A quick trip back in time

Now that the work on our new home is progressing quite nicely I think it's time to look back over the history of the building. Built well over a hundred years ago (we don't know exactly when, sometime between 1870 and 1890), it was originally a working farm. Now all that's left of the original farm is the main building, surrounded by a huge garden, a couple of sheds and around half a dozen cats of various sizes and degrees of fluffiness. I think I may have mentioned in my first post that we are moving into the original living quarters, while my boyfriend's parents now live in the part of the house that used to be the stables before they converted it back in the '70s.

Just as a reminder, this is the house the way it looked last summer. Bit less green and a lot more yellows/oranges/browns right now...The back (or front, depends how you look at it) entry, our front door and the kitchen and bedroom window.

 The same view of the house, this time in the 1960s. The window on the corner at the back is our future bedroom window.

 The old front door and the kitchen window, this time in the late 1930s. The house was being used as a small post office at this time, hence the sign by the door. We want to put a bench back in that space below the window. Right now, there's a flowerbed running along the side of the house.

The house in the 1940s. Our front door is clearly visible, but the buildings to the right don't exist any more. The barn at the back has been converted into 3 garages/storage spaces/ tool sheds.

 In the vegetable garden, ca. 1965. I'd love to revive the vegetable garden! This might be a nice project for next year...

 Same spot, but in the 1930s.

 The farm actually had a name, "Hossenhof".

I don't actually know when exactly this was painted, but it was sometime in the '50s. The building on the far left is the garage, the green building doesn't exist any more. And of course the stables in the main building have now been converted to a nice, cosy, huge living room! :)

 An aerial view of the house, 1960s. Only the main building and the barn behind it still stand. The buildings to the left and the right have long since disappeared. (I really, really want that vegetable garden back!)

The old road in the 1950s. There are still cows in that field on the left, and the one on the right is still in the same place, too. But ever since the new road on the other side of the house was built this road is used more or less only by residents.


So that was my quick trip down memory lane. I find the history of the building fascinating! We are planning to frame these photographs and hang them up on our kitchen wall once we move in, to create a link between the old and the new. Just like the kitchen floor and the old oven.

Getting there, part 2: a wee update

Updates are like buses, you wait forever and then two turn up at once... I've finally managed to convert the RAW images from last weekend that had been lurking on a USB stick into usable .jpg images. As you will see, considerable progress has been made. My only regret is that while my knees may be black and blue from prolonged contact with the tiled kitchen floor, said floor doesn't appear to be any cleaner than before. I THINK it is a couple of shades lighter than it was before I attacked it with a scrubbing brush and hot water (and yes, an old tootbrush as well!), but that may just be wishful thinking.

 Someday soon there will be a tile floor here. For now, there's a dark, scary hole we must walk past every time we need to go to the bathroom. Cold and scary in the middle of the night, mildly annoying during the day.

But it will be our connection between the kitchen and the living room. The bathroom's off to the right, living room to the left. For now it is known as "Das Loch" ("the hole" in German), because essentially, that's what it is, a dark, scary hole in the middle of the house. Maybe even a black hole, who knows? ;)

 The lovely Marcel in action! Who doesn't love wallpapering a ceiling?

The wallpaper completely transforms the room.

It creates a much more "finished" atmosphere. We also put the fridge up as well, to get a feel for the dimensions.

 See my nice, shiny, clean floor?

This is one of the doorknobs I bought about two years ago to be used on an IKEA chest I had painted white and put in the hall. I wanted to see how it looked in our kitchen. :)

 And finally, today I got these pictures. Woo-hoo, we've got a kitchen! Sort of.

 The worktop's going to change. We want a wooden one instead of the grey. And of course the manky old tiles are going to be covered by the lovely blue tiles in the bottom left corner.

 These tiles.

 One huge step closer to a usable kitchen!

Getting there

And just like that, another month has passed. I honestly can't say where the time went. Work, presumably. Friends, sleep, travel, food, ...stuff? And yet, so much has happened in our house! I have to add that 99% of the pictures displayed here are courtesy of my boyfriend, and 100% of the work was done by him and his father. My contributions this month have, alas, been almost non-existent. :(

So when I last updated this blog, we were in the middle of plastering the walls, transforming uneven, old bricks into smooth, grey awesomeness. As you can see in the following photographs, all the walls have now been covered, even the troublesome one containing the old window.

Starting on the ceiling was of course the logical next step. At 2.8 metres, the old ceiling was way too high, so we decided to lower it to a more manageable 2.45. First of all, an aluminium grid was put in place which was screwed into the walls to secure it as well as hung from the ceiling on metal hooks.

 Big, fluffy rockwool on top, to keep us well-insulated at all times.
Plasterboard makes up the actual ceiling.

Slowly and steadily, the plasterboard is sneaking along our new, suspended, ceiling...

...until it almost reaches the window.

 In the meantime, we bought a front door.

 Our kitchen arrived.

 My wonderful boyfriend painted the front door and its frame brown, so that it would later match the windowframes and shutters.

 The ceiling was finished.

 This is what it looks like now.

Front door in its place. We now have a non-draughty, secure front door, which meant we were ready for the next big step:

 Making a great, big hole in the wall between the kitchen and the future living room!
The door on the left leads to our wee bathroom, the future guest bathroom. Off to the right is the living room.

Sadly, the lovely floorboards had to go, because the radiator needed to move from the now non-existent wall to the other wall.

 Rubble!

 "There's a hole in your wall!"

Now we can enter our part of the house without having to go outside. :)

 Work clothes after a busy day.

 Please note: my amazing boyfriend actually BUILT this box! There used to be a window up there, but as the ceiling has now been lowered by 40cm, that window would be partially obscured.

 Our front door from the outside.

New door, new tile border, all it needs now is a new welcome mat. I'm thinking of this one: Doctor Who welcome mat What do you think? ;)


I have more pictures from last weekend, but they still need to be converted from RAW into jpg, and I need to be up in 6 hours. Watch this space!

Incidentally, I'm thinking about this for the garden path leading up to the door. A low-tech version maybe, using glow-in-the-dark paint and some pebbles? Hmmm...