Over the Finish Line

Welcome back! I was busy at the drawing board from the end of September until mid-January but have since been working towards getting some more of the house finished. Feast your eyes...

Bathroom

The bath panel has now been fully grouted in and sealed with colour-enhancing tile sealant.

J9 likes to bathe in asses milk, which comes out of the left hand tap. I prefer the right one, which fills the bath with warm asparagus soup. Very good for the skin.

All neat and tidy with the skirting boards done, all the pipes hidden behind and now insulated with expanding foam. Hanging rail placed above the radiator.

Finally the sink, which stands next to the re-plastered and repainted enclosure for the hot water cylinder. All the fixtures are dead posh and expensive, except we bought them as an end of line ex-display at a fraction of their normal price.

A Milestone

Anyone who has seen this blog before may well recall that one of the major issues with this house has been low pressure on the hot water. We had to fit a noisy pump to the shower to achieve adequate flow. But now, Coleman Plumbing and Heating in Taunton are about to change our lives.

Unfortunately, this does involve some demolition in the bathroom to gain access to the hot water cylinder. I spent half of Saturday ripping out the stud walls Richard built around it.

Then yesterday, Stuart came to work and we drained all the water from the house including the central heating, before removing the old vented hot water cylinder.

This is the new stainless steel unvented, pressurized cylinder that will take its place.

Before installing the new cylinder, almost all of the old pipework was cut out and replaced. I particularly like this bit here with all the curves and angles.

It fits, just.

Huffing and Puffing

We have an enormous cheese plant which has lived in our bedroom since we moved here.

Obviously, it would have been in the way while all the work was going on, such as plastering, carpeting and the like, so with much huffing and puffing (after Janine and I had an argument which I lost), we managed somehow to cram it into the bathroom where it stayed for several weeks while we worked on the bedroom.

Despite me specifically telling it not to grow while it was in there, it gained two leaves and about a foot in height. Consequently, the huffing and puffing on the outward journey was as nothing compared to that which took place when we dragged it back to the bedroom this morning.

Yesterday was a good day!

Nothing went wrong and we made lots of progress. Those kind of days don't come along every day you know! Richard is spreading his misery and germs elsewhere at the moment so a strange, eerie sense of joy and wellbeing swept though the house. Its as if this whole project has suddenly gone bipolar....

We started off with this box of multi-coloured spaghetti. Ratty turned up early before Arne had gone to school, and he just had time to give Ratty a hand and tell him what to do.

By the end of the day, it looked like this. All the new sockets and many of the lights are now live.

Meanwhile, I painted the ceiling in Arne's room, the leftover paint being enough to also paint half a wall.

After lunch, I set about some plastering. I fixed up this small hole in Arne's wall...

...but I was really chuffed with how this turned out. Lots of trial and error, but I got it looking smooth and flat with a nice sharp edge. I'll not be attempting any ceilings just yet though....

Bath panel

It was easiest to make the panel lying down flat on the floor, but with hindsight, that wasn't too clever....

It weighs a ton, with the stone tiles, and when raising it to the vertical position, it flexed enough for half of the long tile strips along the bottom to pop off, and some broke. Bum. Fixed now though.

Several heating pipes run under the bath, so when the radiators are connected and live and we have checked for leaks, we will grout the whole bath panel in making it look rather splosh.

Christmas happened....

....and by some miracle we got an upstairs bathroom in a usable condition. There may not have been any heating, or a bath panel, but the bath was in, the taps worked, and most of the leaks were fixed.

On Boxing Day I was first up, and the first job of the day was to empty the tray placed below the sink unit to catch the water leaking from the hot tap connection. Thought I'd go to the loo while I was there, flushed it, nothing.... No whooshy noise like you're supposed to hear. Uh oh, rising panic, get a grip.... Taps don't work, this is bad. Very bad. Its really, really cold in here... Frozen pipes! Aaargh! Off with the skirting board, on with the fan heater and hair dryer. Got it thawed out and working, no new leaks, before any of our seven guests even got out of bed. The whole world in fact was ignorant of my twenty minutes of sheer, blind terror. That's the way it goes.

In between the seven Christmas guests leaving and the five New Year guests arriving, I had one day to get the oak wash stand out, sand it down, get two coats of Danish oil on it and put it back in. It hadn't stood up to the hard use over Christmas with constant exposure to water from plumbing leaks and guests, mainly due to the fact that some silly twit had painted it with floor sealer instead of Danish oil because they didn't read the labels on the very similar looking tins. What a moron.

Legend

We've been trial fitting some of the furniture and sanitaryware. Richard, who must by now have a near god-like status in the minds of anyone following this blog, will surely be elevated to legendary when you realize he's made the two oak washstands with his own gnarly hands.

Here's the small one for the shower room.....

.....and the big one for the bathroom.

And the throne for when the queen pops round.

Plumbing

Here's a couple of pictures of the plumbing that's going to be hidden inside the dividing wall between the two bathrooms.

The shower where you may notice part of the studwork was ever so slightly on fire when the joint was soldered....

....and the bath.

Blooming heck, a bath deck!

This was yesterday.

Richard was busy with bits and pieces of plumbing and stuff, and I started work on making the bath deck. Some very expensive tiling board is screwed down to the wooden frame.

By this afternoon (having purchased a tile cutter due to the fact that Richard's friend borrowed his, locked it away and went off on holiday, allegedly) there were tiles all around the top of the deck, some on the walls and the holes for the taps were drilled. We've gone for a kind of Roman baths look. (We got a deal on the stone tiles) We'll have to invite some friends over one evening for an orgy.

The first trial fit of the taps reveal just how lush they will look.

Animal grace

Watching Richard plastering is like watching Swan Lake with pink slop.

The shape of things to come

I took this snap in the tile shop this morning, which is very similar to how our bath installation will look. Hopefully by the end of the week.

More progress

The family bathroom is now all plaster boarded awaiting the attention of Richard's trowel. He came into work yesterday (Saturday) for a few hours, complete with hangover (not his fault, all his naughty friends to blame) which you have to say shows dedication and commitment not usually found in oafish builders.

He had Sunday off though, a day of rest and worship at the alter of San Miguel for Richard. Not me though, I built the framework for the bath deck.

Only made three cock-ups that I counted too... Not bad!

Latest progress

Once again, blogfans, I am practically buried under a deluge of stroppy emails from frustrated viewers demanding an update. Highly remiss of me to have kept you all waiting so long.


All the water and heating pipes have been run, and will be
hidden behind skirting and insulation board.

The lobby/dressing room area won't have the full-height sloping ceilings so the
stud wall has been insulated against the cold void which will be behind it.

The dressing room area will be lit during daylight by a sun pipe. That's a highly reflective pipe that links the ceiling with a hole in the roof covered with perspex to let in daylight.

Things are starting to look nice and tidy around the skylights. The ceilings have foam board insulation between the rafters, and are further covered in insulated plasterboard.

The outside walls are covered in that too.

The corner round the hot water tank will be neatly boxed in and the sink will go next to it.

Spot of bother looming for the portholes: I had some bendy board to line the holes with but it was just too short. Need to find another method, so any sensible suggestions are welcome. In fact it's so long since I had a meaningful number of comments on a post, I'll happily accept stupid ones too.

Its a helluf a shelf

I think I mentioned we're having a big solid oak shelf in the bathroom. Rich fitted it today. it is built into the fabric of the stud walls so when it is all plastered out, it will have no visible means of support.

For now, it makes a darn fine tool shelf.

Stud

Today Richard occupied himself with work most appropriate. He began construction of the stud walls. A stud building stud walls. Well when you think about it, any wall built by a stud would be a stud wall. Richard's walls are particularly studdy, according to Richard. As for me, I'd rather not think about such things.

The insulation board came too. All the outside walls and ceilings will be covered in this, and hardly an ounce of heat will escape from our new bathrooms.

Porthole

I've been working on fitting the porthole windows over the weekend and while Richard fits the second skylight today.

First I made a former from bits of scrap wood and nailed it in place from the outside. Then I squidged some render and bits of brick into the gaps from the inside, which I forgot to take a picture of. When that had set, I could take the former off from the outside leaving a lovely round hole for the window frame.

The frame was then wedged in place and all the gaps filled with expanding foam, the greatest building material ever invented.

Here's the window from the outside after I'd sealed the the bare render with watered down paint.

Headache

I'm certain there will be more than one headache to endure on this project, but none so acute as Richard's when he employs his tried and tested technique for making a hole in the roof. He just picks his spot and stands up quickly. You have to admit it's effective.

The reason for the head-banging? We're having a skylight.

Double vision

Like a giant face looking at you. I'd love to paint a huge pair of glasses on it but I don't think Janine will let me.