Tag Archives: fireplace

Timber!

February 5, 2019 by Caroline In Renovations, Tor Aluinn Tagged boiler, fireplace, garden, heating, kitchen diner, tree surgeon Leave a comment

Colin the tree surgeon (or Celtic Firs, to give him his official business name) came out and did his stuff, and it’s made a big difference to the amount of light in the garden and coming through the windows at the back of the house.

We have a nice load of firewood to take home and season 🙂

The trees at the back also got a trim. The lower branches from the other big evergreen were extending around 6ft into the garden and once I get all the output from the chipping machine cleared away (could be a while…) it’s going to be a pretty big space. All the brambles and blackcurrants have been cut back to the boundary as well.

Inside, Pete and Al have been hard at work. The rest of the wall is down in the kitchen, all bricks and wood have been removed, and it’s swept out and tidy.

Upstairs the little fireplace has been removed.

If the little Victorian-style insert from Ethel’s doesn’t fit into this space, then I’ll get David to take that bit of plasterboard off, re-frame it and cover it over completely.

In the master bedroom, the hot water tank cupboard is gone. Now there’s space for a 5ft double and two bedside cabinets.

Other news from the last couple of weeks – the boiler at Ethel’s stopped again, the day before the guests were due to arrive. This time I consulted Google and found that the overheat light was coming on. After leaving a message for Jeff on every form of contact details I have for him, including Facebook, I went down the road to feed the horses and saw his van parked outside a house further down the road. He came and had a look and said that there were three usual causes of what was happening – 1) pressure drop (which I’d eliminated by resetting it the other day), 2) the pump had failed, meaning the water the boiler was heating up wasn’t getting moved out of the boiler and around the system (the pump was fine), 3) dodgy thermostat. He found that the sensor for the thermostat had come slightly out of its insulated pocket, so re-seated it, fired it up and told me to monitor it. Thankfully it’s been fine ever since, but I think we’re going to have to budget for a replacement boiler in the next 12 months, as even though Jeff said it probably had another two or three years in it before things started going wrong, I’d rather do it a bit early and not have any pissed-off guests.

We had a half-decent amount of snow here last week and sod’s law, one of the days with the heaviest fall overnight was the one where I had to go out to Coldbackie for a site visit with the plumber. Yes, I finally have a plumber! He has keys and will get started as soon as he can. He’s made all sorts of sensible suggestions about bathroom layout and saved me an entire shower cubicle. We’ve measured out the en-suite width upstairs and I’ve written on the wall to show David where the new stud wall needs to go. I was going to do all the ordering through his account with the local plumbing merchant in Thurso, but while I was browsing through the Heritage bathroom catalogue, looking for an appropriately-period-style suite for the new bathroom, I found a website with a January sale on the entire range. Kris told me to order from it, as he wouldn’t be able to price-match, so he’ll get all the en-suite goods and the replacement downstairs loo and shower through his account, and I’ve got £800 off on the upstairs suite, which is 10% of the entire bathrooms budget. The one I’ve picked is Granley Deco, which is 1930s, same as the extension.

RDI went back out yesterday and got the heating working again. I need to give them a ring to find out where we are, because they were going to do the radiator move as well and I can see today that they’ve moved the temperature control to the new position and put the two isolation valves on, but there’s a big wet patch on the concrete floor and the radiator is still under the kitchen window, so I’m not sure whether they simply ran out of time, as I know I was down as an afternoon job, or if they hit a problem. A relief that the house is warm again though, although I’d turned the water off as a precaution while it was off. It doesn’t half look pretty out there in the snow though, even if driving around snowy unploughed roads is a bit hairy – view from the front bedroom last Tuesday.

Oh Ecclefechan!

October 10, 2017 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged fireplace, hearth, stone Leave a comment

Back in December, I put up a post about what I’d like under my Christmas tree, and one of the three buildings I picked was Tigh Achenechan (or Tigh Ecclefechan as I keep calling it).

At the time, I thought the asking price of £200k was optimistic and reckoned £150-160k was more realistic. It disappeared off the market a couple of months ago, but when I drove past it at the weekend the For Sale sign was still outside it and today it popped up in my Facebook feed from the agent. It’s been repossessed and a new home report has been done. The new asking price? Just £129k. Hopefully someone else will buy it before we finish Ethel’s because I suspect if I go and look round it, heart will want to overrule head!

We’re still inching forward down the road. No David so far this week; if he hasn’t appeared by the end of next Monday I’ll drop him a text and find out what’s going on. Mick finished sanding the twin bedroom and landing and painted the landing ceiling while I was lying on the sofa full of cold at the weekend and now I’ve got a base coat on the twin bedroom walls and will start on the woodwork tomorrow.

While I was away, Pete turned up and picked and pointed the little fireplace in the double bedroom and laid a new hearthstone on top of the old one. He’s done a fabulous job.

I’ll need to stick some dried flowers or something similar in there to make it clear that it’s not for actual fires, but I’m so glad we’ve managed to show off some of the old stone.

One door closes, another opens

September 26, 2017 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Finances, Renovations Tagged boiler, burford tongue and groove, fireplace, hot water, howdens kitchen, rent to holiday let, windowsill Leave a comment

Very sadly the house we’ve been in the process of trying to buy for the past 5 months has fallen through, so bang goes the idea of our current house becoming holiday lets two and three. However, in that weird way the universe has of sometimes saying, ‘Don’t give up,’ the same day that I found out it definitely wouldn’t be going ahead, I also got given a new opportunity. A friend of mine has a house she lets to tenants, who moved out last week. She’s had a couple of hassles with various sets of tenants in the past and is so busy at the moment that she doesn’t really want to have the headache of finding new ones and settling them in. She’d really like short-term holiday let tenants, but definitely doesn’t have the time to sort that.

Well, I can recognise a ball lobbed in my direction occasionally 😉 so I asked if she would be interested in giving me a 5-year commercial lease to run it as a holiday let. She’s going to discuss it with her other half and then we’ll have a proper talk through the idea when I’m back from a week away with my mother and I can have a look inside, though if it’s anything like her other properties it’ll be immaculate. The cottage itself is in a spectacular location, on its own on a headland, overlooking the sea, but from memory it doesn’t have an enclosed garden and I suspect she wouldn’t want dogs in the house anyway, which will limit income.

I think steps forward with this are, assuming friend is still interested in pursuing the idea after talking with her husband:

Have a look inside.
Make notes of what I think might need changing based on what I learned from the holiday cottage rep (e.g. I’m pretty certain it’s set up as two twin rooms, so one would need changing to a double)
Ask holiday cottage rep for income estimation
Crunch numbers

My very rough back-of-an-envelope calculations give an average monthly profit of £150-£250, which I was a bit sniffy about, because I was comparing it to Ethel’s, but then I thought about it and if someone offered me £200 a month for about 16 hours’ work I’d take it.

I’ve stalled a bit down the road, as David’s vanished again. He asked me a week ago Friday if I minded if he did some work in his neighbour’s kitchen on Monday, but he’d be back, and I haven’t seen him since! Dougie is back from Borneo, but I don’t feel I can chase him up until I’ve got the last two ceilings finished. The twin bedroom and the landing are now mostly sanded down, just a few bits to go over where we touched up some sunken plaster, but I’m not sure I’ll have time to get them painted before I go away.

I also had a visit from Jeff this week. Jeff’s a semi-retired heating engineer from Birmingham and a genius with boilers, but Ethel’s nearly defeated him on Monday. The hot water wasn’t working, so Jeff dismantled various bits of the system and found that the paddle switch was working as it should be and the pressure switch was activating the pump correctly, but for some reason the boiler itself wasn’t firing up to provide heat. There was a considerable amount of head-scratching going on until he took the casing off the circuit board and the mystery was solved. Because John and Ethel had always run their hot water from the old Rayburn in the kitchen, the people who installed the boiler had completely removed the switching on the circuit board for it! It can be sorted, but Jeff has been honest and said it’s way outside his comfort zone and he’d be happier if Dougie did it, so that’s another one for his list when he’s next here. Once that’s up and running again, Jeff will come and service the boiler, because he reckons it hasn’t ever been done since it was installed.

David did manage to get a fair bit done in the three days he was with us. The finished kitchen window seat – I was in town today and called in at the local haberdasher, who say they’ll be able to make me seat cushions for this if I make them a template for each end.

Knobs and handles fitted in the kitchen. That blue isn’t quite so in your face with the units toning it down, so I think we might keep it.

Fireplace surround complete and skirting board started.

Traditional Easter

April 17, 2017 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Finances, Renovations Tagged bathroom, fireplace, kitchen, paint, plastering, plumbing Leave a comment

Easter weekend and DIY – as British a tradition as toast and Marmite 🙂 We have been no exception, although I had to bow out gracefully today because I’ve pulled a muscle in my back. We’ve made progress though.

Mick has plasterboarded one of the dormers upstairs. Originally this was just a flat ceiling, but I wanted it opened up and I’m glad we have, though it’s going to be a git to plaster.

Talking of which, I’ve nearly finished plastering the kitchen – just the sides of the chimney breast and the window to go. Mick started to sand down the dried stuff, but his lovely new random orbital sander worked for about 15 minutes and then the motor burned out, so that’s going to be a phone call to the place he bought it tomorrow!

While I’ve been plastering, Mick has been plumbing and the shower mixer is now plumbed in and plasterboarded over. We thought we could hear a drip, but when Mick took the right-hand sheet of plasterboard off, everything was bone dry and we couldn’t hear it any more, which is a bit strange. We’ve left the plasterboard off for now and will investigate properly next weekend.

Spoils of my last shopping trip – black slate to tile the shower with, a mosaic tile for a border, teal paint for the double bedroom, grey for the living room, platinum for the bathroom (which will have one dark grey feature wall opposite the shower) and sage green for the single bedroom.

Pete’s done an amazing job with the fireplace. The mortar has faded as it’s dried (the close-up was taken on Friday, the wider angle today) and all he has left to do is clean the stone up and then he can fit the stove. I’ll be asking David to finish it off by doing a return back to the stone and then a simple wood frame around it, painted white.

I heard back from my friendly mortgage broker on Thursday. He wants to approach two different lenders and asked me to fill out a chunky form with all our financial information and send it to him, together with Mick’s payslips, my tax returns and copies of our credit reports. I’ve pulled it all together over the weekend and emailed it over today, so all I can do now is cross my fingers.

Starting to feel like we’re getting somewhere

June 9, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged baking, concrete, fireplace, floor, kitchen, liner, pointing, renovation, roof, slates, stone, tanking Leave a comment

I’m not quite sure how it’s got to be Thursday already, but this week has passed in a blur and Pete, James and Connor have got an awful lot done.

The kitchen has been plastered:

coated with bitumen:

and then the liner was put down and the concrete floor re-poured. Try getting through THAT, damp!!

The same’s happened upstairs in bedroom one (minus the floor liner), as that gable end faces the sea and takes a battering:

And they’ve also sorted out that wobbly stone under the window:

and picked and pointed the gable end in bedroom two (I’ve decided to keep that fireplace as bare stone and not put the little surround back in, by the way):

So the inside is more or less ready to hand over to Dougie and David, once the floor’s set in the kitchen – only we’re having trouble tracking down David! The problem with using someone widely acknowledged to be one of the best joiners in the area is that he’s very in demand. Pete could really have done with him here this week, but we think he’s been working down at Forsinard where there’s no mobile signal, as no-one’s been able to speak to him. By ringing his home number at 9pm last night, Pete finally managed to speak to his other half, so fingers crossed he might be able to start with us next week, as Dougie will be back and ideally we want the studwork to go up for the wiring to be run down (and I need to know whether he’s using 3×2 or 2×2 so I know what thickness of insulation to order!)

Outside there’s progress as well. The scaffolding is up on the back and the roof tiles are off:

That membrane does make it rather blue inside!

And after a long weekend down the road at our neighbour’s house after they were delivered to the wrong address on Friday, Travis Perkins came back on Wednesday and brought the roof slates up:

And, of course, one of the most important bits – care and feeding of your roofing team! It was cheese and chive flapjacks today:

I also had a visit from ERG today to quote me for the windows and door. Before they arrived, I looked out the paperwork from when ours were done three years ago and noted that 2 doors and 10 windows came to £8,800 – so considering that I was wanting 1 door and 5 windows, my estimate in the budget of £5,000 seemed about right. Er, no, their prices have gone up a bit. List price £8,300, 20% returning customer discount brought it down to £6,640. I made the time-honoured tradesman ‘suck-through-your-teeth’ noise, he asked how much I was hoping to do it for and we ended up shaking hands at £5,812. The surveyor should be coming round in the next two weeks to measure up more accurately and then it’s 6-8 weeks for manufacture and delivery, which will be about right for my schedule. The front door will be dark green outside, white inside and part-glazed. The windows will be white inside and out, with oak window sills and door and window furniture will be silver. Once the exterior is painted just off-white, it should look pretty smart!

Tomorrow Callum is coming to sweep the three chimneys. I’m not sure how many years it is since they were last done, but Derek the heating engineer made the same suck-through-your-teeth noise when he looked up the living room one as we were discussing the woodburner, so I think it’s going to get messy….

Game over on the fireplace

June 3, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged concrete, fireplace, flagstones, plastering, renovation, stone floor, tanking Leave a comment

Well, I was right. When Pete called in for the key this morning, he said the absolute best prices he could get from his insurers and from the people who’d provide the steel to support it would price the job at £2,200. Now, spending that on opening up a single fireplace would be fine if we were doing a cottage in, say, Oxfordshire, which was going to be worth in the region of £500,000 when finished, but for house prices up here, it just doesn’t make sense. Plus Mick would be forever worrying it was going to collapse with guests in situ and, as he pointed out, it might be horrible behind all that stuff anyway. So it will be swept out (must ring Calum the sweep next week…) and hidden behind plasterboard and be a little secret for someone else to uncover the next time someone decides to strip it back to bare walls in another 100 years’ time 🙂 And in the meantime we’ll lavish a bit of extra care and attention on the two perfectly nice fireplaces we’ve got at the other end of the house.

As you can see, Pete and Connor have been busy today, cutting out the kitchen floor and plastering up the wall ready for spraying with bitumen on Monday. Under 4cm of concrete, they found some of the original flagstones set into the bare earth.

And the deliveries have started! A big Travis Perkins lorry came down the village this afternoon, dropping off a load of stuff for Pete and the replacement Velux windows – we’ve gone for the conservation-style ones with the bar down the middle, so they’ll look a little similar to the original roof lights.

Time to start spending

May 20, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged building work, Ethel's House, fireplace, guttering, kitchen, renovation, roof, stone, windows Leave a comment

Pete dropped round yesterday to have a chat about the kitchen fireplace and deliver his quote. “Caroline,” he said. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you want to open up this fireplace?” I had a think about it. “7.5.” “Ah. Not a 3 then.”

The fireplace has been causing headaches. Pete’s consultants have been trying to work out the load on that wall, but because it’s a rubble wall (i.e. constructed out of random sizes of stone) rather than standard bricks or blocks it’s (a) difficult to calculate the weight and (b) difficult to predict how it will behave – because there’s no structure to it, if it starts to collapse then worst-case scenario the whole gable end could come down.

That said, they haven’t said ‘Don’t do it’, it’s more a case of ‘If you do, be very careful’! They think that an RSJ at the front and back of the fireplace should work (both are needed in case the wall starts to twist), but obviously this is based on best guess. Insurance-wise, Pete can get an extension to his normal insurance to cover the work.

Mick and I had a chat about it – I knew what my gut instinct was, but wanted to see what he thought, and it turns out we feel the same: if we don’t at least try, then every time we walk into the kitchen and look at that wall we’re going to wish we had. So I sent Pete a text to say that we would like to go ahead with it, but we don’t want to put pressure on him to do a job he’s uncomfortable about, so if he has reservations then we’ll cover it over again.

Anyway, the quote. When Pete first looked at the job last year, he said a thumb-in-the-air guesstimate was that a straight roof replacement would be about £12,000 and indeed, that part of the quote has come in at £12,485, including sorting the chimneys out. However, once you add in the four new Velux conservation-style windows and the joinery work, that goes up to £15,301.80. On top of that we have separate quotes for the other work we’ve talked about::

Supply and fit new half-round guttering system, including over joist hangers to front and rear £967.00
Pick and point upstairs gable ends internally (I checked, this includes sorting out that loose stone under the bedroom window) £1,172.00
Remove floor section in kitchen, tank to 1m, fit waterproof membrane and re-pour floor £940.00
Re-harl front section of wall after removal of fascia board £340.00

Once they’ve picked the upstairs gable end, it may be decided that we’d be better off tanking it, in which case Pete says he’ll do it for the same price.

Time-wise, they just have to get the ridge tiles on their current job (which they’re not going to manage today, by the looks of the weather!) and finish cleaning up site and then they’ll be over, so their gear should start arriving on site towards the end of next week and then they’ll start the week after – which is when I have to pony up the first third of the bill!

A tale of two fireplaces

April 27, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged crack, Ethel's House, fireplace, kitchen, lintel, living room, renovation, support Leave a comment

The weather here today has been completely horrible – sleet, snow, hail and wind. In other words, not ideal conditions for getting up on a roof, so Pete and his crew abandoned their current job up the road in Strathy and came to have a look at our fireplaces.

One end went REALLY well – this is what the living room fireplace now looks like:

Those stones will clean up nicely with a wire brush, Pete will repair the back with matching stone and I’m going to try and find an old oak beam to put above the lintel – the plan is to box around it with the plasterboard and leave the stone exposed. Although there’s a hearthstone there, the floor level’s going to be raised up with the underfloor heating, so if we can find a big enough bit of Caithness flagstone (or two bits to go side by side), we’re going to use that, as Pete says he can fit it for us – but has warned me that the three exposed edges need to be natural, not cut, otherwise it won’t look right. We’ve got a couple of bits here and a friend of Mick’s has got some he’s willing to let us have, so hopefully we can find one or two pieces that work.

In the kitchen, things haven’t quite gone to plan. The guys got the Rayburn moved out of the way and the fireplace was revealed in all its glory (husband included for scale! – he’s 5’7″)

Pete carefully chipped out a corner of the rubble – it’s 17″ from the front of the lintel to the back wall of the house!

BUT we have two enormous load cracks in the lintel (one shown below, the other is a mirror image). Pete is doing the calculations to work out if we can still break it out by inserting a big sheet of steel into the wall under the lintel to support it – essentially functioning as an RSJ, but less visible. Fingers crossed!

Another find down the back of the Rayburn – this looks handcarved.

Damp corner. The concrete floor is going to be cut back, the wall tanked, a new membrane put down on the floor going up the wall and then the floor re-poured.

I don’t know what wood this is, but it’s obviously tasty!

Yet another vintage wallpaper, this time in the bathroom.

Mick has made a temporary sign for deliveries – 75p of stick-on letters and a bit of wood and two screws that came out of the house!

Stripped

April 10, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Finances, Renovations Tagged damp, drill, electrician, fireplace, kitchen, living room, plasterboard, quote, renovation, sockets, stone wall, switches, tanking Leave a comment

Mick decided to take the day off on Friday, got the bit between his teeth and completely stripped the living room.

Sadly no enormous fireplace on this end. We did have a brief discussion about the merits of swapping the kitchen and living room over, but decided that the extra hassle and expense of replumbing probably wasn’t going to be worth it. It just means we rotate the kitchen layout 90 degrees and drop the idea of having a big dresser against a wall for all the crockery and cutlery. There is, however, a lovely old hearthstone in that fireplace 🙂

As the plasterboard came off, it was clear that there was a membrane underneath the concrete floor, which is why it’s dry. Unfortunately it doesn’t go under the walls, so a little damp has got into the old lime plaster. We’re going to pick it all off, let it dry out and take a look at the stone, then see if it needs tanking before we put the studwork back up for the insulation and new plasterboard.

Dougie the electrician rang on Saturday with his quote. Bear in mind that this was the list we ended up with when he asked us what electrical things we wanted in each room:

Front room

Main BT socket
Satellite connection
3 x wall lights
2 x standard double sockets
2 x double sockets with USB chargers
CO2 alarm

Hall
Smoke alarm
1 x single socket
1 x ceiling pendant light

Bathroom
Electric shower to be changed out
Electric towel rail
3 x large (about dinner plate size?) recessed ceiling lights
Extractor fan

Kitchen
6 x recessed ceiling lights (standard spotlight size)
Cooker
Heating control system
Hob hood extractor
Small spots for lighting the food preparation surfaces
3 x standard double sockets
2 x double socket with USB chargers

Landing
2 x recessed ceiling lights
1 x single socket
Smoke alarm
Move meter from hall and bring in power here instead of through the front door
Low-level, fairly dim lights up the stairs, wired to a switch in each of the three bedrooms to light people up and down to the bathroom at night, without waking everyone up by switching on the main landing light

The two larger bedrooms
1 x central pendant light
3 x double sockets with USB chargers
Satellite dish connection
Ethernet connection
Smoke alarm

Smaller bedroom
1 x central pendant light
2 x double sockets with USB chargers
Satellite dish connection
Ethernet connection
Smoke alarm

What do you reckon his quote was? Mick was thinking in the region of £6,500-£7,000. I was hoping it would be about £5,000. He’s quoted us £4,655. I was so surprised that I completely forgot to ask what I needed to buy and what was covered in that list! When he was talking about the stair lights, he said the ones he intended to use were in pack of six, so lights must be included, but I know that I’ll need to pay for the shower, the extractors, the towel rail and, obviously, the cooker. What I’m not sure about are the cover plates for the light switches and sockets, so I’ll have to email him and check.

Since he says he’ll want to start upstairs and can begin in about three weeks’ time, we attacked the upstairs again this morning and made good progress in stripping out some of the last bits of panelling – now David the Joiner has confirmed that all the internal wood that isn’t a sarking board or rafter is non-structural and can be removed, we’re being a bit more adventurous with the pry bars! Only one worrying moment, which was when I was breaking out some of the panelling below the window in bedroom one, put my bar against an enormous rock in the wall to brace it and the rock moved….!! It’s completely loose, so it’s been pushed back into place and we’ll get Pete to have a look when he’s next here. A little bit of wet stone under the window in bedroom two as well, but we’ve had an easterly with rain in it all weekend, and I think it’s just been forced in around the window.

I also got to grips with a power tool for the first time – I used Mick’s drill with a Phillips screwdriver head attached to remove the handrail up the stairs. It took a couple of goes to get the idea that I had to keep it pushed into the screw even though I was using it to take the screws out, as that seemed a bit counter-intuitive, but 24 screws later I was quite comfortable with it.

Discoveries

April 6, 2016 by Caroline In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged fireplace, house project, kitchen, lintel, renovation Leave a comment

It’s been a day of discoveries in the house. We’ve spent the last couple of days concentrating on the kitchen, which we knew was going to be hard work, but our efforts are slowly paying off. Pete the Roofer came over this evening to introduce us to Dave the Joiner, and it was great timing because we were able to ask him about a couple of things we uncovered that looked slightly worrying!

Yes, it’s a very big crack and that whole white bit wobbles, but fortunately it’s old lime plaster and just needs to be knocked off the stone and picked out.

We made a good start on breaking through the plasterboard and oooh, look – is that a lintel I spy emerging?

I think that’s definitely a lintel!

Would you look at the size of that fireplace behind?? It’s blocked up with cement and rubble, but we’re going to get it opened up and see what’s there (subject to the crack in the side of the lintel not being an unresolvable structural issue…). It’ll make a fantastic feature if we can do it!

The remains of the pantry innards have been removed.

And would you believe that behind the plasterboard we removed, we found at least five layers of wallpaper??

I ended up making a collage photo of all the different ones we found that still had enough left to photograph the pattern – this is just the kitchen, remember.

And finally, scratched into the plaster behind the wallpaper, three names – Ethel’s three children

Anyway, the good news is that we’ve found nothing that worries Pete and the even better news is that he thinks he’ll be able to start on the roof in about three weeks’ time. I’ve spent very little so far, but now the bills are really going to start rolling in. Pete’s bill will be split into three, the first part paid when materials are delivered to site, the second at the halfway point (to be predetermined and agreed) and the final third once I’m happy with the completed job. Time to start working out the best way to extract the cash off my 0% balance transfer offers.