Only a smidgen
Only a smidgen of time to work this week but I did my best.
Saturday – Only a smidgen
Only the Saturday of the weekend free and any night I could muster and motivate myself to work after a day at work were available.
So Saturday, an early start and straight on with the end wall downstairs. This wall was the one that was drying out, I’d recently applied splodges of Thompson’s damp seal paint and things were going to plan. Well they were almost going to plan, the wall was now looking very dry and the stains had been removed and any remnants covered but there was a problem in the chunkiness of the paint. As I’d mentioned in my previous post the paint was gloopy and this gloopiness had ran somewhat, the removal of the stains too had provoked some pitting too. So what to do… well first to get rid of the stark whiteness of the Thompson’s paint so I decided to paint the whole of the end wall including the bit under and above the little window and the side of the chimney breast. A liberal coat of Cotton White was applied and this covered up some of the minor indentations and once this was all dry this would allow me to stand back and further address the situation.
Once this painting was done I ventured into the garden with a tub of root/stump killer for the remaining tree/bush stumps I had produced during last week’s pruning. I would have done some stump killing last week but my store of stump killer had been exhausted or lost and so some shopping was needed.
I’m not big on killing trees, I remember when I was a little boy, there was a wonderful house in Verner Close in Hartlepool, it was enveloped by trees, it really had something of the Addams Family about it and being a rather creepsome little kid I loved it. Later in life I visited Verner Close again and found the house standing proud freed of its vegetation, I was rather put aback and couldn’t understand why they’d done this.
Even now I’d still like a house shrouded in trees and I would have kept my wonderful orchardy moat if there hadn’t been problematic problems. Firstly there were trees actually within inches of the house, those that weren’t around the house circled a manhole cover which housed my source of all things drainage. There were some lovely trees too among them too, so it was a shame to have to cut them down, it was a shame too that the majority of the better placed trees were Leylandii. I don’t like Leylandii!
So once I’d followed the arborist’s recommendations and the associated tree-chopping stipulations of the mortgage, once the trees too close to house and drains had been removed and the Leiylandii too had also been felled I was left with one lovely and very senior Ewe tree, that was it, apart from a smattering of Leylandii I’d left that served as privacy for my garden, that was it. It’ll take ages to grow them all back but with some better positioning and a better choice of stock I may have more long term success in the future.
Anyway I digress.
Once I’d painted the stump and roots with my stump killer I moved back into the house. There were a million little jobs to tackle that morning and some were mundane chores such as washing and tidying up, there were fun ones too like lighting the fire and chopping up logs with my trusty axe but once I’d done the painting, the roots and the chores then my morning was over.
A spot of lunch and then onto the main project of the day.
The project was now moving on, the bedroom and study had been done, they still needed a bit of touching up and some electrics etc.. but it was time to move onto the corridors. There were still a number of jobs to do, the main being the bathroom but I decided on the corridors as I wanted to do the bathroom once I had a full week to tackle it.
The upstairs corridor I was starting with included the top of the stairwell, this is where it all gets a bit interesting. The stairwell is very very tall and I’m a blokey working on my own and I was very aware that heights and working on ones own weren’t a good mix. So rather than using wobbly ladders, or expensive staging I decided to fabricate a platform.
Now hang on isn’t that dangerous too, well it could be unless tackled with a set of uber-coach bolts and some matching and terribly good rawl-plugs. Y’see I’d gained in experience over the months and one thing I’d picked up on was that those rawl-plugs you get in DIY stores, the ones in brown and red and yellow in families of snap-off clusters, well they aren’t that great. Fitting the vertical radiators a couple of months back I’d wasted hours using the supplied fittings and in the end I’d taken a trip to Screwfix to purchase some dandy fancy plugs and some coach bolts, these would support an elephant let alone little old me. These bolts also could be fitted with a socket and ratchet, this allowed the bolts to be screwed in without the necessity of a screwdriver, a screwdriver could be a bit hit and miss when stood with a driver above ones head. Sockets were much easier to wring in Yogic positions, including above ones eye line.
Anyway I had a bit of a store of C16 timber in the garage too so I pilfered some beams from my stock, I took them upstairs and cut two to length to fix to the walls. These were pinned into place with the coach bolts –I found that washers were a good idea to stop the bolts sinking into the wood, so much was the grippiness of the bolt. A liberal bit of measuring and spirit levelling and I had two beams fixed firmly to opposite walls of the stairwell. Back to the saw and I cut more beams to length to stretch between the two opposing fixed beams. These were then screwed home and once this was done I dropped some Caberflooring into place to serve as the work platform. I screwed the flooring down to the stretcher beams and hey ho I had a work platform in place that afforded me access to the higher walls of the stairwell and also access to the ceiling without the need to use even a step ladder.
I stood back and admired my work.
Hang on, isn’t that really wonky.
All my measuring, all my spirit-levelling and one beam was exactly the width of a beam higher than the opposite one. I’d marked out a level point but rather than the indicated top mark for the beam I’d used the mark as the bottom marker.
Bah and humbug, it had taken ages to get to this point, despite being wonky it was as firm as a Victorian schoolteacher, so hey it was close enough for rock and roll, it would be coming down in the next couple of week, I could live with it.
Anyway by now the paint had gone off on the bumpy wall, it now needed some more work. A quick perusal and it now made sense to get some filling done, any sanding would have just removed the top layer of paint or even removed the damp-proofing. A quick mix of some Easy-Fil and the bish bash bosh the walls were dotted with strategic and frugal spots of filler.
So the rest of the day was spent on the platform with my trusty Karcher steamer, the paper was really tough to remove, in the remaining hours of that day I only got two thirds of one wall completed. It was a bit of a stuggle, by the end of the day my back was starting to twinge and my arms which were still painful – I’d resorted to wearing arm braces from my rowing days on them – were rather worn out. What didn’t help too was having to crawl up the final steps of the staircase and vice versa when travelling down, so was the intrusive nature of the platform.
Still a bath, a curry and bed in my newly washed bed linen (part of my daily chores) and I was revitalised.
Monday – Only a smidgen
I’d had an afternoon being poked in Darlington MRI hospital and being satisfied I was hopefully going to live for at least a few more decades they subsequently let me go home. Normally on a Monday I would be working late night duty at my day job, but this Monday evening because of the appointment I had the luxury of arriving home a quarter of an hour earlier than I would have done on a normal (no overtime) evening, woohoo the luxury.
So a bit of food, a bit of feeling sorry for myself after some rather major prodding in the hospital and then on with the house.
First of all that back wall again, the new filler had made some progress on the covering of the lumps but it needed some of the edges teased off. So rather than use a sander this time I used a sanding block and gently removed the rough edges, once the walls were looking tight and smart it was back out with the roller and again the whole of the wall and around to the fireplace was given another coat of White Cotton paint. Brilliant it was now looking almost a smidgen away from being finished and a nasty job nearly out of the way too.
Once done it was back to the platform, my iPhone playing a podcast of Mark Kermode and Simon May’s film review and I was a happy monkey for a couple of hours. This time the paper came off a little more successfully and by the end of the night I was two thirds into finishing off the walls of the upper part of the stairwell. Only the ceiling and a bit of the walls to strip, some filling, sanding, painting, filling, sanding, painting, steam cleaning, coving, coving filling, coving painting, curtain rail fitting, wood painting and light fitting fitting to do and the platform could come down.
So half an hour or so of work then, only a smidgen 🙂