We have decided that it is finally time to re-decorate the house, with slightly more than just an extra coat of paint.
Many of the rooms still have the wallpaper from before I moved in over 20+ years ago, albeit with several coats of paint on top.
I also know that some of the walls will require a fair amount of bonding work as the current sand/cement render is loose.
The work will be progressing around the house, but I will document it on a room by room basis.
Saturday 25th, Sunday 26th February
We started clearing out the Family Room, which more recently seems to have been used for storage of items removed from the loft and elsewhere in the house to place on sale on Ebay.
After clearing it all out, mainly by relocating it to the bottom of the dining room, I was able to pull up the laminate flooring that I had put down around 12 years ago.
These two pictures show the room after I had already loaded the flooring into the car to take to the dump, but before I had removed the rest of the quadrant.
Next I removed the skirting, as we intend to lay the flooring, and then fit the skirting over the top, thereby obviating the need for quadrant.
The above picture shows what the plasterer requested with regards materials for the entire job, which ultimately turned out to be woefully under specified.
Wednesday 1st March
I spent the evening removing a radiator from the wall, something that should have taken around 30-60 minutes ended up taking around 3-4 hours because every connection decided to leak the moment I went anywhere near it.
In the end I replaced all of the nearby fittings and several pieces of copper pipe, just to make it water tight once again.
Thursday 2nd March
The plaster eventually turns up at around 10:30 having overslept and finally gets to work with some initial bonding work around the doors.
More bonding around the doorways.
The painted walls apparently just soaked up the PVA glue, so will need another coat tomorrow morning before any skim coat can be applied.
Friday 3rd March
I was working from home today so I could check up on progress.
The section above the garage door needs some plasterboard applying, and apparently that is my job to fit it.
This was news to me, as all my previous plasterers fitted any plasterboard as needed.
When my lunch break came, I went and bought a bargain piece of plasterboard for £1.00 from Selco and was about to fit it, when I was told in no uncertain terms by the plasterer that “You had enough time to fit the plasterboard, I am working now, and you will have to put this piece up later”.
I was completely dumbfounded by his rudeness, but I was not about to start an argument, so I simply left him to it.
The implication was that I had been sat upstairs ‘doing nothing’ all morning and only now attempting to fit the plasterboard, rather than the reality, where I had been working since 07:30 and was now on my lunch break.
These two pictures show the progress at the end of Friday (actually taken early on Saturday morning).
We were intending to re-use the underlay and simply put some thicker fibre underlay on top, but based on the level of mess, this is not going to be an option.
Saturday 4th March
After a trip to Selco to buy some fibre underlay, I removed the polythene underlay and swept the floor.
Next I put up the plasterboard above the garage door and prepared to lay the new fibre underlay.
I forgot to take a picture of the underlay before we started moving in all of the lounge/dning room furniture so I will insert a picture when I have moved it all out again.
Here are a few pictures of the Family room, now full of ‘stuff’ relocated from the Lounge and Dining Room.
View from kitchen door.
View from patio door.
View from garage door.
