Upstairs Bath Stage 4

Last of the plumbing — as it was likely to be — was a struggle but not too hard to deal with.  Then we got a start on the sub floor (leaving an opening for access) as soon as the leak testing was done (hooray! no leaks first time out) and the waste pipes were properly welded.

J has no experience at all with this stuff and has been standing out of the way.  It is actually slower (before she actually does the things) to show her how to do things than it is to do them myself but I want both of us to have a hand in this.  She’s a good painter, mind, as we both paid the rent during Uni doing that; but, today was the first day she’s used a drill (in this instance, screwing down the subfloor.

We’re a little behind the ambitious schedule but I think we’ll be using the toilet up there this time next week (albeit, still needing to tile the place and hook up the rest of the amenities).  10 full workdays into this project, between us, we toil on.

Previous updates:

Stage 1: Design and layout
Stage 2: Shit arrives and floors come up
Stage 3: Plumbing

Upstairs Bath Stage 3

The builders we talked to suggested it would take two workers 10-15 workdays (20-30 man days to be un-woke about the terminology) to finish a bath like the one we want.  After 5 full days working solo (not including time spent shopping and designing), I had finished pulling the flooring then routing and leak checking the hot and cold supply plumbing everywhere it was required.  This photo, a few hours before completion of that task, shows the state of play with full 15-25 man-days remaining:

That was the hardest of the plumbing work and the most likely to go wrong; however, the next bits were the more nerve wracking: routing the sewage and drain pipes overhead with respect to the downstairs ceilings on its way to the standpipe and out to the sewers.  We bought some diamond core saws and started in on the big paths through the walls.

The walls on these old houses are 9 inches (22½ cm) thick and the morter is essentially concrete.  I did the 40 mm one for the tub and sink waste Saturday and the 117 mm one for the toilet/soil pipe Sunday which left everything in the pink room coated in an dust the colour of Grenadine.  I would have done both on Saturday except for breaking a pipe in the OLD (current) bath whilst chasing the soil stack which is hidden in the walls and which will be coupled to this waste stream on completion.

The main stack is nearly 3 meters away, though, and while we could get away without it I decided to put in a supplemental air admittance valve (an AAV) as a de facto 2nd soil stack.  This ensures no siphoning during the longish drop from potty to sewer.  Regulations say the AAV needs to be 8 inches (200 mm) higher than the wastewater entrance, so we went with 16 inches to be good citizens (and to prolong the life of the device).

The tub came with feet but they were bright, shiny chrome-plated and ghastly.  Here they are after primer and two coats of wood stove paint:

The final soil plumbing connections will be done next Saturday (1 Feb) at which point we will start to lay the subfloor after initial continuity-and-leak testing and inspection/signoff.  With any luck, the floor tile can go down and the toilet get attached the week of 3 Feb (and the rest of the bath bits put in place the following weekend).  Shits getting real.

Working man-days so far: 7.

 

Upstairs Bath Stage 2

Continuing on from the initial plans, our hardware started to arrive the 2nd week of January.  All the straight pipe for water supply and the toilet came on Friday, then the toilet, tiles we ordered Sunday , bathtub, sink and heated towel rack on Tuesday.  By Tuesday afternoon, we had checked everything arrived okay and started on the first tasks.

The old radiator blocked access to the wall through which the plumbing would eventually pass but removal required completing the hot water circuit so the heated towel rack got plumbed in as a place-holder.  We will take it back out to put in the sub-floor, tile backer, and tiling but for now it is standing there providing heat over the canyon of exposed trusses.

This was probably the hardest of the pipe soldering to do.  The pipes were “wet” since they were in use and had to be dried before the clean-up and solder work.  Also, one of the old unions was directly over a snake nest of electric cables and both straight unions and 90° joints to fit were next to very old, very dry timber.  I protected these with fire bricks and some flame resistant sheeting and only caused a wee bit of smoulder smoke to emerge.

Pressure checks look good — no leaks 2 days in.  Real plumbing Saturday and with any luck the flooring will start going down Sunday.

Targets for 2020

It’s the start of a new year so here are some goals…absolutely achievable ones, mind you.

Running:

52 commute runs.  With travelling for work a few weeks per year, the University closures at Easter and Christmas, other Bank Holidays, and 5 more weeks of vacation to boot this means quite a few double commute weeks (at least 12, maybe more).

2020 miles for the year.  This isn’t unusual, but with an injury a couple of years back I have only relatively recently gotten back on form.

An ultra.  I have one in mind at the end of summer and training has already started.

Drinking:

A different beer or other beverage weekly from one of the many foreign shops in our neighbourhood.

Home:

New bathroom, convert old bath to WC and laundry, refit the kitchen, build a new shed, refinish the wood and tile floors, redistribute and add power sockets, run cabling (internet, audio-visual, etc) under flooring, restore the downstairs fireplaces, build cabinets on sides of chimney breasts upstairs, find someone to do us a pre-Rafaelite themed stained glass insert for the archway we uncovered.  There’s more, but this seems like a full enough list for one year.

 

Upstairs Bath Stage 1

 

British houses of a certain age have the bath downstairs.  Ours does which is an improvement because the original bath was outside.  But, we’re  old people and trekking downstairs and through the kitchen to pee a couple times every night was never going to be sustainable.

The box room in ours is 1.5 m wide by an average of 3 m long (the wall on the landing is angled).  Regulations require the electrics to be protected from water and any sockets to be RSDs (residual current devices).  As British houses also have a dearth of electrical sockets, I pulled the existing ones in there out and relaid the conductors to our bedroom to give us two new sockets replacing the three 2 m extension cords servicing our clock and bedside lamps.

The radiator will shift to the adjacent wall making room for the toilet; it will be replaced with a radiator/towel rack.  A sink will go in leaving a roomy path to the loo and beside the tub (first crayon mark-up left a passage that was a little tight).  The bath, toilet, and towel rack walls and the backsplash of the sink are going to be white subway tiles with black grout.

The flooring will be replaced with plywood under cement board and some as yet undetermined ceramic tile.  We are angling for something either modern (in the immediately pre- or post-war sense) or pre-Raphaelite but will have to see what happens.  The plumbing is marked on the current floorboards and will be finalised once the fixtures arrive — the floorboards themselves will be saved to make repairs to the other original flooring throughout the house when the time comes for that refinishing job (much later…early Summer is the target).

 

Plumbing starts in a week or so.  The parts are going to be ordered today.  Once the tiling is done, the fixtures can be attached in a matter of hours.  Updates to follow.

 

Gift That Keeps On Giving

It is still months from our big flooring projects — redoing the original wood flooring is a spring or summer project — but in the meantime the house continues to reveal its original self.  When I took out an old, built in kitchen cabinet I found the quarry tiling that came with the house.  When we get around to redoing the kitchen (the bathroom is ahead of it in the queue), we’ll knock out the modern tiles and clean up the self levelling screed between new and old.

For now, we’ve moved the fridge from the dining room into this spot to live like modern people as much as possible.

When I pulled up the fireplace in the dining room (on skip day), I was keen to see the condition of the wood floors beneath the cheap looking laminates.  Lifting an edge of these I am now convinced that they, too, like the kitchen and the entrance are Edwardian quarry tiles.  We have to see their condition when we start on the wood floor project, but may pull these up and trade them for credit at the reclamation yard toward some encaustic tiling from the same period (keeping out enough of these for repairs to the kitchen ones).

I used this photo of the stairwell to decorate a running post earlier this month.  We went ahead and started sanding these as they are in good condition and the paint was making us feel like we were still living in a tip.

In the meantime, Jackie started removing the wallpaper from our entrance alcove — the only thing left to strip.  Unwrapping this Christmas present is an endless surprise and the odd, 60’s wallpaper was yet another treat.  However …

… an arch shaped crack in the plaster piqued our interest and we started dismantling it to discover the original plaster of Paris archway.

Full removal did minor damage to the walls, but we packed it with fresh undercoating plaster and will get around to sanding and painting soon.

 

2019 Christmas Skip

Ordered a 6 yard skip (that’s 6 cubic yards or 2/3 of the eponymous ‘whole 9 yards’).  It was dropped this morning at 9:45 and by 11 I had rid ourselves of the previous owner’s detritus.  All carpets and carpet pads unrolled and folded in, first; next, the lumber and pokey bits we pulled up below the carpets.

There was an old boiler furnace and several gas and electrical heaters (the electric fire was in the dining room fireplace where it was nothing more than a fire hazard).  Almost as soon as these hit the pile, scrap scavengers emerged and hauled them away.

There was broken Ikea furniture, kids toys, curtains, tiles, lumber, and a pile of sand about 2 meters by 1.5 meters by 3/4 meter high.  This last item filled spaces left by the corrugated nature of everything else.  At the end of shifting all this, a 3 square meter flower bed spot was uncovered.

And, as I hoped, there was still a little room remaining.  When it is fully finished, I’ll detail the removal of the ugly fireplace in the dining room, but over the course of the next hour I was able to sledgehammer, chisel, and crowbar the fucker free from the chimney breast (indeed, a successful removal of this breast cancer of sorts).

Day one of the Christmas Break is in the books.  Now for a wee run before my muscles start to seize.

Old Horseshoe Bourbon and the Christmas Tree Run

One of the great discoveries in this blog’s long history was that Lidl and Aldi, the German discount grocery interlopers into the British market, both stock unusually good booze.  I stopped by Aldi Saturday to pick up some lovely Clarke’s — my go to brand of quality, cheap, brown stuff — and noticed a ‘premium’ option for a couple quid more on the same shelf.  I know Old Horseshoe, like Clarke’s, is probably just the leavings of some better known brand, shipped to Hamburg in a tanker ahead of bottling for distribution across Europe; but, it is especially fine bourbon and after toasting our tree with generous snifters of this vanilla-rich nectar I decided to forego the addition of club soda to the rest of it…at most, this should only be insulted with the water of a single, melting, ice cube.

 

That tree we were toasting took more effort than it should have to acquire.  While Aldi had been stocking Xmas trees the last several weeks, we find it crass to put one up earlier than the weekend ahead of the last full week before Christmas.  So, Saturday the 14th we went into the local market then past other shops and finally, approaching the house, to the Aldi as a last ditch effort.

The Run Streak required a minimum of 3 miles and I Googled trees to see how far I would have to tote one…turned out there is a place that sells the big, green bastards in Wednesbury.  I jogged up with a pub stop on the way then asked the attendant about pricing.  “Forty-five for one about here,” he said holding his hand like a US Army salute at his eyes, “and fifty for the bigger ones.”  I whistled and wandered into the forested alleyway.

Eventually, I found an even taller-than=fifty-quid batch that looked fuller and greener than the ones on display.  Apparently, these weren’t selling especially well and he offered me one for £30.  Wrapped and paid for, I stood under this massive trunk and wished him a Merry Christmas.  “And, yourself and yours, as well,” he dutifully offered.  I hoisted it onto my shoulder and told him that might depend on me getting this home on the trams (the Metro station being a half mile away through the village centre).

He seemed stunned and looked at me long enough to realise this was not some weird, American style Christmas jest.  “I love you,” he said.  Holly, jolly, I thought and made my way home…drivers waving me across roads and folks smiling the entire journey back.

Holiday Run Streak 2019, Week 3

 

Sunday 08 Dec: 7.3 mile trip to old house to check mail
Monday 09 Dec: 8.5 mile lunch run lost under King’s Heath
Tuesday 10 Dec: 6.9 mile grocery and hardware trots
Wednesday 11 Dec: 4.6 mile lunch run to old house (mail check)
Thursday 12 Dec: 6.9 mile feverish lunch run to town and back in the rain
Friday 13 Dec: 6.3 miles on Run Commute #3 (from work)
Saturday 14 Dec: 3.4 mile Xmas Tree run to Wednesbury

43.9 miles this week, 125 so far this run streak.

The week was a blur due to fighting a case of the dreaded lurgy until Saturday when both the fever and the rainfall finally broke.  We looked for a Christmas tree all over West Brom but I eventually had to go out for the shortest run of the week to Wednesbury, a village up a hill about 2½ miles away.  The church that dominates the skyline from back at my part of WBrom — seen in the above photo — was still up hill from the pub stop on this jog.

Saving the photos for a ‘home’ themed post sometime hence, we uncovered some Edwardian quarry tiles in the kitchen and the front entranceway and think we may be able to restore them to their former state.  We also examined one of the fugly fireplaces and have started trying to source a period surround for insertion once we destroy the reprehensible excuse for a hearth.  Stay tuned.

 

Holiday Run Streak 2019, Week 2 (as home refurbishment continues)

Down the rabbit hole…

Continued the house refurb by finishing the paintwork (except the trim and ceilings) and removing the last of the carpet save for the box room which will soon be converted to a bath.  We removed doors in the kitchen, on the stairwell (as well as the carpet, there, revealing the old stair runner path), and between the entrance hall between the two receptions and started to repopulate book and music shelves in their temporary homes.  There was a failed radiator valve that was leaking and a section of rain gutter we will need to get someone around to reconnect.  But, it all seems to be going to plan.

Speaking of, “going to plan,” the run streak continued as well.  Here are the dailies for Week 2 (39.5 total, 5.6 average):

Sunday 01 Dec: hardware trot, 3.0 miles
Monday 02 Dec: Digbeth via canals, lunch, 5.6 miles
Tuesday 03 Dec: hardware and old address mail run, 3.1 miles
Wednesday 04 Dec: Run Commute #1, canal, 9.6 miles
Thursday 05 Dec: Malt House/Library lunch run, 6.9 miles
Friday 06 Dec: Run Commute #2, Halfway House, 7.4 miles
Saturday 07 Dec: Rising Sun, Tipton out-and-back, 3.9 miles

Not on a run commute but just a regular one: impromptu primitive art in The Hawthorns Station…every window has at least one representation of cock and balls drawn in the condensate.  I believe the children are the future.