Week 2

Week two is where it started getting real and walls started coming down. The first weekend we had the house my dad came over and fitted the steel support beam, and started taking down the kitchen walls! As a reminder this is what it looked like before

This photo shows the start of the work and where the beam sits in relation to the living room, there was another hole on the opposite wall for the beam to slot in.

Once the support system was all in place the wall started to be knocked down!

We were left with it looking like this after the main demolition work was done (that hunk of concrete was taken off I just snapped this picture while we were waiting for someone with a larger cutting tool to come and do it!)

You can see where my brother had started on the electrical work in these photos, as the room that we were going to use as the kitchen had been a dining room before it had no counter level plugs (and actually only one double socket for the whole room) so we had to add on a lot more plugs. Thankfully the circuit board is reasonably new and up to date so it could cope with the additions, but as we also add more to the rest of the house it may be something we need to look at redoing. We only had 3 or 4 plugs in the kitchen at our flat before moving here so we are chuffed to have so many in this kitchen!

Also in the photo above to the right of the beam you can see a small hole and a damp patch which we found when we took off the wallpaper, it was stuffed with an old bit of damp carpet.

It had been shoved either into the ceiling or under the floorboards from upstairs to soak up a slow drip. Wonderful. It was a very slow drip as the carpet was damp but the ceiling actually wasn't wet to the touch, we sealed it as best we could with putty as we didn't have time to get a plumber out at that point so we got it sealed up then patched the hole from below with plasterboard ready to be plastered and we then called someone out to fix it a few days after from above by taking up the floorboards in the bathroom. This is probably not the best way to do it and we likely should have got it fixed right away but the gamble paid off for us as it didn't drip enough to cause an issue (we put a sponge under it just in case it was still dripping).

Tom was off work for week two so he concentrated on tidying up the kitchen ready for it to be plastered and kitchen fitting in week three. This included pulling out about 500,000 wall plugs, stripping more wallpaper off the ceilings, removing old light fixtures, taking off the skirting and the coving and generally getting it all back to the bare bones. He also patched any holes in the ceiling that had been made during the demolition and electrical work (and leaky carpet removal) and the old window with framing and plaster board, as well as gluing plaster board to the support beam. This was actually surprisingly easy, just cut the board to size and nail it to the joists in the ceiling, and make a frame in the window gap and nail it to that. Gluing it to the beam was a little tricky and we could have done with a clamp but we basically wedged it with some wood supports and I sat on a ladder to hold it in some places until it set!

This can be done by plasterers but we had agreed to do this as they were going to be pushed to get the work we wanted done finished in one day and we didn't have the time for them to come back a second day (the kitchen fitters were starting the day after!). You just need to be reasonably neat at cutting and measuring and it is totally do able to do this yourself and save money on plastering.

We finished up week 2 with the kitchen looking like this

All patched and ready for plastering! Here's a quick reminder of the "before" of the kitchen as it was on completion day :)

As a point of reference the boiler hasn't moved, although Tom did knock out the cabinet underneath it with all the circuit board and meters in it, as this was going to be inside a kitchen cabinet. 

In the rest of the house Tom also pulled up the old carpets and dragged them outside while the kitchen was empty (the patio doors were our main access at this point as the front door was still inoperable) which really helped to 1. brighten the place up as they were quite dark carpets (they are in the before photos here) and 2.freshen the smell for our poor tradespeople. The downstairs carpet smelt quite musty and that damp/dog smell you get in old carpets, and the upstairs smelt of urine. Not sure if people or dog or what but it was there.

You can donate old carpets to animal shelters or give them away to people looking for off cuts etc for allotments or garages if you would like to save them going to landfill but with the potential hygiene issue we felt we had to put ours in the skip. The floor under the bedroom carpet looked like this, those damp marks aren't water. Lush. It has had a good coat of disinfectant and a steam mop since then before the new carpets went down!

We also had the radiator removed in the kitchen and airing cupboard, a gas pipe in the kitchen capped off and removed (it was inside the archway wall) and the kitchen sink removed, as well as Tom keeping himself occupied with the never ending wallpaper stripping of course!