Hillfoot House

Now that the chaos of Christmas is over, we are starting to clear away the drifts of wrapping paper, sweet wrappers and dirty glasses. The drawing room is complete and ready to be revealed in its full glory!

We used a decorator, Michael Ball, who had experience of working sympathetically with older and heritage buildings, and he and his team stripped all of the surfaces back to the plaster or wood.

When he stripped back the paper over the mantelpiece, the plaster crumbled away and we could see that there was another beam under there, about six inches above the mantelpiece and the width of the entire chimney breast. I didn’t manage to get a photo of it, sadly, because the plasterers covered it over again very quickly.

We didn’t find any other big surprises except to discover that the coving is wooden, not plaster as we had assumed. We had also already worked out that the ceiling is false, but probably dating back a hundred years or so – there will be a huge beam under the centre of the ceiling, like we have in all the other front rooms. The wooden coving, though, helped us to work out when the false ceiling was fitted. And we found that the tiles around the fireplace were oxblood red, which came as a total surprise!

We papered the walls down to the chair rail, and painted below it. The sofas and chairs are new, and the curtains were made to go with the overall colour scheme. Tracie and Lynda of LInteriors in Bucklebury worked tirelessly with us to achieve what we ended up with – a restful, tranquil room, with elegance and dignity but also comfort.

You can see the tiles in the fireplace in the photo above, and the wallpaper in the photo below:

Here are the curtains (and a sleeping cat) – it was a sunny day so the photo is a little darker because I am pointing into the light.

We also had lovely cast iron radiators fitted which are warm as toast. Now that the roof is better insulated, too, we have been finding it very warm, and we have had to turn the heating off rather than on!

We are thrilled with the room. Looking forward to adding more pictures, some cushions and maybe some shades on the chandelier: but other than those tiny changes, it’s all complete now.

After what feels like an eternity of endurance of dirt and dust, we have reached a halt in the building works, thank goodness. It began in October when the scaffolding went up, a skip arrived and a portaloo was installed; then the roof and the gable wall were the first priority. The roof at the front of the house had no insulation or lining, and so the roofers took off all the tiles and stacked them up. Then they cut slabs of insulating foam to fit between the rafters, then they laid a weatherproof membrane over that, held it down with battens and finally put the tiles back, replacing a few damaged ones with similar, reclaimed tiles.

Here is the roof when it was exposed:

You can see the curve of the oak rafters, which were so solid that the roofers said they were finding that they were having difficulty in hammering in their nails. You can also see the foam slabs of insulation in the middle of the roof. I imagine that on most houses, the rafters are pine and are spaced at industry agreed intervals, so the slabs of insulation just slot in neatly. In our case it was more like a jigsaw puzzle!

Meanwhile we had a lovely chap Paul who was working on the gable wall. There were some damaged bricks which needed to be repaired, and in most cases he was able to turn them round, putting the damaged part to the inside of the wall. The grouting was weather damaged and there was some general staining to the bricks, caused by wind and rain and passing traffic. So Paul regrouped and cleaned the bricks, and now the wall looks fantastic.

While the roof was being worked on, Paul replaced the chimney pots and put “witches hats” on them, and did the same amazing work on the chimneys, regrouting and repairing damage. Of all the work, this was the part that left us open mouthed in amazement, and the difference is very visible.

Other changes were that the cracked lintel above the study side door was repaired, which seemed to be much easier to do than you might have expected. At any rate it was fixed in a day, though the result was also a lot of damage to the plaster indoors, and the plasterers had to make that good and then the paint had to be reapplied. Again, this didn’t take very long.

Lastly, the outer paintwork was all repainted, and damaged wood and guttering replaced where necessary. That isn’t yet finished, and the builders will be back in January to complete that work. We also have some drainage problems to sort out at the back of the house, and other things have become apparent. For example, we will need to have the chimneys lined now: the banging on the gable wall has loosened some of the dried out mortar inside the chimneys (we had to pick bits of brick out of the fireplaces!) and the smell of smoke is much clearer in rooms where they are above or next to a fire that has been lit. We need to have the dormer windows insulated on the inside, too: the repairs to the lead and the outside have left massive cracks in the plaster on the inside, so while we are repairing that we are going to use insulating board there. But it is all looking so lovely now: and we were phenomenally lucky that the weather stayed dry and not too windy while the work was underway.

Next weekend it will be exactly a year since we moved in, and it’s a good time to take stock.

So… since we moved in, we have decorated three bedrooms, the study and the sitting room including carpeting.  We’ve had the floors sanded and lacquered in the dining room and the drawing room.  We’ve added furniture to all the bedrooms – virtually all the bedroom furniture we brought with us has been replaced – and to the sitting room; we’ve added rugs in the dining room, hallway and rear hallway, and we’ve added a table, chairs and dresser in the kitchen.  In the garden, we’ve removed one hedge, one tree and pruned the rest of the shrubs very hard; we’ve added a swing, replaced the patio, topped up the shingle in the driveway and planted two plum trees as well as a normal quantity of flowers.

We’ve gone through about three times as much oil as we expected; but we have been less cold than we also expected. We’ve learnt how to use an AGA, discovered how to live with four cats instead of two, seen deer and pheasant in the garden, and lots of lovely garden birds that we never used to see (despite four cats…).  We have dealt with decapitated rabbits and straying chickens, and jumped at the shrieking of barn owls.

We’ve changed our routines completely even though we only moved six miles: we shop in a different town, we hardly go to the supermarket (instead, we use Abel & Cole, the local farm shop, the local butcher, the local farmers’ market, with only a monthly trip to Waitrose for things like kitchen roll) and we go to different pubs now. Our journeys to work are less stressful and Ian travels from the local small station instead of the huge central station in Reading.  We’ve learnt about the auction sales and how to bid, and goodness, we’ve learnt a lot about the entire industry of specialists who can provide wallpapers, paints, fabrics, radiators, paint strippers, beam restoration, plaster restoration etc…

We’ve learnt a bit about the house and its previous owners.  A moment of sheer joy was when we found that a new variety of plum was discovered in our garden in 1912: there were no plum trees in the garden any more, so we have tracked down an example of the variety and planted it.

In the next year, the plans are to carry out some remedial work on the brickwork, chimneys and roof; to refurbish the sash windows; to resolve a problem with the damp course at the back of the house, and to address the plumbing generally.  Some radiator replacement, some refitting of the bathrooms; then we want to redecorate the dining room, drawing room, hallway and our bedroom. The kitchen will wait another year (as may some of the current list – there are limits!)

Meanwhile, the long promised photos of the spare bedroom.  We are very pleased with the quiet calm of the room, and the way that it looks like it has been like that forever.

We had help here: lovely Tracie at L Interiors in Bucklebury, together with Lynda, helped us to find the right fabrics, wallpaper, paint colours and curtain poles, and they arranged for the curtains to be made, and the headboard, and the valance.  We did consider whether to leave the floorboards exposed, but although they were lovely, there were quite large gaps between them.  There was such a risk of losing earrings, change or more in the gaps: and we also thought it might be draughty and cold in winter.  So we had the carpet laid.

We still need to get some more furniture for the room. We’re on the lookout for a pair of Georgian bedside cabinets, and we did bid on some in one of the local auctions but were outbid. We have, however, managed to get a George II mahogany chest of drawers which we have now installed.  Need a wardrobe, too; and it would be good to put in an older cheval mirror, rather than the one that’s there at the moment.  But we are getting there.  The chandelier was bought online. We installed the picture rail: there wasn’t one there before, and it has a nice effect.

Lastly, this is a lovely photo of the house which I took when the snow fell.  Delighted to find that the snow didn’t melt instantly from the roof…  and irritated that I still can’t work out how I managed to get the date to be stamped onto the photo, and nor can I work out how to turn it off again….  It would have been nice to move the cars too, but they were a bit stuck right at that point. Oh well, another time! 

Another post at long last.  We have had so many things going on in the house that there have been very few chances to take photos of the rooms while they are not cluttered up with furniture from another room.  And as the last workman packed his toolbox into his van and drove off, it was time to get the Christmas decorations out: so for the moment I still haven’t got photos of finished rooms (the spare bedroom looks AMAZING) but what I do have is photos of how we’ve decorated for Christmas.

Christmas tree in dining room on Christmas Day

The last seventeen Christmasses have been in the same house in Tilehurst and we had a rhythm to knowing how to arrange furniture, how best to display cards, and where to put the tree. It was such fun to start all of those thought processes from new.  We argued for ages about where the tree should go, and finally agreed that we could now have not one but two trees: and in the end we decided that one would go upstairs in the hallway, so that its lights would twinkle out from the central window of the house, and one would be in the dining room.  That seems to have worked very nicely.  So we drove off in two cars and bought the trees, tape measure tucked cautiously into my pocket.  This tree is just over 8 foot high – actually, nearly 9 foot…  You can see that the table is part laid already for Christmas dinner here.  We rented a round table from Carters the marquee hire people, as we were having ten for dinner.  Our dining table only squeezes eight on, and is on the List for Replacing: this was a lovely way to test out a round table in there!

Tinselled shelves with cards and felt robin

Again, we debated about the cards.  We thought about hanging them on strings in big loops across walls; or on ribbons or other mechanisms to hang in long drops down the walls – and suddenly it was so obvious.  So we cleared away all of the year round ornaments and items from the curved shelving in the drawing room, added some tinsel and some more decorations (I do love the massive felt robin) and put the cards up on the shelves.  The photo of both of the shelves doesn’t look as Christmassy as it feels when you’re in the room: in daylight it seems to drain some of the glow from the tinsel.

 

How the shelves look in the drawing room

We have never before decorated outside the house, and the girls were very keen to do so.  Out in the countryside you can see the lights much more clearly and there is something enormously comforting about them drawing you in: in the middle of town, frankly, the lights are easily drowned out by the general street lighting and overall glow of the town.  We wandered around DIY stores, reading the instructions carefully about how many metres of lighting we were buying, and how far the lead stretched before the lights start; we thought we were selecting some lights that were going to loop round the entire garden six times but of course they struggled to make it as far as the gate!  We ended up buying three sets of lights, and of course they are all different colours (who knew the difference between Warm Glow and Cream before?!) and we managed to get them all on different twinkle settings.  But it was a good start and we are much inspired for next year.  Best of all, we invested in a light up reindeer which makes me grin every time I see it!

I have tried to take photos of the lights from outside but my camera isn’t very good for taking outdoor shots.  This one is the best although the flash from the camera has lit up far too much of the background.  On the other hand, if you look closely you will see Rose who came out to inspect me taking photos.

The least decorated room is the sitting room but on the other hand it is finally finished and was looking tidy today so I have taken a photo.  The ceiling light has been fitted and the coffee table is in place; the only thing left to do now is to try to get some sockets onto the wall behind the sofa (on the left, facing the windows) so that the table lamps can be lit there too.  The most important items of furniture are of course the radiator beds.  We bought one for Rose, knowing she would love it, and were proved right: but Charlie was a bit put out and so we bought one for him too.  In the evenings the two of them occupy those beds, like an old married couple.  Cleo and Merlot still find their own spots to sit in, though Merlot often joins us and sits on the sofa.  Something, incidentally, about the flash has cast patterns on the far wall but it is simply plain.

Twin radiator beds for the cats

We will take the decorations down at the weekend and at the moment we have no immediate plans for decorating or floor sanding etc (though some are in development and we’ll be setting dates soon) so once the post decoration spring-clean has happened, I’ll be able to update more thoroughly.  Promise!  Happy New Year: we are all looking forward to 2013 very much.

The girls’ bedrooms are (more or less) finished, and we’re delighted!

Caroline’s room before

Posting ‘before and after’ pictures – I’ve tried to take the photos from similar angles.  When we moved in, the carpet was grey-blue, the curtains were green velvet and there were wooden pelmets.  The walls were a shade of magnolia.  Caroline had very little adult bedroom furniture -neither of the girls did.  In the previous house, their rooms weren’t big enough to take double beds, so we had refrained (and that was one factor in moving).  The bedroom furniture they both had was the furniture we’d bought them when they were seven and eight; Caroline’s chest of drawers, for example, was the one that went with her bed on stilts. As part of the project to redecorate their rooms, we’ve also chosen new furniture for both of them and, in fact, all of the furniture is new in both of their bedrooms. For both girls we also gave them carte blanche in Laura Ashley to choose their wallpaper and paint.  We arranged to have the same carpet laid in each room – a wool twist from John Lewis – and then we set them loose with a furniture budget to choose what they would like to fit into their rooms.  Caroline chose her furniture from the Pine and Oak showrooms on the A4.

Caroline’s bedroom after

We have had three of Caroline’s walls painted in Laura Ashley’s ‘Soft Truffle’ shade; the fourth wall is papered, using the Oriental Garden wallpaper.  Then the curtains are made in Lille Stripe fabric, and the carpet is a cream shade from John Lewis.  She chose a double bed with two bedside tables, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a dressing table; and she went for a chandelier style of lamp from Laura Ashley. To finish it all off, she’s got new bedding including pretty cushions and a soft wool throw – Merlot loves the throw.

Round the fireplace, we had oak strips laid to hold the carpet but still expose the slate hearth – she is particularly taken with this.

The photos make the paint look different colours: but one photo was taken at night (and shows a more accurate colour) and one in day time.

View towards the door

The views from this room are amazing: I think they are arguably the most hypnotic in the house (though I can spend a long time hanging out of the second floor windows too) and Caroline gets to see Bella’s Copse, the woods across the fields from the house.

View of Bella’s Copse and the fields in between

You get deer there, and there are lots of rabbits in the fields.  Haven’t seen anything more unusual yet: but I’m sure there are other lovely creatures out there.

We’ve realised that we didn’t take any ‘before’ pictures of Liz’s room, which is a pity.  It was pink before, with the pink up to the beam across the wall. The pink has been replaced with a duck egg paint colour, and the line of colour goes up to the height of the beam.  Above that it’s simply white.  On the long wall opposite the beam the wallpaper is the Sycamore pattern in duck egg shade.  We haven’t yet got the blind, but she will have a duck egg and white Roman blind in the window.  At the moment she relies on hanging a blanket in the window to keep the light out!  We bought her a bed, two bedside tables, a tall set of drawers and a dressing table; her lamp is a set of glass prisms.  She has just acquired a rug for the floor too. She has some stunning features in her room: not only does she have the fabulous beam, she has a lovely little corner in her room leading to the door which is closed with a barn-style latch.  She also has a circular window, and we have yet to work out how best to decorate that.

Liz’s bedroom

I have seen an article in a magazine which showed a circular wooden set of shutters, but this might be incredibly expensive.  As Liz is still at university and is away in term-time, it means we can afford to think and plan how best to manage that particular feature.

Liz’s room looks out over the front garden, which gives her quiet joy.  You can see one of the weeping willows through her bedroom window.  Cleo is on the bed: she has adopted this room as her home within the house and can be found on the bed most of the time.

Liz’s room towards the circular window (right) and the door (left)

Woo.  LONG pause which I was blaming unfairly on a combination of BT’s inefficiency and the failure of 18th century builders to think of how wi-fi would work… turns out it was my laptop which was on its last legs.  I am now fully equipped with a new laptop, and am steadily trying my hardest to move files/photos/bookmarks from the old one to the new one: not easy when old laptop hates connecting to wi-fi!

In the intervening few weeks we have finished the girls’ bedrooms and today the decorator has finished the sitting room.  But as ever we are far more interested in the cats.  So today I am going to pick a few of the photos of cats from the last few weeks and show them instead.

Lots of people have asked how the two resident cats have coped with the arrival of two new cats and a whole new family of people and their furniture.  We’ve been amazed, frankly. We seem to have had very little blood: quite a bit of bad language, and a few flapping paws, but no outright fights.  There’s been quite a lot of territory carving.  Charlie owns the dining room table; Merlot owns Caroline’s bed; Cleo owns Liz’s bed; and Rose owns most of the rest of the house. Our bed is still no-mans-land with Charlie and Cleo dominant but Rose making inroads.

Rose (spelt Rosé, as in the wine, but largely pronounced Rosie as it sounds less pretentious) is the one whose opinion matters most.  She purrs very loudly indeed when she has got her own way and is the only cat of the four to jump up and sit on laps.  She’s hugely pretty, very clever, and has the most enormous eyes.

Rose being very cute

She likes to make sure she is fully aware of who is where at any given time: she counts us all in and out, and checks the girls’ boyfriends in too. She is permanently convinced that, without her supervision, I would be unable to find the food and bowls for their breakfast. If a cat could hold a clipboard and a handbag, that would be Rose!

Rose looking gorgeous

Meanwhile, Charlie, the James Bond of cats, languidly works his way round the house, quietly astonished by Rose’s determined attempts at overall dominance.  He is a large cat, and hasn’t really ever thought about it before: think of hefty rugby players who don’t have an aggressive bone in their bodies but who find that everyone offers submission to them.

Rose and Charlie eating

Cleo tends to lurk, mostly in Liz’s bedroom but sometimes in ours.  She is uncomfortable with sharing space with everyone else and is always dominated by Charlie.  Every so often she tries to sniff Rose, particularly when Rose is sleeping on the wicker chair: but this usually goes horribly wrong. Cleo then runs for cover. Of the four cats, she is the only one who still wants to use the indoor litter tray even when the doors are all open to the garden (very annoying!)

Cleo on wall

Merlot, youngest of the cats and least complicated, is a simple soul.  He is completely and totally in love with Caroline and sleeps on her bed all night.  He’s not sure about the rest of us and so far hasn’t purred for anyone else: but for Caroline he purrs incessantly. He chats a lot, and comes into our room at night to talk to us.

Merlot on Caroline’s bed

Generally, though, they are all being very good with one another.  They accept that each has a right to be there, and there has been no ganging up or taking of sides.  A couple of other cats have strayed into the garden at times, and they have been seen off very quickly: but other than a few harsh words at times, there has been little aggression here.  At night all four are kept in: so far I think there have only been half a dozen occasions when one or more cats have failed to come in when called.  We haven’t ever had to get up in the night to break up any fights (or been startled from sleep!)  Here they are on the patio (newly laid) outside the kitchen door.

Charlie, Cleo and Rose

So all is well in cat-land here.  I am having bulk deliveries of catfood from Zooplus, and have finally found dry cat food that all four cats will eat.  We have only had about three or four mice in the house (though there have been a couple of baby rabbit incidents, thank you Merlot) and we have found that the steam cleaner is very helpful in getting cat sick stains out of carpets. I thought my colleagues in the office were going to explode in hysterical laughter when I bought a cat scratching post and some new filters for the cat water fountain: I didn’t understand how big the scratching post was (it’s about four feet tall and the width of a dinner plate) and the delivery arrived in the office.  And when I mentioned the filters, there were howls of laughter at the thought of cats pressing a little silver button to squirt water into their mouths…  But there are four happy cats here, and that has to be a good thing.

Tomorrow we will aim to hang the curtains in the sitting room and I will post photos this weekend of the girls’ bedrooms.  It’s a relief and a joy to have uninterrupted access to the internet again: I was getting so frustrated with finding that my access kept cutting out, and the computer kept overheating and resetting.  But now it’s time for bed!

Oh dear, I’m not good at keeping up with this regularly.  We have been very busy and have been entertaining in quantity.  The main problem with a kitchen of this size is that we have not just one, nor even only two fridges: there are three.  The one that lives by the kettle is the one with milk, some soft drinks and some other bottles in it; the big American fridge holds our main daily things (cheese, meat, etc and some drinks) and the one in the utility room holds drinks.  Which means that Ian gets easily confused and he keeps accidentally buying another half dozen bottles of prosecco, telling me happily that he thought it would be useful for the next round of visitors.  I point out that we are really doing quite nicely on the prosecco front; and he confidently corrects me and tells me he could only find one bottle (or two) and then I send him on a tour of the fridges (and the wine rack in the pantry)…  The Jubilee weekend was lovely and there is bunting all down the fence next to the road: we’ll leave it up till after the Olympics, because apart from anything else, it’s really useful for telling people how to find us.

View of the cellar from the bottom of the stairs

Our growing strong friendship with the staff at Laithwaites in Theale means that we are seriously considering starting to store some wine in the cellar.  A friendly builder man said that we should put a min/max thermometer down there for a month or two to see how much the temperature actually fluctuates before attempting anything.  The cellar gets damp but so far we haven’t had more than a bit of a puddle (admittedly a flowing puddle) in there.  The hartshorn ferns love the dampness and the light from the coalhole window.

The brilliant news is that the second opinion on the roof is that it’s in much better condition than either the surveyor or the first builder suggested.  We can trust it and worry about it in a couple of year’s time.  Though we have already gone through the first delivery of oil for the Aga and central heating and have had to top up the tank at very short notice (thank you to the lovely oil company who responded so quickly) so the lack of insulation on the roof at the front will mean higher fuel bills for a while. We are starting to believe we live here and that we’re not just on a fabulous once-in-a-lifetime holiday in someone else’s house.  Slowly but surely we are getting to know the quirks, noises, and oddities in the house.

This week we had a lovely girl from Laura Ashley’s design team to visit, and she has come up with some lovely thoughts on decorating.  At the moment we have a decorator busily painting the girls’ bedrooms; more of that next time because I do want to finish off the ground floor at this point.  Following her suggestions, we’ve made some apparently really minor rearrangements of the furniture in the sittingroom (one sofa moved by about three inches, the other moved so that its lamp table is on the other side) and this has made a startling difference. Ian has bought some off-the-peg curtains for his study in the Laura Ashley sale, and has had a lovely time hanging them this afternoon. (We’ve saved the old curtains in case the previous owners would like them when they settle down in their next home!)  We also rearranged his furniture and have come up with an arrangement that means that if he wanders down to the study to “just check something” he is then lost for several hours because he’s so happy in the space.

The filing cabinet doesn’t hold very much, and the whole of the bottom drawer is full of my family history files – but during the move, the drawer was locked and the key was lost, so we can’t currently get in there anyway.  The only use to the filing cabinet, frankly, is to provide a surface for the printer.

Looking through the door on the right you can see the shelves where we have currently filed our entire CD collection.  We had no idea we had so many CDs because we had a number in boxes and in the attic and in storage before we moved.  I kept loading the shelves when we moved in and was sure that the DVD collection would fit on there too.  How naive can you get.  But the shelves are wonderfully useful there, as are the coat hooks where we have most of our coats hanging cheerfully. Ian thinks that the golf bag is a useful ornament to the room.  Bless.

The DVDs went into the library.  We’re calling it the library (and I am being teased mercilessly by my colleagues – I made the mistake of saying that we had another box of books to unpack, and that we couldn’t decide whether to put those books into the drawing room or the library…)  but it used to be a sort of storage/office room and was previously a bathroom. It’s not a big room but it has wonderful beams again and once we have taken out the storage units and had shelves built to go round the walls, it will be a wonderful space.  Pity my taste is so trashy in novels: but I do understand, from my reading about Georgian houses, that no home was complete without a library. So we are only following the trend, perhaps 275 years later…

The doorway is a sort of Piccadilly Circus point.  As I stand to take the photo, I’m slightly to the right of the crossroads that connects the corridor between the sitting room and the study, and the front door to the rear door with the cat litter tray. From inside the library you can see all the different entrances and directions.

The junction of doors and corridors

The beams are lovely, though.  There are peg holes in the beams – at least, that’s what I think they are.

Beams in the library

That should more or less polish off the ground floor.  I’ve had a look at my stats and I think I’m being read by Sarah, Karen and Christine mainly which is lovely! Not having had much experience of blogs, I was very nervous that I would be viewed by lots and lots of strangers which isn’t really the intention at all, so I feel reassured that I do know who I’m talking to.

And given who I think my audience is, here is a lovely photo of Rose who is sleeping on her chair (woe betide anyone else who tries to sleep there…).  Her cushions were thoroughly hoovered yesterday as we needed to use the chair for our guests.  She was not impressed.

Rose, with her paw over her eyes while she sleeps

Small pause for a couple of housewarming parties: and for me to make some layout and design changes (thank you to The Blog Whisperer for her fantastic advice) but on to the next rooms anti-clockwise.

The sitting room from the kitchen

The sitting room was once a corridor – you can see the corridor beyond – but we’re told that there was a fire at the back of the house at one point, and the then owners took the opportunity to extend outwards.  The left hand wall (where the red sofa is) backs onto the dining room wall where the sideboard is.  There are two metal framed windows here; the room looks out to the back of the house, and in fact the bit of garden there is quite high and we get a view largely of the grass and a bit of fence beyond. In the evenings there are bats swooping around there, and we often see the chickens which belong to the neighbours.  Charlie the cat was completely horrified when he met them: he dropped his body to very low and he slunk back into the house with wide eyes. It’s a warm, cosy room, even though it’s north facing.  The ceiling is lower than in the rooms at the front of the house, which helps. It is the only room which had an aerial socket when we moved in; we’ve had more fitted since then but the drawing room really seems a bit too nice to slump in and gaze at TV.

The kitchen deserves a full week’s worth of posts, but I won’t inflict that!  It’s very large.

The kitchen, taken from the dining room door. Utility room and pantry on the left; back door on the right (though it does open out at the front of the house!)

As you stand in the middle, there are six doors leading out: one to the back door, one to the dining room, one to the sitting room, one to the utility room, one to the pantry and finally one to the back of the Aga and the boiler. We have a new kitchen table on order: the one we’re using is our old dining table from two houses ago, which was up in our loft for the whole time that we lived in the last house.  Nice table but it does wobble and the middle panel is a different shade, and the ends are curved which makes it harder to sit people comfortably down the sides.  Ian adores the Aga and has adapted very quickly to using it.

Master panel for the bell system

On the wall above the doors leading to the dining room and the sitting room there’s the master panel for the bells throughout the house.  The bells must have been installed in the early part of the 20th century – the style is very much 1910’s.  The front door flag is broken in the open position: but when you press any of the bells in the different rooms, the stripy flag waves to indicate which room is summoning.

Kitchen door going out to the front of the house via the alternative front door

The door which leads to the outside is a really useful place for boots, coats, recycling containers etc; and there’s a small downstairs cloakroom in there too.The kitchen sink is a lovely deep butler’s sink, which holds loads.

The pantry, or larder, from the kitchen, complete with lino and beams

The pantry floor is a linoleum from what seems like the 1960’s; and we were astounded at how much the shelving would take.  As you can see, we’ve packed the contents of an average kitchen in there, and there’s plenty of room for more.

In terms of the floorplan of the house, the pantry and utility room are right at the back of the house; and when you look at the beams, and the way the walls have been constructed, including the depth and the plaster, it feels to me that the house is older than 1737.  I think these parts are Tudor and that the original buildings were steadily absorbed into the larger house.

The utility room with more lovely beams

I have to book an appointment at the local records office to start the research: but I think I’ll make that the autumn’s project.  My gut feeling is generally that the whole house was not built from scratch in the Georgian times, but was a rebuilding and extension on original buildings.

Here’s the dining room.  This is to the right when you come in through the front door.  Stunning beam across the room; it’s a big room, like the drawing room, and it has all sorts of glorious extra bits.  The previous owners used this as their sitting room, but we felt it was better suited to being a dining room.  The door on the left, underneath the quirky high cupboard, leads to the kitchen, which is why we felt that the dining room works better here.  I think we will have to replace the table and the sideboard in due course but there’s no hurry: but the table is not big enough.  We’d like to put in a big circular or large rectangular table.  The view is out over the garden, and there’s an amazing fireplace.

The dining room from the far window, facing towards the hall

The piano likes it here: the acoustics seem to work, and the floor is relatively even there, and the sun doesn’t really get to it.  You can see my clutter, where I’ve been going through all the paperwork to steadily change our address.  The Pandora bag is Liz’s 20th birthday present, a pretty bracelet.The cupboards in the room are fascinating, and so far we haven’t started to fill them up. The cupboard to the right of the fireplace (as you look at it) has hidden cupboards within it: the Georgians must have been very twitchy about keeping things safe, or maybe hiding things from the servants.  Not sure which.

The cupboard (with cat, who can’t resist the open door)