Our little house has a dearth of storage and a lot of wasted space. A few weekends ago, I set out to fix both of these.
Next to the chimney breast in the living room, I framed out two built in cabinets and started populating them with shelves. In here, the stain we used on the floor is, on the cabinet lumber, splitting the difference between the fireplace mantle and the floors.
I bought a fairly cheap router and then spent as much as the motor on some pretty decent bits. This allowed for a bullnose on the top and some quarter-round edges on the doors.
Everything is plywood except the interior walls which are mdf. The framing is 18mm x 45mm softwood. Price tag including the new tools just under £100.
We’re not decorators so Maple Haze, the deep autumnal burnt orange we painted the dining room a year and a half ago, was a bold choice. Bold and ill-informed. Returning from a night out in summer or anytime after 4 pm in winter, the lights expose you to the fiery pits of Hades. It has been long overdue for replacement.
We went with Almond White which matches the beige in the fireplace tiles almost perfectly. The above photo shows the penultimate coat. It is definitely less oppressive than before.
The kitchen was always going to be the most stressful room to refurb (even though the bath was an absolute logistical motherfucker). But, there had been no planning done in the kitchen design as we bought it and the stress of living in this poorly thought out galley (I’m in the kitchen several hours per day) built up over the nearly three years we focused on the rest of the house. We had been picking away at it when we converted the old bath to a laundry and when I was de-Artex-ing the gaff but the first signs of the potential came with tearing down the plaster on two walls and removing a spurious cabinet over the BUN paint tester spot:
That was over a year ago and other things got in the way until late summer this year when we finally pulled the trigger and bought some better appliances then cabinetry to surround it (Ikea out, Ikea in, but Ikea has a solid kitchen reputation).
With all the parts in the house (and the dangerous and tiny gas cooker replaced by a very well reviewed induction hob with two fan ovens), we set about dismantling the old — appropriately enough on the day before the Queen’s funeral.
The pipework for the underfloor heating was partly assembled then finished and leak tested once the quarry tiles were removed.
Installed one week, we were able to start the flow through them the next. Jimbo seemed to approve of the warmth despite some tile clean-up, polishing, and sealing still to do by the time this snap was shot:
The de-rendering last month was mainly meant to expose the brickwork around the window we were replacing. The old one stretched down to the drainboard and sink and was fitted unsympathetically and asymmetrically into the original casement frame. All of that was pulled out.
It is a double brick wall so I had much more masonry to lay than expected (not to mention that it was the first bricking I have done since 1978 on my uncle’s dairy). We are painting the outside when we finish the repointing (probably early Spring) but the new brickwork and window look okay.
The tiling we planned for the wall with the new window would be a struggle to hang directly on the brick, so I installed cement backer boards while Jackie applied some base coat paint to the portion of the opposite walls that will be exposed between the hanging and base cabinets.
It is still a wreck, we’re prepping meals and drinks on the old worktop which is balanced on sawhorses, the dining room is cluttered with flat packs and hardware (much to Jimi’s delight), and food/dishes/small appliances are scattered hither and yon. But, we can start to see it coming together at long last.
A previous owner — probably the idiot we bought this house from — had render applied to the brick walls around the kitchen and what was then the bath. I had to remove a little to change the size of one of the windows and since it came off relatively easily I went ahead and chipped it all away.
These houses were meant to ‘breathe’ to protect from damp but people with no other recourse (for lack of a damp course) sometimes apply the layer of mortar to act as waterproofing. Here’s what I think happened.
The walls are two bricks deep with a small air gap to allow transpiration. So, outside moisture would rarely have any impact on damp internal walls. But, the quarry tiles that we uncovered in the kitchen were sealed with porcelain tiles so that they could no longer allow ground moisture to pass except at the walls where the tiles stopped. This made the internal walls damp and mouldy. This was also the case, as we found it, under the plastic sheeting beneath the laminates in the dining room (now covered with limecrete-adhered limestone tiles, compatible with making the entire house damp proof).
Rather than get someone reputable to investigate (or, more likely, rather than correcting the source of the problem as we did a couple weeks after taking ownership), she found someone willing to stick this crap on the walls to keep external moisture — remember, this wasn’t even a problem — out of the internal walls. Our damp problem ceased as soon as we removed the porcelain tiles and we have now uncovered a few other nice features like the 90 degree turn rounded brickwork at the corner.
There is some pointing and repairs to do, to be sure. We are also re-routing the gutters to the back drains and reduce the number of pipes emerging by turning the boiler overflow toward the ground and combining the sink and dishwasher overflow. There are breathable masonry paints available to finish the wall (but we are installing a shorter kitchen window to allow a backsplash, so painting will wait until the new brickwork is done).
Saturday morning I had some expensive appliances for the new kitchen being delivered and Jax had an appointment in Olton and had already left for a rail connection when the delivery arrived. I shed myself of that duty and dashed off to the tram with about 3 minutes to spare to make the rail connection with her. But, we met at the Hawthorns and headed out for our Saturday adventures together.
I stayed on the train after she departed and hopped off at Widney Manor then, using the sun and my watch to poor effect, ploughed a serpentine path for 45 minutes then, pulling out my trusty old compass, managed to find my way home albeit through the less-than-optimal-for-running Sparkbrook markets.
So, there it is. A long run instead of working on finishing the house. But, tomorrow is set aside for touching up. the trim and replacing skirting boards. The stuff for installing the extractor hood, induction hob and fan assisted oven, and the dishwasher are ready to pick up on Monday for next weekend. It will take two weeks to get to the south wall tiling in the kitchen but the cabinetry won’t come till the end of August giving us some time to put in the under floor heat piping and retiling the room (we’re turning the tiles 45 degrees to make a diamond pattern but using the originals and the ones we pulled from the dining room and veranda area.
The run was tiring but I kept a decent marathon pace. A thirty miler looms but it will be MUCH slower and have better nutrition.
The lead photo, above, shows the prep of the wood floors ahead of finally (after nearly 3 years) tackling their refinishing. What you see there is coarse (passing through 3mm mesh) sawdust that is raked and compacted into the spacing between the original boards. Then, PVA glue diluted with water (3 H2O : 1 PVA by volume) is poured over the top and allowed to penetrate before the excess is wiped up. Then, very fine sawdust is used to make an even filler atop the coarse layer with more 3:1 glue coverage.
Sanding was essential and a massive struggle. Fighting the belt sander for 5 hours solid in two rooms was the best core- and upper-body workout I’ve had in years. All the shit we had in both rooms had to find temporary homes in the remaining spaces and we wound up living in the nearly finished dining room area:
These turned out really good, I think. The colour is called medium oak but the third coat is just clear due to the colour already getting ‘right’ after two passes:
Finally, as Jackie says, we are wresting a little order from the chaos this refurb has developed into. Final sawdust filling of the landing and the bedroom is planned for tomorrow with the last of the stain and seal going down next weekend but if it turns out half as good as these did then we will be very pleased, indeed.
We were in a hurry, we didn’t know what we were doing, we ran out of materials … all these things resulted in an undulating surface to our dining room and veranda on which we could set any furniture without significant shimming. To be fair, every visitor complemented the floor and made excuses for us like “these old floors are going to be uneven, aren’t they?” The house may be 115 years old but the floor was only 1½ when we started re-levelling it on Good Friday.
To mark the grade, I put down screws in the low places to a height of the highest part of the poorly poured floor. We took up the tiles on the high spots first and then poured the new limecrete over the remaining bits levelling to either the screwheads or the already-high spots.
It is the nature of NHL (natural hydraulic lime) that the binding is slow and goes in two steps: first the development of a water to lime crystal lattice for several days followed by a slow carbonation period of several weeks. To avoid the original problems, we diligently kept the pour floating under water for a few days (one of the reasons we demobbed to Dudley over the Easter weekend).
We made our own tile adhesive — so we would have something breathe-able between the new and old screeds, also breathe-able — out of 1 part NHL to 3 parts sharp sand with a bit of polymer additive to improve flexibility and workability.
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
By mid-May we had all the limestone laid but still hadn’t chosen the tiles for the entrances. (There were issues with the door heights that required either excavation to make room for the thicker limestone or a choice of a much thinner encaustic tile.)
What we eventually came up with — only finishing at the end of May — was a nice pattern that picks up the tan of the limestone and the blues in the living room . . . and may help us decide what to do, eventually, with the kitchen:
It has been a while since I did a refurbishment post but we’ve not finished anything in ages — instead, we’ve had the wood floors, the kitchen, the gardens, and finalising the dining room floor all on the go and creeping imperceptibly forward. The stairs, too, but as we move toward moving a kitten into the house, the items that would suffer from little paw prints have been prioritised.
Back in 2019, we went through this as we stripped out wallpaper and floor paint:
Layers of wallpaper adhesive clung to the plaster leaving pits that eventually needed reskimming:
We eventually gave up on prepping the wood on the stairs for stain and varnish (but we are making progress toward the bedrooms, the landing, and the living room) and decided that a good floor paint would be best. Before the last coat of coconut milk wall paint was applied, I spent an exhausting morning sanding the treads, risers, skirting, and handrail. Going over knots released the odours of pine sap predating women’s suffrage, WWI, and wireless broadcasting:
It may not look it here but the tread surfaces are mercury flat.
Another month passed and we finally settled on the colour — or lack thereof — scheme. One coat per day over the long weekend we just took and we are finally down to touch up and detail work. Looks okay, considering:;
Sick most of Thanksgiving break, we buckled down on the Sunday after to install the new patio doors. The old ones were worse than just hideous PVC but also almost useless (the door opening was smaller than the narrowest dimension of the garden waste bin) and insecure — the sliding door’s rails are outside making it impossible to drop a secondary stay in place and making it easier to remove the door even locked.
At the end of the day, the temperature in the house had dropped to 10 degrees Celsius and was below freezing outside so too cold to fill in the gaps with mortar. Overnight, we got by with old clothing and paper towels stuffed in the up-to-an-inch wide spaces:
We injected mortar the next morning. Plastering in the grouted areas and fitting the draft excluders where the doors mate completed that portion of the job, but now we had to shift the old door frame and doors out to the shed to replace the temporary door fitted to close to house in last summer.
The temporary door came from gutting the kitchen and the rest of the hole for the sliding door frame was covered with plywood. I left no vertical tolerance but horizontally it was a snap to settle into:
So, now the shed has a little more room and it is easier to get to the wee alleyway affected by the building, itself.
The shingles went up one evening after work late last week but with the earlier sunsets (as Summer dies on the table before us) trimming and activation of the bitumen sticky-stuff had to wait a few days.
Jackie got started stripping the new front door which used to be the door to our stairwell in the main house.
We got the walls cladded and the back covered with a temporary door while we await delivery of the patio doors that will free up the sliding glass doors we intend to install at the back.
Progress is slow. We still await the polycarbonate window and there is lots of trim and more coats of paint to do to tart this up but it is functioning as a work shed.
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 
