D’you know, I’m feeling all nostalgic. Sometimes autumn gets me that way (though are we into winter now, officially? Still looks autumnal round here, with lots of trees green), and having a big project underway seems to make the temptation greater as you can look at pictures of your progress and think ‘ye gods, we lived with that?’ etc. So, I thought now might be a good time to remind ourselves how far we’ve come in this little cob house of ours, warmed by the woodstove’s cheery glow, sleeping under a hedgehog roof, looking out at a blanket of stars in the darkness of the night sky. The work we are doing here has a long way still to go – there is external render to remove and sort out (what we were told was a house which had ‘always been looked after’ turned out to be a house where the twenty-five-foot well was covered only with rotten wood and about half an inch of cement, after all, and let us not speak of the uPVC window fitted at the back of the house, all in the best possible taste, of course), and the plaster inside still means that gaffer tape is pretty much structural to our ceilings, but hey – but streuth, Quercus, and Lovely David, have wrought Big Changes Which Warrant Capitals in other areas. We moved here in 2005, and the extension, which houses our bathroom and kitchen, looked like this:

Note frost inside windows.  

Note the mould, caused by the aforementioned damp. Did I mention the damp? Yes? Thought so. Note also the fabric-like ceiling, which was an uninsulated sheet of tin with some sodden marine ply on the inside. 

We did do our best, of course, with what we had; we knew when we moved here that we couldn’t really sort things out until we had more money, and had successfully completed at least three bank raids. Er, I mean, of course, until I’d got a job which paid more than four peanuts and a few grubby buttons. Which PhD study tends to prevent. Or at least slow down. So, we painted things jolly colours and Quercus built the very lovely Driftwood Larder, made completely from reclaimed timber which a local woodyard was going to chuck out. (As an aside, he now wants to get rid of the DWL, relegating it to shed storage or something; I just can’t bring myself to! I can’t! Not my lovely cupboard, complete with built-in herb storage on the side! No! I just won’t! And he can’t make me. Or something equally mature.) So then we had this as a compromise, for a while: 

But that was the best we could do, really, and even that took rather a lot of effort to keep up – the mould came back in a matter of weeks, and the floor was so damp, so perpetually, that the floor tiles all lifted up in about a month. (They were the quick-fix sticky-downy sort, you see.) And we’d always known that the extension would end up having to come down. Particularly when the roof started to leak in three places. And that’s before we even get started on the water supply happenings – remember the well? With its bacteria? And its excess nitrates? And its aluminium? And its tendency to run out in summer because it wasn’t really that deep, in well terms? Oh, happy days. How we laughed. 

Also, I should add that size-wise, our extension was not what it could have been. Two sets of kitchen units, with about two feet between them – getting past someone required a level of familiarity which limited you to members of your own family, shall we say. The entire kitchen and bathroom was housed in a structure of about twelve feet square, with the kitchen being L-shaped and the bathroom, well, roughly the size of a (small) postage stamp. Again, how we laughed. 

So now, what we have is work in progress. A work about double the size, I should add, and with rooflights! and more than one (falling out) window! and without a floor that you could fall through into a large, dank, wet, water-filled hole! and with water which isn’t tea-coloured! See? All mod cons. I’ll take some proper pictures of the outside tomorrow, but for now, let’s just say it’s a vast improvement. And soon, we may even have power in the house again… (It’s been an electricky day – the power has been moved from one side of the house to the tother, and Lovely David is, as I write, tying in to the existing electrics. It’s been sort of on-off, on-off…)

Inside, though:

(Note cat in foreground; so rapid is she that the Wacket cat has never yet been photographed. OK, slight exaggeration. But she only gets photographed when she chooses.) The bathroom is also something of an improvement, but for now, I will content myself with the smugness of the kitchen. (Let’s face it – this is already both photo-heavy and of little interest to the outside world; I will save being a bathroom bore for tomorrow.)