Laying Insulation: Unpleasant Occupation.

I've made boxes out of old plasterboard to cover and protect the downlighters for the bedrooms below and put down the first bag of new insulation over the top of the old. That makes it about 300mm thick. I would rather have been Henry the Eighth's Royal Stool Inspector than have this as a regular job.

Off the Floor

Yesterday I built more staging out of salvaged wood to get things off the floor so that we can put down more insulation, and took a ton of empty boxes to the recycling centre....

....and this morning I made a narrow insulated walkway to the southern end of the house. I thought I'd be up in the loft for a couple of days, but its looking like more than a week...

Staging

There's no point spending a fortune on insulating walls if the loft isn't done properly, which you'll be amazed to learn, it isn't. That's partly because of all the rubbish we've chucked up there which is compressing much of the insulation, and partly because there wasn't enough insulation in the first place.

What to do? Build staging and get all the boxes and stuff off the floor so that we can put down more insulation. You can't have too much insulation, you know. There you go, I said the other day there might be some more words of wisdom soon.

All of the materials used have been salvaged from other parts of the house and reused. Never chuck out old bits of wood!

Tank Battle

Had to knock off a few more courses of bricks off the chimney breast for the much larger tank to fit, and chop out one of the uprights holding the roof up. There was another nearby so the roof didn't fall down.

Here the strong wooden base is in position on the chimney breast leveled with some old slates.

A lot of huffing and puffing and rejigging all the plumbing we only did about a week ago, and the new tank is in position and filled with water.

Mystifyingly, this did not make any discernable difference to the pressure on the hot water system. The shower has improved though. The rest of the plumbing needs to be looked at carefully as something isn't right. Stay tuned.....

Plan B

In fact this is probably Plan C or D. Remember a few days ago I mentioned we had inadequate pressure on our hot water system? (Check back to Tuesday 10 Nov). We tried moving the header tank in the attic to a loftier position. The effect was minimal.

This should make a difference. Upgrading from a 40 gallon tank to a 100 gallon tank.

It went through the loft hatch. I had a Plan B for that too, which involved making a big hole in the bedroom ceiling. I was pleased it went through the hatch. Just. Shame there was nobody about to either witness or record the miracle I performed in achieving this feat.

That was yesterday. Today I made a base for it to stand on atop the old chimney breast. Two old door jams salvaged from the studio renovation, and some chopped up shelves the school was chucking out. Reckon that saved me thirty quid, so never chuck away old bits of wood. More words of wisdom soon. Maybe.

Happy Very Belated Halloween

I just downloaded this pic from the camera. Arne grew the pumpkin from a seed, and carved it himself. A fabulous effort I'm sure you'll agree.

En-suite Progress

A couple of recent shots to start the day of the en-suite which has taken some steps forward.

I got this corner cabinet in Homebase for half price when I went in for some insulation which they didn't have. It's 45 degree angle means you can have lots of fun peering into all corners of the room simultaneously while sitting on the loo.

Got a shelf, towel rail and soap/cupholders up too.

Yesterday was a good day!

Nothing went wrong and we made lots of progress. Those kind of days don't come along every day you know! Richard is spreading his misery and germs elsewhere at the moment so a strange, eerie sense of joy and wellbeing swept though the house. Its as if this whole project has suddenly gone bipolar....

We started off with this box of multi-coloured spaghetti. Ratty turned up early before Arne had gone to school, and he just had time to give Ratty a hand and tell him what to do.

By the end of the day, it looked like this. All the new sockets and many of the lights are now live.

Meanwhile, I painted the ceiling in Arne's room, the leftover paint being enough to also paint half a wall.

After lunch, I set about some plastering. I fixed up this small hole in Arne's wall...

...but I was really chuffed with how this turned out. Lots of trial and error, but I got it looking smooth and flat with a nice sharp edge. I'll not be attempting any ceilings just yet though....

Kerslake

We found out a little more about who is likely to have written "Kerslake Oct 23 1940" on the wall. As I said, the Kerslakes are a big family around here, and there are still a couple of brothers around who are around 70+. It was probably their father, who was a painter and decorator. Pure history, man!

A Lofty Experience

We've been below the floors downstairs, and now were up in the rafters. We have a bit of a problem with inadequate pressure on our hot water system. That's why we have a pump to power the shower. One way to increase the pressure is to raise the header tank to as high as it will go so that the water has further to drop.

The tank was sat on the ceiling joists above Arne's room. When we put plasterboard up a couple of days ago, the boards were massively distorted under where the tank was. Behind the tank is the old chimney breast which was capped off sometime between the early sixties and the '80's.

I bashed off some more of the chimney breast and we sited the tank as high as it would go, and extended all the pipes as simply as we could. Unfortunately, and as I expected, it has only made a marginal difference to the hot water pressure. We will have to come up with a plan B, of which more later. But fortunately, the severe bow in Arne's ceiling has completely disappeared. That's what you get when you don't spread the load properly. Was NOTHING in this house ever done correctly in the first place?

Archaeology

Here's a fascinating little aside. I spent much of my weekend stripping the wallpaper and paint off the walls in Arne's room. Under the paper written on a layer of paint, I found this. The Dua family owned the house from about 1981-1999 I think, and many of them still live locally.

When I stripped all the paint away, I found this on another wall. "Kerslake Oct 23 1940." The Kerslakes are a big family around these here parts. If I manage to find out anything about who might have written this, I'll let you know!

More AJ's room

Back to Arne's room. The ceiling in here was 9mm plasterboard (should be 12mm). The joins were full of some sort of filler which hadn't been smoothed down (should have been taped prior to skimming with plaster). It hadn't been skimmed, but had been painted with textured paint which had almost completely failed to disguise the crimes just outlined.

What's this "Heath Robinson" style contraption?

A plaster board hoist! That's what!

Going up......

We're screwing new 12mm boards up over the old ceiling. We drew lines first where all the joists run, so we'd know where to put the screws. Rich looks like he's amazed they haven't fallen down. Or maybe he's just had an idea?

The whole ceiling is up. The holes are where the downlighters will go. Rich was meant to be skimming it today but he's not very well. Unusually, his ailment is not a hangover. Get well soon.

Plumbing catchup!

Since we had to take off many of the radiators in order to insulate the walls, it seemed completely nuts not to replace all but the only two newish radiators in the house. Most of them were very old, inefficient and in some cases ridiculously enormous. Several rooms were inadequately heated by small single panel radiators. The lounge had a double one 3m long which two of us could barely lift. The people who fitted this system wanted a warm lounge but weren't fussed about anywhere else.

So, replace them we did. Giant for compact, inadequate for appropriate, old for new. Want to see pictures of all the nice new shiny radiators? Thought not, boring as hell. Some rejigging of the pipework was necessary to fit the new ones, which were all different sizes to the old. One thing led to another, and much investigating was done to discover just how the system worked. Part of it was the crazy arrangement of pipes which you saw in the lounge a couple of days ago. This entire loop was removed and replaced with two neat pipes in the hall connecting upstairs with downstairs. Lots of pipes were buried under the floor. Originally they would have been under a suspended wooden floor but this was long gone and they had just had concrete poured over them.

Here's Rich digging some of them up just to try to find out how they are arranged under the concrete.

Part of phase 2 which will hopefully happen next year, will be to put a layer of insulation on top of the concrete floors downstairs and place a suspended timber floor on top of that. With that in mind, we decided to run all new pipes above the present floor downstairs. The only place this would have been a problem was running them past the front door which then wouldn't be able to open, so a temporary loop over it was envisioned.

However, when we pulled up the carpet, we found there was a channel of damp rotten wood through which the old pipes ran, so we could run our new ones the same way (having first removed the wood), creating for the first time an actual lowest point from which the whole system could be drained. This picture shows where Rich drilled through the wall and ran two 15mm pipes directly outside with valves to drain the system. Brilliant!

Meanwhile, other tasks included putting insulation on these pipes which supply the radiator in the kitchen. They had a very long run and lost much of their heat before they even reachd the radiator.

We also thought of a genius use of the pipes which crossed the floor upstairs and used to come through the lounge ceiling. We reconnected them to the upstairs loop, dropped them discreetly down at the back of the lounge, through the wall and used them to supply this new radiator in the kitchen. The kitchen was always inadequately heated as there was no room for a radiator big enough to heat the space, but now we have two.

And a little one in the laundry room where there used to be none! I did all the pipework and soldering myself on this and none of it leaked.

And through it all, I made frequent visits to the dump. We're on first name terms now, me and Stig (of the dump)

Nothing for 3 weeks, then two come along at once....

This is our bedroom. Looks like we won't be sleeping in it for a while...

Pipes in the lounge

The day we moved into this house 7 1/2 years ago, we were simply too excited to be bugged by anything. It wasn't until the next day that the true horribleness of these fitted shelves made of MDF hit home.

Ripping those babies out was one of the most fun things I've done in a long time. Can you guess what ornaments were on them before they went?

Once they were out, they revealed some quirky plumbing. the pipes came across under the floor upstairs, through the ceiling in this alcove, crossed over each other twice before disappearing under the concrete floor and recrossing the house back to the front again. They got ripped out too.

Did they really think painting them chamaelion style would stop anyone noticing?

More Ratty

All those cables and Ratty knows exactly what they all do.

Not only that, but he thinks he can fit them neatly into this small box!

AJ's room

First, we move the furniture out of the way.

Then we strip all the wallpaper, pull out the window surrounds, knock off the loose plaster, foam in the window, making loads of mess and dust creating large amounts of black bogeys.

The insulation board goes up.

Wall is plastered and the new radiator is hung. There, that wasn't so bad, was it?

Ratty

This is Ratty, drilling some more holes in our nice violently green wall to run another cable. He's a brilliant electrician, and much more beautiful than Sparky was. I expect he's called Ratty because when he's been in your house it ends up looking badly gnawed. He'll be here on Wednesday moving some cables he's already routed because his clients changed their minds about where they are going to put their bed. The blighters....

Mess

I thought I should share our chaos and discomfort with the wider world. Why should we have to suffer alone? We are doing all six rooms in the main part of the house (3 bedrooms upstairs and 3 reception rooms downstairs) so we're having to keep moving from one to another, and most of them have a pile of furniture in the middle, and all of them are covered in dust, and none of them are remotely nice to be in yet.... This mess is like no other mess we've ever experienced. It is the uber-mess, the mess to end all messes.

The mess in the spare room...

The mess in our bedroom....

The mess in the study.... That's another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Expanding foam and Kryptonite

When we ripped out all the gaudy tropical hardwood window surrounds, we found that the wondow frames fitted by Country Window Systems in Dunkeswell, Devon, were actually only held in by silicone and thin air. Great job guys, I thought you did it quickly. So we've splurged in about ten quids worth of expanding foam into each window surround to hold the blighters in.

Now the expaded foam will hold it tight, and insulate the gap. RIchard would prefer if it was fixed in with eight inch titanium bolts anchored into Kryptonite, but he's a belt and braces kind of guy.

Here's Richard plastering away again in Miles's room (long story), which as previously mentioned, is not his favourite job. But its Friday, and he's off camping for the weekend with some of the boys from Culmstock, so I expect to see him here at about eleven on Monday morning, with large gaps in his memory.

Plastering

Rich doing what he hates. Plastering. As opposed to getting plastered, which he loves.

Lounge

Apart from having the entire house rewired by Ratty (who is coming to run some more cables tomorrow so I'll try to get a snap) we are also applying extra insulation to all the exterior walls, of which we have many, and although they are cavity walls, the extra insulation will cut the heat loss by more than half.

We were able to simply peel the paint off the wall in the lounge as it was the kind of vinyl paint that was popular in the '70's. After seven years, it was about time we redecorated anyway.

Once the paint was stripped, Richard, yes, he of studio and bathroom fame, could get to sticking up insulated plasterboard. This has 50mm of extruded polystyrene stuck to the back of it and its £30 a sheet.

The wooden window surrounds have been consigned to history, and we now have nice wooden cills and plastered reveals.

But going to Spain wasn't the only reason this blog hasn't been updated for months....

Life has been very complicated on many fronts lately. But while we were away, Ratty came and ripped up all the floorboards, drilled loads of holes everywhere and left cables dangling out of them. Ratty is our new sparky, he's not nearly as ugly as the old one.

Here's the fuse box with lots of new wiring ready to connect once a new consumer unit is fitted.

And a couple of examples of cables sticking out of holes.

We've been in Spain.

We saw some spectacular rocks.

We stayed at a nice campsite where we upset some Germans and made friends with some other Germans. We might have mentioned the war once, but we think we got away with it.

And we buried Arne.

Making the bed

I've been getting through some sun screen this week I can tell you. Its been glorious weather for sipping Pimms by the pool and reading a good book, but not so great for what I'm doing.

I should come up with a new index of pints of sweat per 100 bricks cleaned. Don't know what I'd score, but it would be a lot. Here is the historic moment when the corners of the path were joined up thus enclosing the area of the bed and enabling me to.....

...install the planks which will make the bed raised. These are old joists which we saved when we demolished what was in our opinion a ghastly pergola.

Sorry, it had to go. Here J9 admires it with its architect and builder when we first looked at the house in 2002. Actually, it looks surprisingly good here! The stone slabs you can see on the ground are also being recycled and will make up part of the paths surrounding our vegetable beds.

But the pergola was of no practical use whatsoever, unlike this lovely bed. You could snuggle down for the night in that no problem.

Its too hot for this....

As you saw from J9's skimpy attire in the last post, its been warm around here. Very warm. Too warm for digging soil and rubble, cleaning bricks, barrowing sand, mud and hardcore from here to there and especially too warm for compacting down the hardcore by bashing it with a sledgehammer. Unfortunately, that's exactly what I've been doing for several days at a stretch.

Here, the paths made of the old brick we lifted from the original floor in the studio are beginning to take shape. These will run all the way around five raised beds.

Phew! This is hard work. The first bed is taking shape.

J9's battle

J9 also got in on the action. She decided to tackle the corner by the greenhouse, which had become a tangle of weeds and brambles.

We've grown a fine crop of the afore-mentioned weeds and brambles under the lean-to, and the mini greenhouse, which won us a gold at Chelsea in the couch grass section.

The couch grass was coming up from under a load of slabs which some idiot had laid without a weed barrier. J9 lifted all the slabs (she's so strong!) and then got stuck in ripping up the carpet of roots. The weather was better than the day before.

I love to see someone enjoying themselves.

J9 1-0 Couch grass

Tha path to glory

Up at the top of our garden, we have a vegetable plot. This has been covered in old carpet and plastic for 2 years to kill off what the previous occupants euphemistically called their "wild flower meadow," which was actually a tangled mass of couch grass and weeds which proved impossible to defeat by mere digging. We have now designated half of that area for the chickens, and are in the process of laying paths and when that's done we'll make some raised beds for the veg. Now....

...this has been the scene outside our back gate since November/December 2007 when I dug out the floor for the new studio. I would have sent it all off in Somon's trailer but for the fact that various people have asked if they could have all the hardcore for building, and promised to take it all away, and then not done so.

So, while one half of my brain was thinking what the heck am I going to do with all the hardcore, the other half was thinking where the heck am I going to get enough topsoil for the raised beds.... Genius! Dig out the topsoil from the paths....

....barrow up all the rubble....

.....and fill the trenches with rubble, providing the ideal foundation for the brick and slab paths we're going to lay!! I told you it was genius.

Eggscellent!

Hello loyal followers! At last, another entry in what has become a sadly erratic blog, but I'm afraid this is the nature of things these days. I've been busy, partly with work and partly with other things that have demanded my attention. Four of which are poultry. Although in themselves they have nothing to do with the renovation of the house, they have galvanized us into a frenzy of activity in shaping their environment and what with the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, one thing has led to another and another etc and some serious butt is being kicked out in the garden. And since the garden is kind of part of the house, I've decided to blog!

Here's AJ feeding our new hens. Their names are Princess Layer, Hen Solo, The Bantam Menace and Hen Kenobie. Can you spot the theme?

They are very tame and will happily eat from your hand. We know a geezer in the pub who works at a chicken farm, and we rescued these when they were about to become pet food.

We bought them a house, and I built them a storm shelter. It is temporarily situated where we'll soon have raised vegetable beds. We feed them on organic pellets, and they also eat worms and slugs, which they fight over.

A little heavy on the rouge this morning....

Our reward is some great big lovely organic free range eggs every day, usually 2 or 3, but we've just had 4 eggs two days running! Clever girls!

Shower room latest

A couple of shots of the latest from the shower room.  

After I fixed the disaster which was the vertically inadequate tiles, I got on with installing the shower taps, hand set and other accessories. Looks fantastic, water pressure still too low even with a pump, shower tray leaks in the corner. Still some work to be done then....

 

At least I won some battles with the wash stand. Sink waste leaked persistently, took some time to work out that there were two leaks, not just one. Now there are none. Door frame, skirting and low energy illuminated mirror all fixed and doing what they are supposed to.

Radiator is up too, although not yet connected. You may place your bets on whether there will be any leaks. What are the odds?

Bath panel

It was easiest to make the panel lying down flat on the floor, but with hindsight, that wasn't too clever....

It weighs a ton, with the stone tiles, and when raising it to the vertical position, it flexed enough for half of the long tile strips along the bottom to pop off, and some broke. Bum. Fixed now though. 

Several heating pipes run under the bath, so when the radiators are connected and live and we have checked for leaks, we will grout the whole bath panel in making it look rather splosh.

7 week break!

I've been busy, that's the only excuse I'll offer. Most of the time I was otherwise engaged, but some progress has been made, not least of which was that both toilets were replaced due to their contents having a habit of leaking on the floor. Not ideal. 

Well, I'm not about to go blasting you with half a million pictures of what's been happening, I'm going to feed it to you in tantalizingly small dribs and drabs. Starting off with a little series on the hole in the wall from the bedroom to the en-suite. 

Going way back, you haven't seen the start of the en-suite yet. The opening through to the bedroom began with a few bricks knocked out and concrete lintels installed to support the wall. Sensibly, Richard had made some important notes and diagrams on exactly the bit of wall he was going to knock down.

This was the opening into the bedroom before Jack came and plastered the walls and ceiling.

The floor in the bedroom is a lot higher than the floor in the dressing room, which meant cutting a hole in the ceiling downstairs to make way for some steps.

Tricky Al made the steps. I left his money in an envelope behind the bar at the pub, so I hope he didn't drink it all. It was a squeeze making them fit, but fit they did.

Pat & Bri's

Going back a couple of weeks, we were in Kent doing some preparatory work on relocating my dear old mum, and we took some time out to visit my old pal Steve who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and who's blog I follow religiously. He was over visiting his folks Pat & Bri who have a beautiful old house near Canterbury, which as far as I could see needs just about no work doing to it. The lucky lucky....... This was the gathering of Steve's lovely family and lovely friends that evening.

Making Repairs

Well here I am, back at almost exactly the same stage (bathroomically speaking) that I was at this time last week, specifically being ready or thereabouts to start installing the shower door. Here's how I achieved this epic feat:

I cut out the damaged sections of plasterboard which had come away with the tiles, and bashed in some noggins which aren't in this picture, but trust me, I did. (Noggins are bits of wood that go horizontally between the vertical struts where you join bits of plasterboard so the joins can't move.)

Then I cut some bits of plasterboard to fill the holes, and fixed the damaged insulated boards at the back with some drywall adhesive.

Once that was all dry and hard I cut the tiles to the correct height (I quadruple-checked this time) and stuck them on.

And finally the tiles are grouted. When that is dry I can seal them and start work installing the door. In between doing all this I managed to relocate my dear mother 200 miles from Kent to Devon. I think I'll just pop off to Milliways for lunch now.

Triumph and Disaster

Having toiled away for most of the week tiling and grouting the shower and shower room floor, I had reached the point yesterday morning where the shower enclosure was all ready for the door to be fitted. Rather than steaming ahead with that which was the temptation, I decided to paint the walls first so that I didn't get paint all over the door and stuff.

So this morning I set about fitting the door. The first thing I discovered was that due to a mis-measurement of about 15mm, I had cut all the top row of tiles about 15mm too low.

So I had to smash off the top row of tiles....

Which of course took half the plasterboard off with them. I really can't think of anything funny to say about this.

Bang up to date

This very morn was I tiling the shower.