The search for a house
My girlfriend and myself have been looking for a house for about 1,5 year at the moment when we bought our first house. It has been a real struggle to buy a house in 2024, but we finally got our first house which makes ourselves really happy homeowners! Before this house we looked at about 20 other houses which we didn’t get to buy. This house fits our needs as it is still close to the fruit farm, and the garden and space besides the house allows for outdoor activities for ourselves.
The house we bought
The house we bougth is located in Limburg Netherlands near the city Venlo. build year is 1951, and it’s basically in the heart of the village as it is right besides the church. This house has been a rental house for the past 74 years and was originally designed to have the angled walls because besides the house there was another street. Luckily for us this street has been added to the garden a long long time ago which gives us a gigantic garden for dutch standards in the center of the village.
Move in or renovate
When we got the keys and looked arround, The house didn’t seem to bad for us. We discussed a while about what to do as we could just move in as it was. after some analyzing with some related experts we came to the conclusion that the moment right now is the moment to renovate the whole house. That is because once we live in the house we can’t do any decent renovations anymore, and only patch up room by room.
Since i like to do things well i said, we either do everything and make it our dreamhome, or we do nothing at all. So together with my girlfriend we decided to renovate the house completely as well as possible.
The big plan
Since a renovation is the way forward, and basically everything needs replacement as the whole utilities are 75 years at this moment it made sense to also make some more extreme designs and just don’t think about what you got, but think about what you want. We did that, and after alot of sketching the conclusion was made. We need to connect the living room to the garden to have a nice feeling in the living room. Also the kitchen needed some more space, and a connection to the garden. While doing so, it means sacrificing the storage area. Because a storage area for washing and so on is required a home extension was required so we decided to add an extension the the right side of the house where we can make the washing room, and expand the kitchen.
The front door would be moved as it’s in the wrong spot, and this would create a complete new entrance hall for the house. we can also make a toiletroom in here now, and a new connection for all the utilities.
Upstairs a new bathroom and toiletroom have to be realised as we are removing the old bathroom and toilet from the ground floor.
What we need to do
To make our plan reality, there was alot to do.
We had to do this in order:
- demolition of ceilings
- take out the ground floor to make new nice concrete floor.
- remove powerlines, radiators and waterlines.
- clean up the garden to get access, and get rid of junk ASAP.
- dig out the constructionsite for the extension.
- build a new utility cabinet.
- Demolish everything we build new, or is not required anymore.
- build new walls and roofs.
- install electrics, and floorheating.
- get new windows and outside doors
- build the sanitary rooms
- build the kitchen
- garden work
Starting of "The demolition"
We started demolition work in December 2024. We started with the ceilings which was a horrible job to do. The ceilings consisted of stonemesh with chalk. This was extremely dusty, nailed very tight to all the beams. To get rid of this we really had to hammer everything.
After that we got the old bathroom walls out on the bottomfloor to make some space for a big breakthrough of the livingroom.
Demolition of "The Walls"
Taken out the bathroom and kitchen we had to wait a few days to hear if we would be allowed to remove the wall between the living room and bathroom/washing room. In this time we decided to clean up upstairs as there was alot of walls on the wrong place but also some walls which were just too weak. For this reason we decided to remove these aswell.
I also really like the old floor in the living room as it is real french oak wood, so i took this out to save it and keep it in good shape.
After doing all that we could remove the wall in the living room which finally gives us a view of what our new living room will look like in size. after taking that wall out we could remove the complete wooden underfloor in the living room which was a bit rotten at that moment. This has been caused due to the wall insulation which locked the moisture beneath the floor. Once taken out the flooring i could see the outside of the basement, this made me realise this is my only chance to ever insulate an waterproof this, so i took this chance and started digging to coat the outside of the basement with a rubber coating and put EPS insulation in just because we can.
The garden
Arround the middle to end of Februari we started to have some better weather. This was very much required to get started in the garden as everything was just wet before, and since our garden (which we figured out a bit later) is a 2m thick clay layer this would cause some complications.
The first steps were to open up the garden, so remove a fence which was completely overgrown. After that i could access the garden, replant all the bushes which were in the way and drive through with the shredder to clean up everything, this gave us a clean driveway.
In the back of the garden we have a pond which i removed, this was a complete concrete pond with alot of concrete and rocks all arround which made me fill up a lot of bins with debree. I decided to buy myself a bucket for the excavator to filter out all the rocks, and i have made alot of use of this bucket. this was a big job, but also a fun job with the excavator as it put my restored boom through alot of work.
After getting that pond out it was time to get closer to the house. This ment the first thing that had to happen was to remove the old carport as this was rotten, and we had a home extension planned on that spot.
I started by taking the roofing off, and stripping as much as i could. Since it was still winter everything was dirty and wet. When having the roof off i decided to take the rest down with the excavator to get some quicker cleaning up done. Most work of this project was too get all the junk to the junkyard.
When i had the carport gone we started taking the driveway and terrace out so i could dig here freely and clear everything up from debree.
At that point i also picked up some really nice super big tiles from ebay which came in handy for our garden during the renovation as they were a square meter each. This was ideal to move arround with the excavator and a clamp.
getting the floor ready
The toiletroom was still intact, but it was time to remove this as it wasn’t required anymore. Once having the whole old toilet out i removed the toiletroom aswell.
After having everything out, the heating was up as that was still operational until this point because our house required heating to dry up from the period before we bought it. I started draining radiators, and cut everything out with the angle grinder. I sold the metal to a scrapyard and that got me enough money for the next project the uttility cabinet.
Because our house is old there isn’t a real utility cabinet. Because we build an extension we have to get a new utility cabinet becasue everything is going under our home extension which is not allowed either.
This is a expensive operation, but i think it’s good to do it as it allows us to make everything future ready. For this reason i build a utility cabinet which is nice and wide, this way alot of routers, gateways and other stuff fit in here nicely.
our floor of the living room was still way too low, and we had to raise it with sand before adding insulation. Since we removed all the outside pavement we had a bed of clean sand here. Therefor i scraped this off and moved it inside with the wheelbarrow. This was alot of work, but got our floor up to the proper height.
After getting our floor leveled i also wanted to insulate the basement from the outside on the outside side. Since i could reach here with the excavator i decided to do this straight away. This was safe to do because the basement has it’s foundation way deeper then the house foundation. i did this in parts to keep it safe so the house still had some support from the side, and vibrated hard every time i closed a part.
Bad news and extra work
After some expertise we figured out that the foundation flooring was not dense enough, and this was because the sand under our planned extension is way too soft and has too much clay. The only solution for this is to dig it out, and bring good ground back in which can support our future expansion.
Because this had to happen fast to prevent getting issues with my original foundation i decided to call our local contractor to get a excavator and some tractors with dumpers in to get this over with quickly. They showed up in the morning with a excavator and big vibratingplate. At first we had a truck for transporting soil, later that day we had 2 tractors with 18m3 dumpers driving to get the sand transported. in the end we moved in 90m3 new soil, and transported out the clay.
Now we have solid sand which forms a absolute solid base for our extension. This however still needs to be dugout to pour the concrete in. I decided to do that part myself since i have a nice excavator for that work. This was a nice digging job with a just completely revised excavator boom!
after having the excavation work done we had to get all the pipework done so i had our installer come by to install the pipework under the floor. This was a day of work but installed very nice in the end. with the pipework in also threw in 3 110mm jacket pipes for future things just to make sure we always have a way to get somewhere.
Concrete!
The time has come, we have to insulate our flooring which was alot of work actually, and after that we had to get all the steel mesh in to make a strong constructive concrete plate. That took a whole 2 days to make properly.
At concrete day we were ready for it, and it only took about 1 hour to get the whole living room concreted and the outside foundation for our new home extension. i covered this all up with plastic on the outside, and kept that wet during the rest of the day to prevent cracks in the conrete. Inside i sprinkled the floor a few times lightly to ensure the concrete wouldn’t dry out.
At the backside of the house we had about 18m2 of asbestos in the roof. Since we were insulating and renovating we also had to get this removed, so i had a asbestos company remove this asbestos with all the required paperwork to get it done.
Smashing walls out!
After the concrete got solid and hard we could start demolishing the walls which would change due to the new insulation, doors and layout. So we first removed the construction of the roof at the back, and after that started tearing down walls. This was heavy work, especially at the bottom as the cement used down there was super strong, while more up it was really weak. Working with my drill tool wasn’t too fast so i decided to smash most of the wall down with the 10kg demolishing hammer which was quite effective but hard work.
Before we started working on this our contractor has supported everything in the correct way, and he told us exactly what we could remove.
Moving sand and making terace
After concrete i had alot of left over sand which i could use to make my terace. Before i started, i still had to dig out the old terace to find alot more heavy concrete debree. I had to filter that all out and eventually started filling up the terrace space again with yellow sand. Since we had alot of yellow sand left over we brought in the tractor with bucket to transport it, and i could heap it up and create the terrace eventually while standing up nice and high with the excavator. We vibrated the newly created pad to make it very solid. And about 5 days later i put up all the concrete tiles which i got. This forms a nice solid and clean terrace for us to work on during the year while we build our home.
Our home requires to have doors in the new utility cabinet, so i did make these aswell. I made a nice locking mechanism on here so it’s possible to lock these doors. While making the doors i wanted to make them very practical, because i know the utility cabinet is a place where alot of technology comes together, which also means alot of setting up. Therefor i made double folding doors to make them very short and flat when open so they are not in the way when they are open.
We also cut the hole for the frontdoor out. And i had to add 5 beams in to extra support our bathroom to make sure the floor will never crack. This was alot of work, as making holes in the wall between us and the neighbours was a filthy job, and getting the beams in was a challenge. Eventually i got this all done and fixed in a nice way.
Since our foundation wasn’t perfectly from the side as we poured concrete in the dug ditch i wanted to make it look nicer, therefor we placed huge 1x1m tiles besides the house. This way i can keep this part of the garden lower and the house still looks nice on this height. This was a heavy job, but with the clamp i made on the excavator it was really well doable.
After the foundation work i came back with my leveling board to level out the garden to make it a nice flat driveable garden, this made the garden a really nice construction site.
Another project i did at this moment was to build the toiletroom downstairs up. i wanted to do this myself and we made it with aerated concrete blocks. This was my first time i built a wall with concete so it was quite new and challenging for me. Especially placing a stud in front of the door wasn’t the smartest move, but i managed to finish up the room lucky enough!
Outside walls and a huge triple dormer window!
We got this far with our home extension where our outside wall have been created by the masons. It was time to prepare the drainage work in the terrace part to make sure i had somewhere to hook up to when i get a roof.
For our bathroom, toilet and bedroom upstairs it was a nice thought to have more space and more natural light inside. Therefor on the backside of the house we add in a new 3 windows dormer room. This way these 3 rooms all 3 get 1 new extra window. This is adding soo much space to the rooms, but also the very important natural light!
I hired some experts to create the framework for the dormer window as it’s quite frightening for me too cut open the house like we did here. We cut a hole to fit the new dormer windows, and started building it up. The shape of this dormer window had to fit the original shape on the other homes in our street so i wanted a pointed roof which in no way was a standard feature but i am really happy i pushed this through. We spent 1,5 day to build this whole dormer window up as we had to try and measure alot of things to get it properly made. The whole new dormer window was built to be able to insulate with 10cm thick pir plates to create a very good insulated shell.
Meanwhile on the extension our contractor has started working on the roof which is really nice to see this taking shape! i once again got demolishing work to do here to remove our old frontdoor as this would transform into the doorway into our washing room.
A few days later our contractor was able to close the roof up which was a great feeling as we were getting alot less water inside from this moment on!