Renovations - Part Fourteen

Its all looking pretty awesome inside the new shop building....if I don't say so myself!

The upstairs room in the original building (which will become the workroom/studio) is almost finished apart from the window and door frames getting re-fitted. All the boarding and plastering/skimming is finished and drying out well. I thought I'd show you some pictures from way back at the start so you can really see the difference in the room. The ceiling was high before but now it really is enormous! In fact Ayaz tells me the height in that room is pretty much the height of our entire new house!

This room actually used to be split up into 3 smaller rooms to make a mini flat/bedsit. You can still see the remainder of one of the stud walls on the floor in the picture before. The stud walls also covered up the sections of A frame that you can also see below.

This is Ayaz starting to take the plaster off the walls (months ago now). The whole room was stripped back to brick and the ceiling taken out.

And now.......all the skimming is finished so all the walls, right up to the apex are nice and smooth and drying out well.

Work has now moved out to the stairway and landing and the first floor of the mini wing at the back of the building.

The view below is a really old photo now. Its taken from the landing on the stairs, looking into the first floor of the wing. This little place started out as a mini bedsit/flat too with stud walls seperating it out into a kitchen, toilet, shower and living room area. On the right of the photo you can see a sloping roof and then just a narrow door way to get into the bigger room behind. Well this has all totally changed now!

Below is another view looking to the back of the room.

Below is the same view, taken from the landing on the stairs. Now the roof and ceiling have been completely re-built, the door way opened up and the room is all boarded out ready to be skimmed and the windows to be fitted. The windows are on the left and right side wall of the room (so you can't see them in this picture).

Below is the view from inside the room looking back towards the stairs and landing. The door way will be on the left and on the right will be a small toilet (eventually) - those type of things still seems quite far away.

Below is the section of new roof from the outside, ready to be felted. Ahhhh....another step towards being water tight!

While I'm outside I'll show you another few views from the back scaffold.......here is the windows at the back of the big first floor room of the original building. We thought it would just be the lights (the frames around the glass) that would need replaced but of course...things are always more rotten then you think they'll be. So sections of the big frames will need spliced out and remade as well.

This is the house now built up as high as it will go. They just have a few small things to finish off. Its getting a flat roof so the space the house takes up now won't really change that much. Its all still a bit of a scaffold jungle at the back but hopefully it won't be too much longer until that can all be taken down.

Back inside again, they have been preparig the big room downstairs (where the shop will be) to get all its insulation and plaster boards on.

Below is another old picture with the damp old plaster and fireplace....

The chimmneys had been chopped off a long time ago and the fire places were just decoration so we decided to just remove them. There were pretty plain anyway.

So they have been taken off and properly blocked off now.

The last exciting thing I have to show you is the window for the very top of the front of the building has arrived. They took the old rotten one away and made an identical replica! It looks so sturdy! So its all ready to be painted and then they'll fit it next week! Once that window is in place and all finished off, the front scaffold can come down then its big bay window fitting time! I am seriously so excited about that! The boards have been covering the window for so long! It will be amazing to see how much light will come in the window!

Its all happening so fast now so stay tuned for the next installmenet next week! We are really pushing along as much as we can to be open in some form before the end of the year so watch this space!