When I say that 2025 wasn’t a good year, I forget that somehow we managed to finish what was really quite a big job. It all started when out of frustration at the never ending rodent problem down at the wood store end of our living room, I decided that the way to go would be to rebuild the woodstore but in concrete block, just to keep the buggers out. Now, Lyra was coming up thirteen, and her tiny bedroom was becoming a studio, and a living room, and a hang out, but was still only six foot wide, so the question of a bigger space had come up and we were trying to decide where that might go. I was all set to make the house longer, when John, a friend who is also a bricklayer, suggested that maybe the woodstore could become a bathroom and a utility, and that we could knock Lyras room through into the old bathroom. That way the house wouldn’t actually get bigger, we would just move things about.
This seemed like a great idea so we got on with clearing the woodstore, rat and all, to make it ready for the blockwork replacement. Now part of the reason we didn’t do this originally is that the house is built directly onto granite, and at that corner of the house the granite erupts from the ground into a great lump. A very hard to shift lump. In fact it’s not actually granite, its a close relative called granodorite, which was pushed up as molten rock some 300 million years ago, and been there ever since. It started to form when this land was south of the equator, if you can believe it, and so has had quite the journey until I came along.
The idea was to leave most of the rock, build onto it, have it protrude into what would become the shower, and then shave off the bits where the room would be to level it out. This involved cutting slots into the rock with a petrol driven disc cutter, and then breaking the bits off with a sledge hammer. Incredibly dirty, hard work that took weeks, interrupted briefly by a trip in an ambulance, following an incident where I swung a splitting axe (I’d snapped the sledge hammer) as hard as possible, only to catch it in a hanging cable, and have it rebound straight into the top of my head. It was messy, and frightening for everyone else, but the paramedics were amazing, and after a CT scan and and having the hole in my scalp glued shut, I was sent home to continue, albeit mode cautiously.
John did an amazing job of building a cavity wall over and through a huge lump of granite, and even tolerated my request for round windows, which I hope you will agree are suitably hobbity. We were able to extend the green roof over this room, and by the summer of 2025 I was getting stuck into the interior. Because it was all inspired by places I’d seen on my travels, I didn’t want just a plain old bathroom, so Claire and Lyra came up with a great mosaic wall for the shower, which we all helped design and make.
I finally got to use the old doors I’d gone all the way to Wexford for 18 months previously, and we exposed the original back wall of the cottage in the connecting coridoor. The finishing touches came in the form of a wall with a hidden(ish) utility room door, a little wall sculpture using some old printing blocks that mum had held onto from the 60’s, and then finally I hung some of her original paintings that had been sitting in cupboards for 60 years. It seemed a fitting tribute to finally have them on display, and having them there really brought the project to a good end.