So, I thought I’d do a little housey update for you all. And for me, I suppose, since I think I’m really the main audience for my ongoing rambling. Anyhow, I realised I’d not done an update for a while and quite a bit of progress has occurred since the last update…
The plasterer has been and gone, and downstairs is now in the process of being prepped for painting. We’re sanding the joins between old and new plaster and patching up the bits where the old plaster isn’t attached to the wall, or not attached to other layers of plaster. A week or so ago I ordered an insane number of sanding sheets for our little cheapie detail sander (some MacAllister thingie) and a few days ago we started work on the lounge. We’re gently sanding essentially all of it, because the plaster’s not very even and we want painted walls. There’s also quite a few patches which have just been quickly filled well enough to wallpaper over. Also, there’s the hideous black crap on the wall which has evidence of having been damp, although it’s been hacking down with rain for the last month and it’s not got damp this time.
I’m wondering if the absence of heating in the lounge was making a very mild damp problem much worse. Who can say? Well, I suppose we can come winter. I’ve also been staring at the guttering and it’s not been overflowing the way it seemed to when we first moved in, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on there. I think, however, that we may have to fix that if it needs fixing.
Aaaanyhow. Plasterers. Yes. He has replastered the new-dining-area, the returns and arch (our builders are great at many things, plastering it turns out is not one of them). He’s replastered the hall ceiling and skimmed the hall wall (again, the builders did their best there). He’s filled in all the channels downstairs.
I spent an hour or so hooking up the phone point in the lounge, reinstalling the (not actually called a) master socket in the hall and that all happily now works. I’ve discovered my CAT5e is not CAT5e. I complained to the seller who offered me a discount off some CAT6. Err, how does that fix the CAT5e that is plastered into the wall, exactly?
*sigh*.
Dunno if it will work well enough, it’s not twisted pair is the main thing. The irritating thing is while I describe it as cheap, it wasn’t actually cheap. It was cheap in the sense that I only had to buy 100m of it, rather than 300m which the decent stuff seemed to come as. So it was approximately 1/3rd the price of that, but it wasn’t cheap like half the price per meter. Ah well, we’ll see. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t I get to swear profusely and probably go and grovel under the floor and see if changing the centre section is sufficient – so it will be shite quality at each end of the run, and good in the middle. :-/
Sadly, it is inaccessible without ruining the floors, and I’m not ruining the floors.
Yes, the floors. The floorboards in the lounge and the hall have been refinished.
Before:
After:
Yes, yes, the after is of the hall and the before is of the lounge. I can’t quite explain why I don’t have a photo of the lounge before we covered it up with dust sheets and started making it uber dusty. But I don’t.
Anyhow, doing the floors before the walls it turns out, is unfortunate. See, for once, when a company says ‘99% dust free’ they mean it. We assumed that the alleged 1% of dust would still be a fairly hideous quantity of dust, and so got the floors done before painting the walls. Actually, before prepping the walls. This, it turns out, was a mistake. Our floor sanding people are actually 99% dust free, and the room was pretty damn clean after they left. Unfortunately, we are now having to sand the walls. Huge great dust sheets all over the floors and so on, and I’m really not looking forward to sugar-soaping the walls. We have learned from this, though, and booked the floor sanding to happen at the end of July upstairs, so hopefully the rest of upstairs should be prepped and painted before they rock up.
This does, however entail getting our act together somewhat. As a component of that we started trying to order our nice eco-friendly paint yesterday. And then found that the process for getting it was, well, difficult. We realised that when we’d got all over excited about their site saying “we do colours matching the ranges for these companies!” we’d not looked closely enough. They do, but if it’s not on their little pre-matched list then it costs £35 extra. This pushes their prices from a bit more than Dulux up to Nearly double. Since we can walk into our local independent store and get colourmatched paint for colours that we want, well… it’s more than we can justify. I don’t quite get why the colour matching service is quite so expensive for the Eco paint, but hey.
Of course, we worked this out having sent off for samples for brands we thought they’d colourmatched. Well, they have, just not the colours we want. Pots of Little Greene and Fired Earth paints are arriving at our house… it’s quite exciting.
What’s also exciting is the garage. Over the past 2 weeks the builders have put up the garage, essentially. They’re hoping to finish today (although the remaining batch of tiles are marked by their absence*, which is somewhat irritating), and are currently putting doors on (I saw them waving** doors around earlier). The garage is looking awesome and is a vast, huge, enormous space which we’re planning to fill very quickly with two classic cars (the Enfield and the Minor). It’s big enough to pull the Volvo in and work on it too***, though, which is also The Cool. This is also brilliant as the Minor is very due a service, and we can temporarily put some of the house stuff in the garage while we decorate.
This putting of house stuff in there is very definitely a temporary act, because the stuff that’s in the house at the moment is stuff we actually use a lot.
Anyhow, so this is the garage progress:
About a week ago:
A couple of days ago:
Close up of our reclaimed roofing:
In other news, we’re starting to look at furnishing the house:
Kathryn, in a stretch of inspired putting up with me being negative**** managed to locate a carpenter/joiner who is making us a bespoke kitchen for less than the cost of the Homebase/Wickes/B&Q kitchens. Ours is going to be solid wood, even solid wood carcases. Walnut doors. I am in flipping awe of my wife. She rocks!
We have also managed to locate a vintage architect’s drawing table which is winging its way to us, a vintage (and awesome) waffle iron, and generally the world is working towards our house being awesome. One thing we’re still searching for is a cut-corner toilet to replace the 1950s one that’s attached to the 1940s cistern. We’ve got the right sink, the right cistern, but can’t find a flipping toilet. It’s not made easier by the fact it appears to have a very high exit for the effluent. The soil pipe exits the bathroom at about 9½” from the floor. I did find one which was the right style, and the soil pipe exiting in the right direction, but it was only 5½” from the floor :(
Anyhow, despite the fact I’m on nights I think I should go and do a bit more sanding and filling, and maybe prep the room to start washing it down with Sugar Soap.
* We were 505 tiles short, which they calculated at the point when they had 300 tiles left. I ordered them 2 days ago and they’re meant to be here today. My faith in this occurring is reasonable, but my faith in it occurring at a time that means they can finish the building off today is less strong.
** Okay, hauling :)
*** Not at the same time as the Enfield and the Minor, obviously!
**** Grumble: don’t think we can afford it, grumble, look at the prices…. etc.
