Old School renovation update – 6 months in

Written by Sarah Nicholas @old.school.scotland

Well, 6 months into life at the old school and our biggest news is WE HAVE HEATING!! The day after our Air-Source Heat Pump was switched on, I was running around turning down the radiator thermostats feeling weirdly…warm.

In the almost 7 years that Col and I have lived together, we have had an open coal fire, night storage heaters, wood-burning stove, diesel heaters (#boatlife) but never once have we lived somewhere with central heating. So buying a house with just a stove and some plug in radiators for heating didn’t phase us that much… until we started spending over £100 a month on wood deliveries to (barely) heat just one (admittedly very large) room! The race was on to get the heating installed before winter truly set in…

I’ll do a more detailed blog post on the process of retrofitting renewable heating in due course. But lots more has happened besides (and because of) the heating install since our last update, and we also got our first major bad news of the reno. So here it is - the good, the bad and the ugly of our past few months!

The Good

The heating installation gave us a rock solid deadline for getting through some prep jobs. We took down a stud wall and carefully lifted the oak floorboards in what will be our main kitchen-diner-living space ready for underfloor heating. There were a few walls which we raced to paint before radiators were hung, and we decided to smash in the weird reception counter in the entrance hall – so satisfying!

The entrance hall soon after we moved in – complete with ‘reception’ and boxes galore!

Entrance hall with the counter gone and underfloor heating overlay boards laid

But the Big Deadline was finalising the upstairs floorplan so we could tell the plumbers where to run pipes and fit radiators. Since we decided to move the staircase, we’ve been through MANY iterations of upstairs layouts. We had settled on a version which ticked all the boxes, but still wasn’t really ‘clicking’ for me.

We unearthed a battered copy of ‘A Pattern Language’, which I devoured in a couple of sittings. It’s an oldie but has some great gems of advice on what makes a house ‘work’ – it’s quite hard to get hold of but I’d recommend it to anyone embarking on a new build or reconfiguring a space. It helped me understand how spaces should fit together, and we finally cracked a layout that makes so much sense. Unfortunately it does mean taking down almost every wall upstairs and starting again… we’re going to be experts at stud wall removal and reconstruction before long!

We handed over a sketch of our new upstairs layout to the plumber the next day and with a healthy dose of imagination and a lot of gesturing he understood what we were on about.

 Current upstairs layout – adapted from McEwan Fraser Legal floorplan

 The sketch of upstairs we handed to our ever patient plumber!

This experience made me realise how different the skillset needed is for trades working on renovations (especially DIY-heavy ones) compared to new-builds or architect-led work where there are detailed blue-prints and standard processes.

We were super lucky that the plumber leading our heating install was brilliant at checking in with us at critical moments, problem solving awkward corners and unexpected obstacles, and not batting an eyelid at last minute change of plans. But by contrast it was only by chance that we intercepted the sparky about to put a thermostat on a wall that won’t exist in a few months’ time!

The Bad

In November we got our first big hefty dose of bad news about the Old School.

We knew the bell tower would need some work from the survey, and we negotiated some more money off the asking price to cover what we thought was needed. But after closer investigation, not only is the bell tower leaning but two of the big upright stones are cracked at the back and the internal timber beam supporting that huge weight of masonry has split. Which means the whole thing has to come down and be rebuilt with reinforcements, including the end of the roof and wall below. Needless to say, this will cost far more than the amount knocked off the asking price!

Our school’s beautiful but buggered bell-tower

But after a few tears, a couple of restless nights and a good long walk, I have made my peace with it (Col took it much more in his stride – a cup of tea followed by a dram sorted him out). We will need to re-prioritise (again) and probably delay ‘phase 3’ of renovations by a few years, but we’ll be here many years beyond that to enjoy the results. And we were the suckers who fell for a home with a bell tower, so we have to deal with the responsibility that comes with it!

The Ugly

It will not be news to anyone that retrofitting central heating is not pretty. The noise! The dust! The chaos!

We survived two solid weeks of working from home surrounded by a team who arrived before dawn to drill through solid stone walls, take up floors, cut holes in plaster (the dustiest job known to man), router channels in overlay boards and mastermind the most incredible array of copper pipes, manifolds and heat pumps. The hardest part was hearing ‘oh shiiiiiii****’ from somewhere overhead, and resisting the urge to run over and micromanage…

The team were brilliant, flexible and meticulous. They even planned the quiet jobs to coincide with my most important video meetings – that’s service! But for now I’m quite happy to return to the DIY approach of cramming jobs into evenings and weekends, containing the chaos (well, sort of!) and having less pressurised time to plot and plan again.

Our next big milestone is building the new stairs. We’ve decided to get the pros in for the build and install, but there’s lots of prep work to do before they start at the end of January.

So next up – restoring and relaying the floorboards and putting up the first of many new partition walls!

PS – if you are considering heating options and live north of Perth (Scotland), the team at Sugplumb who fitted ours are offering readers of this blog £50 off your installation if you quote ‘Old School Reno Diary’ when making an enquiry. Full transparency - we will get a referral fee if you go ahead (to help pay for that blasted bell tower!!)