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.