A productive weekend!

So I did not have the energy to write the weekend post yesterday evening. It was a combo of nights out and the the building work. However I am writing it now...

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were productive days but unfortunately the pictures don't quite portray that. I think the reason for that is because most of the jobs are in the corners or under the surface. The list comprised of a few things, the first was to remove the wall paper, cornice and skirting board from the bathroom end of the room. The skirting came off easy but the cornice was a dusty difficult job, that was far less satisfying that it should have been. I did not have any safety specs and after the third eyeful of dust that Charlie received and in turn the third earful of grumbling about inadequate safety gear that I received, I made him up a mask using a composite video cable and the plastic body of a remote control car.

This was how progress was looking on Thursday afternoon, and yes there was two of Charlie at that point, go figure.

The next thing was to sort those pesky radiator pipes that were sticking through the floor. This involved draining the heating system, a job made fairly easy as all that was needed was to open one of the valves on the aforementioned pipes. The plan was to put on a new portion of pipe and cap them under the floor near where they should be so that at a later date I could lift the boards once again and then pipe them to the radiator. This plan ended up changing on Sunday but I will come to that. To drain the pipes completely I drilled through part of the pipe that I was chopping of causing a comical burst pipe fountain, fortunately intentional at this point. Next the new strait sections of pipe went in.

The last job that needed doing this weekend was to hang some new cross joists to support the new dividing wall. This was not done with the wall we took out, which was in breech of building regs, so its a good thing that I am changing it really. It was a difficult job as it required floorboards to be lifted, some of which ran the full length of the room. Never the less with some help from a sizable team now, Dan and Will/Piers joined to help on Saturday, they were done without too much trouble and just in time for a few beers.

On Sunday we were back to a team of two, and a hungover team of two at that. After a review of what was to be done next I decided that the plan to raise the floorboards again later was not so wise and it would be better to just get the radiator that I wanted now, measure where the pipes should go, bring them through the floor in the right place and cap them off there, ready to attach later. So we head off to screw fix and bought a lovely chrome radiator and valves.

While we were there we popped in to Topps Tiles and got a couple of quotes for the bathroom area, but more on that in a later post. When back we drained the system, for the second time in that weekend, this time using a slightly more cowboy builder adaptor (no hose pipe and no radiator valve sticking through the middle of the floor). I then set about doing the pipe work.

That was the end of a solid weekend. The room does not look much different as I said, but a start has been made on the cornice, the skirting is gone, the wall paper is going, the supporting joists are in, and the heating pipe work is done. One other thing that was bought and delivered was the pocket door system, as seen at the side of one of the above photo's, but I will dive into that on another post. As always, big big thanks to Charlie, Will/Piers and Dan for their help (Dan helping even while hungover). Also thanks to Dan's mate, a plumber who's telephone consult was most helpful (probably prevented some costly Darvill mayhem...)