As for the actual structure of the building – well, there leaves very little here to be desired. Built in the 1980s complete with a terrible thin plastic roof, this room enters temperatures at minus figures during winter and leaks during heavy rain. The walls are just one brick thick, presumably built onto very shallow foundations with a terrible combo of single pane windows sandwiching a double glazed door. The room sucks the light from both the dining room and kitchen, both of which have no connection with the outdoor space, thanks to this terrible obstruction.
In an ideal world, I would have this re-built properly, open up the entire dining room and kitchen into it and have it as one beautiful glass extension, with a huge open plan kitchen-diner. But sadly, our budgets are considerably lower than we could ever afford to have that done!
So what do we have planned? Well, replacing the leaky conservatory roof was one of this years renovation goals and we desperately wanted to get it done before we go away in a few months. After all, retuning to a flooded conservatory was not something we wanted to deal with. Due to the very basic and weak structure of this conservatory roof, double glazed glass roofing was completely out of the question. I naturally looked into it, as a comparison cost, but to go for a glass roof option would have cost upwards of £1000 and putting that amount of money onto a poorly built structure is not a vey good investment idea. Not to mention that we don’t have that kind of money for this project anyway.
Internally, we don’t intend on changing a great deal – we’d like to add some insulating plasterboard to the single brick wall (one on the left), lay some flooring and generally give this room a lick of paint. The washing machine will probably be moved back into the kitchen and this room will just become a little summer snug. BUT, before all of that(!) we need to replace the roof. And even before that – we needed to repair and prep the beams. Most of them were all fine, but a couple were looking just a little worse for wear….
What do you think? Would you have kept this room or completely teared it down?
Total Costs
(rounded to the nearest pound)
New Tools Purchased:
None
Materials Used:
Paint £20
Wood Hardener £9
Wood Filler £12
Total Costs: £41
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