Update on the House

In a previous post I talked about chopping wood and going through the pile in the barn. Well I have and I did, as I feared, find dryrot in profusion in there. Most of it was in the old wood left by the previous owners, but the rot had spread and blossomed. Given that the barn is attached to the house, there was no question but that it had to go. But first I had to get to it – I gave up chopping wood, and started a bonfire instead. Whilst some (most) of it would have been uncontaminated, the fungus had spread its brown spores everywhere and the wood currently unaffected could easily turn into another source of the problem. Piles and piles of wood went on the pyre.

I was eventually left with the larger pieces – many of them the old tree trunks that had been the source of the problem in the first place. I therefore got the builders to help me and they created a huge bonfire – much larger than anything I would dare. Now all that is left are a number of smaller pieces in the barn plus the soil, which contains the debris of wood which has been consumed. These I will dispose of, probably by burning. One of the great advantages of this enforced clearance is that I am able to see more of the barn and its features. The walls dividing the cattle stalls are made of single pieces of granite with a carved knob at one end to which to tie the beast presumably. The combination of red brick vaults rising from granite walls is remarkably elegant. I was reminded again by how taken I had been with the barn when first I saw it. I even look forward to seeing what lies under the layer of decay – there may be nothing but an earth floor or there maybe more granite cobbles.

The builder explained that the early German houses were built with the animals living downstairs and the family up. In the harsh Czech winters the heat of the animals would help heat the living quarters above. This is why they were often built into hillsides. In our barn the layout seems to be different – there are chutes in the barn ceiling which appear to allow hay and feedstuffs to be thrown down from their store above to the animals below. Meanwhile in the house we have gone back to a similar arrangement to that of the old days, but without the animals. We have abandoned downstairs to allow the dryrot treatment to work and are living quite happily upstairs. The arrangement of the rooms seems to suit this - various friends have commented positively on the change. I certainly have noticed that the neighbours (with one exception) all seem to have their main living room upstairs – it feels warmer up here and I suspect we might end up adopting this approach in winter, even when we get our main room back.

Roots - The Shed

When I was very small my parents moved to the house that has been their home ever since. It is in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe,a terrace house in the street that leads past the church. It is a non-descript house, but one with a long history. All the houses in the street were built on burgage plots – long thin pieces of land with a relatively small road frontage built in the late Middle Ages to house the homes and workshops in a single plot of the artisans who serviced the community that had grown up around the large Saxon abbey. Our house had until recently been a bakery. When my father built the kitchen extension, he found medieval walls of some outbuilding.

At the end of the garden stands the “shed” - a two-storey Cotswold stone stable, where my father and later my sister had their workshops, thus the tradition of craft continued to the modern day. When we moved in, my father found owl pellets and dead snakes in jars at the bottom of the garden, the former owner had kept his owls in the shed. A large lean-to greenhouse ran the length of the shed, in front of it were vegetable beds, before they succumbed to my mother's ever encroaching flower beds. At one end of the shed instead of limestone there was an old brick wall with bricks that were crumbling away, these afforded me, when I was practicing to play backstop for the school rounders team, a surface which deflected a thrown ball in all sorts of directions. At the same end an external staircase led up to the second floor.

As is so often the case the shed was my father's domain, it was where my mother did not attempt to organise his untidyness. It was the place where he invented things – he like his father before him is an inventor and one such invention paid for the kitchen. It was also the place where he kept his wood.

My father had plans for the shed, throughout my childhood he was restoring it. It was a huge adventure – he was delighted to find cobbles in the floor, which he carefully uncovered. One day he returned from the pub with a large piece of Cotswold stone which he had been given. It looked like nothing at first until you turned it round to reveal Norman or Saxon carved stone – it was part of a pillar from the old abbey. The stone was carefully installed in the stable wall. He claimed some oak beams from the demolition bonfires at a nearby flourmill and singlehandedly installed them in the ceiling, whilst my mother watched through fingers standing at the kitchen window, unable to stop him but worried stiff that something might slip and he would be injured. By the time I was at university the shed was now so restored that I was able to have my 21^st birthday party there. But somehow that was as far as it got, somehow he never did finish it. The woodturning lathes which were waiting his retirement there have stayed unused.

Why am I saying this in a log about the Czech Republic, why now? Well this morning I caught myself delightedly unearthing granite cobblestones in the yard and I was reminded of Cotswold cobbles in the shed. Looking up I gazed at the barn. As I have said in an earlier post it was the barn that had first attracted me to buy the house and yet it remains unfinished, as something prevents my continuing in its restoration. I wonder whether this is my “shed”, whether I am acting out my father's experience and whether I will complete my dream as he did not.

Looking back.

It is interesting this retrospective blogging, that I have been doing over these last few posts. It allows me to look again at my feelings and motivation for buying my Czech home, why this house, why then. So much has happened in the two and half years since I first stood in the farm's courtyard and looked up at the barn. It has distorted my view of things - the work, the times of despair and doubt, the discovery of one problem after another, and now the pleasure of the house transformed - all have in some way pulled a veil over those first emotions. I thought I knew them, but now through these blogs I find I did not.

In particular I had forgotten that it was not the house that really made my heart pace at that first encounter but the barn. It therefore strikes me as strange that whilst I have restored the house, pouring in far more money than I had calculated, the barn remains as it was then, with the exception of a new roof, which was forced on me by the heavy snow of the first winter. I am still in awe of its potential (so much more than that of the house) and it is that potential that perhaps stayed my hand. One could argue quite reasonably that I have not done work on the barn because of simple finances or lack thereof, but I am not entirely convinced by such a rational argument. I suspect, as is the case in my entire Czech property adventure, that the subconscious was playing its part too.

The truth is I still don't quite know what I am doing here. I feel like some hero in a Czech fairy story - I have followed the path into the dark forest and after some adventure have arrived in a large bright clearing. Here I rest and recover, but now I begin to make out another trail leading away and into a darker section of the forest. There things move in the shadows and I know that at some time I must leave the warm grass and go on. But now I wait for a sign - a deer or dove perhaps. In investing in the house I invested in a home, the barn however is for another purpose and I have no doubt that it is connected with my future work whatever that may be.

A first look at the barn

The most impressive building in many ways was not the house but the barn that ran at right angles to the house. It was typical of the barns of this area in South Bohemia - two storeys with a balcony. Originally the barn would have formed one side of a courtyard, but the barn that would have been opposite the house had been removed at some time. This had the effect of opening the courtyard out to the sun and offering lovely views from the house into the orchard.

The back of the barn, like the house, was built into a hillside and so the upper floor had two doors opening onto the hillside . This meant that the sheep and other animals could walk straight into the top floor. This was not an unadulterated success as we discovered when we entered the barn.

Inside the barn was a tumbledown collection of tat - much as the attic had been. But this did not disguise the fact that the barn was remarkable. The ceiling consisted of a series of brick vaults springing from the granite walls. The animal stalls were made of huge blocks of granite with carved finials to tie the beasts to. However at one point the ceiling had given way and straw hung down from upstairs. "What happened?" we asked the owners. "Oh the sheep fell through the ceiling," they replied. The urine from the animals which had overwintered in the barn had destroyed the bricks. Concerned we asked whether the sheep were hurt - "Oh no," they shrugged, "They had a soft landing." I could not help thinking that that might not have been the case for the ones that fell through first.

Upstairs there was an open space with large exposed beams, however in places it did seem as though timbers were missing - taken perhaps to prop something up or feed the winter stoves. Crowded higgledy piggledy into the barn were chicken coups, unidentifiable structures, old beds, and even a couple of wild boar skins, discarded probably where the animal had been carved up. The roof was made of concrete tiles, which no doubt had fallen off the back of a lorry. These were far heavier than the traditional Czech ceramic tiles and were placing quite a strain on the remaining timbers. I didn't notice this in my first flush of enthusiasm for the house. Suddenly instead of a simple retreat in this lovely country, I could see potential, so much potential.