Cloakroom and laundry part 2

We’ve piddled about, working on the WC/laundry throughout the lock down (the initial gutting of the room was covered in April, here).  It was long overdue but, like the upstairs bath, we saved thousands of quid by doing it ourselves.

The tub left a section of floor 1.2 cm lower than the tiled bits and, as we are just going to use heavy-traffic floor paint on it anyways, I levelled it up with a polymer enhanced screed (dating the work near the basin taps).

We eventually painted the floors after levelling the grout lines.

At the existing doorway, we knew we were going to transition into the kitchen with a different floor covering and decided to go ahead with removal of the existing tiles from that point on.

Beneath ½” of concrete render, the original quarry tiles started to emerge.  This door didn’t exist in the original house plan.  To get to the toilet, you would walk outside and enter from the garden (the toilet was a separate room out there).  The tiling comes to a halt here in what would have been the chimney breast of the old scullery:

This featured in a Neighbourhood Beer Tour post when I poured a bit of floor-levelling cement into this interstitial area:

We left the wall tile for the cloakroom as a border on which to affix a pocket door mechanism.  The rest would eventually get plasterboard to leave a vapour gap and to hide the pipe and cable.

Not wishing to paint over the floor tiles directly and thereby leaving the groutlines as features thereon, we covered these with a layer of thinset tile adhesive to level things up.  Once this was set and sanded, the painting could commence:

Hard wearing paint for cement flooring is kind of limited in colour.

The pocket door was Jackie’s idea.  Or rather, it’s a commercial product, but she knew about them and pointed out the space savings over a pivot door.  It came as a flat pack item.

Initial framing up and one side covered with drywall:

Plasterboarding continued off-and-on for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, the plasterboard had to meet plaster:

The old double glazing will eventually get replaced with something clear and untainted by fungus between the panes.  For now, though, at least there’s some natural light coming in.

For the wall tile, we primed with a stain blocker.  This provides a key for the real paint and protects against any fungi and mould we didn’t destroy with bleach when we cleaned the grout beforehand.  The plaster and board got primed using a couple of mist coats (4 parts cheap matt emulsion to 1 part water).

To contrast the grey flooring and to bring warmth to the room, we went with a yellow kitchen paint.

We cleaned up and cut down the size of an old door once separating the living and dining rooms and installed it to silence the laundry equipment from the rest of the house.  Here it is before painting:

We had a half box of metro tile leftover from the upstairs bath which we used to make a window sill.

This brightened things up a bit but not as much as replacing the cloudy double glazing with some fresh window cartridges (had these custom made to fit with minimal shimming compared to the standard sizes).

The eventual cost (not including things we either salvaged or had leftover from other projects) was:

grey floor paint: £20
lumber to box in the sewage/vent pipe: £10
1/4 bucket cheap matt emulsion: £4
wall paint: £21
plumbing bits: £35
electrical bits: £30
plaster board: £20
stacking mechanism for washer/dryer: £40
door for pocket door: £22
wall for pocket door:£235
tile adhesive/grout: £7
bullnose for tile: £3
miscellaneous hardware (magnets, trim, hinges for door to kitchen, etc): £37
____________________
Total outlay: £484 (£597 including the glass which we would have done anyway but was spurred by this room project; neither total includes the new washer and dryer, which we were getting whether or not this room ever got finished).
Builders’ estimates: £3-6K … and none of them seemed to understand what we wanted.

We still have some touching up to do but the main transformation is complete.  From the toilet:

To the sink through the pocket door:

To the new laundry room:

The finishing touch, though, was mounting the salvaged door, which separates this pair of rooms from the kitchen (the door is seen in the top photo of this post).

What next?

 

Weekend Garden

The Dalek reminded me that I had some photos from the garden over the weekend.  The butterfly wings are dusty brown underneath and when they are folded together just look like a dead leaf.  Clever.

The wildflower patch is in constant flux (lots of poppies that only last a day but are all sorts of colours and patterns).  The marigolds, zinnias, and sunflowers had been lagging but have set buds.  The Dalek sits down at the end of the patch by the bunnies, now.

One of the avocados has been pinched back.  Some of the zinnias are further along and unfurling blossoms as I type this.  The bees and butterflies seem content with this.

Midyear

The kick in the ass to the mileage count really started in May so 2020 miles in 2020 is back on track.

Six full months into the bastard year 2020 and I am taking stock of my New Year goals when things looked a lot different than now.  It is day 182 so the real midpoint of this leap year is tomorrow, but 6 months seems a nice demarcation.

I planned on 52 commuter runs either to or from work.  So far, I’m at 48 and feel on track to go into surplus in two weeks.  24 of each, right now, but TO is easier than FROM in the darkness of Autumn and Winter.  Of this year’s miles so far, 468 are from commutes.

The GVRAT map as it stands 30 June 2020

Malaise, illness, other priorities, and just plain laziness had really seemed to doom the 2020 miles goal for 2020.  But, I ran 63 out of 72 days of the Total Lockdown and have run every day since May 2 (in large part due to the Great Virtual Run Across Tennessee).  My mileage at 31 March was only 355 but today stands at 1042, well past the 1010 halfway point.  Monthly, it looked like this:

January	120
February	89
March	146
April	151
May	251
June	285

An ultra is probably off the books for this year; I really can’t consider the GVRAT counting as one since it isn’t all in one go.  I had planned on the Liverpool-Leeds Canal Race at the August Bank Holiday but despite their hopes of holding it, I can’t count on the pubs along the way being open so my nutrition strategy from The Ridgeway would have to be completely retooled (as of today, the pubs have been closed 102 days and will almost certainly go down again the way everyone is behaving).  An alternative in November, a 24 hour ‘race’ tracked by GPS to see how far from the Centre of England you can get by any route, is sold out for this year.

The planned Weekly World Tour of Local Shop Bevvies didn’t even get started until Lockdown but now stands at 37 (all beers, now, although I have made it through a dizzying array of Russian and Polish white liquors, too):

Poland: 20
Lithuania: 8
Russia: 5
Latvia: 2
Slovakia: 1
Czechia:1

Refurbs continue on the new home, but the supply line disruptions put kinks in the overly ambitious original plans.  We have yet to start on the major electrical work or the wood floor refinishing (both being coupled).  The 2nd fireplace is still intact and the 1st one still awaits an insert.  But, the upstairs bath is done, the garden has come along, and the WC/laundry is nearly finished.  We won’t be finished with the full list by Christmas but could easily be by this time next year.

Finally, though not part of the original goals I started mapping Canal Furniture and other interesting waterway items.  The map has categories for Bridges (and Aqueducts and Tunnels), Locks, Gauging Stations, Graffiti, and Misc Points of Interest — each of which can be toggled on or off.  The project should continue to grow although there are some tow paths I tread with dull regularity (see “commuting”).

 

Summer Skip and #GVRAT Run

The Pile had reached the top of the fence to the left and the middle of the Firing Squad Wall to the back.

I’ve mentioned The Pile more than once, but after pulling down the brick wall of the shed then denuding the dining room it became a dangerously high and unsightly mess (yes, pot calling the kettle black).

I called in the skip for noon and it arrived only an hour late.  We’ve reclaimed our patio area, now, and it is still unsightly but it is no longer a builder’s tip.

The old woman across the way added the suitcase and subsequently her nephews finished filling it with a few bits of fencing materials

It was three hours, non-stop filling the thing with about 2/3 of the volume made up of brick, tile, and cement-affiliated materials like mortar and render.  We have scrap magpies that sense a skip from miles away and anything metal that we set aside got spirited away in one or another white van; so, we didn’t have to make room for the old washing machine, bathtub, or the radiators.

I’m really glad I got out for the run before starting to load the skip.  GVRAT mileage now stands at 517.3 which would have me seeking rest in the loft of this barn for the night:

Dining Room Floors Uncovered

Saturday, I spent 6 hours softening and scraping the last of the old Artex from the dining room ceiling.  We used the old laminates, which we hate, as a built-in drop cloth then started to pull them up, as well.  Above, you get an idea of the layers we went through to get to the 1¼” thick, 113-year-old quarry tiles beneath.

Between the laminates and the lino lay some pads.  As we lifted the pads, a musty odour lowered our spirits.

Not all of the black is mould, but some of it was.  These old houses are like living beings and the flooring is meant to “breathe,” which means that the moisture from the earth below permeates the tile and the porous grouting (when that even is used as most of these floors are laid tight enough that it is unnecessary) and is carried away by air flow.  Rising damp occurs when a vapour barrier drives all of this moisture to the walls (a modern damp-course being beyond the ken of 19th- and early 20th-century architects).

Several moppings later, the rinse water was still drying cloudy from old cement based adhesive and the black that remained was obviously a bitumen based adhesive.  As a result, I spent another 6 hours, Sunday, chiselling scree and wire brushing bitumen, tile by bloody tile.  The middle 5 rows still await this first pass, some of the bitumen will require solvent or a heat gun, and the entire floor will benefit from an acid bath to finish the lime removal.

But, with plans to lower the floor 40mm to meet the old veranda and simultaneously install underfloor pipework for heating, we can live with this for a while.  Watch this space in a few months for excavation, lime-crete pour, underfloor heating plumbing, and final tiling.

 

 

Is this Summer? And, #GVRAT Daily Update

I ran to the Screwfix in Dudley Port for some indoor refurb items (drywall adhesive, filler) and some ant poison (wouldn’t normally, but they are in the house — you’ve brought this on yourselves, you bastards).  I realised, on my return, it was too nice to do stuff inside.

Brought the laptop out (to do some invoicing and stay abreast of quotation requests in this busy grant writing period) but mostly focused on levelling up the hedges.  On the neighbour’s side to the north the hedge had branches 2 inches thick that towered 15 feet over the top of the actual hedge row.  The pile of sticks is what I couldn’t fit in the garden recycling for two weeks hence.

Having never dried out from the run, I suddenly realised the weather was disturbingly like that of a real Summer (as opposed to one on an island in the North Sea and North Atlantic).  Glorious.

I cashed out of mileage for the day with 7.7, bringing the overall GVRAT tally to 458.2. I appear to be on a bike path behind some houses to the left and a strip mall archipelago on the right beyond the trees:

Shed 1 Removal

At the top of this post, the photo from 4 months before we moved in shows the door to the right which is part of a storage alcove added at some point to the house.  Sturdy but too small to be of any real use, it wasn’t small enough not to eat up valuable garden area nor was the wooden shed (which will be replaced by next spring) rickety enough to justify keeping this brick one.  We’ve been meaning to tackle this and, with the pile of other refurb debris almost high enough to justify ordering a skip, the time seemed right.

The rains started as I finished removing the roof.  There was still some carpeting to go to the next skip in there so I covered it with the old door.

The Pile is a combination of old plaster wall, porcelain tiles with the levelling scree that was on the original quarry tiles, plumbing (some of which needs to get reclaimed/sold on), doors, and scrap lumber.  The wall was brick covered in cement render and soon started coming down from the top.

We’re both knackered.  The drill hammer weighs 11.5 kg and a lot of the work was at head level and above.  For her part, Jackie spent the hours retrieving, sorting, and stacking bricks so there would be room to reach ground level as the rubble rose around me.

In for a penny, I knew I would be aching the next morning and decided to use up the last of my strength and energy removing the cement render from the original partition wall between us and the neighbours.  Worst case — that the original was hopelessly damaged by this scree — was not realised and now we feel confident we can recover the original outer brick work wrapping around the back part of the house … on another day, mind you.

Closer to end of #GVRAT (by 10K) and ordering another skip

The rain held off but was due to set in around noon so I ordered some fast grip drywall adhesive from ToolStation in Dudley and made a loop out there.  When we finally decided to actually do some of the refurb work, the weather was still fine so we started emptying the near shed (the one built onto the house by the old loo entrance) and removed its roof.  There will soon be a pile of rubble to match the pile of rubble we have been accumulating since the December skip and we won’t be able to put it off any longer.

The run clocked in at 6.2 miles for the day (I’m only heading to the off license, later, and can’t really justify adding that wee trip to my GVRAT mileage, so a 10K for the day it is).  Now at 440.3, my virtual self stands in Lenoir City (pronounced, “Leh NOR”):

#GVRAT and other updates (at 313 GVRAT miles)

Beautiful weather while I was inside putting up a wall/pocket door mechanism between the WC and the laundry room but it absolutely pissed down for my run.  Timing is all and I am nothing.  When do the pubs reopen?

The mileage brings me to 313 in the GVRAT, putting me next to a pond between Sequatchie and Tracy City:

Utenos Auksinis — Neighbourhood Beer Tour #27

Another lager, Gold (the translation of Auksinis) from Lithuanian brewery Utenos and another baby step toward completion of the laundry and cloak room met each other, Sunday.

I thinset the uneven bits of the old floor tiles in preparation for the floor paint and plastered in holes around the wall tiles (pressing in faux grout lines in the a wide areas above the sliding — but not recessed — door into the space).  We will start painting tomorrow then reinstall the toilet and basin Monday evening when the floor has cured.  Pocket door/wall (for the WC) and plaster board will go up after that.  The floors will be a slate grey and the laundry walls, eventually, a light olive if we find one that complements the vaguely bluish tones in the floor paint.

In the meantime, Auksinis.