Polish Painting

Painting makes such a difference!  Thank you to Daniel and his team from Poland, borrowed from our neighbour, for this great speedy finish downstairs and in the hall.  Unfortunately the rest may have to be done by the householder!

We Have Painted Shelves & Books!

This will soon be a house one can actually enjoy living in! 

Cupboard Love

Oh we love these new bedroom cupboards ...

 

But who's going to paint them???

Dust City, Arizona

One of the things I have personally found most difficult about renovating a house from top to bottom is the continual battle with DUST!  Breathing it, walking in it, endlessly wiping it away, the constant hand washing ... OCD anyone?

Yesterday "the men" took the door off the box & bag filled sanctuary, where my last remaining remembered possessions are stored and ...
forgot to think about the dust that would then flow in. 

Can you spot where the scissors were (left)?  Can you see my footprints in the sanded paint outside the bedroom?

A 21st Century Chimney Sweep

This is Mick the chimney sweep, a man with a funny line on most topics - it could have been an impro sketch! He doesn't believe in climate change ... "after all the dinosaurs didn't burn fossil fuels for the ice age to hit"... And he helps out Father Christmas "we all go to a big conference round his place.  He's magic." Hmmm yes ...

However, he has given our chimney a clean bill of health.  Here is the smoke finding it's way 28 feet out of the correct chimney pot!

It's a white wash!!

The decorators have taken over and the downstairs rooms have turned all white within hours!

Needless to say, the dust is overwhelming and is in everything and everywhere.

Built-in Cupboards

"So I'd like the shelves put in so my boots will be able to stand up straight" she says "they don't like lying down" ... you couldn't predict it ... meanwhile in a partially successful effort to improve TV reception I have put together this in the cramped back loft.
Just need a TV now!

 

Nearly there, nearly there ... only a few more:

a) weeks?

b) months?

c) builders?

Answers to the blog please, calls charged at your standard msg rate.

Mick Wins The Carpentry Race!

Wow, Mick is quick, and quicker than Nick!  2 days and 2 sets of shelves completed! And good quality too, but he did have Dan to help him.  Ignore the scary primary colours that the project manager will not allow to continue to grace the wall.

Nothing wrong with Nick's work, mind ... he's doing fine and having to deal with very wonky floors upstairs!

Progress

Wow! That is what I call progress.

 In less than one day, Mick has built this beautiful piece of furniture from my drawings below.

Cupboards galore!

It's the final push, we are at the last hurdle now to finish this refurbishment before Christmas (ahm). We can dream.

We have two carpenters working flat out building cupboards for the library and cupboards for the master bedroom. They both come highly recommended one by a friend and the other by the builder who thinks his man is the god of all carpenters! Let's see - it's an exciting challenge and one I am going to relish deciding. I hope it's going to be a tough one.

Mick working on the library cupboard and bookshelf.

 Nick is working on the bedroom cupboard - where is he? Oh yes, parking ticket it's 10.30.

Underfloor Insulation

We have applied insulation to the ceiling of our restricted height cellar by using flexible multi layer thermo-reflective insulation sheets with a very low U value of 0.19 W/m2 K. Cutting the sheet into strips and stapling these between the joists with a strong staple gun means no loss of headroom in the cellar and hopefully less heat escaping from the ground floor rooms above. We'll have to wait to see how effective it is when winter really bites!

Ensuite Bathroom

The ensuite bathroom is now almost finished and looks good.  Continuing my theme of needing access, especially where water is concerned, Tim has created an ingenious solution for the recessed flush reservoir in this room.  I was worried that this would be inaccessible once tiled over and that we would be stuck in the event of a flush problem.  However, here two tiles are held to the wall, in line with the other tiles, by four magnets and can be easily removed if there is a problem, as demonstrated (right).
Great solution!

Leaks and Access to Leaking Things

Bit of a nightmare to see water appearing through the kitchen ceiling this morning, which we quickly traced to the bathroom and apparently the relatively newly fitted loo, possibly damaged by rubble & grit, though more investigation is required.  With that loo semi boxed in, the source of this leak is already quite difficult to access but here I am trying!  Looks like a murder scene?  It might be when the builder gets round here!  Note to self and all renovators: Remember to make things as accessible as possible!

Danger Money?

Tim earns his danger money and leads from the front as he tries to work out why the gutter leaks.  Rather him than me!  He concludes that whoever put the gutter in thought water was designed to run uphill ... oh dear.  Sisyphus strikes again!

Rads & Over Zealous Drilling

Oh it was all going so well.  The plasterer had finished, the carpenter was putting in doors and skirting boards, careful with that drill there carpenter, and the plumbers were finishing up the bathroom, having installed the great new vertical radiators that will be real space savers.  No more rads behind the sofa.

But then ... where's that water coming from?  Yes through the ceiling there!  "But I flushed 20 times last week and there was no problem" pleads the plumber.  Investigation reveals that flushing is no substitute from keeping an eye on carpenters wielding power

tools, here used artistically to drill straight into the soil pipe in several places!  Lucky we found that as I was about to try the facilities for real!  So here are the Polish plumbers taking the wall apart to repair the damage!

One day, one day ... it will all be over, so my psychiatrist assures me ...

oh look it's fixed; now put the wall back can you?

Master ensuite

What a difference a bit of tiling makes! From a hole in the wall space a possible shower room emerges like a phoenix from the ashes.

We decided to go for some mad mosaic limestone floor tiles a bit like the pavement tiles you see in places like Portugal. It looked good in the show room. Anyway, here they are in our bathroom.

Painting Issues

So we had a debate about the colour of our house.  D wanted "African Daisy blue" supported only by a random passer by; everyone else (including all the builders) went for "Swansdown green". So here is the result.  Do colour charts lie? 

 

In close up you can see the difference in colour between the  white frames and features and the Swansdown pebbledash, but it's less obvious from afar.  The result is all right (and all white in my opinion without a lisp!) so is there a case for changing to something more striking? Even at £52 a pot, as Tim the exasperated builder reminds us!  I think so!!!!  Who wants to fade into the background?  dt

Crack Den Design

 

Hopefully neighbours are tolerating our new crack den look as the front of the house gets blasted off ready for painting.  The criminal underclass chic continues inside with this understated wires and crumbling wall ensemble.

6 Only in Porto, Portugal

After much deliberation about whether to go on holiday with so much going on at home, we decided to bite the bullet and book the flight to Portugal.

Our first destination was Porto. We spent our first three nights at 6Only, a fabulous old town house lovingly refurbished by Mariana and Pedro.

This house shows how modern interior design can help maintain the integrity of the old features of a house if thought out properly. Mariana and Pedro have created secondary internal walls to take all the service functions to minimise the damage to the existing walls and ceilings, thereby creating quite a unique feature inside these rather grand old rooms with their beautiful floor to ceiling windows and intricate plaster work ceilings to bring this hotel bang up to date.

It was so lovely to stay here. The welcome and the hospitality given to us by our hosts were second to none. We would definitely recommend this place to anyone who visits Porto. We had a truly wonderful time here in a friendly, clean, dust free environment.

Ensuite is coming along

It might not look it but we now have wiring, plumbing and plasterboard! We are just waiting for the tiler.

Floor insulation

Garry cutting the insulation boards to fit tight between the joists.

The boys getting down to work

Insulation under the floor boards go down - we are using 70mm of insulation, we could have gone for a thicker board but Tim thinks this would do unless I pay him lots more money!