MORETON HOUSE

Season's greetings to you all! What a year we've had, completing our accommodation wing and welcoming our first holiday guests. Next year we turn our attenti...

At last, I can write about a finished room (oh yes, there was champagne!). More than a year since we first stripped the paint, I give you the club room. This...

About the time the first apartment was stripped back to its bones, we were toiling with winter. We’d been in South America and Asia for the past few years, s...

With the outside looking shiny and white, it was time to turn attention our inwards. The part of the house we tackled outside is a two-storey section of a se...

Turning attention to the west side, we didn’t bother trying to strip off plastic paint coatings this time. So one week and a couple of skips full of old rend...

I promised myself I’d write this post when the scaffolding came down, so that I could take some decent ‘after’ photos. But instead of removing the scaffold, w...

..of the natural hydraulic variety I’m afraid. I’m going to get disappointed googlers looking for hockey if I use the term NHL. So last post we were down to ...

Sorry I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s not from lack of progress, more that I planned to blog about this when it was finished, but the job kind of grew. A l...

Confession time. I just spent my day doing geometry, and really enjoyed it. I was playing about with shapes on the landscape plans, and I came up with a new ...

I need to make it absolutely clear; this is a ‘before’ picture. I have no words. I said last post that I would share some pictures of the second of the two s...

This week’s news from Moreton was all about the water. It seems to have been an unusually wet year – or is north Devon always like this? I hope we haven’t ma...

My family has its fair share of gardeners. My parents have a fabulous garden and mum has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the latin names of plants. I have very...

Not surprisingly, getting the house safe and watertight has been our main priority this first year, but we have enjoyed getting to know the garden. We were k...

I had a message from a former student of Grenville filling in what some of the rooms were used for by the school in the 1980s. As we restore the house, we’ll...

We always knew we had a bit of a problem in our southeast corner. The beautiful ancient Holm Oak tree on that corner was brushing the house, and there were p...

Having given up on our first choice of rooms to renovate, we moved our attentions to a newer part of the house. It doesn’t look newer, but our heritage asset...

Having done the obvious stuff (meaning that the existing apartment was functional, if not exactly beautifully restored, and we have a soft play room) the que...

The second post in my round up of the first year’s work will detail the very top, most important, priority for the new owner of a grade II listed historic co...

It’s a new year, and one of my resolutions is to blog more regularly about all things Moreton. My plan was to wait until we had our planning permissions in p...