The Living Room jobs list

Hello there.
Please ignore me, I'm just popping in to post my Living Room To-do List as its own entry because:

1. It's the only list I've got to work from
2. Although I've published it before it's buried at the bottom of another post and I keep forgetting where to find it
3. I can't keep using "I can't find my list" as an excuse not to do anything

So here it is. I'll keep updating it as I finish things off and, rest assured, I'll let you know when anything interesting happens...

Note: The jobs on this list are unofficially sponsored by BBC Radio 5's Kermode and Mayo's Film Review podcasts which, at a rate of around three or four per day, I appear to be mainlining.

Hello to Jason Isaacs.

• Buy oak skirting (acclimatise!)
• Buy oak architrave (ditto!)
• Buy radiators + feet
• Buy switches and sockets
• Buy light fittings
• Buy door knob

1. Sand ceiling (03.05.16)
2. Sand walls (esp around sockets etc) (04.05.16)
3. Scrape out chimney breast pointing (25.05.16)
4. Brush down original exposed pointing in feature wall (13.05.16)
5. Sand beams above oriel window
6. Caulk ceiling edges to walls
7. Strip door frame reveal in to hall (06.05.16)
8. Fit oriel window wall light and chase electrics
9. Make oak window sills x2
10. Remove old radiator pipes from pantry
11. Install new copper pipes to repositioned Pantry radiator
12. Replace copper pipes to front radiator
13. Brick acid chimney breast brick faces (26.05.16)
14. Brick acid feature wall brick faces for final time and stabilise
15. Patch delaminating sandstone window sill?
16. Fill missed areas in front window ceiling with lime putty
17. Putty-up Pantry wall where radiator pipes used to be
18. Fill all accidental holes from previous jobs with lime putty
19. Repoint chimney breast
20. Cut skirting and architrave to size ready for fitting
21. Re-sand mantelpiece
22. Repaint around edges of register plate
23. Decorate
24. Wax and finish door frame reveal (07.05.16)
25. Replace switches and sockets
26. Replace light fittings
27. Fit window sills x2
28. Restore floor
29. Fit skirting
30. Fit architrave
31. Fit radiators + feet
32. Fit refurbished door (07.05.16)
33. Fit door latch and knob (21.05.16)
34. Rob bank to pay for new custom-made oriel window frame

The Living Room chimney breast has been the focus of attention for the last two or three weeks.
Scraping out the old, crumbly lime pointing by hand is easily as soul-destroying as having
to scrape Artex from the ceiling

...and compared to scraping the pointing, using a half-inch paint brush to coat each individual brick face
with neat brick acid in order to clean them up is a doddle

Fitting a wood burning stove

A recent study suggests that modern Man's early ancestors first started using fire 350,000 years ago, and that a significant proportion of that time has been spent waiting for the new Living Room log burner to be installed in The Lodge.

It's all in there. Studies never lie.

Name: SausageTheCat

Age: 5 or 6ish

Likes: Sleep, Marmite crisps, ham, cheese,

gravy, sniffing plywood stove crates

Nevertheless the wait is finally over and I'm delighted to be able to write this blog post in front of what is supposed to be a cockle-warming roaring fire but is, in reality, a few pieces of mildly moist wood that are spewing so much smoke I'm worried the fire brigade will rock up and ruin my day.
I'm not sure what's going on with it, to be honest. It's not the stove - that's perfect - but we've had a few gorgeous fires now and only yesterday did I discover that none of the wood I wanted to use next is burning. It's supposed to be well seasoned (donated by someone Terminator Trevor knows) but it must need another few months in Outbuilding 2, which is our log store until we work something else out. Unless the log store's damp, which it probably is... I need a hand-held moisture meter, I do.

Aaaaanyway, the log burner is in!

Let's get the legal stuff out of the way first, though - it's perfectly within UK law to fit your own log burning stove and despite people who haven't done it suggesting that you're about to kill your entire family and immediate neighbours, you're free to go ahead and chance your arm. And everyone else's.
In Scotland you don't even have to tell anyone with an official hat on, but the rest of us either have to have our efforts signed off by a HETAS-registered engineer or a Building Control bod at the local council in order to comply with Building Regulations. Apparently thousands of people don't even bother with the red tape and go ahead regardless. If it's good enough for our Scottish cousins...

The flue liners were dropped
back in August when the
weather was nice and warm.
Remember that?

But here in the rest of this fair isle, if you've done your research and got the proper-sized hearth, made sure there's enough room around the stove for airflow, dropped approved flue liners in the correct way and coupled the whole lot up with proper fittings and seals - all of which we did - then there won't be a problem with approval and your wallet will be the thick end of a couple of hundred quid lighter in return for a certificate.
Don't just take my word for it though. Everything I've just typed I got from the excellent Stovefitter's Manual website here, which you'd be daft to overlook if you're planning to install your own burner. And it's written by a real human being rather than a spotty marketing exec who hasn't got a clue.

So having decided that we were going to give it a go, Dawn and I ordered a hideously-expensive 5kw Fireline Purevision PV5W which we decided we wanted way back in 2014 when one caught our eye at Grand Designs Live. It wasn't overly-ornate, had lovely clean lines (which we eventually decided to use for the hearth and mantel, too) and, most importantly, had a huge window so we can bathe in the warming glow of the fire. Lovely. In fact the sales blurb for it uses the phrase "high-definition" which basically means you can see it and it's real.
We didn't want the stove to sit straight on the slate hearth as though something was missing, however, so we also ordered the smaller of two log store stand thingies which raises the burner by about 200mm or so, which is just enough to make it look 'right'.

At 120kg for the stove alone we enlisted Terminator Trevor to help with the man-handling, which was made easier by removing everything that could be removed - namely the door, insides, top, ash pan and even the silica gel packets because every little helps.
Together we managed to struggle it in to place and get it centralised, then on went the trimmed-down vitreous enameled connecting pipe which was sealed to the flue adapter at the top and the main stove body at the bottom with fire cement.

The door and everything else was then replaced, our Christmas present stirling engine stove-top fan was assembled and a little bit of kindling was lit, then out we went to marvel at the sight of smoke coming from the chimney for the first time, which was amazing to see and marked a big old milestone for us all.

Fire is Man Business so Dawn had to ask
for permission to light the first one

We kept the fire small to begin with while the fire cement and stove paint cured and by the time Trevor headed home it was roaring, which it was for about four solid days afterwards, bringing the previously-high humidity in the room down to an ideal level. We even spent a couple of evenings sitting by the fire in our camping chairs, wishing we had a comfy settee and smelling faintly of wood smoke - which everything now does.

I've already mentioned our wood supply in the log store, and there's plenty in there to keep us going if not this year then next when it's properly dry. Yesterday Trevor and I chainsawed a couple of fir trees down in the front garden which were leaning at 45 degrees, the logs from which are now stacked around the back, and there's another load of unseasoned wood next to it which Trevor scrounged from someone else just before Christmas. I plan to build a proper wood store with some skip-dived reclaimed timber in a week or two, which should provide decent cover and airflow to get the seasoning process fully underway.

Big chopper. Got wood. Etc.

If only we had some wood that we can burn.
Luckily, living on the edge of managed woodland means that there's a bloke at a farm down the road who makes a living from chopping, seasoning and supplying firewood so I might give him a poke tomorrow to see what his prices are.
Yesterday, before I realised the problem with our own supply, he dropped a couple of massive 20"-tall chopping blocks off for the extortionate sum of £10, so we're keeping our fingers crossed that he can get us through the rest of the chilly weather without going completely bankrupt.
One block will be used for proper axe-wielding purposes while the other will play host to a Christmas present from my dear wife, a superb Kindling Cracker, which will likely keep my precious fingers attached to my incredibly useful hands.

Our lovely new Purevision PV5W in full flow.
As far as we can tell this is the only photograph of the small log store being used in
anger anywhere on the interwebz. Maybe I should've prettied it up a little more.

The obligatory flaming log photo.
The fire chamber is so big we could probably get an old settee on there if we pushed the door closed with our feet.

Door-dipping and installing a reclaimed oak beam

The boring work has resumed at The Lodge on the run-up to our Grand Designs-esque moving-in date of 'Christmas' (which will never happen) so I have amused myself by writing a list of things that need to be done in the Living Room.

The items above 'LIME PLASTERING' either need to be done before the plasterer arrives or at any time in the future, and the stuff below it has to wait until we're plastered - so we're a bit stuck until he gets here and we still haven't got a date.

Italics = must be done before we can move in!

• Fill, strengthen and level fireplace where I've been digging it out
• Buy/size/install solid slate hearth (to regs)
• Install log burner with stove pipe (also to regs)
• Tidy up internal oriel window WoodWool-boarded roof
• Decide how to deal with exposed cabling - Conduit? Make a feature?
• Repoint and stabilise (against dust, not falling down) chimney breast
• Insulate and cover oriel window's massive sandstone heatsink sill
• LIME PLASTERING
• Fit curtains/blinds/shutters (I want shutters but Dawn isn't fussed on the idea)
• Fully restore and protect quarry tile floor
• Buy/fit/raise 2x radiators by 2" and renew pipework
• Move one of those radiators to a different wall entirely with new pipework
• Scrape out cracks in ceiling and face-up with lime putty
• Renew doorway architrave and refit door
• Make and fit 6" Victorian skirting boards
• Limewash/paint/wax/oil/garlic butter the walls/ceiling/woodwork where applicable
• Buy or clean/move furniture in from upstairs, the Dining Room, the shed or wherever we've got it squirreled away among piles of dusty tat boxes 
• Set that furniture on rugs that we've neither decided on or bought yet to protect the floor, keep it breathing and help retain heat
• Buy/fit new sockets and switches
• Buy/fit new lighting
• Make and fit oak windowsills
• Set up our new 4k TV
• Buy a Playstation 4
• Never lift a finger again (unless it's to shoot baddies on telly or change channel)

But a couple of things which were originally on the list have been sorted out in the last few days and they have made us very happy:

Restoring the Living Room door

Before

Other than the uPVC front door, all of the doors in The Lodge are wooden (probably pine), old (most appear to be original) and covered in layer upon layer of elderly white gloss paint.

All of the knobs were missing when we moved here, but many internal doors still have old locks (sans keys and also thick with paint) and hand-forged hinges which are partially hidden behind painted architrave. Scuffs, scrapes and chips are pretty much the norm and overall they're quite grubby.

We'd been wanting to strip a door to see what surprises lay under the paint for ages, so the Living Room seemed like the best place to start as we're concentrating on that room at the moment.

I found an antique restoration place a few miles away and, after removing the door from the frame, I carted it over there in the car. As soon as he set eyes on it he estimated "early 1800s", so that's enough for us to assume it's original.

Over the next week it was dipped in hot caustic soda in a giant bath, complete with lock and hinges, then blasted with a steam jet and hand-scraped with a Stanley knife...

...and when it came back it was bloody lovely.

The body of the lock is a little
damaged, but that's known as 'history'

I'm not a fan of pine in general, probably because I'm used to seeing cheap mass-produced pine furniture in TV ads, but this was something different. The years had seen it age wonderfully, with bumps, little divots and scorching from previous paint-scraping attempts adding to the look.

The rim lock was silver underneath all of that paint and the rough detail of the hinges, where they had been hand-worked, was imperfectly perfect.

The first thing that needed doing was to remove the lock mechanism and take it apart for a further clean inside, then bash it about a bit until the catch started working. WD40 is great stuff!

...using the BACK
of the blade...

Next came the time-consuming job of finishing off scraping out all of the joints between the planks, from under the braces and from the tiny holes and cracks all over. Even though the restorer had done some himself there was still a lot left behind and it wasn't finished by a long chalk, so out came my own Stanley knife and I got to work for a couple of days.

Dawn calls me a 'perfectionist' whereas I prefer the term 'fastidious' (some may say 'anal' but they can bugger off) - but this is the kind of work I love.

It gives me a chance to be as picky and detailed as I want and I work on the theory that the more I do in preparation the better the end result and the more satisfied we'll be. So I took my time.

The whole door was then given a light sanding with 180 grit paper to get rid of the splinters and 'woolly' bits, then vacuumed to make sure all of the dust and loose paint was out of the cracks and wotnot.

After

Having got used to the new look over that time I was a tiny bit reluctant to do anything else to the door, but the plan had always been to wax it to finish it off.

So I used a tin of 'Antique Pine' wax that was recommended by the restorer and roughly paintbrushed it in to all of the visible surfaces, making sure to get it in to every nook, cranny, split and gap.

After that it was buffed with a circular brush attachment on a high-speed drill which brought up a satisfying (but not OTT) shine, then the lock was refitted... and that was it.

It's a door, yes, but we love it. All it needs is a new latch to replace the one which was obviously removed in the Olden Days, and it'll be done. Oh, and a new knob to swap for the temporary one we've got on there at the moment.

The plan now is to match the skirting and new architrave to the door to tie the whole room in with it rather than have a hotch-potch of different finishes in different places. It should look amazing when it's done.

Can't wait.

Fitting a reclaimed oak beam mantelshelf

Having stripped all of the chimney breast back to bare brick - and finding hints of past adornments - it was obvious that there was something missing.

It needed just a little touch to finish it off... something suitably big and grand without looking ridiculous. Understated but impressive. Simple. Nothing fancy.

It needed a reclaimed oak beam as a mantelshelf.

Not a stick-on fascia as had been suggested to us a few times, which would have annoyed the hell out of us because it wasn't real, but a bona fide structural oak beam set in to the wall. No half measures.

We're not sure what this was originally but you can just see a chamfer
along 90% of the lower edge and there's a matching one on the other side, so
maybe a post or some kind of plinth?
The chamfers will be hidden at the back when installed.

Our first visit to a reclamation yard didn't fill us with much hope. "Take us to your oak," resulted in us staring down at a soaking wet and filthy black pile of what was presumably wood, left out in the open for eternity in a giant muddy puddle.

I'm sure there were some nice beams in there but there's no way we were going to clamber around all over the pile, dragging the manky stuff out only to drag it back again. And that was despite being told "it'll all clean up lovely".

The next yard, which is quickly becoming our favourite one (where we bought the chimney pots from), was much better.

Their oak beams were set out under a corrugated roof on three- or four-tier sturdy shelving, and there were lots. Not only were they bone dry but they were also visible which, as a potential buyer, is quite handy because it means you can actually look at them.

Our new old beam gets a short back and sides

Our idea at that stage was just to get a general feel for what was available rather than buy one straight away, but we saw one that looked to be roughly what we were after so we went back home, did a bit of proper measuring, discussed it for a while, slept on it for a few nights then went back and bought it for a grand total of £108 on Sunday gone.

I have no idea how much oak beams usually cost these days, but included in the price was the very welcome personal service of staff member Big Verne who is one of the hardest-working and friendliest 'older' gentlemen we have met other than Terminator Trevor, my dad-in-law. When the place closes I imagine that the boss has to kick him out and send him home.

Given that we (Dawn) name(s) many inanimate things here at The Lodge for
no reason whatsoever, I've decided to call our beam 'Big Verne'

We didn't really want to waste anything from the beam, given that it's old and needs to be treated with a kind of respect, so we had chosen one that was more-or-less exactly the size we needed. Verne trimmed the ends off (giving us a decent lump of oak to use somewhere else at a later date) and took off a thin slice of what would be the top and bottom faces. The front face was in reasonable condition and just in need of a good sanding-down.

Then we struggled the beam in to the car and whisked it off to its new home for the next 100+ years.

My first slight regret with The Lodge project is that we didn't fit the beam ourselves.

Being such a big eye-catching piece in the house, it would have been nice if we could have done the whole thing together, but with the chimney breast being a vital part of the overall structure, we didn't want to risk knocking the house down and living in a shed forever, so I arranged for Roofer #2 (who contracts work out) to make a return visit with his minions and get it over with.

Before being sanded down.
Measuring-in at roughly 9ins x 9.5ins
and 4ft 3ins long

Unfortunately I only managed to get a day to do the sanding, because they turned up days earlier than I expected and Trevor and I hadn't even had time to sort out the over-long flue liner that has been gracing the quarry tiles for months. The register plate was going to be fitted at the same time, so we needed to do a little prep work first, which didn't happen.

So the fellas turned up and Trevor and I were relegated to 'audience' for the most part as they hammered, chiseled, swore a bit, and got everything done and dusted in just a few hours. I trimmed the liner down with an angle grinder and helped to heft the beam in place, but that was pretty much my whole involvement. Never mind - there'll be other chances to do important stuff.

But the end result is... fantastic. I can't even put in to words how great we think it looks.
We're keeping the edges sharp and clean and square rather than round them off or chamfer them, because the stove we've ordered is quite square and boxy - modern rather than fancy Victorian, which we're not keen on - and we want to keep the theme. The slate hearth that we haven't even sourced yet will also have sharp, square edges and will be exactly the same width as the mantel, keeping enough symmetry to sate my self-diagnosed OCD.

Once the lime mortar that was used has had a chance to go off I'll be sanding the visible faces down to 180-or-so grit, then we'll find a final treatment of some kind to finish it off and bring out the grain. From what I've read, using finer sandpaper might result in the final finish not taking properly, because the pores in the wood that hold the wax/oil/whatever would be too small.

I need to do some Googling to see what is most suitable, but a wax finish similar to the one on the door would be ideal.

I just don't know if it'll all melt like a candle when the stove is on...

I've run out of words now so I'll just show you some more pictures, complete with the final result!

Fitting the register plate (right).

The beam will replace the two rough brick courses above the opening, where a mantelshelf seems to have been before, and will also come one course lower - effectively the course starting at the white brick.
This is to preserve a small 'step' feature in the wall which begins above the third course above the opening. It's basically a quarter-inch lip which runs across the entire chimney breast wall for some reason.

Above the register plate is now an adapter which fits the 5" stove outlet pipe at the
bottom and the 6" flue liner at the top. When the stove arrives it'll be attached to the
5" end with the help of a 5" black enameled pipe to make it all pretty. The register
plate will also be painted black with heat-proof paint.

The chimney breast is two courses-plus deep here, with the second of those forming part of the actual flue as it sweeps upwards and inwards. I'm sure there must be a name for it.

Because taking the second course and more out would prove way more expensive and difficult, with greater risk to boot, we decided to use the beam to support the bricks in the front course which, at the central point, are only one brick deep in any event. You can kind of see them sagging a little in the pic. Shards of slate were packed in to the mortar joints between those bricks to strengthen them and make the whole thing less saggy. You can also see that in the pic on either side of fellamelad's head.
So it's partly structural and partly not, which is good enough for us.

A very odd angle - Trevor just isn't that long...
The beam is a pretty tight fit, which means it shouldn't tip forwards given that it's
4.5" in the wall and 5" out, and it has been limed in place with slate packing to
strengthen it even more.

Before

After, complete with our first Christmas card - AT THE START OF DECEMBER
All we need now is the hearth and the stove!

Bringing out the dead... or not

I can see my house from up here!

If you had asked us earlier in the year how we would be spending our six monthiversary at The Lodge, chances are that ‘trying to find what had died up the chimney’ would have been low on the list of options.

Yesterday saw the major milestone creep up and launch itself at us so, being unable to conjure up celebrations of any kind at the last minute, I marked the occasion by climbing a ludicrously-long and wobbly ladder while Dawn, Terminator Trevor, Andy and SamtheDog cajoled me from 300ft below (approx) on terra firma.

The feat of admirable bravery had come about thanks to 250,000 flies (also approx – I tried counting but they wouldn’t hold still) that had decided to take up residence in Bedroom 1 over the past week, along with hundreds of ladybirds and a couple of handfuls of furious, evil wasps. The wasps were a minor irritation, all things considered, and the ladybirds – despite being Harlequins that are purported to cannibalise our indigenous ladybird population – were comparatively pretty. It was the flies that were the problem. And a fairly large problem it was, too.

I had first discovered them a few days after finishing removing the Artex in the room, when I popped my head in for some reason. Probably on the hunt for one of our many missing tools. The door had been sealed up with masking tape to stop dust going through the house and the windows had been closed, but it was there I found a few dozen flies trying their hardest to smash the glass and make a bid for freedom. I helped them on their way, scratched my head, then closed the door back up.
Two days later and the room was like something from a horror movie. There were many, many hundreds – if not thousands – of flies at the windows and a load of them buzzing around the ceiling. Just writing about it is making me itchy.

Flies - before it got bad

I opened the windows again and most went on their merry way, so I spent a few minutes pondering their origins. Having finished the Artex at around the same time they had appeared, had I disturbed some kind of stash of dormant eggs where the walls meet the ceiling and a reasonable amount of lime had come away between the two? The window frames haven’t been touched by us since we moved here and they’re gopping filthy – were they hatching inside there? It was entirely possible. What about the floors? There are large gaps between the edges of many of the floorboards and the brick walls. Were they emerging from in there?
Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been the chimney because there’s a bird guard cowl thing on there so nothing could have come in and died, could it? No. No way.

A couple of days after that the sheer number of flies in the room almost saw me hoisted aloft and carried out of the window along with them, so I decided that enough was enough.
I had been avoiding sticking my head through the partially-open loft hatch (the CCTV cables still feed through there) for reasons that I’ve documented thoroughly already, but the time had come to man-up and get it done. But other than a huge hornet crawling around on the rafters there were no flies at all. There might have been a slight smell of… something… but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. So that was the loft eliminated, anyroad.

I tried smoking them out but they went up...
then down the other pot and in to the Living
Room. It took hours to get rid of them.

After pretty much discounting all other possibilities I stuck my head in the fireplace and looked up the chimney flue as a last resort. I was instantly bombarded by a dozen guardflies hurtling towards my exposed face, and when I cautiously looked up again, taking care to keep my mouth closed this time – there they were.
Hundreds of flies were lining all sides of the brick flue and slowly but surely making their way down to the fireplace and the promise of escape via the window. The majority were at the top, close to where I could see the underside of the cowl so it was only natural to assume that something previously-living had been thwarted by my ingenious efforts and had simply died on top of the pot or down the side of the cowl, unable to get inside the chimney. That would explain why I couldn't smell anything in the room.

That’s what led to me fearing for my life up by the chimney pot yesterday morning. I had run out of ladder rungs to hold on to so was clinging to the pot itself and anything else I could reach that seemed secure.
And guess what I found?

Absolutely nothing.

So that was the best-case scenario out the window along with the flies themselves.
It would have been a perfect ending to find a maggoty pigeon wedged between the inside of the pot and the outside of the cowl’s cage… not for the pigeon, of course… but none of the alternatives are particularly great.

Which raises some questions:

• What was dead?
• Where exactly was it? The flue doesn’t go straight up to the top without passing Go, there are a couple of slight kinks and brick ‘shelves’ that could be harbouring the culprit, which means we’re never likely to find it.
• When did it get in there?
• Most importantly – HOW did it get in there?

There are a number of theories, any one of which could be correct but none of which will likely ever be proved. One is that a bird flew through the open window and went straight up the chimney – on the outside of the steel flue liner – and just gave up when it found it couldn’t get out.

Our infestation of ladybirds has paled
in to insignificance for the moment

Another is that something was already trapped alive inside the chimney when we dropped the liner, sealing its fate by closing off its upward escape. Maybe it was already incapacitated somehow. But that was a good two months ago now so is the timing all off? Maybe. How long does it take for a dead pigeon to go all, you know, soft and gooey like that?
And another theory is that after the liner was dropped, a rat, mouse or brontosaurus (there were enough flies to make that a possibility) somehow managed to get inside and become stuck on one of the shelves, which means that if it has happened once it could happen again.

The one saving grace is that we’re yet to fit the register plates to the ‘ceiling’ of the fireplaces so if it does happen again we’ll probably not realise and the flies would have nowhere to go except upwards.

Which would make a pleasant change because this itching just won't go away now.

Wood, glorious wood!

We've seen enough TV property shows to know that renovating a house, especially when you've got no relevant experience, is ruddy stressful.

When this photo was taken I had just learnt
two things: 1) chimney flues are razor sharp,
and 2) I have no idea where the plasters are

And as the busiest period The Lodge has seen since we moved here draws to a close and the scaffolding finally comes down after more than two months, courtesy of a trio of grunting simians in human suits, I can say with certainty that this is true. Not a night has gone by in the past 11 days where I haven't sat bolt upright in bed - still 'asleep' - shouting and screaming about something or other: chimney flues; paint; red-hot metalwork; spiders; rafters; lime pointing, lead flashing, etc.*

But the stress itself is not important, so I've been told. It's how you deal with the stress when it arrives that counts.
So far I'm finding that the best way to deal with it when things get on top of me is to weep gently into my 18th coffee of the day while hiding underneath the hawthorn in the front garden, but I'm already concerned about the long-term effects in terms of both caffeine intake and permanently-puffy eyes. It spoils my charming looks.

So (gate woes aside) I suppose I need to recap a little bit, starting after my post about the bargeboards wot we made.

The usual suspects (spot the hoverfly).
I used Cuprinol on the purlins to stop any unseen rot

In that post I mentioned that the following days were all about oiling and painting our fancy new creations, and that is exactly what happened. It wasn't a glamorous job - I was balancing rafters, architrave and the bargeboards between two smelly wheelie bins and trying to look like I was having the time of my life whenever the neighbours drove past while listening to a stuttering digital radio app on my phone and picking kamikaze hoverflies off my tacky paintwork. But it got done.

The finer points of the paint job aren't terribly interesting but I'm going to explain them anyway because it took me three mind-numbing 10-hour days so I don't want to gloss over it. Gloss? Geddit? Hmmm?
Well you shouldn't, because not a drop of gloss paint went near the woodwork. Instead we decided to head down a more traditional and environmentally-friendly route with linseed oil-based products which protect (oil repels water, doesn't it) and add colour at the same time while, supposedly, lasting much longer than regular paint.

One coat down... three to go

First of all I applied a coat of linseed oil mixed with white spirit (3-1 ratio - the white spirit helps it dry and absorb faster) mixed in a former pickled gherkin jar to give the wood one of its five-a-day and a good base coat, ready for the colour later on.
I managed to do about half of the timber within a day of its arrival, which dried nicely during the couple of days it took to make the bargeboards, but unfortunately I had to rush the rest of the oiling a little because time was short.
I should really have let this first coat of oil sit for a good few days before I did anything else, but the joiners and roofers were due to arrive on site soon and as the oil needed time to penetrate the wood rather than air dry a lot of the remaining timber was still a tiny bit sticky when it came to applying the paint because it had only sat for a day or two, tops.
In the end it didn't make a huge amount of noticeable difference but I'm the fastidious type so it made me a bit fidgety.

Cowboy builder
(not really - it's just a silly hat)

Next came the messy job of painting the things, and for this Dawn chose a company called Linseed Paint Company which is a one-man-band type of affair in which the husband produces his gloopy linseed oil-based concoctions in his poor wife's Aga. It's excellent stuff but it makes a right mess of their Sunday roasts. 

We only bought a litre of the black paint (£40 inc P&P) but we were assured it would go a long way, and by crikey it did. By the time I had given everything a thin first coat (as advised - too thick and it would start to blister) and set it aside underneath a rather nifty 15ft x 15ft glorified gazebo to protect it from the rain, I had used less than a quarter of the tin and although the natural colour of the wood was still showing through in places there was impressive coverage which was well worth the wonga. 

By the time all of that was finished it was time to step-up the pace with the joiners, Roofer #1 and Roofer #2 due to arrive next day and fight-it-out for scaffolding space while removing tiles, whittling woodwork and setting the final two chimney pots in place.
It was all hands on deck and I tend to struggle being in just one place at once, never mind three, so I drafted in Terminator Trevor for help who, true to his unstoppable form, brought along with him a crippling cough that would have had a mere mortal walking towards The Light.

The following few days are all a bit of a blur now but they went something like this:

Feeling a bit fluey

• I made roughly 1,623 cups of tea for a grand total of eight people
• The roof tiles were removed from the gable ends of Bedroom 1 and Bedroom 3
• Old rotten rafters and laths were removed, allowing me access to sections of original timber that I hadn't been able to reach before so I could scrape and hurriedly repaint them
• Three new rafters were cut to size, installed and given a second slap of paint by the chippies who went way beyond the call of duty while I was busy elsewhere
• Two sections of rotten purlin were cut away and replaced with new (painted) timber
• The bargeboards and architrave were fitted, which were then given a second coat of paint partly by me and partly by the tea-and-cigarette-fuelled chippies
• The final two chimney pots were set on the west stack
• The register plate in the Dining Room fireplace, which turned out to be totally over-the-top foot-thick poured concrete reinforced with thick steel bars and cross-hatched metal grilles, was painstaking (and painfully) removed with an angle grinder, uphill sledgehammering and brute force
• All four flues were dropped in to their respective fireplaces, complete with modified cowls which, incidentally, fit like proverbial mittens
• The gables were rebuilt with all new tanalised laths above Bedroom 1 while some of the original ones were kept over Bedroom 3. We could paint these black or box them in, but Dawn and I quite like the contrast with the bargeboards, so they're staying as-is (I oiled the original laths to protect them, though)
• The tiles went back on both gables, this time using 'tile-and-a-halfs' at the edges where a roofer many years ago had simply used roughly-chipped and ugly mismatched half-tiles
• I oiled and painted the purlin ends on the east side of The Lodge while the scaffolding was still up
• A handful of damaged roof and valley tiles were replaced, as were a number of incongruous red tiles that had been used around the Bathroom Velux window
• An ugly sheet of thick corrugated plastic under the Velux window was faced with scalloped lead flashing to hide it
• The gates were constructed and fitted... then repaired a few days later
• Everybody on-site, at some point or another, had a minor meltdown about the overabundance of thrips the area is playing host to at the moment
• I gave all the woodwork that I could get at two more coats of paint... climbing stepladders on top of scaffolding is no fun whatsoever
• The verges of both gables were re-mortared with a part-lime/part-cement mix

...and suddenly the second roofer disappeared in a puff of smoke...

This final point, much like when the chimney was rebuilt, goes against the pure lime ethos that both Dawn and I have, as inspired by our surveyor Pete from heritage-house.org, and I ended up having a tetchy squabble with Roofer #2 about it (he's the main contractor for most of the other work) which involved lots of rude words and almost ended in fisticuffs, hair-pulling and him petulantly walking off the job.

The Dining Room register plate was a challenge

This is probably the subject of a different blog post altogether, but we're finding it very difficult to find tradesmen who can not only do what we want but also agree to a job that they actually carry out as specified. They start off with "yeah, I can do lime... not a problem" but when it comes to doing the work it's "well, I can put lime in but it needs cement too or I'll be back to repair it all in three months".
And with time constraints and limited options because many specialist tradesmen won't travel far we're being forced into a corner that we don't want to be in. It's very frustrating and probably the main reason I'm hollering in my sleep lately because I feel a little bit like we're being walked-over.


Anyway, Roofer #1 has been back in the last two days to finish off a couple of jobs including looking at the flashing around the chimney and tiling on the porch and bay window roofs, and when his van rolled out of the gates this afternoon I realised that that was it: job done.

This major phase in The Lodge's history is now complete and we can sit back and relax.

Hahahahahahaha (ad infinitum)... who am I kidding?
I need to get back in the Living Room and Bedroom 1 so we can work towards getting them ready for us to move in to before the cold weather comes. That means gypsum removal, expensive lime plastering, ceilings, floorboards... and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

* All of this really happened, including the spider-based night terror which was prompted by a cellar spider ambling nonchalantly across the quilt cover, past my delicate and vulnerable face, as I was reading my Kindle in bed one night. I didn't move a muscle. I don't think it saw me although it could probably smell my fear. I know I could.
And the lead flashing thing was just last night. Apparently I started getting a bit antsy because Dawn wouldn't measure the lead sheet I was trying to mould around the chimney base. That was probably something to do with the fact that it was 4am and I had neither a lead sheet nor a tape measure.

Before

After
It might not look like it, but there's a lot going on here