Relaying the Hall Floor (Part 2)

The new limecrete (NHL5) screed is laid (left) over the recycled foamed glass, and I have done a scratch coat on the lime plaster (below) where the old concrete skirting board was.

But things do move on slowly at times, like when you are waiting for the NHL to set completely, or when waiting for the scratch coat of lime plaster on the wall to go off so you can do the second coat.

The English limestone flags arrive today, I hope, but they cannot be laid for at least another couple of weeks, but it's more like three weeks - first it's the wait for the floor to be ready then - guess what? - the contractor has a planned commitment for 9 days on September 6th which means we are waiting until almost September 20th.

However, with a small delay the water pipe was fixed two weeks ago now. I am really glad that it was noticed as it would have gone sooner or later. The cost was probably an additional £750 (plumber and builder together). I can only guess at how I would have felt if, in a couple of years, the new floor had suddenly become very damp and we would have to done the job, cursing, at even greater expense.

I have also sold the Staffordshire Blue tiles for a reasonable price. They went to a flooring contractor who was going to lay them in a couple of days time in a house in London. Sadly I could not interest him in the collection of red quarries I have.

One job I can do is to paint the skirting board which has already been delivered. The profile matches what we have in the lounge which was made for us in 2011, so t'other half is very pleased. Result!

The Corroded Rising Water Main

I mentioned that the water main had been found to be corroded and, as a result, the floor work had to be suspended until the water main could be fixed. The job was done today (I am most grateful to Curtis & Carder Ltd) and here are some photos of the corroded pipe.

It might have been only precautionary (and also expensive) but I am sure that, in a year or two, we would have had a massive leak in the hall; if we had continued and done the floor, that would have been most annoying and a lot more expensive!

No further comment or comment is neccessary!

Relaying the Hall Floor (Part 1)

Well, I have finally taken the plunge: the 6" square, 1" thick, red and black (Staffordshire Blue) quarry tiles in my hall have been lifted and I am laying a limecrete floor.

The current floor is (I reckon) the original from the conversion of the school to a house in about 1861; the photo (right) shows it as it was in 2010. We left a small part of the old floor near the under-stairs cupboard (left of the stairs in the photo) as it's not in bad shape.

The limecrete floor will be constructed with a base layer of "Geocell" Recycled Foamed Glass (RFG) (see www.mikewye.co.uk/limecrete-floors/) as opposed to the Light Expanded Clay Aggregate (LECA) which I used for the kitchen floor (see entries in March/April 2011).

The RFG (being loosely laid, left) has several benefits (compared to LECA), one of which is that the depth of the floor is less and hence there is less to dig out! I have already been caught out by the volume of the removed floor - it seems to have expanded massively (like, doubled) in volume and so is filling more bags that I expected! It was very well compacted.

We have also removed the horrible concrete skirting (which was painted BROWN before we moved in! I re-did it in white) which will be replaced by some pretty profile in pine to match what I fitted in the lounge.

The removal of the old floor left a huge hole between the door to the lounge (at the front of the house) and the door to the kitchen/diner (at the back). I solved this by fitting a bridge using two 3 metre bits of 75mm x 50 mm C16 covered with bits of old floorboard from the firewood pile.

As an added refinement, I have covered the boards with a piece of carpet (as laid on the stairs and landing); the stairs are easily accessed from the bridge.



An unforeseen problem: in one corner of the hall we uncovered the mains water supply (which I knew was there but had ignored for the last 10 years) - photo below.

Below the tile level it was badly corroded and so it has to be done NOW, not later; so now outside there is a large hole and I have a plumber coming on Friday to fit a plastic pipe through the wall to the mains supply outside the house (photo below - note how the water pipe comes out from the wall and goes under the rainwater drain at an angle). More expense but it's worth it (as I keep telling myself).

The original plan was to re-fit as many as possible of the existing tiles supplemented by similar ones bought at local reclamation yards. Sadly, yesterday I took my other half to a reclamation yard as I needed to buy some more reclaimed tiles - the re-useability of the lifted ones is just over 50% (even worse than I had gloomily expected).

This visit was a mistake - first I was gently told off by the owner for sorting out suitable good condition tiles (!), so I didn't buy any at all. Then, second, once the other half had seen for herself the difficulty of finding acceptable old quarries, she decided that we should buy some proper stone flooring instead. Aaargh!

So I now have available a large number of mostly one inch, good clean reclaimed quarries (a variety of red, red/orange, proper Staffordshire blue and other blue/black), plus a lot of good ones waiting to have their grouting etc removed, plus a lot more of rejected ones (suitable for outside use only). At least I don't have to do any more grouting removal and also the retained small part of the original floor will now be done as well.

These are actually the old tiles in 2010 - the ones I have now are not quite as bad!

A Real Work of Art - in our house!

"A real work of art" is how my other half described it -or more accurately, them. We have just replaced two opaque bits of glass in a bedroom door with two specially commissioned contemporary style items of leaded stained glass. I think we'd had the idea a while ago but, like so many ideas, it has taken a long time for it to come to fruition. That is often how I do things, I guess - at least it usually means that the final thing is perfect but equally often, it dies a death.

The panels in question are in the standard old four-panel pine door to a north facing bedroom. I guess that the old wooden panels were replaced a long time ago in a bid to shed some light on the stairs which otherwise have no natural light. The glass used was about 4mm thick and one side has vertical grooves to distort the image from the outside. The trouble was that it was impossible to get old paint and varnish off the edges and especially from out of those grooves, so they always looked dirty. Interestingly, the plain side of those glass panels is actually wavy, so I have no idea how old they are.

Strictly the new windows are coloured and leaded glass (and not painted glass), but everyone calls this "stained glass". Here are some photos of what we now have and the old glass.

It's quite difficult to get a decent photo from the stairwell, but the left picture shows the colours cast on the door surround, and they also appear on the yellow clay paint of the stairwall.

The old panes, removed without breakage!

This shows the wavy nature of the old glass.

Thanks to Themis Mikellides at Bath Aqua Glass who made the windows for us.