Monday morning and Dan is flying through the plastering. With the staircase finished inside and out, he moves up to the cupboards in the attic.
The stairs are going to need a bit of a wash!
And in no time Dan has the attic cupboards finished, just the fiddly bits under the lower purlins to do, which he has to finish by hand as no trowels fit under here.
Not too much of a mess to clean up after the plastering!
The beams of the A-frame wrapped up tightly and very tidily plastered around.
Andrew the plumber arrives to finish off the cast iron rads that are fitted. He just needs to cut the brackets down to size and finish off with these dome headed nuts that Colin has found for us. They work very well and we won’t catch our legs on any sharp edges sticking out.
Perfect!
By lunchtime Dan had finished and cleaned and tidied up! This is the plasterboard that is left over and unfortunately it is difficult to dispose of. We may need to get a small skip, we have already accumulated enough shit to warrant getting another skip anyway.
This will greatly please Cat! To be fair this whole wall needs repainting anyway.
Monday evening and Cat has just had her Covid vaccine (AstraZeneca). While she was out I hoovered the first two floors of the house, cleaning up all the dried plaster and dust, and in the evening she manages to hoover and wash the attic floor and new stairs just before her fever kicks in…
Cat has spent Tuesday in bed, briefly emerging to take Paracetamol before returning to bed. Properly ill. The rest of the house needs cleaning up so I spend the afternoon hoovering and scrubbing.
This floor has (thankfully) cleaned up really well!
I scrubbed the stairs again.
The plaster is drying out well. Cat and Colin plan to hold a painting marathon at the weekend to get it all painted…
The Ramboard saves the floor (again). This wall had only been mist coated, no top coat, as we knew it would end up like this when they returned to plaster.
The old stairs got washed again (along with all the black plastic protecting the walls) as they were covered in white plaster dust.
Thank the lord we wrapped up the electrics.
Not quite well enough though as this got wet and shorted the lighting system…
Wednesday morning and our new carpet for the attic is arriving from Ray Randerson Carpets. It’s going to be a struggle getting a 5 metre roll of carpet up the two flights of stairs without bashing any of the plaster etc. so I move and cover up what I can.
In actual fact they didn’t have a problem. There was a team of them and they brought the roll in through the sitting room window and straight up both flights of stairs so fast that I missed them! And no scuffed walls 🙂
There is around 9 metres of carpet on this roll!
Harvey and Blake are back to fit our balustrade around the top of the staircase in the attic. This is an oak newel post that will sit at the end of the balustrade and fit over the stringer of the stair, so they are hollowing out the bottom of the post by hand to fit the shape of the stringer (triangular).
Ooo more dust! (They did clean up but I did have to do more hoovering. My back is holding up so far though!)
The stringer end that the newel post will fit over.
The newel post slots on and now hides the end of the staircase.
We were planning to have a thick oak newel post at every corner of the balustrade, but we are not sure it is necessary for such a small space.
Instead we will just have the oak spindles all the way around. I was worried this wouldn’t be as strong if leaned on but they have assured me it will be. The spindles will be spaced every 100mm with a strong oak handrail around the top, so it should be plenty strong enough.
Super annoyingly the carpenters weren’t supplied with all the right bits of oak to finish this and so need to get more machined. This is hugely frustrating as we will have to wait until next week for them to return and finish. This has had a knock on effect on our carpet fitters who will have to come the following week now. It also pushes our move in date back a week costing us more money in rent… We were doing so well this week with progress. Three steps forward, two steps back.
Thursday and Magicman has returned. I was not happy with the finish on the bath as some of the repairs hadn’t been polished and weren’t glossy enough.
Within an hour he had polished them all up so you can no longer tell any repairs have been made. These repairs have a 12 month warranty and are expected to last the lifetime of the bath! We weren’t expecting that.
The next big decision for two bloody fussy designers is the flooring in the study. We were going to go with a slate floor but we have been put off as many flooring companies don’t stock it anymore. They don’t rate slate very highly and say it doesn’t wear or last well. So we are going down the natural stone route.
These are some samples we have so far. We like the colour of the ones on the left but the finish and texture of the ones in the middle. Anything too light will show up all our muddy footprints but we really like the unpolished natural feel rather than perfectly flat finishes. We need more options. We are not in a massive rush for this, we can live with a concrete floor in the study for now, but the radiators in there can’t be fitted until the floor is down. This is totally immaterial though as we have no heating anyway due to a broken bloody boiler!
Green.
So very green.