Mar 242012
 

A few people have asked me recently about how the house is getting on so I thought I’d do a post showing some of the things that have changed since we bought the place back in October.

When we first bought the house the old owner had some fairly awful fireplaces in the living room and dining room. One of the first things we did was replace them with something a bit closer to what would have been there when the house was first built. Here is the living room fireplace – before and after. The after picture is pretty old. It’s now been smoothed out and painted around it.

 

In the dining room we’ve replaced the fireplace with a wood burner. The wood burner is plumbed into the heating so during the winter months we can get a fire going and it’ll heat water for the radiators and baths/showers. We’ll also have a boiler so we don’t have to do it if we’re feeling lazy.

 

The next major change is the addition of the shower room upstairs. We stole a bit of space from the middle bedroom which is going to be my study so doesn’t need to be very large. The main bathroom is going to be downstairs so having a toilet upstairs is a huge bonus.

 

As the on street parking in Wolverton is pretty competitive we’ve turned the end of the garden in a place for cars with access by the alley.

 

And this is what the garden looks like at the moment. The concrete slab for the extension is down. We also have a big pile of soil if any keen gardeners need any soil.

 

Considering the current frequency of my blog posts I imagine the next house post will be when it’s close to finishing.

 

Nov 292011
 

Continuing the resurrection on this blog (two posts in two weeks!) I thought I better write a quick note about probably the most important thing to happen to me in the past few years and that’s getting on the housing ladder. Back in October Jordan and I completed the purchase of our first proper home together.

It’s in Wolverton – one of the old towns that was assimilated into Milton Keynes in the 1970s. We wanted an old house as they have a bit more character and history than a lot of the new builds as well as a lot more space. There seems to be a greater feeling of community in these old areas that you just don’t get in the rest of Milton Keynes. You actually see people walking around in the streets which is pretty rare in Walnut Tree where we are now.

The lady that lived in the house before us had been there since 1965 and from the looks of things very little has been done in the last four and a half decades. It made the place pretty horrible to look at when we first saw it but it also means it has a load of original features intact like cast iron fireplaces in the bedrooms and quarry tiles in the back room (hidden under some lovely carpet – pictured right). We’re also going to have the floorboards exposed throughout most of the house. Half because they’re nice and half because we have a cat that seems intent on murdering anything we can get his teeth round which tends to make quite the mess of carpet.

There’s a whole load of work to be done so we’re not going to be moving in for quite some time. The house doesn’t even have central heating. It’s quite daunting when you think about all the things that need to be done and all the things that need to be bought. In fact, we made a spreadsheet of everything we needed to buy and the total was rather shocking. It may have to be Super Noodles for dinner from now until next summer. And I’m sure every time I look at the kitchen sink I’ll think to myself “that was £250 well spent… I could have bought a PlayStation Vita with that”.