It's amazing to believe we've only had the house two weeks, it feels like an age! Despite being back at work this week and only working on the house in the evening, it feels as though it's been as eventful as the first week. Still, it seems like we're making quite a bit of progress!
I'll start with the good parts first:
Having removed part of the big-bedroom wall and buying the timber to put a new one up, we spent the weekend creating the outline of our upstairs family bathroom! We painstakingly and meticulously measured and then measured again to make sure that all of the bathroom suite items would fit inside and that the door wouldn't hit the bath! We then set about cutting timber, screwing it to the walls and ceiling first to give us a frame to work from and then filling it in-between with stud work and noggins. Once we had put the door casing in, it finally looked like a room! It seems a little strange now to walk up the stairs and face a wall, but I think it will work well and look good when it's done.
We had the architect at the house on Monday (which happened to be a bank holiday; that's dedication to your work!) and went over a few more suggestions which means we're not far off submitting our application for planning permission! We've decided that the best plan of action would be to remove the chimney breast and add a door through to the future lounge extension. As well as improving the flow of the future house, it has the added bonus of making the study and mid-sized bedroom more use able. It does however pose the challenge of how we go about removing the chimney... We want to retain the stack above the roof line to retain the look of the original house. We're pretty sure that it'll involve structural engineers and building control which all just sounds expensive at this stage!
Other successes: We had National Grid perform a quick site survey which meant we could choose the location and box-style of the gas supply. The site survey was perfect timing as we've also lined up the central heating to be installed next week which means we can give him a definitive location of the gas meter.
And so onto the not so good parts:
We've started taking up the floor boards in the study to assess the damage. It's not surprising that the joists are falling to pieces as they were sat directly on top of the external brickwork with no hint of a damp proof course! The joists must have been soaking up moisture for what looks like decades and it looks a mess. There were a few rather worrying patches which could potentially be dry rot; being able to push a blunt pencil into the joist probably isn't a good sign...
Reading about dry rot on line, there are a lot of horror stories about it spreading through your house and turning it to ruins; fingers crossed this won't be true in our case. Some courses of treatment seem extreme to say the least but I think the first thing we're going to try is removing the joists with obvious signs of decay and replacing them with new wood and include a damp course! We've made a start on removing the old joists and splicing new ones into place. Hopefully when we get central heating into the property and dry the whole place out it will be fine for another few decades!
Thursday night saw our (read as my!) first DIY disaster. In my greed to collect as much copper from the house to be weighed in, I decided it would be a good idea to remove the back boiler from the newly open up fireplace. Having seen all of the disconnected pipes upstairs, coupled with the fact that this thing had been buried behind about a tonne of bricks for who knows how long, I assumed that this would be empty also. How wrong could I have been... Having made a nice neat score in the pipe with my cutter, one more turn saw a nice neat jet of water starting to spurt out of the back of the pipe. My second incorrect assumption of the night was that it would simply be some residual water left in the pipes and that it would stop very soon, but that thought soon disappeared when I realised that rather a lot of water was coming out and with quite substantial pressure! I quickly ran to get a bucket and started shouting madly for backup! With my wife sat there manning the buckets, my first job was to switch off the mains water supply to the house and open all of the taps to drain the tanks as quick as possible. The taps very quickly dried up but the water was still pouring out of the pipe which we just couldn't figure out! So I then started frantically searching around the house, taking up floorboards to try and follow the pipes to their source. After about 20 minutes (and several buckets of water later) we finally determined that the back boiler was still connected to the hot water cylinder and that it was connected to the bottom of it meaning that the whole cylinder would need to empty before it would stop! I then decided that if it didn't stop, at some point I might need to try and cap off the pipes, but without any plumbing supplies at the house I needed to go home to get some. Off I went leaving my poor wife to sit there, wet and cold, to empty buckets...
Having returned armed with a few spanners, an odd assortment of plumbing connectors, a blow torch and some solder I was informed that it was still showing no sign of stopping! We then decided that it might be taking so long to empty because I'd only slit the pipe a tiny amount meaning that although the water was coming out at pressure, only a small amount was actually coming out. After some deliberation, we decided the best thing to do was open the pipe further so that it would empty quicker. Opening the pipe did indeed make it come out quicker but it still showed no sign of stopping! After about an hour an a half of emptying buckets we started getting very nervous that it wouldn't stop! I checked and checked again that the source of the water was the main cylinder, that there was no new water coming into the house, and that it must stop eventually! Despair set in and just as we'd started looking up emergency plumbers on our phones there was suddenly a change in the tone of the water hitting the back of the bucket! It was stopping!!! The tank had eventually drained itself and the water had finally stopped filling the buckets. After waiting five minutes or so to reassure our selves that it had definitely stopped we left a bucket propped underneath the pipe and went home for some well deserved tea (only two hours or so late...). I came back just to check after tea and was pleased to see that there was no new water in the bucket.
On the positive side I did learn a lot about plumbing and also a few other things: 1) Listen to my wife... 2) only do one job at a time 3) don't tackle any jobs at the house alone which may result in disaster!! 4) Don't assume.
There are a few things I still don't understand like: why it was still connected when it was buried in a wall with no prospect of ever being used again, why there was so much water when it was obviously used as a heat source - surely it should only have been in the cylinder coil and not the main tank? Still, it's one less thing to worry about as it'll be gone when the central heating is installed.
And finally there was the bad news about the roof. We had the flat roof repaired which caused water to leak into the house in a different place than it did initially. We then patched the roof further which moved the problem back to the initial place. It turns out that the water is actually leaking in the pitched roof and the flat roof just seems to be channelling it. The result of it all is that we're going to have to remove all of the tiles from the back-side of the roof, remove all of the timbers and felt it, before putting all of the tiles back. We've been told we can get it done next Saturday so fingers crossed the weather will be nice and we won't have too much rain between now and then.
I'll start with the good parts first:
Having removed part of the big-bedroom wall and buying the timber to put a new one up, we spent the weekend creating the outline of our upstairs family bathroom! We painstakingly and meticulously measured and then measured again to make sure that all of the bathroom suite items would fit inside and that the door wouldn't hit the bath! We then set about cutting timber, screwing it to the walls and ceiling first to give us a frame to work from and then filling it in-between with stud work and noggins. Once we had put the door casing in, it finally looked like a room! It seems a little strange now to walk up the stairs and face a wall, but I think it will work well and look good when it's done.
We had the architect at the house on Monday (which happened to be a bank holiday; that's dedication to your work!) and went over a few more suggestions which means we're not far off submitting our application for planning permission! We've decided that the best plan of action would be to remove the chimney breast and add a door through to the future lounge extension. As well as improving the flow of the future house, it has the added bonus of making the study and mid-sized bedroom more use able. It does however pose the challenge of how we go about removing the chimney... We want to retain the stack above the roof line to retain the look of the original house. We're pretty sure that it'll involve structural engineers and building control which all just sounds expensive at this stage!
Other successes: We had National Grid perform a quick site survey which meant we could choose the location and box-style of the gas supply. The site survey was perfect timing as we've also lined up the central heating to be installed next week which means we can give him a definitive location of the gas meter.
And so onto the not so good parts:
We've started taking up the floor boards in the study to assess the damage. It's not surprising that the joists are falling to pieces as they were sat directly on top of the external brickwork with no hint of a damp proof course! The joists must have been soaking up moisture for what looks like decades and it looks a mess. There were a few rather worrying patches which could potentially be dry rot; being able to push a blunt pencil into the joist probably isn't a good sign...
Reading about dry rot on line, there are a lot of horror stories about it spreading through your house and turning it to ruins; fingers crossed this won't be true in our case. Some courses of treatment seem extreme to say the least but I think the first thing we're going to try is removing the joists with obvious signs of decay and replacing them with new wood and include a damp course! We've made a start on removing the old joists and splicing new ones into place. Hopefully when we get central heating into the property and dry the whole place out it will be fine for another few decades!
Thursday night saw our (read as my!) first DIY disaster. In my greed to collect as much copper from the house to be weighed in, I decided it would be a good idea to remove the back boiler from the newly open up fireplace. Having seen all of the disconnected pipes upstairs, coupled with the fact that this thing had been buried behind about a tonne of bricks for who knows how long, I assumed that this would be empty also. How wrong could I have been... Having made a nice neat score in the pipe with my cutter, one more turn saw a nice neat jet of water starting to spurt out of the back of the pipe. My second incorrect assumption of the night was that it would simply be some residual water left in the pipes and that it would stop very soon, but that thought soon disappeared when I realised that rather a lot of water was coming out and with quite substantial pressure! I quickly ran to get a bucket and started shouting madly for backup! With my wife sat there manning the buckets, my first job was to switch off the mains water supply to the house and open all of the taps to drain the tanks as quick as possible. The taps very quickly dried up but the water was still pouring out of the pipe which we just couldn't figure out! So I then started frantically searching around the house, taking up floorboards to try and follow the pipes to their source. After about 20 minutes (and several buckets of water later) we finally determined that the back boiler was still connected to the hot water cylinder and that it was connected to the bottom of it meaning that the whole cylinder would need to empty before it would stop! I then decided that if it didn't stop, at some point I might need to try and cap off the pipes, but without any plumbing supplies at the house I needed to go home to get some. Off I went leaving my poor wife to sit there, wet and cold, to empty buckets...
Having returned armed with a few spanners, an odd assortment of plumbing connectors, a blow torch and some solder I was informed that it was still showing no sign of stopping! We then decided that it might be taking so long to empty because I'd only slit the pipe a tiny amount meaning that although the water was coming out at pressure, only a small amount was actually coming out. After some deliberation, we decided the best thing to do was open the pipe further so that it would empty quicker. Opening the pipe did indeed make it come out quicker but it still showed no sign of stopping! After about an hour an a half of emptying buckets we started getting very nervous that it wouldn't stop! I checked and checked again that the source of the water was the main cylinder, that there was no new water coming into the house, and that it must stop eventually! Despair set in and just as we'd started looking up emergency plumbers on our phones there was suddenly a change in the tone of the water hitting the back of the bucket! It was stopping!!! The tank had eventually drained itself and the water had finally stopped filling the buckets. After waiting five minutes or so to reassure our selves that it had definitely stopped we left a bucket propped underneath the pipe and went home for some well deserved tea (only two hours or so late...). I came back just to check after tea and was pleased to see that there was no new water in the bucket.
On the positive side I did learn a lot about plumbing and also a few other things: 1) Listen to my wife... 2) only do one job at a time 3) don't tackle any jobs at the house alone which may result in disaster!! 4) Don't assume.
There are a few things I still don't understand like: why it was still connected when it was buried in a wall with no prospect of ever being used again, why there was so much water when it was obviously used as a heat source - surely it should only have been in the cylinder coil and not the main tank? Still, it's one less thing to worry about as it'll be gone when the central heating is installed.
And finally there was the bad news about the roof. We had the flat roof repaired which caused water to leak into the house in a different place than it did initially. We then patched the roof further which moved the problem back to the initial place. It turns out that the water is actually leaking in the pitched roof and the flat roof just seems to be channelling it. The result of it all is that we're going to have to remove all of the tiles from the back-side of the roof, remove all of the timbers and felt it, before putting all of the tiles back. We've been told we can get it done next Saturday so fingers crossed the weather will be nice and we won't have too much rain between now and then.
No comments:
Post a Comment