Our refurbishment is progressing well at the moment, as I am now greatly energised from my day off on Saturday. Earlier this week, I cleared this substantial pile of fire wood, cut from old skirting boards and aged furniture, to make room for our current project. Alex and I moved it into buckets which we then let down over the balcony to a waiting wheelbarrow, and it is now sitting in dry store ready to warm us in our winter fires.
Now that the electric cable has been moved from the stairwell, Julie was able to block up the access gaps (with the cement blobs showing below) which has helped cut out the howling gale in our stairwell. Meanwhile Yvonne finished the other side with plywood and plasterboard, but that didn’t photograph quite as well.
We need to decide how to finish the wall shown below. The stairwell becomes wider between the ground and first floors, so what you are looking at is the part where it becomes wider, just below the fourth flight of stairs. Current preference is to install a shelf and then work out afterwards what to put on it!
Back to the first room, but with the wood pile moved on (in case you didn’t believe me)…
…and back to the insulation work. This is quite an exacting exercise, so works persons occasionally need to divert to other tasks – especially if the lorry delivering the insulated plasterboard doesn’t arrive when expected…
…so we moved on to stripping out the floor 1 bathroom which I had reserved as a treat for Julie and Yvonne.
The tiles are all being levered off, complete with the plasterboard, ready for refitting.
Oh goody, the plasterboard arrived, so we returned to the main task in hand…
Now Mike just needs to install the new electric cables fast enough to keep ahead of the insulation crew.
He is doing a great job to date. FYI, the window boards all have to be removed, because the insulation is 55mm thick and would swallow up the existing window sills. Mike strips them all out and you can see on the left hand side below the new window board waiting to go in, in due course.
Today the weather was wet in parts, but the weather forecast for tomorrow is dry so we hope to be outside stem-injecting the rhodos again. I hope you are looking forward to lots of photos of the great outdoors in the next blog!