Building a new Entrance Hallway and Staircase.....

Hello! I am still here, I have not abandoned my blog........ but I dont know where the year has gone.............2015 is just falling away from me.
Apologies for not posting in a very long time......we have been busy working on the house and garden as usual and I have a couple of renovation updates to come in the next few weeks.........but today I am going to show you the new downstairs hallway and stairs which were finished last year.

If you remember, we had to remove the weird metal spiral staircase which had been at one end of the kitchen in order to cover the freezing cold stone floor and we wanted to add a wall to create a proper hallway for some new stairs.
The old kitchen was about 8.5m long so we could afford to loose the space and with the metal spirals location and orientation, the space underneath and around it was wasted anyway.

So it was removed......Cue Euan with an angle grinder and a sledge hammer........

Looking through from the entrance porch at the indoor fireworks!......

 

And here is the ladder that was to be our means of getting up the stairs to our bedroom and bathroom with a shower.........for 7 months over the winter.

We choose to concentrate on getting a kitchen in the kitchen and to tackle the stairs afterwards. 

Euan built a new half landing and put together a flatpack staircase.
Niether of us had ever done anything like this before so it was a bit scary I have to be honest.....

Once we had secured the stairs and landing in position on top of the new floor, the roof space above had to be reworked.....roof supports were removed and stabilised, wiring and plumbing re-routed to allow the addition of 3 radiators in the new upstairs and downstairs hallways.

Removing these supports and cutting the floor right back to the external wall here, allowed us to put in a half landing instead of a winder and move the staircase back about a metre from where the opening had previously been.......which made the world of difference.

This new hall is the smallest room in the house but its probably been the renovation step that has been the biggest transformation for us, having this new space between the kitchen and living room. 
It was worth climbing a ladder for 7 months to get to bed!

Theres a cute wee cupboard space under the landing and I found a lovely little reclaimed cupboard door on ebay that was an almost perfect fit.........we just need to get around to fitting it.
  

We choose simple spindles and the 8 Newel posts are actually just fence posts from the timber yard up the road! Euan cut them to size, ran then through a planer/thicknesser and sanded and painted them..........this large saving allowed us to buy a beautiful oak handrail of which we neede quite a bit as there is a gallery upstairs.

We are lucky enough to have a seperate entrance porch though that door there for wellie boots and coats so it didnt need to be big enough for those kind of things.
We absolutely love the new space, it turned out a lot better than we expected and its hard to imagine the house any other way now.

But that was a while ago now..............and now that the weather has warmed up, we are getting stuck in outside again but my next post will be on the Kitchen Island.......... which is almost finished!

Lots of Love, Hayley x

An Attic Bedroom and the last few days of Christmas Magic.......

 Happy New Year!

Our visitors have departed, we are have eaten our way through too many boxes of chocolates and the pile of wine bottles in the recycling box is rather embarrassing.....so the house feels a little empty.
We had a really wonderful family Christmas here and there are just a few more days now to enjoy the decorations that made the house feel 'magical' this year.
Then they will be boxed up and put away for another year which is the bit I always hate.

We have almost finished the downstairs bathroom now which is just captured to the left off the hallway in this photo......I will write post all about that's transformation very soon.

Poor Euan was literally fitting the shower on Christmas Eve in between his night shifts, ahead of our visitors arrival! We really cut it very fine.

                                                      

 An Attic Guest Room. 

This little attic bedroom was created in a bit of a hurry to accommodate our extra guests. Its turned out  nicely though and has gone from being a 'through room' to the attic beyond and the coldest room in the house to the cosiest!! 

 This is how it looked not that long ago!!..... weird 'carpeted' built in desks and a piece of MDF forming a door straight through to the attic beyond. The ceiling has been plastered too low so Euan who is 6'3 had to tilt his head when in there...... with no insulation in the walls or heating.....you needed an outside coat on to be in here over the winter.

We put the roof up by 8 inches so Euan could at least stand in the middle!!!

We stuffed insulation in the walls, rewired it, re-routed the pipes so we could have a radiator in there, blocked up the door and put in an attic access ladder downstairs. 

Its a really cute wee room now and very warm which is a delight!!

I am looking forward to catching up with everyone's blogs and plans for  2015.

Here's to a peaceful new year......I would raise a glass if we hadn't drank all the wine.

Hayley and the muddy paw gang xxx