22nd October

This weekend has seen more progress. Spok and Paul have been up in the week and had a fire, burned a lot of the wood and trees that were cut down last Sunday. I have heard from Cadent Gas and they want to come and lay the gas supply as soon as they can despite me being told it would be after Christmas. I’ve agreed on the 16th November and have now ordered a recessed meter box. The trench will need to be dug out in a couple of weeks time and the meter box fitted.

On Friday evening my father and I went up and set about removing the copper tank out of the front bedroom and disconnecting the pipe work (most of which was lead) which we did successfully. We also disconnected the old cast iron bath. The plan was to leave the cold water tap in place to the kitchen sink and remove everything else. Unfortunately we cut through the cold water supply to that tap instead of the hot one, the result was we took the lot out. The cylinder was emptied painstakingly by filling up a bucket at a time and throwing it out of the bedroom window. All in all though, a productive evenings work.

Saturday and Sharon joined us. First job of the day for father was to reconnect the water and get a working tap which he did in the toilet. We then took the old bath out and it is currently sat on the back garden. We plan to eBay that and see if it’s worth anything. I filled the trailer with all of the scrap metal. John turned up with his big trailer and took two and a half tonnes of rubble and plaster to his place for his caravan park which was great. However since then we have replaced it with about another four tonnes. He is quite happy to take that when he gets a chance too. Spok came up to see how we were doing and he Met John. We got Johns opinion on the walls that the girls have scrubbed, although they have come up brilliantly, the time factor and the fact we’re going to have to chisel them out for the re-wire has made us decide it’s probably better to remove it all back to brick. A bit more work but at least when its done the whole house will be like new. He has also said he can change the 2 windows that were the pantry and bathroom in to one in the middle of them which I think will be better.

We then progressed to removing the ceilings from the kitchen, taking the plaster off the walls in the back passage and downstairs loo and bagging up all the rubble. We snapped all the lats from the ceiling up and bagged them up for sticks for Spok. We then ripped out the old back boiler and fireplace/cooker and dragged it outside ready for scrap. We were lucky that a scrap man came round and we sold him the copper tank and lead piping and he took all of the other metal away too. This freed the trailer up and we took all the plasterboard to the tip in it. Again a good days graft.

On Sunday morning I went up and made a start on removing the chimney breast out of the kitchen an when we took the ceiling down we learned that it wasn’t load bearing. Although 2 of the kitchen beams were supported on it, we can remove these and put a couple of longer ones in to sort that. The job was really hard graft. My dad came about 10.30 and have me a hand, it was painstakingly slow and hard but 98% of it is out, bagged up swept up and ready for the next visit in a couple of weeks.

We have also measured up the beams and floorboards required for when we replace the floors and a John is going to order them tomorrow all being well.Read more