This week we hit it hard in the shop as the flat has been taking over. Thanks to the unhelpful business rates law; we cannot claim unoccupied rate relief as the previous owner had already claimed it. Therefore, we need to get the shop OPEN and paying for itself.
We made some major changes to the shop this week; bringing down walls, bringing down the crumbing ceiling and hacking off the (supposedly) damp plaster.
As the images show, the small part of the wall we’ve removed has made an enormous difference to the look and feel of the shop, opening it up and making the whole space appear larger. Such a small change has made a huge difference and we’e only had to sacrifice a small, pokey, useless hallway leading up to our flat stairs.
The ceiling was harder work and you can see from the images the amount of dust that filled the shop was crazy and quite toxic (despite our masks Mum!). The plaster required Hayley and Stuart who kindly took over when Seb and I were too exhausted to mallet anymore… hacking and hacking and hacking…
So you may remember from our last update on the shop; how we were told the back walls were completely damp. Yet, as we removed layers and layers of dry plaster and wallpaper, we discovered no damp patches and perfectly dry bricks. We got a few damp experts out who both confirmed that, in fact, the walls were perfectly dry and required no damp treatment…
Our happy faces on getting this news!! Yet we did waste money on hacking off perfectly good plaster & the three days of time it took (as well as our friends). It was a frustrating happy discovery. All we have to do now is clean up the bricks (another day job) and then we can dot-and-dab (look at me and my builder lingo!) new plasterboard on before plastering. The silver-lining to this time wasting exercise is that we can fire-board the walls which should help bring down our building insurance cover.
Yes. It really is the little victories at this point!
Whilst Seb was busy doing his man-thing elsewhere. I started cleaning up the bricks. Ideally, we don’t want to completely hide this beautiful feature with plasterboard. We want to show off the roots to the building and make the most of what she has to offer.
I don’t know what you all think, but they have started to come up rather nicely if you ask me…
We’ve decided to plaster up to just above the filled-in-fireplace. We can’t get that concrete out plus, we think it’ll make it feel warmer and cleaner to plaster up to where the bricks level out. We can create a shelf that runs along too which will be good built in display space.
Between the two fireplaces, we will make built in shelves so as not to take up floorspace and utilise as much of the room as possible.
Now we’ve completely stripped it back to its bare bones, I am so excited and so inspired by the space. There is so much potential here and we can make something really special.
We just need to start putting it back together…
