The final chase
Well as I put it last week I was taking a few contemplative days to see my old mucker John off last week.
Not wanting to hijack a blog page in remembrance of John I still thought I’d briefly tell you what went on.
My old lovely acquaintance and ex’ pardner Amanda had been busy and had found out the time and location of the funeral and we’d agreed to meet on the day at the crematorium. I’d arrived early and walked down into the crematorium I heard a voice and turned round to see Amanda emerging from her car.
Outside the crematorium, we kicked our heels and it took around ten minutes before anyone else arrived with another couple wandering around the graveyard. A little later they came over and we discussed the rather thin attendance, the couple reckoned that the slim turnout was due to a party in John’s shop prior to the funeral, everyone would turn up at once. Anyway, we waited… and waited.
At the allotted time and still, no one was there apart from the four of us, I turned to Amanda.
“Are you sure we’ve got the right place?”
Amanda whisked out her phone.
“Look, here it is, Stranton Crematorium, Tuesday, 1:30, the 17th of November”
“Erm, you do know it’s the 10th”
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the pub 🙂
Heck, another holiday went without an inch of work being done. It was good to see Amanda again anyway.
Sheesh
So apart from a funeral without the main party in attendance what did I get done?
Friday and I decided to get a bit of work done, I’d been busy with my little girl the other nights so this was the only evening I had to work. The only jobs left before plastering and painting were to finish off a plug socket and a light switch.
The plug took moments as it was only a plaster wall and meant a little sawing and bunging in of a plastic back-box. It did, however, take a bit of education first, I’d only done roughy-toughy metal back-boxes in solid walls, I was expecting it to be hard-ish at least, I put it off till the end of the day, however, it turned out to be a doddle.
The light switch was a completely different state of affairs, a four gang two-way affair. I will elaborate, a four gang switch is simply a light switch with four switches. A two-way switch is where a single light is operated by two switches. For example, imagine that bulb on the upstairs landing which is operated by the light switches both upstairs and downstairs, that’s a two-way switch circuit. Well basically all four gangs of this four gang switch would be two-way, erk, and also the switch was on a wall where there was very little access to it, double-erk.
I knew this was the job that needed to be done before the weekend, it was one of those jobs the stuck in the throat and one that would stop me from doing work. It was an excuse to procrastinate, if I had this jobbie hanging over me on Sunday morning then there would be a likelihood that I’d not leap out of bed into my overalls and kick on with all the jobs in hand.
It needed to be done on Friday night, I need it to be the final chase.
So the first job was to tunnel out a section of the wall to cater for the double 37mm deep metal back box, tunnel out a chase up to the ceiling and drill a hole in the wall to the porch and in the ceiling too. Lots of hammering and cutting and dust and sweat later and the box was in place, the hole was drilled and the channel was chased with a nice deep groove for all the two and three core (you need three core for two-way switches and boy is it thick) and earth cable.
[doptg id=”61″]
Next, I had to get into the bathroom and start lifting floorboards in order to find a route for the cable to the main corridor upstairs. This would have been easy but unfortunately, that section of flooring was under the planned walk-in shower floor and this was currently a repository for all the junk metal and other ephemera I’d removed from the house, it was my lazy-boy dumping spot. So a bit of pushing and shoving and a steady pile of metal was removed and piled up downstairs and another pile of random junk was arranged for the bin men (yes they are men, I’ve checked) to take on their next visit.
The boards where I calculated I would need access were luckily already cut and loose so lifted them, returned downstairs, crossed my fingers, and drilled through from the downstairs chase into the ceiling above. Luck and some steady measuring prevailed and on returning upstairs there was a nice neat hole right in the middle of the section of flooring I’d removed.
One by one I poked cables through the ceiling, 2x three core and 2x two core, once through the ceiling they were electrician’s tape taped to a long bit of plastic I’d pushed through the floorboards, and using this as a plastic probe I then dragged back the probe and the attached cables through the flooring into the corridor. Each cable was then methodically double-labeled (yes double! I’d had labels come off other cables and I thought this would be annoyingly pedantic, so I did it 🙂 ) This took ages and there was also the not too small task of poking another pair of three core cables through a hole through the wall I’d drilled earlier with my extra-long SDS drill, this was to control lights in the outside porch and the exterior light. Again these were coursing their two-way way to a two gang two-way switch in the outside porch.
I’m getting very confused now.
This took all night and to be honest on further reflection this may have taken some part of the Wednesday evening too. So I’m even more confused now.
Anyway, what I do remember is that Saturday was a day of comparative rest with my little girl, we visited my folks house and spent a lovely day together there and then in the evening we braved an awful deluge mixed with a smattering of fog to deliver ourselves to her other gran’s house which is posed even further into the wilds of the Pennines than even my own wildly placed house. We had a lovely evening with Izzi perching herself on the corner chair and telling us at length about her boyfriends before I put her to bed with a few stories in her little bedroom there at her Nan’s. Back in the car and back to my freezing house to catch up on some sleep before…..
Next day though I realised to amazement that two of the 3 core cables I’d poked through the ceiling were too short. Boy do I hate routing these cables and worse still I hate having to do jobs over again, so with a heavy heart I started and within ¾ of an hour, I had the new – longer – cables in place and all tidily labeled.
The next job was to bond plaster the back-box into place and then plaster in the cable chase for the four gang light switch. There were also two more chases to finish off, one was rather involved as I’d removed surplus plaster that had cracked around the chase, so this took some time. So oodles of plaster later I then need more filling after I’d hacked out the wooden wedges the dado rails had been attached to, these were pretty solidly in place and it took some wild drilling to get them out, they didn’t go down peacefully though and the holes they left needed big dobs of plaster to fill them up.
A bit more plaster was applied to some various areas and once done I surveyed my work and the room was finally ready for finishing.
Now as I’ve pointed out before, I only have myself to get on with all these jobs, along with these jobs comes the housework, cooking, etc. This day although fully booked with DIY was also liberally sprinkled with a couple of meals, washing, dish-washing, cleaning, and my personal dusty ablutions at the end of it all.
So although I was ready to plaster I had the housework and my bodywork to work on, I also had to find a place to store a pile of metalwork that had found its way downstairs after clearing out the future shower area. Couple this to needing to get the fire on, to chop and cut wood and I also needed desperately to tidy out the family room (I couldn’t face tripping over a tool again, especially not with a pail of paint or plaster) and finally I also needed to sort out rubbish, to generally clear up bags worth of rubble and to sweep the floors of all that flipping dust.
So once I got around to plastering it was getting into the evening.
Normally when presented with an uneven wall I go at it with some Easi-fill and I fill and sand, then repeat, then repeat until I get a smooth even finish. Well quite frankly though I’m pretty brilliant at this, it does take time and sanding is a pretty awful job to do. So searching around YouTube I came across an easy fix, why not skim coat the wall? Well skim coating involves skill in liberal doses and the use of lots of plaster in liberal doses, plaster not being sand-able (well not easily sand-able) once it’s been put on lumpily by an amateur such as myself.
I had plastered the two fireplaces upstairs and I was reasonably confident I could do a good job but still, I wasn’t happy about doing large walls and ceilings, especially ceilings. So trawling around YouTube I came across a solution, skim coat the walls but rather than using plaster use the much more forging jointing compound plaster, such as my favourite filling medium, Easi-Fill.
It looked so easy on all of the videos, people stroking it on with gusto, whole squares of metres of compound applied in a single sweep, a bit of doodling, and all imperfections disappearing under the hardened edge of a Marshalltown trowel or jointing knife.
I’d been won over to this idea weeks back and had bought a Marshalltown jointing knife in anticipation of doing the work the next weekend, or was that the weekend after that, or perhaps the week following. Anyway now was the much anticipated time, I mixed up a batch of pre-ordered (some weeks back too) Easy-Fill and smeared it onto the wall with the jointing knife. Rather than the liquid shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhllllllip of the YouTube videos, mine went on more with a leaden thump, rrrrrrburp. Rather than a whole metre area being covered in one go mine covered an entire Imperial foot. Not put off though I pursued the idea for an entire wall, I think I got better as I pressed on, the weals in the finish weren’t great though, still, according to some YouTube posts this was the “scratch coat” and it was to be expected, the next coat was the one for the finish.
Soooo at the end of the day, I had a rather white drying lump of a wall, once it was dry and once I had returned from my second week of funeral duties I would give it a second coat, and then hopefully it would be a polished wonder to behold. There’s still another fall-back if this doesn’t work, I can sand it to a fine even polished surface, this somewhat defeats the object and I do hate sanding, but it is a fallback.