My big house news!

I am entering a time of both great excitement and upheaval as we reach the culmination of years of work and planning. So I thought it was time I told you all about it!

We are partially demolishing and rebuilding our house. This is something we have wanted to do since we moved here 13 years ago but we only really started this in earnest in November 2021. My amazing, super-human husband Jonathan is doing everything himself. On his own. Yes he really is an incredible person!

There will be some help with cranes at some point very soon and the windows are being installed by the company that provided them but otherwise it’s all him! Some of you may know that Jonathan has been building his own Tiny Houses for a number of years (visit his website here) and has therefore been able to try out all his building methods on a smaller scale. When he turned 60 in 2021 we decided he should put this business on hold so we could finally realise our dream of building the house we have always wanted to live in (and before he gets too old to manage it!).

When we moved here it was really for the 7 acres of land attached to the property and not for the house itself. We intended to demolish and re-build right from the start but constraints caused by the then financial crises meant we couldn’t really consider it until recently. The bungalow and accompanying barn was originally built late 1920s/early 1930s and is one of hundreds of similar properties in this area, all with 7 acres of land. These small holdings were given to servicemen from WW1 so that they could make a new start living off the land. Over the years most of the land has been sold to local farms but ours still had the 7 acres of field. We decided to plant thousands of trees to create woodland and basically re-wild the whole plot. It is now an absolute paradise that we call Shangri la Farm!

But the bungalow is awful. They were all badly and cheaply built at the time and are now cold, damp and mouldy with a range of insects and animals living in the walls and attics (from rats to death watch beetles!). The bungalow (which was originally a tiny cottage) was extended around 30 years ago and this portion of the property (an open plan kitchen/living/dining room) is pretty sound. Despite our best efforts there is no way we can make the old part of the house work as a comfortable and environmentally friendly house. So we are going to demolish this part (3 bedrooms) and build extensions either end of the new part and then add a whole extra floor.

It took around a year for Jonathan to design and plan how he was going to build and manage this, and for us to get both planning permission and building control (which involved structural engineers). Last December Jonathan started building the house.

A couple of weeks ago he finished it! He has built 46 super insulated timber panels which are completely finished inside (either primed and ready for painting or natural wood to be left). Here is one of them mid construction being moved by the Telehandler (Jonathan’s main assistant!).

The Glulam frame is arriving today from Austria and will be put up ahead of the panels. Then the triple glaze windows arrive (also from Austria!) and we are pretty much finished! Somehow a floor and stairs are getting made and then the aluminium standing-seam roof needs to be made and attached (again all Jonathan on his own!).

We hope to move in sometime early Autumn. It won’t be finished internally but we are happy to camp while internal walls and the kitchen and extra bathroom takes shape. Fingers crossed it will be properly finished by Christmas. The house should be up to Passive House standards and very energy efficient. We are planning future solar panels on the roof for our hot water and the small amount of heating we will need. One of the main reasons for doing this is to live as an environmentally friendly life as we can.

Over the last few months I have been having a huge Life Laundry and packing stuff up as if moving house. Last weekend we did move house but only into our back bedrooms! We have turned one of them into a temporary kitchen/living room/office (and where I am typing this) and another is storing everything else (we still have the same bathroom and bedroom). Meanwhile Jonathan is removing the roof from the part of the house we are keeping.  I do hope you are keeping up with all this, there will be a quiz at the end! 😉

But how is this effecting your sewing Jo (I hear you ask!)? Well this room I’m now living in used to house my Moxie Long Arm! So that has now been moved to a new permanent home in my Schoolhouse Studio. I had a re-jig and it fits fine. If I ever get around to making another quilt (!!) I will take some pics of it in action.

I have been a bit quieter on the quilting front this year due to all of this and I have also tried not to plan too many new projects for this summer as things are obviously uncertain. One of the best things was Grosvenor Shows asking for a huge number of my quilts for an exhibition.

When they said they would need them from May to November I knew it was meant to be! They got packed and collected just when I would have been working out where to store them! The first show starts on Friday in Spalding. Read more about the shows on their website here.

I have been writing this blog for so long that there is a post from when we moved in with a tour which is really interesting to read. You can view it here. Everything looks so different now as we have built extensions to the barn, planted so many trees and really changed the whole landscape. One of the wonderful things about writing this regularly is it acts as both an archive and a diary for me! As we move through this process I will try to update you with more photos and another tour to compare with this one.

But for now I am happy and excited to have got to this stage. Even though it is a little discombobulating it does mean we are closer to the finish!