Insurance says we're covered

 The insurance company says we have a valid claim.  This is good.

Now the fun part.

We have started emptying all the rooms.

They all must be emptied and the floor boards removed.  

How did we get so much stuff?  I thought I had been good about not keeping things.  I was deluded. We have way too many possessions. 

We have started the process of getting rid of things.  Some larger things went today.  The sofa bed in George's room is gone.  

The games trolley that held all the family games has gone.  The games themselves are going tomorrow. 

The piano is gone. Nobody plays anymore.

The 300 litre aquarium left this evening.  It's been empty for almost two years.  It took up a lot of space.  I loved having it, but I'm glad it is gone now.  I hope the new owner is happy with it.

Henry moved his record and CD collection.  He put all the guitars in cases and moved them to the loft.

Art has come off the walls and been stacked in the attic next to the guitars. 

We have a place to move the furniture.  That will be moved in the next couple of days.

I expect a few trips to the dump will happen and then the rug will be rolled up and the work can begin.

I don't know what stresses me out more.  The fact that our lovely extension has to be redone or the fact that there is way too much stuff in my life.

Do Over!

In February, we discovered that some of the oak floorboards in our lovely extension had started to warp.  

It was obvious that they were getting wet.  

I put a call into the plumber and he came out and had a look.

When he lifted the boards in the hallway there was a lot of water!

The plumber found the cause of the problem within minutes.  The hot water tank in the far bedroom (George's bedroom) had a faulty valve.  It had been running for weeks!  

Because of Covid-19 restrictions, George has not visited us since July.  We had no reason to go into that bedroom so we never heard the water running.  The water leak didn't affect the heating system or affect the water in the bathroom in that part of the house so we didn't notice anything was amiss.   

The damage to the walls wasn't apparent until furniture was moved! 

This meant a call to the home insurance company.  They sent a claims adjuster out on Monday.

We had to empty the office and the bedroom so that the adjuster could see the extent of the damage.

This is the cupboard that holds the hot water tank 

It was merrily leaking in silence for weeks. 

The insurance company says we have a claim.  The hard work and upheaval is just beginning.  The entire extension is going to be affected.  

The floors have to come up to allow the concrete to dry properly.  The walls have to have the bottom three feet of plasterboard removed and replaced.   

Every room has to be emptied.  We have to find a temporary home for all this stuff.

There is more but I can't bring myself to write about it yet.  It's like having a big "do over" with the entire extension. 

We have been here at Whitelees for twenty years now.

It's just me and Henry now.

We like our lovely home and quiet life.

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!

The plasterer has been! He was here while we were away on our holidays and got quite a bit of plastering done.

This is an area in the new front room with a big wall covered with damp plaster.

It may well be that the long awaited arrival of The French Doors will be soon. Please imagine that this area that is filled with plywood is where the French doors will be. We have been told that they will arrive on or near the 12th of this month. After an 18 month wait, I hope they fit and work properly or I may be blogging from prison.

This is a photo of the window that is soon to become a doorway. Please not the plywood on the right of the photograph. That's where a door will be.

To the left in this photo you can plainly see a big orange gas tank. The plumbing and heating guy said he would be here last week to route this tank outside. I'm going to have to start my phone campaign again. Very busy tradesmen will ignore the quiet customers and only do those jobs when there is a lull in the action. The trick here is to not be the quiet customer when you need something done. Phone them on their mobile/cell phone first thing in the morning and then again at dinner time. My battle cry has been: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I haven't squeaked enough and this tank hasn't been moved yet. I think it is time to start.

This is the view from our soon to be ex-window. Note the drying plaster.

Excited by the upcoming arrival of the doors, the builder will be knocking the hole for the door through and the electrician has been given a date to come in for a final fix. Final fix means the attachment of light switches, light fittings, power points or electrical sockets and hooking the whole business up to the mains. Between now and then, I have to start selecting bathroom lighting.

The Man of the Place has a new toy, an angle grinder. It throws some great sparks! He is cutting up some an old swing frame. We had a swing hooked to it once but it prooved to be very unstable and the swing was promptly unhooked again. The frame has been rusting away, unused in the garden since (+10 years). The frame was always too big to fit into any of our cars for hauling to the dump. Now that has been cut into easier chunks, it can go.

The big sheet of blue plastic is going to be tacked to the doorway to prevent plaster dust from invading any and all spaces once the business of knocking a whacking great hole in the wall starts.

Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood . . .

That is a line from a favourite childhood song of The Man of the Place. It could have been played yesterday and it would have been very appropriate. About 7:30 pm last night, our plumber showed up to do the small job of hooking up our new bathroom to the water main. It was raining. The plumber was supposed to show up two weeks ago when we were having that lovely dry spell. Nope, it was best to wait until the holes had refilled with water.

I didn't get any action shots as Henry was getting up to the oxters in mud. It would have been supremely insensitive of me to go snapping photos like the worst of the worst paparazza while he was digging away in our very own version of the Somme. The above is the finished product. The rising main in the new bathroom. We'll have to fashion a removable panel that will go behind the bath. Then, should there be a burst pipe, or some other watery disaster, we can turn the water off sharpish.

This is the big hole under the bathroom window. Henry had to dig this underneath the wall of the bathroom. Note that houses built in the 1830's really don't have much in the way of foundations.

A trench was dug a couple of months ago and the blue pipe was laid in. Connecting this length of pipe to the mains and the house didn't happen until yesterday. You can see the cut off bits of pipe floating in the rain water that has filled the hole. Henry had to bail it out before he could get in there and do his work. Expensive plumbers get even more expensive if they have to get muddy. Best to keep them dry.

This is what Henry's boiler suit looked this morning before I put it in the wash. Hint: When washing the boiler suit, check ALL the pockets for nails and screws. It will lengthen the life of your washing machine.

Now the holes must be refilled. It will save us a fortune in lawsuits and the lives of countless hedgehogs.