Day 628: Bringing out the big tools now

Remember that monster base from the lost column of the Parthenon that I found in the garden? For those with short term memories or casual followers of the blog, click here.

Basically, it was too big to lift into the skip. Too big to do much with at all except roll around the garden squashing bugs and toes, which somehow loses it's appeal pretty quickly.

But with the help of some POWER TOOLS it's time to turn the block into dust (or at least smaller, more manageable pieces)

So, courtesy of our neighbour Scott (great name BTW), I borrowed a jackhammer. A totally unnecessary tool in any DIY'ers toolbox, but is it ever fun to borrow.

Fully assembled now ...

So, with a little bumping and thumping .. the massive slab of concrete was reduced to rubble. Soooo much fun.

Thanks Scott!

The best part of all this is ... I'll get to do it again with another pillar sometime soon.

Day 627: Opening things up a bit

So underneath the lousy wallpaper was a lousy plastering job .. it wasn't even flush. But what was it covering? Would I find some lovely original tiled Victorian fireplace insert underneath possibly? On the bright side, the fireplace was in use with an old, now removed gas burner. This means that we could replace it with a working fireplace .. only a nice one this time.

With the metal grate removed, I did find a Victorian insert. I could use many words to describe it, but lovely wouln't be one of them. The original large fireplace had been fairly clumsily bricked up and a cracked insert was placed there surrounded by building waste. Not ideal.

For those interested, more on the history of fireplaces can be found here 

As I removed the insert, more rubble began falling through. As if it was mocking me, lovely Victorian tile fragments came falling down. Did somebody really smash away those nice tiles to put in this ugly insert? We will never know.

Anyway, there was a whole lot of material coming out of this thing. Good thing we have a skip on the way soon.

 

And back to the original opening. You can see the small arch created by height-wise bricks that supported the opening. This was held in place by a metal bar running underneath the arch. We were tempted to work with the exposed brick, but have decided to just plaster over the whole thing and install a nice mantel/fireplace surround. 

The question we are pondering now is whether to put in a non-functional Victorian insert or go with a log burning stove. Either would be a huge improvement over what was there before.

Day 598: Changing an 'innie' into an 'outtie'

For some strange reasons, people over here seem to like keeping their gas meters in the house. Besides being an eyesore, they also take up space and are actually quite dangerous. Just think about it .. the majority of the piping is to get the gas from the outside to the inside. If there is any leaks on the mains side of the meter, there is no way to shut of the gas. Uh, no thanks.

The drawback of moving the meter is that it is definitely not a DIY job. For the record, I have worked with high pressure gas piping before but definitely not in my house. My insurance would probably have a thing or two to say about it as well.

So, this post is mostly DBSE (done by someone else) .. 

So, firstly the ugly old meter monster under the stairs. OK maybe not too old as we swapped it out for a smart meter a while back, but definitely ugly and definitely under the stairs.

And if by magic, it vanished. 

In fact, I arranged for SGN (https://www.sgn.co.uk/) to come by and pipe the meter outside in a little NEMA4 box.

They brought their hammers and shovels with them. I have to say the smashed up driveway actually doesn't look much worse than the non-smashed up driveway.

They found the old pipe, connected in and diverted it to the new location.

We went with a semi-concealed box as it was .... uh, semi-concealed. The alternative was some massive metal box that they were going to plonk on the side of the wall. One ugly indoor monstrosity would have become one ugly outdoor monstrosity - no thanks. 

I was going to try and wedge the little half buried box where the air brick was but apparently SGN cannot block off an air brick - they could before but not now. The box ended up gong on the side. I was worried at first but actually don't think it looks all that bad. And while you're admiring the box, also admire the amazing bricks and pointing (they will not be around for long as you'll see in a future post).

Warning the contents in this box may self destruct.

The meter seemed very happy in it's new home which had a retractable roof and an open concept feel to it ...

Watch your step. Blinds went up in case people didn't realise the driveway was all smashed up.

And that was pretty much it for SGN on Day 1 - 3 guys and about 2.5 hours of work. Pretty efficient.

Next I needed to get the gas installed back into the house. SGN doesn't do this part, but I gave Tom Anderson a ring. Unfortunately, his truck failed the MOT on the day he planned on coming by (bad timing) but he nicely sent his colleague Aaron over - who did our boiler piping just over a year ago.

New copper piping was run under the floor boards .. I helped lift them so I wasn't a complete idle bystander in this process.

I also put some new floorboards back down. The meter monstrosity under the stairs is now gone. And the best part is that the smart meter function still appears to work. I'll say that was by design :)

A couple of days after, SGN sent a truck by to pick up the rubble and another day later, a guy came by to re-instate the paving. This wasn't really necessary as we're doing the driveway soon enough but it was all included in the cost so why not. 

So there you go .. our 'innie' meter is now an 'outtie' meter. It wasn't a cheap job, but best to do it now before we finish the floors or do the driveway. Which BTW is coming up shortly ...

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!