electric sky logo - Back to home Page
search catalogue by


browse catalogue


Project: Restoration


 

Historical building surveyor Marianne Suhr tours the country looking for the most exciting, unusual and traditional restoration projects. With her priceless advice for the owners and hands-on attitude, Marianne will be making repairs to crumbling castle walls, mixing up some building mud and even dabbling in a bit of dowsing in her mission to give Britain’s rich architectural heritage the treatment it deserves.

 
                 
 

Project Restoration Project Restoration

This series follows the rescue of buildings in distress as they are brought back from the brink of despair with the help of experts and craftsmen reviving skills and traditions that would otherwise be lost; from carpenters to thatchers and glaziers to blacksmiths. Each episode takes a look at three different restorations across the country from quaint little Welsh cottages to grandeur castles. The series observes the dedicated homeowners who are taking the time to understand their historical homes and the craftsmen helping to restore them properly.

Marianne shares her wealth of knowledge and expertise in special ‘tips packages’, giving pointers from ‘How to plan a project’ to ‘How to work with conservation officers’. Marianne also gets the homeowners involved in repairing their own buildings, giving lessons from pointing to painting and plastering to laying floors.

Please visit the official Project Restoration website www.projectrestoration.tv for more info and to order the DVD boxset.


Episodes

1 of 2   
Episode 1
Marianne Suhr visits the ruins of the Wilton castle, where, within the crumbling walls, Alan and Sue Parslow are hoping to make their home. While the Victorian farmhouse is in pretty good shape the same can’t be said for the shell of the north west tower which is on the verge of collapse. Alan has high hopes for the restoration for this scheduled monument but Marianne is very sceptical of his time scales.

Elsewhere, Marianne visits Nicki and John Beavan whose picture perfect 14th Century Parsonage needs more space to get all the kids round the dining table, but the frail skeleton of the adjacent detached kitchen is going to need all of John’s carpentry skills to bring it back to life. But when even his tractor can’t move the 6 tonne oak tree he plans to saw up, getting the raw materials to start the work is looking tricky.

And master thatcher Wayne Plumbley is putting the finishing touches on a beautiful building whose roof is being returned to thatch for the first time in years.

Episode 2
Work continues at Wilton Castle with the stone masons making urgent repairs to large cracks that have formed in the castle's tower walls. Sue Parlsow takes Marianne to Geoff Williams' yard to see the huge 2-tonne blocks of local sandstone cut to size for those urgent repairs.

At John Bevans’ medieval kitchen restoration, John and his team start to use the timbers cut from the 6 tonne tree to re-frame the structure. However, the first load-bearing beam is so heavy for the 3-man team John has to use his fork lift truck to force the beam into position.

There are more timber problems for Glen Beamson where some thoughtlessly applied paint has been rotting his medieval beams but he can’t seem to find a way of getting it off without ruining the rustic appeal.

Episode 3
The stone masons have finally made it past the halfway mark at Wilton Castle and Neil the carpenter has managed to get the main timbers for the first floor in place, although laying the floor boards in such an oddly shaped room almost proves too tricky for the 2 man team. Meanwhile, up on the roof, Ollie the foreman gets some help from Sue and Marianne for the delicate operation to reseat the rare chimney cap on this one-of-a-kind tower.

Over at the Beavans' Parsonage, John is busy creating more work for himself by dismantling the end wall of the kitchen and takes traditional methods to the extreme with Marianne by digging 200m of 2m deep trenches on the dubious basis of their dowsing skills.

Barrie and Suzie Jackson’s excavations through their dining room wall reveal hundreds of years of history but with Trevor’s tales of strange Victorian practices still fresh in their minds will there be anything more sinister waiting for them in that bricked up fireplace?

Episode 4
Work is finally reaching completion on the tower at Wilton Castle, where it's all hands on deck as the battlements are repaired and the lead workers reinstate the roof making the tower watertight for the first time in hundreds of years; and not before time as the approaching winter could rapidly undo all their work.

With the workmen offsite for the first time in years, Alan is already concocting some unusual uses for his newly fortified castle. At the usually chaotic Beavans' there is an eerie moment of calm as Keith is left alone with 800 bales of reed and just a couple of hand tools to rebuild the entire roof. As the work winds up on the kitchen, has all the hard work brought Nicki the kitchen she so badly needed and is the perfectionist John happy with the end product of all his work?

Over in Reading, Marianne returns to the stone age with Brian Franklin as they make mucky mud and straw repairs to a garden wall that was being chewed up by masonry bees and woodpeckers.

Episode 5
Work is starting on a particularly tumbledown cottage in the Vale of Glamorgan and Marianne comes along to cast her critical eye over the planned restoration. Large cracks in the chimney breast are an immediate issue and very swift action is needed before the whole lot collapses.

Nestled in the South Downs, Richard Burrow’s stunning Elizabethan mansion is finally going to see the bricked-up, floor-to-ceiling windows reopened. But a trip to the studio of expert glazier Cliff Durrant gives restoration novice Richard a wake-up call when he learns just how much the handmade glass his windows could end up costing him.

Elsewhere, Kate Todd’s house has been suffering at the hands of a hastily applied concrete render and it is up to Anthony Goode to teach her the messy art of applying a rough cast lime render in its place.

Episode 6
For Mike and Julie, a trip over the hills to find the source of the new stone floor reveals an amazing quarry with water cascading down the cliffs and men splitting slates with nothing more sophisticated than a hammer and chisel. Then it is up to Marianne to show Mike the way forward in the backbreaking work of laying the breathable limecrete floor that these slates will eventually sit on.

Back at the Danny House it’s a steep learning curve for Richard’s workers as they struggle to get to grips with the horsehair plaster and chestnut lathes needed to finish off the apartments to Marianne's exacting standards.

A final visit reveals the stunning finished article and the beautiful bedside views that Richard has been missing out on for so long. A

t another grand residence, this time in London, Filippo Virgili is undoing the shocking damage done by some careless builders to the rare murals in this once lavish home.

Episode 7
Mike takes a piece of his collapsing wall to traditional building expert Nigel Gervis for the low down on how to recreate that rustic finish and with just the right pigments selected they get on their work clothes for a lesson with Marianne in how to get this unconventional finish on the walls.

Then, after returning from a well-deserved break Mike and Julie find that the savage Welsh weather has brought other parts of their building to the verge of collapse and work goes into reverse as Mike and Marianne break out the demolition gear to flatten the dangerous lean-to.

Over in Oxfordshire, Frances and Vincent Schofield have taken on a huge project but with little knowledge of exactly how much there is to do, Marianne has her work cut out. Vincent’s light touch with a pneumatic drill on the concrete slab reveals original terracotta tiles and with a bit of lateral thinking they manage to source some local beeswax to give the new floor a glowing finish.

Tony Rainbow is determined to get rid of the deathwatch beetle gnawing through his beams without drenching the house in toxic chemicals but is turning his house into a giant oven really going to cure his problems?

Episode 8
With the lean-to completely removed and a short break in the weather allowing Mike to lay the foundations for a new bathroom, Cliff Blundel has been called in to advise on the best way to rebuild the wall. Unrelenting Welsh weather has brought this restoration project to its knees, forcing Mike to concentrate his efforts inside so what have they actually managed to achieve from their original plans?

Armed with sledgehammers Vincent and Marianne make short work of the panel hiding the secret stairs. While the dust is still settling Vincent disappears off to his local blacksmith to try his hand on the forge making some traditional nails to rebuild the stairs.

On the outskirts of London the owners of a gothic townhouse are carrying out some decorative pointing bringing the true colour back to their home.

Episode 9
Marianne visits Jane Kinnaird who has taken on a huge amount at The Menagerie, an old private zoo that stood the test of time for 250 years but in the last couple has been almost destroyed by vandals, culminating in a fire that very nearly finished it off.

It is vital to get the building watertight before the winter arrives and Keith is tiling the roofs as fast as he can but cutting each of the rare Switherland slates by hand is really slowing things down.

In Oxford, Vincent’s determination to keep his staircase restoration authentic has taken him outside into the freezing cold with only a hand saw and a huge piece of elm. When it comes to his stone worktops, however, he can’t resist a chance to get back into his workshop fully equipped with disc cutters and laser sighted powersaws. Justin Parsons has called in the experts to help him restore his Victorian tiled floor but for all the clever theory, in the end it comes down to a lot of elbow grease.

Episode 10
Neil has his work cut out repairing the windows of the Menagerie where thoughtless vandals have insured that there isn’t a pane of glass left whole anywhere in the building. And as if he didn’t have enough on his plate, Neil is pulled off window duty to help Keith and Marianne install a half tonne green oak beam. Closer investigation of the old one finds it is literally crawling with Deathwatch beetle.

A trip up to the burning furnaces of a Leeds foundry reveals the methods behind producing gutters good enough to please English Heritage and Marianne makes a first visit to Louise Bunting at the White House, a huge building that hasn’t been touched in 150 years. While it has its beautiful staircase in tact, the toilet seat has seen better days so Marianne goes to see how they replace this grim one-of-a-kind.

And Cliff Durant is back with his blowtorch and hand fixing some original stained glass windows from an Edwardian townhouse.

  1 of 2   

An Electric Sky Production for Discovery Networks Europe


other titles in this category

 

 
 

home  |  new releases  |  formats  |  about us  |  contact  |  producer info  |  news  
markets  |  shop  |  screen online |  terms  |  electric sky productions
site design and build bionicmedia