Tag Archives: house extension

Sir Isaac Newton Stole My Supper!

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As part of the club’s ongoing development and expansion we’re starting up a new kids class and programme. In order to get it up and running we’ve started a bit of a recruitment drive, and yesterday we did the first major part of that with a full day at a local primary school. Five of us took the day off of work (well, strictly speaking four of us, one person works at the school) and got there at nine in the morning ready to spend the day teaching the kids some basic kickboxing skills and to give them a good run about. Although we had a plan of sorts for the sessions, it sort of evolved during the day and was nicely refined by the end of the day.

I’m not sure what I was expecting before I went in, I mean, I knew the very youngest (Year 1) would be the hardest to teach the kicks to, but what I wasn’t expecting was how much shorter the attention spans got as the day went on and the children got older. It was a bit of a battle of attrition by the end of the day when the oldest kids were all crammed in, but it was a lot of fun. I knew I enjoyed working with kids and teaching them, but I was surprised just how much I enjoyed working that closely with them.

After over four hours of constant warming-up, stretching, kicking, cooling down and repeating ad nauseum (broken up with a nice spot of lunch down the pub), I was shattered once I got home. Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time to get settled; Wednesdays are training days. So I dragged my backside up off of the sofa and went along for another hour of Tang Soo Do and adult Kickboxing. I won’t lie to you, I was knackered by the time I eventually got home (via Tesco for sustenance and a beer), and all I wanted to do was eat some food, drink my beer and go to bed to sleep for a week. I painstakingly prepared myself some nice little panini stuffed full of chicken, and then it happened, Isaac f**king Newton stole my supper!

To be fair, he himself didn’t, but his law of universal gravitation did. Yes, my fancy sandwiches slipped of the plate and went all over the floor. I honestly could have cried, at that time that was just about the worst thing I could have imagined. Today’s swim is off the cards I think, I’m like a total zombie and barely capable of getting off my chair, let alone swimming a mile or so. It’s games and Inbetweeners (the funniest show on TV, no question) night with my reprobate friends tonight though, something I look forward to as the highlight of every week.

I’ll leave you with what might look like a very dull photo, but to me it’s brilliant. Walls at first floor height!

Look! Walls!

Look! Walls!

Take Off And Nuke The Site From Orbit. It’s The Only Way To Be Sure.

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I live in an old miner’s cottage. When most people hear that or see it the usual response is “Oh how lovely, it’s so pretty, it must be nice living there”. For the most part those people are right, but in terms of practicality it’s a nightmare. There are no straight walls for a start – ok, it might add ‘character’, but you just try putting shelves up or hanging a picture. It’s also very cold, and very small. The walls are two foot of granite blocks, something which isn’t easily insulated, and the doorways are typically around six foot or so. I’m 6’3. You do the maths. I’ve hit my head on them more times than I care (or even am able to any more) remember.

As it’s an old miner’s cottage it wasn’t built with modern living in mind, which amounts to a one-up, one-down box. There’s a single-block, single storey extension tacked on the back with a tiny bathroom, thin kitchen and ‘dining’ room, all of which when added up are about the same size of my living room. It’s cold, very damp, and very impractical. The problem is the house is in a really nice location, down away from the main road and with plenty of garden front and back. We came to the conclusion that the only way we can live comfortably and happily in it is to knock down that old extension and built something more substantial, to make it a proper house – a proper home. So that’s what’s happening.

I was stood in the kitchen yesterday, looking at the snow in the back garden and cooking some lunch when I saw something unusual. Normally I’d expect to see the cats prowling about, but yesterday I was greeted by a digger coming through our back wall and tearing the end of the garden down. We’d arranged a builder, had plans drawn up and submitted them, and got everything done from that point of view weeks ago, but a final start date was never agreed upon. The digger is there to dig an accessway from the road to our house, as the lane down is poor and not something you’d ever get heavy plant machinery down.

The driver of the digger came up and had a chat to us, and casually during the conversation mentioned that they should be demolishing in the next day or so. The next day or so….. right, best get packing then!

The whole rest of the day and evening was spent furiously sorting things into ‘bin’ or ‘keep’ piles, and then trying to figure out what to do with it all. It’s just about there now, so it looks like tomorrow I’ll have half a house. It’s suddenly becoming very real. The builders reckon it’s going to take 12 weeks from start to finish, and to be honest I thought it was going to take a LOT longer than that, so anything around that length of time would be fantastic. It would mean we’d be in and settled by my Birthday at the end of May – party time. I’m really looking forward to having somewhere nice to invite people for barbecues too, BBQ season is close at hand now and as regular readers will know, I loves me a barbecue!

I’m going to use my blog here as a diary for the whole process, hopefully it’ll help me put it all into perspective a bit when it’s dark and miserable out and the back garden looks like a bomb site. There’ll be plenty of pictures too, I’m hoping the transformation will be as stark and brilliant as it is in my mind. Cross your fingers folks.