Renovation Project

If you follow the West Egg blog, you'll know that my husband and I just completed on our first home purchase. To say we're excited is an understatement. It is a total wreck and needs a huge amount of work so I thought it would be good to blog about it here on Nest Egg, since, well, we've got our very own nest now :)
The other reason why I want to record the progress and development of the project is that my husband is away with the army for the next little while so it's great for him to log on and see the progress as well as our family and friends who might like to see how the project is getting on.
So, to give you an idea of what we've got ourselves into, it's an 18th century (we think) cottage with a barn behind and a nice sized garden. The elderly lady who lived there moved out last September so it's been empty for almost 10 months. Thanks to our wonderful English climate of rain, rain and more rain, the garden is like a jungle and the ivy creeping around and up the house has jammed the front door shut and is causing all sorts of problems.

The original building is a two up two down, it has several higgledy extensions added on which are awful and the lovely original render was bricked up and modern plastic windows put in. We plan to restore it as much as possible but first I need to visit the local library and research how it was originally built and what has happened over the years.

This is the existing floorplan for downstairs. We plan to knock through the kitchen and downstairs "bedroom" to make a big open plan kitchen. I think the staircase will also need to moved or another one put in. Aside from that, we're waiting to see what the architect comes up with in terms of the extension proposal but I don't think we'll be able to do any extension until next year as it's all so expensive.

The end goal is to have at least two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, at the moment it is one long room divided in part by the chimney breast.

I'm doing as much work as I can myself along with my amazing parents who have done this all before so they know what they are doing, and lots of friends have kindly offered to help along the way which I am so so grateful for.

We started work on the barn on Monday and that is now cleared and ready for the next stage so as soon as I've got the photos uploaded I'll post about that.

Please please please if any of you have any flashes of inspiration or ideas do let me know either by email or leave a comment below.

Louisa x