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.
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).
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 