We have walls!

I have no idea where the time goes, I have the blog mainly written but we have been so busy I have just not had time to put up posts, but as of today, the resurrection of our old manor house will go back to a regular update and tomorrow I will let you know what has been keeping me so busy besides the renovation.

This is going to be such an exciting week, the walls are going to be put in place in the main front room. We will finally see what the rooms will look like.

We have deliberated so much on this aspect as the ceilings are so high, the doors are so big and a thousand other what ifs.

One option that John really liked was to put a false ceiling in and have a mezzanine on top of the rooms, I was not struck on this idea as the mezzanine would not have been high enough for people to use, but John wanted to see the entire ceiling as the wood is so beautiful.

But after many discussions of varying pitch and colourful words, we have decided not to have the mezzanine, we will put the walls in place and see what it looks like.

If we don´t like it we can always take them down and start again. This is the best bit of working in a space that has had nothing done, you can literally do what ever you want.

It takes a couple of days for all of the frame to go up, but it is starting to look like the mezzanine is not needed.

The next part to go up is the plaster board, this will be the real test, are the rooms going to look small and poky, will it work, how big does the corridor need to be, so many questions and no answers until it is all done.

Only one side of the frame is plaster boarded as we need to add all of the electrics but it looks good, the ceilings are not too high, the rooms are not too small, Oh My Goodness I feel like Goldilocks, it is just perfect, but luckily no bears are going to return home.

The room works and now we have the outline of 3 bedrooms a bathroom, a hallway and a large vestibule, and now that we have the doors the same as the ones upstairs, this floor really will mirror the upstairs floor and will look like it has always been there.

The only potential problem is how sturdy the walls will be as they are very high, this is not really a problem as we can add built in wardrobes to the walls and use shelves as cross braces, this will make all of the walls very sturdy.

Obviously this is not one days work, and has taken some time to get to this stage.

Top tips

• Do not have set ideas, have an outline, but the house will let you know what it needs
• Do not be afraid of getting it wrong, you can start again
• Do not balance with one foot on scaffolding and one foot on a ladder!
• Never throw anything away until you are finished (see below)
• Do not get conned into buying expensive accessories. we made our own feet for the scaffolding so that it did not scratch the floor. very simple and very safe (as long as you use the same size pieces of wood (see below)