Bored with boards
My hands were once my picture of Dorian Grey, as they aged I’d stay pretty much static.
Now we’re all growing gnarly and old together and my hands are becoming quite rugged. Days spent chiselling away at concrete and manhandling large lumps of timber have had a quite positive effect on their strength and a negative one on their suppleness. Jam jar lids hold no fear for me now, screw tops are unscrewed with aplomb and armed with a pair of gloves most weighty objects are despatched without a bead of sweat being sweated. Sometimes after a day of work they assume a gorilla like cupped posture and feel positively charged with energy, I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but jam jars quiver in my presence.
Anyway a week of work, I’ll try not to go on a detailed expedition, but here’s the synopsis.
Generally lots of work and endeavour and little to show for it, I reckon I had six free days of work, most of the time I put in the hours with twelve hour plus shifts but there were a couple of days were I was either hamstrung by other duties and/or just exhausted and these boiled down to seven or so hours.
What I did on my holidays:
The first Saturday kicked off with some shopping, Screwfix for some bits and bobs, B&Q for some insulation and Tesco for vitals. I spent the afternoon routing the 2.5mm twin and earth I’d bought that morning in preparation for an electrician terminating it at a later date. I put some PIR insulation over the sleeper walls in the flooring and some PIR at the ends of the joists too to protect the roll insulation.
The following week I started rolling out the Knauf Ekoroll into the sections between the joists, the section was 115mm tall but I filled it with two layers of 100mm insulation, I just couldn’t face the 15mm remaining gap if I used one layer of 100mm and 100mm was rather a generous figure for the insulation, it was more like 80mm in practice.
I’d read the precautionary tales about compressing insulation and this reducing its effectiveness but this was only for compressing down, for example putting 100mm into a 50mm gap would be less effective than having the full 100mm all puffed up to its recommended depth. However this was not what I intended as I had a finite 115mm gap, I couldn’t expand from this, 115mm was what I had to work with. Generally the plans was to use two layers of 100mm in this gap, hence I was using 200mm in the available space of 115mm, I didn’t have the luxury of using any more than 115mm, certainly not the full 200mm. So although 115mm compressed wasn’t as good as the full 200mm uncompressed, it was better than the just putting 100mm (80mm??) into the 115mm gap. I knew that the improvement would be negligible but I thought it would be worth it and it was pretty cheap too, especially on the discounted B&Q offer of three rolls for £45.
Three rolls goes a long way, even double layering.
A morning of opportunity was lost to a garage visit, a recall on a fuse that should have only taken the garage ten minutes to fit cost me two hours. On arrival the sales assistant asked whether I fancied a free wash and a valet, I jumped at the chance, although the exterior was sharp and clean the interior had suffered from the car being used as a builder’s truck. A wait of two hours for this rigorous valet turned out to be two hours waiting for an engineer doing spot checks on the car with a fine-toothed comb. Rather than a clean interior I was presented with an estimate for proactive work that should be done on the car and no valet, not even a scented tree. The estimate was for over £2k of work, hundreds for a windscreen crack that was so fine no-one could find it, a wheel re-alignment of £400+ etc. etc. at least their coffee was good, luckily I didn’t have a mouthful of it when they gave me the estimate.
Anyway the insulation when in beautifully and then it was the top subfloor, some chopping up of sheets of spruce plywood and screwing it to the floor joists.
I did this and worked across the room to a suitable break point and temporarily floored out the rest of the room with some loose boards.
The next job was one I wasn’t looking forward to, the end of the room that hadn’t been done was now littered with timber and tools, these needed moving before I could strip it of floorboards, insulate and refit the flooring. This was a big job.
So first job was to tidy out the garage ready for the influx of timber, I simultaneously shifted the insulation from the garage into the house, to free up more space for timber and then I cracked on with the room itself. First I moved the tools across to the newly boarded out section, I then moved a rather hefty pile of chipboard loft boards into the living room, followed by the timber into the garage. The remaining plywood (spruce and hardwood) I then moved to the boarded out section of the room. Simple to write but in practice this took hours, phew. This left the kitchen end of the kitchen diner ready for work.
The first job to tackle in the room was knocking out the fireplace, this would have to be done to allow for a new range cooker but it was also done in order to allow Ray my wonderful builder to inspect the fireplace and see what could be done with it – knock it out entirely or make it into an inglenook for the cooker.
The fireplace came out without a hitch, it was a shame to have to smash it out but I’d offered it for sale without a handful of specialists and no-one had wanted it as:
- They were impossible to remove and not damage
- They were impossible to sell on
- They weighed a ton
- They were out of fashion and ugly bugly
I tried to save a few of the more interesting tiles and mouldings, but even with kid gloves and the gingerly attentions of my finest pry-bars they still cracked and snapped. So high-ho and off to work I go with my sledgehammer and crowbars.
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Smithereens of fireplace later and numerous trips to the rubble pile in the garden and I started on prying up the floorboards.
It’s amazing what one forgets but I hate taking up floorboards, you have to do it without damaging the boards and keeping their tongues and grooves intact is an artform.
In case I’ve not said it before – in my more refined methodology, you should – list alert!!!:
- Work from the tongue side
- Lift using a Roughneck 64640 Demolition And Lifting Bar, see bottom of page for link to item
- Don’t lift too much
- Use a long bladed steel cutting blade in reciprocating saw to cut through the first line of nails
- Lift again using the thingamajig
- Use the long blade to cut through the second line of nails
- Lift out board gently
- Relect on this process and note how many times it went wrong in practice, not least the bit where the blade gets knobbled and bent after hitting a nail end-on rather than cutting it.
Anyway seemingly weeks later one has a pile of floorboards that one has to de-nail and man-handle into the garden to add to the pile of existing timber under the bulging blue tarp.
Once this was done I had a visit from Ray and his grandson David who were here to give me a quote on the chimney breast and putting a soil pipe and door into the under stairs cupboard, hopefully to become a cloakroom.
The chimney breast option was to have an inglenook cut out for the range cooker, Ray said that despite the chimney not strictly supporting anything above it was offering the outside wall something to lean on and it would be best left in place. The soil pipe was good news too, the route wouldn’t take it through my kitchen diner, so this meant I could crack on with the flooring without having to wait for the pipe to be installed.
Ray had had some bad news since his last visit but he was still on top form and full of good ideas and experience, David was his keen self too. I showed them both around what I’d done, the bedrooms were met with a “it’s f**king ‘ellish” from David, I was assured he wasn’t blowing wind up my a**e.
These guys are the best, the quote will be reasonable and the work will be exceptional.
Anyway once done the flooring section now needed tidying up before I could fit any insulation, before this though I needed to do a bit of housekeeping. Generally the house and gardens were in a reckless state so I took a morning to do all my washing and cleaning and a bit of an afternoon to lop down some weeds that were taking over the garden. I now had thistles on the drive that were higher than the bonnet of the car, my house was beginning to look rather unpresentable. So strimmer in hand I got on with the job, a later a circuit with some Roundup to kill the weeds was interrupted by rain.
Once done I got on with the flooring. The first job was remove all the lopped off nails from the joists, I’d tried using a claw hammer and various other nail-grabbing devices in the past but I found it best to simply angle grind them off. So mask, gloves and goggles on and a grinding I went, making short work of the nails.
A bit of a break in the weather allowed me to finish off the weed killing, I followed this with some woodworm treatment of the floor joists. Some of the floorboards I’d removed were full of historical woodworm holes, the joists remained pretty much untouched. I knew Mr. Wormy was dead but I thought it best to give them the once-over with a bottle of spray… just in case.
This done I was pretty much well on the way to starting the insulation, but a few things needed finishing, I’d taken most of the skirting off before I’d started removing the floorboards but some still needed removing under a radiator which necessitated the removal of the radiator which in turn necessitated the draining of the downstairs system. This had to be done anyway as I was going to replace the full circuit with a new manifold based system. Simple enough with isolating valves and a radiator drain pipe but without either there was a bit of a problem.
First I jury-rigged up a connector I’d bought from Screwfix to a pipe I’d found – with a tap on it at the bottom of a radiator spur – to a hosepipe to drain down the system, then I turned every tap I had to off on the thermal store/manifold and any other tap I could find on it’s spider web of pipework I turned the radiator spur tap to on and hey-presto drain-presto, it worked, the system purged and it only purged from the downstairs radiators. Next to put a pair of isolating valves on the feed, so I could isolate the downstairs more conveniently in future.
Another Screwfix sourced pair of full-bore 22mm isolating valve compression fittings to hand and I set about cutting into the downstairs radiator feeds. For easier access I needed to move a pipe that was sitting on top of the 22mm feeds, the conversation in my head went something like this:
“You’ll need to cut that pipe”
“But what is it?”
“Ah it’s only an old radiator pipe from the redundant and decommissioned upstairs radiator circuit”
“But it could be something else”
“Nah, it’s just that radiator circuit, just cut it”
“But you should check it, you should test it”
“Nah just cut it”
Pipe cutter swinging into action I was met with a teeny stream of pressurised water spurting out of the pipe.
Oooooooops
Well electricians tape didn’t work, so turning off the stop-cock it abated, hence it was a cold-water pipe.
All I had to hand was a 15mm single direction coupler, so I fitted it in the direction to allow the cold water supply to work.
Later that day I found that the hot water taps weren’t working downstairs. I’d inadvertently misidentified the pipe, it was a hot water feed, my hot water is fed directly from the cold water mains through a heat exchanger, hence the stop cock stopping the supply.
Oooooooops
Switching the coupler back-to-front and everything was hunky dory again.
Anyway radiators drained, isolation valves fitted I removed the radiator. This radiator weighed tons and all I could do was drag it out to the garage, once finished I retraced my footsteps to find a snail trail of tarry fluid ejected from the radiator that ate another hour into my free time to clean up.
So radiator off I now removed the radiator, I then spent a couple of hours with a wood chisel chopping floorboards in two. These boards actually went under a wall and hence didn’t end at the wall. This was due to them being located where a doorway had been plastered over and they had no natural wall ending. The chisel was awfully hard work but I couldn’t get a saw in close enough to the wall so it all took some doing.
Another day and another job with a chisel, the French doors had been fitted in the kitchen diner and some concrete had been used to create a plinth on the inside. This plinth was useful as a temporary platform but it wasn’t deep enough for me to board over, hence hours spent chipping away with a cold chisel and a big ‘ammer. Not a great job but I did notice my professionalism-ish with a chisel now, I’m getting the touch of a builder. My hands are getting a bit butcher too.
A few other jobs such as cleaning a pile of sand out of the under-floor air vent, removing all the rubble under the floorboards (took ages and many visits to the rubble pile), removing a plug spur, pining the other plug point out of harm’s way, removing a small wall of bricks, cutting other bricks etc. and my week was over.
I had spent some days with my daughter during all this time, but all in all I had six days of rather intensive work. The slacking couple of days had been only seven hours long but the more busy ones had meant over twelve, verging on fourteen hours a day.
All this work and barely nothing to show for it all.