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The robin is one of the many secret hideouts that Jo and i have established over the past few years. It is a small two roomed abandoned cottage ontop of a hill a short walk from my house. When we first went to examine this house it was because we had friends coming up to stay with us, lots of friends, and we didn't know whether we could get away with a party in my house so we searched for a place away from my parents where we could relax knowing that we would not be bothered. When we first arrived the house was a complete disaster. The windows stood gaping with no hint of glass or frames, the doors were all missing and the floors were covered in two hundred years of mud and dirt. We walked in the front door and strode into what must have once been the living room, i had been in the old house many times so i knew what it was like but Jo seemed apalled, The roof had a huge gaping hole in it that looked out into the winter sky through the broken bodies of ancient wooden rafters. This room would never do. We walked through to the other room, stepping over many mysterious debris and plants that were growing out of the floor and walls. In the next room the roof was whole and a tree directly outside the window made the room unnaturally dark as we stared at the room which was black with dirt. Facing us in the room was one empty armchair, the rest of the room being completely devoid of any recognisable objects. I eventually managed to convince Jo that this would be a good place once we cleared up and we set about boarding up the windows, clearing the floor, excavating the chimney (which must have been blocked all the way up with nests and rocks) and then finally creating furnature out of the few pieces of undamaged wood we could find.
The Robin, as we named it after a shortened version of it's real name when it was a house, served it's purpose as a place to hold partys out of the house. We soon began to decorate it, spending a lot of money on spraypaint, and made the Robin a place worth hanging out. Unfortunately due to it's extreme age the house is not safe and like the mines is falling into diserepair but i think that Jo and i will soon fix it up again, possibly supporting the wooden beam above the window which is the only thing stopping the rafters from crashing in. We will also need to re hang the door which mysteriously was wrenched off it;s hinges. Lastly there is a huge pile of dirt lying under the window which we still need to remove but i think that the place could still be used. |
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The picture on the left shows the door in the background and one of the benches we hastily constructed out of two old egg incubators and a piece of wood. The candle in the picture is sitting on a table we made out of some mysetry wodden box we found outside in the garden. The graffitti in the picture has been improved since then but even in this old picture it's pretty cool. Most of this graffitti on this wall was done by Jo and anyone who knows him would reconise his unmistakeable art style. I really don't know who decided to paint the dolphins but i guess everything was a bit bleak. As you can see the building is not in the best of condidtions but it's better than sitting outside in the snow and rain.
The picture below is the roof, which i decided in a moment of strange inspiration, to cover in red question marks. Jo painted a huge swirling pattern above the center of the room and below it on the floor i sprayed another huge questionmark. |
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On the opposing wall Jo painted our bands logo, possibly the biggest single design in the building beside the huge swirling design on the ceiling. You can see in this picture once of the large holes in the ceiling. We blocked up most of these with pieces of wood we found lying around. The holes just look out into the attic but the roof above is still pretty watertight. Strangely the roof was the only part of the room to still have any paint on it because as you can see it is completely white. The other walls still have the remains of wallpaper and paint on them but all seem to have that sickly brown colour of rotten wood. This is due to the fact that the stone walls were hidden behind weird thin bits of wood instead of plaster. The picture you can see below is Jo standing with his back to the window which we draped a black cloth over to hide the rather unsightly mess we made in blocking the window, it also gives the place a little bit more of a homely feel, or as much as that is possible in an abandoned cottage like this. You can see on the floor the huge pile of debris that is what we managed to clear off of the floor and out of the chimney. Also in the background you can see the leftovers of one |
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Particualr party, heaps of bottles which we decided to put on the shelves of the old cupboard. On Jo's left is he fireplace, the surround for which we found buried under tonnes of junk and mud on the floor. You can see on the floor the brush we used to sweep the muck off the floor with but even still the ground was still covered with dirt that i dont think we'll ever be able to remove. I hope that one day we'll make the Robin safe enough to sit in comfortably without worrying about the roof collapsing. The pictures below are a couple i found in E-mails i sent from my camera phone, Their not really very clear and they are quite dark but i think you can get an idea of what the robin is like. Someone recently went in there and took all our stuff out, the bottles and paint cans and the material we put up on the window but we're in the process of refubishing it now and it will soon be just as good as it was before. |
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