The Transformation - Week 12

This week we are on elave and hoping to paint most of the rooms and have time and space to do some jobs  without the usual weekend rush.

The week started well as the scaffolders arrived on Monday morning to take the scaffolding down at the front of the house - finally we would be able to see the big 'shop' window and the impact on the light in the dining room and kitchen:

 Scaffolders at work -  it comes down a lot quicker than it goes up!

There is still some work to be completed on the outside of the house - pointing mostly  - so it's not quite finished but this gives you a view of what it looks like with the new window and repairs completed to the roof and the chimneys.

 A view of new window from the outside.............

 and from the inside - note the new range cooker in the foreground!

 The view of the kitchen - first coat of paint on the walls and the ceiling.........

Wales and West arrived as expected and started to dig up the road and the pavement in order to connect the gas supply.  For most of the morning we wondered if they would ever get the job finished as they seemed to spend more time chatting that working.  However, eventually they discovered that the old cast iron pipe didn't actually have a live gas supply - despite a team from Wales and West testing it and confirming some weeks ago that there was a gas supply - so they would have had to dig up the road and disrupt village life for a morning anyway.

 Men at work!

Unwelcome news - Deathwatch Beetle (hopefully now deceased but yet to be confirmed) - this is what they can do to a very solid beam that has been in the house for almost 150 years and until a carpenter started to tidy up this space above the big front window no one had noticed it.  Apparently they eat the wood from the inside out, unlike woodworm who start on the outside, and it ends up as a dust with a hard shell.  SO, having thought we would not need steel in the house we now do and are awaiting structural engineer calculations to have the RSJ fitted.  At the same time as they take this beam out the one above it will have to be treated - from above - which means undoing some of the work already done in the bedroom upstairs, although they may be able to get to it from the outside where there is a ledge above the window as the lead flashing has to be renewed anyway.  The man from Rentacure took one look at it and knew immediately what had caused such devastation to a seemingly solid beam.  Thankfully we have discovered it now and not once everything was finished.

Filling in the hole left from unearthing the mains gas supply in the road.  They cannot simply fill the hole with the hardcore taken out of it a separate lorry was summoned with fresh hardcore and filled it in the same afternoon.  All seemingly very efficient - but see below on the final finishes!

 The Gas supply emerges in the courtyard in a ground level box.  The meter was also fitted the next day.  The vent at the side of it is for the condensing boiler.

The next connumdrum is this 'hole' in the floor in the bakehouse which we have now tidied up.  It may have had a wooden lid of some sort at one time - now long gone.  However, we don't really know why it is there.  There is a cavity of some sort under it and someone has suggested it is the flue for the old bread ovens but we haven't been able to determine how that would have worked if that is indeed what it is - still to be determined!

 The outside tap has now been fitted and we have mains water again.  Better still we have working toilets in the house - without doors at this stage ut that will happen next week hopefully.

 The trench for the gas pipe in the archway has been filled in and a drain fitted so that there is no pooling of water at the front door.  It's been temporarily filled in with gravel until we decide what to do with the surface in the archway as there is a lot of 'patched' concrete in there.

 Now isn't this a beautiful finish, and they even re-painted the yellow lines on the road, BUT they only re-surfaced the road as the photo below shows the pavement is still unfinished!

 The general view is that the pavement is to be re-surfaced by a separate company, as yet to show up!  Wales and West may yet have to be reminded of their obligation to finish the job!  Of course it may just be that they didn't bring enough tarmac for the job!

 Mission control is all wired up and ready for the boiler to be commissioned next week!

 Since we changed our minds about the wall in the dining room and decided to keep the brick for now the plasterer has been back and made a lovely job of finishing off the edge of the old wall that used to adjoin the shop and the back room.

 The french doors have arrived and await primer and undercoat before being fitted next week.

 The frame for the french doors

This is the galvanised steel tank that was in the roofspace above the utility room.  It provided a lot of head scratching as to the best way to get it down as it weighs ~200kg.  Eventually two strong men managed to rope it up and lever it down by using one of the roof beams to allow it to be lowered slowly enough to be placed on the ground rather than crashing down, which would have been interesting!  It's ow gone to the scrap merchant along with the remainder of the metal - total income to be shared with the guy who took it away ~ £200 - enough to get another load of rubbish removed without any further payment necessary.

 The french doors have had their first coat of primer and an undercoat.

 As has the frame - it is huge and takes ages as it's quite fiddly with the seals to be avoided - most of the time!

The range cooker almost in palce awaiting the arrival of the gas engineer next week.