Bank Holiday Weekend
Bank Holiday Weekend, wohooo, three days to party and have a good time. Well that may have once been the case so let’s start again.
Bank Holiday Weekend, wohooo, two days of intensive DIY and one day to see my lovely daughter (wohooo). Now don’t get me wrong I’m not being facetious I really do love working on the house, I don’t know if I’m getting to be an old fart or not but in a way I do prefer working to partying till I drop. “In a way” that is J
Anyway plenty of time to get things done, I worked till I dropped, one day of 17 hours and the other – well it was a school night – only 14 hours of work. I find that although I do get a lot of work done but once you stand back and survey the work there’s not that much to show for it. This I’ve always found with the prep’ work, once everything is done then the rest of the work just falls into place and a room suddenly comes together.
The intention of this weekend was to get the final half of the subfloor completed and I would have but there were some problems with floor that held me up. Basically the floor is a little out of kilter, nothing dramatic but the sleeper walls and end support walls had suffered over the years. Not only had the supports dropped but wooden supports had decayed too and this all needed work. Researching around and my preferred method of packing with slate was still popular and as I had a garage full of slate it made sense to adopt this method. So spirit level to hand, angle grinding slate to fit and then cementing into place it all took the entire half of a day to complete this job.
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A joist too had a few problems, it was in two halves and had been nailed badly together, this needed to be disassembled then bolted together with large coach bolts. One end also wasn’t in great shape and the previous builder had nailed a bit of wood to the side to allow some bracing, I supplemented this with some more structural timber heavily bolted to the problematic joist.
This all now done I then got on with refitting some of the DPC I had to remove in order to fit the packing, I then lined up the joists so they wouldn’t now cover the air vent and I nailed temporary bracing to them so they wouldn’t move while I got on with fitting the subfloor.
Anyway a day was up just doing this – along with a visit to Screwfix and Tesco as I needed fixings and food too – still it was sound groundwork and would pay dividends in the future.
The next day and generally it was time to crack on with fitting the subfloor, more crawling around in the earth pinning insulation and plywood to the bottoms of the joists in a teeny space. The space at one point got so restricted that I had to fit one of those noodles to my electric screwdriver that allows one to drill around bends, I didn’t expect much but it worked a treat.
At one point I had a visit from Anna and Izzi, Izzi had just been to a party and was in her party finest, so I was really shocked to see her take a tumble in my brickyard of a family room. She got straight up though, dusted herself down and said she was fine, aww, she was all covered in soil I felt so proud of the little trooper.
Anyway I pressed on all day, dozens of other jobs springing up where there had only been one, in the end I managed to get four strips of subfloor and insulation fitted, I only stopped once my electric screwdriver gave up the ghost and demanded recharging. Not a bad couple of days but I must get this floor done soon.