A floor to dance on, and A Mystery

This week's success was finding and installing some reclaimed flooring in the lounge.  I started the lounge floor job last November, and did repairs to the joist ends in one half of the room; basically the joists were rotten wherever they were close to a wall!  This let me keep the other half as a datum as I had no intention of doing a complete new floor from scratch.  However, when refitting the usable boards to the first half, I found that the boards were all different widths, which made the job immensely more difficult as I couldn't just use any board in any position, but had to find serviceable matching pairs to cross the room.  My next problem was that I went to the wrong reclamation company who didn't deliver the 24mm thick floorboards which they promised.  I then found that I was driven by the various contractors who needed me to do preparation of some sort to keep everything going (OK, I could have paid for someone else to take off the old plaster...) and the floor took a back seat for a long while.  Two weeks ago I found a gap in my own schedule and did enough of the floor to let me start on the other half of the room - hence the joist story earlier this month when I removed the remaining floorboards.

On Wednesday this week I re-visited another reclamation yard which had no floorboards when I had visited before.  This time I was lucky as they had a huge pile of reclaimed pile, 20mm thick and 200mm wide.  I reasoned that I could plane down the edge of the last 24mm board and so this thickness would be OK.  Then I persuaded the lad to go through the pile with me so that I could choose over 100 feet of matching boards of suitable lengths, and they even delivered for free that same afternoon! 

So, Thursday's task was to finish off the joists in the front half of the room where it had all been so damp.  I got quite bored cutting nine notches in lengths of new 4x2 to retain the same level when replacing the slightly different sized older joists.  This worked surprisingly well - I won't bore you with my calculation and cut marking technique but it worked!  The photo (right) shows the joists in the bay window; note that I have not changed the position of the joists at all - the ends you can see are original, apart from the two where I have added an end-piece after sawing off the very end in order to retain as much as possible of the original wood.

Then I started to fit the new (reclaimed) boards and the floor was virtually finished by Friday; it would have been completely finished but I ran out of screws.  I also had a single uncorrectable mistake, when my very last saw cut was 10cm short...  Fortunately Jane was going past the reclamation yard later, so she picked up another 2 metre length for me.  The photo (left) shows the almost finished floor in the same bay window - it's almost fit to dance on (if I could).

Other Progress

Plastering has continued; progress is slower than I had anticipated.  Doing the two skims over three major items takes two days, so in four days this week, Phil did three ceilings and three walls (plus a few other odd bits).  We hope to have finished the upstairs completely by the end of next week, and another week should see downstairs done apart from the walls with the two chimneys and the kitchen window wall.  We are progressing and the end is in sight, but it has been a long haul.

We have also just received Listed Building Consent for the various items already mentioned such as the new fires, the kitchen floor etc.  Hooray! First major hurdle over.

A Mystery

Finally, an unsolved mystery: I have gained a step ladder.  I don't have a photo of it but I'm sure you can use your imagination.  On Wednesday I thought I heard a sound at the back door, but when I checked there was no-one there.  An hour later, going outside, I noticed that there was an aluminium step ladder propped on the wall a few yards past the door.  Phil and Jaye agreed definitely that it was not there earlier, so where it came from is a mystery.  If it was one of my other contractors I cannot understand why they would leave it here now as they are not expected back for weeks.  In any case, anyone who knows me wouldn't just leave it without a word, they'd pop in for a chat, wouldn't they?