Peak District Cottages – Chris's Blog

Shirley's current laundry area

As Shirley, myself and our handyman have all been off colour all week, very little has got done at our peak district cottages. Hopefully next week will be more productive. All the benches and garden furniture need cleaning and repainting ready for Easter along with all the other jobs that have been put off because of the weather.

A couple of things we have started to move forward. these are a) getting an environmental accreditation and b) starting planning work on the extension to Shirley’s laundry area.

Hopefully the environmental accreditation won’t take up too much of our time. We are hoping that with all the work we have done on the heating system, dry lining the cottages and general monitoring of utility usage etc we will not be far off. There will be loads of daft forms to fill in but then what hasn’t these days.

The extension for Shirley’s Laundry will take a lot more of our time (and cost considerably more). We have had the Architectural drawings and planning permission for a couple of years but have never had the time to take it further. The plan is to knock down the existing lean to extension currently housing the laundry and boiler (see photo) and extend the back of the old house to enable us to put on sufficient space for a proper laundry and a small toilet/shower/wet room. This will make a dramatic difference for Shirley as it will give her room to dry and store linen nearer to the cottages. At the moment any drying needs to be taken all the way upstairs to a drying room and then brought back down. With some careful design we should be able to completely resolve this issue. The Toilet/shower room will be a welcome bonus. At the moment the only way to go to the toilet is by going through the house. Not very useful if you have muddy boots on. Even the dogs will win, as the shower will be a wet room so they can be showered down inside rather than be hosed down in the cold outside (now that really is spoiling them).