BREAKTHROUGH!

The time has finally come to break through into the new rooms. The flooring has all been finished and grouted, although we did have to spend a long time getting grout stains off of the stone work. Limestone tends to be hard to clean, as it is so porous.


We hired a large polisher for a day, which was so powerful that it slid me across the room into a wall, like Wile E Coyote.






It did clean up a lot of the grout, but it wouldn't clear up the edges of the slabs, so we had to scrub it all of by hand. We tried scourers and different cleaning products, but in the end the most effective thing was Wet and Dry paper. Tina did most of the cleaning, I helped out for the last couple of days as she got RSI, and she did so much scrubbing that she lost all her finger prints. It would have been a good time to go out on a burglary spree, if we were scouses.


While all this was going on, we started to knock out the old toilet, and the wall behind it, so that we could open up the utility room. The block wall was rock solid. In one week, we managed to knock out two blocks. The original builder must have come straight from building the Maginot Line.


The next week was more productive. After Saints non performance against Bristol Rovers. I knocked out a quarter of the wall in one day, and another quarter came down after the home defeat by Plymouth. The top of the wall proved most difficult, as the concrete of the lintel was poured into the hollows of all the breeze blocks, making a super hard pain in the arse concrete slab. We tried to get the blocks of, and leave the lintel, but the first block to a big chunk of lintel with it, at which point I made a quick trip to Robert's house to borrow some Ac-row props.





A few days more drilling, hammering and angle-grinding, and we were ready to put a beam up in it's place. Tina was let loose on the power tools to clean the beam up, and Robert popped in for an hour on Saturday morning so that we could lift the beam into place and prop it up, then I cemented it in at both ends.





We still have to cut more of the wall away at the bottom, and this is quite a delicate operation, as there are a lot of pipes there, but we now felt ready to move the furniture into the new living room.














So we are finally in. There are still a few bits to do, and we can't seal the floor yet, so we have to be careful not to spill anything, but it is nice to be in the room at long last. Only another 8 rooms to go!