Living room paint — preparations

The first of the downstairs rooms we planned to finish (ignoring the laundry/WC) was the living room. With the fireplace and hearth, ceiling fan, and radiator installed, the next step was to plaster up the abuse all of these inflicted.

The bright yellow laundry at the far end of the ground floor contrasts greatly with the Teal we opted to paint the LR so we planned to use the colour wheel to transition from one room to the next with Maple Haze and Empire Jewel as transition hues.

First, however, we needed to move the sockets to their final locations. We have planned to build in some cabinetry on either side of the chimney breast so those needed to come up at least 75cm.

We’ve increased from three duplex outlets (six plugs) to five duplex, two triplex, and a bank of data connections so we now have 16 sockets, two CAT6 network ports, and two satellite feeds. There were also some lighting fixtures to cut out of the existing plaster (picture in this post).

All these cuts and the tops of the skirting board locations needed coarse plastering. This also served to spackle some holes.

The finishing plaster wasn’t even put down as a full skim coat. Instead, it was only skimmed very thinly into my ceiling trowel marks from the initial push to move in and the coarse plaster from which we excised all that old wallpaper from back then.

We finished cleaning up at 9:45 Sunday. This gives 5 full days for the mud to cure (it is humid in there, right now) before we settle in to the mist coat and probably three coats of the teal.

Jewellery Quarter to The Hawthorns via the canal

It seemed like ages since we’ve been out (I mean, when did they install this pissoir in the JQ, anyway?). Not the proverbial ‘out out’ but just out for a long walk and a stop by a shop. Jackie had a brief appointment on the prison island Saturday afternoon so we put all that to right.

The hike was uneventful but very pleasant. There were people out socialising and we ran into Davey, a work colleague of mine who lives in the city centre, and had a brief chat. Leaf buds were everywhere — a green explosion looms. And, there was a new graffito since the last time I ran this stretch of towpath (one I am especially taken with):

We veered off the path at the Smethwick Junction and walked up to the Range near the Hawthorns stadium. There were some Johnstone Paint tester pots we wanted to try out and all three were decided on for the next rooms to paint over previous testers (Teal Topaz for the living room, Maple Haze in the dining room, and Empire Jewel for the kitchen). These paint swatches are everywhere downstairs, at present; but, at least two of the rooms will get covered during the upcoming Life of Brian holiday:

Fireplace Refurb #4

The living room still needs finish plaster, painting, new skirting boards, and the wood flooring stained; but, the fireplace (above) is finished — again, save for plastering — as is the one in the even more construction site-y dining room. We started by doing a coarse repair of the walls with bonding plaster:

This had been in a state of utter disrepair since we took out the old fireplace in August. You don’t even see it after a while.

Monday, I framed out the living room hearth:

Filling the excess space with damaged quarry tiles from the living room underfloor heating effort helped minimise the volume when the self levelling compound went in (can still see their shape before the final volume was mixed and poured):

Later that night (when the surface was suitable to take weight), we test drove the new mantle:

Tuesday came and, it being vacation of a sort, we were keen to make a lot of progress but also still not work too hard. Jackie continued painting the doors from the second bedroom — we stripped as much paint as we could without disturbing the lead based layers too much and she had (has) a lot of hardware to deal with. PLUS, she is utterly useless at the poured concrete game so it kept her busy.

The living room fireplace at Tuesday breakfast.

My Tuesday was by contrast quite busy. I started with framing the dining room hearth. This time I couldn’t immobilise the frame by screwing it to the floor so I brought in bricks (would have preferred sand bags but beggars can’t choose). I also had to dash out and by another 20kg of levelling compound due to faulty calculations:

Whilst waiting for the callback from the diy place to confirm my order, I put down the top tiles on the living room hearth:

Then, finished the dining room pour:

The facing tiles were too tall for the poured hearth in the living room (an error corrected in the dining room), so I dug out the tile saw and trimmed away the excess. After grouting, it doesn’t look half bad:

Wednesday, the tiling shifted to the dining room while the cast iron fireplace insert in the living room was mounted. First up, set the heavy mofo in place to see if there was any additional trimming to do on the fireback, which there was, damntheluck.

That was a 3 hour delay including rebuilding the front of the fireback. I’ll eventually paint the fireback and the new mortar to match one another but we aren’t planning on ever burning in this (although it draws like a motherfucker, sucking the plastic dust tent around me as I chipped and drilled).

The grouting on the living room hearth rounded out Wednesday.

This one needed even less chipping away to get the insert to be insertable, but the dust tent seemed appropriate nonetheless:

Plaster over the fittings to do, and we have no inkling of what colours to use in the room (save for black inside the fireplace where my fireback repairs are) BUT the beasts are installed. And, lovely if I do say so myself (and I do).

Second Bedroom detail work

In the second bedroom (our erstwhile “office”), previous residents had slapped paint everywhere over the decades. Some of J’s work this week has been uncovering the hardware (original bits on the original doors, which we also stripped and repainted).

The latch for the attic hatch/over stairs closet is stamped “Pruce’s Patent” above “A. B. & Co. Bm” with “THE BOSS” on the springy bit held by the brass thumbscrew. Under layers of paint and oxidation she also found the loverly brass handle:

Last week, I had already done the fittings for the main door (similar to earlier ones, except the Bakelite doorknobs still need cleanup):

2021 Week 6 Recap: Winter doldrums

Busy at work. No running save for a Saturday 5K diagnostic jog to try out the sore IT band (good, but not good enough to start ramping back up). Painted the bedroom (that we plastered last week). Trump did not get convicted in the Senate but may soon do so in Atlanta. Pubs are still closed. I’m getting squirrelly enough that even I notice it.

£30 in fines, £39.50 fees.

BR2/Office Redo Part 1

We’ve been beset with niggling details of other room projects but we need to be done upstairs before the first week of March when we will focus on fireplaces. The 2nd Bedroom (which serves as our home office since no one visits even without the excuse of a global pandemic) was the first ceiling plaster job I did to cover the Artex abomination. It was my “learning to plaster” room and as such I have always intended to go back and put the whole thing right.

For instance, look at the corrugation in the plaster around the wiring rose. That’s all my lousy trowelling and failure to smooth things before the mud set permanently. The entire ceiling was like that.

First, though, I moved the light fixture to the perceived centre of the room. If you draw diagonals from the corners, the actual centre is almost directly above the desk chair due to the chimney breast jutting out. This was unsatisfying so we tried the a point behind that one and midway between the chimney breast and opposite wall; this seemed to far back so we compromised on halfway between these extremes.

As luck would have it, the hole I drilled went directly through the centre of one of the rafters making this location suitable for heavier fixtures when we decide what we really want in there.

Anyway, in addition to the old through-hole (inexplicably right next to the west facing window, if you look in the above photo) we also had to fill in holes for shade mounts and the old radiator mounts plus extend the wall plaster to the height of our slightly smaller skirting boards.

This will need to cure a week or so then we can carry on painting the hovel.

Fireplace Refurb #3

We haven’t finished upstairs (bedroom door is still in the works and the 2nd bedroom is still a complete shambles). Yet, we’ve ordered and received our fireplace inserts and have plans to spend the first week of March constructing the hearths, mounting the inserts, designing the mantles, and replastering.

The side panels of the inserts hold decorative tiles. We ordered some majolica slabs in holding with Edwardian styles contemporary with the house.

Beyond that, we’ll have to cut away the smallest amount of the firebacks to make everything fit snugly. Very exciting, this.

2020 in retrospect

Goals on January the 1st, 2020 (completed):

• 52 commutes (achieved 14 July, with 105 by the end of year)
• 2020 cumulative running miles (completed on 25 November, 2152 by end-of-year)
• 52 foreign beers from our local/foreign shops (20 November)
• New bath upstairs (late February)
• Downstairs bath converted to laundry and water closet (August)
• Re-do the floors (ongoing, but wood done around mid-November)
• Hide and expand the electrical and information networks throughout house
• Built in closets and other storage in bedroom (December)

DNF for the year:

• An ultra — toyed with the idea of a virtual ultra like the Run Across Tennessee but nothing is at all like the complete depletion of resources and mind/body disconnect that you get 15 or so hours into a day-and-a-half effort. Maybe 2021….
• New kitchen suffered from time constraints but also from finances. It is a precarious time and the awful kitchen works well enough while we refill the hoard for the 2021 builds.
• New shed is also on the books for the new year ahead, also because we just ran out of time and don’t fancy running out of cash.
• The fireplaces — ahead of both the kitchen and shed — continue to mock us
• The stained glass insert will have to wait for our dining room refurb (the floor tiling and underfloor heating done but the fireplace, the fancy plastering, the skirting boards, and the arches by the veranda all need to be done beforehand)

Somewhere on the Harborne rail trail July 17 during the commuter run into work, I logged my 20,000th mile since moving to Britain. A few hundred of those have been in Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, and the USA but a milestone nonetheless.

Obits in these pages:

• Chris Abell, former running mate and Pro Vice Chancellor for Research at Cambridge
• Mohammed Reza Shajarian, mystical Iranian musician and social activist
• Congressman John Lewis, 5th District of Georgia, warrior [DSCDP pick]
• Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks’ best friend, father of Rob [DSCDP pick]
• Fred Willard, Fernwood resident
• John Prine, troubadour
• Buck Henry, my long lost dad, who worked with aforementioned Carl and Fred at various times

There was COVID. There were lockdowns. I continued to work — harder than usual in a lot of ways — at the labs throughout and, with the minimised human contact, I’ve sustained the longest continuous period without any symptoms of physical illness that I can remember.

Most years suck in retrospect. 2020 sucked as it was happening almost every minute of the year so it is hard to apply normal benchmarks. Looking back, it sucked no more over the background noise than most other years; but the background noise includes 1 in every 1000 Americans AND Brits dying of the virus just since March; it includes Donald Trump getting almost 75 million votes; the background shit is piled so high you barely can make out the death of Democracy or the flailing ineptitude of the current UK government or actual Crimes Against Humanity (such as, Taylor Swift continues to put out records).

So, here’s to 2021. No plans, this year. I have a fines-and-fees structure for the period from now until Thanksgiving that should pay for a nice holiday when one is possible again…more on F&F with the monthly reports in a few weeks.

Closets continued

We designed some built in closets in the Summer and the parts arrived late October.

The weekend before Thanksgiving was given over to sealing the lumber from our custom made, fitted cabinetry. We diluted boiled linseed oil in equal parts with mineral spirits then heavily doused the birch plywood with the solution, letting it stand for 30 minutes, then buffed away the excess.

A few more than a hundred pieces of thick, birch plywood ranging in size from 12cm X 25cm up to 2.5m X 1.4m and requiring a good soaking with the linseed mixture were drenched and — after about 20 minutes to absorb into the wood — wiped down with some towels one of us brought into the household from our single days.

The ones on the right are oiled while the ones to the left would get it the next day:

The idea is that birch will soak up more stain in some random parts of the wood structure than others and the linseed oil serves to even out the absorption of the stain and reduce the blotchiness that this causes. We finished oiling early Sunday afternoon and planned to put off the staining work until Thursday to allow the linseed oil time to poymerise. (Spell checker just tried to change “blotchiness” to “bitchiness,” but I stand by my editorial decision.)

The day after Thanksgiving we started staining the bits that would be seen … doors and the exposed exteriors would eventually get 3 passes (our stain has a polyurethane sealer built in so it really takes 3 times to build up enough to have a sheen as well as achieving a depth of colour). The door on the left (above) has only been sealed with linseed oil while the one on the right has had it’s first application of stain.

Interior faces also got stained for the sake of colour continuity (the birch is very white even with the linseed oil cured into it). Some parts (like the interior of the drawers or the faces of the carcass of the closets that go against a wall) don’t need staining at all.

Between stainings (all the exteriors are getting three coats), we less-than-saturated 0000 steel wool pads with mineral oil and softened the nap that raised with the previous coating, leaving a smooth surface for the next coat. We used a powerful magnet to clean away all the fine bits of steel wool left behind then used a towel to buff the boards clean. After coat #2, there was no more wood to smooth but the scratches from the steel wool would act as a key for the final coat.

The space is amazing and we have freed up the rest of the temporary storage in the other rooms by finishing these.

Cool also to get the old, small tele wired in although we still haven’t used it in the week since completing this.

Thanksgiving 26 November 2020

Our first Thanksgiving in the new house, last year, came two days after moving day which was 10 days into the initial attack on the crimes against decorating that had been inflicted on the place over the course of the previous century. Today, our second Thanksgiving here is a little more under control although there are stacks of lumber and bags of plaster and other building kit all over the dining and living rooms.

But, it is so much more like our traditional TG efforts. Morning bevvies, start baking cornbread for the dressing and preparing a crust and filling for sweet potato pie. We had a goose because we’ve already had turkey this year (and NO ONE but felons should be subjected to that abomination more frequently).

There is a lot for us to be grateful for this year and not just the obvious, mentioned above. And, for today (and tomorrow), we’re going to try to stay focused on all of those things.

Goose, stuffing, pie, cheeses of many ilks…leftovers to help absorb the remaining wine and booze the next day or two. Truly thankful.