Biting off more than you can chew.

I don't really know why I gave the title of the blog that sentence but sometimes it did feel like it, I want to share in this long post what most of the summer we have been doing.

When it all started because we thought about a loft conversion.

Credit Pixabay

So going back to the back end of last year, we knew that space was indeed an issue, trying to make do with the rooms we had in the house, but the layout what far from perfect. I remember when looking at the photos of the house which really.... really I need to do some before and afters.

I had an idea where each room would go by looking at the pictures, living room and kitchen were going downstairs, and bedroom and bathroom to go upstairs, or so we thought, because never thinking about the dining room where that was to go, kind of scuppered our plans a bit.

The house went a bit topsy turvey and the living room ended up on the first floor, no problem really I thought furnished it and put in a nice log burning stove, all set really.

Then the winter arrived and we really got an eye opener.

It is a proverbial pain in the ass, when you have a two storey property and you are trying to keep it warm in winter time, without radiators. My main problem was cooking in the kitchen if the fire had not been lit, trying to peel potatoes, when your hands are like ice is no fun!!

What should have been a relaxing, maybe cozy winter, ended up being me feeling exhausted, cold, depressed and wanting summer to hurry its ass up. I started to wonder if we had made a drastic mistake, being that I liked the house, however it did not have the space that we required to make it feel well more homely.

So we thought it better to think of how to best use the space that we had, and working out we had quite a big loft space, that it would perhaps be a better idea to convert and have a third floor available to use, maybe as our bedroom and then it would leave another room free.

So it would be by chance that a friend dropped by the following week.

Our friend who is British and also lives here in Bulgaria stopped by around December time and came for coffee, the great thing was during the day in December the weather was still delightfully warm, so we sat in the summer kitchen chatting, and we ran the idea past him for his opinion.

Neil is great due to the fact that he has done building work over here already and has a pretty good lay of the land as to what you can do and what you can't do. For instance the law in bulgaria states that you can build on the existing footprint of the house without the need for planning permission, as long as you do it on the footprint and not elsewhere on the land.

After explaining the plan he sat back and considered it and looked over to what was the old house at the back of ours. He made the suggestion that we had not considered being that we thought it would be quite expensive to do, and Alan wanted it as a workshop for his tools.

Neil came up with an alternative that with using reclaimed materials mostly we could infact add the old house to the existing and put in a whole new floor and that the cost would not amount as much as we thought it would initially. After a walk around the building and working some measurements we agreed it would be a much better option, which would mean we would have the kitchen living room and dining room on one floor, bedrooms above us and it would actually turn it from a one bedroom into a FOUR bedroom property.

So stay tuned for more posts,

Follow our adventure of how we turned this.....

Into this.....

I look forward to the next installment.

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