So much room for activities!

After last weekend was so productive I decided to take Thursday and Friday off in order get the rest of the walls down. The work is noisy and I felt that if I did the noisiest of it in the week I could minimise the disturbance to my neighbours. Also charlie finished some mock exams on Wednesday so kindly offered to come down and help again.

The plan for Thursday was to remove the radiator from the dividing wall followed by the dividing wall itself. Leaving the room as per the plan below.

Removing the radiator posed its own choices, we could could remove it at the adapters and shut it off with the inlet valves but this leaves the pipes sticking through the floor while we try to knock a wall down around it; a bit risky. The second option was to lift the floorboards, drain the heating system, cut the pipes and cap them or route them to a new radiator position and then cap them. The problem with this latter option is that the plan is still in flux and I'm just not certain of where the radiator is going to go. In the end we decided to just remove the radiator and leave the pipes for the time beings, and just be carful when removing wall.

So first job was to drain the radiator and remove it.

Next was the wall, but at this point we were still debating the best layout for the bathroom, a discussion that had begun because the opening that currently remained to the right of the wall was quite nice for going in and out of the bathroom area. We decided it would be useful to see what the double door opening I the middle would actually be like, so rather than just demolishing the wall, we started by cutting the double doorway opening in it first.

With that done, a very useful exercise, I was pretty sure that the original plan was on the money once again and we proceeded to remove the rest of the wall. While doing this I learnt that it had not actually been built on a joist, it was just supported on the floorboards in between joists, this was pretty shoddy and does not comply with building regs, something that does not bother me so much as it is now gone, but given that the new wall was going to be put in one joist back, does mean that I will also not land on a joist and will need to put in a series of cross joist supports for the new wall. Something that I had hoped I could avoid doing. Oh well...

With the wall gone, we carried on with the cleanup job and begun scraping off the bumpy wall paper that is pasted across the whole room.

It was a great days work and now, temporarily, the room is huge, there is so much room for activities. Big thanks to Charlie once again!