A few photos

I suppose this happens to a lot of bloggers: you set out to chronicle something you're working on and then get so busy doing the work that you don't have the time (or energy) to blog about it. So I'm taking the easy way out by posting a load of photos to show what I've been up to.

The bathroom is done. All the pipes are boxed in and the ceiling and boxing have been painted. All it needs now is a mirror and a toilet roll holder.

The main bedroom is also all papered and painted (ceiling, skirting boards, door frame, walls, even the radiator). Papering into the window recesses was a real challenge in all the bedrooms.

This is the mahogany windowsill in the smallest bedroom. I stripped and sanded all the windowsills back to bare wood and then treated them with wood oil. How anyone could paint over such beautiful wood is beyond me. This room is also now papered and painted.

In the second bedroom there is now just a box over the stairs where the big airing cupboard used to be. Colin, a handyman, made the top and fixed the sides for me. Then I fitted the skirting boards around it and painted everything. As in all the bedrooms, I put thick lining paper on the walls and then painted them.

The window in the second bedroom. This radiator needed painting as well - in the same colour as the woodwork.

Coming soon: the living room.

Back to work!

Is it really 4 months since I last posted to this blog? That's ridiculous! What on earth have I been doing in all that time? Well, quite a lot as it happens. We bought a house, packed all our belongings, moved into the house, unpacked our belongings (OK, about half of them anyway), retrieved more belongings from various garages, storage facilities and friends gardens they had been languishing in... you get the picture.

But at the end of June I finally got back to work on the renovation. It was high time the bathroom was finished, so I sat down with Paul the plumber and sorted out exactly what we needed to order, what needed to be done and who to hire to do it. As well as the plumber, I needed a plasterer to fix the walls that had been damaged by removing the tiles (one of the toughest jobs I've ever tackled), a tiler to sort out the floor and walls and a joiner to box in the pipes once the plumber had resited them. Luckily I knew someone who could do the joinery and tiling and Paul recommended a good plasterer who was available at short notice.










Now you see it - now you don't. It only took half a day for Paul and Damian to pull out all the fittings (left) and to replace most of the pipes, putting in some temporary flexible ones so that the plasterer could work around them. Looks pretty rough, doesn't it?
Not for long. A few days later Alan arrived with his plastering tools and smoothed it all out in a day. Thanks to a spell of warm, dry weather, the walls dried out quickly.

In the process of pulling out the bath, my trusty plumbers discovered that several of the old pipes had been badly welded (or not welded at all) and were slowly leaking. Once I got a good look at the floor, I realised that this had encouraged damp rot and some areas of the floorboards and even the joists were soft and/or brittle. This called for urgent treatment before any other work could be carried out. Crawling around on my hands and knees, I dug out the crumbly bits and then soaked the affected areas with Ronseal Wet Rot Wood Hardener. It stinks to high heaven of solvent, but it works a treat, saturating the damaged wood with a quick-drying resin that dries rock solid. Luckily the damage proved to be quite localised (see dark areas on photo below), so it wasn't necessary to replace any of the wood.

Finally Paul and Damian could finish repiping the drains and water supplies and install the bath. The floor and walls are now ready for Dave the tiler/joiner to come in and do his stuff. His first job will be to cover the floor with 2cm thick marine plywood to give a solid surface for the tiles. But that will have to wait until the first week of August because next week everyone is on holiday with their kids.

In the meantime I'll be fixing all the loose floorboards left by the upheaval of rewiring and replumbing the house. I've already started upstairs. There's a good chance we'll need to get to the wiring and heating pipes in the future, so I'm screwing the boards down rather than nailing them. That way I can easily lift them up in the future, and I can also easily see which ones to lift.

What I've learned

Learning on the job is a slow process, and I often wish I had someone more experienced I could turn to for help. The various workmen I've employed have given me hints here and there, but mostly I've had to rely on DIY manuals, the internet and lots of useful leaflets from Wickes, etc. I have therefore decided to pass on a few nuggets of hard-won wisdom to anyone out there who is starting out as clueless as me.

1) Wallpaper that has been painted over with gloss or other water-resistant paint is a nightmare to get off. Scraping it with a wire brush is useless. Cutting it with a blade is only marginally better and can damage the plaster underneath. Sanding it just produces a lot of fine paint dust and a nasty cough. The solution is to get a sharp scraper blade and scrape off the paint layer to leave just the paper beneath. If you get the right angle on it, you can peel it off in great long swathes. The paper then comes off really easily with a steamer or paper-stripping solution.

2) The wrecking bar is the best tool ever. It makes taking off skirting boards and dado rails so easy and is great at pulling recalcitrant nails out as well. However, you may need a thin piece of wood or cardboard to protect the wall.

3) Don't try to unscrew any screws when removing skirting boards or dado rails. You'll just end up with a rawlplug sticking out that is nearly impossible to remove. Pull the screws out with the skirting board and the rawlplug will come with it. Unless, of course, you want to reuse that screw hole.

That's it for now. Got to get back to work.

New windows and doors

There's just one problem with working so hard on this house. It doesn't leave me a lot of time for my blog. I've been taking advantage of the good weather this week to start stripping the wallpaper - with all the windows wide open to stop the steam from building up. None of which would have been possible without the help of my very kind former neighbours Tom and Tessa, who lent me their steam-stripper.

Last week was even more exciting. In the space of just two days, window fitters John and Ted took out all the old doors and windows and replaced them with lovely new units. It was a major expense and I was of two minds whether to do it or not, but now that they're in I am so happy I went ahead with it. The new front door, in particular, is a vast improvement (see photo).


The only things we didn't replace are the old wooden inner sills and the back window on the extension which was fitted in about 2002. The photo of the back door (and new bathroom and upstairs bedroom windows) also shows the new electrical cable going from the kitchen extension to the garage, previously known as "the death trap".

The old windows haven't simply been dumped either. The metal frames have been taken by scrap merchants who can reclaim the aluminium and I've kept all the old wooden frames that the aluminium windows and doors were set in. They were made of solid mahogany and I'm certainly not going to throw away an endangered hardwood. 

And finally, something to amuse my readers. This is my attempt at dealing with a very wet back wall on the garage and it has raised a few eyebrows, but it does work. Basically, the rainwater coming off the garage roof was going down the drainpipe and then just running straight back onto the wall below, causing small floods on the garage floor. By diverting the rainwater onto the patio with a few strategically placed bits of pipe and guttering I have at least achieved a temporary fix. I've got a whole house to renovate - the garage can wait.

Finally some real progress

In the past two weeks the house has been full of people and noise. First the electricians came and pulled up so many floorboards on the first floor that I could see right through the ceiling in some places. Rather useful as it gave me a chance to check out the condition of the joists which, I'm pleased to report, look sound. Once they'd done their bit the new wiring disappeared from view, but the sockets and light fittings are all new. 

Then the plumbers arrived and started ripping out the old boiler and water tanks. In no time they had fitted a new A-rated condensing boiler in the loft space. Because it's a combi-boiler we no longer need any water tanks and the loft suddenly looks quite spacious. Best of all, the old airing cupboard in the second bedroom is empty as well (see before and after pics), which will give us so much more space. 

The pipes and wires for the new boiler run down the corner of the second bedroom and, once boxed in, will be hardly noticeable.

The wall in the kitchen where the old boiler used to be is a mess at the moment, with two big holes and loads of plaster missing, but once that's all fixed it will give us space for another wall unit. More importantly, it gets rid of the condensation that used to stream off the walls.

One of the plumbers' last jobs was to replace the radiator in the living room. Not only is the new radiator now big enough to heat this lovely large space, but it has been repositioned under the window (Photos: first old, then new radiator). For reasons that neither I nor anyone else who saw it could comprehend, the old radiator was stuck behind the door. Perhaps they just ran out of copper pipe - who knows.

There were a few incidents I could have done without - such as when one of the old solder joints popped off just as the plumber was filling up the radiators, leaving a rather large puddle under the floorboards by the front door. Once that was fixed, I went around nervously checking all the pipes as he refilled the system, waiting for another old connection to give way under the pressure. Luckily they all held and the house is wonderfully warm now. Of course I'll have to switch it off when we get the windows replaced, but that's for another day.

An unpleasant surprise

This house just keeps coming up with surprises. The electricians found this one when they pulled up some floorboards. It’s a rather wet wall - on the inside of the second bedroom.

I had noticed that the overflow pipe for the water tank in the loft was dripping on to the wall above the front porch. You can see a line of moss, so it’s been like that for quite some time. I figured, as we were replacing the tank anyway, the problem would then disappear.

What I hadn’t counted on was that some water had also run down on the inside of the wall, and when it hit a connection between the outer and inner walls - like a joist - it ran along it and soaked the inner wall as well.

To find out how bad the problem was, I pulled off the wallpaper in the corner of the room and found some ominous damp patches. And there’s another one in the corner of the main bedroom, plus a rather damp area above the front door directly beneath the dripping overflow.

I cut off the source of the problem by turning off the mains water supply and draining the tank. But it’s going to take time to dry out the walls, especially now that the heating is off and the weather is cold and damp. Maybe I should hire a dehumidifier. Luckily the plaster isn’t crumbling, so I think it will be OK once it’s dry. I’ll put on an anti-mould treatment before redecorating, then cover it with lining paper. 

I’m almost afraid to take down any more wallpaper. What will I find next?   

The workers arrive

Today work on the house began in earnest. Up until now, everything has been preparation - lifting the carpets and other floor coverings to give the electricians access to the bare floors and dismantling unwanted cupboards so the plumber could get at the pipes and tanks.

But this morning, on the dot at 8.30 (and I am so NOT a morning person), the electricians pulled up in front of the house ready to be let in. Within 15 minutes they had done a quick reccy and were already hauling their tools through the door. In no time I could hear holes being hacked into walls and floorboards being prised up. By the end of the day they'll have finished rewiring the upstairs, including an extra socket in the main bedroom. Tomorrow they'll do most of the downstairs.

Tomorrow we'll also be joined by my trusty plumber, who will be starting on the heating system. Luckily the electricians and plumber have worked together before and get on well, so I can generally let them organise who does what and when.

That leaves me free to carry on hacking skirting boards and dado rails off the walls. I bought a new "wrecking bar" on Friday and am having great fun learning how to use it. It definitely lives up to its name.