Redwood Renovation

Why pay a professional to do it, when you can destroy it yourself…??

At the same part of the house where we discovered the hidden doorway (and the fifty year old hidden message) is a downstairs toilet.

It was put in around the early seventies and is looking very tired indeed!

We are going to put a downstairs toilet in another part of the house, so this one can be removed, as it will widen the hallway and make a good entrance into what will eventually be the new kitchen.

Also, in the corner, opposite the toilet is a full height cupboard, which looks like it’s been there since the fifties, so that is coming out at the same time. It has no ventilation holes in the cupboard and it smells a bit damp, which will dry out once it’s had a bit time to breathe.

Most damp problems are caused by either water penetration or through lack of ventilation.

First thing to do is to remove the toilet door, this lets us move around a lot more. Then remove the architrave and skirting. As there is a built-in unit around the wash hand basin, that one comes out next.

Then, it’s a case of removing the gypsum plaster board, with a hammer, crowbar and at one stage, a shovel!!

It didn’t take too long, so after that I then removed the cupboard in the corner, which houses the electrical meters etc.

Here are some pics of the before, during and after.

I’ve also captured some of the work I’ve done on video and I’ll be editing it and then posting it on in the very near future!!

Cheers

Graham

Or perhaps two…

We’ve discovered a safe!

It’s hidden in one of the bottom cupboards, in what we call the Major’s study. It’s probably been there for around 100 years. Problem is, we don’t have a key and I was looking in the built-in cupboard (some might call it a closet), in the hallway, at the back of the house, where there are a load of random keys, just hanging there.

After trying several different types of keys, it became quickly obvious that not one of them fits!! So it’ll have to remain locked for the time being. There’ll be nothing in it, so I’m not that bothered about it.

Whilst I was going back and forth with different keys, I did notice something about the cupboard that seemed a bit odd. The floor was tiled.

This may not seem the slightest bit unusual to most people, but, for me, I asked the question. Why go to all that bother of tiling a floor, when you are going have the door shut 99% of the time. It is a cupboard after all, it’s got several built in shelves at different heights, although it does have a full size Victorian panel door….

I discussed this with my wife, Michelle, who agreed that it did seem a bit extravagant to do this sort of thing on the cupboard floor.

So, being the sort of inquisitive chap I am, I decided that I would drill a couple of holes through the wall, to see what it was made of. Several holes later, it appeared that the back of the cupboard was a brick wall. Keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a stone built house, I thought that it was highly likely that this was an original doorway into the dining room, but was at some stage in the past, bricked up.

After talking this over with Michelle, we agreed that I should go ahead and remove the back of the cupboard and return it to it’s original purpose of a doorway.

One easy way to see that a doorway has been blocked up is to look at the skirting board. Usually, there’s a piece of skirting board pieced into the original to fill in the space where the door should have been. However, on the other side of the wall, the skirting board was almost in one piece!

After removing it, I found a Players cigarette packet, with some writing inside!

It has two names written inside, (J. Robinson, cannot make the other one out) the date (March 15th, 1950) and the quote of “What a bloody job we had!”.

A message from the past, very surreal!

Anyway, using the breaker, I got the brick wall down in about an hour, including removing the rubble as I went.

The new doorway is in the middle of the dining room wall and is just where I was going to put one! So a lot of time and money saved there.

The pictures below show the cigarette packet and the eventual removal of the brick wall from what was the hallway cupboard!!

All that’s left to do is put a new doorframe and door on the other side of the doorway, with the door opening into the dining room and not the hall.

Oh, the second hidden door…. It’s in the upstairs hallway, which is for the fourth bedroom. Ironically, it’s in the exact place where we were planning to put one into the fourth bedroom!! I found it the day after I found the first one!!

See ya later!

Graham

Well, this week it’s time to get the chimney sorted and cleaned in the room that we are temporarily using as the lounge, originally it was called the morning room.

There are loads of newspapers stuffed up into the chimney space and I’ve already pulled one or two small bits out, but as I’ve done so, the amount of dirt and soot that’s fallen down has been pretty spectacular.

Unfortuately, we also found out that there have been quite a few jackdaws nesting in the top of the chimney, which, for one reason or another, got stuck and then died where they were! Here is a photo of two victims, now known as the Chimney Jackdaws.

When we had a look at the newspaper dates, it appears that it was blocked up in 1980. For what reason we’ll never know.

Gary, the chimney sweep did a great job of sorting it out and filled two black bags full of soot and around a dozen jackdaw skeletons….

Now that it’s clean, we’ve started to use the fire, burning our own home grown wood from the numerous logs that have been left lying around the grounds. There are quite literally dozens of them, some of them are piled together, others just left lying where they have been chopped off part of a tree!!

As for kindling, you only have to walk a few yards and you can pick up armfuls at a time, there’s absolutely loads. We’ll not be running out, anytime soon.

Well, this was an eye opener for starters and I thought that having a chimney swept would be a quick, straightforward thing to do. But not at Redwood Renovation, the voyage of discovery just keeps on rolling!

See ya later!

Graham

Redwood Renovation is a an informational website about the eco-friendly renovation of a stone built, late Victorian house, located in the County of Durham, in the North-East of England, which was built at the end of the 19th Century (around 1897).

For around the last 25 - 30 years, the house has been fairly neglected, it’s had odds and ends done to it over the last few decades, but it’s more or less had nothing substantial done to it since the 1970’s.

Most recently, it’s had some work done on the coach-house roof and the house has been rewired. But the rewiring has left holes in walls and skirting boards and for some reason, there’s squares of wallpaper missing around the light switches!

The house is set in around 2 acres of land, which consists of several different gardens, a grass tennis court and some woodland.

Apart from having the grass cut on a regular basis, having some occasional work done on the plants themselves, the gardens have been left to their own devices. Trees have been planted in an ad-hoc manner and lots have self seeded in the ground, just as nature intended.

This might sound an ideal manner in which to let the trees look after themselves, but it’s left them in a right old state. Some of the trees contain deadwood, are leaning in an alarming manner or are so close to each other (some inches apart) that they are quite literally strangling each other! We plan to renovate this drafty, much unloved Victorian house and turn it into an eco-friendly, low carbon footprint home. We will be using the latest green technology for the following;

• Double Glazed windows
• Ground Source Heat Pump for heating and hot water
• Underfloor heating
• Rainwater harvesting for washing clothes, flushing toilets and garden use
• Wood burning stoves
• Increase insulation to all areas
• Create a Victorian organic vegetable garden
• Solar panels
• Hot water heating panels
• Low water usage bathroom fittings
• Low VOC paints

We know that this is a lot, but we are going to vastly reduce the carbon footprint of this beautiful house!

As part of the renovation, we will be producing blogs, podcasts and vidcasts of the work, materials used and philosophy behind why we are doing this.

Stay tuned!

Thanks

Graham