madelinekelly

We've kind of fixed the entire first floor now. It's not plastered, and it hasn't been re-wired, and the floors are still horrible saggy chipboard, but other than that it's basically habitable.



We started on the back bedroom as soon as the front one was done, wanting to have somewhere to act as a temporary sitting-room. We thought it'd be easy, because it's such a small room, but we hadn't reckoned with the derelict back wall. A lot of the stone was loose, so Matt had to rebuild as well as repoint. Until it looked like this:



I got on with the easier job of repointing the chimney breast:



I also helped with the easier repointing on the main wall -- but I refused to tackle any of the freaky holes. Matt's physicist brother and one of our geochemist friends did a bit of repointing too. Two weeks later it looked like this:



And then Matt limewashed it while I was out at work:







We've set up a sofa and rocking chair in there, with a coffee table and a little TV stand. Luxury! We can sit down and eat indoors when it's raining! We can be lazy and watch DVDs in the evenings. We can relax together, which was something we hadn't been able to do since the beginning of March. Aaahhhh. It's been wonderful.

After tackling the back bedroom, Matt got on with the landing (not enough space for both of us to work on it).

Here's the landing in its repointed state:



When we first uncovered that sloping lintel we were really worried. None of the stones underneath it were secure in the wall, and all the mortar had turned to dust. To the left of the door the inner skin of the wall had been removed and what we could see of the outer skin was worryingly rickety. Matt spent a couple of weeks rebuilding and repointing the wall, until it looked as you see it above.

One coat of limewash later...



So much better. You can really tell how it'll look when it's been re-plastered. And the wonky lintel now looks interesting and quirky as opposed to plain terrifying. Well done, Matt! The next thing to happen on the landing is a new hardwood door and frame, which should be happening in a couple of weeks.

Once the landing was complete, Matt decided to shift everything possible from the ground floor to the attic. We've resigned ourselves to not doing anything with that attic space in the near future, so it's become a dumping ground for anything not immediately useful. But the ground floor, which has been a depressing building site for the last few months, is the next area for renovation. A lot has to happen in there in the next month or so: new beam and pillar, new fireplace lintel, new bottom step for the staircase, removal of corroded copper pipes in floor, and more.

Here it is, all tidied up:







On Thursday, dad's builder friend came round and sorted out the horrible wonky lintel in the kitchen for us. Here's how it looked before:



The original stone lintel had collapsed down and was resting on a mouldy, rotten wooden one.* Above the lintel was a tumble of rocks with no mortar. We were worried that if we tried to replace it, all the rocks would land on Matt's head and the wall would fall down. But dad's friend did it in an afternoon:





Huge improvement! At some point soon Matt has to rebuild the little bit of wall above it (which is just underneath the landing door) and then it's done, bar the re-plastering...

Matt also started work on the dodgy chimney breast in what was the dining-room. It needed to be repointed asap because it has to support the new oak beam that we're getting in to replace the sagging and too-small steel joist. The original lintel for this fireplace has a bad crack running vertically almost all the way through it, so it has to be replaced too, which is another reason why Matt had to get the repointing done sooner rather than later. He got most of that done last week, so it looks like this now:



All in all, it's been looking pretty good at the house. We'd got a lot of stuff done. I'd arranged for various tradespeople to make things for us -- windows, windowsills, doors and doorframes, the bottom step for the staircase, the oak beam, and of course finally re-rendering the exterior. It was all supposed to start happening this week.

But this house has a habit of throwing bad things at us whenever we begin to feel like we're clawing our way out of the abyss. So yesterday I learnt that the scaffolder, on whom everything is pinned, has suddenly decided that our street is too narrow and he'll have to apply for a road closure permit, which will delay things by a couple of weeks. Now I have to phone the police to see if the road will really need to be closed or if the scaffolder is just being an idiot.

And I'd hired a concrete breaker (basically a lightweight pneumatic drill) so that Matt could attack the ground floor. We need to re-lay the concrete underneath the staircase before the new step can go in, and there needs to be a 4 inch deep hole under where the oak pillar (to support the oak beam) will go, and we thought it was time to dig up the stinky patch of concrete by the front window (where a lot of varnish got spilt and was never properly dealt with, years ago**). So Matt started doing that yesterday while I was out, and immediately discovered, right in the middle of the varnished spot, evidence of an oil leak.

We knew there'd been an oil leak some years ago, but had been assured that it had all been dealt with. It hadn't. The oil-feed pipe is still there in the concrete floor. The oil is still there, in the concrete, the hard-core, the sand and the soil. It'll all have to be dug out. If it's spread as far as the front wall of the house then I don't know what we'll do. The stench is unbelievable. We've had to move into my mum's house for now.

Yesterday was incredibly depressing. I'd say that things can only get better from now on, but with this house you just never know...

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* A couple of weeks ago Matt was working in the ground floor and left the front doors wide open. An old man walked into the house and announced that he'd been born in our front room in 1936. He proceeded to tell Matt lots of stories about what the house used to look like, and how there were little kipper smokehouses at the back that all the local houses shared. He also proudly said that it was his dad -- a local cinema manager -- who'd built the extension at the back. So finally we know who was responsible for that shambolic wall and freaky stone lintel. He was a nice man, though, so we didn't let on how awful we thought it was.

** At the same time as the old man, a small boy wandered into the house and explained how he'd used to play there with the childminder's daughter. And it was his fault the can of varnish got knocked over! Another mystery solved!

People do have a habit of just bumbling into the house if we leave the doors open. It's kind of entertaining, and just a little bit alarming. :D