Burghley Renovation

When we got back to the UK I decided the house and basement were far too big to live with comfortably; also I found the basement particularly irritating for several reasons.  It is excellent in that it gives you another floor to play with but the huge frontage is pretty much totally useless, a nuisance to open as it requires some dexterity and a large space to do it in, the plastic railings drop off if you just look at them and it doesn't really work in terms of its design.  If it is a set of steps from a pavement level to provide access to a terraced Georgian house how come there are windows and a door at the ends of the basement rooms?  They would have to be on a street level and can't exist in a terrace!  The bulk of the basement front can't be used for storage or another entrance or anything which made any sense.  Hence the Burghley Renovation.


I hacked it to bits and started again.  It cost me two sheets of paper from DHE to match the house and cover the grooves in the doors, wood filler to fill in the grooves, paint for the steps to make the additional step blend in and some trim for round the front space.  Other than that it was a case of re-using the bits I'd hacked apart to rebuild a more logical and smaller basement front.  The photos pretty much explain how I did it.