A shed or a cabin!

A few years ago, well only 3, which is only one more year than a couple! we bought a Billyoh shed. We spent ages researching which was going to suit what we needed and ordered it online. Big mistake! The floor rotted and fell through, the roof bow'd and all in all it was a massive pile of uselessness. I tried calling, email and writing to Billyoh but have never had a response.

So, we've torn that down and Mr Toon has built a new one. He ordered all the wood from a wood yard in Derby. When it arrived, I wondered if he'd ordered a bit too much, but turns out, nope, he was building a shed just slightly smaller than Windsor Castle!

Along with the shed we decided to buy a special saw thing (can't remember what it's call, but I'm freakin good at using it). I cut the wood, Mr Toon did the building business. As we wanted this to look really good, we decided to go for a tile effect shingle, which was slow to put on but looks fantastic.

All in all, it's cost us about £1200 but looking about, for this standard and size of shed, I think it would have cost well over £3,000, plus if Mr Toon and a split up, it's big enough for him to live in!

Warm and cosy

I'm going to put it out there, I really think Toon Towers is the cosiest house EVER. Now if you'd have asked me if our house was cosy this time 3 years ago when we had no proper heating, carpets, external wall insulation, insulated plasterboard, insulation in every void possible I have said through chattering teeth "nope, it's just freezing". And we had the privilege of  huge electric bills off nearly £1800 plus coal and gas bottles. Now with all the energy efficiency measures we've installed, our electricity bill is £700 per year and we earn between £500 and £600 for the solar. It's brilliant that our bills are so low now, for example because any excess solar power goes into heating our hot water and because we've had fairly sunny days for the past 10 days, we've had free hot water which definitely deserves a boom! But above all its so lush (flash back to the 80's for saying lush) it's so lovely and cosy, but on the rare occasions it's not warm enough we just stoke up the wood burner which tops up the whole house and looks so beautiful. Can't wait for the next phase of renovating the bathroom and kitchen, and change the front and back door which will just add to the cosy-ness!

Sooty but no sweep

This weekend we took the fire place off the wall in the lounge to clear out all the debris that had been dislodge having the chimney renovated and the wood burning stove fitted.

It's good to do this a couple of times a year anyway and we have the chimney swept once a year even though we don't use it as soot build up loosens all the time.

When we removed the fireplace the back was full of soot and chimney debris, which explained why it was leaking out the bottom! 

Bonkers!

I know this is a very British subject but how bonkers is this weather. We've been working out in the garden repairing the wind damaged screens but also strimming down the grass that has grown really fast over the past few weeks.

It's so mild today and the suns out so Toon towers is running on solar energy, which when you think about it, for 5 days to Christmas really is mad. I have got the wood burner going just to keep the temperature constant in the house. Because we're all electric if the house gets too cold it's a bugger to get warm again and costs a fortune!

My mum and dad have just bought an all electric and are going through the pains we had but they do have an existing heating system. They have the old fashioned storage heaters that to be fair chuck out some serious heat, however there seems little control over the temperature. They've had to switch 2 of the heaters off.

They're looking at changing their panel heaters to the Rointe heaters (http://rointe.co.uk/corporate/delta-heating-system/) we have them in our house but the newer version which can be controlled via an app (so much better than the remote control version). We've found them to be really good and the beauty is when you're renovating a house you can move them around until your ready and then hard wire them in.

We know they are energy efficient but definitely helped by the mad mild December. Our electric bill was nearly £100 less than 2014!

Just realised how long this post took to go up, bit word but worth a read!

Christmas DIY

Since the 1st of December (or maybe slightly earlier) Mr Toon wanted some lights for the front of the house but just couldn't find the right ones.

He looked online and found some that looked ok but they were over £100 each and were only ok and not WOW. In the end after much searching he decided he could make something thing much better and at a fraction of the cost.

So off he went to his wood pile (he's always got a pack of wood for emergencies. Not of the zombie apocalypse kind, Mr Toon says that for that you'd need a dense hardwood such a mahogany or oak!) and he built our new glorious Christmas lights. In total he spent £50 all from B&Q (I've included the wood already bought). I think they are an absolute triumph!

They were fairly simple to make, made a cross wooden base and then 2 uprights, bring them together at about 6ft high and work out the angle to be able to attach them together, then same again for the other two uprights. Attach all 4 to the base.

Then for the lights, in the box there were plastic attachments that work really well. Mr Toon attached the top one the spaced them out to make sure the rope lights held their shape. 

The difficult descisions

It's always really hard to try and decide where to spend the money when your renovating a house, but what I have found that it's worth having a treat every now and then to boost a room and spur you on, otherwise it feels a bit like your working really hard for nothing, especially as a lot of the big costs go into things you can't see (plastering, electrics, insulation) .

I've tried to do this in every room, the lounge we put in a beautiful fireplace that has been cast from an original Victorian design (http://www.carron.uk.net/carron-fireplaces), the front bedroom, well, to be honest, I went to town on that bad boy, V&A wallpaper, Laura Ashley bed, all new furniture but soooo worth it. I've found as well that shopping around and waiting can significantly reduce the cost of a room renovation. The bed was in the sale and came with a mattress that we didn't need, so I sold it on ebay for £100 which bought the cost of the bed down, the wallpaper was part of a triple nectar points campaign and had 20% off and the furniture was 50% off. 

I find that if a plan ahead and watch products, I can often get what I want for a decent amount of discount, plus and I can't stress this enough always buy through topcashback.co.uk, it's free money and a no brainer. I tend to do a click and collect as I object to delivery fees.

I didn't splurge at all on the dressing room as we pretty much had everything we needed bar a set of drawers and a mirror, although I have gone back into this room as it's not working fantastically. I've moved it around and Mr Toon is going to make me a dressing/console table so I'll post a pic of that as soon as its done. As its a functional room, I'm not too worried about how it looks aesthetically, as long as it works for us to get dressed in everyday and I can do my hair and make up and its easy to keep clean and tidy.

I have used carpet tiles on the floor in the dressing room, as they are so cheap and I have a bad habit of dropping make up and my straightening irons. The brilliant thing about carpet tiles is you can just pull the offending one up and either clean it or chuck it away and replace it. The whole room cost £60 and I moved them from the dinning room to the dressing room as I hadn't ordered enough for the dinning room but lived with it for a while until I could get some more. (is this a bit boring or are you still interested, let me know!). I'll put a pic up of the dressing room and you can see what I mean. Mr Toon wanted to do wood click flooring, but I think its really cold and you get dust bumbles in corners in a matter of hours of vacuuming which I hate hate hate!

I have had a massive splurge on the dinning room and have bought and had installed a wood burning stove, and oh my god it's so lush. We paid for the experts to put it in, Mr Toon could have done it, but we would have to have had it independently checked to get the HETAS certificate and it's a real specialist job that if it went wrong would cost a load of money, sometimes with a renovation you just have to pay the experts.

We had to have our chimney stack renovated and our chimney pots refitted as the whole thing wasn't in a good way. This has been the worst thing we have found since we started on the project and luckily for us our neighbour is a roofer and he's done an amazing job. 

Everytime the wind blew whilst we were waiting on the work being completed, I was sure the chimney was going to fall down, so its really nice to know its all sorted and save.

The wood burning stove really chucks out a load of heat, and on Saturday we had a covering of snow, but didn't notice the cold in the house as the stove was on and pretty much kept the whole house warm. The real test will be Christmas when we're home all the time.

Now we need to renovate the rest of the dinning room, but we haven't got a clear idea of what we want yet. I use Pinterest a lot to plan the rooms, I have lots of ideas but they haven't come together yet!

  

Introductions first of all!

Hi, this is my blog it's about our run down house, the journey we've been on and continue to stay on to renovate it.

Think I should also say, we're not like the people on grand designs or all the other house renovation programmes. We're really normal people, with normal jobs and normal salaries. We work hard all week, and then work hard on the house most evenings and weekends.

We call our house Toon Towers, bet your wondering why, is it because we are made Newcastle fans, nope, bit boring, my husband's surname is Toon (who will always be referred to as Mr Toon, that's what everyone knows him as, not in a Mr Big way for those who were fans on SITC, but in that is his name way!)

Now I know this raises another question, why didn't I become a Toon?? Simple, it's horrible to write. Don't believe me, try it, do a signature with Toon, seeeeee.

So anyway, back to the main reason for my blog. 

When we bought Toon Tower's it was in the worst state, we bought it as a repossession, so we didn't have a clue what we were going to get as its sold as seen. The toilet was sealed up, all the electrics had red tape on, there were no carpets but there was a fair amount of the old owners belongs he hadn't managed to remove. 

Now no disrespect meant to the previous owner, but by god the house was smelly, filthy and covered in dog hair from a dog that had died two years previous to the owner losing the house. 

It was a massive shock to the system, but we rolled our sleeves up and got on with it. We've been in the house for over 3 years now and have made massive in roads.

I had a blog that I was working on but the platform closed down. So I'm trying to upload all the previous posts!