Monday 25 February 2013

A new roof on our Cornish House.

New Roof Cornwall
With bad weather holding us back we are finally given a dry day to get back out and work on the roof. In the above picture you can see the final beams in place ready to cover and get roofing tiles. Unfortunately there are only so many jobs my lovely boyfriend can do himself and laying the roof tiles is slightly out of his skill set so although he did the majority himself we had to get the professionals in to finish the job for us. 

Cornish roof
It might be late and now dark but here is the very nearly finished roof. Need to work on the render around the edge but at least we are water tight and hopefully a little warmer. It's another job ticked off the massive ever growing list, and a job we hadn't realized we needed to do. Hopefully there aren't to many more expensive surprises for us!

Sunday 10 February 2013

Why do we get torrential rain when we have no roof?

We should have realized that a whole day in the dry with no rain was too good to be true and in true Cornish style today is wet. Very wet! Waking to find water pretty much everywhere is not a good way to start the morning, See below the little outhouse for our gas bottles under about 3inches of water. 

LPG gas bottle central heating
With all hands on deck we tried to sweep as much water away into the drain as possible to stop the water ingres into the house.

Sweeping up the flood water
With the water steadily pouring outside, that means that the water is steadily pouring inside. Here water is coming through the kitchen cupboards.
Flood water in the kitchen
The worst area for leaking was around the chimney were the roof was removed, here the water was literally running down the walls.
Water leaking around the chimney
As the night drew to a close the water started filling up in the porch. Hopefully the next day working on the roof is a little dryer and we can get the roof finished and get the house dry.
Flooded porch


Friday 8 February 2013

New roof to our new home

With a bright sunny day it's time to start attacking the rotten roof, the roof we have since found out that is built from several layers of roof. You can see in the picture below just how rotten the roof was. 
Rotten roof
Striping off the roof tiles and beams 
Striping off the old roof
It was quite an apocalyptic sight seeing my kitchen without a roof, the kitchen isn't great anyway and the plan is to replace the new kitchen once the roof is repaired and the room actually dry but here i really felt like there wasn't even much of a house to live in anymore.
Kitchen without a roof
You can see on the below image the scarring left on the wall from the additional roofs that had been built over the top of each other. Hopefully now we will just put the one roof back on and this time it will be done properly, with real roofing materials and not a wardrobe panel in sight!
Inside of the house with no roof

Single story roof being removed
The new beams are being cut into the roof.
New single story roof beams
With the night drawing in it was time to stop the roof build for the day, with some roofing felt an a few beams in place we were relatively dry for the night and will continue the rest of the roof ripping it off and repairing it tomorrow. 
Temporary roof lining



Wednesday 6 February 2013

We have finally got an internet conection

Today is a very important day, a day where BT finally come and connect us a phone line and get us set up with a land line telephone number and most importantly the internet. You'd think that when it comes to installing new lines and signing up new customers they would be straight around and get us connected so that they can start charging us bills. But after 5 weeks of waiting we finally have an appointment with an engineer to come and connect us. 

Happily I can now blog more, shop more, watch TV online and do all the things online like internet banking that you take for granted until the internet has gone. 

Although no one has our new telephone number yet and the only people to ring are wrong numbers but i'm sure that will soon change!
BT connecting us to the internet

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Lean To glass roof uncovered.

After pulling down the plaster board from the kitchen ceiling we uncovered the most weird botched up ceiling and roof we had ever seen. Underneath the plaster board was a glass lean to styled roof. This was then boarded over with wardrobe panels. Including door fittings in some places. This was then covered again with roofing tiles. Removing each layer of roof carefully and filling up another skip we could finally access the roof and put on a new roof. This time with just the one layer and not 4!!!! 

I dunno what the Cornish do when building houses but the guy that put this together was... lets just say resourceful to say the least! Our roof is now being rebuild using timbers and slates and not a wardrobe door in sight!

Glass lean To roof

Glass roof sky lights

Monday 4 February 2013

Plaster boarded ceilings

Now that the front room is repaired and the wiring put in place the battens have gone up and the insulation in place this can all be hidden by shiny new plaster board. 

Now I know these pictures are extremely boring, but to me this is quite a momentousness occasion where all the months of ripping stuff down and tearing stuff out we finally start putting some rooms back together. I know we are a long way off but this is keeping me happy for the time being. 
Freshly plaster boarding ceiling

Plaster board around wooden beams
You can see the dining room in the distance starting to get insulation so this will be next to get the finishing treatment.