More steps backwards...

It feels like sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. In fact, that's nearly all the time.

We're living without 10 of our doors, as they've gone off to the dipper to be stripped.

In other stripping news, we've also stripped the hallway:

It makes the house really dingy looking! Plasterer comes this Friday, so will look better then.

You can see the stairway going off up to the right. Which now looks like this:

Fair bit more to do!

Been a long time, I shouldn't have left you....

Can't quite believe the last post on this blog was 8 months ago. It has to be said that the push towards Christmas 2015 kind of blew our wad so to speak, and we lost the house mojo a bit. However, there's been more progress than has been reported here, so I'll have to get my finger out and post up some other pics and stories. But for today, this probably looks like we're going backwards!

We decided we needed to have a bit of a push - we'd got 'kind of' comfortable living the way the house was (in that we'd got used to it, and living with it seemed preferable - just - to doing something about it).  So we cracked on a bit. The things we needed to do were finish off some of the more boring bits (CAT5E wiring & intruder alarm wiring), and one of the things that was really annoying me about this was that the floorboards were not secured down, and therefore clunked all the time when you walked on them.

This shot shows the plumbing more than anything. The central heating system has two zones, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. The underfloor heating for the kitchen I suppose counts as one more.

I took this shot just as we'd torn some more wallpaper off! You can see the CAT5E cable disappearing off to the left. That's going through the ceiling of the office where I'm writing this. The master bedroom is through the door at the end. There's a few floorboards up in there. I'm leaving some cable coiled up under the floor in there. It will allow me to close up the floor in the hallway, but carry on in the bedroom later.

And there's the completed floor. Not really, but every floorboard is screwed down solid. This view is looking out of the master bedroom along the same hallway as the picture above. That coil of cable on the left is going up to the loft. There'll be a stud wall about where it is. That will make a small dressing room just outside the master bedroom.

A close to finished room and a nearly finished room.

You might remember 'Eve's Room'. Well, because it is so self contained, and because Christmas was coming and we needed a guest room, we decided to press on with that one.

We'd decided to go a little larger with the dormer and when we'd left it in October, it looked like this:

So not exactly in a terrible state, but a long way to go.

Between then and now we got it to this:

Which I'm sure you'll agree (apart from the rather scruffily made bed - the cat managed to gain entry dammit) is a big improvement. It fits a king sized bed (just), and with decent underlay and carpet, it's very cosy. Not much room for the soft furnishings, so just pull-down blinds. Lots of work went into this - I put skirting boards on, and sorted out architrave and doorway, and hung the radiator, my wife did the rest of the decorating. Mark the floor man did the carpet. Nice. A big difference from the single dormer that was there before is that now you can see out into the garden from the windows as you come into the room.

Because we had guests, we had to crack on with the main bathroom. We've had to go from this:

To this:

I can take some credit - I mounted and plumbed in the bath and the sink, and I'm nearly done with the shower (scuppered only because the waste was broken by our usually very careful tradesmen), but mainly the work was done by Mark the tiler and floor layer. He's been doing work for us for over 10 years - top man. Although it looks done (apart from aforementioned shower), the floor isn't the one we're having - Mark sourced some lino and put it down to get us in business before the in-laws arrived. We've ordered a black and white Amtico effort, which I'm sure will look great with the rest of the black and white theme.

Kitchen pt. 459

..or that's the way it feels anyway.

This is how we were at on the day after boxing day. The granite is on, the appliances are all in, the electrics are all done etc.

This is standing by the bi-fold doors, looking toward the back wall of the kitchen.

Here's a few more of the kitchen units themselves:

There's more to go. The pantry needs its door rehanging, the kitchen door needs glazing, there's tiling round the alcove where the hob is, there's skirting boards to go on and a bit more architraving to do here and there. Plus there's still a snagging list from the kitchen fitters to go.

Still, we're pleased so far. When the whole thing is done, I'll have to do a 'special' post to take us from where we started with the kitchen until now.

Here's a gratuitous 'during' shot to whet the appetite:

Next post - a room gets finished! (Nearly).

The heart of the home....

... is the kitchen (if the house mags are to be believed anyway).

We left it about here on the last update:

The underfloor heating was just about in.

The screed went down and then Mark (tiler and floor man) hit us with 'yeah, well it will take 2 weeks per 1/2" of screed to get dried out". Hmm. That'd been 8 weeks then - which isn't in the project plan at all! So on went the underfloor heating in an attempt to dry it out. It was all going well until:

Which isn't that we let an incontinent giant sleep in the eaves room, it was that we'd taken a radiator off the wall in the eaves room, and it had (apparently) got cold enough that the thermostatic valve opened and let the heating water out. Cue more full blast underfloor heating. Can't wait for that bill!

Since then there's been some more progress:

It's limestone. This is the view from the back of the house, just inside the bifolding doors.

Here's the view the other way.

Here's an idea of what we've done in what was the utility room all that time ago (it's been about a year now). The ceiling is vaulted, and those veluxes face South.

Just need to get the kitchen itself in now.

Oh.

The colour isn't really true - hopefully I'll get some better shots at some other time and the colour will be better.

Here's the view towards the bifolds again.

And towards where the hob will be. You can make out the extractor in the alcove at the back of the unit. It's one of those that pops up out of the worktop. Should be cool. No, it really should - it was hugely expensive - much more than I'd ever want to pay. 

The son - he's where the warming drawer will go. He's a mischief. Little sod.

More Odds and ends

Bringing us up to date on the odds and ends in the last post.

We've had the tiler in (a bit) in the en-suite in the guest bedroom:

I suppose with it half done, it could almost look like we're taking apart, rather than building it up. However, it's definitely the latter. Mark, our tiler, is a great bloke, but he fits us in after work and on weekends, so it moves more slowly. Not that we're bothered - he's been moving on in the kitchen too as you will see.

The guest room has stalled slightly because of this:

It's a wet patch on the ceiling where a chimney goes. That got sorted this week, so there's plasterboard over that now. But we were hanging around a bit waiting for the roofer to sort that (and other bits and bobs) out.

The eaves room went from:

to:

with extra

You can see the dormer's extended and there's two windows in it now. It's a bit plastic fantastic in terms of the windows, facias etc,, but at least it's low maintenance. All new timber windows is out of our price range, :(.

Downstairs, the new woodburner is in, in the playroom:

It sits on a hearth of quarry tiles that were out in the garden disguised as a greenhouse path, We've not had a really hot fire in it yet, hence the blackened glass. The patches on the walls are our experiments with colours. The boxes you can see are full of LED lights from ecoled.co.uk. Since we started on the kitchen, the playroom has been a bit of a dumping ground. All got to change soon!

The unit is now revealed - it does look good, but it will look better once the trims are in to trim it to the walls and ceiling. And of course the rest of the room is done.

You can see the state of the room. And also you can see into what will be the utility room once the kitchen is done. That piece of furniture through the second door is a dresser that came from our old house which will live in our new kitchen. Winter's drawing in, hence the halogens.

The Dining room has been plastered out:

Those boxes in the foreground are the two ovens for the kitchen, an induction hob, and a warming drawer. That big mirror is not for the bedroom ceiling - it's for the bathroom. It's now on the wall up there - took some getting up there I can tell you! The thing in the corner is another mirror for the boot room.

The mirror thing reminded me - we're not passengers in this story - there's lots of work being done by me and my wife. Getting that mirror upstairs and into position took massive effort from both of us. Today she's been stripping wallpaper, I've been wiring in speakers - I'm pretty worn out this weekend!

Other odds and ends...

We've been beavering away on other projects too.

This is the guests bedroom. It's where our daughter was sleeping before we did her room. You can't quite see it, but we went through the wall here and took some of the bathroom to make a guests en-suite.

This is that en-suite. The dark walls are the shower enclosure - it's Adex and it's a sort of liquid tanking. It should be totally unnecessary if the tiles are done right (and they will be - we have a great tiler), but if nothing else they give a good key for the tile adhesive to grip too.

I fitted the bath at the weekend. Not had a bath in it yet, but looking forward to it. It's in the same place as the old one, but as you can see, you're facing it from the new doorway now.

This is the family bathroom's shower enclosure. To fit it and insulate the walls, we had to buy space technology insulation. Plasterboard never cost as much! It's used in Passivhaus builds.

This is just a view down the hall upstairs showing he plasterboards and the rewiring.