Back to Business

"What's the plan for this weekend?" I said to Janine a few weeks ago. "I dunno," came the reply. "Any reason we can't just decorate the lounge?" "Let's do it!"

We've lived with the horrible orange ceiling and the dark red walls in an already dark room, and more recently bare plaster, holes from removed plumbing etc. for far too long. There are still more important things to do, but this is the room we spend much of our time in so let's make it a nicer place to be.

 

 The first thing to do was to recruit some child labour, cheap and willing .

Good job Arne! Removing the paint has revealed the truly epic nature of the levels of stupidity some people are capable of. Someone in the past had crudely hacked out a channel (neither straight nor level) and sunk a live cable into the wall where anyone in the future could have decided to bang in a metal nail to hang a picture. That's how people get electrocuted in houses. Luckily they'd filled it so badly it was still clearly visible beneath the thick coat of paint.

Having reached the chimney breast and done much of the prepping, I couldn't bring myself to start painting knowing I intended to rebuild the fireplace into something altogether more pleasing and impressive than the hole in the wall with some unevenly exposed brickwork. Janine and Arne were going away for a few days during half term, so I had time to make a mess and get to work.

Step 1: Remove the rest of the plaster from around the fireplace. You may notice six bricks annoyingly protrude below the rest, and I decided they had to be cut. Hacking them off might well have brought half the house down.

 I made a tent to contain the dust, and borrowed Richard's stone cutter.

A gentle tap will now knock the bottoms off.

 The tent did it's job. It wasn't nice in there.

We have a large pile of original Victorian bricks saved from other building projects and dug up from the garden. After cleaning they were used with lime mortar (1 part lime, 1 part cement, 6 parts sand) to build a tower on either side of the fireplace.

Every few courses steel ties were added to keep them firmly anchored to the original wall.

Then a plywood former was made following the curve of the original arched top of the fireplace.

 Another couple of courses of bricks were laid which were cut at an angle to form a new arch.

 I laid the bricks loosely first and marked their positions on the former, before using mortar with more steel ties between the bricks.

 The next course of bricks required some neat cutting to follow the curve of the arch. One more on top of that and it's job done, nearly.

The moment of truth. The next day, I gently wiggled the former out and nothing fell down. Result. A large slab of oak should arrive this week to finish it off in style.  

Arne's first Day

Nothing to do with the house, but here's Arne ready for his first day at secondary school. More on the house soon, I promise.

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.

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!

Demolition squad

We're going right back to the brickwork. Luckily the plaster practically leaps off the walls if you just give it a dirty look. It's also lucky the dog gets through lots of Chappie so we've got plenty of bags to put the rubble in.

This morning Arne and I formed a highly effective demolition squad and destroyed all the stud walls, thus opening up the entire space. Luckily, it appears that the bloke who did the plastering also built the stud walls, so they more or less fell apart too.

Construction and demolition

The first, and very pleasurable task, was to rip out the old monstrosity and permanently remove the panels hiding the hot water pipes.

You can see how big the cupboard was. This space will now become part of the new family/guest bathroom.

Arne helped a lot with building the frame for the new airing cupboard.

Here it is all coming together where those orange panels were. The big orange tank is the pressure vessel for the central heating which we recently had installed to make the system more efficient.

Another view... duh!

Laying the floor

Serious business. Down goes the underlay.

The first few bits are stuck together with glue. It will be a floating floor, which means its not attached to anything. Just a big slab of stuck-together boards.

Arne helped me before he went off to water polo. This floor will be so beautiful you just want to snog it. By the way, did I mention it is made of bamboo? Apart from the long distance transport, it is very eco-friendly as the bamboo only takes a few years to grow. Mighty sustainable. Hope there are no pandas around here who will want to take a bite out of it.

Painting

The reason for the big clear out on Monday? So we could all paint like crazy on Tuesday!

Niels did the ceilings because he is the tallest, and also the only one apart from Sal who doesn't have some physical ceiling painting impairment.

The lovely Sal (Niels's partner) wearing my old Dexy's Midnight Runners style dungarees.

The lovely J9 hard at it.

AJ was at it too!

Niels and AJ found a highly efficient way of spinning the washed up paint rollers dry!

Paint boy

Let there be light! (Singular)

I had to wait until after dark to take these shots. The source of the illumination is entirely from the low energy lighting installation (no flash photography) and mighty splendid it is too. When all the walls and ceilings are painted white it'll brighten up a lot more.
Your first look at our lovely new loo. We may have to have a family raffle to decide who gets to go first.
Arne inspecting the MLS with its own lighting. Well done Sparky! Hope the oozing gets better soon.

Skylight highlight

Site Inspector Jenssen (wearing festive super custom handmade protective Norwegian headgear today) waves his approval after inspecting the new skylight installation.

Uffculme Challenge

Part of the challenge was for AJ's parents to get out of bed in time (see posts below) to get AJ to the start line in time for the Uffculme Challenge race, a competitive cross-country run of 1.75 miles for his age group. Here he is crossing the finish line; the look on his face says it all.

Inferior headgear

The site inspector was wearing inferior headgear today which he borrowed from Alistair. BTW Alistair, thanks for your help and sorry about slagging off your hat!

Health and safety regulations

My son Arne does his daily inspection of progress. He knows he is not allowed on site without wearing his custom designed hand-crafted Norwegian protective headgear, which deflects any falling rubble with amazing efficiency.