Day Five

Today was a hard day. We didn't do anything more physical than the first four days but because we are tired and it was cold, tensions were running high. Still, it was productive and I had my first forray info the world of suspended floors.
I started the day by clearing the ceiling in the future dining room. Once that was done I decided to reward myself with a bit of demolition and started removing some more bricks from the fireplace. It looks like all of the bricks can be removed, but I think I'll wait for a second opinion before I do...
We then started removing the paper from the walls of our temporary bedroom to-be and were pleased to find that most of it was coming off easily. After pulling off most of the easy bits, we decided to break for lunch...
Whilst eating we started puzzling over how we could for a fire into the new lounge extension and what we'd do with the existing chimney. We didn't manage to get to a suitable decision so instead have asked for a chat with the architect. Hopefully she'll be able to solve our dilemmas!
After lunch, instead of us both going back to paper stripping I decided to lift some of the floorboards of the suspended floor with suspected damp. After grappling for a while with a hammer, chisel and saw, I finally managed to prise up the first floorboard. It was a little depressing to find that the joists were really quite rotten... I'm guessing it's not a good sign to be able to push your finger into wood it's that soft... I'm not sure whether we'll need a complete new floor, our whether we can just replace a few joists. I'm sure re-laying a floor isn't beyond my skills, it's just another job to add to the list...
Towards the end of the day, I decided to stay in the house alone whilst my rather cold wife decided to go home for a hot bath to warm up. Rather than just carrying on with yet more paper stripping, I decided to take the saw outside and start hacking away at the rather larger fir trees. I manged to lop off a fair number of branches but they're so vast it didn't really make a difference.
I ended the day with some good old paper stripping. There well be a bit more to do tomorrow, but by the end of the day we should have three completely stripped rooms! At that point it'll definitely be time for some walls to come out! Fingers crossed...