Wherever I can in the Whitby cottage I’m upgrading to provide better thermal and sound insulation.  One area in particular was highlighted by the other half.  This was the wall between the bedroom on the first floor and the bathroom. When we bought cottage the wall was just hardboard pinned on to some old and […]

An end to the bathroom floor saga. It’s been great to finally finish this part of renovation. For earlier parts of the story have a look here  where I had to support and level the floor, the lengths I had to go to do this “in keeping with” , repairing the old boards.  And then their was […]

With a current emphasis on getting the kitchen sorted it was time to sort out some tiling. Another little milestone as it’s a final finish but as such it needed to spot on and fully authorised by the the other half. A trip to the a DIY shed sorted the choice of tiles without too […]

The kitchen in the cottage is small, there’s nothing much we can do about that because the walls that divide it off from the rest of the downstairs have definite historical value. The only things would could do is first to take the various layers (including plaster board, tiling, asbestos sheet) that added inches to […]

This was, hopefully, nearly the very last bit a structural reinforcement required.  The front stone wall, even though it is 2 foot thick has bulged slightly outwards over time. A gap / crack had opened up between the outer wall between the window reveal and opening to passage way and the single skin brick wall […]

Another decision point, what to do with the floors downstairs.  It had already been decided to get rid of the existing floor tiles but there was one thing left before we went any further.  To find out if any old flagstones had been covered over. In the kitchen I took up some tiles and chiselled […]

The floor of this bedroom is very uneven, movement in the past and bowing of the supporting beams had caused part of the floor to slope down. The other part of the floor had support from the passageway wall underneath. I could have lifted the existing floor and packed out the beams. This would have […]

Compared to the attic rooms, the first floor bedroom started of  as looking a little under par. Yes it had the only exposed part of the cruck frame and a beamed ceiling  but it was just a rectangular box. It needed a little more character.  We found some as we stripped back to the timber […]

I had previously managed to plaster board most of the attic walls and ceilings but it needed a few more sheets to finish the rooms so I could plaster it all.  I didn’t show the new wall in the previous post so to start with is the new stud wall separating the  twin room from […]

The previous posts show the insulation that went behind the other dwarf walls in the attic. These contained plumbing and ventilation ducts so the space was unusable.  There is one wall in the attic that did have some useful space available. The cottage now has a fully insulated roof so just putting a door in […]