Diary catch up #9: Starting 2015 as we mean to carry on - with DEMOLITION

As New Year's Day 2015 dawned bleary eyed, there was the muffled sound of preparations being made downstairs...

I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep.

Apparently he had left us all to sleep 'a reasonable amount' (i.e. it was now 9am and his fingers were twitching) but he could wait no more - the Engineer needed to respond to those pesky New Year urges and demolish things!

He had 4 days or so before he had to go back to work.  It seems his intention was to try and get it all done in that time...ha haa haa....

Welcome, good people, to Project Snug

Here we are with the 'Before' shot, although of course as I was still in bed I only got to take this after he had done his sheeting up.

The Snug - ready for the off

Not surprisingly, I can't find any photos of this room truly 'Before', as it was so horrible and nasty that we never even put any furniture in here ourselves when we moved in.  This is the damp room (along with the bedroom above) for which all the scary remedial work was needed to the outside walls - the blasting, repairing and repointing of last summer and autumn.  Take my word for it - you wouldn't have wanted to put your furniture in here either!  The corner between the chimney breast and the window was the worst area by far, although the whole of that chimney breast wall was decidedly iffy, those areas have started to dry out amazingly well already.

The fastest ever bit of work was taking out the old dry-lined corner - obviously an attempt to deal with the problem of the damp wall many years ago.  I was absolutely paranoid what might have been growing behind this plasterboard! Lady Luck seems to have been with us on this one though - not too bad and no evil rots!

Dry lining on the south east corner wall removed

Next came the much more entertaining (well, for me anyway) knocking off of the delightful 1970's ornamental stone pyramid on the chimney breast...Easier said than done, once it became evident that whatever was used to cement the stones together was designed to withstand a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.

Pyramid removed - hurray!

That took the rest of the first day, and was finished off the next morning.  Revealing beneath an 'interesting' brick chimney breast structure that had been altered several times in the past, it seems:

What lies beneath...A possibly late Victorian/Edwardian fireplace opening that has been narrowed down at a later date, probably by Grandad when he had the Baxi fire installed in the early 70s.  Later this was reduced even further, for the nasty inset woodburner that Grandma wasted her money on about 5 years ago.  However, there is a weird pattern in the brick work higher up the chimney breast that looks like there was a different arrangement here before the Victorian opening was created.  Our builder has suggested that it may have been a much higher lintel arch originally, perhaps to accommodate a small cooking stove or pot belly type that could take a kettle on the top.  

Sadly what we found needs quite some repointing of the brick work (you can poke your fingers through into the flue in many places) and we seem also to have reached the limit of what the Engineer is happy to do in the way of knocking out himself - he prefers to have someone with greater building skill knock the fireplace back to the Victorian opening, and then make it good so that we can move the little woodburner from the hall/dining room into here.

His destructive attentions moved swiftly on to the remaining peeling damp paper and loose plaster on the front corner:

Don't you just love those black painted beams? Very Ye Olde pub interior

This is the place which is the slowest drying out - it appears to be very gradually drying to a circle which is still quite dark, and we can't work out why.  We decided to scrape off all the lining paper and knock off anything that was loose and seemed 'blown'.  We discovered an odd situation of past repairs where new layers of gypsum plaster had been skimmed thickly straight on top of older (damp) lining paper...I cease to be surprised in this house.

The Engineer bravely knocked off as much as he could, without resorting to power tool assistance.  But quite large areas are incredibly well adhered - so much so that he felt hammering at them with force might result in half the stone wall underneath coming away too.  So an executive decision was made: to leave the well adhered and hold a watching brief over the rest of the time we spend renovating this room.  That way it can continue drying out and may be fine as it is.  We expect it to be several months while we are working on the floor and chimney here, so plenty of time to wait and see.

At last I managed to catch him in action, for the record!

The Engineer - international man of mystery rarely seen this side of the camera lens

The result of all his hard work - 3 solid days...so far...

Little did I realise, that was just the warm up.

Fast forward to the following weekend and next came up the floorboards...

...another fun job involving running the circular saw along every single joint to take the tongues off the boards (no nice straightforward straight edge floorboards for us, oh no no no! These aren't 'original' Victorian type boards - this floor has been replaced before, unfortunately for us, with tongue and groove boards...), and then more enjoyable fun lifting the boards with his new man toy floorboard lifter thingy.

Turns out, when his dad built the crazy paved stone hearth, he did it on top of the floorboards in that area. To be able to lift them all (which was necessary to be able to insulate beneath, the purpose of this exercise), he had to come and break the news to me that he was going to have to remove the hearth too. Arrggggghhhh.

Can Of Worms, anyone?

The Crystal Maze inspired 'solution' to how to lift the hearth and be able to hopefully relay it later

A brief family trip to the garden centre - returning with a woeful lack of tempting plant purchases, but instead £30 worth of pond netting - apparently the weapon of choice for the discerning DIYer who wishes to suspend his underfloor insulation correctly, maintaining the clear ventilation below...

Can I just ask - what did we do before Youtube and the Internet? The Engineer's treasured dog-eared 1987 edition of the Guinnes Step-by-Step Guide to DIY just cannot compete.

Retro-fitting the insulation underneath the suspended timber floor.  Looking at this, it is no wonder the room was so cold and draughty! The breeze from the three ventilation grilles used to whistle up between the floorboards and the skirting, whilst also keeping the surface of the floor below the carpet fairly chilly too.  Add to that the general dampness of the walls...
But one thing was true - the good ventilation appears to have saved the timber from rot.  An achievement to be celebrated, considering the incredible level of moisture there before the remedial work was done - water was all but trickling out of the stone when you chipped off areas of the old exterior paint coating.

This was a dirty, scratchy, horrible job - the Engineer, bless him, tackled it single-handedly while I was charged with keeping the little blighters entertained safely elsewhere and out of his way.  Fibre insulation and children do not a happy combination make.

The vapour barrier went down and then the boards back on top - which is pretty much where we still are now.  It has been fiddly slow work for him filling the gaps left between the floorboards (having removed the tongues, of course they now effectively are square edged boards, but much less well fitting than before!), but a task which he wanted to do thoroughly and effectively.  After all, the whole point of this is to improve the comfort value of the floor.  Putting the skirting boards back on is causing more headaches, but I admit I have not helped matters by constantly demanding bits and bobs of outdoor jobs here and there, which are becoming increasingly pressing as the season moves ahead and the weather is improving - oops.

I will attempt to take a reasonable picture of the current state of play in the Snug Room tomorrow in the daylight, just to keep these records up to date xxx

Here we are - as it is at the moment.  Not too pretty, admittedly, but Rome wasn't built in a day! Hopefully over the next few days, if I'm lucky, there may be further advancement on the Snug Project - fingers are firmly crossed.