With any luck, we will start installing some internal doors tomorrow. I can’t wait. This will give us the opportunity to clean up some of the rooms and keep them clean. With the decorators due at the end of the week, this is going to be really important.
The width of all of the internal doors are slightly different. This means that we have to make all of the internal door frames by hand. The good news is that at least we know they are all going to fit.
We have just finished plastering in the lounge – including the new fireplace and the ceilings. All of the plastering was completed in two days. All fuelled by Lucozade and coffee!
The guys have done an amazing job and I can’t wait to see it when the plaster has dried out completely. This should only take a couple of days once we have the dehumidifier running.
With the aid of copious amounts of Lucozade and coffee (with milk and 2 sugars), the plasterers have managed to plaster all of the lounge (including the ceilings) in just two days. The days have been long, but their work has been outstanding!
It will take a couple of days for the plaster to dry out completely, but this process can be speeded up a bit by using a dehumidifier. With all the rain we had to do, everyone has been glad to be indoors!
While we have been sorting out the small wall at the front of the property, we are also sorting out the uplighters that will light up the front wall at night. This has been a little more involved that I first imagined.
There seems little point in shining light onto the wall directly underneath a window – it isn’t going to show any texture on the wall and it is only going to shine light inside. So we have decided to place the lights evenly under the parts of the wall without windows. I think this should work, but I am worried that the lights are not evenly spaced.
The next concern was how far do the uplighters have to be from the wall to illuminate the wall. This obviously depends on a number of factors – type of light, type of lamp, distance between the wall and the lamp etc. The only really way of finding out what it might look like is to try it! With that in mind, we put a plug on one of the lights and experimented with how far away it should be from the wall.
This shows the effect of one external light positioned about 50cms from the base of the way. This is using a 5W LED lamp with a 45 degree spread. We will position 5 lights along this wall to show up the texture of the stone. We are using Robus uplighters.
We cleared as much of the tree that was damaged in the weekend storms as we could, however, our chainsaw wasn’t really up to the job.
Chris LeRoy kindly dropped by today to sort out the bigger parts of the tree that were still standing.
My 14 inch chainsaw just wasn’t man enough to deal with this tree. Chris LeRoy – our local tree surgeon – happily (and very carefully) dealt with what was left. He logged all of the big wood for us so that it can be easily chopped into logs for the fire.
This just needs to be split and stored for the next 9-12 months before we can burn it on the log fires! It looks as if it was an old apple tree. However, in the last couple of years we have seen no fruit on it.
We had made some good progress plastering in the lounge over the last couple of days. With any luck, we should be finished in the lounge by close of play tomorrow. This is amazingly quick and the plasterers are doing a great job.
The new chimney breast is really taking shape and it is starting to look like something now!
The pink plasterboard is fireline board. This is more resistant to heat than normal plasterboard and makes it ideal for using around a fireplace.
It is difficult to see with all the scaffolding in the way, but we have plastered about half of the fireplace. The remaining bits of the lounge (including the ceiling) will be finished off tomorrow.
The gable nearest the roadside is South West facing and as a result tends to get a lot of bad weather. This has obviously been a long term problem since the interior of this gable end had been dry lined previously.
We have put a waterproof membrane on the inside of the all, but decided that a coat of a silicone sealant would do not harm. We decided to use Clear Cladding from Belzona as this is a micro porous silicone product and as such allows the wall to continue to breathe. This is an alternative to Sovereign that seems to be popular with many builders.
Clear cladding is expense – it is around £100 for a 1 litre tin – however, this concentrate is diluted before it is applied and a small amount seems to go a long way. The product dries clear and it is difficult to tell where (or not) it has been applied to the wall.
Clear cladding is a silicone based product that is used to seal stonework and mortar. This concentrate is mixed 1:9 with water. As a result a small amount goes a very lond way. It is important to make sure that you don’t get any of the solution on glass as it is nearly impossible to get off!
This has now been treated with clear cladding. It was done the previous day and you can tell the bits that have (and haven’t) been coated. Let’s see if it works!
Although the house is fine, we did lose one of the bigger trees in the orchard yesterday afternoon. I suspect we were actually around when it fell down, but we didn’t hear it.
We waited until the wind died down before attempting to clear the debris. Our chainsaw managed to cut through all but the largest branches – I suspect that we will have to get our friendly tree surgeon to deal with these. The smaller branches will go on a bonfire. The larger ones have been cut up into firewood. It will be around 12 months before these are dry enough to burn.
We the storms yesterday afternoon, we lost one of the trees in the orchard. This was a particularly large treee, so it was even more disappointing to lose it. However, it was pretty rotten inside and this wasn’t the first time that it had lost some of it’s bigger branches in the wind.
One of the larger branches fell and hit the dry stone wall that we built last year. Another ended up in the skip.
It didn’t take long with the chainsaw to cut up the smaller branches and then cut the larger ones into logs. Unfortunately, some of the bigger bits are jsut too big for my chainsaw.
I cut up the larger branches into logs for the fire. These will have to dry out before we can burn them, but they should be ready to burn by the end of the year.
Now most of the building work is finished, we are turning our attention to the outside spaces.
We have decided to build a small wall at the front of the property. While this will provide space for pot plants etc, it also finds a use for some of the left over reclaimed stone that we have acquired during the build. Much of this stone will have been on site since the property was first built, so it is good to see it being “recycled”.
The weather has been very wet this week, so progress has been slower than we would have liked. However, this should be finished by next week.
With the outside work nearing completion, we are attempting to finish off some of the outside elements. This is the front wall at the front of the property. Unfortunately, the weather has not been very kind to us this week!
Until August last year, there used to be an old barn attached to the cottages here. With the kitchen due to be installed in about 3 weeks time, we are getting ready for the decorators to start on Monday – once the kitchen is installed, it will be very difficult to get tower scaffold into the kitchen to paint the ceiling. With the plaster on the walls, it is starting to resemble something habitable.
The balcony into the kitchen is from the upstairs study and marks the transition between old and new. The doorway on the left leads into the hall (where we are just finishing off the plastering).
There is a series of tall unit to go into this space. The canopy slightly overhangs the units as there are lights embedded in the canopy. There is another light just over the doorway into the utility room.
The roof trusses and purlins are all made of oak and built in the old fashioned way to match the rest of the property.
This wall was built using stone that we reclaimed from an internal wall that we demolished in the old cottages. There will be a bank of work surfaces (including a sink and a hob) to go along here.
We have pushed ahead with the fire place in the lounge and, by the end of the day, we are ready to fit the plasterboards on the metal framework. Even without the plasterboards on, the fireplace is usable. I can’t wait to see it in action. We even had a fresh delivery of kiln dried logs yesterday!
This metal work is the same that we have been using to dri-line the solid walls in the older part of the property. Fortunately, we had some left over. The framework will be covered in fire line board (a pink coloured board that is more heat resistant than normal plasterboard).
Another view inside the chimney breast. The large stainless pipe at the rear is a 10 inch flue (it has an internal diameter of 8 nches). The two pipes in front of the flue are to vent the heat that might build up inside the chimney breast. The heat will rise out of these pipes and into the lounge.
Here’s the inside of the chimney breast. It has been formed using the same metal work that we have used to dri-lining the solid stone walls. The metal work is then boarded using fire line board – a type of plasterboard that is more heat resistant than “normal” plasterboard. The control you can see here is for the butterfly (an internal baffle) in the flue that controls the amount of air that exits through the chimney.
The rest of the fire line boards will be put on by the plasterers when then get around to plastering the lounge. The fire line board will then be plastered in the same way as the rest of the walls. We should get to plaster the lounge during next week.
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