I’ve
not written about the house for ages. Partly because I don’t want to be
all ‘blah, blah, curtains’ and other girly awfulness. (I get all of
that out of my system on Pinterest.*) But also because it’s been a long,
slow process getting the house to its current state and I bore myself
going on about it. That’s not to say it isn’t rewarding renovating a
house. It is. It’s just the novelty of living in a renovation project wore off sometime around Christmas.
But
now, finally, we’re really getting there. Rob has been beavering away
on the downstairs and it’s now pretty much finished. It’s like living in
an actual house.
The
kitchen is a triumph! It is perhaps very bad form to praise your own
kitchen so highly, but I don’t care because I have the best kitchen
ever. Rob has built beautiful storage cubes out of lime plaster and
topped them with local pine to create worktops. We searched high and low
for our terracotta floor tiles, but they were worth the hassle. A rusty
old woodburning stove has been painted deep red and topped with wood to
create extra worktop space. And an old chest has been turned into a
nifty cupboard. We’ve tried to reuse materials that were already here
and not buy too much new stuff.
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| Hooray, a real kitchen! |
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| Couldn't bear to throw away the rusty old woodburner so it's now a worktop! |
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| The dishwasher - just add Rob. |
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| Pots. Cubes. |
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| Check out the mugs hanging on an old coat rack. How very kooky. |
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| Is it a chest? Is it a cupboard? It's twisting my melon. |
The
lounge is lacking our furniture so you’ll have to use your imagination
here! The old beams have been exposed everywhere downstairs and Rob has
re-plastered the walls with traditional lime plaster. We’ve used some
stone from the garden for the lounge floor, which is lovely and cool in
the summer but might not seem such a great idea come winter! We’ve
bought another woodburner for here though (even though there is a
radiator heated by the big woodburner in the kitchen). And we’ll chuck
down a million rugs or dogs or something to cosy it up more.
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| Shiny new woodburner. Complete with wood. |
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| Some creative plastering going on here. |
Off
the kitchen is a separate pantry. I’ve always wanted a pantry. My Nan
has one, which us kids always called the “cubbyhole”. I used to hide in
there and sip the cooking sherry, pretending it was my own tiny,
windowless house – which is sort of a depressing game for a child to
play. Perhaps it was a premonition of some kind. Or maybe I was just a
really weird little person. Anyway, now I have my own pantry and I haven't once hidden in it.
The
bathroom is very clean and grown up and, erm, white. We would have
liked some colourful Moroccan-style tiling but this
is Bulgaria and you can only have tiles off the 80s so we stuck with plain
white. Nice though.
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| Complete with 'welcome' sign above the toilet. |
Upstairs
there’s still plenty to do, particularly the study, which needs a lot
of work. Currently it’s a room with an earth floor and bare brick,
single skin walls that you can see daylight through (for some reason
this is the only room in the house with really thin walls). Our bedroom
and the guest bedroom are quite liveable after nothing more than a lick
of paint, but they will eventually need re-plastering and new
flooring.
And
that just leaves the staircase. Yes, this is still on the outside of
the house! After the study is done, the staircase (finally) becomes top
priority. Downstairs we’re going to brick in around the staircase to
make a little hallway with doors out on to the garden and also into the
kitchen. The stairs lead to a balcony and a door into the upstairs
hallway. We might leave this open as a balcony for now, but eventually
we’ll glaze and brick this area too and it will become my ‘knitting
landing’. Uh-huh, that’s a landing where I’ll sit in my papasan chair
and knit. One day. Assuming we will ever finish this house.
*As
a scrapbooking geek, I ADORE Pinterest. I’ve got tons of projects lined
up for Rob thanks to Pinterest! I bet he cannot wait to get started on
an arbour made of twigs, a raised flowerbed made from wine bottles, and a
DIY patio day bed!
PS. As a reward for making it this far through my post. Here's a picture of a donkey with a fringe. You're welcome.
