Ruined

After covid had scuppered his previous attempt to lend a DIY hand, my dad finally made it up for a weekend of roofing. This, after visiting one of my siblings to take the grandkids to a dinosaur park, and before taking another out for a fancy birthday meal. But who wants dinosaurs and cake when you can be scrabbling around on a roof removing rusty nails?

After an extremely frustrating evening for me and Chris, trying, and failing, to install a bonding gutter on the join between ours and the neighbour’s roof, we were looking forward to a more productive weekend.

While Chris concentrated on removing and trimming tiles to more successfully install the bonding gutter, me and dad went about taking apart most of the scaffolding at the back of the building and moving it to the side, the one remaining piece of roof in need of stripping.

While moving scaffolding may sound simple enough, I can assure you it’s surpringly tough and exhausting work. As well as the physical strain of heaving heavy boards and metal bars up and down, there’s the mental gymnastics, as you try to work out the best order in which to disentangle the structure. If at any point you get ahead of yourself, and miss a few steps, it’s easy to end up with scaffold boards stranded three levels up with no neighbouring structure to help you get them down. For example…

Having taken down and rebuilt the scaffolding, as well as sorted and cleaned the remaining slates, there was just time for Chris to ready a new lintel, taking out the two rotted pieces of wood, both seeming to have had some previous agricultural use.

We returned to the lintel day 2, to make use of our additional manpower to lift the two heavy concrete lintels into place. While we had managed just about with the two of us on the window lintels, those needed above the doorway were slightly longer and therefore a touch heavier. A third person made things infinitely easier.

Leaving Chris to prep the next lintel, myself and dad headed for our newly erected scaffolding in order to strip the last patch of slates, clear off the batons, and bag up any rubble that remained after the process.

Once exposed, we could see that only three rafters need replacing on this side of the roof, a bit of a relief after having had to replace so many on the other sides. Now that all the tiles are off, the next job will be to install the new purlins, something our neighbour, a farmer and roofer, has offered to lend a hand with. Having a expert along for this task will be a big help, seeing as it’s probably going to be the most technically challenging aspect of the whole renovation.

Finally, the roof ready for its new purlins, and the new door lintels left to set before the stones above can be replaced, we helped Chris remove an impressively large piece of wood from above the lounge window. Having pulled this monster out we realised it probably would have survived another 100 years as a window lintel. Still, with concrete lintels ready to take its place, we’ll reuse this mammoth, and probably ancient, piece of wood as something else. My vote is for a bench, but we’ll have to wait and see.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that roofing takes absolutely ages. At least it does when you are two amateurs working weekends and evenings.

The good news , however, is that the rain has held off. This long dry period that has left us all sunburnt and exhausted, and killed off half the plants in the garden, has also meant our house didn’t flood while the roof was open.

Finishing off the second side of the roof was very much the same as the first, except with no extra pairs of hands and much less free time. Overall, the second side needed slightly less work, with fewer rotten rafters, and less stonework in need of repair.

One added complication was that the roof overhangs the wall more on this side of the house as, as Chris says, this is the way the weather comes. In practicality this meant a good foot and a half gap between the edge of the scaffold and the start of the wall, which I was constantly worried about falling through. We also had to put one of our scaffold legs on the top of an old garden wall, that was just in the wrong place. Technically ok but also kind of scary to look at.

Due to impending weather we also decided to put half as many batons on the second side, so as to get the membrane on quicker. We’ll be filling in the other batons when our new order to nails finally arrives. Much cheaper via the internet, but also much slower.

Another complication of the roof overhanging the wall was working out where to locate the first baton. We think we got there in the end… but we simply won’t know till we start putting in the slates.

The final roof section to work on will be the hip, however to start this we need our new purlin to have arrived, so for now we are getting on with other jobs, such as cleaning out all the rubbish that fell into the house from the roof, and filling our second skip with all the rotten wood and debris we removed from the roof.

The funniest bit of past DIY we’ve found is a pipe that pops out in the ceiling of our kitchen. Finally removing the shower tray in the bathroom we can see whoever installed it had to cut a hole through the ceiling as the pipe was put in too low.

A job that we were worried would take forever, but has been surprisingly quick, is sorting the slates. Each slate needs to be cleaned of old mortar, and graded as, in good condition, in ok condition and in poor condition. Slates graded as perfect can be used on the edges of the roof where we will use nails. Those in poorer condition can be used on the rest of the roof, where we will use wire hooks. And the worst condition slates may be cut and used in places we need half tiles. This sorting process will also tell us how many new slates we need to buy, meaning each broken slate has a price tag. While sorting the slates we also encountered all the insects that had made themselves at home in our temporary bug hotel.

Next weekend we have a few days off to go chase butterflies as an early birthday present for me. To make up for the days off though it’ll be busy evenings instead. After all, as the summer is slowly finishing, conditions for DIY will only get worse. The clock is always ticking on our renovation project.

It’s roof week! During our initial estimates of how much work the house might require, Chris felt replacing the roof might well be an unavoidable job. Yet, it wasn’t until we had had a better poke around and gotten the advice of a structural engineer that we knew that the slight dip in the roof was due to a cracked purlin (the wooden beams that hold up the rafters). With this news, the optional roofing job became a necessity.

Replacing a purlin isn’t an easy job, meaning striping the entire roof, in order to remove the weight pressing down on it. Having poked around in the loft, Chris also felt we needed to replace a fair few of the rafters while we were there. All this added to one big job. So, we booked a week off work, hoping we could at a good chunk of the work done in our nine-day break.

Yet, after weeks of planning, it has to be said, our roof week did not start well. Various family members and friends had offered a helping hand throughout the week, much appreciated on such a big job, to the point where we were expecting five people some days. However, as the first day loomed we had two down with covid, and two taken away by other commitments. And, as if to continue the theme, the structural engineer we hired to tell us the size of purlin required also got covid….

Still, with a much-reduced workforce, we soldiered on. Chris’s brother Phil was able to join us for the first two days, which got us off to a good start.

Our first day was entirely taken up with assembling the scaffolding, a job that needs at least three people in order to prevent tumbling ironwork and sore heads. We have just enough to cover all of the front and two-thirds of the back, while tackling the side (hip) will mean completely dismantling one set and reassembling it in its new location. However, as we can’t start the hip until we have the new purlin, and we can’t order the purlin without the engineer’s spec… and the engineer has covid… this job will have to wait anyway.

It took two whole days to remove the slates from the front and back of the roof, in between showers of rain and removing and reinstalling the tarpaulins. For one day we had the extra help provided by Phil, and on the other we just had ourselves for the labour. While removing them wasn’t too labour-intensive, just awkward and uncomfortable, carrying stack after stake down to ground level was exhausting. With around 1,000 in all, thick heavy Welsh slates, Chris’s Fitbit claimed we climbed 61 staircases in one day.

Slates finally down, we could move on to pulling off the old batons. While not all of them were in a poor state, removing them without breakages was nearly impossible. As we cleared out the old wood, as well as bag after bag of rubble created by the disassembly of the roof, we discovered signs of past residents, from old bird’s nests to stores of hazelnuts and ash keys, stashed away by mice.

By Wednesday, our activities began to attract a whole new kind of wildlife. My mum and nan had made the pilgrimage to visit our new house. While helping tear apart the roof wasn’t quite their speed, they set to work uncovering the path and steps at the front of the house.

Although they were both impressed by the beauty of the location, and the character of the building, it was also clear they were slightly shocked and horrified at how much work the house required. I guess that means that no matter how bad my photos and writing make the house appear, just remember that in person it’s much, much worse.

With the batons off, the next stop was to replace any rotten rafters. Between dry rot and the copious holes of tiny boring woodworms, there were few that survived the cull. While the rafters were fairly easy compared to the heavy lifting of the slates, one challenge was removing the 6 to 8 inch nails, holding everything in place. Out too went the old water tank, no longer needed, and much easier to remove via the open roof than through the tiny loft hatch.

An unexpected, and time-consuming job, was rebuilding the tops of the walls, which seemed to have fallen apart at some point in the past. I quite enjoy rebuilding stone masonry, being rather like a 3D jigsaw. Because much of the stone is limestone, there were also plenty of fossils to discover.

Another interesting find was an old chimney. This we think connects to a small hole in the corner of the kitchen, where we are told these houses had large copper boilers.

The hardest day for both of us was the Friday, when it seemed most likely one of us might accidentally wander off the scaffolding. In my head, as each day we got up already exhausted, and hauled ourselves to the building site, our future home, I compared the work to running a marathon. During my one and only marathon I felt so tired halfway through that it seemed like every step was a fight against gravity. Yet, during the race, you know the only way to end the pain is to keep on to the end. The same is true in the renovation. While we may be dog-tired and covered in bruises, the only way to end it is to keep going. So we did.

Reinforcements came at the weekend in the form of Chris’s other brother, Rich, finally over his bout of covid. More wall repairs, treating the old timber with woodworm treatment and wood hardened, finally paved the way to getting new batons on with a breathable membrane and line of insulation for the eves underneath.

We have spent a long time thinking about how we would welcome wildlife into our house. There are no signs of bats using the roof, though there are plenty of old wasp, bird and mouse nests. Having consulted an ecologist friend, we decided the best option was to attach boxes to the outside of the house. Once the roof is complete, we hope to have lines of bat and bird boxes open for visitors, without the risk of bats becoming entangle in the membrane within the roof space itself.

As well as the unexpected extra work of wall repair, we soon realised the wall plate (a piece of wood at the top of the walls that the rafters sit on) at the back of the house was completely rotten. This meant sourcing and sizing a piece of wood, delaying the replacement of the rafters at the back, which in turn delayed the application of the membrane and the batons.

So with our roofing holiday at an end, we have one side of the building still open to the elements, however, a few late evenings and a weekend’s grafting should get it to the same place as the front of the house. Then there’s just the hip to tackle, the purlin to replace, and 1,000 slates to carry back up the rickety scaffolding and reattach to the roof……

As Chris’s brother pointed out ‘I can see why they normally bring it a whole team to do a roof’. Because apparently two enthusiastic amateurs, and a host of helpful family, just can’t replace a whole roof in a week. Shame, but at least there’s a heatwave coming, so at least the mess inside the house won’t become a sloppy mess in the meantime.

There comes a point in every DIY project where you seem to have a hundred half-finished jobs, but nothing that actually seems to be moving you forwards. We’re very much in this zone, seeming to flit from one thing to another. At some point all the half finished jobs will reach a satisfying crescendo, but we’re not there yet.

This week, the contractors, paid for by the grant, started installing the batons for the insulation. Seeing how many have gone in, needing to be screwed directly into the wall we’re very glad someone else is helping out with it.

Mostly, we arrive to find the contractors gone, with a little more work completed, our mysterious helpers appearing and disappearing like the shoemakers elves. Yet sometimes they do leave behind mysterious signs…

As well as apparently gifting us our first wall art, our contractors have a clear preference for one particular brand of energy drink. Maybe that’s what we’re missing to help us through our DIY slumps.

Although we very much enjoy watching other people work for a change, we’ve also been getting on with many of the half-started jobs around the house. From more grouting to yet more braces, it’s been a bitty few evenings and weekend.

The one big job we’ve managed to get on to is replacing the old rotten wooden joists with the dining room and kitchen. To remove the joists we had the choice of taking up the floorboards and replacing the beams from above, or cutting them out to remove them from below. We are keen to save our wooden floorboards and weren’t sure they would survive the upheaval. So instead, we decided on the more difficult route.

Around half the beams need replacing, either because of rot or wood worm. Removal meant sawing through the beam at either end and prising the beam off the nails holding it to the floorboards above. These old square cut nails then had to be hammered up back through the floorboards to be pulled out.

The two remaining ends were removed from the walls, a delicate processes involving serious abuse with a crowbar. All this had seemed exhausting enough for one day, but we didn’t want to leave a series of floorboards trapdoors for the contractors to find. So then it came down to measuring, cutting and treating the new joist, before manhandling it in to place. Amazingly, we were able to reuse the old nails we had pulled out of the original beam, as they had survived our mishandling amazingly well.

All this done we congratulated ourselves on our first beam successfully replaced, carefully avoiding a sideways glance at the seven more to go. Maybe it really is time to stock up on red bull?

When people say not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I guess they mean that things that seem free always come with a catch. Probably about right.

When we were going through the motions of buying the house Chris went back one day to take some measurements. The estate agent, who was there to open up, offered him a letter that had come through the door. It was a leaflet outlining a grant homeowners in Wales could apply for to make their houses greener and more energy-efficient. Chris thanked her but said he’d already checked out the grant and it only applied to people on benefits. What we didn’t know, and what the estate agent then told him, was that the grant had now been opened up to wider applicants.

Since this lucky discovery the grant officer has been out to visit our house and let us know we are indeed eligible. The reason for our eligibility is amazingly how poor our house currently is for energy efficiency, generously granted an impressive G rating.

But there are of course a few wobbly teeth in the handsome’s steeds gob. Firstly, some of the methods the funders would need to use are different from those we would have chosen ourselves, such as putting in a waterproof insulation rather than allowing a breathable material to be used. But the main issue is that this round of funding comes to a close at the end of June.

Having inspected our already partially deconstructed home, the funders offered to pay for the insulation and plastering of all our external walls. Having weighed he pros and cons, the cons being it wasn’t the type of insulation we had originally decided on, the pros being a massive cost and time saving, we decided to accept their offer. Yet, what this means is we need to have the external walls ready for insulation and plaster much sooner than we expected. This means getting all the repointing, installation of new lintels and electrics done ASAP.

Hm…

Some good news is that our visit from a structural engineer went well, with her stating that only one of the big cracks in the walls was a concern. Having repacked and repointed this huge gap in the corner of the room, we will need to buy and attach another metal strap to stop any movement.

With our deadline looming, the funder arriving on Monday to start installing batons to hold the insulation, this weekend has been devoted entirely to repointing. Even with two of us working on this one task, progress was amazingly slow, yet somehow we finished enough to let in the workmen on Monday.

It will be amazingly exciting to see all the external walls plastered again, but it’s important we don’t get lulled into a false sense of security. After all we still have two load bearing walls to take down and a roof to replace. Still every step is taking us closer to the day we move in.

Anyone who has ever done any DIY will know there are periods when everything just seems to slow down. You’ll be flying along feeling like you’ve hit your stride, when suddenly it’s as though someone has placed the hourglass on its side and everything stops.

This is how our second long weekend has felt. While plaster removal, and carting wheelbarrow loads of rubbish into a skip was tiring, it was at least fairly quick to make headway.

This weekend I set to work repointing walls, while Chris dug test pits in the garden to work out where our drainage issues stem from.

The majority of the mortar on the walls is still in good condition, with only the odd holes needing filling here in there. However, in some areas large cracks had formed, due to the walls having moved out. These cracks need to be cleared of loose stones, and filled with new stones of the right size. This work, while satisfying, is amazingly slow. At one point I noted I had been working on one meter of wall for two hours. Most of the hold up is finding stones of the right size, like trying to get the right jigsaw piece when someone has emptied several jigaws into one box.

For Chris the game outside was far more hide and seek than puzzle solving. In the garden several pipes take water from guttering, water flowing from surrounding fields and also from an old well, under the garden and to a soak away under the road.

Currently, blockages in the pipes cause flooding issues. Most of the water seems to run to the neighbours property, and she showed us where last year’s flood water had entered her kitchen and damaged the wooden floor. So, while the weather is good now, sorting out the drainage is still a priority.

Finding a buried pipe shouldn’t be too difficult when you know the inflow and the rough outflow. Yet, Chris’s many test pits left us more confused than before, with no pipe in test pit B despite the pipe in pits A and C heading directly towards this point. At the end of an exhausting few days of digging it was decided the rental on a mini digger really isn’t that much after all.

One thing that wasn’t moving slowly this weekend, however, was out little winged guests. Our wrens fledged, with four little fluffy balls fluttering around the house with speedy inexperienced wings. We spent quite some time catching them throughout the weekend as they disappear upstairs or into the eaves, but they seem happy and healthy none the less.

This week, on our fourth week of owning the house, we had our first full seven days of DIY. When we first knew we were getting the house, we agreed that all holidays would be devoted to its renovation until further notice.

Now at the end of our allotted time we are bruised and battered, and finding simple actions like gripping the steering wheel a little taxing, but it’s been a satisfying and worthwhile push.

One of the surprises of the week was that we realised we have a couple of lodgers. An enterprising wren had worked out that a quick hop through a broken letterbox led it to possibly the safest nesting spot for miles around. So far, the family seems to be doing well and isn’t bothered by our comings and goings.

More remnant house items also found themselves a new home, with all our assorted kitchen items donated to a local refugee charity, a couple of panes of glass helping a local woman with her greenhouse repairs, and various electrical goods making their way to a repair shop for some rewiring and eventual resale.

Possibly, the most tiring job of the week has been filling the skip with wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of plaster, broken wood and old carpets. Amazingly, one day’s work filled the skip nearly to the brim, with us cautiously adding additional bucketful each day after that.

One of our slightly fiddly jobs this week has been to start installing the structural supports, in order to stop the walls from falling outwards (so fairly important). Though it’s hard to imagine our metre thick walls ever budging an inch, large tell-tale cracks emerged from under the plaster, reminding us that this isn’t a job to be left undone.

Staircase dismantling continues, with the wooden frames finally removed from both. While one staircase is set to be removed entirely once we have new joists to reinforce the floor, the other will be replaced with a slightly wider, more open version, to make both the staircase and the lounge feel larger and brighter.

Following on with the same theme, the wall between our future bathroom and the hall has been removed in order to build it again a foot further back. This will allow the bedroom doorway to move likewise, in order to allow room for the wider staircase. As always, one job leads to another, and another, and another.

But by far the winner of the week’s DIY jobs was the replacing of our first lintel. While luckily most of the lintels have already been replaced in the Erw Helen side of the house (the house once having been two separate residences), it seems the Sunnyside half had very little maintenance over the years. In this part of the house the lintels are largely composed of semi rotten, woodworm-riddled pieces of uneven timber.

With this first window lintel, the structural safety had been even further undermined by the historical builder only keying the wood in on one side of the window, the other end resting by its very edge on the stone below.

Although slightly amazed that the whole house hadn’t collapsed years ago, we were a little nervous that we might upset some carefully balanced masonry by affecting the repair, like removing a bottom Jenga piece from a currently standing but precarious tower.

However, despite our concerns, and the physical strain of lifting new concrete lintels into place, the window is now safe and secure once more. Only another three to go, while trying not to collapse the house.

Overall, our week was a big success, though naturally, there are still a hundred and one things to do, as Chris likes to remind me whenever I start sounding too optimistic.

My favourite part of each day at the house is always the same. When we stop for lunch, covered in dust, and already exhausted, and go and sit on the pile of scaffold boards at the side of the house.

When our hammering has stopped, and the dust is floating back down, all you can hear is the sound of bird song and the rustle of the wind in the leaves above us. Whether it’s the respite from the work or the beauty of the place itself, there’s something almost magical in those moments between the noise and dirt and pain. I look forward to the day when we’ve placed a garden bench in that spot and we can come and sit there whenever we choose.

It’s been our first long weekend at the house. Normally long weekends are a relief, a chance to relax and unwind. But it’s a little different when you’re lugging bags of rubble down a narrow staircase.

We had planned to hire a skip to remove the bulk of our DIY waste. However, due to the narrowness of the road and drive we were concerned it wouldn’t be possible to unload the skip. While we were pondering the rubble piles piled up and eventually we decided to start making runs to the recycling centre.

Moving rubble is one of those ‘little’ jobs that I’m convinced won’t take very long, until, that is, I start it.

So far we have removed the plaster from the walls of five rooms, roughly half, in volume, of what needed doing. Starting in the first room we began shovelling, filling old sand and cement sacks. One sack, two sacks, three sacks, and we had barely moved a foot. In the end we filled 25 bags in one room, seeming only to inch along with each bag.

Although this was tiring enough, next came the tricky bit, carrying the bags out of the room, down the narrow stairs, through the house, along the uneven garden path, down the garden steps and into the boot of the car. As someone with very little upper body strength this is work I find particularly exhausting.

Car filled, sweaty and dusty, off when went to the recycling centre.

I love recycling centres. They fill a basic desire in me to save and reuse as much as I possibly can. I find satisfaction in seeing all the neat piles of things going off to a brand new life. When the time comes to drop off all the batteries, light bulbs and tetrapacks that I’ve been saving up for months, I feel elated knowing I’ve done my best not to be wasteful.

Our old plaster, broken and ruined as it is will now go on to a new life, largely heading back into the construction industry, reincarnated into new buildings, roads or other projects. All 60 bags of it.

Yet after four car loads, with Chris’s suspension depressed to it’s lowest limits, we decided a skip might afterall be our best option, and the remaining rubble sits stacked up in bags waiting for it’s saviour to arrive.

Following the recycling theme, more of the previous owner’s possession have been rehomed. The 80s washing machine, oven and fridge all went to someone who repairs and resells old electronics, while some vintage floral curtains that Chris wanted to use as dust sheets sold for £20, to someone with a discerning eye and a love of sewing.

Although not necessary as part of our replastering works we also cleared the plaster off an old brick fireplace in one bedroom, and an internal wall in the dining room. While exposed stone on external walls could reduce the effectiveness of our insulation, this isn’t such a big issue for internal walls. Therefore, we are leaving a few key features exposed to add to the texture and character of the house.

Along with the creational and removal or rubble, Chris, cursing the excessive use of glue and nail, began dismantling the storage above the stairs. Currently, the stairs are dark and cramped. To mitigate this we plan to widen them and open up the area above them. The remaining space in the bedroom will be turned into a much more practical built in wardrobe.

And finally, we had our first guests, showing them around the destruction and chaos we’d created. But as the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

One of my favourite things about old houses is the history they come with. Marbel staircases worn with the passing of feet, brass door handles polished by many hands, layers of paint and paper exposed by rips and chips.

Yet, while the past can be picturesque, it doesn’t always meet modern needs. When updating an older building it’s a fine balance between losing all the pre-existing character and making the space usable.

Our house was once two smaller houses. Although they appear to have been joined for a while, interestingly the owners never removed one of the two sets of staircases. The second staircase, while a part of the history of the house, divides one space into a small room and two space wasting corridors. Therefore, in order to create a more useful space, we began taking down some partition wall and the outside of the staircase.

Chris has put his bid in for the new room to be the master bedroom, though I prefer the room next door. We’ll see who wins in the end.

While removing walls is always fun, the drudgery of clearing old plaster continues. Luckily, most is so rotted that it falls away in big chunks. In some places the plaster removal reveals awkward surprises, like old repairs or large cracks. More pleasant surprises include an old fireplace.

Rehoming the old items from the house continues with the old bed finding a home in someone garage (we decided not to ask why), while the ancient oven was taken to help cure motorbike parts. My new favourite item is an old oil applicator can. Chris can’t understand my fascination, but this small object takes me back to Sunday morning cartoons with hero desperately trying to fix his plane, car or train. Perhaps the magic oil can will help fix up our ruined home?

When it comes to DIY planning, Chris is the expert in our little team. I am an over-optimistic DIYer. I look at jobs that take weeks and think; ‘oh yeah, that’ll be done in a few hours’. One of the reasons for this is that I forget that jobs are like Russian dolls. Open up one job and there’s another looking up at you from inside, and so on and so on.

Today’s job within a job involved 5 hours of driving in a rental van to collect a load of scaffolding and roof batons.

The scaffolding is going to be a key part of replacing the roof, and will also help us during window installation. You can rent scaffolding but we decided to buy it instead. We were lucky to find a set going for £750, around a third less than new, on Facebook Marketplace. While the £750 outlay for the scaffolding might seem expensive, renting scaffolding can cost £500 a week, and we knew we needed it for longer. The hope is that once we are done, we can sell it on for a similar price as it cost, saving us wasted money.

While the scaffold collection was the original reason for the van hire, we looked down our DIY list to see what else we needed to buy that would be difficult to pick up in our cars. Roofing batons are too long for easy transportation, so we decided to collect those at the same time.

Again a saving could be made by buying from a small two-man company that buys split packs of wood in big mixed pallets and separates out and repackages them to sell on. At £210 for seventy batons, these were around half the usual price.

So while it might have been an expensive day we knew we were saving ourselves a good amount in the long run.

We were lucky that the two sellers were happy to give us a hand loading up the van on collection, which always makes things a little easier. Unloading at the house was a different matter. Scaffolding is heavy and awkward at the best of times, but more so when struggling up in evening steps, through overgrown vegetation, in the surprising heat of an early May day.

I am not an unfit person, and I feel pretty physically competent when needing to carry out manual labour, but one of my weak points is my arm strength. By the end of it my arm muscles had turned to jelly, while Chris was sweating buckets. Physiologically, the worst thing is that we know we’re just going to have to move it all again when it goes up. Still, at least it was cheap – after all, blood, sweat and tears are free.