Offline Website BuilderThe next year was spent building a garage.The first job was to clear as much space as possible, much of the old timber from the house was stacked up there which John sawed up and took to the Porch House for fuel, there were also about 10 old doors which Dave Hand took away to make tables and cover the bar in the Underground, the small venue under the Community Hall. We also got Joe and Craig back to rebuild the stone wall along the footpath.
Trying to gauge how best too fit a garage and a car space in was not a simple task, in the end John decided to build the retaining wall first and then, once the space was clear, draw up the plans and submit them to the council. So at the beginning of January 2017 a digger and skip were hired and work started.
Once the site was clear and the retaining wall in place it was possible to put the Caterham in position to work out the layout. Once that was done John drew up the plans and submitted them to the Planning department.
We bought 500 reclaimed bricks for the front wall and a set of garage doors from B&Q.John spent almost a day playing with wood and scaffolding deciding how to build the garage roof, it is quite a three dimensional puzzle but the end result turned out well.
We used the old slates recovered from the back of the house, they are called “Randoms” and are twice as thick as normal slates and a little softer.
The work was finally completed 18 months after we started, the first (and probably the last) time that John has built a building. In January 2019, we finally sold The Porch House and moved into our new home.
Another enhancement was a mural on the front of the house. We had been looking for something suitable for over a year and then saw a painting decorating a building under restoration in France. We sent a copy to Felicity Warbrick and asked her to come up with something. The resulting painting is great.
The picture shows Felicity and Nick after they had completed the picture in 2020.
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