House plans

There are a couple of expressions people might use after moving home and looking around the house properly for the first time. We might say we want to 'make it ours' or alternatively we might want to 'put our mark on it'. Either of these expressions could mean almost anything from putting your own pictures up on the wall, new lamp shades, or entire decor changes in every room but in essence what we mean is that what was to the taste of previous owners is not to ours. Just putting in our own furniture, replacing what has been taken away, doesn't quite give us what we want so something more fundamental has to change to meet our desires... and this requires making plans.

In the Grand Designs TV programme the format at this point is for the presenter to pour doubt upon the ideas some rather embarrassed family has for a barren plot of land they have acquired and to raise his eyebrows when told their proposed budget. 'How much! And how long do you expect this to take?' Of course on TV by the end of the show it is all smiles and happiness as we are shown around the colossus of a house with its custom built staircase and vast areas of glass looking out into a perfectly landscaped garden, evidence that the project has turned out well after all and is fully in keeping with the owners' original plans (although maybe somewhat over the original budget).

So now to reality. We are not building anything from scratch but there is, nevertheless, much that we would wish to change about the house we have just bought and moved into, probably going far beyond 'putting a mark on it' if the truth is to be told. Take the kitchen, for instance. It needs more worktop space and it would also be nice to have cupboards with shelves that are within arm's reach and not nudging the ceiling and needing steps to reach them. The gas cooker might look ok but it is far from perfect. The oven doesn't cook pizza properly, pies need defrosting first to have any chance of cooking and the grill is pretty hopeless. Then there's that tap over the sink that the kettle won't fit under - whatever were they thinking - and the kitchen power points all seem to be in the wrong place. The lack of an extractor fan also means that as soon as cooking starts the whole house knows what is coming by the smell.

Moving on to the bathroom, the tiny shower cubicle gave me claustrophobia as I bumped my elbows on the sides and it was squeezed into a small room which already has a bath with a shower attachment. The shower screen was the first thing to be ripped out (we have another en suite shower in the house that we can use). We have always found a spacious walk-in shower ticks most of our boxes and we have lived in a house without a bath for the last 10 years.

Fortunately since this is not the first time in our lives we have moved house and redesigned rooms to 'make them ours' I am equipped with the technology to produce scaled plans that I can view in 3D so we can visualise our ideas. Shown here is bathroom version 4, one that will involve a toilet relocation and a new shower tray and screen. The electric power-shower has gone, replaced by one fed with both hot and cold water, which seems to make more sense to us.

Whilst I can manage the destructive bits, stripping the walls and ceiling, for the plumbing side of this project and particularly in relation to the toilet, what we need now is a nice plumber to install and connect up all the difficult bits leaving me to redecorate afterwards. The polystyrene tiles have come off the ceiling (something that revealed a long crack in the plasterboard above) and we now have some nice shiny pvc panels up there. Our favourite plumber is lined up to do the rest.

These two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, are the priority for us although we are conscious of wanting to do so much more to the house to really make it ours, ultimately to change the decor in every room, a massive undertaking perhaps, but we're talking about longer term plans here, no rush. 

Meanwhile there are other things that will soon start going on outside the house, big changes that will keep us warm for years to come. Insulation all around, wrapping the house up in a blanket to keep us cosy.