We’ve had a busy week at Waterloo Farm this week as Nigel has had the week off work, so we’ve been there most days and made some good progress. We’ve had a couple of very encouraging conversations with the ‘professionals’, both of which have meant we will probably be spending less money on certain aspects of our renovation, which can only be a good thing!
Firstly, we had Dirk Bouwens round from The East Anglian Earth Buildings Group (EARTHA www.eartha.org.uk) who specialise in buildings made of clay construction, i.e. Clay Lump and Wattle & Daub. Since the oldest part of our house is clay lump, he agreed to come and have a look. He confirmed that the clay lump part is around 200 years old but not older which is great from an insurance point of view! We asked him what we need to do in terms of a damp proof course as we had previously been advised that we would need to get a chemical DPC done before moving in, which is an invasive and messy business. He took a look around and said he didn’t think it was necessary because the walls seem pretty dry to him, so that was a relief. We will at some stage need to hack off the render on the front of the house and replace it with something suitable for clay lump, as it’s currently concrete pebble-dash which is very bad and doesn’t let the walls breathe, but it’s not an urgent job, just a labour intensive one!
Secondly, we had an electrician over to take a look at the electrics and fully expected him to tell us we need a full re-wire, but in fact it appears that the vast majority of the electrics are modern, and so all we need to have done are things like, additional sockets, moving light switches and current surface-mounted sockets, new up-lighters etc. We do need to get the electricity meter and the consumer unit re-sited as they are currently on a wall due for demolition, but again that’s do-able, just a little costly! We talked about having downlighters because the ceilings are too low for traditional pendant lights (beware all visitors over 5′ 10″) but because the ceilings are reed and plaster, there’s a risk of ruining the ceiling getting the hole in in the first place, and secondly you need special ‘fire saftey’ fittings which can’t take energy bulbs, so we have ruled that out from an environmental point of view. We will have up-lighters instead and get rid of the dimmers so we can stick with plenty of energy bulbs!
So, two conversations in two days, both of which look to have saved us money – this is excellent news as I’m sure we are going to need every penny we’ve got on other parts of the building …
Tags: Clay Lump, Damp Proofing, Electrician
Categories: Home Improvements, Living the Country Life