After a disappointing and frustrating day together, both myself and Chris headed back separately to do a little more work. Chris had to take a day off work for the delivery of the steel, while I took a separate day off as I had holiday to use up before the end of the year.

Chris’s day at the house was amazingly productive. As well as a bit of tidying he managed to get the stairs prepped for removal by taking away all the supporting wood. He also took out the rest of the doorway I had started to disassemble. He considered removing the stairs alone, but realised that it would be easier with two people. And, of course, he’d never hear the end of it if I wasn’t there to see the stairs finally come down.

Downstairs he then prepped the wall for demolition, taking out one doorway and inserting the acro props where required.

My day alone was more fiddly, and less physical. All the boards we’d removed from the ceiling needed prepping to go back up. This meant removing all nails and any loose bits of wood.

There are very few walls left with plaster on them, but Chris pointed out the otherw day that any internal walls would need stripping up to a meter from the edge, as the external insulation will be added to the first section of internal wall to reduce heat loss.

A final small job was removing the other doorway from the wall that was going to come down.

Having accomplished so much separately we were in a good place when we returned to the house on Christmas Eve. Our first job was to remove the old stairs. Despite Chris’s insistence they would just slide out, we did have to cut through a fair bit of wood to get them loose. As with all wooden structures in our new house, the previous workmen/women had insisted on sticking six inch nails through everything they could. Alarmingly we could see the brickwall above wobble as we tried to loosen the stairs from their nails, meaning we resorted to cutting them out, for fear of toppling the wall we were trying to save.

Our final job was to install two pad stones, for the big steel to sit on. While the pad stones in the attic had been fairly straight forward, building them into the thick walls downstairs was time-consuming, particularly as it involved breaking up very large stones to open up holes in the right places. Still, with the pad stones in and the concrete around them given a few days to set, we should be ready to take down the wall and install the steel next time we come to the house. It all sounds so simple when you put it like that….