Anniversary!

Just over one year ago we walked through the door to find this:

A year on we’re (more or less) happily living in the place

So time for a photo shoot progress check. But before we get to the photos, a small list of lessons learnt we’ve learnt over the year!

1.       Multiply key things by two. By that I mean budget and time. Thankfully we’d more or less doubled the former, but not the latter. And that doubling time thing extends to every little job you do yourself. Actually, triple it for safety.

2.       Make your motto “paso doble", i.e. 2 steps forwards, 1 step back”. However hard you plan, the unexpected will arise.

3.     Demolition will be quick and painful. Reconstruction will be slow and painful. The former will go by quickly but you’ll wonder if the walls can still stand with such holes in them. Though you’ll forget about the carnage during reconstruction, you’ll remember that things were always moving back then and ask why they don’t now!

4.       A house renovation can produce more rubbish than you can image. We loaded 45m3 of waste into skips in the last year. And we didn’t even knock any walls down...

5.       Your house, your life, your journey. You’re doing it for you. It’s easy to forget sometimes this isn’t just something you have to do. It’s something you do for you, and that you can mean the 2, 3, 4+ people in your family. And the “you” is the most important.

Hall - stairs

Lounge

Dining room

Kitchen

Laundry-toilet

Bathroom

Master

1st floor bedroom

Still lots of little things to do in these two floors, and then two more to go!

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We're slowly moving the blog to Instagram (@bortzmembrok). After all, an image speaks 1 000 words!