It’s the long Easter weekend and we’ve got four whole days off DIY. With a big family celebrating taking place, we decided to down tools a join in. However… though we’re looking forward to the rest, we do both still feel pretty guilty that we aren’t using the extra days off to knuckle down and get some stuff done. Therefore, to ease our guilt, we decided to take a day off on the Thursday and do some pre-weekend-off work.

Immediately after my extensive house clean the whole place got filled with rubble once more. With the final wall coming down the house was once again covered with dust and grit. We spent some time scooping up and bagging the waste. Even being only a small bit of wall we easily filled over a dozen bags. While I ferried the first load to the recycling center Chris took out of few more of the supports and layed more bricks on top of the steel.

On my return Chris decided that seeing as we were already creating a mess we might as well strip the last of the plaster off the bedroom wall. This internal wall had originally been designated as good enough just to touch-up, but it turned out we were being optimistic.

While I waited for Chris to bash enough off to start filling bags I went through a stack of wood from the old staircase, that lay hidden behind some insulation board. I found quite a bit of paneling suitable for the ceiling repairs, and more wood for building partition walls. Unfortunately I also found quite a bit of floorboards, which we had forgotten had been part of the cupboards above the stairs. These would have been handy for our floor repairs, but perhaps they can be kept safe in case of future repair work.

And lastly we decided to get the insulation up on the shower room ceiling, something we’d been holding off till the wall was down. Because of low wood supplies we’ll probably just put up plasterboard on the ceiling in this room.

So that was it, time for a mini holiday. The good news is we’ve finally got a date booked in for our air-source heat pump and solar panels to be installed. As with the external wall insulation we are getting a government grant for these items due to the very poor EPC rating of our home (G). We were told we would be eligible a long time ago but the final decision has dragged on. I think until they are in neither of us will really trust we’ve got the grant, but a date at least gives us hope that in a few weeks time we might actually have some heating.