In which we make a dent in the attic

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Up in the roof of the timber-frame cottage, there was a huge space — the entire footprint of the original house.

We’d been considering what to do with this space, and decided to turn it into a bedroom.

Here’s what it looked like before. Back then, we’d decided this would be the sleeping end. That’s not how it ended up:

You can see there’s fibre-board between the beams and over the rafters. And there’s a whopping great big ridge beam that looks original (hurrah!).

Here’s the other end — we were originally going to put a dressing / sitting area in the middle, then a shower room at the far end. (It’s a huge space.) We’ve since changed our minds because when we took out the attic floor and had a double-height space with beautiful oak stairs, we decided to keep that…

You can see at this end, there’s pine sauna-esque cladding running up to the “ceiling”, which has been lowered. We’re going to remove all this and expose the original ridge beam.

Where the paint line is, is where the old train set ran around the room. The chap who lived here had this amazing train set. He’d built an entire landscape, and it must have been quite the thing when it was going. I love miniature stuff, so I would’ve loved to have seen it. It was mostly disassembled when we moved in, so we took the rest out and gave the train tracks to Joe’s niece’s friend.

We ripped all the cladding out, stripping it right back to the rafters and then starting again.

We considered putting new oak beams in to support the roof, because the white ones you can see in the photos are cheap softwood. They’ve been bodged in and are a right mess where they join at the truss. We’re not boxing them in because we want the space, so we might replace them with oak, which will look amazing and will last longer than we will.

This is the old staircase opening, which we’re removing. The staircase is serviceable for occasional attic use, but no good for regular use.

We’re having a new solid oak staircase built by the same chap who built our friends’ beautiful new staircase. We’re widening the opening at the top and it’ll look amazing. We might have stairs built up to the truss so we can climb onto the beam easily then faceplant into bed from a height. Fun!

Here’s the plans drawn up by our master craftsman. It’ll be in before Christmas…

In the meantime, though, here’s how far we got with the destruction…

This is pretty much what the sloping walls look like now. We uncovered three solitary queen wasp nests, beautifully built. And a full, gorgeous paper wasp nest. All abandoned.

And bird nests. Not so much nests, actually, as an entire bird housing estate… I think that was mostly responsible for our roof insulation. Thankfully, the roof and the weatherproofing are in really good condition.

There is, however, a random course of bricks that has been placed beneath the roof where the walls join, so we’re going to need to look at that. Not least because they all move alarmingly when you at them hard. I think a soffit should be there. We’ll dig into that.

We haven’t uncovered the ridge beam yet – that’s next weekend’s dirty task. In the meantime, here’s a beautiful wasp nest that resembles The Scream…