ollibees

On going topless and the stone saga

• By Julia Pankratova
• 2013, 2 June
• 3 Comments

We have the scaffolding in place at last (!), and the views from the first-floor-to-be are amazing!

The past three days whizzed by, we are into June now and the British Isles blessed us with a dry and sunny spell again!

It all started on Thursday night after work with dismantling of a stone wall in the front garden and shifting the stones (all 5 tonnes of them) with a wheelbarrow to the back garden, where it was then going to transform into a circular raised stone bed of plants and sitting benches in the chill-out corner. This was mainly a last-minute decision, as we knew there was a digger coming the following morning that would leave nothing of those stone had they been left where they were!

The stone beds were finished off on Friday, all in all taking a total of 6-7hrs to complete (including stone dismantling and shifting) – which is not too bad for an amateur as I was, who had never done stone wall building before in my life (- I could safely qualify as a pro by now 🙂 ). It all looks lovely now, grapevines are planted in the sunny spots against the shed and the pergola,  lily-of-the-valley saved and replanted in the shade, with yet some lavender to be replanted to join the grapevines for some ground coverage.

Friday was also a day of more digging by a digger man named Eugene and his big digger Yanmar B25V. The Yanmar made its way, way too easy into our garden, “paving” a new highway we’d never had before on the side of the house where we used to have a bootroom. The progress it made digging up the remaining old foundations and levelling it all off left both, Malc and me, speechless… Still, the fuffing around that we had had with our hired mini-digger a few weeks earlier was worthwhile and good fun and worth the money! 🙂  Again, we could by now be almost pros in digging 🙂

On the downside, Eugene (and his Yanmar) did leave a right mess outside of our dining room patio doors. And we actually paid someone to do this? We are quite capable of doing it ourselves! 🙂

Eugene is coming back on Tuesday to dig the footings and put down the foundations.

Saturday started with us taking our old summer house to the allotment, which is yet to be erected there, so we are able to admire our allotted land in pissing rain and howling wind from the peace and quiet of the indoors 🙂

We then progressed to Travis Perkins to pick up three-pallet-fulls of bricks of various sizes + concrete + Celtex insulation, in order to make sure that the brickies would have a good kick start on Monday 8am with a god supply of materials to hand. So much for Malc’s organisational skills 😉

Oh, forgot to mention, bungalow’s renovation is as per below (starting on the left-hand-side,  if looking at the house from the rear garden):

1. Build to the roof line above the existing garage, “reading room”, (- had lots of book shelves and a small sofa, not big enough for anything else – hence the name) living room and master bedroom. Replace the roof, pitching it up a metre higher
2. Reshape the existing master bedroom into a spare bedroom
3. Reshape a spare bedroom into a family bathroom
4. Glaze living room (downstairs) and master bedroom (now upstairs) + skylights
5. Build ground-floor extension to the right-hand-side of the house (kitchen extension, bootroom, snug and study)
6. Finishing off the roof + skylights
7. Glaze kitchen, diner, ground floor extension and two front ground floor bedrooms,
8. Build staircase
9. Finishing touches, bathrooms, kitchens, etc
10. Move furniture around all along throughout the build, including sealing off spaces so we can still live under the same roof without incurring any bills in addition to the mortgage and the build works!

Just as an idea, a contractor came in this week and costed our job at £170,000 , and that would not even include kitchen, bathrooms or finishes! I would expect gold taps in the bathrooms at that price! But we are not proud, I prefer stainless steal, and hence we declined. We know our project is somewhat ambitious and not cheap. Therefore we are prepared to save on as much of the labour costs as possible, by doing as many jobs ourselves as possible within reason (apparently labour costs contribute towards more than HAF of all house build costs!).

Anyway.. I divert… Saturday morning the scaffolding guys turned up and erected scaffolding to the side of the house, whilst we were at TP. The remainder of the day largely involved loading / unloading tonnes of bricks of various shapes, sizes and weights as well as trying to “de-stone, un-felt and de-board” the garage roof, whilst trying to stay alive by not falling through the rotting cheap chipboard or touching mains wires overhead (safely covered for us, but I still would not trust the buggers! 🙂 ). Lots of noise & lots of dust… and all now too in plain view of ALL our neighbours, since we were now doing it at the first floor level… I am sure we looked like a right pair of clowns with our face masks on, trying to remove the bloody felt off the roof with all means possible, including spades, gorilla bar and a broken shovel that Malc had broken in the process…

And today, Sunday, we thought we would be kind to ourselves, as well as our neighbours, and have a lazy morning… Or was it rather Malc’s idea, who was in a last-minute male state of mind to buy me my birthday present for tomorrow (thank you, you are very kind!) 🙂 A trip to the city’s recycling centre with a load of insulation, old/new tiles, roofing felt, old carpets and underlay left one of the skips so full they had to close it!

A spot of separate shopping down town (literally, as we live up in the hills) ensued, was followed by a reunion an a cheeky coffee at the usual Nero (the newly opened Costa is heaving (!) and Starbucks is not better, not to mention the other hundred coffee shops on Winchester’s High Street! Either people have become utter coffee addicts, or Winchester Council is struggling to attract any other businesses to the area.).

Inevitably it all ended up back in the garage… where Malc continued dismantling garage’s roof and I “peacefully” in the meantime “pottered around” (as us girls do) shifting hundreds of books from the “reading room” to elsewhere, lugging floor-to-ceiling-high book cases in same direction, organising food for tonight’s barbecue, and cleaning and dusting as I went along. The day ended with us boarding up the reading room and skinning it – which was a great work out of on had any frustration to get rid of!

Oh.. and then there was a barbecued chicken Peri-Peri and this blog post 🙂 And tomorrow the brickies arrive. My 33rd birthday with coincide with the birth of our new house! 🙂

Oh.. and the building control officer is coming over tomorrow too, Rosy Pie :), so Malc is in sweats to make sure that all is in order before she turns up! 🙂

All in all: stone stones, concrete bricks, thermalites and normal bricks moved in large quantities. And roofs are partially dismantled. Hence the name of the blog.

Skills learnt so far since the freezing February when we kick this off with building a new fence from scratch (yes, there was a big itch!):

Malc: digging with a digger (and then getting put down in place when the real pro comes!), steel terminology, renewables (solar stores in particular)

Julia: fencing (as in “putting up fences”, not prancing around in white overalls with a long stainless still skewer), digging with a digger, laying foundation, using a sledgehammer, using a kango, using a nail gun, sawing with a circular saw and a chop saw, puncturing a wheelbarrow (twice in 2 weeks 🙂 ), laying stone patios (the relaying them), building steps, laying stone walls, building raised beds with railway slippers (was with brick and render before), lifting weight in tonnes… 🙂