The Waldenburg Chronicles

As there isn't a lot to report at the moment, I have something else interesting to fill up the blog for the time being. I came across some more sketches of Waldenburg on this  website . Well, I didn't really come across them by chance, I've been actively searching for earlier information about the buildings. The first is another one by Georg Friedrich Meyer, also dated around 1680. The view is from a different direction, so our house is at the back of the town slightly to the left of the Gate Tower. The next ones are from 1746, 66 years later than those by Georg Friedrich Meyer and this time from Emanuel Büchel. The next one is taken from the other side of the village, with an emphasis on the castle. There is, unfortunately, a lot less of it today. I've added one of my photos of the castle taken a couple of weeks ago further down for comparison. It's taken from a different perspective on the other side of the valley, but it's clear to

We had to know what's behind some of the structures in the house, so it was time to grab a few tools do some organised damage, to nothing essential or with historical value of course. So with a hammer in hand, we started to make holes in ceilings and floors. The ceilings that we had to look behind were all plasterboard. By the look of it, they'd been put it to hide cables that obviously weren't needed when the house was built. The floorboards that we looked under on the ground floor revealed an interesting surprise. There was about a 30cm drop down to a tiled floor. From the hollow sound while walking on them we had expected some space below but not as much and tiled floor was a surprise too. Someone poured concrete all over them to support bricks to support a beam. So I hope that we can get it off without too much damage. These are the kind of features that we would like to keep. 

A couple of weeks ago a new opportunity arose. We were told that it may be possible to purchase the house next door to the one that we bought. So over the past two weeks, everything has been moving very quickly, but it also means that everything to do with planning has to be on hold until we have all of the information and make a decision. Although we don't know when the house was built, we do know from the title sketch, which dates from 1680,  that it was before 1680. Both of the houses are already shown on the sketch below; I've marked them in red. From other documentation, we believe that it may be from at least the early 1600s if not earlier. We now know that the date of 1763 that we originally had, is actually the date that the rectangle windows were added to the back of the building to possibly replace the arrow slits.