While my wallet gently weeps
As I was going to be working in the attic and as I was going to be doing it all on my own I followed the sound advice of my pal Don and took a bit of extra sleep in the morning. A more rested Billy meant a safer Billy, the attic work was going to be really rather dangerous, no floorboarding at all and the high ceilings of a Victorian house meant a rather long drop should I fall through the floor.
There was also the problem of getting rather large chipboard floorboards into the attic. The boards are around 2.4m x 60cm, not huge but unwieldy and at 25mm thick they were quite a weight. So getting them through the attic door and safely into the attic was quite the feat. Actually getting a single board from the garage, through the kitchen, up the stairs and safely into the attic was a double feat and it didn’t matter any longer that I still didn’t have any heating as I soon heated up.
My first board and disaster struck, or rather it stuck, my attic door wasn’t big enough and no matter how much pushing and shoving the board would not go into the attic. On realising that it wasn’t going to go into the orifice I tried removing it and found it wedged solidly in the hole. The trouble now was getting the board out without damaging it and also damaging myself. I caught myself hanging off it at one point, not calculating the potential problems should it suddenly come free. Anyway after some pushing and shoving and I managed to dislodge it and move it a couple of inches, a bit more pulling and more movement until it smartly unwedged itself and popped out of the hole. Great but not good, no sheet of chipboard in the attic but spared the embarrassment of having to explain that no work had been done due to a large chipboard floorboard sheet stuck firmly in the loft hatch.
The only solution to this dilemma was by the application of a saw and the widening of the hatch entrance. After some research on the internet I visited my garage and sorted out a nice pair of substantial mahogany planks my Dad had kindly given to me. Strong as steel these would be excellent to temporarily support the joists once I’d cut through them. Just the right length I screwed them into place and sawed out the larger entrance this I then followed by unscrewing the now redundant old – and too small now – loft hatch. This clattered to the landing floor and I now had a large hole into which I could insert large sheets of chipboard.
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Strange thing though was that while I did this I noticed that one of the joists was around an inch lower than the rest…. Very odd but it just hadn’t sunk in at this point why that this could be a problem. Anyway screwing this down I jury-rigged a spacer and plugged this between the supporting mahogany support and the joist and thought nothing more of it.
That afternoon was spent on the internet, I now had to buy lots of timber to finish off the loft entrance and strengthening of the joists surrounding it and also I needed a new loft hatch. A bit of research later and I had a shopping list of timber and a loft ladder and hatch – ok this is all beginning to run away with the budget now.
I hopped into my car and a quick trip to Travis Perkins of Bishop Auckland – who by the way were wonderful – and I had a full order of lots of timber (delivery on Thursday) not only to finish the loft entrance but to allow me to lift the floorboards in the large bedroom – they are sitting an inch too low at one end of the room, I don’t know if I mentioned this but this room was once two rooms, one end being an inch higher than the other, this needed fettling and I now had the timber ordered to do it.
On the way back I also popped into Simpsons Fuel and bought six more bags of those wonderful ovoids.
Back at the ranch it was fire on, pie in microwave and a nice very late lunch.
Afterwards it was back to the back-breaking work of getting the sheets into the attic. Now although the hatch was now more accommodating the problem in hand was still rather problematic. These sheets were heavy, large, the ceiling was high and the ladder I had was a bit wobbly. Anyway after a few attempts I found a tactic that didn’t involve too much danger but this was only after dangerously nearly losing control of the operation on a number of attempts. Eight sheets later and all was good so I jumped into the car and headed over to do my Wednesday baby sit.
Getting over to Anna’s I found Anna’s class was cancelled so after a quick bowl of soup and a cuddle from Izzi I headed back to my now freezing house – hey there’s a great big hole in the ceiling now – and tried to get a bit more work done in the freezing cold attic.
Knackered and bed.