Ruined

We have drains! The digger drivers did a fantastic job digging a ditch along the side of the house, installing a new pipe and refilling it with gravel. The pipe now pops up on our boundary and has been constantly running. We can’t be sure yet if this will solve all our drainage problems, so we’ll have to wait till the next downpour, but finger’s crossed it’s all done.

Once the ditch was filled there was even some spare gravel, which they kindly spread out on our drive, so it looks less of a mess. The sink hole was also largely filled in, so we’ll see if that remains full or not.

As well as the drainage we asked if they could pull out two of the large tree stumps in the front garden, so we can eventually widen the drive. We didn’t realise how massive the stumps were. I wanted to use them for a stumpery, but they’re too massive for that, so they’ll be cut up into firewood. Now we just need to dig through the remaining debris and seperate the stone from the soil and move it all out of the way. Wish we still had a digger.

The new pieces of wood in the bathroom and bedroom ceilings had some more coats of paint added and some caulk around the edges. I’m very pleased with the bathroom, but not so much with the bedroom. I might use some wood filler to neaten it up.

After having abandoned the wooden coving in the bathroom as the geometry was hurting my head, I realised Chris was also avoiding it for the same reasons. So finally I got back to it. I had to take down a few of my earlier attempts to start again, and some of the joins are terrible, but I got there. I then filled gaps with filler to make up for the wonky walls. I just need to sand it all down and repaint, and hopefully no one will ever look too closely at it.

On the landing I finally replaced a missing ceiling board and caulked the gaps ready to paint. Chris also removed the tiny door to nowhere above the stairs.

Meanwhile Chris has been living like a goblin in the attic, taping plastic sheeting, laying ventilation pipes and putting down insulation. Finally, there’s just a little insulation to lay, perfect timing with the first winter frost having just hit us. Just a few windows and doors to replace and the house will finally be draft-free.

Having thought the plasterer wasn’t returning for two weeks he was able to continue this week, getting the rest of the ceiling and most of the back wall finished.

I spent too much time with a few fiddly jobs around the glass bricks, grouting and cleaning them, then sanding the wooden support below them, before painting everything else the same colour as the wall. In the bathroom I also cut and painted some beading for the edge. Just a little filling to do and the glass bricks are finished.

My other fiddly and annoying job was cutting out some bits of wood to fill in the thin strips between the sloping and flat ceilings in the bedroom and bathroom. It took an age and I made a rather messy job of it, but with some more filling and painting hopefully it will just fade into the rest of the wood.

Chris continued with his mammoth insulation job, having to lay down plastic, tape it to the plastic in the roof below, and then laying down the insulation. He’s about a third of the way through. It’s nice to see the big rolls of insulation disappearing upstairs after they’ve been cluttering up our spare room for so long.

Chris also started to figure out the coving in our bedroom, which isn’t a simple task with wonky walls and a sloping ceiling. It looks nice though, even with only half the room finished.

After storm Babet our neighbour is having her drive repaired, much of it having ended up on the road. With the digger drivers already on site Chris asked them for a quote to dig out the tree stumps next to our drive, and install the new drain. When we got a quote off them for £1k he was initially horrified, but having worked out the cost for us to get the materials and hire the machines, he decided it wasn’t too heavy a price to pay for an extra pair of hands, plus it takes a job off our list.

Today they started by digging back from the road. They found the old clay pipe, which appears to be clogged with roots, explaining why it hasn’t been working. Hopefully they’ll be back later in the week to finish the job. It feels a little like cheating whenever we pay someone to do something for us, but I guess no one but ourselves is keeping score.

Our plasterer appeared this Saturday. He’s a landscaper who is looking to move into plastering and so is taking jobs on the weekend to improve his skills before making the jump. As he’s not a trained plasterer he’s charging a little less, on the understanding we might not get perfection. Given that we’re doing the rest of the plastering ourselves, and that isn’t perfection, we really weren’t worried about this. Turns out his ‘not perfect’ is much better than our ‘best we can manage’.

In his first day he got half the ceiling done and one of the three walls. It’s exciting to see it come together, but sadly he’s only working Saturdays and he’s away next weekend, so he won’t be back for a while.

Unfortunately, in order to get the room ready for the plasterer we’ve had to move most of the stuff out, filling up our other rooms in the meantime. However, once the walls are finished we’ll be on to polishing the concrete floor, which requires the room to be empty, so there’s not much point moving things back in.

We finally got rid of our corner cabinet, a spare from the secondhand kitchen we couldn’t fine a spot for. We listed it for free as we weren’t sure anyone wouldn’t want one cupboard from a set, but a nice Greek couple came to collect, and as a thank you gave us a bag of mini ice creams!

Upstairs in our bedroom the corner behind the chimney has needed doing for a while. As part of it was plastered qith board plaster and part done with lime plaster Chris thought it would be better to smooth it out with filler rather than add more plaster on top. I applied the filler, trying to even out the surface, then sanded it back and painted. It’s definitely not as neat a finish as plastering, but it’s a corner that is always likely to be behind furniture, so it doesn’t hugely matter. Idris supervised me from the comfort of the bed.

Another job that’s needed doing for a long-time is cleaning the chimney and sealing the bricks. It took quite a while scrubbing the bricks with a wire brush, before wiping them down and painting on two coats of sealant, but it’s a good job to get done. As the chimney is right next to our bed I could often smell the dust coming off it, which can’t be good for my lungs.

Another small job I managed to tick off the list was filling and painting the plasterboard over the doorway, where we’d once had glass.

While I was ticking off little jobs Chris was busy with one big job, up the in attic. In order to reduce condensation and recirculate heat Chris had decided we needed mechanical ventilation heat recovery system. So before insulation can be put down in the attic, first plastic sheeting has to be put down and attached to the plastic sheeting we put up in the ceilings, and then the ventilation installed, and finally insulation put down. Though the house isn’t particularly chilly we can feel a cold draft from the attic, so insulation really needs to go down to reduce our heating bills and avoid waste.

Chris spent his time laying down the plastic in one half of the attic and starting the cut though the holes for the ventilation. I joined him briefly to help pass the ventilation pipes across from the other half of the attic. There’s still plenty to do before the attic is finally insulated, but it’s a good step in the right direction so far.

In some ways it’s felt a little like a step backwards this week with the bedroom, lounge and kitchen going from relative order to a chaotic mess once again, but it’s all forward movement all the same. Though I’m looking forward to a dust-free future.

Weekend plans, plus a touch of winter sickness, have made it a relatively slow week. Even when we have got going, the fiddly nature of the jobs has made progress feel particularly sloth-like.

We’ve been borrowing a chop-saw from one of Chris’s brothers, but as we need it for quite a while, and he has his own jobs to be getting on with, we thought we might as well buy one second-hand and sell it on later.

This has meant I can get on with the various bits of skirting and architrave that needed doing across a number of rooms.

Chris has finally finished laying and grouting the utility floor, aside from the few by the door that needs replacing. Now we just need to add a wooden step to complete the look.

In the bedroom we finally installed a curtain. The curtain itself is second-hand, but I struggled to find a large enough wooden curtain pole nearby, so that ended up being new. Although the room is never particularly cold, you can now feel the temperature difference between the curtain and the window when they’re closed.

In the kitchen Chris has been getting on with all the various bits of edge beading, as we offered to get it done for the plasterer, to avoid him wasting time on it.

I spent a good few evenings repainting the bathroom door, as dark green isn’t the easiest thing to cover.

We’ve been battling over the flooring in the lounge for a long time, as Chris wanted hard flooring and I wanted carpet, but we may have found a compromise in a cork flooring, which isn’t as cold as tile or wood, and has good sound absorption qualities.

I was disproportionately pleased with myself for reusing the cork samples to create bases for some of our old bathroom tile samples, in order to repurpose them as coasters. I feel I could have made many more, but Chris pointed out there’s only so many coasters the two of us need.

In our last house I spent an absolute age sanding decades of paint off a salvaged door. With four doors to get back to wood I thought I’d try the paint stripper we used on the floor to see if this might do the job a little quicker.

We decided to strip back the landing side of the upstairs doors, which are currently all dark green. The inside we’ll paint white, as the rooms are brightly coloured and a busy door might make everything feel a bit much.

In the end I applied four coats of stripper, with an hour between each coat. It worked well, with layers of green, grey and brown paint coming off easily with the scrapper. Finally, I let it dry and gave the door a quick sand. One down, three to go.

In the lounge I painted the bookcase cream. Chris hadn’t seen why it needed to be cream rather than white, as we had white paint but had to buy cream. But with the red walls white was too harsh, the cream is much mellower. With that done we’re finally able to unpack some of our books.

In the kitchen I got to work taking the corners off the plasterboard, so the plasterer can give us nice rounded ends to the walls. It would have been nice to go for even more dramatic curves, but without very fancy plastboarding I don’t know how we could have achieved it.

The final bit of ceiling plasterboard also went up in the kitchen, meaning we’re now ready for the plasterer to do his thing.

With the kitchen plastering not far away, I’ve started thinking about colours. I quite liked the idea of a kind of turquoise, and got a range of sample pots, only to find they were almost the same colour once on the wall…

In order the clear out the kitchen a little more we decided to put up the plasterboard ceiling in the showerroom. First I put up wooden planks for the board to attach to. Trying to locate the rafters to screw in to reminded me what a pain doing the ceilings had been.

With the showerroom ceiling up we loaded the remaining plasterboard into the car to take to the recycling center. We’d been holding onto loose ends here and there but we can now safely say we’ve used what we can.

Last minute, Chris had a flash of inspiration for a few scraps of insulated plasterboard, and used them to cover the pipes and machinery for the underfloor heating. With that in place he cut out the back of the cupboard so it could sit more comfortably against the wall.

He then mortared the bricks in place for the step into the utility.

Storm Babet hit us hard, with heavy rain falling almost continuously all night and all day. We knew we had drainage issues, but this was the first time they really made themselves felt. Water streamed down from the wall at the back of the house, as it drained down from the field above. Our neighbour came to ask if we could fill some sand bags to protect her house, as the water was backfilling our drains and running down to her house. Chris dug a channel and the water rushed past the side our house, ankle deep.

In the end we all survived without the water finding its way in, but it made it clear that the drainage needs sorting sooner rather than later.

The starting point for us is to fill in the sinkhole, which the water will be piped through. The land has sunken down around the sinkhole significantly more, so Chris decided we should put our remaining uncleaned bricks down it. Though we could have sold them, they likely wouldn’t have been worth much, and it’s more important the sinkhole is stabilised.

We had time for a couple of trips to the recycling center, taking a stack of rubbish from the house, and the remaining bags of garden waste. With the big bags now gone I was able to plant the last few pots from the garden center, as well as move in some of the plants we’d brought from our old garden. I’d also been saving a birthday card made of paper impregnated with wildflowers seeds, so I added that to the wildflower area for good measure.

The storm has now passed, and the roads that became rivers are roads once again. It’s been very cathartic to have a good clear out, and exciting to think the kitchen is one contractor’s presence away from being fully plastered. Of course after plastering we’ve got the dusty work of grinding down the kitchen floor, which will make the house feel like a bombsite once again, but at the same time after that we’ll not be far away from a finished kitchen! Finger’s crossed our concrete pouring is up to the job.

We are at a stage of the renovation where it seems the house is full of little fiddly jobs. The type of jobs that take all day but you can’t even really tell you’ve done them. Frustrating jobs. On top of this we made the mistake of going on holiday without getting magical elves to continue the renovations while we’re away.

However, despite a general exhaustion and sense of slow-down, there has been one project I’ve been particularly pleased to get done. After all the help we received with the front garden I felt I needed to keep going to clear the rest of the ivy.

Pulling up ivy is back-breaking work but luckily I’d used a tool called a tree-popper a few years ago and realised this might make my life a little easier. These heavy metal tools help lever the roots out of the ground, making it much easier to get rid of rooted woody plants. Even more luckily the company that sell them offered a rental services, and shipped them to me after my request. This made it possible to clear the rest of the roots on my own.

As well as roots I located the old carpet our neighbour said had been laid down to surpress weeds, and below that the old brick garden path. Chris was keen to dig up the path, but I quite like it so we agreed to leave it for now and dig it up later if it turns out not to be needed.

With most of this section of the garden now cleared we went shopping for structural plants, such as shrubs and grasses, trying to follow the rule of repeating patterns to give it some order.

The only thing we kept from the old plants, which were largely ivy and bramble, was a set of wild climbing roses, which must be self-seeded. I’m hoping I can train them over something to give them some structure.

We also planted out a number of roses and a ginko tree that have been looking very sorry for themselves in pots. Hopefully they’ll revive. Finally I scattered some wildflower seeds I got as a present from my brother, over the end wall, so hopefully some colour will be seen from the road, even if the rest is still in progress next summer.

One of the fiddly and annoying jobs I started was installing the architrave and skirting in the bathroom. For my first attempt I’m fairly happy, though I gave up on the beading around the top of the room as I was making a mess of it. This is perhaps a job better suited to Chris, with his more mathematical mind.

Elsewhere I did the watery coats and first colour coats on the areas I previously plastered, including the utility and shower wall. While I do like the orange I chose for the utility room, it looks frustratingly like bare plaster in the photos.

Chris, in the meantime, had a frustrating day tackling the two odd corners and the central steel in the kitchen. While only small areas needing plasterboarding, their odd shapes, or the complicated manner in which the board needed to be attached, left him huffing and puffing in frustration.

And finally I painted on some wood stain testers to the back of our unpainted skirting. Personally I preferred the colours either end of the scale, the darker cedar or the lighter light oak, but all other votes were for the mid-tone of the oak. I’ve bowed to the popular vote but on their heads be it.

As well as feeling that we’ve slowed to a crawl due to the nature of the jobs, we’re also coming under increasing pressure from the weather. Not only do half the windows still need replacing, there are three doors with holes in letting in the cold, and an uninsulated attic still to deal with. The good news is despite all this our new house is still warmer than our previous home in winter, the bad news is our heating bill is only going to get more frightening. Lots to do to keep warm, and lots more to do to make this place pretty for Christmas!

I had a bit of a shock last week when a memory popped up on Facebook informing me that a year ago we’d been busy laying the slates on the roof. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since the roof was being finished and the inside was nearly untouched. Who know where we’ll be in another year’s time!

The weather is starting to turn autumnal, and our many houseplants are getting to the point where being inside in the dust is probably better for them than being outside in the cold. For now they will live bunched together in the least dusty rooms, but hopefully one day they can claim their rightful places.

Sometimes big jobs make little to no impact. Painting the big staircase wall took three coats and a lot of clambering around, and yet in photos it’s hard to see the impact, particularly when the colour almost matches the bare plasterboard in the doorway.

And then again sometimes little jobs make a huge difference. We ordered a blind for the bathroom window, aware our neighbours can see in (if they really wanted to) at night. Though it’s only a small thing, somehow the room looks much more complete now it’s in place. Because of the sloping ceiling Chris had to spend a good while cutting an angled piece of wood to attach to the ceiling to make a flat surface.

With that done the lintle needed covering with insulated board, which then had to be filled and finally the whole thing will need a coat of paint. Jobs always lead to more jobs.

One job we didn’t have to do was replace our garden fence, with our neighbour kindly paying her gardener to take out the old one and put in something new. It takes me itch to get on with the garden, but with winter coming there’s still a lot inside the house that needs prioritising.

This weekend I did my first bit of plastering on dry wall. So far I’ve just been doing the stone wall plastering, which in an old house can be much rougher without being judged. Chris was very insistent on the need for perfect smoothness on the drywall, so sofar I’ve left it to him, as I lack the skill to do a perfect job. However, having done a lot of drywall plastering now, Chris has a growing hatred for it and decided perfection wasn’t as important afterall. I started off on the odd pieces here and there, that still needed doing, in order to get used to the technique, before tackling the utility room. I agree with Chris that it’s not a fun job, but it’s at least very satisfying to see the transformation.

While I was plastering Chris was busy shopping, spending a whopping £500 on wood for skirting and architrave, among other bits and pieces. We’ve been very lucky to be able to reuse so much wood throughout the project, because whenever we go to buy any the price is horrifying.

With new wood purchased Chris was finally able to hang the other door on the wardrobe, which will hopefully help keep more dust out of the bedroom.

And finally Chris continued with the laying of the utility floor. The floor can’t be fully completed till the backdoor is replaced, something we need to do sooner rather than later, as you can currently feel the wind rushing through the gaps in it.

We met a distant neighbour while out on a walk yesterday. He’d seen me dumping rumble in the garden when we were busy digging out the kitchen floor and asked if he could take a look inside. Meeting us out and about he asked how things were going. On hearing how far we’d gotten since he’d last seen us he said ‘oh I do love a happy ending!’ Perhaps not quite the end yet, but it certainly feels a lot closer.

There are big satisfying jobs and then there are the bits and bobs that seem to take forever, yet never provide as much satisfaction as the big jobs. With busy weekends these last two weeks we’ve seemed to be plodding through a big list of little jobs. Great to get done, but not particularly inspiring.

The first little job I got on with was putting insulated board along the top of the doorway into the kitchen/diner. The insulated board will prevent cold leaking in from the external wall.

Chris, in the meantime plastered the ceiling in the utility. Once dry I sanded it down and did the watery coat and two subsequent full coats of paint.

The ceiling done, Chris got on with laying the floor. Annoyingly it can’t be finished until we replace the external door and build the doorway into the kitchen. However, Chris grouted and sealed enough so that the washing machine could be installed.

While Jude had done a great job getting most of the big wall plastered, there were lots of little bits left to do around the house. With the heat it became even harder, with the plaster cracking incredibly quickly. I had to soak the wall first and then keep brushing over it to keep it damp. Even then there were plenty of cracks to fill once it was dry.

Beside the chimney in our room we’re going to install a cupboard, in order to cover over the bricks I used expanding foam to stick a piece of plasterboard over the side.

I finally got round to grouting the tiling on the bathroom windowsill.

One big job that did get done was the installation of the washing machine. With the tiling done, we moved the machine into place and Chris rigged up a platform for the drier to go on top. He reused a part of the old worktop that was once the main kitchen work surface.

While Chris was installing the washing machine I spent an annoyingly long-time building a bookcase in the lounge. In theory it hadn’t seemed like it would take very long, but with wonky walls, and several width changes for the shelves, it took forever to complete. The bottom of the shelves will become a cupboard in time.

The final bigger job was getting the shower door and shower installed. Chris is particularly excited about this, as he isn’t a big fan of endless baths.

One thing I like about writing a blog is it helps remind me how far we’ve come and how much we’ve done. With things constantly moving it’s easy to forget how much we’ve achieved. Looking back can certainly help remind us of that.

This week has possibly killed us, just a little bit. Not only did we have the deadline of family coming in to help with the garden on the Saturday, we also had a last minute visit from some friends from Germany on the Friday night, meaning our deadline was a little more truncated.

With the lounge ceiling plastered, I got to work repainting. Having decided not to strip the beams it was an effort not to paint over their edges. Of course I failed, however I’m hoping a good scrub with a toothbrush at some point will resolve this clumsiness without too much hassle.

A glutton for punishment, Chris’s cousin Jude returned and thankfully tackled the second coat for me, leaving my evening free to paint the remaining wall and give the rest a second coat of red.

Jude then finished off the plastering on the lounge wall. In my lunchbreak I then went over the older plastering, using filler to smooth out some of the cracks, ready for painting.

Lounge now painted I rolled out a rug donated by my mum and dad, to add a little coziness until we finally carpet. Due to the general dirt and grime of DIY this will be the very last job in the house. Idris is certainly a fan, enjoying having something comfy to lay on.

We then moved various items of furniture in to make a makeshift living space, with most of the items destined for the dining room long-term.

It was particularly lovely to get the piano in under the stairs finally. However, while it fit perfectly lengthways, we realised that Chris couldn’t sit at it without hitting his head on the stairs. We’ll have to get a smaller radiator and move the piano out a little, which is a shame, but it’s at least a solution to the issue.

Having moved the boxes of books from the kitchen to the space under the stairs, we were finally able to reach the rest of the kitchen ceiling, so as to finish the plasterboarding.

And then the family descended! The aim of the day had been to clear out the larger section of the front garden, which consisted of trailing ivy, bramble, an overgrown box hedge, and various bits of scrub. Oppomistically I’d thought the ivy was just a relatively thin carpet, which could easily be pulled up, but I was wrong. It turn out the ivy was nearly a foot deep in places, with thick tangled stems that wove their way through the old stone walls. Trying to pull it up was impossible, and reaching the soil beneath seemed a mammoth undertaking. I’d clearly made the right decision bringing so many people together to tackle it! We filled 12 bulk bags in the end, and the ground is still a mess of ivy roots.

At the front of the garden, next to the road, we knew we had several huge slabs of slate, stood upright as a kind of wall. What we didn’t realise is in one corner of this wall there is a humongous tree stump, which must have been the reason for the walls current jaunty angle. There were also a number of tree stumps in the rest of the wall along the path, which may be a bit of an issue if we want to widen the drive. Still, good to see what’s there.

Although the house is still a building site, it was nice to have a semi-finished lounge for people to sit in. For the first time the house felt a little more welcoming to visitors.

With the crowds departed, we spent most of our Sunday lugging bulkbags of ivy to the recycling center, before moving on to interior jobs.

With the tiles all in place, Chris spent some time grouting them. The glass bricks were a bit of a nightmare in the end, but I think they make a big difference to the space, keeping it from feeling dark and unwelcoming.

On the bank holiday Monday we focused on the utility room, lugging everything out once more, and preparing the walls for plastering by cutting off the excess expanding foam, curving the corners and applying PVA. It’s amazing how quickly the house descended into chaos once more.

With the machines out of the way we added insulation to the ceiling and attached the plasterboard. We’d decided to sacrifice the beams in this room, so as to make it possible to hide the pipework in the ceiling. As we didn’t need to attach batons to screw the plasterboard to, the insulation kept falling out, meaning we had to resort to gaffer tape to keep it up.

I continued with my plastering on the stone wall, now able to reach the areas that had been hidden behind the machines.

Finally, the utility is ready to plaster, just in time as we’ve had our delivery of limestone for the floor, an end of line offer from a reclaimation yard. On delivery they agreed to take our unwanted ridge tiles, which had failed to sell online.

Once the plastering is finished we can lay the limestone and then finally install our washing machine, which will be the first of our white-goods luxuries to come into use. Exciting times.