Sounds Like A Plan

And looks like one too.

A nice chap called Marcus from MB Design Services has ended our architectural nightmare and drawn us up some lovely looking plans:

We’ve decided to tack on a small rear extension to enlarge the kitchen area a bit – since we were building this bit anyway, hopefully it won’t end up costing the earth but should give us just that bit more space in the kitchen; it was looking a bit squashed in what is otherwise a pretty huge room…

Anyway, armed with these drawings we’re pressing on to finish the upstairs. Hopefully will have more detailed plans with the specification of materials etc. soon so we can get the extension priced up and underway.

It *will* be done this year!

Getting Plastered for the Festive Season

Well, the festivities and New Year may be over, but I forgot to upload all the recent excitement back then so my seasonal pun will have to sit awkwardly in January’s posts… You see, we have had the plasterer in. Two rooms look almost like rooms now – it’s incredible.

Wisely, we stripped all the plaster off the walls and had Pierre the Plasterer in to slap on a coat or two of sand and cement followed by some multi-finish. In an effort to keep costs down I laboured for him over a weekend – while the other one stayed curled up in bed with a hangover and a friend:

I spent most of the day with the concrete mixer, shoveling sand and cement, adding what I would have thought was far too much water for something that was designed to stick to the walls, and carrying bucket loads of the stuff up and down the stairs. In pictures, it went a bit like this:

Two rooms done, two rooms and a hallway to go to get the upstairs ready for decorating – decorating is what some people think we’ve been doing for the last six months! Alas no. Before finishing the upstairs we still have to:

Finish insulating loft
Board loft
Finish loft hatch
Fit loft hatch
Plan central heating pipe run
Choose bathroom suite
Choose taps etc.
Choose bathroom cabinets
Remove tiles in bathroom
Strip plaster (hallway, bathroom, spare room)
Wire-brush the walls (hall, bathroom, spare room)
Plasterboard ceilings (hall, spare room)
Tie bathroom and hall walls together
Sockets, aerial and lighting cable run (hall, bathroom, spare room)
Extractor fan (bathroom)
Smoke alarms (hall)
Cable run from upstairs to downstairs
New cold water feed to bathroom
Shower pipework
Remove water tanks in the loft
Remove immersion tank in spare room
Remove back-boiler pipework
Remove old bathroom suite
Plastering (hall, bathroom, spare room)
Install new toilet
Temporary hot water solution
Tiling (bathroom walls)
Plumb bathroom
Fit bathroom cabinets
Mark joists on downstairs ceilings
Central heating pipework
Skirting boards and architraves
Remove, sand back, fill and paint doors
Re-hang doors
Choose & buy paint for walls
Primer/Undercoat paint
Second fix electrics
Light fittings
Hang radiators
Choose & buy curtain rails, curtains and blinds
Fix curtain rails
Tiling (bath floor)
Carpet

Then we just have to do the downstairs!

All I Want For Christmas

 

Had yet another awesome toy to play with today – donated by our lovely neighbour’s son – Pierre The Plasterer, who will be doing some…er…plastering for us in a couple of weeks time. This hammer-drill gadget may have been a Wickes Special (and surprisingly didn’t fall to pieces) but it was pretty much perfect. Ok, seriously, don’t get me one of these for Christmas – I was just trying to get into the festive spirit of things…fail.

Nevertheless, armed with this thing that I don’t even know the proper name for, I set to work to remove the remaining plaster from the walls (which I had previously been doing manually with a crowbar).

It was so good, I thought I’d give it a go at the tiles in the bathroom (which had been cemented to the wall).

No worries.

And while I was playing around with toys, the other one was busy brushing down the walls next door with a wire brush. The idea is to remove all the sandy dusty debris to allow the first coat of plaster to stick properly. This turned out to be a fairly laborious process which took all day to (almost) finish the master bedroom.

The first brush was rendered useless before lunchtime.

And the fun continued until well into the dark of night – although this photo was taken around 4:15pm…

More Stripping

And thankfully, it’s still nothing to do with me taking my clothes off.

Having spent hours and hours carefully removing all the wallpaper all those weeks ago, we recently decided to remove all the plaster too. Originally we hoped to just skim the walls but since some areas were completely shot to bits, we decided that the best thing to do was take it all off instead of spending hours fixing and filling every last hole. Unfortunately, I had already spent hours fixing and filling (almost every last) holes to get the walls ready for the plasterer so all that work was undone this weekend.

Quick Catch Up

We’ve been busy. Even though I haven’t blogged for ages, we have been doing stuff. Honest.

In the last month we’ve moved downstairs, insulated and boarded the loft, built a loft-ladder and hatch, moved all our crap up into the loft, hidden a window, first fixed the upstairs lights and sockets, had the consumer unit replaced, fitted window boards to the upstairs windows, started to remove all the plaster from the walls, blagged some free carpet from uk.freecycle.org and got ourselves prepared for the winter. I’ve also changed career and we’ve both got new jobs. See? Busy.

In the process we’ve made a mess and kicked up a load of dust:

 

Windows Made of Awesome

Well, Poly Vinyl Chloride unplasticised actually but really pretty amazing. A van load of awight geezers turned up at 10am yesterday and got to work – they fitted all the upstairs windows and a back door and french doors downstairs, tidied up and were gone by 7pm. They were a noisy bunch but the banter was amusing and it turned out they were all related – I guess that’s what happens when you live out in the sticks…

Anyways, they ripped out the old crittall windows and put some nice shiny white ones in. Now we might have a chance of making it through the winter without any heating!

Preparing for Windows

Windows are going in as I speak so I thought I’d better post about my day of fun preparing for them.

This is the current state of affairs of the dining room windows/door which we will be changing to PVC French Doors instead. In an effort to save money, I (was) volunteered to knock out the brickwork underneath the two side windows, ready to receive the new doors.

It went a bit like this.

First I moved the coal store, just in case the sparks from cutting into the render burnt the house down – a potentially lucrative insurance scheme but probably a little tedious on the paperwork front…

Next, I marked the bit to cut out using a plumb chalk line and a bit of gaffer tape to make it easier to see the guides.

I then attacked the wall with my new angle grinder fitted with its 230mm masonry disc.

Eventually, amid a blizzard of red brick dust, I had cut along the lines.

I noticed at this stage that my 230mm disc was now more like a 50mm disc. This was annoying so cursing my tools like any good workman does, I took a quick trip to B&Q.

It became clear that the angle grinder alone was never going to cut through the entire wall so I started to take it apart from the inside.

First I removed the plaster and then started taking individual bricks out.

Daylight.

This process of removing each brick was a little boring so I just whacked the rest out with the sledgehammer.

To tidy up the edges, it was time to get the angle grinder out again. I had to make numerous cuts into the brickwork and then chisel them away bit by bit. Unfortunately this process made quite a lot of dust and effectively painted the (recently white painted) dining room in a nice pink colour.

It made quite a good job of doing the same thing to my face too…

This used to be a tree

And this is how it came to be…

It used to look like this and then it looked like this:

Some nice boys from “Going Green Landscapes” came and took it down in about 2hrs flat. Neil, the main geezer in charge, lives just around the corner and was once parked up in front of the house so we had a quick chat and put him to work.

 

 

Special Delivery

And we’re really talking special.

So instead of waiting for weeks and weeks to get some cheap insulation delivered from Build Centre courtesy of a deal with nPower, we thought we go grab some for the same price from good ole B&Q. Unfortunately the rolls are quite big and neither of us have a particularly large car.

So…

Worth it at £3 a roll? Probably…

Changes

With all the changes in the house, I thought I’d change the blog theme. This one is called Greyzed by The Forge Web Creations and it looks sweeeeeeeet.