Visitors to the house
Hello again! This past fortnight we’ve been focusing on getting the house ready for visitors. Generally this involves a load of cleaning, tidying, dusting, and hiding of things. Fortunately we’ve got a lot of places to hide things :D
Some of our expected guests are rather more demanding than others. All the humans are pretty reasonable, but the cat will be rather less so. Yup, the cat returns - she’s been on an extended leave with one of Nikki’s work friends while we’ve been moving & settling. Unfortunately it made the most sense to have cat things in the utility room, which up until now has been unliveable. We gave ourselves a deadline so we could stop imposing on our friend - it’s amazing what a deadline does for one’s motivation!
Unpacking
📦 Unpack-o-meter 📦
We've unpacked 64 boxes out of 67!
I think were getting to the point where we put a Mission Accomplished! banner up. We’ve unpacked all the boxes that we really want to and the rest will just be put into cupboards as they are. We really don’t need to unpack the Christmas decorations until Christmas.
The Dreaded Utility Room
Last installment the contractors left the utility room with drying plaster on the walls and an extremely sticky floor. They also left all of their rubbish that we had to chase them up to remove. From this point on we were keen to try and push this room forward ourselves to earn some DIY points. We’d never done tiling before, but given that it looks like the worlds simplest jigsaw how hard could it be?
It’s also a great excuse for more 🎉🎉🎉 tools 🎉🎉🎉
Anyway, armed with a naive optimism and having watched a few youtube videos we put together a list of things to get and trundled off to Wickes.
The first thing to do for tiling a floor is to try and make the floor level. This seemed like a good idea. What wasn’t such a good idea was trusting the damp-proofers estimate of how many bags of compound it would require to level the floor. We mixed up some self levelling compound and sploshed it around a bit.
So yeah, we didn’t have enough to cover the entire floor, and what we had put down didn’t have sufficient depth to self-level as well as one might have hoped. However, our self imposed deadline was pressing on us, so we pressed on.
Lesson 1 - Don’t skimp on self levelling compound
We now had a floor that wasn’t horribly sticky, and there wasn’t anything in the room that we wanted to keep pristine. Perfect time for painting! We painted the room a nice bright white, having carefully applied a half watered down mist coat first. (We had to paint bare plaster in Harrow and this was the recommended way). Apparently not misty enough as it’s peeling off in quite a few places. So we sanded it down and applied some more paint (not a mist coat to save time). This has started peeling as well so we’ll have to do it again. We’ve also got some white fluff coming through the ceiling which google tells us is efflorescence which is a salt deposit as water comes out of the plaster and evaporates.
This seems to imply that some parts of the plaster are dry enough to soak up all the water in the paint (causing flaking) and other parts aren’t dry yet because water is evaporating from them. We’d tried to dry out the room before this but it looks like we hadn’t completely succeeded. We will have to sand it down and do it again.
Whatever. Deadline. Tiling next.
Lesson 2 - Make sure your plaster is ready to paint before painting
Lesson 3 - Don’t try to skip the mist coat to save time
Time for the tiling. One of the bits of knowledge that we’d picked up was to occasionally pull up a tile after you’ve glued it down to check the adhesive coverage - it should be in the 90%s. It seemed sensible to do this for the very first tile we did, just to make sure our technique wasn’t too bad. When we did this, the tile pulled up the self levelling compound as well! That tile hastily went back down again and we didn’t pull up any more.
Lesson 1 (again) - Don’t skimp on self levelling compound
We managed to get 18 tiles in on the first session. These were all the whole tiles and they’re nearly aligned with maybe one of the walls. Roughly 50% of the floor covered.
While Nikki was laying out the tiles, I was trying to use the 🎉 tool 🎉 that we’d bought to trim a little of the end of one of the tiles. A nice straight line. How hard could it be?
It was impossible. We both tried various combinations of scoring, levering, malleting, and swearing - none of them worked. It was time for a 🎉 new tool! 🎉 We’d also managed to use the entire bucket of glue+grout on about half the tiles it said it would do.
Back to Wickes we go!
We came back with a new tub of glue+grout and a motorized wet tile saw. The saw is amazing given how much it cost (£45). It’s super loud, tends to spray silty water everywhere, and says that you shouldn’t use it outdoors - but it does result in tiles being cut in a controllable way.
After another session of tiling we’d managed to get 95% of the floor covered, but we’d managed to run out of glue+grout again. Argh!
Back to Wickes we go!
For the spacers between tiles we were using some that we saw on a video that looked like a really good idea. They maintain the space between tiles, but they also try and maintain the level between tiles.
In my experience they were crap. They were definitely the cause of some swearing and occasional flinging things across the room.
I don’t quite know if I’m being unfair, but they really didn’t help with the bits of the floor that weren’t already level. The problem is that they don’t pull high tiles down, they tend to pull low tiles up. This meant that we had to pull up at least two tiles to re-glue down. If you tried to tighten them too much they tended to snap. If you didn’t remember to place them in immediately after putting the tile down it was generally impossible to put them in afterwards. Fortunately they’ve got a built-in stress relief mechanism.
Once we’d finished the last few tiles it was grouty time! Grouting went super quick. Just squeegee some of the stuff into the gaps between the tiles. No problem. I think it took one of us about 20 minutes in total.
The next day it took us several hours each to scrape up all the grout that hadn’t actually ended up in the grooves :( A lot of time spent lying on the floor with a credit card scraping up lines of white powder…
Lesson 4 - Wiping up damp grout is probably much easier
Anyway, at that point it was done! Woo! It’s by no means perfect. Most of the tiles are very well attached to the floor. Most of them don’t flex. They’re mostly aligned. And we’re mostly confident that it won’t go horribly wrong :) If it was all perfectly aligned and level it wouldn’t fit in with the feel of the rest of the house anyway.
It’s currently supporting the washer-drier and looking a whole lot better than it did, and that’s pretty much all we need it to do.
So yeah, lots of lessons learned in the process.
Would we do it again? I think we would, only better 💪
Return of the Electricians ⚡
Another visit from the sparky! The remaining jobs to do were:
- Installing the sockets, switch and lights into the utility room
- Installing a light and switch into the vaults
- Finish installing the consumer unit
- Inspect the rest of the house wiring
The utility room light looks amazing! We’re really pleased with the results.
The wiring inspection was pretty interesting too. The house doesn’t quite meet Certified Good Electrics standards, but it wasn’t actually far off. Astonishing given the age of the property (and previous encumbent). There are some batty wiring decisions though. There are three lighting circuits: floor 1, floor 2 and floors 3-4-5. Great news if the lights go off and we’re stuck on the top floor. We also discovered that there is a single socket in our kitchen that’s on its own ring, completely unnecessarily.
Most of the ‘rings’ aren’t actually rings according to the sparky - it’s unlikely to be an issue for us but it does mean that the total amperage ratings are lower. The only rooms where that might be an issue are the utility room and the kitchen, both of which will be wired correctly when they’re finished.
Apart from that there wasn’t much that caused us to not get a clean bill of electrical health, and it all seems to be related to bathrooms.
- The lightswitch in the master bathroom is within 3m of the bath (will be solved when the bath is moved)
- The lighting in the basement and top floor bathrooms fail because you can unscrew the bulbs and stick your fingers in the socket. Apparently that’s fine for the rest of the house - bathrooms must have some compelling power to stick fingers in sockets
- The top floor bathroom light/shaver socket doesn’t have an earth, but it’s double insulated so that’s sort of ok, but there’s definitely an earth cable connected to it that doesn’t work so that’s not sort of ok
The sparky complained that some of our electrics were ugly, but not sufficiently ugly to cause us to fail.
All in all, it went pretty well.
Jiggling the Layouts
It was nice to be able to build the shape of our new kitchen using our mountain of cardboard boxes, but now that we’ve done that it would be nice to have that room back. The movers (based in London) didn’t seem all that keen to come pick the boxes back up, so we took them to the tip.
Hooray! We have another room! The dining table that was sat in our living room now has its own room, and our living room no longer feels as much of a studio apartment that has to fill every purpose.
Much better!
Vague improvements to basement shower room
The best shower in the house right now is the basement shower, which holds about the same volume as a person. It’s a bit too cramped to bend down to reach the floor, so a nice quick win is to install a caddy for our shampoos.
We’ve also added a little latch to stop the saloon-y doors swinging open while you’re inside - which boosts the total lockable bathroom door percentage from 60% to 80%.
It’s still not that pleasant a bathroom, but it’ll tide us over until we get the main bathroom sorted later this year.
AOB
We had been planning on starting work in the ‘outside’ toilet this time, but completely failed to make any progress on that front what with preparing our house for guests. Maybe we’ll make some progress this fortnight, but our weekends are starting to fill up with things that aren’t related to the house - which is really cool!
We found a painting hidden behind a radiator
Flowers in the garden are pretty. We’re gradually learning what the names of the plants are based on what our guests can remember. We’ll sort out a proper map at some point.
It’s been a week of mixed feelings. On the one hand it’s nice to not have a load of contractors buzzing around the house all the time, and on the other hand deadlines can cause stress. On balance I’d say it’s been pretty good.
See you all next time!