The house in Peredelkino: first measurements and one surprise

The start of a long story about a timber house from 1998: what the measurements showed, how far the old plan lies, and what we found behind the kitchen cabinets.

A house in Peredelkino, 1998, 150 mm timber, two floors and an attic, 210 square metres. The owners bought it last summer and the first thing they wanted was not to rebuild but to "bring it to its senses": the house is sound, but over a quarter of a century it has filled up with bad decisions. We started with measurements, as always, and as always the measurements turned out to be more interesting than the plan.

The plan from the previous owners dates from 1998, drawn by hand, dimensions in centimetres. The difference from reality is up to 11 centimetres along the length of the house and up to 6 within rooms. That is normal for timber: the house has settled unevenly, the north wall is almost 4 centimetres lower than the south, and the first-floor boards slope north enough for a pencil to roll away. Every partition we touch will have to be set to level, not to the existing floor.

The surprise was in the kitchen. Behind the base cabinets, in the outside wall, a blocked window. Exactly on the axis of the room, 90 by 120, filled in and boarded over inside, hidden by siding outside. Someone once decided that wall cabinets mattered more. That window faces east, towards the apple trees, and in the morning the kitchen will be full of sun. We'll open it first of all, and it looks as though the whole ground floor will now gather around it.

Coming up: the services (the house runs on an electric boiler, and that needs calculating), lighting in an attic with low slopes, and the choice between painting the timber inside and cladding it. It'll be long.