Logs

Just a short note: after several months of not doing so, I've spent this afternoon sawing, splitting, and stacking a load (or thereabouts) of logs. Several loads have built up on the drive, and we needed to clear some space. Secondly, as we're now running the stove, we're starting to burn wood for the winter, so it's time to start filling the shelter as it's emptied. Liz was working today, but helped with transporting the wood down, and stacking. Light ran out after 19 barrows (25 is a full load), but there we go.

In other news, Jenny and Philip have properly moved out, their sale/purchase completing at noon, and the new owners beginning to move in.

Of Cheese

After a frankly hellish week, the contrast with a delightful weekend couldn't be starker. Although we've had a couple of hours each morning helping Jenny and Philip load their removal van—the culmination of their relocation to Shropshire—while Ann and David enjoyed a well-earned lie-in, the rest of both days has been entirely relaxing. We've made far too much food, played many games, and enjoyed a film or two. They've been excellent company, and we've all benefited from a revitalizing rest. Although we're back at work in the morning, they're still with us, and will make an early start too.

The work to get to this point's been pretty tough, and taken a lot of energy. However, we're glad that we had something to aim for, and a motivation to get to where we are, without which the work might have dragged on. The end, now, feels in sight. Still to come:

Finishing off both bathrooms: the en suite needs some worktop fiddling, a couple of bits of plasterboard, and tiling on walls and floor; the master en suite needs basin and worktop attaching, bath plumbing in, and tiling throughout.

The locks for both en suites need installing.

We need to dismantle the pink/house bathroom, including taking down the walls making the airing cupboards, and insulate the external walls. That, including some electrical work, is the best part of a weekend.

The cupboards in the front guest, and the new guest room replacing that bathroom, need to go up.

There's a few small patches of external walls to finish: behind the cellar door, in the kitchen, and a plasterboard that's mysteriously missing on the landing (the mystery is why we never put it on).

The back door from the utility needs replacing with a better one: that door's being recycled upstairs.

Skirting boards, and a lot of injectable foam insulation, need putting up.

Then, we need to plaster the whole house, ready to paint. The next deadline is a visit by Jenny and Philip just before Christmas (when we need two rooms, two bathrooms, which have working locks); and then late January, when we need everything to be functional ready for a Cambridge-crowd house party.

However, comparing the list above with what we've managed since July, I hope that things can slow down somewhat for the next two months, and we can have fewer 15-hour days, no more 18-hour days, and certainly no more 42-hour marathons.

Forty-Two Hours of Madness

(This is retrospectively posted, as I was in no fit state to be writing at the moment it's time-stamped, but posterity calls.)

David and Ann have long been scheduled to visit for this weekend, which has given us a key milestone and deadline to aim for in our work. Quite reasonably, I think they'd expect a functioning bathroom, and a live-able bedroom.

They were due about 2300 Friday night. Unfortunately, as of 0800 Thursday, neither bedroom nor bathroom were ready.

Also unfortunately, the tiles for the bathrooms, which I ordered some time ago, have been badly delayed (they need to all come from the same batch of stone, for consistency), and instead of arriving last Wednesday, were eventually due to turn up Thursday morning.

Perhaps predictably, the delivery didn't go smoothly, and they ended up arriving 1745 Thursday evening.

In order, then, to get a guest bedroom and working bathroom, we stayed up from 0700 Thursday morning, until about 0100 Saturday morning, working basically non-stop for the forty-two hours in between. I was functionally narcoleptic by then, and we collapsed in to bed as soon as we'd had a cup of tea with Ann and David, after they arrived at about half-midnight (a much delayed journey on the M1).

It has not been fun.

In the last couple of days, in the new en suite alone, we've:

• installed the cabinets;
• connected the bath to the drain;
• levelled the bath;
• affixed battens to the wall;
• tiled the critical few square metres around the shower (the rest will have to wait);
• grouted the tiles;
• silicone sealed the bath;
• constructed the toilet cabinet;
• built the cistern into the unit;
• plumbed it in;
• modified the door to attach the pan through--both flush connection to it and soil pipe from it;
• connected the flush button;
• attached the water supply to the basin;
• built the trap and drain;
• cut the worktop;
• mounted the sink and waste; and
• made a frame for the small worktop at the foot of the bath.

In the guest bedroom, we've mounted four wall cupboards above the bed, and two full-height units on one side. One full-height unit is up in the front guest (the old study), but that's it: the wall units will wait.

In our bathroom, taken out the suite, and installed the cabinets, repeating the toilet cabinet work, and cut the worktop. I've not plumbed the toilet or basin in, yet, though.

A massive tidy-up of the house has made the dining room passable, and the living room is now basically normal; the master bedroom is fine, the landing is tidy, the old house bathroom (the 'pink bathroom') is less cluttered, thanks to the new wardrobe/cupboards; and although the garage is pretty full, the house is actually miraculously straight. Thanks to this go entirely to Liz, who's been madly tidying while I stumble in a sleep deprived haze through many of the construction jobs.

We just about managed to hoover, too. So, when David and Ann rolled in after a particularly messy journey up the motorway, we had a respectable suite to accommodate them, and I'm delighted that's the case.

To paraphrase Churchill: this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end; it is, perhaps, the beginning of the middle.

Cabinets, Bathrooms, and Blinds

On Tuesday, the order of cabinets arrived. Nominally, they're kitchen units, because this, for whatever reason, is the most economic way of obtaining cabinets with hardwood doors, even for bedrooms or bathrooms. Anyway: they've safely arrived, a collection of eighteen or so cabinets, with extra packages of shelves, side-panels, shelf supports, and a massive, 4m piece of worktop, which had to go all the way round the house and in through the patio doors. That was rather hairy, as the weather on Tuesday was atrocious, with high winds and heavy rain at the time of delivery...and peace to either side.

It's since been cluttering up the downstairs, although we're gradually taking cupboards up. The 'broom cupboards' that we're re-purposing as full length wardrobes are slightly tricky to manoeuvre: they're 210cm tall, 40-50cm across/deep, and not light. We're getting there, though, doing a couple in a sitting, then taking a break.

Once upstairs, we've positioned the two cabinets for the new en suite, with the basin and toilet placed 'dry' with them, to get a feel for the room. Actually attaching everything is next.

We've also ordered blinds, one for each bathroom, a big one for the patio doors (which are as draughty as predicted), and two for the kitchen, replacing those on the big window behind the sink, and on the old outside door.

It took the best part of a day, but I've also done the plumbing and wiring works for the shower, ready to install the bathroom suite.

Window Reveals

For the last three days, we've mostly been putting in window reveals and heads, and, in a few cases, windowboards. Because of the difficulty installing the insulation foil into small thicknesses, many of these have been foil laminates, and they've all been plyboard sheets, rather than plasterboard. It's given the windows quite a consistent, and nicely-framed feel. Also advantageous has been the way it's really well sealed the windows, which were previously very draughty. There's still some improvement to be made, as I shall go around injecting insulating foam behind each board, to fully seal it.

The best one has been the big window in the master bedroom. When we stripped off the plaster, we found that what appeared to be a square lintel had only been 'regularized' with the plasterwork, and was in fact a beautiful wonky shape. We were loath to lose this behind squared boarding, so for this one window (and the dressing room, to complement it), we have used plasterboard, and followed the curves of the reveal, rather than box it in. It's worked really well, to our delight, and this one window has a uniquely organic shape.

While doing these, we've also put the planks (curtain boards, we're calling them) above each window, onto which are mounted the curtain rails. These can't be reliably supported by the plasterboard, and there's never (a quirk of of the design of the battening) an appropriate batten, so we have to have a board to span several battens and carry the load of the curtain to them. They're almost all up, now, and Liz has begun re-hanging rails and curtains.

Plumbing Woes

I don't enjoy plumbing. I much prefer electrics, despite their greater inherent danger, because I know what I'm doing, and I can normally tell if it's not working properly. Plumbing, with the potential for leaking pipes (worse, leaking pipes sealed behind expensive tiling), troubles me more.

Partly, of course, it's because it often takes me a while to get things nicely sealed up. Today I've been getting some of the plumbing ready for the new en suite. That's meant identifying the cold water supply where it runs through the room, breaking into it to install a pair of equal-tees (one to feed bath and shower; one for sink and toilet cistern), and getting pipe and valves to roughly the right places. Trickier was identifying the little-used hot supply, and doing the same. It's all done, but I'm sure that something's not quite sealed properly, as there's a bit too much water around. Some's inevitable, as I'm cutting into pipes that are full of water, and they won't drain fully, even with a low-level tap opened. But I think there's too much...

Other than that, we've finished insulating and dry lining the new en suite with plasterboard, now that the drain is in, and I've made a big shopping list of the last (hopefully) things we need to finish the bulk of the work, starting on Saturday.

New Drain

On Wednesday last week, work started on the new drain for the new en suite. They didn't manage to get it all done in the day, unfortunately, as access to the drain was more concrete-y than expected, for one thing. Today, though, they arrived after lunch, connected up the soil stack and diagonal drain, and waited for us to arrive.

Once we could let them into the house, they were able to diamond core drill the hole through the gable wall, and add the exit pipe. As the light had gone, they'll have to pop back in the morning to make the final connections, but all being well, we'll have a complete drain by this time tomorrow. It's just as well, as the bathroom suites arrived last Wednesday evening, and so we can now finalize the last few orders.

All being well, we plan to catch up with a lot of the part-insulated windows on Wednesday, before starting work on fitting the bathrooms next weekend. That might take a while, but we've got seven days (Saturday onwards) to get to the point of having at least one functional guest room, and two working bathrooms, before David and Ann arrive...

Finishing the Dining Room

We insulated the front wall of the dining room in two stages, having started in early August, but breaking for other rooms. We've now gone back, and yesterday insulated the back wall of the room. This was relatively simple, with just a couple of sockets, a light, and the big patio window; but there was also the old cellar landing, which we have bookcases in, and which is a slightly awkward shape. Anyway: we stripped most of the plaster off on Friday night, and finished the insulation by relatively early on Saturday night (midnight, or thereabouts...which is a definite improvement on some days).

We discovered that there was, at one point, a back door at the top of these stairs.

Unfortunately, I accidentally screwed a plasterboard screw through a cable, which necessitated a thirty minute delay while I repaired it and replaced the fuse.

We got there in the end, though. Today, we've insulated our walk-in-wardrobe in the corner of the master bedroom, thus completing the master bed. This afternoon was spent putting up the new stud wall that will separate our en suite from the new small bedroom that the house bathroom is becoming, and plumbing in the two radiators that go on this wall. One will be replaced by a towel radiator later (probably in the spring, really), but the other's permanent.

Finally, this evening, we've put up the removable insulation on the gable end of the dining room. Removable because we want to retain the stone wall, so we've come up with a way to insulate it over the winter, but have our stone wall back for the summer. We'll have to see whether it works: if not, we may have to sacrifice the exposed stone wall.

Division

This weekend's work has been focussed on dividing the end compartment of the first floor, which contained the two spare rooms, into more equally-sized rooms, and an en suite bathroom. We had to start by taking down the rest of the stud wall dividing the two (Saturday morning), and stripping off the remaining plaster from the guest room, and the back of the study (Friday evening). Although that meant a late night on Friday, it did pay off in a much pleasanter start to Saturday.

Once we'd stripped the room back to bare stone, we were able to put up the insulation on the back wall of the guest room, and the gable end a bit further than where the new wall of the en suite was going. It went reasonably smoothly, not least because that stretch has only one window and one radiator; and we added some sockets, as normal.

Messing around with the electrics took, as normal, a little while. We had to separate off the light at the end of the study, which will now be the light in the bathroom; add a switch for this light; and add double-throw switches for the lights in both bedrooms, so that they can be controlled from next to their door to the landing, and to the bathroom. It was a little complex, but we got there. We also added one ring main looped socket, which we shall extend to further sockets later.

The stud wall itself was reasonably straightforward; two roughly 2m walls defining the bathroom, with a door into each bedroom (we're recycling doors for now, with the intention of getting nice new ones when we can...), and then a slightly longer one joining the square bathroom with the square lobby diagonally opposite.

It was a little hard, without the wall, to get a sense of the two rooms, but they've turned out really well: they both feel ample for double guest rooms, or permanent single rooms.

On Wednesday, work on the new drain for the en suite starts: they'll be drilling through the gable wall to create a 4' drain, taking it across the gable end of the house, and dropping it into an existing septic tank sewer behind the greenhouse. While they're here, they're going to reline that sewer, which has been damaged by the berberis growing straight over it.