Home Improvement

Since moving to Kingsteignton in 2003, we have spent a lot of time and money improving the state of our house. If you are the previous owners and you are reading this, then you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Anyway, what follows is a roughly chronological sequence of photos displaying our work so far...

Added 11th January 2008: I originally wrote this page back in 2005, and I look at it quite often as it's really nice to see how the place changed. What is really striking though is reading it now after our baby daughter Lucy was born 6 weeks ago. Where I've said "the little spare room" should now read "Lucy's room". The very last two photos, of the garage partition, were taken ten days before she was born - I was fitting trim pieces around the door opening when Mel's waters broke. I still haven't finished it. And of course, when she is old enough, Lucy will be able to see for herself what we did to the house while we were 'nesting' for her!
 

Click each photo for a larger view and an explanation.

Bathroom photo diary (From January 2006): Click here
Conservatory photo diary (From November 2006 to February 2007): Click Here
Summer House photo diary (From August 2007): Click Here ^Updated!

Moving in:
These photos were taken within seconds of us first entering the house on moving day. The scary looking chap perched on the light switch is Boris. He remained there scaring us for months, and then I think Daisy ate him.

Garden:
We have spent a lot of time sorting the garden. It hadn't been touched in over 6 years and was overgrown so much that we didn't even know we had a summer house until I fought my way through the bushes to find it!
We added a conservatory and a load of decking over the winter of 2006-7, Click Here for the separate photo diary.

Kitchen:
This was an immensely satisfying thing to have done. Everything was fitted by me, with tiling and decoration by Mel.

En-suite:
As you can see from the first three photos, this room was a mess. The tiles literally fell off the walls, which were saturated up to chest height. It took me a week to dry it out with a de-humidifier and an electric heater. Happily, as of March 2007 I've managed to recover a load of old photos from my old PC. So now there are photos of the missing half of the en-suite that weren't here before:

Bathroom:
Click here for the separate photo diary done in January 2006.

Fireplace:

General: