It is a long time since I posted anything on this blog -

Just to say that a bit of a small step has been made in the last two days.

The Man of the Place managed to power wash all the moss off this side of the house and then replace the render.

It looks good now. Imagine what it will look like when the wall is painted and the patio slabs are down . . . .

Merry Christmas everybody!

We're almost done with this extension project. The Man of the Place is enjoying a well deserved nap in front of the fire. Faithful hound is there too.

A few more things need to be finished - but over Christmas, no work is going to be done. Look forward to these finishing touches in January.

The heating was installed. The boiler has now been commissioned and is legal to heat our house. It does a wonderful job. We haven't been cold since. We're not quite used to all this warmth. I'm waking up very thirsty in the morning. Having the boiler commissioned sounded so formal. I was half expecting to have to smash a bottle of champagne over it. "I hereby commission this boiler! Bless her and all who are heated by her!" In reality, it was an unassuming man who came out, checked all the wiring, the exhaust, fuel line to the boiler etc. . .. He had a cup of coffee (milk and one sugar), gave me the forms for the guarantee and went on his merry way.

Henry cutting a channel for the thermostat. This makes for another area that will have to be repainted.

It has been all hands to the pump the past couple of weeks. We now have beautiful oak floors.

There are two places where the oak floors wouldn't be practical.

The orangery and the bathroom. You can see Polly inspecting James' work as he puts down the tiles in the orangery that connects the two buildings together.

This is Andy, helping out James the plumbing and heating guy. The lovely white bathroom tiles are just out of shot.

Holes in the Floor

We are getting so close to being finished with the extension. So close in fact that last night, I asked George if, when the heating is fired up next week, would he like to move his bedroom furniture across. We still don't have doors on his new room, or the bathroom but he could move over.

The major thing going on at the moment is that the heating system is getting hooked up.

The electrician has put up thermostats and control panels for the two different "zones" in the house and the plumber is working on getting the heating system connected to the boiler.

To connect things to the boiler, the floor boards in the corner our front room needed to be removed. This meant disassembling the dining room table and lifting the carpet.

This is what it looks like . . . .

This is The Man of the Place with the enormous power tool he had to hire to do big stuff under the floorboards.

Done by Christmas?
You can see the packs of oak floor boards waiting to go down.

Let there be Light!

We work along and it seems like we get nowhere and then all of a sudden there is a giant leap forward.

The above photo is a picture of the some of the lights in the ceiling of the new front room. It isn't this orange. We have a white ceiling, but with the halogen bulbs, it comes across as orange in the photo.


The electrician got to the point where some of the lights work in the new extension! He will be back tomorrow to make the lights work in more of the rooms and to start getting the boiler hooked up to electricity.

This is the light in the new back hallway.

This light is in the new office. You will notice that the office has been painted a lovely duck egg blue. Pretty pretty!

The oak planks for the new floor has been delivered. The next step is that the heating system is to be completed. We expect this to happen within the next couple of weeks.

WRONG HEIGHT!

Now it turns out that the concrete floors are about an inch too high. Bugger.
Bugger bugger bugger.

When we were getting ready to pour concrete, we took advice from the joiner about where the level of the concrete floor should be. We had to take into consideration the new wood floor, the areas where the floors would be tiled and the diameter of the heating and plumbing pipes.

The poor Man of the Place has to cut grooves in our concrete to accommodate the heating pipes. This is causing more dust than anything else that has been done to date - including the knocking down of 200+ year old internal plaster walls!

Today he is also using applied geometry to figure out where to make the cuts. I bet most of you never realized that there were anything other than evil applications for geometry.

Clever boy!

We love Kevin!

He's our favourite plasterer/builder/great guy.

When it comes to plastering he is an artist!

This weekend he finished the last bit of plastering in the connecting room "The Orangerie". He won't be back now until the weather dries up a bit in the spring and he does some work pointing up the stonework on the exterior walls.

The window becomes a door

For years it was a window and we saw lots of great things from that window; owls, first snows and traffic going by the house.

Then there was some new activity out the window.
When the new room was built, the window then only looked through to a new and empty room. Now it is being taken out.

I was a little emotional as this window was removed this evening. Our little house won't be the same any more. While the extension was going on outside, it was . . . . outside and didn't affect our little world. Now everything is going to change.

The doors arrived!

They showed up on Tuesday the 8th of August.

You can see right through to the other side again! This naturally means that it will be easier to do things like to get to the front garden. (I'll have to see to those weeds.)

They look pretty good but now that they are in and looking so well, it makes the weedy bit in the front and the back look all the worse by comparison.

I'll spray the green weeds and pull up the brown ones this weekend if the rain stays away.

More plaster has gone on the walls . . .

and the word is that the French doors will be coming soon!