Progress report - and secret revealed

I had hoped to have more to show you by now, but I've been a bit lethargic at night and fiddled a lot without actually getting much done. So I decided I'd show you anyway how things are going.

First here is the front, with the painting done. It is darker than I'd intended but I don't mind it. The door is just sitting there and will need some adjusting, the pavement area needs some work and the trellis porch will be cream, not white as it is painted at the moment.

front view

And here is the surprise. Here's a view of the rear wall. The removable rear wall. Why do I need a removable rear wall?

Rear wall

Because I have doubled the size of the cottage......

Here is the front of the house, with an altered back roof, and one of the internal walls just sitting in place. Here you can see the hole in the first floor for the stairs to go through, and the hallway between the front and back sections of the house.

This is still the front of the house, again with two walls just sitting there, not glued in place, and the attic floor balanced on them but not straight as you can see.

The front of the house has a sitting room off the hallway on one side, and a dining room on the other side on the ground floor. The first floor has two bedrooms. At the moment all rooms are painted lavender. I am waiting for some wallpaper to arrive but it won't be here until nearly the end of the month, so I wanted it to be presentable until then and to give me a guide to the colour I was working towards for accessories and furniture etc.

The attic is accessed by a fold-down attic ladder. You can't really tell here but I've distressed the flooring with a very thin black wash.

Below is the rear section of the house, which won't have an attic. The rear roof obviously is part of an extension that was done at some time in the house's history, hence a different roofline.

This section has a kitchen and breakfast/family room on the ground floor, with a toilet at one end. The first floor has the bathroom and a third bedroom which Claire and Caitlyn have made their study since it has a nice outlook over the back yard and the creek.

Now I need to get on with the rest of the walls and doors, and the furniture. I am waiting for the kitchen kit to arrive, but have bedroom, living room, dining room furniture and the bathroom items. Beds need dressing, other trims need doing - still a lot of work, and time is running out.

So what do you think of my 'surprise'? I wanted a house that has more rooms in it, and more dimension. I guess Pickett Hill and the John F Craig House have encouraged my already-existing preference for that. No, I won't be doing it for every house, but I am enjoying it for Lavender Cottage.