Wood Chip and beyond

Wood Chip takes a very long time to take off, this particular brand of Wood Chip seems to be welded on. The industrial paper stripper has become an integral part of our team, and we will be sad to see it go, but that is still a long way off yet. However room by room our Pile of Rubble is slowly becoming Wood Chip free.

We began investigating the design options or our pile of Rubble as soon as we decided to purchase it, this has proved to be invaluable, so far its taken six months of working on the plans in order for them to be submitted to the Listed Planning officer. The major points are the windows. Our Pile of Rubble still has a front window that looks very much like a shop window. As it was Listed in 1972 the front window has never been changed. We are only allowed to replace windows, if they are too rotten to repair. Out of the twelve windows in our Pile of Rubble, only three fit this description. As well as having a very in-depth rational for our reasons around changing the window, we also needed a written historical statement for our Pile of Rubble and eight separate detailed drawings. These made it to the planning in January.

There is only so much work that can be done in a listed building whilst we waited for planning. So we decided after careful planning that this was our only opportunity to jump on a plane and find some winter sun.

Our destination of choice was Mexico. So armed with various DIY books and magazines we embarked on a very different adventure for 15 days.

Now when most people think about Mexico in January, it is hot and very sunny, for a full 8hrs everyday. We are the worlds worst people to go on holiday with, this is the first January in years, when it has rained and been overcast. At times the pool attendants had fleece jackets on, and on one occasion the pool was closed early due to a rain storm. However this did not dampen our spirits. We did have a number of sunny days and quite a few when it was very hot.

We had a brilliant day visiting the ancient ruins and seeing a few different areas surrounding Cancun.

By far one of the best experiences we had in Cancun was visiting CoCo Bongo. This is a fantastic night out if you find yourself in downtown Cancun and at a loose end, get tickets and go. It was just a brilliant experience, and for two women who last went clubbing in our younger years, it was mind blowing, we didn’t get back to our hotel room until 3:45am.

Little Mexico adventure over, we headed back to our Pile of Rubble. Planning application had been made public, notices were up outside and we needed to prepare the internal walls for the biggest change in our houses history to date.