First week in the house.

The house is 80ft long, it's a storey and a half with 4 large rooms downstairs and the same again upstairs. Its larger than your average Irish Thatched Cottage. None as a Long House here. 

 

I know this looks pretty rough..but believe me, it gets worse...Not often you get a pink bathroom suite.

These chairs which we have 4 of are over 150yrs old and looking great...Can't wait to see them around my old kitchen table.

One of the original old oak beams that was broken and sticking through the tongue and grove in the upstairs bedroom..

You can still see the old bed left made up in the room..Thankfully we weren't sleeping in it when the ceiling decided to cave in.

Original windows (large ones South facing) that are in quite good condition.

Who needs electric when you have logs for the fire a cold beer and a few candles.

This is the little doorway into what we call the Secret Room..its a little tac room that is upstairs at the end of the house and can only be accessed up some stone steps and a tiny doorway..we found an old horsehair mattress up there and some horse harness's. There was also a very old range cooker.

For a few weeks I had the use of the kitchen while we pulled out old wood and took layer after layer of wallpaper. We used the woodburner to cook on and used parafin lamps and candles for light at night. Then Ian decided that the chimney in the kitchen was a bit unstable and my kitchen went from this...

to this....

So that was the end of cooking in the kitchen for a while...

This room had been devided into two. The deviding wall was just a wooden frame and needed taking down. We wanted to open the room back into one room again as it originally had been. This is the room below the Secret Room. Alot of the ceiling was collapsing and the old thatch above was crumbling. Ian took this wall down and lifted the old floor which was shot too, exposing the mud floor below. When this wall came down alot of the old thatch came down too...and the toliet which was already in bad shape ended up looking like this..