So, the builders are back, and thus we have progress. Also, I’m on holiday as of today, and have celebrated by setting myself as ‘available’ for an inordinate number of shifts of agency work. I also had a bit of a grovel under the floor, too. But I’ll get to that in a sec.
First up, at the weekend we went to get some new doors – well, when I say ‘new’, I mean reclaimed. We ended up back at the wood reclamation place because other places wanted £60 for not very exciting doors; we got an internal door for one of them. Not sure how long it’ll last, but hopefully it’ll do for a while. Sadly didn’t manage to find an original 1930’s front door. Well, we did, but they were way too big…
Unfortunately, our restraint kicked in again and:
I’ve been wanting this belfasty sink for weeks. Every time we went it was sat there. A quick check tells me that it’s just got water based paint on in. Now, it’s probably lost its vitreous coating on the bottom, and I’ll probably end up swearing about it, but at the moment I’m enjoying the concept of it.
There was something about the shape of it which made me just want to have it. It’s not quite the standard Belfast shape, and I like the idea of reclaiming one.
We also bought this:
Which we’re hoping will become a coat stand/hook… :)
In the rest of the house, the wiring is now complete with the only thing missing being some covers for this:
That simple little cable bundle is…most of the wires for the TV. I neglected, bizarrely enough, to include a VHF cable (doh!) and an ethernet cable in the spec. While we don’t watch much TV, it seems a bit dumb to miss that out, so while I’ve been doing some other under-the-house jobs, I also started the running of this cable.
The builders have done this:
Which is pretty spiffy. The new door is rather nice, it’s much bigger than the old one, and despite being hideous UPVC I’m quite pleased. It gives us a nice view out the back from where the dining table will be, which is good, because we thought we’d manage to create a situation where you’d not see anything outside when at the dining table.
They’ve actually done rather more than that, there’s Acros in, and doors removed, and 2/3rds of a wall built, and a hole in the existing wall.
I, however, have started on my addition to the house. When I was looking at the fetching little channels that Anthony had cut, I realised that I could probably get away with shoving some patch wire in there too. So I bought some, and some telephone cable (because I realised we need to move the ‘phone point), and some VHF cable (for the telly) and went into the depths:
Unfortunately, I didn’t finish today for two reasons. One is that the house is only partially navigable from any point of entry into the crawl space. There are three places you can get in to the house, and sadly, it turns out that to reach all of the underneath, you need to use them all.
Also, I bought very cheap CAT5e cable. It came as a bag with looped cable in it. Once it’d been round a few bits of the house (under the house) it’d become a mass of knots. A huge great mass of knots. I spent about 20 minutes just trying to untangle it so that I wouldn’t have to grovel under the same bit of the house again… unsuccessfully. So tomorrow I need to get back under there and continue the unknotting, and then pop up and down in another zone.
More photos as usual here.
