Day 1006: What Lies Beneath

It was destruction time again at the Suburbitonproject. 

As we are going to lay down flooring (eventually) on the ground floor, we needed to make sure everything was sound underneath. In Victorian houses, the floors are usually suspended with joists spanning sleeper walls and floorboards on top. Air bricks are installed in the walls to let the wood floors breath and not get all rotten. In some places there is even space to crawl underneath - but in ours there really isn't - well, not for me anyway. 

So this meant checking everything under the floor was sound and also accelerating all my future projects into a short period of time. The big rush? Joan and Rene are coming in about 6 weeks' time and Carolyn was pretty firm in that they would need a floor to walk on. Demanding client.

So my big list of under floor jobs:

• check joists for any signs of rot
• check for leaks in the plumbing
• look for dinosaur bones
• re-plumb a couple of radiators
• insulate the heating pipes
• find buried treasure
• run network and coax cables
• discover secret passageway
• put insulation under the floor

As you can see, there was a lot to do before our company arrives. Time for some busy weekends.

The first part was getting all the floorboards up. This is a back breaking job in the best of times with square edge boards, however in our case the boards had been replaced sometime over the last century with tongue and groove boards (T&G). These go down easy and make for a solid floor but are a real $@&£!!! to get back up. 

I followed another blog (Restoration Couple) for inspiration. A great site worth following and kind of makes our DIY blog look a bit DIY 😞 .. they are much better on the tech editing (but I think we have the advantage on the humour front)

Anyway, the big difference was the T&G. The tongues had to be cut to get the boards up. I tried a variety of options but landed on the circular saw with the depth set to a minimal level and the reciprocating saw (my new gadget bought for this). I also tried a Dremel with a wood bit but I think this job was too much for it so not recommended. 

The circular saw was the easiest and fastest but it kicked up a tremendous amount of dust. So my recommendation after all of this would be to get a plunge saw (which I didn't have).

You'll see that I numbered the boards. This was so that I could put the jigsaw back together again. Since the boards were being covered up, I used a Sharpie and was OK with writing on the top. If we planned on restoring the boards (which is a lot of work BTW) I would have been a bit more considerate. 

There you can see some of the boards now lifted up and the joists and sleeper walls. And further down .. what lies beneath. In our case, some dirt that hasn't seen the light of day in over 100 years. And still no dinosaur bones ... I think I may need to give up on that dream. 

This was a lot of work to even get to this point. Cut grooves, pry board, curse, pry some more, curse, finally get one end of the board up, curse, pry some more and then finally the board comes out. Then it's getting about 30 nails out for each board. The best way to do this is to turn the board upside down and hammer them out.

I figured by the end of the day, I'd banged and pried out about 600 nails. No wonder by back was hurting. 

And of course, I had to do the same for the hallway. 

But after all this I did find one of the things that I was looking for (besides a dinosaur and hidden treasure) - the reason why our heating system loses pressure once every couple of weeks. In the photo below you can see a drain down valve with some limescale on it. This might have worked OK on the old gravity fed system but was probably a constant drip under the new pressurised system. 

The blue pipe is the polypipe that Tom ran when he replaced the lead water mains coming into the house. And the rubble is leftover building material from sometime in the house's history. Apparently, most builders back in the day (and several today as well) just chuck stuff under the floorboards instead of throwing it into a skip. In all fairness, back in the day there were no white vans or skips to take rubble away. I took some of the bigger pieces up, but didn't want to get too crazy on an area of the house that I hopefully would never see again.

So in the end, a long day of ripping boards up and then having to put them back so we didn't lose any kids under the floor. We almost did lose the neighbourhood cat Suki who decided she wanted to explore. If only I could teach the cat to solder pipes, there might be a use for her.

Carolyn came home and said "what did you do (besides making a mess)?" and for once, I didn't have much to show for it. Ripping up boards, while necessary, is not much fun .. or good blogging material for that matter. My apologies. 

Day 999: Fence Topping

Its been a while since the fence went up (see here) and all the colours have started to fade now which actually looks quite nice. 

When we put in the fence, we purposely left the posts a bit long as we weren't sure if we'd want to put in a trellis. Turns out we did - and when I say we, I am of course referring to people other than me.

This ended up being a low priority hence this post coming so long after the first. Anyway, trellis' are dead easy to install.

The only challenging part was cutting them to size. This involved popping out the staple, removing the vertical slats, cutting the length and then gluing/nailing the slat back on.

I installed them with a bunch of galvanized nails so it won't rust. Overall about 45 min worth of work that took a year to do. The only thing remaining is to cut down the remainder of the posts and put on a cap to finish -expect this to be finished sometime next year I guess.

PS. As I write this Carolyn is battling to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture and absolutely refusing to read the instructions. Of course, rather than helping I've asked the kids to try and interpret the Ikea instructions for her while I hide away on the computer. My next project may be building myself a dog house in the garden to live in.

Day 999: Some rad work

The long term plan is to get the new flooring down. However .. and this is a big one. Once the new flooring goes down, it's never coming back up ever again. Few things in life are permanent .. but this is definitely one of them.

And what that means is that all the stuff under the floor needs to be tended to. This includes plumbing for the central heating, insulation, network cables, pipe lagging, rotten floor joists. SPOILER ALERT - these will be all subjects of future posts. 

But in this post, I'm going to go over the installation of a new rad. 

So first, the materials. I went on a big ol' trip to ScrewFix and filled up the car with as much plumbing materials that I could fit. This included:

• 3m x 15mm copper pipe
• Fittings - straight, corners and T's
• Push fit end caps - to close off the bits I'm not working on
• Thermostatic valves
• A new single skin radiator for the hallway
• A garden hose and some clamps for draining down the system

Below you'll see the old vs the new. The old was ...well old and not the most efficient. It was however thin which was nice. The new is wider, smaller and much much more efficient in radiating heat. The different size meant that the piping would all have to be moved but that was by intent. Otherwise it wouldn't have been as much fun.

The rad that I bought came with all the fixings and mounting except for the valves.

But first, before doing anything, I had to drain down the system. There are a lot of good YouTube clips on how to do this. My favorite is from PlumberParts here (James is a legend). I don't expect this blog to be nearly as entertaining .. but hey you're reading it anyway.

The drain valve (that I knew about) was installed in the kitchen rad so we can easily run a hose outside. Blue garden hose was fine for this purpose as the system would not be under pressure when we drained it down. The hose was clamped down with a jubilee clip (note the towel to catch the drips). 

 

The other end was run outside into the gully. 

Once the water started to come out, I went round all the upstairs rads to open them up and let more air in and keep the water flowing. The fastest way of doing this is to connect up a wet vac and suck it out. I just let gravity do all the work for me and had a coffee while it was coming out. BTW - this took about 45 minutes so it was a nice long coffee.

 

So then I put all the supplied fittings on the new rad. I used a little plumbers mate to make sure everything was water tight.

Next came the thermostatic valves which will allow us to control the temperature of the hallway rad now. This is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly because it will allow us to fine tune the radiator to whatever level we want and allow us to fully isolate the rad if need be. But more importantly, the house thermostat is right next to this rad. We found last year that when the heating was on, the house thermostat got warm too quickly and the heating was switched off too soon. This made some of the other rooms consistently cold. Yes, we could have just moved the thermostat but that would have been too easy.

Then came my least favourite part .. the pesky rad tails. If you've read my post "Scott vs the radiator", you'll know why.

But luckily, this old DIY'er has learned from his past mistakes and now know how to tackle even the meanest of radiators. Out came the Loctite 55 - I swear by this stuff. Wrapping the threads about 8 times against the direction of tightening and I knew it would be OK.

After this, some majic happened and voila .. the rad was installed on the wall and piped into place. The magic really wasn't magic .. but you'll find that out as you read some future posts. But until then you can admire the rad rad. 

Day 998: B'day DIY

Yes. Long time, no post. No excuses really .. well some excuses. First, there are lots of posts, I just haven't posted them. Second, the weather in the UK has been fantastic - best I've seen it in 11 years which makes it hard to work all day inside. I've actually done quite a bit on the garden and some exciting things like painting the walls - and if there is anything less exciting than watching paint dry, it's somebody blogging about watching paint dry. I've decided to spare everyone that.

So today was my birthday. I was going to do some work on the house for a change, but Caitlin informed me that I absolutely cannot do any work on my birthday. Bless her. 

I however did manage to sneak out in the morning and run some errands. A big trip to ScrewFix (actually 2 but that's another story) and B&Q to pick up lots of supplies for the work ahead. The house is getting filled with building supplies so you know something is up.

So in the spirit of not working, we had a fun assembly challenge putting together a picnic table. And I had helpers. Now that the big Ivy tower in our garden was felled, it left lots of space for tables and things. And our little 2 seater was looking pretty sad. All this nice BBQ weather and we didn't have proper seating to really appreciate it.

That's changed now. 

To start off though, a bit of a gripe. The picnic table was un-assembled which is fine. We purchased it from B&Q as Michelle and Stu bought one last year and we liked it - and it was reasonably cheap. What irks me is that B&Q don't have this for delivery - you need to run out there an pick it up yourself. It's big, bulky and heavy (38kg) meaning it's a proper pain to get home. I would gladly pay £30 for this to be delivered - wake up B&Q!

Now that I've got that off my chest. On to the assembly. Picnic tables are pretty basic. The instruction didn't have or need much English. First step was to lay out everything on the grass to get all the pieces correct.

The 'A's were pretty quick to put together. I put the sockets on the wrong part (not reading instructions) but I only have myself to blame. Now for the challenging part, putting the 2 'A's together. This was a team sport as you can see. 

With the frame together, it was time to screw down the table top and seats. Caitlin and Ash had some fun with the power tools. 

And the final touches. They actually did screw in the boards - this wasn't completely staged.

So there you have it, a long overdue post, a birthday, a non-work/fun day and some happy kids. We celebrated the picnic table challenge by having a picnic lunch and some presents - one of them being a ScrewFix gift card :)

And, yes the grass is shades of yellow and brown right now. We haven't had any rain since June. But hopefully the grass gets well watered when we're in Canada :)

Day 994: Happy Prime Day!

Every year Amazon has a Prime day for members and I'm definitely a frequent shopper. So much so that Amazon wanted to check if I needed to setup a business account. 

Prime Day happened this week and as usual, it presented a great chance to pick up discounted items that you don't actually need. 

Of course I went straight to the DIY section with Bosch ending up as the deals of the day. Next to the Stanley FatMax range, Bosch is my second favourite brand of power tools. My only gripe with Bosch (other than the awful colour choice) is that tools seldom come in proper cases. Wheres most of my FatMax tools have a nice plastic carry case, Bosch just has a cardboard box. Boo!

Today's unnecessary purchases (with my justifications) included:

• A belt sander - guessing I will use this for the stairs
• A hedge trimmer - we do have hedges
• A laser measure - these are cool and I'm sure I'll be measuring something :)  

So there you have it, completely unnecessary purchases. But it's also my birthday, so I can just chalk it up as presents to myself. Another Prime Day over - who knows what I'll buy next year.

Day 990: The big cover-up

At some point we'll properly plaster the entryway. and get rid of the yellowy patterned wallpaper. But as we've seen from our front room, this is an involved process. Stripping away 90+ years of wallpaper and paint is not our idea of a fun weekend. 

So much like the British Conservatives with Brexit, we'll just kick the can down the road a bit longer. However, unlike our esteemed government - we will actually do this. Likely after we finish the loft. In the meantime, we'll just cover things up with white paint. 

The base paint we used was Zinsser Wallpaper Cover-Up. We used the cover stain version in the front room and it did a nice job on the awful nicotine stains. So hopefully this version, designed to go over wallpaper, has a similar result. We also used cover stain on the coving. 

Carolyn loves it when I take flattering live action photos of her DIY and post them in the internet. Luckily, I'm writing this post from Canada so hopefully it's forgotten by the time I get back :)

We had some obligatory Sugar Soap to clean the existing wallpaper and improve the adhesion of the paint.  

This was followed by the stain blocking paint and then a couple of coats of matt white cotton Dulux paint. 

End result looks pretty good. Much better than what was there before. Eventually this work will all be undone when we plaster the hallway. But this is likely still a while away so at least the first thing people see now when they come into our house isn't some yellowy walls.