Hillfoot House

Our front door from the inside

Well, it’s been a month (just about) since we moved in, and we still half expect the previous owners to arrive, thank us for housesitting and wave us goodbye: and in other ways it feels like we have lived here forever.  We would find it very hard to return to a newly built house on a housing estate; and when we are away from the house we feel an urge to run home and give it an enormous hug.

Here are some pictures of some of the ground floor.  Starting with the front door, which has massive iron bolts as well as the key, to close it, and which used to have a big wooden bar too – you can still see the slot that it would have rested in.  The key is massive, and so we tend not to use the front door ourselves, leaving that for visitors coming in and out: someone needs to open the door from the inside, really.

The hallway and view from the front door.

But as you come in through the door, this is what you see: the staircase going up and the corridor going ahead to the back door and to the back

corridor which crosses it.

The staircase is very uneven, with treads sloping fairly visibly to the left; the whole staircase has been raised at

some point in the past by about two inches which means that the bottom step is just that much higher than all the others.  This can be disconcerting, especially after a glass or two of wine.  The banisters are lower than the standard nowadays.  We haven’t yet explored what lies underneath the carpet: nor have we established yet what a house would have had, in 1737: we suspect tiles would once have been laid, but very much doubt that there are original tiles under there now.

The drawing room

Once you come through the front door and look to your left, you can see the drawing room.  This is a gorgeous room which seems to have been almost ignored for the last century.  There are no curtain tracks, or traces of there having been curtain poles or blinds: the beautiful curved shelving on either side of the chimney breast remains untouched; and at the side of the room facing the windows, and at the back of the room by the staircase, there seems to be chipboard covering what sounds like wood panelling below a dado rail.

Curved shelves in the drawing room. Complete with cat.

We’ve put various things into the circular shelving, mostly to see what works and what doesn’t: not at all sure that we’ve picked the right things yet.  Glass doesn’t seem to work as well as china, but it needs to be things that can be viewed well from the side rather than from the top.  Charlie the cat feels that this is a good place to sleep.  We’ve taken up the carpet that was in the room and have put down a rug that had been in our attic for years.  The sofa on the right is an old sofabed, with throws on it to disguise it.  This is the room that we will work hardest on, but part of the work will be to find out what the panelling is like, and we may have to lift the floorboards, check the joists, reapply the woodworm treatment and re-lay the floorboards.  Not sure what the ceiling should be like and whether plaster mouldings would have been de riguer in 1737.

Enough for one post. More of the ground floor tomorrow.