Update

No photo's this time, but here is what's been happening.

All the floors in both front rooms have been leveled and replaced. Things are moving back towards making the place like a house rather than a building site.

Last night was the saw the first room being plastered. This is real progress, only 2 more rooms and a hallway to plaster. The electrican is also still plugging away (rather slowly).

And now for my first list:

The What's Left To Do List:
-Plaster 2 rooms
-Plumb Kitchen
-Put flooring down in kitchen/backroom
-Lift hallway floor
-Level joist in hallway
-Lay new hallway floor
-Install wood stove
-Install Kitchen
-Relay upstairs carpets
******MOVE IN******

Or something like that.

Oh and I cut the grass for the first time last week too.

From Despair to There

From Despair.....

To There...

The biggest job so far has been in the kitchen/back room. Thanks to my wife's genius and vision we decided to knock the kitchen wall down into the back room and create a large L-shaped area that will be the command center.

A simple job in theory, however the kitchen needed to be removed as it was pretty dire. Also the floor was uneven. That would need corrected.

To get the ball rolling Mr Andy, family friend and all-round building legend came over one Saturday morning, put up some big steel poll's (that have a name and are used to hold up ceilings) and knocked the hell out of the wall.

Job done, two rooms become one. Dusty but simple.

Back to that floor. The floor in the back room also had a weird tarmac base. We decided to lift that as we already had to lift the kitchen floor because of the problems with it's levels. Once lifted we found soil, soil and rubble. No bloody wonder we had problems with damp. The solution, DIG, DIG, DIG until we hit clay, then fill it in with stones and damp proof lining.

The Dig For Freedom Campaign

Old man B and my good self broke our backs and dug out the two rooms, it hurt and burnt but it's done.

Since then we have put in the first layer of concrete on floor, put in a new kitchen window and rebuilt the fire place, we will be putting a wood stove in this room. The kitchen has also been purchased, it's waiting for the floors to go in.

It will rock, it will take a good bit of work yet.

Silly Mistake

I had a wee look through all my photographs of the house and have found that in some kind of act of insanity we don't take any feature the place before we ripped into the work.

The back garden is about the only area untouched by the mayhem, as you can see above. Before we started the house was pretty much what you would expect from a place that was occupied by an old lady on her own. There were, and still are a few rooms with funky smells. In the room now christened as my "happy room", I can definately pick up strong aromas, mostly pee pee!

All the rooms had bad wall paper and carpet from the 70's, in fact in the living room I lifted the carpets and found pieces of newspaper dated December 17th 1978, that's older than I am! And the kitchen was old and falling apart.

The house also needed damp proofing, roof repair, rewired and some of the floor joists needed replaced. That's quite a bit of work for somebody as unskilled as myself and we didn't have the funds to pay a pro to take all the jobs on.

To date have had a pro in to do the damp proofing (we stripped the plaster back to save a few bucks), the roof has been repaired and the electrician is working away at the moment.

The coolest stuff is happening in the back room/kitchen and I'll be back with more details about that soon.

This is Holmhurst!

Hear ye, hear ye. Behold the tale of our house, "Holmhurst Manor"

It's a house like any other, on a fairly common North Belfast street, but too my good lady wife and I it's a dream (with a slice of nightmare mixed in).

We have bought and lived in two house's in Belfast before we bought this house, one oldish (1930's) terrace house which needed some decoration and then a brand spanking new terrace house. The older house was nice, it felt like home, we decorated and made it ours (then sold it). Our next pad was just a shell, it was "luxury", it never ever felt like we put our own stamp on it.

At the time house prices in Northern Ireland we rocketing, we had doubled the value of our second house in a little over a year and we felt we should jump on this opportunity to make some cash and buy a family home. And so we found this house and bought it in January 2008.

I'll take you on a tour over the next few days and then we'll go through our plans and progress.