Renovation Motivation

We haven't done anything on the renovation since before Otto was born but recent events have reminded us that this house will fall apart one day if we don't get onto it.

Over the summer we had a problem with the wiring in the kitchen and found out that none of the plugs in the kitchen or laundry have earths. An electrician fixed the problem but said it needed a more permanent fix. I also took him up into the attic rooms and he confirmed that there are some live wires (although not 240v) and some other wires with old rubber casing casing which could crack if we touched them.

More recently there have been a few issues with our roof. There is a skylight above where the staircase used to be which is really just a piece of corrugated plastic. We'd had some pretty windy weather and the skylight had become a bit rattly. I went up on to the roof and tried to bang the nails in the plastic back down but it was very brittle so I had to resort to gaffer tape. There was a large chunk missing from the top left corner which I couldn't do much about.

Ian gaffer taping the skylight

We found a roof fixer pretty urgently. And here is the finished product. You can see the roof still needs lots a lot more TLC but we're leaving that to the main renovation.

The next little incident was this weekend when we got our first rain for a while. I noticed during the night that there was a drip in the hallway which had happened once before. Then the next morning just as we were getting breakfast, the rain got very heavy. There was "rain" falling all the way across the hallway near the skylight outside the kitchen. Sofia was a bit upset because we were in such a rush to fix it. We don't have any actual photos of the rain inside because we were madly trying to fix the problem but here is the aftermath.

Note the rusted light fitting

I quickly got out of my pyjamas and into some clothes. As I was putting my boots on I noticed that there was also a big leak in the room inside the back door where we keep our boots.

So I grabbed the ladder and got onto the roof as quickly as possible, still in heavy rain. The roof over the back part of the house is like the house below it - built in many stages, not always with the highest quality standards and not really maintained. There weren't a lot of leaves on the roof but there were just enough to block some of the gutters which caused the water to back up and get into the roof. It was pretty easy to fix the problem and then get out of the rain and into a warm shower.

We really need to get started with this renovation...