approved our contingency was to use as a loft/storage, as the rest of the house was big enough for our home.

The other point was were the dormers at the front, you can see from the picture, were too small, not safe, there needs to be an escape route if anything was to happen and these weren`t big enough to accommodate that. We were just, at this point going with the flow, nothing seemed too major and out of our league.

It was exciting times. planning our strategy.

So, one of our design issues was how to make the house flow from aging cottage to new build, and aligning the roof.

As you can see also at the front of the cottage is a porch, which was built on by the previous owner, who I believe was strongly advised not to do this but did anyway. This was a bedroom as well as a porch. We knew that this would eventually go and would help with streamlining the house.

So this is how we saw it. We were fully aware the cottage needed work and that there were some things needing doing to the newer house.

We had surveys and we asked alot of questions. So we were taking calculated risks.

The colours were not our taste but we would change those no problem.

So we knew we had some work, we knew we were taking a risk, but not on the scale it has become.

From the pictures and the surface all looks well and good.

We could never have predicted the outcome of this, even with all of the questions and research that we did.

'Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment, The more experiments you make. The better '

Ralph Waldo Emerson