Our Little Durham Restoration Project...

[paulrockliffe]

Then my man was back with more plaster to spread, here's a montage:

Under the stairs:


Cupbaord:


Landing Ceiling:


The old window is still there because, honestly, I can't carry it out on my own without breaking something!

Window:


Top landing sky-light etc:



Stairs:



More Landing:

[paulrockliffe]

I let it dry for a few days, then got on the paint again, a montage of pink turning white:

[paulrockliffe]

The main floor was pretty messy and dusty by now, so it got a proper scrape, hoover and then I rollered over it with a mix of warm water and PVA glue:



Then, onto the other floor, 14mm engineered oak. I guessed that when I tile the adjacent bathroom floor it'll come in about 14mm, so no thicker with this floor and it should finish nicely.







Starting to look good!

[paulrockliffe]

Got the bathroom sink in the post:



It's a Belfast sink designed for chemistry labs, so it's deep enough that water doesn't splash out and all over everything. It's wide enough to work with the space it's going in and its really shallow back to front. It's a solid 100mm shallower than anything else I could find, so it leaves plenty of room to step past to the toilet and shower and with the recessed worktop isn't compromised at all on functionality.

[paulrockliffe]

Also got some more ceiling speakers, so fitted those up too:







Again, maximising the space in what is a small room - no need to find somewhere to sit a stereo down. Wired back to an amp in the cupboard, there's now a Chromecast Audio, a Nest Mini and the amp power is controlled by Home Assistant. So if you ask Google to play music or the radio it plays it on the Chromecast, Home Assistant detects the Chromecast is playing and turns on the amplifier and the music comes out of the speakers. Neat. And practical.

[paulrockliffe]

I got told to stop messing around, so back to proper jobs.

Bit of lazer:



This is onto a wall that's a pocket door, so the fixings here are crucial, nothing can protrude much past the plasterboard as there's a door there! I used these fixings I've forgotten the name of that clamp the board, then cut the screws short. They work brilliantly!

Two brackets:



One radiator:



Again, this was the only space for it, tucket out of the way and not on any wall where it'll get in the way of people or furniture as there's no room for that. You can see the start of an interesting piping route to it too.

[paulrockliffe]

There's never enough storage, so onto a quick job to alleviate that pressure from the Boss.

Couple of tracks and some brackets, ordered some posh-plywood cut to size and bish, bash, bosh:





The door frame is exactly the same width as my shoulders, again maximising the space for stuff. I saved myself a job by not boarding out the inside of the cupboard, no one will ever see it as the shelves are full and the noggins make great shelves for extras.

Extras like the collection of spare toilet brushes:



WTF.

I also added some rails under the bottom shelves, now the kids school uniforms are hung up there, which is really handy!

[paulrockliffe]

MarcoD said:

Good to see you got around to updating your thread. It’s looking great - is this up to date now or are there more photos to come?

I haven’t updated mine for a while but have really dropped off the progress this year, I think I’ve managed stair handrails and a couple of fitted wardrobes! I’ll wait until I do something more interesting before I update.

No, I'm still not much under two years behind, though I looked through the pictures while I was updating yesterday and I'm a long way through them now. So although I'm about halfway through time-wise now, I guess I've been really really really slow in the second half!

Part of my problem is rather than working through all the jobs I need to get finished, I look at the whole list and pick the stuff that will have the most impact, that and in the summer I'd rather be outside, so I keep getting distracted by stuff that needs doing in the garden.

Around the time of that last update the back fence posts rotted out and the whole thing blew over. I tied it back to some trees behind and tried to ignore it for as long as possible, but this summer parts of it were leaning well over a metre into the garden and I spent a whole heap of time sorting that out. Problem is it's a fence in front of a fence in front of a fence in front of a fence in front of a huge pile of rubbish that's been dumped over decades, so days and days of digging just to get it to the point I can put something back up.

And the amount of time I've spent tidying one bit of my workshop, so I can tidy another bit, so I can tidy another bit, making slow incremental progress towards being able to work out there again has been unreal! I've finally got it to the point where I can use the machinery again and the only stuff that's in the way is stuff that needs to be sold, but the amount of time wasting that's gone on there is incredible!

If you take a few years out to do a big project, you're left with loads of these sorts of jobs to find time for. I'm currently ignoring the missing fence though, and 100 other jobs to try and close this off and put an end to it.

[paulrockliffe]

Next job was making a start in the cupboard, it was cold so I wanted the radiators to work, which meant emptying the cupboard to plumb that up:



I had to resort to a compression fitting as I didn't dare fire up the heat near all the wires!

Insulated:



I worked out exactly where the pipes needed to go through the wall, obviously this one was right where there was a big lump of timber, so complicated bends and some light tinkering with te timber was required:

.

With everything that needed to be behind the wall, behind the wall, plasterboard could be deployed and the cupboard lights installed:



And the .1 goes to this sub, tucked away under the eaves:



The other wires are HDMI to the eaves, and to the projector on the ceiling, a relay for the door bell so we can hear the postman an alarm panel, a phone line (will never use that!) and ethernet. Ethernet was run up 9 years ago when we renovated the house, so there's a gigabit switch, then a load more ethernet running all over so as much can be plugged in as possible.

Amplifiers:



There's 7.1 surround in the main room and 2.0 in the second room, plus I added better wires to the bathroom below, so that amp is to go in here too.

[paulrockliffe]

Then the Velux blinds arrived, so those all went up:



They all look like this, so I won't bore you....

[paulrockliffe]

Door frame:



Door:



Then some more plumbing, this time the small room radiator. Doing my best to tuck the pipes out of the way, so these run behind the radiator:



Polished the pipes too, don't know why, but they're still pretty shiny two years later.

The other end:



And the full effect:



Skirting has arrived at this point, so there's a piece there and I guess that'll be the next job....

[paulrockliffe]

The last bit of wall and the end of that beam need hiding away. When all the design work happened the plan was to use this room as a dressing room, with the ensuite beyond and the main room as a bedroom. There was to be a full width wardrobe on that wall, with the beam etc hidden inside and a Narnia cupboard through the back of the wardrobe.

But, with realising that the dressing room is big enough to use as a guest room and the kids sharing a room, so we don't need any new bedrooms anyway, everything has changed! Using this room as a bedroom works better with the space left around the beam open as it's tightish moving around a double bed, so various off-cuts were deployed as follows:



There's a mix of skirting, architrave and some bits that were bought years ago as part of a router-table build that never got properly finished.

More offcuts and a quick pocket-hole screw build:



A sorta step thing:



Not sure I can call it a step in case it's supposed to be building regs compliant.

[paulrockliffe]

I then got bored of that as it was getting fiddly and moved onto something easier. Skirting was fitted mostly with glue and wedging it to the wall with blocks screwed into the floor. This worked really well!







Someone's gonna hurt themselves on this mitre on day, but just look at it!

[paulrockliffe]

Then work bought me a new desk, except it was only part of a desk and it was in the way, so I lashed up some boxes and set it up:





Edges dressed and all oiled:



This is March 2021, unsurprisingly it's only this week I've finally got round to making the proper drawer boxes, trimming it down to a more sensible length and moving my computer. But it made a great work table while all that didn't happen!

[paulrockliffe]

Just thought I should point out that the 7.1 surround is in already, because priorities.

[paulrockliffe]

A skirting snake:









This came out really nice. This sort of thing is why everything is so slow, there's probably a solid day's work here for 5 bits of skirting. But I admire it every time I come up the stairs, so there is that.

[paulrockliffe]

Then more skirting under the eaves. It's really important to finish off the bits no one will ever see really nicely, because you know they're there. Something like that:

[paulrockliffe]

Then it was my daughter's birthday and she wanted to have a sleep over and watch movies with her cousins, it's April 2021, so I think this was legal at that point, but I've lost track of time now. Anyway, stuff was hired, I moved an old sofa bed up and put up the projector:







So I guess we have a functional room at this point, as evidenced by the fact that it got used for something that wasn't my workshop! Good job!

[paulrockliffe]

Kicked the kids out and got on with more wood.

I repurposed what was part of the fireplace in the house my Dad built that I grew up in:



It goes behind the door to finish off that bit and create a shelf for something. Currently it has my 3D printer sat on it, though that will have to move soon.



Luckily I only screwed this one down and didn't get round to plugging the screw holes as I've since realised that it would be better with the speaker wire and a socket set into it, as that corner has ended up really messy with wires, so it's to come off and some wires are to be fished through eventually.

[paulrockliffe]

What do you do when you accidentally order twice as much flooring as you intended and returning it is going to be too expensive and last time you posted wood back the courier dropped it off the back of their truck and then lied extensively about it before returning it in pieces to you a month later?







Posh eaves storage!