My House's Work In Progress Thread (Pic Heavy)

As a follow up from the garden WIP thread, I made several years ago (which is reaching an end). I thought it would be good to document the work that has been going on at my house nearly 4 years on since we moved in.

We moved in on 16th July 2010 and immediately had to sort out quite a few things. The previous owner and dog had left the house in a terrible state and I spent 4 house hoover the whole house and must have emptied the hoover 5 or 6 times with the amount of dog hair that was sucked up off of the carpets.

The bathroom and toilet were also left in a filthy state. This picture of the shower tray I think pretty much sums up the overall cleanliness of the house.



As you can see for some reason the vinyl floor hadn't quite met the shower tray, why is still beyond us. As a result water was leaking in the floorboards. Also the toilet wouldn't flush properly as the handle would spin round 360 degrees.

So our first priority was to get the bathroom sorted. Mr Dave and his Dad spent a whole weekend ripping out the old toilet, basin and flooring and replaced them all with new vinyl flooring, toilet and shower cabinet.

We don't have many pictures of how the bathroom looked before hand but this is the only one I can currently find on our various hard drives (note the position of the toilet handle).I should add that most of the blue paint on the wall peeled off like wallpaper when it came to repainting the room. Probably because the plaster didn't have a mist coat before it was painted.



This is how it looked in June 2011. Nearly a year on from moving in. New, floor, new shower screen, new basin and most importantly new bog!



Since then we have had a new radiator and shower installed and hung a few pictures up but it's not really worth me sticking pictures up of that really.

 

Once the bathroom was in a more useable state we then cracked on with the lounge after the paving in the garden and driveway were done (see garden working progress for those pictures).

This is how the lounge looked when we first moved in. As you can see a bit drab.






The first thing to do was to remove all the wallpaper and also the fire insert. This had just been bolted on to fill a hole so there was no gas involved or anything like that.



Once the wallpaper had been stripped we found large amounts of polyfiller on the walls which was causing bulges in the wall. I started to sand them down and then found I had sanded through an electrical cable in the process. In the end we had to re run new cabling throughout the room.

This lead us to have a electric fire rather than a woodburning one which we had liked the idea of. But in hindsight it was the right choice to make.

Before we installed the new fire we had the window wall and ceiling re plastered as they were covered in artex. I then started to repaint the walls, which in hindsight I should have waited until the room was completely plastered.





Now onto the fire. We removed the cast iron fire insert and then laid a new hearth.




We decided in the end to use paving slabs, cut them to a L shape to fit into the small gap and then set them down on a bed of mortar.



We then had the chimney breast plastered on the outside and the inside to hide the brickwork. We then went out and bought ourselves a electric stove and a length of flue pipe (which was thrown in for free by the dealer) and this was the result.



We had been quoted £2500 for all the work on the fire (including cost of the fire) but in the end we did it all for half of that, including paying for a plasterer.

Mr Jane then got to work on building the mantle. We wanted something a bit different and went to a salvage yard and bought ourselves 3 lengths of reclaimed oak for £120. I then treated it for woodworm, while Mr Jane got to work on joining it all together. There were large cracks in the top beam and we wanted to make a feature from this so filled it with coloured epoxy resin to add a bit of interest to the whole thing.

This is the finished result.



We also bought a large ikea unit (reluctantly) to hold our TV on. Which is on the opposite side of the room.

 

This had by now taken us up to the beginning of 2012.

We had also had new radiators installed while the lounge was being done, which made a massive difference to the house.

However the wiring problem came back to haunt us when Mr Jane replaced the light in the bathroom to find it had no earth and upon closure inspect found that most of the wiring in the house had been done at a really poor or dangerous level (excluding what he had already installed in the lounge of course). A good example of how dangerous this was is from the wiring going to the box room (my studio). Whoever had installed it had left quite a few copper wires bare and simply moved the loft insulation out of the way so it wouldn't catch fire.

So we had no choice but to have a rewire. The sparkies took 5 days to replace everything in the house (with exception of the lounge and outdoor wiring Mr Jane had done). This all passed being mega-d and left us with several walls full of channels cut into the walls, thankfully the lounge was spared this destruction.

About a week after the rewire we had had an attempted break in and so had no choice but to also get a burglar alarm installed for peace of mind.

Our sights finally turned to the front bedroom, which was at the time our spare bedroom.

The spare bedroom had been used as a storage room while we got the other rooms done. This is how it looked soon after we moved in. As you can see it's very dark and brown.



Yes that's all our records on the floor too.



I felt the built in, although useful, took up way too much space and so had to go. This room was then replastered by Mr Jane and a friend from across the road, who had both just done a plastering course. After the room was completed (it took them 3 months to do) they concluded never again.

Here are the finished results.

<pictures to follow>

The next room to be completed later in the year was my little box room / studio. This was re plastered, new wood floor put in and repainted. I have no photos of this as its such a small room to get any decent pictures of.

 

Now into 2013. Most of the intensive work had been done, such as the re wire, radiators etc. So all we had left to replace was the boiler and the fire attached to it in the dining room.

This was brought forward as we quickly found that the built in in the back bedroom was hiding an awful lot of pipework in it.

The boiler was done in April, which turned out to be freezing cold. The boiler was then mounted in the back bedroom and all the pipework that had been added on was laid under the floorboards.

This is how our spare bedroom look soon after we moved in and stripped the walls of it's wallpaper. The walls were in a pretty bad shape and couldn't simply be painted over.



Once the built in was removed we quickly found that most of our heating pipes were hidden behind it so we now had to seriously think about what to do next.








We decided to get a brand new boiler fitted in this room and then build a built in around it. This would also allow us to replace the horrible fire downstairs and save a bit of money on the gas bill. We had to pay also for all the pipes to be placed back under the floorboards, fixing the bodges of whoever originally installed the heating.



Next job was to do was to build a built in to hide the boiler. That was the other half's job and mine was to plaster all the other walls until he had finished the structure and it was plaster boarded and ready for a skim. This is how it looked before the built in was installed and I had plastered all the walls I could do in this room.



Unfortunately the depth we wanted the wardrobe didn't run in line with the joists, so the other half had to lift the floor boards up and add a few noggins so this would be nicely anchored to the floor. He had to chisel a bit of the joists out to do this.



Framework was all built, although getting it plumb was quite difficult.



Then plasterboarded....



Then skimmed by me



Then undercoated...



Walls were then painted and the radiator re hung.





Then Curtain poles, curtains I made and divisions and shelving made for the wardrobe all installed.



Mr Jane now wants to make the bi fold doors for it at some point, but it's not a priority right now. As you can see this room has become a storage area while the dining room is being plastered.

 

Well done JJ & partner. What a lot of hard work, but worth it!

 

What a fabulous job you have both done

Just one question: what did you do with the old cast iron fireplace? I might be in need of one!

 

Not bad for Stanford le hope

 

We left it outside overnight to get it out of the way and then it rained and turned the whole thing bright orange with rust. Ended up wheeling the thing down to the scrap metal yard down the road and got £7.50 for it.

You're better off looking them up on ebay. There are tons up for grabs for next to nothing.

 

Thank you, JJ

 

Now for the converted loft. This was converted by the previous owners without planning permission which was a bit of a nightmare with the surveyors. So it's not classed a a storage room still as it doesn't have a proper staircase.

Not much has happened in here except Mr Jane building our new turntable stand to house all our records for our DJing escapades. I would love to make it slightly bigger since we had the boiler removed, but Mr Jane wants the room left alone.



Empty shell when we moved in.



Mr Jane's Deck stand being built in his new workshop.


Finished result.

Still plenty more pictures to come.

 

Seems very formal JJ ... can't you just refer to him as Tarzan?

 

I wish I could but he's a member now so I have to refer to him as his "official" name.