After Eight Years

Drop-down loft ladder February 2024 © Ricky Yates

In the last few weeks, the eighth anniversary of my retirement as Priest-in-charge/Chaplain of St Clement’s, Prague (30/04/2017), and of moving into my new home in Stará Oleška (15/05/2017), have both passed. And I am delighted to be able to say that, just in advance of those anniversaries, I have finally managed to see the completion of the renovation of the interior of Stará Oleška 44.

Back in March 2024, I wrote a post entitled, 
House renovation – the next stage, in which I outlined how I wanted a staircase installed to give decent access to the two rooms in the roof space which were then only accessible by a drop-down loft ladder into my study bedroom. Karel junior of K & K renovace nemovitostí Decín, had assured me previously that he doesn’t know anything that isn’t feasible. So on Monday 16th December 2024, he and Karel senior, came to look at what I wanted.

They said that to insert a staircase in the little un-renovated room, as I outlined in my March 2024 post, would involve making alterations to the roof and would be very expensive. Instead, they suggested completely dismantling the tall double cupboard just outside that room, (which I had installed back in May 2018), and reassembling it in the little room and installing a staircase in the space vacated by the cupboard. This would involve no external alterations. So I accepted their suggestion and work commenced on Monday 6th January 2025. I’ll let the photographs do the talking.

Little room following decoration but before repositioning of the light © Karel Konvalinka
Tall double cupboard to be moved © Ricky Yates
Tall double cupboard in its new location with the freezer slotted in alongside © Ricky Yates
Where the tall double cupboard once was © Ricky Yates

Once the cupboard had been relocated, then a hole was cut in the ceiling, from below and in the floor, from above.

The view from below © Ricky Yates
The view from above © Karel Konvalinka

I was expecting that K & K would then install the new stairs. But they told me that they wouldn’t do that until they had completely renovated the two rooms in the roof space as they wanted the stairs to abut the floor of those rooms at exactly the correct height. So whilst they worked, they used their own ladder in the newly created hole to get up and down.

Lining the walls of the room at the rear of the roof space © Ricky Yates
Lining the walls of the room at the rear of the roof space © Ricky Yates

Over the following couple of weeks, K & K lined the sloping sides, the narrow central strip of ceiling, the triangular walls at either end and the dividing wall between the two rooms.

The walls of the room at the front of the roof space lined & wood laminate flooring being laid © Ricky Yates

Only once this was done, together with removing the old drop-down ladder and new floorboards being laid over the resultant hole, could the final task of laying a new wood laminate floor be carried out.

I’ll let the following photos speak for themselves to show what has been achieved and the high quality of K & Ks workmanship.

Front bedroom complete © Ricky Yates
Rear bedroom complete © Ricky Yates
Safety barrier around the new stairs © Ricky Yates
The new staircase as seen from below © Ricky Yates

So after living here in my retirement home in Stará Oleška for eight years, I finally have the ability to host guests. My son Phillip has already asked when the Airbnb listing is going to happen 😉 It isn’t – the two renovated and accessible rooms will be purely for visiting friends and family. And I’m pleased to say I’ve already had my first guest 🙂

 

House renovation – the next stage

The little un-renovated ground floor room © Ricky Yates

As I entitled my previous post, ‘The renovation of the ground floor of my house is just about complete‘. But there are two important little phrases in that title – ‘just about’ and ‘ground floor’. And those two phrases are connected.

The photograph on the left shows the one little ground floor room to which nothing has been done, (other than me vacuuming up all the cobwebs before taking the photo 😉 ), hence ‘just about’. And there remain two rooms in the roof space to which also nothing has been done, hence I wrote ‘ground floor’.

Please note, I didn’t say ‘upstairs’, in describing the two rooms in the roof space. Because that is the problem, there are no stairs, only a drop down loft ladder that you can see in the last photo of my previous post. If those two rooms are to be used as guest bedrooms, then there has to be an internal staircase which would allow any guests to have access to a toilet, shower and washbasin, without having to descend a ladder into my study-bedroom.

What I envisage and hope might be possible, is to install a staircase, starting in the little un-renovated room, and going up and round to the right, through the ceiling. It would then require some alteration and extension to the roof at the rear of the house.

One of the two rooms in the roof space © Ricky Yates

As you can see, before anything can happen, I first will have to sort out the contents of the boxes in the photo above. Most of them are books which will hopefully all fit on my newly installed book shelves. So far, four boxes have come down the ladder and been unpacked. However, there are at least ten more to go. At the bottom of the photo, you can just see down into my study-bedroom. I was standing part way up the loft ladder in order to take the photo.

The other room in the roof space © Ricky Yates

The photo above shows the other ‘upladder room’, with the double bed waiting for visiting guests to sleep in it 🙂 My suggested staircase would enter this room at the far left corner.

When I retired from Prague and moved to live in Stará Oleška 44, I thought it would take me about two years to get the ground floor how I wanted it to be. Instead, it has taken nearly seven years 🙁 My offer to buy the house was accepted on 14th March 2017 and I moved in some two months later.

It is my sincere hope that it doesn’t take me another seven years to complete what I’ve outlined in this post. But first I need to find an architect or structural engineer to discover whether what I want to do is actually feasible.

The renovation of the ground floor of my house is just about complete

Stará Oleška 44 with the first snowfall of the 2023/24 winter, 24th November 2023 © Ricky Yates

Once again, I have to start a blog post with a sincere apology for the absence of any posts for a whole six months – the longest hiatus in the fourteen-year history of this blog. In recent months I have said to myself several times that I must start writing again. But then, there are always other things to do. But enough of my excuses, here is the latest instalment of the renovation of Stará Oleška 44.

Before the extension on the west side of my house was built, (on the left in the photograph), with a new front door into an entrance lobby and what is now my sitting-dining room, the way into the house was up a set of steps onto a open verandah and then through a door into what is now my study-bedroom.

One of the last things the previous owners did was to have two pairs of high-quality double-glazed uPVC windows fitted across the front of the verandah to enclose it, as you can see in the photograph. However, they left the existing single-glazed windows on each side of the verandah, unchanged. In November 2017, I had these replaced to match those across the front.

Interior of the enclosed verandah, 9th March 2017 © Ricky Yates

This photograph shows how one end of the interior of the enclosed verandah looked when I first visited the house on 9th March 2017. The photo was taken from the doorway of what is now my study-bedroom.

After K & K renovace nemovitostí Decín had renovated my study-bedroom in April 2023, Karel junior said that it would be perfectly possible to lay a matching wood laminate floor in the enclosed verandah, to replace the piece of old carpet and flattened cardboard boxes which were the current floor covering. The main problem with that being done was that the room had become the perfect place for things to be dumped that hadn’t been properly sorted 😉

View from my study- bedroom, through the old front doorway into the enclosed verandah © Ricky Yates

You can see some of them through the old front doorway in this photo of my renovated study-bedroom which appeared in the earlier blog post.

Over the Summer of 2023, I finally sorted and found new homes for most of the things and got rid of the rest that I no longer wanted or needed. And so in December 2023, K & K returned to recommence work.

Once the old carpet and cardboard was lifted, it revealed the very poor nature of the floor beneath. There were gaps between the floorboards through which it was possible to see the earth below! The verandah is elevated because the whole house is built on a slope. Therefore, K & K laid a new floor with 10cm of hardened insulation before laying the wood laminate on top. This additionally, all but eliminated the two steps down into the verandah.

Karel junior also suggested that they could line the three outside walls and the ceiling to make the room both more attractive and improve insulation. The two following photos, both taken through the window at one end of the enclosed verandah, show the transformation K & K have made of the room. During the second half of this winter, my study-bedroom has been far warmer, retaining heat from my woodburner for many hours. The impact of the improved insulation.

The enclosed verandah before renovation commenced © Karel Konvalinka
The enclosed verandah after renovation © Ricky Yates

In January 2024, Karel senior returned and installed three shelves at either end of the renovated room.

New shelves in the enclosed verandah © Ricky Yates
New shelves in the enclosed verandah © Ricky Yates

With the fitting of these shelves, as with all their other work, the only problem they had was the complete absence of straight lines and right-angles. Everything had to be specially cut in order to make it fit.

And finally, at the end of January 2024, my dream of having bookshelves in my study-bedroom, came true. As I have discovered, Karel senior is a very good carpenter. He measured these two alcoves…..

Alcove in my study-bedroom © Ricky Yates
Alcove in my study-bedroom © Ricky Yates

.and then constructed these bookshelves in his workshop, before bringing them to my house on a trailer, in four separate sections and then installing them.

New bookshelves installed in my study-bedroom © Ricky Yates

As with the enclosed verandah, he had to overcome the absence of straight lines and right-angles 😉 Now all I have to do is get all of my boxes of books down from one of the two rooms in the roof space, get them sorted by subject and size, and stacked on the shelves. Unfortunately, getting them down the loft ladder is no easy task.

Bookshelves & loft ladder © Ricky Yates