The sky is the limit.

We are nearing the completion of our extension build. It has been a long laborious journey, hundreds and hundreds of hours of digging drainage ditches, filling tyres with soil for the retaining wall and stripping bark of the logs for the main construction. We have also managed to finish the whole mosaic floor, the only thing it needs now is a final layer of grout to smooth it out and a polish. We are happy with the results and will write a bit more about it and show you some more pictures after the final polish.

This week we are filling gaps in the walls and painting everything for a neat finish. Our reciprocal roof has a fabric layer over the spirals of rope and we wanted to give it a beautiful finish. It already had a painted and stencilled design of a tree crown. We added a sky in blue by first spray-painting a dark blue over parts of it.

A few months ago we came across some special rollers for decorative finishes and they came in handy for this project. We used ceiling emulsion in white and light blue, mixed them up to different degrees to get a varied result and applied them in uneven patches all over the ceiling.

Our main aim was to get a brighter room and we are happy to have received the desired result. We are now painting the walls white along with the window frames. We believe it is necessary to have the walls neutral and uncluttered as the room contains a lot of colour in the mosaic floor, bottle walls and ceiling.

We are happy to be living in Ireland where you are allowed to build a 40 square meter extension to your house without applying for planning permission. Because we are six people and we only have a tiny cottage the extension has been on our minds since we first moved in. It has taken a long time completing it, due to some illness, other building projects like renovating the bathroom and working on establishing our garden. It is a very exciting time now as every day the look of the build is changing rapidly and we have the end in sight. Or not really the end at all but a new beginning. We have used our imagination in all aspects of the build. We knew from the start that we wanted to incorporate mosaics, bottle walls and a reciprocal roof, but the build has changed a lot during the year. Ideas have been changed and improved. It is possible to do this when you are not tied down by specific plans. You can incorporate donated doors and reclaimed windows to your heart’s content.  We hope planning rules will change in all countries so that houses can be built and extended in this way. It is a great way of using the building materials available, incorporate recyclables like glass bottles and jars and let the building evolve and change as you work on it. We have found the process most enjoyable and  satisfying.