OK, when I said we knew the survey would be long, complicated and require nerves of steel to face up to, that was an understatement … I think it’s maybe even worse than we expected. On a positive note, there is nothing MAJOR wrong like subsidence or large structural faults, but we are going to have to do an awful lot of work to the place, and worse than that, we won’t be able to move in straight away as we’d planned.
The main problem that will stop us moving in is the fact that a large portion of the downstairs needs to be damp-proofed. The trouble is, the oldest, middle section of the house is made of clay-lump which needs to breathe. Unfortunately this has been prevented by a) the outside being concrete rendered, and b) being wallpapered on the inside, another big no-no for clay lump buildings. The damp-proofing is a really messy job involving removing all the plaster half-way up the wall so there’s no way we can move in and then get the damp-proofing done because everything will be covered in dust for weeks afterwards and it’s just not something we want to subject either ourselves or the kids to!
On the plus side, we are planning to do some other work on the house, and it will make sense to get certain parts of that done at the same time so we’re not in the house for that either. For example, there are a couple of downstairs walls that we want to remove to increase the size of the hall, and we would also like to reverse the stairs, but we need an architect to tell us if that’s going to be possible. If we could get those jobs done quickly, it would immediately improve the flow of the house, and also make future alterations much easier as certain portions of the house could then be ‘cordoned off’ and dealt with separately causing minimal disruption to the rest of the house.
We have managed to get a damp-proof specialist who also knows about the special implications of working with clay lump, in to have a look, and he reckons he could finish the work in about 1-2 weeks, so along with the other work, if we could get the timing correct, we might only need to stay away for 6-8 weeks before moving in. Shame we’ll have to pay mortgage and rent at the same time but we’ll just have to budget for that I guess.
As to the other things on the survey, there is nothing else that needs immediate attention (apart from re-flashing both chimneys), so they will become part of the long-term schedule of works that we will do as and when funds become available. Despite the relative ’shock’ of the survey and subsequent disappointment of not moving in right away, we’re still excited about the prospect of living there!
Tags: Clay Lump, Waterloo Farm
Categories: Finding our Home in the Country