Thanks to a couple of good friends, we found a builder who was willing to renovate the house at an acceptable price. Everything moved faster than we expected: the contact, the quote, and the start of the works. Summer is coming to an end and, since the most important part is putting a new roof on the oldest building, we couldn’t wait any longer or winter would catch up with us.

We weren’t aiming to make the house look as good as new. We simply needed to stop the deterioration, and the only way to do that is to reinforce the walls and, above all, install a new roof.

The first step was to remove the floor of the upper storey, which was fully propped up when we bought the house.

Next, we had to dismantle and remove the roof structure, which was completely unusable.

All of this was done to leave the walls free, no longer bearing the weight of so much ruin. However, too much time had passed without intervention, and the north wall — the one that suffered the collapse of an old adjacent storeroom — was quite badly damaged.

The next steps will be to erect scaffolding so we can work on and rehabilitate the sections of the walls that need it. There is undoubtedly still a lot of work to do, and when the works are finished the house will still not be habitable. However, what was once a completely dead project is now (with a bit of luck) going to become something that will allow us to add more posts to this blog.

In a way, this old house that seemed to have reached the end of its existence is now on the path to becoming a home once again. A home that will be very different on the inside from what it was last century, but that on the outside will remain the same.