Look at my passage

The last couple of days I've spent clearing all the tools and dust and rubbish out of the airing cupboard and repositioning some electrics. Janine can start putting towels and fluffy things in it now!

The old...

The new. The plastering was done a couple of days ago by Jack, now it just needs a lick of paint, some floor tiles and a few bits of skirting and architrave. Job done.

Hole in the wall

The last thing Rich did before he left on his away mission was make a large rectangular hole in our bedroom wall. The day before, Janine had asked me where the hole was going to be, so I drew it on the wall in pen. In completely the wrong place. And the next day (when I wasn't around) Richard came and for some strange reason thought I'd marked it accurately, and made a hole in the wrong place. You've got to laugh...

This was after he'd filled the wrong hole and made the right one.

Through the hole, this is what you can see. A view through the dressing/wardrobe room into the en-suite shower room. As Rich was away we had Jack in for several days doing the plastering. He's very good. He helped lay the floor in the studio after I hurt my back.

Compact and bijou...

I know, I know already! I haven't updated the blog for weeks. Well, I've got lots of excuses, not least of which is that I sent Richard on a mission 200 miles away which has taken precedent over things here. Won't bore you with the details.

However, I have some pictures in reserve of what Richard was doing before he left. Here he's just starting on the third wall of the shower enclosure in the en-suite.

And here he's finished and plastered it. The bit that's not plastered will be tiled.

Then he put in the shower tray. A real neat little low-profile job.

Sewers

The Master Plaster Blaster has been troweling two-handed like a demented one of those blokes on an aircraft carrier waving two bats around to show the planes how to land. When Richard and I were speaking on the phone about how pink and wet the walls were, Paula, his lovely partner, thought we were being rude. Cuh, womens' minds are like sewers.

En-Suite

For the moment, we are concentrating our efforts on completing the en-suite shower room. When this is done, we can use it while we partly dismantle the bathroom in order to finish that off.

Yesterday, Richard installed a shower pump in the airing cupboard, and we pressure tested all the plumbing joints on the shower system. Then we charged up the pump and ran water through it. Don't want to tempt fate, but it all seemed to work.

So today Rich set about boarding up the wall inside which all the pipes and wiring run. The shower has a deluge head, shown here without its head.

A wider view.

The loo will be snug behind the yet to be built stud wall which will form the third side of the shower enclosure.

Christmas happened....

....and by some miracle we got an upstairs bathroom in a usable condition. There may not have been any heating, or a bath panel, but the bath was in, the taps worked, and most of the leaks were fixed.

On Boxing Day I was first up, and the first job of the day was to empty the tray placed below the sink unit to catch the water leaking from the hot tap connection. Thought I'd go to the loo while I was there, flushed it, nothing.... No whooshy noise like you're supposed to hear. Uh oh, rising panic, get a grip.... Taps don't work, this is bad. Very bad. Its really, really cold in here... Frozen pipes! Aaargh! Off with the skirting board, on with the fan heater and hair dryer. Got it thawed out and working, no new leaks, before any of our seven guests even got out of bed. The whole world in fact was ignorant of my twenty minutes of sheer, blind terror. That's the way it goes.

In between the seven Christmas guests leaving and the five New Year guests arriving, I had one day to get the oak wash stand out, sand it down, get two coats of Danish oil on it and put it back in. It hadn't stood up to the hard use over Christmas with constant exposure to water from plumbing leaks and guests, mainly due to the fact that some silly twit had painted it with floor sealer instead of Danish oil because they didn't read the labels on the very similar looking tins. What a moron.

Legend

We've been trial fitting some of the furniture and sanitaryware. Richard, who must by now have a near god-like status in the minds of anyone following this blog, will surely be elevated to legendary when you realize he's made the two oak washstands with his own gnarly hands.

Here's the small one for the shower room.....

.....and the big one for the bathroom.

And the throne for when the queen pops round.

Plumbing

Here's a couple of pictures of the plumbing that's going to be hidden inside the dividing wall between the two bathrooms.

The shower where you may notice part of the studwork was ever so slightly on fire when the joint was soldered....

....and the bath.

Blooming heck, a bath deck!

This was yesterday.

Richard was busy with bits and pieces of plumbing and stuff, and I started work on making the bath deck. Some very expensive tiling board is screwed down to the wooden frame.

By this afternoon (having purchased a tile cutter due to the fact that Richard's friend borrowed his, locked it away and went off on holiday, allegedly) there were tiles all around the top of the deck, some on the walls and the holes for the taps were drilled. We've gone for a kind of Roman baths look. (We got a deal on the stone tiles) We'll have to invite some friends over one evening for an orgy.

The first trial fit of the taps reveal just how lush they will look.

Animal grace

Watching Richard plastering is like watching Swan Lake with pink slop.

The shape of things to come

I took this snap in the tile shop this morning, which is very similar to how our bath installation will look. Hopefully by the end of the week.

More progress

The family bathroom is now all plaster boarded awaiting the attention of Richard's trowel. He came into work yesterday (Saturday) for a few hours, complete with hangover (not his fault, all his naughty friends to blame) which you have to say shows dedication and commitment not usually found in oafish builders.

He had Sunday off though, a day of rest and worship at the alter of San Miguel for Richard. Not me though, I built the framework for the bath deck.

Only made three cock-ups that I counted too... Not bad!

Sun pipe

Holding it delicately at arms length with his hat pulled tightly down over his eyes to protect him from the blinding light transmitted through the sun pipe from the roof, Richard thinks, "Now what do I do, I can't see a blooming thing...."

Latest progress

Once again, blogfans, I am practically buried under a deluge of stroppy emails from frustrated viewers demanding an update. Highly remiss of me to have kept you all waiting so long.


All the water and heating pipes have been run, and will be
hidden behind skirting and insulation board.

The lobby/dressing room area won't have the full-height sloping ceilings so the
stud wall has been insulated against the cold void which will be behind it.

The dressing room area will be lit during daylight by a sun pipe. That's a highly reflective pipe that links the ceiling with a hole in the roof covered with perspex to let in daylight.

Things are starting to look nice and tidy around the skylights. The ceilings have foam board insulation between the rafters, and are further covered in insulated plasterboard.

The outside walls are covered in that too.

The corner round the hot water tank will be neatly boxed in and the sink will go next to it.

Spot of bother looming for the portholes: I had some bendy board to line the holes with but it was just too short. Need to find another method, so any sensible suggestions are welcome. In fact it's so long since I had a meaningful number of comments on a post, I'll happily accept stupid ones too.

Stripe 2008

The legendary Stripe's 2008 Christmas Disco provided a bumper crop of fancy dress once again.

Richard came as a turkey. There are lots of Richards in Culmstock, this is vegetable Richard. He came as a sunflower last year.

Clockwise from the purple one, its Sally, Richard (the builder), Dave and Paula as Quality streets. Quality fancy dress!

Steve and Di made a disturbingly convincing Shrek and Fiona.

Janine was not well. She must have caught something from one of those urchin school children she works with.

I was Janine's nurse. She was a bad patient and spread her germs all over the place. I kept having to contend with dirty old men trying to get off with me. This one was OK though, he was a sweetie.

Warmer and snugglier

The first piece of insulated plasterboard goes up on the ceiling. It will be like a high security prison for Thermal Units in here. There will be no escape.

Its a helluf a shelf

I think I mentioned we're having a big solid oak shelf in the bathroom. Rich fitted it today. it is built into the fabric of the stud walls so when it is all plastered out, it will have no visible means of support.

For now, it makes a darn fine tool shelf.

Warm and snuggly

This is the first stage of insulating the roof. Three inch insulation board between all the rafters.

Stud

Today Richard occupied himself with work most appropriate. He began construction of the stud walls. A stud building stud walls. Well when you think about it, any wall built by a stud would be a stud wall. Richard's walls are particularly studdy, according to Richard. As for me, I'd rather not think about such things.

The insulation board came too. All the outside walls and ceilings will be covered in this, and hardly an ounce of heat will escape from our new bathrooms.

Porthole

I've been working on fitting the porthole windows over the weekend and while Richard fits the second skylight today.

First I made a former from bits of scrap wood and nailed it in place from the outside. Then I squidged some render and bits of brick into the gaps from the inside, which I forgot to take a picture of. When that had set, I could take the former off from the outside leaving a lovely round hole for the window frame.

The frame was then wedged in place and all the gaps filled with expanding foam, the greatest building material ever invented.

Here's the window from the outside after I'd sealed the the bare render with watered down paint.