With serious ‘building stuff’ to do, it’s time to get the big boys in.
Over the past few months, my Englishman and I have knocked out ceilings, cleared the flooring, deconstructed doors and wardrobes and exposed a real treasure trove of 1940’s newspapers and other gems. And, while we are full of enthusiasm and can-do attitude, we’ll only ever attempt what’s within the law and our skill set. We stretch ourselves often, but at times we need to call in the big boys.
After all, if any works need a building permit you’ll need a licensed tradesman to ensure it’s all done to spec: sewage work, supporting beams, electrical work, insulation….there’s a lot that simply can’t be done by a keen DIYer.
So that’s were we have arrived.
Rewiring an old bungalow
We had the house rewired when we first moved in, just six months ago. It was a case of necessity over choice. Our insurance company required it and to be honest we wanted it! It’s all very well to have an old house, but safety can’t be messed with.
In the 1920s use of electricity was only for home lighting. It wasn’t available all day – only supplied from dusk to midnight. It was the mid 1930s-mid 1940s when electricity became more common.We discovered that our original bungalow only had two power points installed post most likely during this period and they were in odd places. Appliances were expensive, but vacuum cleaners and electric ovens where beginning to take hold (as seen in our c1946-7 newspapers)! Over time, more power points were added around the house until there was one in each room (still far short of modern standards)!
Rewiring an old house is very different to a new design. You can’t just ‘add a new double plug’ without extensive investigation. Throughout much of the house behind our original scrim covered walls were drill-breaking, rough-sawn sarking boards. Rewiring was possible but in less than elegant ways!
In some walls running cables meant daisy-chaining (ie: large holes sporadically drilled horizontally along a wall) to feed wire through. The reason being, wires couldn’t be dropped form the roof due to the 10ft stud and you can’t drop wire through noggins. Usually you can crawl under the house and push wire up through the floor — but in our case, the underfloor cavity was too shallow. In other rooms where the roof line was low, holes needed to be cut into the ceiling to access blind walls where wires could be fed through. Trust me, it was fascinating — not to mention messy and heartbreaking!
Still, rewiring was required. At times it seemed like putting wires through the house was like navigating through a maze. Some success was contributed to the aid of a plum line (a heavy weight on the end of a chain) that the electrician was able to drop from the attic and find a path miraculously down a wall. If that was successful rewiring was possible. Luckily in many cases with existing sockets, new wire was tied to the old wire and pulled through the house. Trevor was our electrician and he was AMAZING. If you any need a great tradesman, drop us a line.
Not all renovations can be done at once — we needed to be patient. The trouble is, we’re not patient.
Plan, Plan, and Plan some more
We have an average sized bungalow and only so much that can be done on a modest budget. We didn’t want to modernise our bungalow to the point it wasn’t recognisable as one: we wanted to embrace it, return to the high ceiling studs, smile at the original paneling — and include a few luxuries like insulation. We had none. NONE.
We had four areas that need work:
- a bedroom at the back of the house (a 1940’s extension) a very wet, draughty room — literally with condensation dripping from the ceiling in the morning (eek)
- an old verandah (which was built-in during the 1940s), complete with sloping decks to aid the water run off (to be a new kitchen)
- the old bathroom (to be converted into a scullery adjoining the new kitchen)
- the old kitchen (to be converted into a bathroom)
We decided to enlist the help of a draughtsman not an architect. This meant we had expertise where expertise mattered, who could pull together a site plan, draw up existing and proposed works (knowing building regulations like the back of his hand) and liaise with the council for a permit, relatively painlessly. RELATIVELY.
It takes forever to get the application processed. Submit it. Wait. Wait some more. Do some gardening. Write a blog. Knit a hot water bottle cover. Then try and figure out why all the paperwork you sent got lost.
Get in the builders!
To our amazement we managed to absolutely crack it on the builder availability front. We managed to very quickly score ourselves a professional team who started promptly Yesterday already!
We are underway!
They’ve gutted the bedroom and it looks like a garden shed! One of the internal walls shows the remnants of the original bungalow windows (indeed this was an extension, literally tacked onto the outside of the house).
Wow. Such beautiful sarking throughout, original wallpaper glued over wild looking scrim…..oh the stories this house could tell. We intend to undercover a few.
Rather than packing up and moving out for a few months, we’ve set up camp indoors in the remainder of the house ‘in the thick of things’ and be an integral part of this journey of rediscovery.
It feels like being in a movie set. So far. Day 1.
