OWC House Renovation

The house is a former guesthouse, so most of the bedrooms (6 on the top 2 floors for starters) have a wash basin with associated built in wardrobe and under wash basin cupboard.

The quality of the work is very low for the wardrobes etc… (bit of 2 by 4 timber with thin plywood skin, the wardrobe hanger bar is a peice of copper pipe!) and we don’t need a wash basin in the kids bedrooms, they’d wet everything knowing our kids!!

So I’m in the process of removing them.

On Saturday I finished removing the last remenants of the three wash basins on the top floor. Thought it would take much longer than it did, but once I had the confidence to start cutting copper pipes it went quite quickly.

Tags: Plumbing

The purchase of the house hit a few problems on the way that others may learn from.

First mistake and it may seem minor when purchasing a house, but make sure the current owner of the house plans to remove everything you don’t want left there, and get it in writing.

This house was fully furnished when we viewed it, though no one had lived there for at least a year. Now the owner had listed on the inventory they planned to take all the furniture, but a week before completion it became clear he intended to leave a LOT of stuff!!

To be accurate the renovation started just over a week ago (completed the purchase 27/02/2006), but I only got the idea to start a blog about it a couple of days ago.

This is my first major project, really my first house like project since before this house the only stuff I’ve done is minor DIY projects like building the kids a bunk bed which they fall out of occassionally

I also have a disability, couple of degraded disks in my lower back that gives me constant low back pain (take strong pain killers for that) and dodgy knees (recently started having steroid injections for those). The knees are are going to be the main problem since this is a 4 storey house, basement to atic filled with room upon room!!