Remember this image? The room nearest to us is intended as a utility room, the middle window is where the bathroom will be, and the far room, the kitchen…
And below, going forward a year or so, the roof is on and we have put insulated plasterboard on the sloping part of the ceiling. In a charity shop I found a kitchen that had been ripped out of another property, so I set about chopping and sawing to fit it in place to give us an idea of where the water and waste pipes need to be situated.
This doorway leads to a ventilated larder/store room, ideal for the north (cold) side of the building; something our grandparents would have used in the era before fridges were around. I was lucky enough to find a narrow door which was exactly the right size.
Then everything was pulled out again to get the plastering underway.
Next, the floor tiles… a job lot left over from a commercial floor. And in the meantime I begin to box in the pipework. We aren’t too taken with the present fad for browns and greys, and eventually discover a cheerful primrose yellow, and a sky blue for the ceiling.
The units are then fitted in place, with the washing machine and dryer eventually on the far right by the garden door.
The larder is tiled and partially shelved, and is immediately put to use. On the left you can see the makeshift cheese press, the concept of which I saw in a medieval engraving. With a heavy weight donated by a local farmer, it does the job!
We lost a cupboard to make room for a fridge to house Robin’s Irish bog core samples. This surface was used as a feeding station for the cats – until we got Siabhra. She found it all too easy to deprive the cats of their food, so a cat-feeding shelf was recently added, hence the look of hunger and long-suffering on her face.
