End of Year Catch Up

It's been a while so we thought we should write a final round up of the activity for 2008. It brings us to the end of 2 months of hard work, with plenty more still to come. So what's changed?

Well, the big change is the wall with the crack...it's gone!

The wall through the ages

The 2 main bedrooms have seen a lot of work stripping them and knocking back the loose bits of render and plaster. These gaps have now all been filled with a bonding coat, as well as both their ceilings and chimney breasts fully boarded ready for plaster (yes, that's right, the newly revealed fireplace has been covered back up. It just didn't work being off centre, and removing a brick from the edge showed that we couldn't widen the hole to balance it as we hit straight into the chimney for the downstairs living room fire - more on that later!). The result of the patch work looks a bit like this...including a freshly skimmed ceiling.

We've done all we can to the bathroom without getting rid of all the existing plumbing and immersion heater tank, which is going very soon. Following Redstacks tradition of nothing being quite as simple as you'd think, we removed the plaster from around the bathroom door frame to reveal a wooden frame filled with poured concrete and covered in a wire mesh to hold the render on. Good old 1930's thinking. Makes you wonder whether the weight of this concrete contributed to the crack in the bedroom wall in the first place (the 2 walls run next to each other).

Concrete as insulation anyone?

Hallway en-suite

So that just leaves the new reveal in the living room. We got bored one weekend just hammering the walls upstairs, so decided to hammer the fireplace downstairs instead. We managed to prise off the wood covering that boarded up the fire recess and found a proper fireplace. A Baxi Burnall to be precise. This has the unique feature of a sunken ash pan and an under floor vent system to draw the cool air from the crawl space rather than creating drafts in the room itself. There's a couple of missing pieces, presumably removed when it was boarded up, but the main frame, ashpan and grate are all intact - if a little grubby.

Baxi Burnall

The sunken grate

And finally...Jac's last arty shot of 2008.

A bit sooty, needs a sweep (sorry, Bob Monkhouse moment)