Though we’ve been held up by an evasive plumber, the builders have still been very busy. Ceiling insulation has been going in between the pine plank rafters, and a new window frame has been made for the front end of the house. Roofers have been replacing the remaining part of the roof, retaining the graceful curve over the two carriages and giving us another eight inches or so of height in the central hall.

Once they have finished, and the glass has arrived, this new door and windows will replace the amalgam of rickety Crittal and warped wood that serve as an entrance at present. And these, in time, will open into the new entrance porch. That bit of the building is being saved until last, as it can be done quite straightforwardly even after we’ve moved in.

While waiting for the plumber, the guys have also got on with some crafty carriage repairs. The rear exterior carriage, sadly neglected (it did not even have a gutter on the roof when we bought the place, so the rain used to trickle right down the façade), was in need of some attention, in particular the south-west corner (see title picture, top right). This corner – pictures of which we vowed not to show our parents in the beginning, lest they fear we had bitten off more than we could chew – was always destined to be my study. And now, for the first time in years, I can really imagine it. The Victorian teak frame was apparently in good shape, but the rotten exterior has been replaced with neat new panels, cleverly curved to follow the shape of the train. Craftiest of all, the decayed old door has been removed and another one, from the two compartments we cut out to make the kitchen, spliced in in its place. Previously an interior door, it still sports its pale green paint, and is now out in the fresh air for the first time in close-on a hundred years….

Meanwhile, we have some decisions to make. First up: the material for the floor. Now that underfloor heating is no longer part of the equation, wood is an option again. I love the organic warmth of it, and the way it reflects light. But what sort of wood? Many people would go with oak, I know – but reclaimed oak is prohibitively expensive, and I don’t like the idea of an oak tree being cut down just to provide me with a smart floor. We are veering towards pine. I know it is softer, and will probably get knocked about and dented a bit, but we don’t really mind – and it seems somehow more in keeping with the simple ethos of the rest of the place. Pine’s cheaper, to boot – and if the colour’s too orange we can always paint it. Dove grey might be good….

There’s also the matter of the layout in the utility room. Because of the drainage there, it was deemed that the loo would go in a separate part of the long narrow area from the shower. But then I had the idea that if we got a composting loo, that would not need the same drainage, we could make a proper “wet room” with the shower, loo and basin all in one place. This would work much better. But the last time I looked, these loos were all in the region of £2000 – which, as Frank says, is an awful lot of money for a khazi. He has his doubts about the whole compost loo concept, and I suspect he’s not alone. It will be even more expensive if I am the only person prepared to use it. So more research necessary there.

Word has just come that the woodburner is ready and the radiators will be delivered within the week. All we need is for that plumber to turn up and then things can really get moving. Meanwhile others have been busy, as well as the builders. Wilma our lovely lurcher has had several romantic assignations with her long-time beau, a handsome dark grey deerhound cross named Bones. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks whether or not she is pregnant. The world seems divided between those who are excited at the prospect of puppies (and a few have already put themselves down as potential owners) and those who think we have lost our minds. Her due date would be just after we move in and just before Mary starts school. Well, why opt for partial chaos when total chaos is available?

(Portrait of Wilma by Michael Franke)

Apologies for the long absence. Combination of frustration about the WordPress picture upload problems (fingers crossed that is now sorted as there are some great photos) and 10 days in remote, heavenly Applecross (www.applecross.uk.com) in north west Scotland.

Anyway, there is much to report.

Around the front door, the foundations for the porch have been laid.

Part glass and part weatherboard, with a living sedum roof, this will be a place to hang coats and store boots and beach paraphernalia, ideally with a few shelves for scented pelargoniums, succulents and other plants that will enjoy the warmth. Facing south and operating on solar design principles, the idea is that the side windows will allow the low sun in to heat up the interior in winter, while in summer the (mostly) solid roof and opening velux roof light should stop it overheating. We’ll hopefully be able to use it to help regulate the temperature inside the house, too, throughout the seasons, by opening or closing the interior door.

Then, when you walk inside, the annoying division that cut up the central space between the carriages (a vestige from the time when one half of the house was rented out to holiday makers while the rear was residential) has been removed. Hurrah!

(Notice how Wilma the dog has managed to muscle into all of the pictures. Still, like all lurchers, she is very photogenic… ). Anyway, demolishing this wall, which we had always wanted to do but feared might be supporting something vital, such as the roof, now makes it clear what a fabulous, open and light space we are creating. What you see at the far end are the supports for the wall and door into the utility room and larder (our former kitchen) and opening for the woodburner which will sit against the wall directly opposite the front door. Then, turning to the left towards the garden, you are greeted by….

… this rather wonderful space which is going to be our kitchen!

The roof at the far end will be glass, conservatory-style, with a run of tall opening windows along the back and french windows flanked by more windows on the left, which will open on to a large wooden deck for eating out in summer. The sink, fridge, cooker and counters etc will run along the north-facing wall on the right, with a few cupboards below and open shelves above and matchboarding or tongue-and-groove behind, and there’ll be a refectory-type table on the other side. I’d like shelves beneath the windows which could be used to store books and so on, with either plants or seating cushions on top. And the curved end of the carriage compartment on the left will be preserved as a shallow dresser with narrow shelves for glasses at the top and slightly wider ones for plates and so on at the bottom. We were pleased to hit on this idea for retaining the presence of the train in this way, and may even attach another of the top curving sections on the wall opposite to show where the carriage would originally have ended (if you rememember, after much deliberation, we did “cut out” two compartments here in order to open up the kitchen).

The bold move has certainly paid off, as the space is quite something, as I hope you will agree. Looking back the other way, the double doors from the sitting room with the curved ‘birdcage’ windows in the roof now open straight in to this space, with room for a sofa along the train wall in front of the woodburner, where Wilma will no doubt want her bed positioned. And the run of windows above will let in the morning sunshine from the east.

Looking back towards the front door, you now get an unimpeded view of the five train doors with their solid brass handles all the way down. We’ve taken the lower white line of the mouldings on the doors as the level for the windows in the conservatory end of the kitchen and also for the porch, which should give the space some continuity. Sadly, the lovely old French woodburner in the main space has had to go, but will find a new home in Frank’s “den” in the garden - no doubt the next project. Three lovely old four-column radiators have been ordered - one for the central space, one for the sitting room and a long low one to go under the kitchen windows. We’re pretty hardy and reckon that with the woodburner, too, we will be ok with just this and a few hot water bottles in winter - if you open the bedroom compartment doors a while before bedtime the heat does spread into them.

From outside, it still all looks a bit of a mess, with the remains of the removed section of carriage causing people to ask if the white bit in the middle is going to be a bathroom (why I cannot quite figure).

But it is beginning to shape up nicely, in my opinion. Imagine, if you can, the new windows in place, the walls of the train freshly painted in white, and the new additions like the conservatory/kitchen and porch clad in locally-sourced larch or douglas fir (which contain their own natural preservative) weathered in time to a silver driftwood grey).

And then there will be the garden to do…. the chickens to keep…. and bees….

Still, there’s plenty to get on with in the meantime…. Like getting the rest of the roof sorted, installing the solar panels and laying a wooden floor throughout. And trying to get the ancient telegraph pole replaced and shifted away from the back door. I’ll keep you posted….. (as it were).

These pictures seem to have gone in without too much trouble (if slowly), so I have filled in a few of the gaps in former posts where I was having problems.

I hope to be back again with further progress before too long.

]]> http://elspeththompson.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/1-july-2008/feed/ http://elspeththompson.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/10-june-2008/ http://elspeththompson.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/10-june-2008/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:16:58 +0000 elspeththompson http://elspeththompson.wordpress.com/?p=85

We also have a roof!

Well, a roof of sorts - which is just as well given the amount of rain that has fallen, on and off, over the past couple of weeks. And of course, there is nothing like tangible boundaries to give one a real sense of how the space will be to live in. With the lovely high ceiling in the main space, sloping gently down to the glass-roofed conservatory extension to the kitchen, it should be a great room. I’m slightly worried that with all that glass it might get too hot in summer but there are opening doors and windows along two sides and I’m planning to train one of the prolific grapevines in the garden up a wooden pergola that we’ll build outside the kitchen. Their foliage should provide shade in high summer and a colourful show when backlit in autumn, before shedding to let in maximum warmth and light all winter. It has also struck me that I could allow one branch to grown inside, where it will fruit much earlier - I love the idea of sitting and eating with bunches of ripening grapes above our heads…

We’ve started gathering fixtures and fittings. On the way down last week we traipsed around several reclamation yards, looking at salvaged wooden flooring (most of it, sadly, in a shocking state), old doors, belfast sinks and radiators. Radiators in particular seem to have rocketed in price since we did up our house in London 12 years ago. I swear the old four-column rads we have here were picked up for something like £40 a piece (plus the cost of reconditioning, of course.) Nowadays you pretty much have to add another nought to that figure, even for one of the smaller models. But we are going for them all the same - we only need three, and we know they pump out heat efficiently. Plus, they look good, which is important, as radiators are hard to hide effectively. As I signed the cheque, including VAT, I silently reflected that, not so many years ago, one could buy a new runaround car for less.

We’ve also picked up some great salvaged lights, from a company called Trainspotters (www.trainspotters.uk.com) after a visitor to this Blog suggested I check them out - thank you very much! Their warehouse, just outside Stroud, is a real Aladdin’s cave of salvaged and extremely smart lamps, mirrors, furniture and so on, much of it from old railway stations, factories and so on (see picture below). Our four lampshades, which are dark green enamel, were rescued from a former sewing factory in Manchester, and should look good hanging on chains above the dining table and lighting up the main central pace. I love things like this that add another layer of history to our house.

We ended up camping in the carriages. Although the floor was a bit muddy, good weather made it just about feasible. After meeting with the builders, we had a swim in the sea, ate in the local pub and then - the real treat - sat and watched the sun go down behind what will be the kitchen windows. Well, it was a treat, until our enjoyment of the view ended up in an argument between Frank and myself as to what precise shape and size the windows should be. We’d more or less agreed on a line of long narrow opening windows with dimensions in proportion with those of the original carriages. Then Frank started singing the praises of a big “picture window”, but I could not see that looking right. A cunning compromise saved the day. The central two windows looking out on the garden will be made in such a way as they have no central “transom” , allowing the view of the garden to be undivided and unimpeded. Such details, together with “self-cleaning” glass for the ceiling panels, do not come cheap, but the visual impact of this part of the new space is going to be so great we figure it is worth getting right. We can scrimp and save when it comes to other areas - I’m a dab hand at shabby eco-chic furnishings…..

As the readers of this month’s World of Interiors (www.worldofinteriors.co.uk) magazine can find out. Our railway carriage house (in its pre-build state) is featured in the July issue, just out now. And very charming the clever photographer James Mortimer has made it all look. I’m thrilled and delighted to have this document of the first leg of our journey in the carriages, before this latest big adventure began.

Apologies - I have been having the most frustrating time trying to add images to the last post! Cannot understand why it is not working. Will try again in the morning.

x E

We have walls!

Travelled down by train the other day to check on progress and was delighted to find the new kitchen surrounded by rough plywood walls on three sides, with gaps where the windows and doors are to go and a rafter or two overhead to give an idea of the roof height. It looked amazing. I’d been pleased with the dimensions of the new space when the slab had been poured, but John the builder had told me it would look even bigger once the walls were up, and he was right. The ceiling seemed positively cavernous - a dramatic contrast in height when you walk from the railway carriage rooms out into this 10ft high central space. A row of small square windows runs the length of the carriage on the seaward side, to let in morning light, while a large roof lantern will light the rest. The guys seemed in good humour, and were off for lunch and a swim in the sea before Andy Baxter of Sussex Solar arrived.

I’d earmarked Andy for the job a couple of years back and was delighted to find him still enthusiastic about our project. A relative local, he spends as much time repairing systems that other people have put in as he does installing new ones, so I figured he would be a good person to devise a system that works for us. After much talk of watts and killowatts, and sketches showing coils and unvented cylinders and so on, we seemed to get there.

First the good news: in summer, a single solar panel will be able to supply practically all our hot water, for baths, showers and (thanks to a pair of “mixer valves” you can buy and have fitted on the backs) our washing machine and dishwasher. In winter, even on dull days, it will be able to take the edge off the cold water so that a back boiler on the wood-burner will be able to top it up. Nor is the initial outlay too alarming. In the present climate, anything that can lessen our dependence on oil can only be a good thing.

Now for the bad news: it looks as if the underfloor heating we’d had our hearts on is out of the window. It turns out that having underfloor heating running off a wood-burner is over-egging the pudding. A good wood burner is efficient enough to heat a space such as ours without additional heating; so if we were lighting the wood-burner to fuel the underfloor heating we’d soon be sweltering. Running underfloor heating on oil would be prohibitively expensive, as the pipes take a long time to warm up and are best left running (albeit on low temperatures) for long periods. We’re not on mains gas. So it looks like we’re back to the radiators - salvaged ones if possible. Luckily, there are silver linings in the form of a) less work, which means b) less to spend and c) we can now return to the original idea of a reclaimed timber floor. I love wood - its natural warmth and organic texture and the way it reflects light. Try as I might, I could not really get excited about the idea of tiles - which work better with underfloor heating - in the central floor area. But as for visiting salvage yards and hunting down old school and hospital floors and radiators - I’m on!

The only problem I had to sort out was that the guys had made the gap for the kitchen windows too high: my sketch had featured low conservatory-style windows on two sides, going low enough to have a window seat or shelf for plants beneath, and they’d made them start at waist height. Luckily this wasn’t too much of a problem, John said - much easier to make a hole larger rather than smaller! There was also the issue of how to fit everything in to the new utility room. With the walls up, it became even more clear what a jigsaw puzzle this is going to be, even without incorporating stairs to the projected upper storey. After pacing it out and trying out a few possibilities we all decided to take a rain check on this one and re-convene next time with any thoughts we’d had in the interim.

Back to London on the train, my brain buzzing with ideas. Going down just for the day was discombobulating - my body was returning to London but my mind was still there. We still have a great deal to do, but at this rate we just might - fingers crossed - be installed by the time Mary starts school in early September.

He came, he saw, he concreted….. The wonderfully-named William the Concreter has done his worst, and the scree bed outlining the extension to our railway carriage house is now covered with a beautiful cement slab. (I think officially the quote refers to Julius Caesar, but couldn’t resist it - sorry…) Sticky in the London heatwave, I’d been imagining the sunny weather would be good for this part of the process, but - shows how little I know - it turns out that cool damp days are the ideal requirement, so John and co have had to hose down the cement as it set.

By the time we arrived it was hard enough to walk on. Sadly this meant we were unable to print our hands or scratch our names as we might have done had we been present - but on looking round the corner into what will be an outdoor passage, Mary spotted that a neighbour’s dog had already done this for us with his paws! There will be more cement poured in the remaining space between the two carriages (to lower the floor to allow for under-floor heating) so we can always “make our mark” then.

It all looked fantastic, anyway - so permanent! Great to walk around the “room” and finalise with John where we want the different components of the kitchen, which way the doors should open, etc. etc. There’s going to be a bit of juggling around as to where all the various items destined for the utility area (loo and shower, washing machine, water storage, stairs to the upstairs room and my longed-for airing cupboard and walk-in larder) will go - so we are all going to sit down and try to work it out like a jigsaw puzzle.

As regards the official authorities, Building Regs have been notified and have paid a visit and gone away with their money and all seems well. I’ve also been in touch with the planners, who will also be coming before too long. At the moment, as the extension only increases the existing footprint of the building by just under ten per cent, we do not technically need planning permission, though I feel it is prudent to keep them involved. When we start to change the roofline and add the front “solar” porch, we will be going over what is deemed “permitted development” and will probably need to submit yet more plans. Having tried for more than two years to finalise everything on paper with first one and then another architect, which took ages and ultimately got us nowhere (see the history of this project in the Guardian Greenhouse columns on my website (back to www.elspeththompson.co.uk) it feels so liberating just to be dealing with a creative builder who can make our ideas work - and contribute his own - as we go. This project is so unique, featuring as it does, Victorian railway carriages more than a hundred years old whose condition is variable in different places, that this approach seems the only one that makes sense. As I said to Frank the other night, it feels as if we have been wading through treacle all this time, and now we are moving free! Long may that feeling continue…

The next step is to get some walls up! The timber (from local sustainable suppliers) has been ordered, including the larch we’ll be using for the clapboard cladding because it needs no additional preservative and weathers in time to the silver-grey of driftwood. An appointment has also been made with the chap who gave us a quote for solar panels and an underfloor heating system when we first took possession of the property - he’ll need to assess the changes that have happened since then. I’m hoping he can advise us on the best wood-burning stove to incorporate into all this.

After handing out more cheques and money (ouch! - but amazing value for what has been done), we took Mary off for a swim in the sea, my first this year. As I swam further and further out in calm clear water under a cloudless blue sky, there was no need to remind myself why we are doing all this….

PS If, like me, you love huts, cabins and shed-like structures, take a look at www.shedworking.co.uk for some interesting and intriguing buildings….

I’m relatively new to Blogging, and am learning a lot from the kind people who have found my site through other websites and blogs and have left comments and directions to other places. Last week I was tagged by Gillie whose Blog at http://www.skybluepink.typepad.com is full of lovely things to cook and make, warmly and generously written and all illustrated with beautiful photographs from her home and garden and the surrounding countryside. She asked me to take part in a “meme”  (don’t know why it is called this) which has been great fun, and gives me the opportunity to plug a great book and spread the word about some other Blogs I enjoy. 

The exercise asks you to pick up the nearest book set in a foreign country and do the following:

1) Open page 123

2) Find the fifth sentence.

3) Post the next three sentences.

4) Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

So this is the book excerpt - from “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favourite American writers. You may know her from her novels – The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven and Prodigal Summer, but her writing is rooted in her background as a biologist – she sees nature with a poet’s eye but a scientist’s knowledge. She is a keen ecologist and this fantastically readable book charts her family’s move from Arizona to a farm in the southern Appalachians, and their efforts to eat only locally-produced food for an entire year, growing and rearing much of ihemselves. Each member of the family is allowed one non-local luxury (coffee, chocolate etc) and the book is packed with recipes, anecdotes and growing tips.

“Local food is a handshake deal in a community gathering place. It involves farmers with first names, who show up week after week. It eand an open-door policy on the fields, where neighbourhood buyers are welcome to have a look, and pick their own food from the vine. Local is famers growing trust.”

I am sending it to:

Yarnstorm http://www.yarnstorm.blogs.com - the first Blog I ever found, and still one of my absolute favourites, with its feel-good tone, inspiring ideas and lovely pictures of a creative family life. Maybe you already know it. The author, Jane Brocket, has also written a superb book The Gentle Art of Domesticity (Hodder & Stoughton).

Earth and Tree www.earth-and-tree.blogspot.com - this is a lovely site which I have just discovered, charting the author’s efforts to live a more “natural and earth-centred life”. She also has another lovely Blog called hedgewitch with lots of stuff about the history and folklore around herbs and how to grow and use them.

Three Beautiful Things www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com -  The author simply lists three lovely things that have happened to her each day, and her entries are an essay in economy and lyricism. I do this whenever I can in a notebook and have found that engendering a sense of gratitude for what I have can be a great path to happiness…

Money and Sofia www.monkeyandsofia.blogspot.com - I met the couple who run this site many years ago when they lived the good life in rural Yorkshire. Since then they have travelled in a customized camper van to Portugal where they spent a few years looking for the ideal house and site and are now in Canada. In summer they grow their own organic fruit and veg; in winter they make the most amazing felt toys, knitted socks and other goodies that have revolutionized my present-giving.

Liivian Talossa www.liiviantalossa.blogspot.com- I do not speak a word of Finnish, and nor do you have to in order to enjoy this lovely site, with its stunning and sensitive photographs of a sensitively lived and observed life. Lots of lovely Northern light and nature.

Hope you enjoy this interlude!

Back to the eco-house railway carriages next time… With more pictures.

X 

Well, work is certainly underway! From the front garden the house entrance still looks more or less the same, framed in a haze of apple blossom and surrounded by bluebells.

But venture in through the front door, and you soon see daylight up ahead.

The top two train compartments on the left hand side have been carefully cut out to create the extra space for the kitchen extension. And much of the former kitchen/future utility/shower room has been taken down and is in the process of being re-built. We were prepared for that. But what we had not bargained for was the fact that the floor had been dug up and foundations laid for the cement slab. So where only last week we stepped out of our sitting room on to carpet, we now step on to scree chippings. It was a surreal experience to sit on the sitting room step with a cup of tea looking straight across on to the garden. I kept losing my barings and having to remind myself where the divisions of the new rooms would be.

In the end I managed to get my head around it, and was able to go round with John, the builder, saying roughly where we would want things like the kitchen doors, sink and cooker. I took down measurements and will send him a more detailed plan this week. It’s all so exciting. I’d wondered if Mary (nearly 4) would find it disturbing to find her erstwhile home taken apart and open to the sky, and had been careful to prepare her. But I needn’t have worried: she ran around laughing and kicking up the scree with her pink wellies. As long as she gets her long-promised bunk beds there will be no trouble there. I’m the liability when it comes to sentimentality. I couldn’t help but feel glad that we had not been around for the actual cutting out of the compartments, and found it strange to see the scraps of old wallpaper with which our predecessors had decorated one of the rooms we had only used for storage exposed to the air and fluttering in the breeze.

There’s now no hot water nor electricity, and the remaining rooms are packed with our possessions, so we were heading off to my uncle’s farm a few miles away to spend a couple of nights. Must get a new tent so we can camp on the lawn in the course of future visits (a mouse shredded the last one). There was just time to thank John, Doug and Richard profusely for all their amazing hard work, hand over a wad of cash and write a cheque to ‘William the Concreter’ who will be coming to pour the ’slab’ for the foundations in a few days time. I wonder what will await our next visit!

Caption: Me on the step down from the sitting room and Mary in what will soon be a new shower room.

An entire month since the last entry…. This Blog business is no lark, particularly when you’retrying to finish a book. (Something called ‘The Wonderful Weekend Book: Reclaiming Life’s Simple Pleasures’ which John Murray are publishing in October. The deadline is tomorrow morning and the manuscript, re-read so many times I’m bored silly by it, is finally ready to send.)  Tucked up in bed with a cold, I’ve just spent a good half an hour looking at the Three Beautiful Things Blog (www.threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com) - a wonderful site where the author simply lists three good things that have happened to her every day - and admire its lyrical brevity.  So perhaps more frequent yet shorter entries would be the best thing for this Blog. Especially now that I have some progress to write about….

Work is finally underway on the carriages. I can’t wait to get down there this weekend and see what has been going on - and share some pictures, which won’t, by the sound of things, be as pretty as the ones I’ve been posting in previous entries. But hurrah for that. Having said goodbye to the architect, it’s now just us and the builders, and I love it! (Please remind me of this comment in a month’s time when I am tearing my hair out and cursing the day they were born…) The immediacy of the process is refreshing - it’s so much easier to get things done and decisions made when we don’t have to put everything past a ‘professional’ who then has to make a detailed drawing and check every subsequent nail and roof tile against it. John, the head honcho, is extremely practical (as you’d expect from a builder) but also has a great eye. He’s already had some good ideas about how to tackle the roof and our ideal preference for an upstairs room, but is investigating the existing roof first, to see what he finds, before we finalise the shape, style and construction. 

Given the unusual nature of this building, and the fact that we more or less know what we want from it, this “feel your way” approach seems to make sense. Thank goodness the planners seem to agree - the fact that we have tried and failed twice to go down the “official” route, and already have permission for a building far larger and more dramatic than the one that will now be built, seems to be in our favour, and I am hoping we will be allowed to submit retrospective drawings once we know exactly what is going on. 

Last time I was on site was two weeks ago, just for the day, when we finished emptying all the rooms except those in the seaward-facing “birdcage” carriage, which are acting as store rooms, packed to the gunwhales and swaddled in dust sheets. After two trips to the recycling centre with the car boot so full I couldn’t see, and emptied of all the furniture, pictures, books and rugs, the long central space between the carriages looks huge, and it’s easy to understand how the new scheme should work. I’m very excited, and trying not to squander funds on stuff to fill it up again with from the gorgeous new Toast House & Home catalogue (www.toast.co.uk). 

John’s voice on the phone tonight was excited - it is good to work with people who are enthusiastic about the project and keen to get work underway. They have already taken out the section of interior carriage wall that needed to go to make the new kitchen extension, and have kept it intact either to use in the upper room or to flip round the other way and use to repair the exterior of the severely damaged compartment (see the picture top right of the Blog masthead) that is earmarked for my study. The former kitchen, soon-to-be utility room, has been partially taken down, and the next step is to create the new foundations that would also support a small upper storey. So much of the existing concrete floor - really just a floating plinth laid on the shingly soil - is being broken up and removed. And the rain pouring down through the openings in the roof is creating a fair bit of mud. It sounds as if we’ll find a proper old mess on our arrival. But, after all this time waiting for work to start - that’s just as it should be. I’m so looking forward to seeing it all.

Buying a “project” such as our railway carriage house always entails a certain amount of time spent living with the possibilities. At first this is great fun. I always enjoy the “camping” stage when one has just taken possession – and even sleeping with our coats on in front of the woodburner had a certain romantic charm in the early days, when this splendid 19^th-century French model

was also our only means of cooking. Hot water was confined to an electric kettle or another ancient hob one kept permanently on top of the fire – and though there was an electric shower in the damp and derelict bathroom, the idea of taking off all of our clothes in the freezing cold and standing under a device with the dubious habit of dripping all over the wiring left a lot to be desired. Slowly we got things straighter, taking up mouldering carpet to reveal rather less mouldering lino beneath, laying seagrass matting and woven plastic rugs, hanging makeshift curtains at the windows and redecorating the rooms so that flakes of old paint no longer fell in flurries on our faces during the night.

Evenings were spent with sketchpads and a bottle of wine, making lists of our “dream home” elements and conjuring up ways to incorporate them into a house cobbled together from a pair of old railway carriages. Guests who dropped in for tea or came to stay for weekends all gave their twopence ha’penny worth – and a select few, including a couple of architects and designers, had their sketches filed away for future reference. At first we were just looking to make the place water-tight, windproof and comfortable – a bolt hole with eco-credentials for long weekends by the sea. Top of the list was some sort of viewing tower from which to observe the ocean – the front windows look out over a field of horses to the sea wall, but it is slightly frustrating to be so near to the sea and yet not be able to see it. Then, with the birth of our daughter came plans to make this our full-time residence in time for when she started school, and the plans got more ambitious, aided and abetted by a couple of architects, with whom we spent endless hours discussing possibilities and amending drawings.

The first one, a bluff and likeable local man whose own house and studio (a clever conversion of an old wool store) we had admired, spent a year getting one scheme into planning, only to have it turned down on the grounds of “massing” – too much new development in one place in the form of our large kitchen extension with two bedrooms and a balcony on top. Several other schemes followed suit, but we found them increasingly at odds with the rather ramshackle charm of the existing carriages – Frank still talks about one meeting when, faced with a flat-roofed structure stretching right over the carriages with a series of box-like rooms and triangular protuberances on top, I sat speechless with my head in my hands. (I must say I can’t remember being so rude, but was simply at a loss as to what to say.) An architect friend came to the rescue with a single-storey scheme with a row of rooms stretching away off the end of the kitchen, and the option to turn the corner and create a ‘U’shaped building around a garden courtyard enclosed on three sides, but this, again, was disallowed by the planners. Then, remembering an off-hand comment by another architect friend – “You could always raise the carriages up and build beneath them,” an ingenious plan took root to raise the rear carriage up in the air to create a couple of bedrooms and bathroom upstairs and leave a huge open-plan living space beneath it, with a woodburner with tarred black brick chimney in the middle of a glass wall onto the garden and an outdoor oven on the other side.

Somewhere along the line, the first architect had had to close down his practice when his wife (a lovely woman who endeared herself to us by calling us “the railway children”) became seriously ill, and another, younger chap came on board. Like us, he was a part-time Londoner and part-time local who shared our love of salvaged and reclaimed materials and seemed, at least in the early months, to run with these ideas. Gradually, however, the run slowed to a walk and then an inexplicable standstill as the project stalled for months and eventually went in for planning three months behind schedule. Only when the scheme had been passed, and more snail-paced drawings were permanently in the pipeline, did it become clear that, inspite of us being clear about our budget from the outset, we had planning permission for a building that we couldn’t hope to afford to build.

True, the scheme had become more complex due to a structural engineer deeming it necessary to raise not just one but both of the carriages, but the chickens started to come home to roost when quotes for the various different components specified by the architect – metal windows, zinc roofing and so on – started coming in. Two weeks ago, with still no sign of even a rough outside price for the job, Frank and I sat down and calculated, in our heads, the labour costs as far as we could manage, plus the already priced elements of the design (this was not including basics such as the metal beams for holding up the carriage, the cost of the timber, brick footings and chimney, half the roof, the stairs and upper storey). The figure we came up with was already outside our agreed budget. There was no way the sums could work. The builder confirmed that the scheme would cost double our agreed budget to build and another 50 per cent to fully fit out. Even more alarmingly, he estimated a year-long build, and we now only have five months before our young daughter starts at the local school.

So this is why we find ourselves now, architect-less, slightly shell-shocked, and reverting to our initial, less ambitious plans, in the hope of getting in by September. It’s hard, in some ways, to say goodbye to a dream – that huge open-plan space with doors opening onto the garden will always haunt me. But in others it is a huge relief to know we have saved ourselves from what could have been a nightmare – logistically as well as financially. Simplicity now rules the day, with a scaled-down plan I sketched up on the kitchen table and which the builders seem to approve of. It still gives us a nice big kitchen, by means of a glass-roofed conservatory extension tacked on to a couple of the train compartments knocked through into one. It still gives me a study, and Frank a separate sitting room – and an enviably large utility room with my much-longed-for airing cupboard and walk-in larder (sad, I know, but I have always dreamed of them). There’s still a solar panel, sedum roofing and a woodburner helping fuel an underfloor heating system. What there isn’t is an upstairs – for the moment – which, in the face of rising sea levels, might be deemed foolish. But we’re hoping to go upwards in time, and have scheduled sufficient footings into the plans to create some sort of room up top.

I can’t say more at the moment – and apologise, looking at the wordcount, for possibly saying too much already. But I guess I’m making up for lost time - the shenanigans of the past fortnight, combined with a nasty dose of flu, have meant I couldn’t see a way to keep up the blog. But here we are, still dreaming, still scheming – and hoping very much in the next few weeks that the project, reduced and revised though it may be, will be full steam ahead…. We’ve lived with the possibilities for too long now. It’s time for action.

To read the entire story so far, see the ‘Green House’entries listed on the main website.