House of Pete and Claire

The same gang of three brothers who did the front bedroom were on the doorstep of houseandpeteandclaire at 0815. They were 15 minutes early and filling the bin with empty Red Bull cans. I like their style.

They said the slight dampness to the right of the window was probably due to inadequate flashing  on the chimney. Having got the plastering done, I still have 83 problems. I’d best look for a roofer as good as these plasterers.

On Friday night I found one of the light pendant fittings was hiding a cavity where all the plaster down the lath was missing. The plasterers fixed it.

I hadn’t had time to sort out the fireplace skirting board before they arrived, so I’ve got extra work to make the join invisible.

Some of the wallpaper had been wanting to come off for some time:

In this room the previous owner’s decorators had stayed true to their policy of wallpapering over everything without caring if it was actually a wall:

Stuffed into the chimney, evidence that the media was just as full of $&!^ forty years ago as it is now:

Used four ties as with the fireplace in the front room. No vent this time, as it’s not actually a chimney, it’s just a narrow gas flue in the internal wall which opens into the loft. The bricks have the base facing the room rather than the side, because the cavity is so shallow.

Used hardwall for the first layer, then ran out of that and did the second with browning.

The picture rail had been removed from this room by the previous decorators, but the floorboard nails were proud of the wall by between 0 and 2mm, and rusty. Tony’s Technical Support Hotline confirmed we can’t skim over those, so I got to work with the angle grinder. There were a lot of sparks. Might have been partly because I was using stone cutting discs.

There’s a technique to cutting in from one side, then down from above and taking advantage of how soft the metal gets when it glows red hot. I had to wear a hat because the sparks were burning my head, and I found this hole in my jumper when I was done. There was a huge amount of dust too, afterwards I had to leave the room for 10 minutes to let it settle.

Removing the wallpaper was harder work than the other rooms – one pass to get the top layer off which was easy, then using a rasp to break up the paint over the lining paper so it could be soaked and scraped off, then a final pass to scrape off any remaining lining paper. I started the room on Sunday morning and finished on Friday night, just in time for the plasterers who are skimming it right now. During that time I also did 60 hours of databases and travelling, but pretty £^$&!%# much NOTHING else. That’s browning plaster filling the holes created by the grinder in the photo below. Had to replace a piece of the window reveal down to the brickwork as it was badly cracked – probably by putting in the windows.

The wardrobe was to have a high rail running the full width, and a low rail running 2/3 width, so that clothes could hang full length. I had an idea, and some left over oak worktop…

Fitted the blinds and moved in:

There was some damage to the bottom of this door where I undercut it unevenly when tiling the bathroom, so I glued on a thin piece of wood (actually part of the original door which I had kept) and used screws to hold it in place as the glue set. Then used the 2-part filler on the gaps, giving a smooth finish after sanding.

Painting doors in the shed doesn’t really work. There’s too much dust even after vacuuming. Also insects. And the paint takes ages to dry and cure – after 1 day it was still wet, and after 3 days I picked up the door and the paint film split under where my thumb gripped it. There was cursing.

So this is going to get painted again eventually. Used Johnstone’s water based primer undercoat and Johnstone’s satin finish solvent.

Used new hinges too, which meant two of the three screw holes for the old hinges needed to be refilled. The old hinges were choked up with paint.

Working in the evening on Tue and Wed I got the rest of the paint off the door with the heat gun and some folded sandpaper on the detail. The 2 part wood filler worked brilliantly. Need to apply quickly though, it’s unusable after 10 minutes.

I started to work on this in the yard, but it started to rain…

Hardboard removed:

Escaping the weather:

That’s another coat of supermatt on the ceiling and front wall, and Dulux “ivory” on the other walls:

Didn’t want to risk cracking the ceiling below by removing this concrete. It’s above the TV…

First coat onto new plaster is mixed with more water than normal: