3rd March 2018

Back to it today on a very cold morning with lots of snow still hanging about after a week of terrible weather due to “The Beast from the East”. Sub zero temperatures and lots on snow in the middle of the week has made for difficult conditions all over the country. Sharon aka Sicknote stayed at home today but she did do some ironing which in her predicament was a tremendous achievement.

I hadn’t expected John and Rich to have been there this week but they had although Rich had been off for a few days with the dreaded cold. He is off for the next week as he is on holiday so JB will be on his own if he goes up. Yet again there has been great progress, they have now got all of the upstairs radiators on the walls and quite a bit of the pipework in, nearly all the skirtings and architraves are cut and in place upstairs, the ceiling in the kitchen has been insulated and about half of it boarded and the kitchen wall where the old chimney breast was has been boarded. What a transformation. Talking to John, the chimney breast wall was a bit of a monster and took both him and Rich nearly the whole day just to do the one wall. I can believe it too, it was very undulated and not true but now it’s boarded it looks spot on. The thick black soot has disappeared and its starting to look a lot lighter in there.

I went up this morning and and John and Matt followed fairly quickly armed with yet more plasterboard and glue. The aim of the day was to crack on with boarding the kitchen out. I was the apprentice, fetching carrying, cutting and basically doing anything I could to help which also meant I was chief tea maker. It was very cold at first until JB fires up Bertha. A 50,000 BTU Kerosene heather that quite frankly heated the place up within minutes. I guess the last time the place was that hot was when it was on fire almost a year ago !! Progress was excellent today, the majority of the kitchen and the hall is boarded out now and we were only forced to stop due to us running out of glue and board. Still what is left to do from a boarding point of view is small, a third of the ceiling in the living room and about the same in the kitchen and a few bits and bobs in the kitchen and downstairs loo. The transformation is fantastic, the whole place looks so much lighter and maybe even a bit bigger. The kitchen diner is a lovely space and it’s hard to believe not so long ago it was a kitchen, bathroom and pantry.

I’m not going tomorrow, with all our little mishaps lately I’ve decided to try and have Sundays off. I will spend tomorrow sourcing some materials for the second fix of the wiring and some admin. If there is a picture of the kitchen boarded out on this blog then I may have nipped up there to take it.

So until next week, over and out.Meer informatie