Jethro - the cleanest sweep in town

Not one of Chris's cheesy lines this time...it's actually Jethro the chimney sweep's slogan. He was a lovely bloke though and did a cracking job in getting our fire back into working order.

First job was removing the cap from the chimney pot

Next was a good sweep with his innovative wire thrashing thing (gone are days of the old fashioned brush).

Finally he very generously donated some Baxi furniture which was removed when the previous owners decommissioned it. We managed to get all the bits needed to get the fire going, and it was a roaring success....sorry :o)

Demolition Derby - Part IV - The Kitchen

Having made some good progress upstairs we've turned our attention to the downstairs for the first time really. As the new kitchen is on order and a delivery date still unknown we needed to get a wriggle on to make sure the room is ready. So, first things first, we needed to get rid of the crazy high, ceiling mounted, original cupboard. The surprise here (first rule of renovating club: there's always a surprise when you're renovating) was that what we assumed to be a hardboard back and top turned out to be the painted plaster, meaning the cupboard was actually built into the rendered wall rather than sitting on it. Unfortunately as we pulled away the frame the plaster came with it.


The original plan was to remove the cupboard and then strip back the wallpaper on the rest of the wall ready for a quick skim of fresh plaster...


...ooops. Things don't always go to plan! When we started to strip the wallpaper we noticed that the wall really wasn't as healthy as it looked. It didn't take much for it to end up on the floor. To be honest though this isn't really too much of a trauma as there were already walls in the kitchen that needed to be stripped back and Jac made light work of these too (as usual).


Speaking of floor(s). More fun and games here too. As the walls started to tumble we decided to get the carpet up to make the cleanup easier. As we lifted the carpet we expected to get a glimpse of the state of the floorboards underneath. Instead we got down to level 2 of flooring...a nice piece of lino.


Not completely unusual I suppose. So up came the lino where we then found...level 3 flooring, nice vinyl tiles.


The tiles were then glued down to a layer of hardboard, under which we finally found some floorboards...and concrete...and ceramic tiles!


We can only assume there must have been some kind of stove here once upon a time. Also at the other end of the kitchen there was more concrete flooring where the original pantry would have been. All in all quite a mixed bag.

The last job was just to get the skirting off ready for the new plasterboard. Turned out it was on a bit more securely than we thought.


We got there in the end though :o)


Now we turn it loose to the trades. We have the electricians round this weekend, the plumber is coming on Monday, and the joiner is due next week to box out the understairs cupboard. Oh, and somewhere in the mix we've got Jethro the sweep coming to sort out the living room chimney. Busy busy busy!

A finished room!

Well 3 months later and the front bedroom is finished! (Decoration-wise. Excluding carpets and furniture - waiting on the carpet until all other rooms upstairs are ready and dust & rubble free).


Now we can get started on the kitchen - we've got around 4-5 weeks or so to get the basic work done... walls knocked back where needed and a few tradesmen to get in... joiner, electrician, plumber and builder. Its going to be a busy few weeks!