Saving the Manor EP05 - Long Cold Shower

If you are lucky enough to have an outdoor toilet we can tell you from experience that you are lucky! We use ours all the time. Our Outdoor bathrooms in the formal gardens needed A LOT of love, so much so that while doing the mammoth tasks I really considered my life decision of buying this place…

The building itself was in a very dilapidated shape…. it had roof tiles yes, but the roof structure failed and it was all rotten, the smaller walled courtyard had to be rebuild as it was also collapsing, the walls inside the building were bowing out… It was scary to be around, so much so that out of concern we fenced up the area so people (specially our nephew and niece) didn’t wonder around and something happened.

When faced with a big project, breathe in and take it as an opportunity

I mean what I say. We are human, and although we try to be positive, we do get overwhelmed with the tasks ahead of us, however if we take it as an opportunity to rebuild something special, something to enjoy and to be proud of, then the task becomes more exciting.

Lets start back with the basics, and we can tell you design details that we did and we thought were brilliant and it was never shown;

We had to put a complete new roof structure to be able to make it water tight again. We painted the roof rafters black beforehand so when the wood moves with heat you could not see areas unpainted, that much was shown on the episode…

However a complex idea that was fabulous and not shown, was how Dean managed to hide the cable for the pendant lights that we made! If you have watched the episode, you will recognise that you are not able to see any visible cable to the light, that’s because Dean routed an insert along the main roof rafter so he could feed the cable making it invisible! I must say he comes up with genius ideas sometimes.

The Brick Walls

We understand that construction can get boring, specially when it shows similar jobs over and over again, unfortunately its the nature of the a restoration, same jobs need to get done over and over again.

Taking the wall down in the small bathroom courtyard was slightly daunting, we cleaned up all the bricks to use them again. Building the wall was not an easy task, it was winter, and we work with Lime Mortar, which we love and always try to use traditional materials and methods, the issue is that takes longer to set and so we could only do 2 to 3 courses a day.

Hiding pipes and cables was a complex undertaking for this space, when we rebuilt the wall we hid the water pipes that goes into the shower in the rebuilt brick wall! You see finding the silverlining of having to rebuilding and entire wall! ha

Planting and landscaping

When it comes to plants I am fairly basic I think, I research the plants that I like, I pick a very small amount of varieties and I plant them over and over in repetitions.

As we had SO much on, I was not finding time to research on what plants we should use, so I felt it was one of those occasions where perhaps getting a professional in was going to be worthwhile.

We contacted Pip Smith, which is such a lovely guy and professional, to advise us on plants that would work within the space and to give us a design to follow, which we appreciate it so much as he did part of our homework! We might not have followed his plan design but we had a guide which its always a big help.

I was in my element when we went to visit Allen Moore Nurseries! its such a bast area with thousands of plants! I wanted them all!

Because we were filming we were able to visit them, but they are a nursery for bigger retailers, however they do sell online under Golden Valley Plants, we were super impressed with the quality, and I am still incredible pleased with what we achieved with that space, and by landscaping it in the winter it made us choose many plant varieties that we know will make it look nice all year round.

When we laid the hogging (the path finish) we literally had one day left for the deadline to finish the space and we did everything that we should haven’t done, like laying while raining as that was a big no no!

Something that we could’t stop laughing about is that as we got cracking fast, emptying the big bag of material to lay it, the cameras did not have time to get the scene of moving the material out of the bag, by the time they were ready to film the bag was empty… so they had to put one of the assistants inside the bag to pretend it was still full! It was hysterical!

To finish the episode when Dean did use the shower, he came back to the house and started eating 5 weeks worth of cakes in 10 minutes! Some things never change.