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.