Weekly ramblings: A house talk and a bunch of pics.

We are heading towards the end of the year and most people are looking forward to the holidays. I myself look forward to another little festive day: the shortest day of the year. For me it marks the day after which the length of daylight will be increased, chickens will start to lay again and I can start the first seeds indoors pretty soon!!

Tomorrow I will be cleaning the room upstairs where we keep most of the young plants. The space is currently used for overwintering some of the peppers and a couple herbs and cuttings (the murasaki purple is actually flowering right now)
I need to get everything clean and moved so I can set up the growlights.
The room we’re using for the young plants happens to be a north facing room so we need the extra light to make the plants grow. Once we are a bit further with the renovation of the house we will make a seed starting area on the south side of the house facing full sun.
Currently that space is not heated, drafty and very dark. This house was and still is partly a mess.

The houses here are all brick and concrete so re-doing one takes a while. We are having a hard time to be honest. We are three years in and cannot live comfortably yet. This takes a toll on anyone.
When we got here the house was filled with over 50 buckets to catch all the water falling through the roof, no heating.. ofcourse… and when we got tp the wiring of this place.. well… even I’d get scared
(we turned off the gas and tore that out too!).
Just imagine that, it was in the middle of december also. We fled the busier part of this country and were ready to give it all up for a piece of land.

Still to this day we fully back that decision and besides we both love, really LOVE this house. Once restored it might look rather chique even, because back in the day when they build this house it was used for town meetings and such.
Buildings had fancy window frames and stained glass just like this house has (on the north side).
Part of the glass is broken, basically all the windows on this house have to be replaced. On the south side of the house we already did so since that is the area we’ll be doing first.

One, south side of the house

Two

Three! (and onwards to the roof!)

We are nearly ready with the bathroom and halfway done with the first toilet (the walls had to be up and plumbing done before we could pour the concrete in).
Everything is done by hand by us.

Next is the long awaited bedroom. If we have that done we can move furniture around (we are still living in one room..) and create some space. There is a little seating room which comes after that but all that room needs is a layer of concrete blocks, a bit of paint and something cheap to put on the floor. I want tiles in the long run but need to keep the expenses down in order to get the house done first.

You would not believe the energy bill on this thing….
Insulation, double glazing? What’s that?!?!

Moving on..
We have a woodstove waiting in the shed. We have two entrances on top of the house for a potential chimney but currently there isn’t one. To make matters more complicated this house is not fireproof. To keep it short they have been frying fries here without ventilation for many years and then let is collect dust for another 18 years.
The inner walls are decorated with a kind of board material, its a recipe for disaster.
So to make it safe to use woodheat we would need to tear down the entire wall and build a chimney, which we can’t do because we are sleeping in that single livable room.
You still with me??

So to reduce cost we need to build the chimney and insulate the place, to do that we need to move the bed so make the bedroom, to do that we need to move the stairs first.
Our new bedroom has a kind of hole in the wall and that is where they put the stairs.. very weird spot. We need to move it and luckily through my hubby’s job we can get free wood. Sometimes it’s just pallets but on good days he comes home with solid oak boards! Needless to say he’ll make the new staircase himself.

It’s clear we’ve got our work cut out for us and I haven’t even touched the living room or kitchen yet. It will require some demolition to begin with. The aim was to get it done in ten years, that includes the shed and outbuildings. We are three years in and it’s gonna be tight. In a house like this there are always things that pop up that require immediate attention (and funds) and that messes up the schedule.

Despite all the work I really love this place. It’s full of old beams which will stay visible and we found marks of the war. Even hidden things in the walls and floors from way before that. I also love these handmade nails, those square ones. The character hidden inside the bones of this house is amazing! the things it has lived through. There is a whole world underneath this house too, we have uncovered part when we went to check the foundation.

Entrance to a hidden waterwell. Hard to see but it had solid bricks around it and was so large it could have been a shelter.

Every penny we have goes into this place. We will save this homestead!

An old picture from our first year garden on this property. This plot was all grass no fences.

And this one a year later, how to keep your paths clear with pigs!