The house: the plans

In that busy weekend when we saw the house for the first time, we spend the rest of the weekend looking at the plans. We knew there was potential, and we came up with a layout which we are still working with.

The front door leads to a stairwell, with a small "back" door on the same facade. The living room is very narrow, and has patio doors to the south set back under the bedroom above. The house was originally 3 bedrooms, and when they added two more had to put a corridor through one bedroom giving the first floor a lot of circulation. The prime views and sun are to the south (north up in these plans), so the void above the stairs has the best view!

The short version of the decision-making process: move the stair to the kitchen to free up circulation space; move the kitchen to the dining room to provide access to the outdoor dining area; move the upstairs front bathroom to the south wall to gain sun and view; combine the small bedroom and landing to create a master bedroom with walk-in wardrobe, view and sun; knock the living room and entry together with a few feet from the old kitchen to make a decent sized room - with a view! An optional extra is to raise the ceiling (and the floor of the master bedroom) by about 300mm (one foot) to make an even better proportioned room with even more light. We'll see - more on that later.

Lunch outdoors

Mike and Judy came down from London for the weekend. Karen wanted to pick Judy's brain on gardening questions, and get both Mike and Judy (two architects) to check my work to date. Mike just wanted to see the programme and the budget, neither of which is really up to scratch yet. But we had lunch outdoors (14th of March) which is one of the major reasons we chose this house. This partially sunken area will be right outside of the kitchen when we have moved it (I will get on to the house eventually.) Speaking of the kitchen, we sold the AGA last weekend to a local couple who were delighted to find it. For my overseas readers, an AGA is a large, heavy cast iron cooking range. This one was coal fired but converted to oil, and these things go 24 hours a day and really drink the fuel, so it has no place in a low energy house. And after upping the insulation and airtightness it would make the place unbearably hot. Everyone is happy, though. (Karen got the AGA much cleaner that this before we showed to anyone.)

The site

 Here is the site plan - north is up. You can now tour our neighbourhood via Google Maps - Crediton has street view! Type in our postcode EX17 2DT and look for the big white gable. You will see what the place looked like when we bought it, but Karen has been busy doing a spring clean. No. 1 is the house, 2 the garage, 3 the timber green house we moved (for the second time) from Creedy Park with the help of Pete and Jo. Note bare Leyllandii hedge behind - demolishing ivy-riddled panel fencing was Job 1 for the scourge of Ivy, Karen.

. 4 is the site of the future studio - music and textiles, with possibly a black and yellow striped divided down the middle. 5 is the future sunspace (more on the house). Karen has been doing a spring clean, which included having a friend who's a tree surgeon remove 5 trees (see red circles). One was the really ugly yellow cypress tree you can see at the foot of the driveway.

Oh, and No. 6 is the sunken courtyard.

We were busy yesterday clearing the new site for the garden shed, which we hope to move next weekend from the studio site to a location behind the house. Tom is coming back from London and loves a little demolition project - he will remove the pergola gateway from the drive to the front lawn. Fun, fun, fun!

What have we done?

Welcome to my first blog. I will try to keep these short (no scrolling), but I am about 3 months behind, so there may be a number in the next weeks. Some friends and family members have asked why on earth Karen and I moved from the beautiful setting of Creedy Park, to go to a dirty, draughty house with a neglected garden in Crediton. Good question! Although we lived happily at The Stables for almost 19 years, there were limitations: the beautiful sunny courtyard out front belonged to a neighbour, the vegetable garden was a short hike up a hill, and the living room was partly below ground and dark. We had made it as energy efficient as we could without stripping out the interior to add wall insulation. I did an MSc in Environmental Design of Buildings a couple of years ago and really wanted to apply my new knowledge to our own house, and Karen was getting tired of the too-large veg plot and had done wonders with the courtyard, but there was nowhere to go with that. So we started looking. We found our new house online one Friday last September, made a visit on the Saturday and made an offer on the Monday. Why this house? It was the view, the light, the sun, the garden (ready for a makeover). It was actually livable so we could make plans while living here. It took a while to get over the shock of moving, but I think we made the right decision. Now, what to do first?