Anyway, the blog is now back, with more news of our building work.
Since we finished the new living room, we have been concentrating all of our efforts on the utility room, or as it is at the moment, the dusty corridor between the kitchen and the living room. We had already knocked the old toilet out, along with most of the wall that was behind it too, but there was a lot more work needed to turn the space into something usable.
The first thing was to sort the plumbing out. We had lots of pipes that were attached to the old wall, and now hung in mid air, like some sort of still. To get them seamlessly across the new room, I carefully dug out a channel the width of the room, at his suggestion, for Mr H the plumber to bury the pipes in.
When Mr H arrived to move the pipes, he did another survey of all the pipes and remembered that he had already laid some pipes under the concrete, and so we didn't need the channel after all. We managed to move the rest of the pipes under the bath into another hole that I had cut in the bathroom wall, and suddenly you could walk through the room without risking tripping over a mass of copper pipes, although you could still fall down the unused channel that I had dug.
Now the floor needed to be sorted. First we had to take up the old blue tiles that were in the old loo. These were laid on a thin concrete screed, which was on top of the main concrete base of the house. We took a long time to decide how much of the tiles that we needed to remove, as we needed to get a good straight line to finish on. We thought about going right up to the bathroom door, but it would be very tricky to cut a straight line in such a confined space, and there would have been more fun and games with the step at the other side of the room, which is also covered in the blue tiles.
In the end our mind was made up for us, as we had decided to use the stone left over from the living room in the utility room and there wasn't enough to cover the whole space. I worked out the different sizes we would need to cover the whole room and we went to order them, only to find that you can't order just 1 stone of a particular size, but that you have to buy it in linear metres, which would be far more than we needed. So now we have a blue corridor at the end of the room, which avoids a lot of problems.
Next up we filled the empty channel back up, and put down some levelling compound to tie the floors in, either side of the old wall. This was a lot more successful than when I tried it in our first house, and ended up with a little mound of leveling compound in the middle of the kitchen.
The last wall now needed to be studded out, and as it needed to be able to support cupboards, it had to be studded in wood, with an extra layer of chipboard for strength.
Before we could plaster, I had to remodel the cellar doorway, as I hadn't allowed for the width of a door frame, as well as the door, and we would have ended up with a door so thin that only size zeros could get through it. It might have been handy for incarcerating Victoria Beckham, but not much good for the pair of us.
Finally, the room was ready to skim, or in my case skim and sand all the bumps out. Skimming the plasterboard was not too bad , and even the ceilings were OK. I was expecting to come out looking like a wedding cake, but managed to get a lot more on the ceiling than I did on myself.
So this is how it looks at the moment.
