Never mind. One advantage of doing this room's work, and having the floor up in several places (and no shower monolith) was that I could rectify a design error in the kitchen. Since re-designing it in 2010, we realised that when stood at the sink, you were in your own shadow, which made washing up out of daylight hours (the sink's under the window) rather gloomy. Our solution has been to add a recess mounted LED light above and slightly right of the sink, which entirely remedies this.
Pleasingly, it's the only thing we've wanted to change in the kitchen, after four years.
Back in the new side guest room (old pink bathroom), we then set to insulating the room, throwing up the battens, insulation, and plasterboard rather quickly, actually—it's showing, now, that we've done some 250m2 of this stuff. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it: because we wanted to start plastering today, we wanted to give any dust kicked up by demolition as long as possible to settle, and the two messy jobs we knew we still had to do were the fireplaces in our bedroom, and the front guest. (There's some plaster removal in the front guest, but it's minimal, and the room can't be plastered for ages, and only one wall is plasterboarded.)
Our bedroom's fireplace is in the same stack as the working sitting room fireplace, but obviously off-set. It was an extremely unpleasant job, but I stripped the breast of plaster, and broke out the stone/brickwork blocking the mouth of the fire. I looked as though I'd been coal mining when I was finished, as there was an enormous amount of soot, ash, and dust in the chimney. I was working in a confined space; a tent we'd put up to protect the room. It worked to protect the room, but I was horrible by the end.
The front guest room's fireplace was a lot better, partly because I knew what to expect, and had the vacuum to hand to suck up soot as I went. I found, unexpectedly, a letter lost in the stonework, which was from the summer of 1937: more on that another time, but it gives a date around which the fireplace was probably last used, before being blocked up.
That drew to a finish a long (0430 finish on Sunday morning) day, but the last of the mucky work. Today, a comparative lie-in (we only started work at 11: the laziness!) was followed by putting up the triple wardrobe in the side guest room, doing a variety of sorting and cleaning, and then, while I used expanding foam to finish the landing and master bedroom's walls, Liz started to plaster the side guest room. It's amazing, the difference it makes, even though it's only 70% done. We hope to finish it tomorrow evening, or at least get another bucket of plaster onto the walls.
This weekend sees the end of major operations, in a way, with the remodel/insulation. After this, the job list has the following, which, compared to what's gone before, feels much more manageable. I misquoted Churchill a while ago, but now I think we're able to say that we're at the beginning of the end.
- Plaster everywhere (sounds awful, but each room should only take about three hours, making about 27 hours work);
- Skirting board everywhere (ditto: there's only 90m or so to do);
- Paint everywhere (yes, this is awful, I admit);
- Tile the two bathrooms;
- Wire up the electronic locks for the bathrooms;
- Put up the cupboards in the front guest room;
- Put in the sockets in the diagonal wall dividing the guest rooms;
- Strip the last of the wallpaper upstairs (not much of this, in the master bed, and front guest);
- Single last plasterboard to go up in the sitting room, the landing, and kitchen;
- Window reveals & boards in the front guest room.
And I think that's it. By the end of our Christmas break we should be there, or thereabouts; the painting will probably take us beyond that, realistically, but let's say 'by my birthday', we'll be done.
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