Walking through rejuvenated Leeds from Clarence Dock to Brewery Wharf at 2am Sunday morning, among new blocks of executive waterfront hutches, with the leftover heat of the day still present, a faint fog striking up, and the smells of the canal, the brewery, the wet grass and the indian restaurant mixing, it felt like a foreign holiday. For a moment I was in Singapore on a 24 hour layover en route to Australia.
On Saturday I took a trailerful of stuff to the HWRC (the dump) and, brandishing my permit booklet, got in this time.
Top tip for the next person pulling down their bathroom: Tiles count as rubble but plasterboard counts as plasterboard. So you really want to get the tiles off the wall before pulling it down, because trying to separate the buggers while leaning over the side of a trailer is soul-crushing stuff. Dogged perseverence and the loan of a shovel from a nice man at the tip, I mean HWRC, got me a mostly-clear trailer and a return home in jubilant mood.
I drilled a couple of holes in the bottom of the trailer for drainage, having had to deal with waterlogged plaster and rotted wood for the bottom half-inch of the job. I then set about figuring out how to fit the problematic flush-fit bath/shower diverter into wall 1. This meant getting to play for the first time with my router, bought through the bosch staff discount scheme. I came out of the experience a little deaf but with all my fingers intact and a custom wooden bracket for fitting the diverter! Yay!
After a break I faced up to the fact that wall 1 will need its studwork modifying, and took the plasterboard off that wall. Top tip #2: when removing plasterboard, look for where it’s nailed and jemmy it off there. Then it comes off in large flat pieces will a minimum of dust compared to the hammer and bolster method, which manufactures dust with a by-product of small pieces of plasterboard.
That evening I planned to get a pizza and watch a movie but a txt saw me wending to Leeds for a late night salsa session, with the upshot that Sunday was a low-energy day. I did though manage to make a scale drawing of the modified studwork, so that’s going to be all go once I have a level for the floor.
So really I need to be at the point where I’m choosing the floor tiles. That will set the height of the bath panel which sets the height of the bath which sets the extent of the wallboard (I’m fitting the bath direct to the studwork and overlapping the drywall and tiles to provide a good seal, and want to fit horizontal noggins at the right height to screw the drywall into so I’m not really happy to just leave “a few mm” for floor tiles).
Hmm, reading that back, it looks like I have decided that I’m having floor tiles. So that means I’ll need to lift and reinforce the floor then…
I don’t think of myself as having vertigo… but I definitely am not good with ladders. If you want to challenge your fear of heights try knocking down a ceiling from in the loft.
There I was, on all fours, spreadeagled between the beams, pummeling on the plasterboard, when suddenly just about a whole 8′ x 4′ piece fell into the room.
So then I was spreadeagled between the beams with nothing but 2.5m of air between me and the bathroom floor. Although nothing had changed in terms of how I was staying up and not, e.g. breaking my back, the illusion of safety had been removed. And my little shrew brain demanded a full audit on any movement that I attempted to make.
In the end I had to refit some of the loft boarding just so that I could move about enough to knock out the rest of the ceiling.
Another terribly satisfying session. (1) bathroom with ceiling, (2) bathroom full of bits of ceiling (3) bathroom clean and trailer full of bathroom ceiling. Hoo-hah!
Soon it will be time to do girly things like choosing tiles.
It’s Friday.
Dancing in York? In wetherby? In Leeds?
Or pulling down the bathroom ceiling and the plasterboard off wall 1?
My diary says “go for it”
Whee! that was a great evening-and-day.
Son of wall 2
This time I decided to build the wall flat on the floor and slide it into place at the end. If you have enough space (I don’t, quite) then this is a much nicer way to work than building it in situ. You can bang the nails straight in from where the floor and ceiling are going to be rather than fannying around hammering nails at diagonal angles, moving the wood out of position.
Somehow among the reclaimed wood two bits were about 1cm longer than all the others, and also somehow I managed to unwittingly select these for the end studs. So I built a big square then found none of the studs stretched across the gap. Some unhammering and a bit of sawing later it all fitted.
I also re-learned the lesson about using reclaimed nails: just don’t. It’s about 11.8 times as hard to bang in a nearly-straight nail than it is to bang in a straight one. And a straight one with a crooked head is even worse. So four reclaimed nails in, I switched to shiny new ones.
Tilted up the wall and wrestled it into position. My mathematician’s side told me it wouldn’t fit, but knowing that wood is forgiving and I have a big hammer, I went ahead. There was a moment of mild concern when it looked like the wall was about half a centimetre longer than the hole it was supposed to go in, but on correctly seating the other end, and whacking it with the big hammer, it all came right.
It’s probably premature to fit wall 2, since the floor, ceiling, and bath replacements will all be easier without it, but (a) in situ is the best place to store it and (b) I really wanted the emotional buzz of seeing it in place. And I got that alright! Seeing it in place was roughly equivalent in satisfaction to successfully lighting 11 barbecues at once whilst playing keepy-uppy.
Sunday morning I hacked a few more bits off the house before going off to practice with the band. When I got back I was physically and emotionally exhausted so I just moped all night, which was a bit rubbish.
Today I was grumpy all day, especially when, at 12:55, having decided to treat myself to a proper lunch, it was announced that the 2pm meeting had been moved to 1pm, so I had to sit through an hour of interesting financial forecasting with a rumbling stomach, then missed the lunchtime buffet slot when I finally did get out to lunch.
But there’s nothing like a stinky day at work to make me determined to do something for myself when I get home. So I went straight upstairs, tore out the very last of wall 2, cut the sole and head plates, marked where the new door is going to be, drilled holes for the electrics, and phoned for a pizza.
Before charging ahead and nailing down the new sole plate, I checked out the bathroom floor. The area under the bath is absolutely knackered, so it’s going to want cutting out and replacing. So I made a cut through the chipboard alongside where the new wall is going to go, having remembered what a pain it is trying to cut the floor flush to a wall using the circular saw.
When the pizza arrived, I was sweating like a bastard and removing my gloves as I answered the door. “Having fun?” asked the delivery guy. It turned out he was a tiler whose business had all dried up in december, and he was sure he could save me lots of expensive mistakes if I stopped everything now and gave him a call. I might just give him a call but I won’t be stopping anything after taking this long getting started!
Noisy work stops at 9:30 so after a sweep up, a bath, and a blog, it’s time for measuring and planning and choosing of colours. I’ve just offered the shower rail up to the wall and it’s going to look fantastic!
Reconnected the lights in the bathroom since it’s so flimmin’ dark for June, moved the loft junk and unboarded the loft to get access to the ceiling.
Scant progress yesterday. I just moved a few things around, and looked at the diverter valve and tried to figure out how I would fit it.
I’m faced with the choice of trying to fit it into the wall and “making good” over the face of it, or of removing the plasterboard from wall1 and going for a clean slate. I’m trying to resist more stripping down but this might be another case of the “hard way” and the “harder way”. i.e. stripping down and starting over may prove to be a larger volume of easier work rather than a smaller volume of stressful, intense, and error-prone work.
It’s also getting high time to decide about the tiles, and what finish I want on the floor. This is a tricky one because if I go too posh with the walls then any cheap floor is going to stick out like a sore thumb… so I have to hold back on the bling when it comes to the walls. Tiling the floor properly would involve removing the subfloor and adding reinforcement to the joists, or it’ll be too flexible. Decisions decisions…
I awarded myself 10 points and a gold star (and a curry) today for progress.
In the morning I drew pictures and measured stuff and now have a plan for wall 2.
Then I bought a hacksaw and set about pulling wall 2 down, reclaiming the timber. It’s not really a rational thing, to reclaim the timber, since the new wall would only cost about £36 in timber, but it’s more a thing I have about wasting stuff that’s been ripped out of the ground.
Any worries about its being load-bearing quickly disappeared when it turned out that the studding didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling! Inspired by that, I decided I would assemble the new wall2 flat on the floor then move it into position wholesale.
So rather than cutting the wood, I pulled out and sawed through the nails and got most of the wood out intact.
I now had a plan for how walls 2 and 3 would interface, but before wall2 could be completely removed there was the small matter of the ‘lectrics. Having daylight, and my diary saying “go for it on the bathroom”, I powered off the house and set about the electrics. This involved lifting two boards in the loft (thankfully only boards at the edge of the boarded area). There were two plugs and one lightswitch to relocate, and I had to remove the (probably illegal) dimmer from the bathroom.
There was fun to be had drilling big ole holes in stuff to feed the cables through, then much banging and swearing and wrestling to actually thread the cables through them.
Then wall 2 could be (mostly) removed. Here’s the before and after.
before
extreme ventilation
As usual, once I was working I had a great time, singing piano montunos and dreaming about my latest salsa crush. I was promising myself a trip across to manchester tonight to dance with her but… well, read on.
By 6:30 I decided it was time to wrap up. I wanted to leave the electrics safe and useable, so I refitted the switches/sockets to the now rerouted cables (all but the one for wall2, which was just lying around under the floor, to which I nonetheless fitted a socket). While I was there, I thought I might as well fit the bits of wood to wall 3 to hold the boxes… so at 8pm I was all set to power up the house, grab some food and … POP.
A rather theatrical blue spark from the fusebox and an anticlimactic whirr from the refridgerator.
I remembered the golden rule of “don’t start anything after 4pm in case you need to by new bits”.
Investigating upstairs, the live leads had come out of one of the plugs’ terminal and shorted to earth. I just hadn’t fitted that one correctly. Funnily, it was the first one I’d fitted, before I was hurrying. But I remembered it being a bugger to fit. After the short, the live leads were lightly coated with white, and the screws fixing the socket to the box were black, one of them having had its thread melted. I replaced the socket with a junction box for now.
Fortunately B&Q was open till 9 so fusewire was to be got, and I’m all powered up now (except for the bathroom lights, since I wasn’t about to figure out the rat’s nest of wires in the loft after removing the dimmer wire.
lightswitch and socket moved to the new wall
By the time I was curried, it was far too late to go to Manchester no matter how much I deserved a dance with my crush. So looks like a trip to lancs at the weekend on the offchance. Meantime, the big push on the bathroom continues…
I really have to watch the dust issue. After nearly a week of lethargy I spent two days not disturbing anything then donned a dust mask and hoovered the whole house. I got my energy back! Yay. So I’ve stapled a sheet across the entrance to the warzone and hopefully the dust will stay out of the living zone, especially out of my bed. It makes the warzone a little less comfortable to work in (poorer ventilation, less light) but it’ll be worth it to avoid another week of dusty lungs.
This morning I sawed through some nails and removed more wood.
Also I wondered whether it’s allowed to make water pipes travel horizontally along walls.