So big changes in the Brown household lately…
DUST, DUST AND MORE DUST
Back in September last year (2017) Sharon came up with one of her “bright Ideas” which I quickly dismissed.
After a few weeks of subliminal message and dropping the idea into conversation at every opportunity I did start to think she maybe had a point and the idea had legs….
There began the Garage conversion journey, we planned to convert the garage and knock through from the kitchen to create a large kitchen dining room. It’s September 2018 now and we have only in the last month got to the end of the journey.
A SUMMARY SOME OF THE STAGES:
- Board the loft, we are going to need to put some of the rubbish/ very important stuff into the loft
- Buy a big shed for the rest of the rubbish/ very important stuff (why do we have this many tins of paint?)
- Empty the contents of the garage into the loft, skip or very large new shed
- The builders arrive every morning at 7:00am, unscrew the boards that cover the massive hole in the front of the house where the garage door was, and turn on “radio Builder” depending which tradesman was on site determined whether it was mellow/Radio 2 or Some sort of heavy Rock music. The garage is right below our bedroom so no chance of sleeping through that.
- Kitchen goes from a decent sized kitchen to half its size with a temporary wall and kitchen apparatus, crockery & various pantry items being strewn around the living room and what’s left of the kitchen (American fridge freezer in the living room anyone?)
- The wall gets knocked down between kitchen and garage and the kitchen becomes a sink and freestanding oven and hob (connected
- by a very large electric cable hanging from the ceiling) , Emily still manages to create a masterpiece of a birthday cake for Lucy
- The kitchen becomes….well a big empty building site really, we now only have an outside tap and a microwave in the lounge, the washing up is done in the bath, the fridge is still in the living room
- Gradually the room begins to look like a room again and we can finally see the space we will have
- The Kitchen units are installed and we are up and running again, well sort of, we are having Corian worktop so have to use floor boards as worktop until the worktop is ready in 2 weeks’ time so we still don’t have a hob or a sink (hence the outside tap and bath are still in use!)
- Decorating, new floors, windows, heating, now it’s all done, and we look back at the photos it is hard to believe how bad it was at times. It was definitely worth it and we love the space, luckily we had an amazing team doing the work for us.
A fuller pictorial diary is on my photo website, this website is still a ‘work in progress’ and I am slowly adding to the chronological diary of the conversion. But there are pictures so its much easier to see how it happened for anyone interested –
A link to page 1 is below (for ease) and further pages can be found on the first link or by accessing ‘Galleries’ from the menu (Please note the pages are a ‘work in progress‘. I will be adding to them slowly over the coming weeks to give a full start to finish guide of the conversion), they do not currently link to each other so use the main link above for now.
http://stuart-brown.photography/garage-conversion1
OTHER MATTERS
Both girls continue to do well at school, now being nearly 14 and 13 the hormones are defiantly kicking in and there has been the mention of boyfriends (but only to Sharon!).
Emily has now started upper school (we are in a 3-tier school system here, so this is her last school). There are major changes for her including mastering the art of tying a tie and she has to wear a blazer. The school is huge so she has got lost a couple of times, On the plus side, for her, she is allowed to have her hair down, wear makeup and have her
hair dyed as long as it’s not too extreme (the school might think she can do this ….I am still not so sure!) . She has to leave the house at 7.30am to get the school bus in the morning which is a bit of a shock. She is settling on quite well and adjusting to the friendship changes that happen when you change school.
Lucy is now in her last year at middle school and is in top sets for all her subjects she will join her sister at upper school next year, she gets a bit annoyed that nothing is a surprise for her, she is only a year behind at school, so she always knows what’s coming next.
Even the homework follows on and so she knows she will have to do her family tree at some point this year, luckily my Mum (82 and still compos mentis) has a very interesting family with her grandfather marrying 3 sisters and having children by all 3!
Now the girls are a bit older Sharon is doing more things for herself including Yoga, joining a Book club and 2 ukulele groups, this is as well as the Treasurer role she does for the school, village magazine and village hall.
Also she does all the behind the scenes stuff at work, ensuring everything goes smoothly for our customers, chasing/ battling with lenders and insurance companies, and of course looks after our home and all of us.
Please try and remember her name is Sharon not Cheryl, Sam or Sue as she frequently gets called, this can get me into all sorts of trouble believe me. She is an amazing woman and we are lucky to have her!!
BTW she wrote the last bit herself : )
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LASTLY, SOME JOKES TO FINISH OFF (A MANDATORY PART OF THE SBMS NEWSLETTERS)
Last night my wife sent me a text saying she was in casualty.
When I got home I watched all 50 minutes of it ……………..
I never saw her once !
She still hasn’t come home and I’m starving!
The man who invented predictive text has p!ssed away.
His funfair is next monkey.
The other night I was invited out for a night with the ‘girls.’ I told my husband that I would be home by midnight, ‘I promise!’ Well, the hours passed and the Blue Wkds went down way too easily.
Around 3 a.m., a bit drunk, I headed for home. Just as I got in the door, the cuckoo clock in the hallway started up and cuckooed 3 times. Quickly, realizing my husband would probably wake up, I cuckooed another 9 times.
I was really proud of myself for coming up with such a quick-witted solution, in order to escape a possible conflict with him. (Even when totally smashed… 3 cuckoos plus 9 cuckoos totals 12 cuckoos MIDNIGHT!)
The next morning my husband asked me what time I got in, I told him ‘MIDNIGHT’… he didn’t seem angry in the least.
Whew, I got away with that one! Then he said ‘We need a new cuckoo clock.’
When I asked him why, he said, ‘Well, last night our clock cuckooed three times, then said ‘oh sh*t.’ Cuckooed 4 more times, cleared its throat, cuckooed another three times, giggled, cuckooed twice more, and then tripped over the coffee table and farted.
Think carefully before securing other debts against your home. Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up the repayments on your mortgage.
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