Work begins in 2014

For the last few months leading up to Christmas we have worked so hard getting the house ready for the festive period and the visit from my parents, working every single night and all weekends for the last few months has been hard. We have missed festive drinks with friends and avoided Christmas shopping all together to get the house ready.

Once the family arrived tools were officially put down and they have stayed down until today. We enjoyed a nice two week break from Christmas into the new year and going back to full time work was definitely a shock to the system. Now we are nearly three weeks into the new year and officially rested and relaxed it's time to start work and hopefully get the house finally finished.

Today the boys are working in the porch, an area that has been completely ignored up until now, whilst the majority of the work was creating a comfortable living and kitchen area the door to the porch has been shut and forgotten about until today.

With a stack of slates delivered we are working out patterns on how to lay the floor in the porch. Pictures will most definitely follow when the new floor is laid.

Time lapse video of flooring being layed

With one solid weekend with James and his dad working on the flooring we now have a beautiful oak floor throughout the downstairs of the house. Watch the time lapse video here to see the floor going into the living and dining room in the house.

The oak floor running through the kitchen looks amazing and really does look beautiful.

Now we have a nice new floor we have had to go and buy ourselves and door mat as really don't want to be making our lovely new floor dirty!

How to level out a wonky floor

With most old Cornish houses things aren't quite straight and level and our floor is definitely not level. The worst area is within the kitchen where the floor slopes massively over to the left. With several bags of self levelling compound mixed up we begin the task of pouring the solution on the floor concentrating on the worst areas first. The concrete then naturally pools across the floor filling in the deepest gaps leaving us with a floor a lot less wonky ready to receive the new oak flooring.  

The area that hasn't been covered with the concrete is actually at the correct height the rest of the floor was just a lot lower. Now we just need to wait for this to dry and we can lay out our extra thick insulating thermal underlay and start fitting the floor at last. We removed the tiles that were originally on the floor several months ago so it has been an extremely long time living in a house with a concrete floor so I can not wait to see the new floor go down and see the house transformed once again. 

New oak flooring arrives

The long anticipated new oak floor has now arrived and made a very good feature stacked up in the front room for several weeks but now it is finally time to start laying the new floor. 

The first job is to remove the remaining old laminate floor that only covered half the room and prepare the room ready for the new floor fitting.

With the room stripped bare ready for the flooring we have time to screed the old floor and make it level ready for the new floor. With the concrete down all we need to do now is wait for this to dry and then the floor can go down. 

Removing ceramic floor tiles in the kitchen

With the back wall and the ceilings fresh plaster drying nicely it's time to remove the rest of the ceramic floor tiles. I started attacking these with a chisel and hammer but after several hours and very sore fingers and aching arms James's dad arrives with a massive pneumatic drill and breaks the rest of the tiles out in record time. Leaving me to clear up all the mess into the skip outside and sweep up all the dust from the whole entire house ready for the next job on the girly DIY to do list. 

DIY: Laying a new bathroom floor

With the beams in place it's now time to start laying the new floor boards. With a specially treated wood designed to be water resistant specially for wet areas James gets to work on getting the first board in place and making the room usable to walk in once again. 

Board by board slowly the floor is made and the two rooms are separated once again with the bathroom returning up stairs and the kitchen forming downstairs. 

The floor now fully in place and we start to plan were to put the bathroom suite in the newly created room. Partly I want to imaging that the room is actually complete and dream of having a hot bubble bath in a clean brand new bathroom, the reality is that we need to plan where the bathroom goes for James to run all the plumbing and pipework first. I think we will have to stay with the in-laws a little bit longer until the bathroom is slightly more back up and running!

How to replace rotten bathroom flooring

From my last post you would have seen the complete removal of the bathroom floor upstairs leaving us with a double height area in our house without both a bathroom and a kitchen meaning it highly important to get a floor back in as soon as possible.

Here, the first of the supporting beams are inserted around the edges of the walls. Next it's the job to insert equally spaced joist hangers around the edge to take the beams horizontally across the room. 

With the beams in place and the joist hangers all fastened up, James shows me how strong they are by walking around the 'new' bathroom floor. Next to fit a solid floor and we can start thinking about getting a bathroom suite back in. 

Bathroom floor no more! Shocking pictures!

After several hours of removing pipework and completely clearing the bathroom it's time to start removing the old floor. Fortunately or unfortunately for us the floor was completely rotten and several of the beams were barely touching the wall let alone securely and safely fastened into the wall. This was great for getting the old floor out but did get me thinking and slightly worried that the floor was not at all safe an I had been having big bath tubs full of heavy water up there and could have been quite the accident.

With the floor slipping away from us it highlights the reasons why we are doing the job fully and glad we didn't put a brand new bathroom into a room that potentially would have come crashing to the ground.

with the floor removed it's quite a weird feeling standing in what used to be a kitchen looking up at what used to be a bathroom. Suddenly these feels like an epic task and had no idea this would be involved when we bought the house. I guess buying my first home I was extremely naive but luckily James isn't scared of hard work and has promised me that this is an 'easy fix'

Standing in the doorway of the old bathroom looking down into the old kitchen and suddenly we see the severity of the project. Seeing the house like this is quite shocking and probably the worst state the house has been in. On-wards and upwards I guess lets hope the worst of the demolition is over and from here on in we start putting our house back together rather than pulling it apart.