Fantastic three day weekend
A fantastic three day weekend, two days of work and an entire day to see my lovely daughter.
I should have prepped better on the Thursday evening, I turned out of bed early and after a swift breakfast my first hours were spent sorting out the kitchen, sorting and putting my washing in the machine, catching up on mail, chopping up lots of logs, emptying the car of wood, putting the car back together etc. All things I could have done last night, but was too cold, lazy and knackered to do.
My logging is getting better, every time I swing my axe I think things get a little more accurate and deadly. Infact I turned out quite the bundle of wood this time, inflamed by my fuel frenzy I cut a chase down to Simpsons Fuels and bought five bags of ovoids to supplement the timber. I reckon ovoids/coal and wood are the best mix, logs tend to burn quickly and ovoids keep the fire steaming hot for the subsequent log refuelling of my stove. Not cheap though, six quid a bag and I tend to get through a bag every couple of days. Hopefully the springtime weather will mean that this is my last purchase of coals for a little while.
Anyway once I got these necessary jobs out of the way it was on with the skirting boards. The first job was trying to salvage some bits that had broken in two on removal. I find with ancient skirting board the shorter the length then the more likely it is to break. In this case the broken boards were only a few inches long but represented the fiddly bits around the chimneybreast. More often than not I would have simply used these bits as firewood and used my morticing skills to produce a replacement, however as the chimney wasn’t a perfect ninety degrees and as the joint was a mixture of butt joint and an angle I decided to try to salvage the board.
I rooted around in my fixings box and came up with a pair of L-shaped brackets, using these and some wood glue I managed to fix both bits of wood back together. This turned out quite a quick job, a lot quicker than the job I’d undertaken in finding these wooden jigsaw bits in the piles of scrap wood I’d amassed. Anyway they didn’t look too tidy once glued and screwed but I knew with a bit of work, some filling, a bit of smoke and mirrors and I could get them looking cracking again.
Anyway first off I tried using Grip Fill to fit the skirting to the brick wall between the bathroom and bedroom. This seemed like a good initial test for the adhesive as the bricks provided a better purchase than the sandstone of the external walls.
While applying the adhesive I noticed a signature on the back of one of the boards, so I added my own and a date too.
So adhesive applied liberally and I offered the skirting up to the wall – this was after carefully marking where it should be positioned after I’d pre-tested the skirting with its sister corner skirting piece – I pushed it firmly down and all seemed well till I tried pushing in one end and the other end popped off. Not good.
Now perhaps it was because I’d not applied enough adhesive or because I’d faffed around too much with it but it just didn’t work. This called for more serious fixings, so it was onto the hammer-in-fittings. Basically I predrilled through the skirting and into the wall with a No. 6 masonry drill and then I put in the full nail and nylon plug assembly and hammered it home. Bingo, it worked, one bit of skirting firmly fitted to the wall with little fuss.
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Well a bit of fuss as one discovers odds and sods as one goes along:
- These fixings aren’t 100% reliable, sometimes they just don’t work, I don’t know if it’s because you hammer into a weak point, or just because you’re hammering into some crumbly stone, well sometimes they just don’t work. So in this instance, pull ‘em out with some needle nosed pliers and do it again somewhere else. No great problem though, you’ll be filling lots of holes later.
- Hammering them in can be a bit like hard work. I like a good hammering but sometimes you’ll find yourself really belting them home to get them in. Not a bad thing as they fix rock-solid but miss the head and you can seriously damage your skirting, in fact not missing the head and you can still split ancient skirting as it does tend to be a bit brittle. My advice is place them a bit further in from the edge don’t put them right on the edge of skirting and place them as close to the middle (top to bottom) as you can muster.
- Countersink the pre-drilled hole. Even though you’ll be banging them in like Thor in bad temper you’ll not get them to sink below the surface and if you attempt this then you’ll probably split the skirting. I’ve lost my lovely countersink in a fatal attic boarding up under the floorboards escapade but I found that a larger drill head managed to sink a nice hole for the screw head very nicely. In fact I think I preferred this to the usual method and as I’d be filling in the hole later it didn’t matter that the head wasn’t level with the wood surface, just as long as it wasn’t proud I was happy.
- I prefer to take the screw out of the nylon plug before I do anything, I pop the nylon plug home and tap it fully into place with a mallet before pounding the screw in with a hammer.
Anyway the skirting proved to be a bit problematic. Firstly the skirting wasn’t complete, for instance there hadn’t been any skirting previously across the fireplace (that I’d sealed up) so I had to find some in the garage I’d salvaged and I mitred it and make it fit. Some skirting was for some reason a few millimetres short in height of the other skirting and I glued and made packing to sit underneath it, I didn’t have to do this as the carpeting would hide it, but it didn’t take long and once I applied the paint and filler it would look like a solid continuous bit of skirting – it made me happy anyway.
Time passed and more challenges, there was a bit of skirting too tall too and I had to cut it with a handsaw the full length to get it to sit right. There was also a bit of skirting that fell ¾ of an inch short of the door architrave. This wasn’t my design, the fitter who’s initially fitted the skirting had done it this way. I tried to cut a very short bit of skirting to fill it in, this shattered each time I did it so I chopped up a bit of MDF and using a chisel I fashioned it to fit into the gap and approximate the shape of the skirting, a nice bit of whittling.
There was even an unusual bit too, an entire run of skirting had to be removed and refitted after I’d screwed it to some wooden runners. This should have been easy as I didn’t need the elaborate hammer-in fittings just standard screws. Thing was once the skirting was fitted it just wasn’t vertical so I had to fit little 5mm inserts to every joist to bring the wood I was fixing, to level to the wall that the skirting was butting up to.
Anyway by now it was getting onto twelve hours in the saddle but I still needed to get the filling done so it would be dry for the morning. Wood filler for the screw holes, cracks and woody imperfections and easi-fill for all the bits of plaster around the skirting that had pulled off when I’d removed the skirting. In fact I used the easi-fill in place of the decorators caulk one would normally use to neaten up the tops of skirting board, I felt I got a neater finish.
Today I learned one important lesson: DO NOT DECORATE UNTIL YOU’VE DONE THE FLOORING, REMOVED THE SKIRTING AND RE-APPLIED IT….. YOU IDIOT. This is similar to the lesson I learned about coving.
Once I’d finished (11:30 at night, erk) it all looked a complete mess, skirting of different colours around the room, dotted with stains and holes and little imperfections, with unfinished wet filler to boot, it really did look like Frankenstein’s monster, a proper dog’s dinner. Still on getting to bed on Friday I surveyed all my work and it was good, I knew with a little work I could make it all pretty and I knew that it would be original salvaged skirting.
The next morning and up and at ‘em and straight into sanding. Down on the floor with a palm sander I set about the wood filler and the easi-fill. Bish bash bosh and it was starting to look good.
Now rather than apply a Satinwood finish to the woodwork I decided to put a matt undercoat on. This would cover the filler in the walls and then basically just whiten up and prime the skirting. I knew I would be applying Satinwood later but I also knew that this room would be a workshop for a couple of weeks while I sorted out the other bedroom, so if I spent time making lovely shiny skirting it might prove frankly a pointless exercise after I’d bumped and bashed it with timber from the other room. It could wait and I could do both the dado and the skirting at the same time just before I got the carpet delivered.
Anyway even with the matt on it looked a billion times better than it did the night before. All the filler had worked well and the little wooden inserts and imperfections, though visible on very close inspection, were invisible to the naked eye.
Now the little radiator.
Another simple lesson: DON’T PUT DOWN THE FLOORBOARDS TILL YOU’VE FULLY TESTED THE RADIATOR(S)…. YOU PRANNIT.
A simple job or so I thought.
A bit of compression jointing, a bit of nipping up, chrome legging and the radiator was fitted. I opened the valves on the manifold, slackened off the air bleed on the radiator, lots of bubbling from the top up tank and whistling of air and a couple of minutes later I had a fully filled radiator. Lunchtime methinks, I thought, a good job done.
A short lunch later and I stepped up to the radiator and tested it for heat and to my surprise there was not a single extra degree of centigrade at all, nada, nein Fahrenheit.. etc. it just wasn’t hot.
Anyway that did for my next four hours as I explored every solution I could find. I even went to Screwfix and bought a bleed valve and a hose and vented lots of hot water out of the window trying to get the thing to work. I even went to the last return connection on the radiator – thinking it might be a broken radiator valve – and slackened it off, only to find a nice flow of water there too. Wet and ever-so-slightly miffed I figured it was either the return pipe (now encased under the floor) was kinked or blocked or there might be an air-lock lurking somewhere in the system.
That was it anyway, I’d done enough DIY for the day so I decided to get my sorting hat on and emptied all the rooms upstairs of tools, screws, nails, wood, rubbish etc. At one point I entirely cleared out the little front bedroom, swept it and labelled up all the access panels in the room. I then diligently put the screws in the right screw boxes, the screwdrivers back into their respective holes in their box and repeated the process with the drills and any other orphan bit of kit I could find. It took a while but by the end of the day I was satisfied I’d managed to do one more job after treading water for so long on the radiator.
The big room still needed a major tidy but that could wait till next week when I started work on it.