A diary of everything involved along the way!
Archive for November, 2009
Progress!
Nov 23rd
Things are moving forwards nicely so far this week – and it’s only Monday!
Lots of painting is being done, with vast quantities of raw plaster being covered with 1st coats of paint.
While paint’s going up downstairs I’m taking advantage of a few spare floor boards that had been left in the loft to replace a couple of cracked & damaged boards in key areas – upstairs landing & hallway!
It’s been a while since I exercised my carpentry skills but am starting to think it’s something I should do more often.
Problem board removed:
Needless to say, they were not all quite so easy to remove & replace. Seems that whoever had installed the house’s central heating had taken a few shortcuts and fitted heating flow/return pipework right at the top of the joists, immediately below the boards.
As a result cutting boards over the joists was a bit of a non-starter as there wasn’t enough clearance to cut the board without cutting the pipes, and as I didn’t want to create a water feature upstairs I ended up removing the board piece by piece to reveal the pipes – creating enough room to cut the board !
Replacement boards (from a convenient collection of spare boards left in the loft!) were trimmed to size, and the fit checked.
Job done – boards replaced & screwed down. Not worried about the mismatch in colour as we’re sanding back & refinishing the floors throughout…!
Everyone should get one of these tools – fantastic bit of kit for cutting, sanding or scraping in confined spaces.. not too expensive either.
Busy week ahead…!
Nov 20th
Just a quick update to say that a busy week is coming up…
Progress today includes lots of ground work to prepare the way – getting a couple of rooms nearly ready to finish off when a floor sander arrives on monday!
Window sills have been painted & coving “installed” in both main bedrooms. Tomorrows job will probably need to be painting said coving, along with a freshly prepared radiator & removing all upstairs carpets!!
Finally, we’ve just about lined someone up to do battle with the garden. It’s a job that’s at the end of a long list of things that need doing but needs to be done…
Watching paint dry…?
Nov 19th
… we’d happily take watching paint dry over watching plaster dry out.
Paint never seem to take that long to dry to the point that you can move on and do something with the wall. Fresh plasterwork on the other hand seems to take forever to properly dry out!!!
Ah well… plenty more to be doing…
Decorating progress
Nov 19th
Now the plaster’s done, it’s time to crack on with the rest of the house.
The first couple of coats of paint have been applied to the main bedroom to seal & cover the newly dry plaster, and this weekend’s job is to start getting the proper top-coats of paint done along with all the woodwork, window sills, skirting, door frames etc.
We’ve also been getting on with fitting coving to the nearly completed bedroom 2, and are in the progress of lining up various quotes for flooring downstairs & removal of an unwanted wall!
Plasterwork finally done!
Nov 17th
Reached a bit of a milestone over the last weekend – all of the replastering we needed to do for the moment has now finally been completed.
The Lounge has now been finished, along with the hall, staircase walls and upstairs landing walls!
The biggest benefit of this work being finished is that it means we can start to actually decorate the rooms now – and hopefully the lounge can start to look slightly less like a building site, and more like a room.
As a quick reminder of why we need to do this, this photo was what the stair walls (and the hall / upstairs walls) used to look like….
They now look more like this… which even with bare plaster are a vast improvement over heavily ridged Artex!
More mountains moved!
Nov 8th
Great progress today – starting to feel like the house is slowly coming together now.
Lounge plastering is well underway; bedroom 1 has had all of the remaining mess/carpet tape removed along with the first coat of paint on the replastered walls & ceiling and the remaining paintwork in bedroom 2 completed.
We’ve also made a bit of a 
positive discovery – all of upstairs bar the ensuite extension has good quality floorboards throughout rather than chipboard.
Does mean that we need to hire a floor sander for longer than thought but also means we don’t need to recarpet everywhere!
A quick test of the varnish we’re looking to use seems to have resulted in a nice finish on sanded boards – which is good even if it does seem to need 3 coats!!
Next steps are to finish off the bedrooms and to get the lounge painted once the plasterer’s finished.
Lots more to do throughout however!!!!
Moving forwards
Nov 7th
Things finally seem to be building up a solid head of steam & are starting to move forwards….!
Bedroom 1’s new plaster’s nearly dry and we’ve made inroads today into getting the room finished.
The carpet’s been pulled up to reveal a floor that has tons of potential if sanded & varnished; skirting has been stripped & sanded; and loads of extremely sharp carpet gripper bars have been persuaded to part company with the floor.
Needless to say this wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded – along with the grippers the carpet was stuck down with what feels like miles of stubborn & surprisingly strong carpet tape… Took a while to figure out what would work well to remove this and fortunately a combination of a heat gun & sharp scrapers seems to work.
Worked around 3/4 of the room today and tomorrow’s job is the rest – along with painting the ceiling & hopefully a base coat of paint of the walls!
One of the bedrooms is also starting to look finished with fresh paint & just needs the ceiling & skirting painting to finish.
The lounge has also finally been prepped for plastering – all in, a busy day!!
Quick Update…
Nov 6th
Haven’t posted anything to here for a while, but work is needless to say very much ongoing!
Since the last post bedroom 1 has been replastered (and is still currently slowly drying out before we can paint it!); walls & ceiling in bedroom 2 have been repainted; walls in the “en-suite” have been repainted and we’ve finished wallpaper stripping in the lounge and ripped out & removed a “window seat” in the bay window along with cleaning up the resulting mess it left behind.
The first piece of plumbing work has also been completed seeing some pipes (which presumably used to feed some sort of corner wash basin in one of the bedrooms) that had been left rising from the floor, capped off underneath the floor along with the excess removed.
I did briefly debate using those new-fangled push-fit fittings to cap the pipes but ended up going with a more traditional compression 
fitting… Was working on the basis that if the pipework is going to be tucked away under the floorboards I’d rather know that the caps were secure and not going to weaken over time or suddenly decide to part company with the end of the pipe. The idea of suddenly acquiring an unexpected water feature in both a bedroom and the corner of the lounge ceiling really doesn’t appeal!!
Finally, we’ve also had a couple of builders out to come and quote for knocking down the dividing wall between what is currently a kitchen utility area and a dining room – intention being to create a larger open-plan kitchen-dining area rather than keeping a smallish utility and a formal dining room.
Next steps to include installing coving in the bedrooms; painting bedroom 1’s new plaster, and having the lounge, hallway & stairs replastered to finally removing one of 1970’s finest creations – floor to ceiling patterned Artex….!!!
Always strange what you find..
Nov 1st
Definitely the EEN…
Lounge stripped
Nov 1st
Just a quick update:
Lounge has now been completely wallpaper stripped & prepared for replastering.
All looking a touch bare at the moment but that should hopefully start to change rapidly now.
Next stop is to tidy up what appears to be a patched-over serving hatch (!)
and to remove a window seat/ cupboard currently adorning the bay window…
While that’s going on we’ve started prepping & painting one of the bedrooms & need to sand back / scrape off some of the lovely artex that’s going to be plastered over!
Onwards!