Stormsail

Ok, so above is what the dining room used to look like before the central heating was installed and below is what it looks like with the tiles lifted off. As the tiles are over a 100 years old I’m going to keep them and probably reuse them else where outside (perhaps making a walkway in the garden once designed and built or perhaps as a front path?). Underneath is a lot and I mean a lot of waste earth now which I’m going to remove and replace with a raised floor. Unfortunately due to the cost of having a number hippo bags removed from my property it means I’ve got to get a skip, which due to the fact that I don’t have a drive needs to go on the road, which requires a permit from the council, which takes 5 days to acquire, which means I won’t be removing the dirt until next week.

Well after 5 days of Andy the Plumber and his team working, they’ve got a combi-boiler central heating system installed with 6 radiators and 1 towel rail. This makes all the difference as it’s nice and warm now (just in time for winter really!).

Obviously you can see there is still lots and lots more work to complete before I can move in! As installing some of the pipe work downstairs in the dining room involved taking up the old tiles it does mean digging out the dirt in order to put in a raised floor, but more of this soon.

So continuing on from stripping the front bedroom I moved onto the front room and dining rooms. The front room wasn’t that bad to do but the dining room was bad due to the old plaster coming away. The dining room also had polystyrene tiles on the ceiling and when removed pulled down chunks of old plaster. I guess that means I’ll have to either re-plaster or cover up with plasterboard.

On lifting up the old carpet I was amazed to see the tiled floor but this makes sense when you think that this was the old kitchen back in the victorian day. The kitchen has since been moved to a single story single brick skin extension but obviously they left the tiled floor underneath. On further investigation this appears to have been bedded in lime mortar straight onto dirt which probably explains why I’m getting damp into the room etc. Something needs to be done about this if I’m to resolve the damp issue.

So I’ve got a house and with owning a house comes maintenance….gulp and spending money……bigger gulp…….and lots of work……..So the first job was to strip the wallpaper and polystyrene tiles from the main bedroom.

Problem was that due to a damp issue from the guttering I ended up pulling down some loose plaster back to brick. Obviously this will need re-plastering with a 3 to 1 sand cement mixture and some renderguard gold additive. This was on advice from BWT damp proof specialists who originally put a chemical damp proofing back in 1996 as this makes the plaster salt retardant and waterproof. Still I’ll need to sort out the guttering issue to resolve the root cause of the damp in the first place but I suspect I might need to involve a roofer to examine the potential source of the water.

Once, the walls had been stripped with a steamer and the tiles removed from the ceiling I was left with a blank canvas reading for skimming ( but not before sanding the walls to remove the left over bumps etc).

Attended the Woking Beer Festival with the lads at the leisure center and consumed some very tasty beer. My favorite of the afternoon was Wells & Young’s Winter Warmer but it should have been my last of the day. Unfortunately I popped into the local on the way back for several more…….and then consumed several cans when I got home with dinner. Suffice to say the hangover the next day wasn’t very pleasant…..