The story so far

There it is - the project that has been taking up most of our (little) spare time since summer 2012 and which will be taking up any spare time for the foreseeable future. The project parameter are that this building badly needs to be renovated. Until October 2012 the building officially consisted of a house (the right hand side) attached to a stable (the left hand side, ground level) with a hay barn on top (the left hand side, first floor).

The first thing that we did was to divide up the bedrooms on the first floor (the first three windows from the right hand side on the first floor on the photo above). Originally, there were three bedrooms. Of these, one could only be reached through one of the others - not an ideal situation. Moreover, all three bedrooms were very big. We decided to split one of the big bedrooms into two smaller ones and a corridor. The corridor allowed us to access the last bedroom without needing to go through the other bedroom. Here are some photos of the interior walls going up in the larger bedroom (the one that split up). In the picture to the left you can see the corridor. The "new" bedrooms are to the left and at the end of the corridor. There is a door into the "cut off" bedroom to the right.

After splitting up the bedrooms in the existing house, we needed to get planning permission from the Landratsamt in Erding. We found out that we needed to get permission to change the declared usage from agricultural (for the stable) to living room. To get that through, we needed to submit a plan, drawn by somebody with enough training in planning. Luckily for us, Johannes Stuckenberger came up with a plan which was approved. On October 25th (2012), I was finally able to pick up the planning permission in Erding. The administrative fee was about €560. Below is the first floor from the plan.

When we got the planning permission, winter was about to set in and it was already getting cold. We decided that it was most likely not a good idea to open the roof. Instead, we decided that we could get working on the floor in the main living room area (the hay barn) and on getting ready for installing the heating in the bedroom area.

You can see from the photo on the right that there was a concrete floor in the hay barn area - at least part of it. We wanted to install underfloor heating here. I decided to get rid of the concrete floor because it would have meant having to put in a step in the floor, the concrete was cracked and I also wanted to get a look at the floorboards and joists underneath.

It turned out that I was right to get rid of the floor. The boards underneath were in a woeful state in many areas. At least one of the joists was rotted completely through in the middle. Other than that, the joists were spaced at over a metre - this was not really good given that we want to put in a couple of inches of concrete (for the underfloor heating). So I got rid of the floorboards too, as you can see from the picture.

So, that's enough for a first post. I'll try to keep this updated as often as I can.