The Evolution of the whisky room
We are really lucky to have four reception rooms. It's a massive first world problem but we haven't been able to decide what to do with this one. After a year of bashing down ceilings and removing fake beams this was the last bastion of the previous owner's love of all things poky and medieval. We were going to just shut the door on it and leave it for a few years but too much time spent at home in a pandemic and nothing else to do meant we couldn't resist the pull of getting the last few god awful beams down.
After some debate we took down the stone fireplace and gubbins next to it. It wasn't original and the cupboard was built in a boxed in way that totally wasted all the storage space in the alcove. The newspaper we found packed behind the stone confirmed that this was all built in 1996.
The beams and lowered ceiling came down along with cast iron decorative flowers and two massive built in speakers (bizarrely there was a lot of modern tech packed in above all this artificially olde worlde charm).
Next we went round in circles for a while getting quotes for the fires. This one and the open fire next door both needed sorting as the flues weren't lined and the chimney sweep told us this was the oldest wood burner he had ever seen and not safe to use.
The plan for in here escalated. We originally intended to just take the old burner out, line the chimney and pop a new one in, but when we took some plaster off we found a big old lintel and some feet and decided to have it opened back up to the original height.
Cue the stove fitters coming and the whole chimney breast falling down! Turns out that's not a lintel, it's an old mantelpiece turned on its side. So when they put the acrow props in it actually just levered it right on out of there along with most of the rest of the stone and bricks. It didn't help that it wasn't tied in to the wall either for some reason. Nothing is ever straightforward!
Anyway it turned out better in the end as then they could rebuild it just how we wanted it. There was a couple of big nice sealed flags that were on top of the alcove storage and they chopped these up to make the hearth. We also reinstated the mantelpiece as an actual mantelpiece. Unfortunately one end of this actual original feature had been damaged by Mr-Fake-Features bashing the end off to fit a wooden beam in so it's only got the nice curve at one end, but I guess it's all part of the story of the house!
We have gone for a Stiffkey Blue chimney breast and Cornforth White on the rest. We still have one stone wall (the plasterer said he was crying inside covering the other one up but two walls of stone just felt a bit much when there is the floor as well). The Cornforth White is a tactical choice as we have this in lots of other places so we can have a spare pot that will be useful in more than one room.
We have had a right headache about what kind of settee will fit around the awkward stairs/doorway/hallway angle but finally think we have figured out a solution - we wanted to go a bit fancier but looks like it's going to have to be an IKEA one that comes with the arms off as this will make it fit through the door. So now we just need IKEA to reopen so we can go and sit on one and decide if it's a doer.
2023 update....
Well. This room has been on a right old journey hasn't it! It's not even the whisky room anymore, alas the whisky has all shipped to the other living room, but it doesn't feel right to call that one the whisky room. So this has become our new "green room" - a room from our old house that was no longer green but forever known as the green room.
Since recording the last lot we did indeed buy an IKEA settee that fit through the awkward doorway, and we lived one, maybe two winters in here as our idyllic grown-ups room to retreat to when the kids were in bed. But the problem was, that even in the day we just never saw them. They'd come home from school and disappear straight into the living room where we wouldn't see them until teatime, then disappear off again until bedtime.
We'd spent 4 years discussing various grand plans to open out the floorplan a bit, but they all included too much compromise - losing the utility, losing the downstairs toilet, spending too much money. I did once suggest bashing down the wall between the whisky room and the dining room but he wasn't keen. But in the end that's exactly what we did. It was a big old stone wall and the bottom course apparently went into the centre of the earth. For a while we were a little worried the house had been built around the Stonehenge of the north, and we had to chop them through at ground level rather than dig them out. But down it came and now the whisky room and piano room have become .... the kids room? The family room? the room formerly known as the whisky room? We don't know but we like it A LOT!
We've insulated the external wall too, huzzah. Not much to say about that boring job but it needed to be done.
We really wanted to lift the flags and lay a nice new heated wooden floor (I know I know they're original, "beautiful" (not these ones), worth a fortune etc. etc. but anyone who says that clearly hasn't lived with them in all their light-sucking, cobweb-attracting glory) but we couldn't get a builder to even give us a quote. We also wanted to take down the defunct chimney breast in the piano room but same story. So for now the floor lives.