While in the longer term this new room will be removed altogether for now we want to create a temporary bedroom of a decent size and there was only one way to do this and that was “big hammer” approach.

The wall itself was very soft and lightweight bricks really only held together by the wallpaper. The frame of the wall was wood and then what can only be best described as “thick tiles” made up the wall, this isn’t going to take long at all…

So we started:

Two grown men with a lump hammer and a club hammer and away we went.

At this point the wall was coming down well. My only concern was that I realised that I was dressed the same as my Dad! Here’s some free advice “Never ever dance or dress like your Dad”, especially when you’re only 34. Anyway back to the hammering but before that a quick picture of “men at work” :

And then it was done.

By taking down the wall it opened up the room from being 2 roof of 10ftx6ft to a 10ftx12ft room, which for us is a far more manageable size.

Interestingly enough the tiled floor you can see above only goes into one room and the other was just carpet on top of cardboard, this suits us fine as we’ll be removing the tiles in the first room for use elsewhere.

The last job that we have to do in this room is remove the wooden cladding on the ceiling and then this room is ready for “proper” renovation.

We’d initially decided to wait until the morning to do any more but one thing lead to another and we just started having a look.

Dad with his trusty lump hammer as a crow bar started to “gently” peel off the start of the wood. We could see behind it what looked like a white plastered wall and with any luck we’d have a nice smooth wall behind. However this wasn’t to be.

On removing the wood cladding we were faced with a wall of uneven and some what damp plaster. Since the plaster was wet when we removed the wood and battening had small chunks of plaster were falling away to reveal what looked like a very nice natural wall. At this point we really could have gone on all night pulling off the wood and picking out the plaster but I knew if we finished all of this on the first night then Dawn would kill the pair of us. So around 11, getting a bit tired and somewhat cold it was time to come back in the morning with Dawn as a re-enforcement.

Dawn the really got stuck in and as you can see from the below pictures and got the 2nd wall done in the kitchen.

At the end of all this we realised we’d got our first surprise with the house. We’d hoped we’d have walls like this hidden away but expected it to be hard to get back to or hard to find. The fact the house was giving itself up so easy to work on was a total joy.

At present we’ve left and will leave the walls bare while the renovation happens however the plan is to point them in a natural lime mix to keep with the colour and seal them leaving these two walls on show. For now we’ve stopped peeling back the walls as we had another wall to pull down and the roof on the out building to tackle. Since we were only here for a few short days we had a lot to do and we couldn’t stop and admire all our handy work, but this wa a really great job to get us motivated for the rest of the house.

Date of Job : April 11/12 2008 (will add to build diary shortly)

One old heavy stove!

The first issue we had is that the wood burning stove you see in the pictures was almost built into the chimney heat guard. This guard had been made some years ago out of what at best was tin and we knew from the little we could see there was some sort of fire blanket decaying above it and best guess was that when we removed this a lot of soot, coke and toxic blanket would be coming down.

There was no way we could clean the chimney through the flume pipe to everything had to be moved. This was going to get messy.

Geared up with goggles, respirator, gloves and a whole lot of pure grunt we started moving the stove which not only seemed to be made out of cast iron but also welded to the floor through years of no use (we’ll come back to this later) .

It’s worth mentioning at this time that it was April and 10pm at night and it was almost freezing so it’s in our best interest to get this sorted and the heat working if we can.

Now we can begin

We finally managed to get the stove away from the wall with the flume mostly intact which was a good start. This thing had to weight over 80Kilos so we made slow progress getting it across the floor to where we could then start on the chimney.

Now it was time for the chimney guard / heat reflector to come down and this was going to be messy. As we started to peel the corners off the tin guard it was only then you noticed the amount of corrosion on the thing and it started coming off in strips, there was just no way this was going to come down either in one piece or in a controlled manner.

So a bit of tugging and manipulation the thing came down in one big chunk with not so much of a crash as a whimper. There was no massive cloud of coke or coal, and the soot was nowhere to be seen. We’d lucked out.

Time to start sweeping

On inspection of the chimney any soot that was in the stack was now solid coke and sending up the chimney brushes only brought down minimal debris, we’d really got lucky here.

Looking like a Stormtrooper

Solid!

While I’d have to replace the heat reflector I wasn’t going to be carrying out bags and bags of soot for days, and the fact we’d not covered the place in black soot was going to really please Dawn.

No we’d made sure the chimney wasn’t going to watch fire we could work on getting the heat sorted from the stove ans seeing as this thing was rusted solid this wasn’t going to be easy… Cold is a great motivator.

Date of Job : April 11 2008 (will add to build diary shortly)