Reconfiguring the Landing

It's been a horribly long day: I've set the timestamp for this entry to be just before midnight, so that the date is 'right' for Saturday 13th...but we only finished the work involved at 0230 on Sunday morning, in fact.

Today's big exercise has been taking down the stud framework of the wall that divides the landing from the master bedroom, and replacing it with a new drywall a couple of feet further into our room. This takes the landing from being big but too small to use other than as a landing, to big enough to function as a study, too, with room along the new wall for a couple of desks, while still having room for shelves. It also has room for the chest of drawers/dresser that's been at the foot of our bed, which—because of having 600mm less space in that dimension—needed a new home.

While we were building the new wall, I've taken the opportunity to add a new switch for our bedroom light, so that there's one near the door, and one on the other side of the room (by my bedside), which I'll change, later, to a clever programmable timer switch. Similarly, although there was a double socket on one side of the bed, and a single spur socket on the other, this was never enough, so I've extended the ring main to give us a double socket on both sides. As there were no sockets at all on the reverse of the wall (the landing side), which wouldn't work for a study, I've also added two further double sockets on that side. In retrospect, I'm not sure that three on each side wouldn't have been excessive, in fact. Perhaps before plastering, I'll add more.

As well as this, we've moved the radiator plumbing for the en suite's radiator across the room, so that it will go on the (yet to be built) internal stud wall, not under the sink. The radiator in the house bathroom (which won't be a bathroom, soon) also needed preparing for its move onto the same unbuilt room, which meant fishing the pipes out from under the floor, and sending them under the newly discovered cement-block wall, to emerge from what is currently the floor of the en suite.

Through all the works on the house in the last weeks, we found that the construction (in this case, of a stud wall) was relatively quick, but the associated plumbing and electrics are what eats up the time. There we go.

Tomorrow, which we shall no doubt start later than today, given the time we're going to get to bed, we plan to relocate the sink in our bathroom (to the opposite corner: I've done some of the preparatory plumbing, but the sink needs to be attached to the water supply and waste pipe), and insulate the external wall of the landing. That could take a while, as it's actually the longest single stretch of external wall, of about 9m length. A double-edged sword is that, despite this, it only has two 'small' windows (relatively, I mean; they're about 100x120cm): that means there's more wall, but less awkward apertures to work around.