Our Little Durham Restoration Project...

[paulrockliffe]

I was at a loose-end on Christmas Eve so I did a quick job:

Plasterboard:



Filled and sanded the joints:



Paint:



Not perfect, but good enough for what is just a cupboard. Eventually there'll be drawers at the back with a worktop on, amplifiers for the surround sound in the loft and the various ceiling speakers that have gone in and my 3D printer will fit into the top corner quite nicely. The cupboard will double-up as a wardrobe if the small room ends up being sued as a bedroom, but that's way down the list even now.....

I'll rotate the pictures next time....

[paulrockliffe]

After Christmas it was back to those drawers, I started making the cabinet to go behind the sofa, this will sit at the far wall away from the main block of drawers, with the space between being left for the sliding drawers to move into:



Then started making the sliding cabinet:



Hindsight is a wonderful thing, this would have been a lot easier if I'd just designed those drawers to wheel out into the room with a locking bolt to fix them in position or something, but at the time I thought I would need to have easy access to the storage. The reality is that that half is entirely filled with Christmas Decorations. Oh well.

The full cabinets got like this before I needed to track down the right paint and stuff to make more progress:



I can't remember exactly what happened next, probably the glass was ready to collect, but I moved onto glazing rather than getting these finished....

[paulrockliffe]

Cast your mind back and you might remember that we framed out the landing area between the two new rooms so we could glaze parts of the walls to avoid completely separating the rooms from each other. I don't regret this at all, it's a really nice detail and works really well at giving the feeling of a spacious London flat on top of the house, but if you'd told me how much work it would take and how much the glass would cost at the start I might not have gone through with it. Certainly my wife would have veto'd it for sure:

Anyway, this all 18mm fire-rated solid panes with the frames all designed to spec, it requires super-precise joints as well as intumescent sealants, so this was a total pain in the arse to do. The angles are complex, the length are exact and the frames have a 15mm bevel on them that adds an extra angle to get perfect too. This sort of thing:




Some of them can't be cut on my mitre saw, so they were marked with a carpenters bevel, had a knife-wall cut to set the finished position before being cut and planed back to the lines. Jesus. I quickly realised I needed to not mitre the joints but butt joint everything, working around the openings.

Noice:



Noice, noice:



Here's one I mitred before I realised how long it would take:



Anyway, eventually I had it all cut, glazing packers sorted, sealant ready and we got the first one in:



Lovely, lovely.

The second one was a repeat of the first. If you've ever wondered what an £800 pane of glass looks like, it's this:



You can see it's dark now, this was a whole day's work! Each cut involved measuring length, both angles, cutting, trial fitting, trimming, fitting again, these are the numbers for that:



4.37 miles, 74 flights of stairs. fking hell.

[paulrockliffe]

OK, it's rotating my photos again. I feel like we've been here before. Google Photos has them right, download to Windows has them right, upload they rotate. How do I stop it. I was going to post some more tonight, but I think I'll pause while someone tells me how to fix this?

[paulrockliffe]

Thanks, yeah, they are portrait. We've definitely been here before, I wish I could remember how I stopped it last time! I just realised I went through a period of having motion picture turned on on my phone, so I also need to turn a load of micro videos into .jpegs too. It's never simple!

Anyway, after sorting out all the fire glass, I framed out between the bedroom/office and the second bathroom:



Then we lifted up a big awkward double glazed unit and I had my Dad gun it with some sealant:



Before I fitted all the framing on the other side. Done:



Next I planed in this bit of skirting. I've no idea why this £600 fire resistant pocket door frame comes with a liner that is only 15mm thick. Can you even buy skirtings that are only 15mm thick? Oh well I did a good job on this:



Then I finished off the cupboard steps that aren't steps because Building Regs:



And glued up a load of strips to make a worktop that will sit on top of the steps:



You can never have too many clamps!

Two years later and I was looking at that top only yesterday and thinking I really should trim it, plane it and finish it so it can be fitted.....

The occasional cupboard will be very occasional, the top will hinge up out of the way to access the steps that aren't steps, and provide a useful little surface when the room is used as a bedroom. I have a loose plan to make some little drawers that swing out of the step tread space too, but given how long it's taken me to get this far, this may not happen!

[paulrockliffe]

Next we're back into the bathroom, we have friends coming to stay and I've been informed that it's imperative that we have two (working) bathrooms. I don't know why exactly as we've had lots of visitors before and it's never been imperative before, but who am I to question. Also, I learned that outside bathrooms don't count, we still have that. I think it does count because the only reason we've never needed two bathrooms is that I use the one outside if the inside one is in use.

Started chucking tiles on the wall, these weren't as bad to work with as I expected, they mostly just needed to be cut down from 1.2m to about 1.0m and then they went on really easily. Just a pain to back-butter them and then lift them once they were covered in glue!



Floor next:



Actually, I guess I did the floor first looking at the pictures!

This was a bit tricker as I had to gauge the glue on the first tile so that the third tile was at the right height for the door threshold, no one likes a wonky floor:



NAILED IT!

Shower controls:



I learned from my first bathroom that the controls go next to the door so you can turn the shower on and off without getting a wet arm and leave the shower to warm up. This one takes a bit too long really to warm up as it's a fairly long run of 22mm, but I did add some extra bonus plumbing so that when next I do the bathroom below i can turn it into a heated return circuit which should help.

Plumbing for the sink in next:



Then the sink itself:



The sink is a laboratory sink, it's key attributes are that it is deep and wide, so you can wash your hands without splashing water everywhere, but it is shallow, so when combined with the recess into the wall the sink protrudes about 250mm into the room, which is only 1m deep. Perfectly functional and quite quirky.

The install is a basic wooden frame for now as I hadn't got around to templating the complicated worktop shape or sorting out a proper top.

We'll need a mirror, so scratch up the wall:

[url]

Two pins in the wall to support it, then glue it on:

|https://thumbsnap.com/W6jLg2NQ[/url]

Toilet was next, really surprised how solid this is, I suppose they know what they're doing, but it just didn't look like it would end up absolutely rock-solid. Again to pinch a bit of space, the cistern was recessed into the timber frame and the toilet is a short-projection one, so there's just enough room to step past it into the shower space:



All great progress, I got everything working, all the tiling finish and trim on and it's all fully functional the day before our visitors arrived. So I had a shower......

[paulrockliffe]

And there the good news ended!

I couldn't get the shower temperature to settle properly, no amount of messing with the valve setup helped and I started to regret ignoring the instructions, "Ensure the back of this valve is available for maintenance."

Then there's this:

For boring reasons relating to the boiler bursting a heat exchanger and some other things I can't really remember, a lot of the plumbing was done while the new pipes weren't connected to anything. I've never had a solder joint leak before, but let's just say lessons have been learned. Always test your pipes before you cover them up!

Before I could fix the shower temperature, I realised there was water dripping in the bathroom below from under the shower. It could be anything, the valve, the pipes, the waste. FFS.

I put it to one side, it wasn't getting sorted while we had visitors, so I looked at the instructions for the shower valve. Conspicuous by their absence was any instruction on which inlet was hot and which was cold and I'd obviously not given that any thought at the time. Of course it matters, how could it not. The only crumb of consolation was that when I downloaded the instructions they'd been updated to include explicit instructions on how not to screw this up, so I knew I wasn't alone.

Then I took the sink out to template the worktop, put it back in a little enthusiastically and smashed the corner off it. It's not installed in my workshop, wit the corner glued back on, but this was the start of my rapid decline in productivity. I was sick of it and I really couldn't face fixing this leak. It could be anywhere and it was going to be a total pain in the arse to sort.

[paulrockliffe]

ferret50 said:

Do not worry about timescale, I'm eight years in and we still have no doors upstairs!

Ha ha, nice work, I was looking at the end of the bathroom cabinet yesterday, I built it 10 years ago. I really do need to make the end panel for that some day soon. It'll take me 30 minutes plus an hour of painting and I have the timber. Actually I'm sure I have a piece of MSF somewhere that was cut to size for it too. LOL

I'm not worried about how long this has taken, just annoyed that I have other things I want to get on with now. If I hadn't done it myself I'd still be waiting for a builder.

[paulrockliffe]

B'stard Child said:

paulrockliffe said:

Thanks, yeah, they are portrait. We've definitely been here before, I wish I could remember how I stopped it last time!

I think stripping out all the photo properties and saving as a new image helps in some cases..

paulrockliffe said:

I just realised I went through a period of having motion picture turned on on my phone, so I also need to turn a load of micro videos into .jpegs too. It's never simple!

That feature should be cosigned to bin on any phone it's a PITA

Really strange, they're working fine now. And I realised that when I download from Google it downloads both the video and a .jpeg, so I might be OK....

[paulrockliffe]

Here's my smashed sink, FFS!



At least all this plumbing works! Though I had to turn all the water off in the loft as testing the shower revealed it was a continuous leak - pipes rather than the shower waste - which I think was better. I had access to the pipes with an endoscope via the toilet, but it revealed nothing, so was fairly confident it was somewhere around the shower valve.

But anyway, visitors came and rooms were tested, the dormer is almost perfect, maybe one day this is where I'll sleep:



And all the extra work that went into sneaking enough space in the dressing room to allow it to be used as a bedroom has paid off, there's plenty of room to get around the bed when it's in use:



Two years later and we still haven't got the beds for these mattresses!

It's funny that the whole kick-off for this project was my daughter being born and us losing our guest bedroom. She's turning 7 in April and she's still sharing the smallest room in the house with her brother, so we've had the guest room all along. I'm supposed to be sorting her room our properly this year, but we'll see.....

[paulrockliffe]

Then there's a picture of that little worktop I was gluing up a few posts ago, I guess I must have at least trimmed it to length. Actually, I'll have done that for our guests 'cos I'm good like that:

[paulrockliffe]

Most people would have immediately got on with sorting out that leak, but not me, couldn't face the thought of smashing things up so I left it. We'll see how long when we get to those pictures, but we're in February 2022 when we had visitors and these next pictures are the end of April so I was obviously properly pissed off!

Posh ply and glue:



Lots of drawer boxes constructed and painted:



Drawer fronts painted:



Then onto a bit more construction:

[paulrockliffe]

I got the face frames painted up and started fitting things. At this point I realised I wasn't happy with the paint at all. It looked decent when I painted it downstairs, but it's just so much lighter up in the loft that it just isn't dark enough, especially with the white framing. Maybe it'll look better with the drawers in, but deep down I know it's all to paint again.



Next there ensured a whole other level of unnecessary complication, remember I said some of these drawers would slide? Well next up I had to reinforce a pair of sliding door tracks with some angle-steel and mount it all on some blocks of wood to span the gap:



The cabinet goes on like this:



And slides over behind the sofa like this:



This might be the daftest thing I've ever done, it's certainly one of the coolest. Yes, it would have been easier to just have it pull out into the room, but you would have been able to tell and the drawers would want to move in use. It's ended up being filled with Christmas decorations, so access is sporadic, so I added some kitchen cabinet feet that can be wound out for extra stability and wound up to move it.

You can't tell it is anything other than 3-bay cabinet, there's a slightly more open join where the frames part, but you would just think I'd cut the timber a smidge too short if you noticed that.

Then I added some plinth:



And a kitchen worktop was split down the middle to go over the top and it all looks like this:



100% needs to be repainted, though of course I know that because I've since done it. The sofa covers most of the gap, there's a crawl space left which gets a door over it eventually, with a few bits of extra trim.

You'll notice a few things:

1. There's a drawer missing. Screwed that up a fraction and because I always go way too tight on tolerances it had to have a couple of mm trimmed off its height. I managed to get that drawer fitted......er...... yesterday.

2. There's a mattress under there. Yes it's a double, yes I've slept there, no I didn't die from breathing in my own CO2, yes it's super super comfortable.

[paulrockliffe]

I guess I was tidying up, it's the only explanation, but the next thing it looks like I did was lay my first carpet!

Posh underlay!



Carpet!



Not sure anyone will ever appreciate this, certainly the underlay is wasted, but there we are.

[paulrockliffe]

Then it was time. It's July now, so we're a solid 5 months of prevarication and denial further on, I bit the bullet and decided to try to get the shower sorted.

My plan was to basically start with wherever was easiest and hope for the best, so I cut a hole in the cement board just above the tile, maybe it's leaking from the valve? It isn't, but I can get an endoscope down to the pipework and I can see a drip!

Good news, I know what will fix it, the bad new is a couple of tiles are in the way. I order new tiles and get the tools out:



For some reason I drilled a hole a hole in next, I guess I wanted a proper look, maybe I thought I could fix it through the hole or something daft. Then I must have remembered about the shower valve and realised if I swapped the pipes over here I was getting two birds with one stone? You can see the leaky joint here:



Pipes swapped around and joints tested:



Then I refitted all the bits I'd cut out with silicone:



And went back over it all with tanking stuff. It's like I was never there.....

[paulrockliffe]

B'stard Child said:

Unfortunately we all learn that same lesson you almost have to do it to realise just how important it is to

1. Keep access to stuff like pipework, valves etc
2. Minimise the number of joints in any area where access is going to be tricky

I went thro 6m of 15mm copper pipe making a simple 1.5m section of pipework with only bends to avoid using any solder joints as access was going to be an utter bh and I couldn't work out a way to make access easier.

3. When fitting isolators to feeds to make future maintenance easier than turning off whole house water - fit full flow ones

I do usually bend the pipes, but this run goes through a timber frame and around a corner, so there's no way to get the pipes in without putting joints in. I did minimise their use, but I should have at least made sure I could test them.

I have full bore isolators, but they turn off the whole bathroom. The sink has it's own, again they're full-bore, the toilet has it's own too. It's just the way the layout works the shower is at the end of the run and the toilet is T-d off the shower cold, so it wasn't really possible to add an isolator that does just the shower and have it accessible.

[paulrockliffe]

Enthused by my success I cracked on with finishing the tiling:



Including this recess that I still haven't ordered the glass shelf for:



The sink had been templates and I popped in to see if the local stone mason had a suitable offcut. They did and this was the result:



Sink, tap and the first part of the cabinet went in too:



Then I had a shower! And it was the right temperature!

Ironically, we're now almost 2 years on from that time when it was imperative that we had two bathrooms and I'm the only person that has ever used the shower. I don't know why I bother sometimes!

[paulrockliffe]

With the tiling done and the bathroom operational next was the heated towel rail. In the latest episode of, "nothing is ever simple", the brackets supplied were completely inadequate; some plastic ste with zero stiffness that had to be installed in such a way as to render the thing useless as you couldn't hang anything bigger than a flannel over it without the brakets being in the way.

Partly my fault, the room is tiny, so the radiator has to be small and tucked out the way, so it's only 300mm wide, but still, not much point if it can't be used.

The other complication, which is entirely my fault, is that the brackets can't be mounted more than 200mm from the edge of the shower anyway as there's a pocket door. But at least I realised this when I built the wall and knew that there was a doubled up timber stud at 150mm; fix to that with a stiff enonugh fixing and it won't need them anywhere else and the towels will still work.

Pass me the tools......

2" square bit of ash, holes where the radiator bars go, ready to be cut into 4 parts:



The rear space element is screwed into the wall with a big screw, then the caps are screwed on so the radiator is held nicely:



Then it looks like this:



This is before it was clamped up tight, super pleased with the tucked install:



And the shower door opens like this:



Super pleased with this, the door is superb, the access into the shower is really wide without it intruding on the standing space outside the shower or smacking in to the radiator!

[paulrockliffe]

But.....

We have another leak! A tiny one, but still. This one we were super lucky with, because of the difficulty in running the pipe through the timber frame, the pipes ended up being tucked in the coving underneath, where they could just about be accessed.

Cut:



The only problem was there wasn't enough room or enough movement in the pipe to get a pipe cutter around it and if I managed to set something on fire resoldering it I wouldn't find out until it was too late! So a gap was cut with a multitool:



And this big lump of brass got bolted in:



Over a year later, I've fixed the coving, but it's still all waiting to be repainted. My wife is a Saint.

[paulrockliffe]

Then things really ground to a halt after that, I didn't do much over the rest of the winter and then when the weather turned I just wanted to be outside trying to catch up on all the jobs that have been put off for years because of the loft. I've just been through my photos and then had to go through them a few more times to make sure that I'm not missing some, then I've just been around the loft looking for other jobs I've forgotten to take pictures of, that's how few things have been ticked off!

So, scraping the barrel and to leave the loft fully up to date:

I had an offcut of kitchen worktop going spare, so it was mounted in the cupboard for the amplifiers to sit on and the kids' X-Box, that all works brilliantly with the 7.1 surround and the projector mounted on the ceiling, even though all the kit is hidden away. Somehow the remote controls for the Google Chromecast work through the walls and that can use HDMI pass-through to turn on the projector:



I carpeted the cupboard too, then I used my 3D printer to make some connection boxes and things to tidy up the cables. Now all the amps just plug into these boxes and I have Home Assistant controlling the sockets so if you Cast music, the amps get turned on and it all just works nicely. I've filled the cupboard with car parts now, this pic has reminded me that I haven't wired in the doorbell or the alarm sounds yet:



While I was there I setup an ESP32 controller for WLED and wired it up to some unused lighting wires to send signals to the LED strips that are in a few places. This has been a total faff to get and keep working and is still putting up a fight, it's picking up interference somehow and I can't get it all to sync up. Another job to look at someday.....



I tweaked one of my speaker outlets by running a wire through the wall to the back of it so I could lose the trailing wire on this speaker:



I should really repeat the trick for the lava lamp and get it properly tidy, but it looks like this now:



I 3D printed this stand for my centre speaker too, just annoyed me having it on the floor:

I'm going to get some wood to make a proper storage shelf thing that will run along from the corner to that speaker and hold it off the floor properly, but I need to order the wood for that and a few other jobs first.