Talking of the new utility room ceiling, Bogdan our trusty builder is back at work for us. The plan was to get the rest of the roof finished off to make the house properly watertight before starting work on the next phase of bedrooms. This means we need a good weather window of around 5 days. Sadly so far this summer we have been hard pushed to make 3 days without rain. This means we are still waiting to get the roof done but as you can see from the picture, Bogdan has been busy stripping all the old walls and revealing fantastic woodwork and more lovely stone walls. He has managed to turn three small rooms into one enormous room which could almost be a small banqueting hall. He has also uncovered chimney breasts at either end of the ‘hall’ though, as everything has been removed downstairs, these will be strictly ornamental. 
It has taken Bogdan 10 days of hard work to get everything stripped out and all the rubbish removed to the tip, and it was not the nicest job of work, but we are very pleased with the space we now have to work with. Now we have seen what the space looks like we have already changed our minds about a few things though the basic design remains the same. The idea is a nice large bedroom, basically covering two of the old rooms with a smaller room which has a joining door inside the big room. The smaller of the two rooms will be big enough to accommodate two single beds which will give us a family suite or, if the house were to change back from a B&B to a private house, we have a large master bedroom with dressing room and of course an en-suite luxury bathroom, which takes us nicely back to the utility room ceiling.
Above our old utility room is a small room that will become the bathroom to the family suite upstairs, however, we have to replace the floor joists of this room as the current ones are not strong enough to hold up a bathroom. So my race against time is to get the new utility room finished so that we can move everything out of the old utility room so that either I, or Bogdan, can replace the joists for the floor. Once that is done we can get Bogdan’s friend (I’m not sure if he is a friend or just a colleague) Frank to come and start work on the plumbing for the bathroom.
Watch this space for progress updates. I don't expect this phase to be finished much before October as it is such a big project, and we have to have a pause whilst the roof is replaced, I think you can see in one of the pictures the new wood of the part of the roof we had replaced last year, on the right, and to the left, the old wood that still needs to be replaced.
