Fi and I collected the keys to our first house on Friday (so exciting!). I had just finished a week of nights (they were horrendous – even for an ENT surgeon) and Fi was working until lunchtime so we collected them at around midday. We drove straight to the house (after collecting some batteries for my camcorder) and just enjoyed wandering around the house and trying to imagine what exactly we want to do to it (quite a bit).
I shot this video as a walk-around of the house to show what it looks like in it’s current state. I’m hoping that it will get better 
As you can see from the video, the interior needs a lot of modernising. We are hoping to remove the wall currently separating the lounge and the breakfast room to make a large ‘L’-shaped lounge-come-dining room. We also want to enlarge the kitchen by knocking through into the downstairs toilet (we will, hopefully, relocate this to under the stairs). We want to convert the garage into a proper room (a small media-room/home cinema/spare bedroom). We also want to lay solid oak flooring downstairs.
Thom came around to have a nosy at our new purchase (you can hear him phoning Fi on the video in the background) and I think he likes it. He made a very reasonable point about flooring with oak; why not utilise the existing (we think) pine floorboards? They need restoring but if they can be restored to a nice finish it would save us £2000 – £3000! I got on the case and someone is coming out to quote us for this on Tuesday. If they’re not the ‘right’ type of wood for flooring or if it seems too expensive, we found a really nice flooring company on Zetland Road who we’ll probably use to fit oak flooring.
Saturday and Sunday were split shopping around Bristol for kitchen shops (and arranging for people to come out and quote us) and demolishing the inside of the house. We managed to rip out the fitted wardrobes in the bedrooms as well as the shelving units in the small bedroom and the lounge. I also pulled and rolled up the carpets in the lounge and the breakfast room.
Such fun!