A cute little ruin indeed

When I first wrote about our new house in The Netherlands, I called it a cute little ruin. We’ve now seen it with our own eyes and well, I wasn’t wrong about that. We are convinced we can save it though. It just needs some work, and since we’re on a budget, it needs a lot of work from us.

Before the next winter starts, we need to replace all the single pane windows and the rotting frames. We have to repair, insulate and plaster the outside walls. The roof is old and wonky, but the seller assured us he repaired the leaking that was visible in one of the bedrooms, so that can wait. We are focusing on the outside for now, partly because we need to, but also partly because we want to please the neighbors. It is a bit of an eyesore in that street right now.
But if we have time, we also want to install central heating as soon as possible, to avoid high gas bills and to dry the house.

The first picture is the back. The other picture is part of the front. They covered the crumbling wall with wood, but the wood isn’t in the best condition either. We’re going to remove the wood and repair, insulate, and plaster the walls. We’re not sure yet if we’re going to be able to bring it back to the original design – they removed two small windows that were above the ones in the picture and altered the roofline. It used to have a half-hipped roof (like this), but now it’s a triangle, like the back. I would like to restore the original, but we have to be mindful of the budget.

The westside wall is cracked. I didn’t take a good picture, but here’s the one the realtor took last summer.

The man who lives across the street told us that they filled up a waterbasin that used to be next to the house, but didn’t press it down well enough. The wall sank because of that, but it has been stable for decades. That explains why the eastside is perfectly more or less straight. We think we can make it look much better if we make sure the new windows are straight, plaster the whole wall (after repairing and insulating) and maybe do a bit of tinkering to straighten the roofline.

T. wants to replace the roof completely (those old rooftiles are cute, but new ones are better for insulation), make it stronger and install (lots of) solar panels. But before we can do that, he needs to rewire the whole house (luckily he can do that himself).

So yeah, we’ve got our work cut out for us, but we don’t care. We’ve done it before and we are both in love with that little house. We were kind of sad to leave it behind, but we had to get back to the island (T. had some business things to take care of and our daughter will be visiting in a few weeks). We hope to be back in May to start working on it.

What about the inside, you’re asking? Oh my… Let’s talk about that in another post 😉