Carpets and flooring

OK, so it's been a long time since we updated the blog...but we've still been working away on the place.  Rooms have been plastered and painted.  Skirting, architrave and coving has been fitted, and finally today we had the final upstairs carpets fitted after having spent time sanding and varnishing the hallway floor to be ready in time.  Here are a few piccies of how things look today.

A Productive Week!

This week we were both off work and the weather was pretty poor as it's summer, so it was time for a big push on the house. Chapel View saw a lot of progress... coving, skirting and architrave, and its first lick of paint. Whitewash for now to put a base onto the fresh plaster with colour to follow in the next week. It didn't all go to plan, the skirting didn't stick first time but when is anything in this house simple!

The landing also had its architrave fitted, the next step will be skirting and coving, not looking forward to the bit over the stairs but once its done its done.

 This week also saw the final fit of the electrics upstairs after a couple of years wait, we have sockets and lights!

New Stairs!

Well the past month has been busy and the plastering is now finally done, the next steps are coving and skirting and a splash or two of paint.

Another job done was the new staircase, gone was the horrible panelling, replaced with wooden spindles which has really opened it all up, the staircase now looks huge! The night before the joiner arrived was a bit scary as upstairs was all open as we had to remove the old bannister and panels from the landing. Luckily we don't sleepwalk! ...

It now just needs the finishing touches - the plan is a nice bit of oak coloured staining.

Getting plastered again

So, after all that prep work, we finally got some plaster on the walls.  Phil came round and in just two days managed to complete both bedroom three and the landing, with Chris helping out mixing and generally trying not to get in the way.

Phil at full stretch with his first ceiling of the day

Vikki, what colour do you want your room painting? Labrador Sands :-)

He'll be back this week to finish the freshly boarded hallway!

... and a few days later it was all done, it involved a bit of a balancing act - rather him than us!

 

Final plasterboarding (for a bit)

With the upstairs all plasterboarded and ready for skimming, that just left the hall to get ready.  After the ceiling work was completed we just needed to stick the boards to the wall and create a box frame to hide the water pipes.  

The box work will be plasterboarded next before Phil comes back to skim.  This will also need a little door/hatch putting in once completed as this box work hides the stop-tap for the mains.

Stairway to...

We thought that once all of our plastering is done and out of the way it would be nice to change the staircase a bit and instead of having it panelled it would look nice to have a spindled staircase. Us being us couldnt wait to see what was behind the existing panelling so decided to take it all off.  Cue more mess but hey ho, it would need doing eventually anyway  :)

So thats it for now... next step is all the plastering which is being started this week.

Hallway Adventures

The next area of the house started being prepared for plastering and it all started so well...

Chris had the task of removing the corner cupboard and Jac started knocking back the walls.

 No tools needed for this one, the plaster came off the walls far too easy! 
Nice quick job tho  :)

Then it started to go a little bit wrong.  As the coving was removed there was a swift realisation that this was the only thing holding up the ceiling...

 Oops!

Looks a bit messy but we've been here before, the same thing happened in Chapel View a year ago so we knew it wouldn't take much to fix. (Note the '4' pipes coming from above, that's more fun and games later.)

And soon it was all knocked back and ready for the next step.

Remember those '4' pipes? ...

One of them wasn't attached to anything in the ceiling so Chris thought it would be a good idea to remove the whole thing as it wasn't really doing anything... Or so we thought...

Cue water, lots of water and a full drain of the central heating system into a couple of gorilla tubs. Turns out the pipe was capped off at the ceiling but still connected somewhere under the floor.  The water stopped eventually and with the help of Norm, a running repair was made to the pipe and it was capped off (again) - NEVER TO BE TOUCHED AGAIN CHRIS! :)

So 4 hours later after that little mishap, the ceiling was plasterboarded - thanks again Norm for your help  :)

And while all this was going on, Jac was tucked away in the greenhouse potting up our veggie seedlings.  This year's harvest should hopefully include tomatoes, chillies, aubergines and salady bits.