Bedtime

The more alert readers may well have read the last two posts about the en-suite and thought,
"hang on, you can't call it an en-suite as you haven't finished the bedroom yet".

To avoid a nasty visit from the grammar police, we thought it best to press on with the bedroom, to correct this anomaly.

The chipboard floor in the bedroom had been screwed onto oak beams years ago, but over the years the beams had shrunk and twisted in places, particularly after the underfloor heating had been switched on. This lead to dips in some parts of the floor, and peaks in others, sometimes up to 2cm. This needed to be levelled out before we could start to fix the parquet.

After a lot of thought, I came up with a solution. The dips could be packed out, but the peaks would need something more radical. I decided to cut the chipboard either side of the offending beam, and then to fix the flooring onto battens screwed onto the sides of the beam.



Cutting them out wasn't too tricky, using a multi-master and a circular saw. After this I removed the chipboard from the top of the beam. Tina then stood on the now bouncy sheets of chipboard, checking a spirit level until the floor was level ( a fairly responsible job to give to a girl ) while I screwed the battens on downstairs.



Now we were ready to fit the parquet, using my friend Pete's nail gun.

It took a few days, as the room is so long. So long in fact, that I it was too long for my sash clamps. and I had to come up with other methods of closing the gaps. It turned out that whacking the back of the giant nail gun worked a treat.

Although the room is big, I still didn't trust myself with a giant belt sander, so I finished it of with a 1/2 sheet sander and a lot of patience.