The Amazing Disappearing Door

I've not been well this week.  A combination of catching some kind of throat infection that Una had last week and the plaster dust.

The builders (or da builders as we like to call them) have been at Ash Cottage for 3 weeks, and we will have them with us most of next week too.  So I know that the amazing disappearing door is not a hallucination brought on by head cold, but that they have:

• Bricked up the kitchen door to the garden.  We have 7 external doors on our house, we simply don't need that many doors.  Not to mention, it was right where the Aga's flue pipe needs to go.

Kitchen door open.   Kitchen door bricked up, and curtain to contain the dust of the new doorway.  Old doorway plastered.

• Opened up a doorway between the kitchen and the office attached to the shop, which will become our new boot room/hallway.  So behind that curtain you see in the middle picture above is Danny knocking a doorway through.

Lintel in place.

The doorway after the first rough plaster

• Done a bit of remedial work on a flue for the tumble dryer that was stupidly messed up by a previous contractor.

• Levelled door sills etc. ready for flood gates to be fitted and replaced air-bricks with ones that close in a flood.

• Knocked out two of the hideous red brick and dark wood 70's style fireplaces, to reveal the original openings.  Here's the one in the back room:

BEFORE... 

AFTER

I'm loving the colour of the green and grey-blue paints that remain on the red brick above the fireplace in the back room.  For the moment I'm not going to try removing the paint from the brick, as I'd like to use the colours as guides when I repaint the back room.

For now, I sit cold and snotty, imagining the warmth and comforting glow of the new wood burners that will go into these fireplaces in the sitting rooms, so that sitting in them is once more a pleasure.