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.