Day 650: The break up

The first order of business for Week 2 was to get rid of the scaffolding. But not before I had a chance to climb up it and explore the work, tidy up some wires and clear out the gutters. Hey might as well make the best of it while it was up. And besides, what kind of builder would I be if I have never worked on scaffolding before.

I thought the scaffolding went up fast – but it went down even faster – the guys showed up and the scaffolding seemed to just disappear. 

After everything was taken down, Michael and the boys came back with some big, heavy/noisy tools. The ol’ jack hammer made short work of the pavement out front of the house. In reality, this had pretty much self-broken for them already.

With the old rubble out of the way, on went the new sub base for the driveway and walkway. It was compacted down and ready to go - but first we needed to do some plumbing ...

Day 648: A new appointment

You wouldn’t think it but a lot of thought goes into the little bits of mortar between the bricks. What colour to use (grey, grey with yellow, dark grey) and even what style of pointing  (weather torn, recessed, flush, a little bit proud, a lot proud) .. Luckily sloppy smearing wasn’t one of the options we had to consider.

As this was the first pointing decision Care and I had to make we, as expected, had no clue. It all comes down to taste. Michael was nice enough to run some test lines in different shades and styles. One was too dark, one was too light.

The weather torn (my choice) eventually won the style competition. We went with a more yellow-grey look to complement the red in the bricks. So once decided (finally), on went the pointing. 

As could be expected given the previous few days, the guys swarmed on it like an army of bees and accomplished the bulk of it in a single day. Which, by the way, was a Saturday. They even managed to re-rendered the window sills. All while we enjoyed a picnic in the rain (gotta love London). Yes, Scott the Builder was allowed to take a day off.

Lots of work to get here but as you can see from the final product, it was worth all the effort.

Day 579: A cylinder in a box

When we put the new boiler and pressurised cylinder in, we had to demolish the old airing cupboard where the previous cylinder was installed. In spite of having so much free time, I never got around to building a new cabinet to hide the larger cylinder. 

You can see from the difference in wall colouring that the new cylinder and piping was slightly larger than the old one. That and the lovely wallpaper - well at least it will be hidden inside a closet now,

First though, the cement base of the fireplace needed a bit of TLC. Or as they say in the property market "some refreshing". We decided to keep this in place as 1) it was pretty solid; 2) would be a PITA to actually remove and 3) I think it is somewhat supporting the cylinder which is c.200kg when full of water.

I used a can of u-can to patch the concrete. It does what it says of the tin and yes I can!

Not quite a colour match but pretty good I think ..

Next came the framing for the closet area. This consisted of a couple of 2x4's fixed into the masonry. 

The outer stud needed to be held in place to ensure it was perfectly square and plumb. Once it was, it was braced to the floor and ceiling.  

Next, I got to use my new toy, the stud finder to fix the cross-braces.

The cross braces needed to be cut on some strange angles. This was helped with the use of a bevel and several attempts to get correct. But I got there finally ...

The stud finder worked really well. Even on the most difficult of studs :)

With the frame in place, I went with the door frame. As before, this was cut to size, assembled on the floor and checked with a square and finally braced with some spare wood to hold it in shape. The frame was then lifted into place and fixed with some spacers an wood screws.

Again, making sure that it was perfectly square and plumb with the frame.

Once the frame was finished, I started working on the drywall ..

Aside from some odd angled cuts, this was pretty simple.

The last step was to put in a shelf to make good use of the remaining space above the cylinder. I plan to put in another shelf above this as well.

The last step will be to install a door and eventually plaster and paint, but that is the subject of another blog sometime in the hopefully not to distant future.

Day 578: All in all it's just another scrape of the wall

We don't need no stained wallpaper

We don't need no smell of old

No ugly flowery textured patterns

Carolyn, scrape that paper off.

Hey! Carolyn! Scrape that paper off!

All in all it's just another scrape of the wall

All in all we're just endlessly scraping the wall

Time to venture out into a new room. Care particularly hated the front reception (smoking) room. The walls were stained and ugly so we decided to take it back to bare plaster and re-skim once again. The goal was to maintain the original coving if at all possible but we wouldn't know the state of the ceiling until scraping off the 2 layers of wallpaper covering it up .. yes, there was 2 layers of wallpaper on the ceiling that the previous owners decided to paint over multiple time to make this job that much more fun.

Care full of ambition and positivism tackling the first bit of wall. A couple of days light work I think ...

Scrape, scrape, scrape ...

Caitlin getting in on the work .. You can see the next layer of lovely wallpaper underneath. I'm not wallpaper historian but I'm guessing 60's?

 

A wallpaper scorer (or child motivator?) ....

It allows the chemicals to seep behind the wallpaper to come off much more easier. We elected to use wallpaper stripper vs the steam machine of limit the chances of the original plaster blowing away from the brickwork.

No family member was spared from the fun of scraping away at the wallpaper. Including yours truly although I somehow avoided the camera on this job ...

And yes, this was a very, very messy job. 

So pretty much there now. All the baseboards have been removed and the walls mostly cleared of wallpaper. Luckily they are in pretty decent shape with no spots pulling away from the walls. The ceiling has a few beauty cracks but also hopefully salvageable. We'll speak to the plasterer and hopefully that's the case.

So this job was about 90% Carolyn, 5% Scott and 5% Ash/Caitlin. And this has taken us well over a month of weekends and evenings. Not a particularly fun job.

Hey! Carolyn! Scrape that paper off!

Day 529: Peek-a-boo piping

Little problems come along every once in a while - situations where there are multiple solutions, some trickier than others. Today's post is about how I could cover the boiler pipes without looking like I obviously just covered up the boiler pipes yet allowing some way to still access them.. 

So first the before post. Tom did an excellent job tucking away the pipes nice and tight to the wall. And as much as I admire the work, I didn't plan on leaving it on display. The idea was to create a removable tiled cover to match the rest of the backsplash.

First I built a frame for the cover using some 25mm x 50mm bits of wood braced at the corners to keep it square.

Then I covered the frame with a 7mm piece of plywood.

This was then covered with some 1/4" aqua panel which 1) provides a great tiling base and 2) was leftover from the bathroom. 

I also covered the space on the right of the panel with some surplus cladding from the kitchen. 

Reason for never throwing anything out.

How is that for measuring tiles? Just enough to complete the job. In truth, I probably cut it a bit too close .. but hey, I was on the right side of having just enough.

Tiling is a heck of a lot easier on a nice waist high flat surface. I would recommend removing your walls before trying to tile them :)

I bought some more 9mm stainless steel trim to finish off the edges nicely and allow me to grout all around the tiles.

And there you go, the final product all nicely grouted and finished in place. BTW .. I also was just down to my last few grains of grout mix. Another close call.

Held in place with some magnetic latches and easily removed with a nifty suction tool I bought off Amazon. Peek-a-boo .. The piping problem is solved.

Day 645: Not to disappoint

With the bricks looking as bling as the day they were first laid, it was time to tackle the awfulness in between them. Michael and the boys from Victorian Tile & Landscaping  came by to do what I later realised is a really, really tough and messy job.

But first and most importantly … more advertising.

The guys had a hypothesis that the person who last did the pointing started at the top of the house with a full bottle of whiskey. The pointing higher up wasn’t as bad (keep in mind this is relative) but as they reached the bottom, they also probably reached the bottom of the bottle as well. I'm sure a well armed toddler with a bucket of Play-Doh could have done a better job (and more colourful).

So the work basically involved taking some grinding tools to the property and clearing out each joint - one by one. The dust was nothing short of epic.


























The guys worked hard on this for the better part of the next 3 days and by the end the results were obvious. The place had once again transformed.

Day 644: Some scaffolding unfolding

We've had about enough of the tired look of of our property - and likely so have our neighbours. In spite of the "charm", "character" and “authenticity”, let's face it, the place was lacking some curb appeal.

Whether it be the stained red brick face that looked like the industrial revolution took place in our driveway, or the the pointing that looked like a 4 year old smeared it on while blindfolded and likely intoxicated, or the concrete that was about as crooked as Jacob Zuma's government, or the Amazon jungle growing out front..

Anyway, enough was enough. Time to beautify the front. Be warned, this was not a job for the faint of heart .. and definitely not one that I would (or could) take on myself.

So let's start with the before pictures.
Warning: for those with weak stomachs, please feel free to skip these.

So as you can see there was a lot of room for improvement.

We hired Victorian Tile and Landscaping to do the whole lot and as you'll see over the next few blog entries, Michael and team did a fantastic job.

So week one started with scaffolding. The job was to begin the day after we arrived back from France. Only, the skip was still in the driveway when we arrived back. Fowles had decided to ignore my many phone calls over the previous week and still not pick up their skip. An angry phone call in the morning eventually solved this. The scaffolding folks arrived at 8am but unfortunately had to wait on the skip lorry .. who also had difficulty navigating the street. Anyway, with skip #3 out of the way up went the scaffolding.

And it pretty much flew up. In all it took them all of 90 minutes to get in, set up and leave. Pretty darn impressive.

But it didn't end there. Like clockwork, the scaffolding was almost immediately followed by the brick cleaning folks. We weren't planning on doing this but Michael advised that the acid they are using is pretty nasty stuff and would likely not work well with a newly redone driveway. So we followed this advice.

And the battle of the billboards commenced ...

The brick guys sealed up every possible joint in the front of the house before dousing it with acid and then power washing it off. The machine was pretty loud and big so by my logic it was also very powerful. 

BTW - fill your own caption in the photo above. My guess is a heated standoff between the guys working on the job (yellow), the manager (polo) and the owner (suit). But I'm probably way off the mark.

The result was a red brick that looked almost too red. I couldn't believe the colour transformation that occurred. Well worth doing now that we've seen the result.

And that marked the end of day one.