My Christmas holiday
Two weeks and a handful of days to work on the house over My Christmas Holiday, minus around six days for New Year and Christmas duties and you have a bundle of days to do lots of work.
Subscribe to My Dream House by Email
So what did I achieve with brutal early mornings, getting up in the pitch black and cold of my house, working through till midnight with only a bath and a bed as a reward for a day’s chores? Well very little despite all my superhuman efforts and endless enthusiasm for the project. The intention was to get the family room finished or near-as-dammit finished, I even put together a schedule (I’ll dig that out for a laugh) called the fifteen days of Christmas, which although longer than I had available, was a reasonable under-estimate of the jobs in hand. I did punch my card on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve working through until six in the evening, so where did all the work go to?
I know that jobs generally do take longer than one estimates but this was ridiculous, the amount of effort I was throwing around with so little to show for it was quite unsettling. Even my ever patient wonderful parents were beginning to seem to be less comprehending of the effort involved and the lack of results. Normally everyone else is quite sceptical of my work ethos but they’re very familiar with ringing me on an evening to find me exhausted having thrown a bucket of sweat at some laborious activity. I’m sure it’s just my paranoia but paranoid me was detecting a modicum of scepticism in their communications.
I’m just being paranoid, they’re really very lovely and very understanding.
Could it be my work rate, hmmm, it could be a little of that. I can be a bit pedantic when doing a job but I don’t see myself as slow, sure I’m no way as fast as an experienced builder/carpenter… but apart from the inevitable pencil hide and seek game I play every half an hour, well apart from that I’m no slouch. So what the buggery is it? Well I don’t know, I think it’s a lot of things but generally it’s me underestimating a job and it’s me not having a partner to work with. Basically an extra pair of hands will double the speed at which a job can be done (at least) but it also gives more incentive to get jobs done and it also is an extra pair of eyes and dozens of – at least – braincells to correct something before it goes wrong.
Anyway I wished I’d scribbled down on a piece of paper what I did each day but I didn’t, so I’ll offer up a brief appraisal of the work done as well as my memory allows me to do.
Looking at my last post I seem to have gotten to the stage where walls had been filled and a mist coat had been applied. Well since then more coats of paint have been applied in their final colours to walls, to dado rails and to coving. Coving has been further improved with some work to the original coving in the living room half of the family room and the ceiling has been re-filled and re-sanded and re-painted. Lots of lovely work has been done with a brush and the room is looking a million dollars for it.
The end walls around the bay window were painted with a coat of Dulux “Thimble Case” paint, being masked with tape from the main Dulux “White Cotton” walls and the Dulux “Timeless” ceilings. I finalised these end walls with a second coat, removed the masking tape and touched up the bits where the low-tack masking tape had been too tacky and removed the paint underneath. Finishing these walls would allow the radiators to be fitted, the final coat of paint being necessitated by hanging of the radiator, the paint obviously needing to be finished before radiators could be hung.
The new rad’s are two tall (1800mm x 495mm) triple column radiators for the walls either side of the bay window supplemented by a narrower radiator to be hung on the wall just inside the back door. They weighed a ton…
This was part of the single person problem, the radiators were a bit of a handful for one person to hang, mark up, drop down, adjust, hang, mark up, drop down etc. so what should have been a couple of hours work dragged on to five hours per radiator. In the end it took a grand total of three days to fit the three radiators, getting each of them straight was a nightmare. Further to the nightmare were the fittings provided, the anchor bolts were useless and I spent ages trying to get them right, in the end I discarded them and used some very heavy duty rawl plugs and hex bolts I’d bought to fix an outside drainpipe.
There was also the extra added problem of chiselling out a course for the radiator pipes in the walls, then fitting all the elbows, abrading the chrome (allowing the compression joints to get a grip on the chrome pipes) and just getting the awkward buggers to fit perpendicular the wall. This was a lot more difficult than it sounds but it was made a lot simpler by having my wonderful SDS drill and chisel attachment, without this I could have been there days longer chipping away at the stonework with a hammer and chisel.
In the end though the rad’s looked marvellous, I’ve still not fully filled and painted over channelling but I have put in a layer of bonding plaster. So why the hecky-thump did it take three days at only five hours a pop, well first there were a couple of evening of fatherly duties and then there was the fact that the radiators blinking wouldn’t work when I pushed the start button. The first radiator filled happily with water but never got hot, the second was the same and the third likewise. I tried everything, I had valves on and offed, I lifted floorboards and found an offending valve switched off, I switched it on, but still nothing. I lifted more boards, I undid compression joints, I squirted water around the rooms, I did everything but hours of work later and still not a single hot radiator.
I had resigned myself to lifting all my carefully fitted subfloor panels to find the probable offending kinks in the pipe and I’d even gone so far as to lift some of the more obvious and likely floorboards until… Well one can’t put this delicately, but while sitting on the toilet I had a Eureka moment.
Why were all the radiators displaying exactly the same symptoms?
All of them had filled, all of them hadn’t warmed up and my further investigations had rustled up: it seemed that in all cases it was the “flow” pipe that was jammed and that the radiators had filled by way of the “return” pipes. Surely to have the “flow” not flowing on all three radiators would have been a bit of a coincidence, well I wasn’t going for that, I must have missed something.
Eureka moment two…
Hang on, apart from the individual circuit isolation valves on the manifold aren’t there a set of flow meters there too, one for each circuit.
Perhaps the flow meters are switched off too.
Once my ablutions were complete I ran down the stairs and straight into the under-stair cupboard that housed my manifold. A quick twist of each of the flow meters and each of them popped up to the welcome sound of the glugging of water swimming through the pipes. Five minutes later and three happy radiators warmed into life, “it’s alive” I ventured at the top of my lungs.
So what next, hmm the main tongue and groove flooring to cover my subfloor, well that should only take three or so days.
Wrong, six days later and it’s still not done.
It’s a big room y’know, not enormous but big, a lot of wood to fit down, a lot of wood to angle around wiggly bits and a lot of wood to find.
I’ve gone through this in the past, when one removes floorboards there’s a bit of waste. Woodworm and rotten timbers account for some of the spoils but general buggering up of boards while removing them accounts for many more, in fact most of the boards lost are cracked when trying to pry them loose of their Victorian brad nail bonds.
Add to this too that I made the mistake of storing the wood in the garden under a tarp in perhaps the wettest weather to ever darken these shores. So another nail in the front room coffin was accounted for in drying out a huge pile of soggy boards, to facilitate this latticed piles of wood appeared in the room, the new radiators and a dehumidifier were used to drain them dry but in the end there were still some sodden boards that were refusing to dry out.
So a lack of boards and time spent mucking around with woodpiles and routinely emptying buckets of water from my dehumidifier. This was proving to be a large problem.
Working my way slowly across the room it took me three days to get past the halfway point and once I’d got there I realised I was almost out of boards. I then spent hours trawling the internet for someone with a good set of 25mm pitch pine boards but they were expensive, they were a long way away and generally they were either not as thick (having been planed smooth) or dodgy (having not been planed smooth but being full of cracks and sitting outside in the rain). Prices ranged from £25 per m2 to £50, this was money I couldn’t afford and the effort to get the right boards and to get them delivered seemed unlikely too.
The only option I had left was one I wasn’t keen on exploring. I had already pilfered the remaining boards from the small bedroom at the back of the house but there was still a large stock of boards in the living room. The living room being the only room I had where I could sit down and watch TV and have cake. The living room being a furnished room with oodles of furniture to shift single-handedly and the only non-bedroom room I could call sanctuary.
Still there it was staring me in the face, just about the right amount of boards, gratis too, in the hardest room to get at them, in the room I didn’t want to disturb. But there it was, my only potential solution… I say “potential” as this plan fully relied on me being able to get the boards up without much waste and there was only “just about” the right amount of boards if I salvaged a good percentage of them. I just couldn’t afford to damage any in removing them if I wanted to finish the family room.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWHYKIdqOpU[/embedyt]
With this in mind I referred to my previous tips on removing boards, generally it ended with a footnote, a nod to a suggestion from my college’s 3D technician, who’d ventured that generally people remove boards with a hammer and a punch. A little bit of research on the internet didn’t raise many more helpful results so I decided on giving the hammer and punch method a go. Anyway I’d spent a lot of time de-nailing boards with said hammer and punch, so I was pretty handy in their use, hey I could do this.
So a whole day was set aside to get this done, it really wasn’t something I was happy about doing, just starting and finding a jumping off point was hard enough. I searched around a bit, a couple of access panels brutally chipped out by whomever fitted the original radiators indicated the direction of the tonguing an grooving, my start point was to be near the window – as one works from the tongue side across to the groove side in levering out a board. Luckily in the window there was a bit of rotten timber where water ingress from the previously badly flashed bay window had leaked. This could be hacked out for no loss, so a bit of reciprocating saw work and there was a keyhole into the floor.
Big hammer, punch, reciprocating saw, jemmy and a big pair of builders gloves and I was off. Whack, whack, whack… etc. with the hammer and a nail could be persuaded to go through the timber, or the head would break or crumble, or a hole would be created that the nail head could pass through, all were positive results. Each board had generally one or two big bad brad nails per joist, sometimes sixteen per board, the heads were mostly well-hidden but easily found by my now experienced nail-finding eyes. So try to imagine how hard this is, you hit that punch with as much power as you can muster, you narrowly avoid pulverising your hand while doing it (I only missed once, ouch) and you have to do it in a cold room, perched on a joist, with furniture piled up around you. You only have to do this hundreds of times and each unyielding nail taking oodles of knocks to prise free the nail, it is pretty aerobic. Once you’re happy you’ve cleared all the nails in a board then you then prise up the board with the jemmy, listening attentively for any cracking. Once you’re happy you then wiggle the board free, all this while slowly moving the contents of the room out, up/down, onto spare chipboard etc. to make way for your scavenging as you move slowly across the room.
It was pretty awful work, I decided to liberate six rows at a sitting and generally this took three to four hours per shift. By the end of the day the boards were all out, the room was upside down, I was spent and covered in sweat and dust but I could happily say that I’d probably salvaged over 90% of the boards.
The next day was half spent just moving the room back into some shape to make a room where I could still eat my breakfast and watch a bit of TV once in a while, I barely had the energy to do much else. However, during that day a blizzard broke out and knowing my food and coal situation a mercy dash was made to the local Tesco superstore and my coal merchant, a couple of hours later I returned to a now snowless Copley, great.
Anyway I now had enough wood, or so I estimated anyway. Slowly working across the room, now fitting wood the boards were being eaten at a surprising rate, the family room seemed wider than the old living room especially in the alcove around the French doors. It wasn’t looking good and on my final day of work I made a superhuman effort and found myself a few hours short of finishing off the available boards but I now estimated that I would fall short if I only used these living room boards. Plan B though… there were still lots of shorter boards I could employ that could be positioned under the intended kitchen units. I’d used short boards in the past, they looked just as good and as I had a subfloor there were no issues with them not being as supportive. There were also a brace of boards that were on the cusp of drying out, so fingers crossed I will be able to get the room finished with the selection of boards I had.
So again… enormous amounts of efforts, endless hours worked and little to show for it all.
I really do still enjoy this, I love standing back and admiring the work I’ve done, it’s so rewarding. I’m just very aware that I’m in debt up to my eyeballs, money has run out and I’m employing every final ounce of finance to get the job finished. The problem is doubled by not having the time to do it.
It’s always the same story too, all my creaking joints, all my strains and pains have been removed by hours of banging away at little bits of wood or by manhandling radiators onto walls. My work ethos has been tuned, I now have my day planned, I now have my tools and uniform organised, I’m ready for anything… and then I have to return to the day job and start the process all again in two months time when I next get a fortnight off.
Still… I’ll soldier on.
Subscribe to My Dream House by Email