Posts under ‘Our barn conversion’

Services. Electrics, Water and Waste. In these pieces I will give an overview and general hints related to the organisation of the services within our barn. It is not my intention to tell others how they should wire-up or plumb their house. Just pass on some things I learnt while doing it for myself. Part [...]

Services. Electrics, Water and Waste. In these pieces I will give an overview and general hints related to the organisation of the services within our barn. It is not my intention to tell others how they should wire-up or plumb their house. Just pass on some things I learnt while doing it for myself. Part [...]

Reprise, review and re-visit. When writing the six previous articles it was very easy to bowl along assuming that the steps I took would be understood by everybody. Feedback would suggest otherwise! As a result, therefore, below is a series of notes made as a result of: a) re-reading the articles and thinking ‘maybe this [...]

Lay-outs, Rooms and Open-plan living. Having constructed and laid out the floors we knew roughly where all the bedrooms, bathrooms, lounge and kitchen were going to be. The submitted plans had shown where the windows were positioned and this does tend to dictate that there is going to be a room on the inside for them [...]

Back to the comfort zone. Having spent a few weeks creating the openings in the walls downstairs it was good to be looking forward to the idea of building the upstairs floor for our barn. As the title suggests I am more comfortable with the wood aspect and had more of an idea of what [...]

What happened next? When I set about writing the above entitled articles, the idea was that they would be a continuous story of how the work was progressing, and how this was changing our lives. As with most of these things personal circumstances changed and situations dictated that for the year to eighteen months after [...]

D.I.Y. or G.S.I. D.I.Y.= Do -it- yourself, G.S.I.= Get Step someone in. So far we have looked at our project as a means of establishing what we wanted to do ourselves and where expert help was going to be needed. This dilemma is one that everybody buying a property in France with “potential” faces. Invariably [...]

Project Management   The previous article left us at the stage where we had obtained planning permission consent for our conversion. The vision of what we wanted now existed in two places; in our imagination and in two dimensions on six sheets of A1 sized paper, which were suitably stamped as approved by the local [...]

Planning Properties,”planning permissions, renovation, conversion”, all terms that we have become more and more familiar with. Programs on television, articles in magazines, all add to the idea that there is little or no effort that cannot be spared to produce, at the very least, the home and the lifestyle of ones’ dreams. This is the first [...]