This Tynwald thatched house renovation was our first!
We bought this weird and quirky house in about 1990. The house was located quite far out of town and therefore was within our budget. The block was huge but the house very disconnected. There were 2 rondavals on the outside as bedrooms joined in the middle with a rectangular section which housed the living areas, bathroom and kitchen.
My apologies – the quality of the photos is not very good because they are the old printed variety. I used Photoscan and have managed to improve them slightly!
The house is such a hotch potch of materials! The roof is part thatch and part asbestos. The walls are part brick and part plaster!
This was the back of the house showing the very disjointed roof line.
We planned to remove the entire roof and raise the walls to a uniform height. Doing this would enable us to design a roof that would incorporate both bedrooms on the outside as well as the living areas in the middle.
We also decided to push out a couple of walls to square off the floor plan.
To make a small verandah we would build in a gable at the front and thatch over it to make it weather proof.
The demolition
This is the back view of the house where we removed a wall and we will build a new one to make the kitchen/dining room one large room.
These are the two bedrooms. We were able to retain some of the roof timber on the bedrooms.
The builder has put in the gable. The walls joining the living areas to the bedroom have been demolished and are ready for the new walls.
The thatcher has erected the roof trusses and the new shape of the roof is evident! The renovation shows the bedrooms ended up much wider where they joined the house. This had the double benefit of making the bedrooms bigger and making the roof more appealing.
It was our plan to live in the caravan while the renovations took place. However, we only lasted for a few weeks, because it was really cold in the winter. So we decided to move in with the out-laws!
We thought at the time it was a good idea to build a tennis court! Which we did… but it was a very big undertaking. We used coal waste as the base and finished it off with anthill from my parents farm.
The pool was enormous! And took a lot of effort to re-paint it.
Unfortunately we dont have any professional pictures of the interior. These 3 are all we have.
The back of the house after the renovation.
The verandah after the renovation.
That’s it!
We have finished our Tynwald thatched house renovation.
Thanks for looking through these old photos. We have a few other renovations in our blogs if you would like to have a look.