Quarry tile floor restoration

By far the dirtiest job to date has been the olivine blasting.

Step one

A glaring problem that needed to be sorted out before the Living Room floor was fully restored was where the dividing pantry wall had once stood, but had since been patched-up with cement leaving a cracked strip of grey where there should have been tiles.

I dug all of that up to reveal another couple of brick courses from the original dividing wall, which were standing on a bit of crumbled lime and bare earth. Having removed one course I filled in the resulting hole with sand and some of the old lime lumps then offered up some quarry tiles that were removed from one of the fireplace hearths upstairs... only to find that the row on the room side of the divide didn't match up to the row in the Pantry. I couldn't have made it look anywhere decent enough by cutting tiles and fitting the bits in here and there like Tetris which left only one choice... I was going to have to lift all of the Pantry tiles and re-lay them.

Trevor joined me and before I could get the kettle boiled he had the first tiles up and was setting them out so we could use them again in the same configuration. He was also clearing out the original lime mortar bed they had been sat on, which had completely failed and was totally unusable as it was because it offered no stability or reliable level whatsoever.

Grumble - less than impressed
that the rows don't match-up

The next two days saw me making tea, knocking-up plenty of 3:1 lime mortar mixes and casting an eye over the job in progress to make sure everything looked level and was heading in straight-ish lines.
Trevor levelled the earth subfloor and set the tiles on a new mortar bed, and when his knees gave up I took over and did the two corners and along the end.

It's not completely level, admittedly, and the edges kind of drop or rise by a few mm here and there, but I'm happy with that because 'working' floors like this were never perfect anyway and it looks like it has been one continuous surface all along now.

In terms of grout, incidentally, I'm not sure what we're doing. I'd quite like to brush powdered lime over the floor and let the natural moisture from the earth cure it in the joints, but that would dull the surface again... sand would do the job but it would make vacuuming tricky... leaving 'doing nothing' as the safest option for now. I might revisit it later but in the meantime, bugger it. It's Character.

Forget your underfloor heating, dpcs and insulation, this is what you want under your quarry tiles...
God's-honest-no-frills muck

The replacement tiles were from the hearth in Bedroom 1, which was causing the ceiling below to sag,
so we reused them here. The black glazing on the sides was later removed during the restoration and the colour
of the paler tiles was lifted during the final stages with a colour enhancer.

Step two

Searching tinterwebz for how to restore a quarry tile floor mainly results in links to professional firms who will either come over to do it themselves in return for a lorra, lorra money or sell you the stuff to make a half-baked job of it yourself.

The photos and videos of the pros doing it look amazing, but that's the idea. You wouldn't want to hire a team of sweaty salad-dodgers to paw ineffectually at the floor and leave it looking like nothing had happened, would you? But it's all marketing and I wanted to tackle the job myself, so my only option was to buy tins of 'product' and have a stab at it.

The very first, and arguably most important part of bringing the Living Room floor back from the dead over a year ago was to remove the carpet and underlay to start it releasing its moisture again, and that was followed by olivine blasting (top picture) to get rid of the glue and rock-solid filth left on the faces of the tiles.
After this it was left as it was for some months due to the rest of the work that needed to be done in there but for the most part (discounting tarps being laid now and then) it was allowed to breathe properly and dry out.

Freshly-mopped and dried before restoration work of any kind

Once the main dirty work was finished in the room we stripped everything out and I gave the floor a thorough powerful vacuuming, crawling around on my hands and knees to trace every joint and crack with the nozzle.
This was followed by two lots of damn good mopping with, again, me on my hands and knees to vacuum up the excess water from the faces and in the joints so it would dry as fast as possible. Anyone looking through the window would think I was playing submissive at a 'Chore'-themed BDSM party.

Dawn had already done a bit of research last year and bought a bottle of Lithofin Tile Restorer for Ceramic Tiles which was supposed to bring out the ingrained dirt and give the surface a thorough, thorough clean.
Except it didn't, really. I'm not criticising it because I don't have enough experience doing this, but even after working the cleaner in tile-by-tile with a scrubbing brush - really agitating it - and drying the faces with a hairdryer after a rinse, they didn't look any different. The only noticeable difference was the black glazing on the tiles that were laid along the edge of the Pantry. It lifted that off really well.
My two trains of thought were that either the cleaner wasn't doing its job or the floor was already nice and clean because of the attention it had already been given. I'm erring towards the latter. 

So not wanting to waste the bottle I tipped it in the mop bucket and threw in a couple of litres of brick acid, hoping that a chemical reaction wouldn't make it explode in my face, which fortunately it didn't.
That was mopped liberally on the floor in the hope of obliterating any proper ingrained muck (destroying the mop head) and it was washed off with clean water a couple of times, followed by me on my knees again.

I had been doing some research myself in to what to do next, if anything, and I discovered Tile Doctor Colour Grow which promised to deepen the colour of what, essentially, were unremarkable matt pinkish tiles, while protecting them from spills but still allowing them to breathe. And that was everything I wanted in one £40 container.

The instructions suggested up to five coats on quarry tiles with no damp-proof course (dpc) beneath, and we applied the first coat easily in just half an hour with a couple of new, clean paint pads... which is when the container ran out.
Unfortunately with 95% of the tiles having no glaze they were very porous which meant they pretty much guzzled up the Colour Grow, but to be fair the transformation was incredible by morning. The red was deeper and the particularly-pale tiles, which contrasted starkly with those surrounding them, had blended quite well so I ordered another bottle and hoped that two coats would be enough.

Again the floor remained this way for a couple of weeks during more work and when everything was shifted back out and more rounds of mopping/vacuuming had taken place (using Tile Doctor Neutral Tile Cleaner) we gave the floor another two coats of Colour Grow from the new tin, because the first coat had made the tiles less porous.

The finished floor. Sorry to use this picture yet again but I forgot to take a specific 'restored' one.

Again, the results were great with the red deepening a bit more but our mistake of forgetting to dab up any excess liquid while were going meant that in the morning the few patches of tiles which had a hint of glazing were still tacky to the touch even through they weren't wet, as such.

The sticky patches on tiles with a hint of prior glaze
are already starting to reduce

I tried to remove the stickiness with everything from water to - you guessed it - brick acid but because the surface was also more resistant to liquid now nothing would touch it and I eventually gave up the ghost.

So we left it and hoped for the best but now after 36 hours it seems to be improving, meaning we won't have sticky footprints all over the rug, which looks better without that kind of thing, frankly.
And speaking of footprints we're trying to get in the habit of leaving our boots at the door now but that's already showing signs of falling by the wayside...

THE LIVING ROOM IS FINISHED!!!1!1!!

AND WE'RE IN THE HOUSE!

503 days since the estate agent woman passed the keys across her desk and about 489 days after our first night sleeping in the shed, we're finally kipping under our own roof!

Two or three blog posts over the next few days will look at some of the work that went in
to the things in this picture recently - skirting, radiators, bricks, etc. Bet you can't wait.

 It has been a heavy-going past two or three weeks in the Living Room with some moderately early mornings and a good few post-9pm or even 10pm finishes. Terminator Trevor, my Father-in-Law of Unstoppable Perpetual Motion, has been largely leading the charge with jobs which need his prior knowledge and experience rather than my panicked Googling, followed by mortal terror, ultimate failure and swearing, topped-off with a telephone call to Trevor to ask for a loan of his knowledge and experience. So because living in a sodding shed has been wearing a bit thin for Dawn and I for a while now, I/we wanted to cut out the middle man and just get stuff done pronto. Enough faffing about.

Other blog posts are going to be published in the next few days about some of the main jobs that were done to get to this point (I've been too busy/tired to write anything as the work went on) but I wanted to mark this milestone day with a post to remind us of what the Living Room looked like before it got full of pizza boxes, dog toys, clumps of cat fur and piles of washing.

The shiny floor tiles are caused by a layer of breathable sealant which hasn't been fully absorbed.
It's not wet - just still a little bit 'tacky' - and brick acid won't even shift it so we're leaving it
in the hope that it soaks in over time.

Meanwhile the living arrangements are in flux as I write this. Dawn is in bed in the Pantry dog-leggy-bit while I sit on the settee with the TV on mute and the lights low so I don't disturb her; the dog is asleep on the rug right where I can fall over him (he's gurgling in his sleep) and a stairgate isolates the room from the rest of the house in the vague hope that SausageTheCat realises that the shed is now out-of-bounds and gets brave enough to come in and risk becoming supper. 

So things are a bit up-in-the-air in terms of family harmony but hopefully it'll work its way out without bloodshed or weapons over the

---

Aaaaaand that's where I fell asleep last night. Dawn woke me up at 3am and told me to get to bed.

It wasn't far. And nor was the loo at 5am.
I like living in a house.

Here are some ever-popular before/after photos:

The highlights of the chimney breast were a 30s open fire, a stone pillar facade,
cracked slate hearth and damp patches on the wallpaper.

The whole room, particularly the Pantry, felt damp and unpleasant

The cement and gypsum plaster walls were affecting the breathability of the Living Room and
as a result moisture from the floors and everyday living was settling in the coldest spots,
making the mouldy wallpaper crinkle and peel. The wall on the left was also covered in
corrugated bitumen sheets for reasons we've never worked out.

The carpet/underlay combo was one of the biggest offenders, trapping moisture from the tiled
floor beneath and keeping the humidity levels up.

And once it was dumped we found that the underlay had been glued to the quarry tiles, making
things worse all-round.

By the mid-point everything had been ripped out and the fireplace was opened up.

The furniture is elderly but it fits okay so it'll do for now.
Hopefully the curtain will be hacked in two soon so we can have half either side of the window.

The oriel window at the front of the building is the next major job because it'll have to be replaced
with something bespoke and the sandstone sill will need to be repaired at the same time.

A long-awaited catch-up

It has been a funny old couple of months since I last wrote a blog post and I'm not sure I want to tell you why. I mean I want to, but perhaps I shouldn't... some of it is quite personal.

My aunt counts her fingers to see if Grumble has eaten any while my mam
feigns arthritis to avoid having her arm ripped from its socket.
Dad draws the short straw.

For one, the introduction of Grumble (as he's been formally named) to the family has changed our routines and focus a little bit - naturally - and setting the unfinished Living Room up as a functioning Living Room for the doggy home-check proved to be an irresistible draw and has remained that way ever since. Such an arrangement isn't conducive to Getting Stuff Done.

But there have also been significant problems which, for June at least, made things completely grind to a halt. Over the past year our only neighbours, who we share the access track and gates with, have been gradually becoming the kind of neighbours you only read about in the newspapers once the justifiable homicide starts and things have been bubbling over with them recently as our my tolerance and politeness rapidly ran out (we briefly considered selling-up at one point). I've also had a couple of non-life-threatening (!) health issues to deal with too.

So I might write about it all one day, but then again I might not. The main thing is that we're all fine and dandy and things have started to move again with the help of our parents who have gently cajoled us in to action and even done some of the work to help egg us on.

I'll blog about the bigger jobs which have happened in separate posts, but here is a run-down of the things which don't need much in the way of wordage:


The Dining Room has been de-junked

aka the Murder Room, the Dining Room has been used for storage since we first moved in, attracting a tiny bit more clutter on the hour, every hour.
It spent a little over a year playing host to shelving, boxes, cabinets, boxes, the TV stand, boxes, drawers, boxes, the sofa bed and even the bathroom door, with the gaps between all of those being filled with more boxes, some of which had split and spilled their guts all over the place.

Imagine our surprise when we found a massive beige dog
lying at a funny angle under the old carpet

It was in desperate need of sorting out and as we wanted to get the old red - possibly asbestos - tiles off the concrete floor we thought we'd kill two birds with one stone.
The sofa bed was already in the Living Room being used as our main settee, so we dragged everything else in there, cleaning as we went, pulled up the disgusting old carpet then prised up a manky tile only to find that it had been glued to the floor with thick, still-sticky, black bitumen tar which stayed right where it had been slopped many decades ago.

Well that was that job scuppered. We weren't going to spend untold days scraping and dissolving the black stuff off only to pull the concrete up at a later date - which we will be doing, so we decided to skip that and leave it for such a time when we begin 'proper' work in there.
So the whole room was vacuumed top-to-bottom, the floor was mopped and dried (for what it was worth), a thick tarp was laid over the tiles and the cabinets et al were reintroduced with a semblance of order this time, giving us room to actually swing a cat. Of course more clutter has been appearing hourly again, but at least we can now kind of get in there.

Old Oily has been dismembered

Death throes

Way back in March the gigantic oil-fired boiler in the Dining Room decided that something in the region of £700-worth of servicing and repairs wasn't enough to keep it going and it decided to die for want of another £500 pump.

But being connected to the electricity, water supply, radiators and the oil tank meant that there was no way on earth that I was going to dismantle the thing myself, unless I wanted to set The Lodge on fire then put out the flames with a flood of Biblical proportions.

So Terminator Trevor And His Trusty Bag of Tools were drafted in and the poor old boiler was slowly and methodically pulled to bits, ready to go to the tip. Bits of it are now piled in the back yard while its main innards are out back by the bins, where they've been for a few weeks now.
We just can't bear to see it all go, but on the plus side we've gained a whole new section of Dining Room floor on which to pile stuff.

Every cloud and all that.

Replacing rotten water supply pipes

Once the boiler was out of the way we had access to a boxed-in corner of the Dining Room which housed the main water supply pipes to The Lodge, complete with stop tap.
Yanking that boxing off revealed (c)rusty old pipework which had obviously been caused by the tap which had been leaking since the dawn of time - just a tiny bit - and a small weep on the joint of the incoming water pipe. The two combined had made a right old manky mess of the pipes while keeping that corner lovely and moist right against the external wall.

The water supply in the back garden has limited uses at the moment...

On a related note we had been meaning to get Severn Trent Water in for some time so they could locate the main external stop tap, which we thought was one of two that we'd found, but one didn't turn the water off and the other one was about 6ft below ground, so we got them to come over and investigate.

It turned out that one of the taps we'd found was for something unidentified, and may have been disconnected altogether, and the other extra-deep one fed an independent water supply in among the weeds in the back garden area which we discovered last year. So that was a nice bonus. They found the one we actually needed with a metal detector, hidden under the gravelly/stony area at the front of the building. 

Once they were done and we were able to turn off the water to the property completely we called the providers of our home-emergency-assistance-cover-type-insurance-stuff who came and replaced both the decaying pipework from the external tap to the house and the leaky stop tap in the Dining Room.

It's all pretty boring really, but when the washing machine decides to explode when Dawn is at work one day I won't have to run around outside waving my arms in panic as a tsunami sweeps through the downstairs - I'll be able to calmly turn the water supply off at the shiny new stop tap then have a little sob while rolling up my trouser legs. Minimal drama.

History hiding in plain sight

Planning the various stages of the Living Room means looking at all of the detail that'll be present when it's finished. Which led us to a surprising little discovery.

The modern pendant light in the middle of the ceiling has been screwed to a wooden pattress all this time, but because it had been layered in white paint over the years we had never spotted it (thinking it was part of the existing plastic fitting), even though I've scraped Artex from right around it.

Pattress
It rhymes with mattress 

I unscrewed the light fitting and spent an afternoon carefully stripping the paint back while trying not to frazzle myself, revealing a solid disc of turned pale wood (I'm rubbish at ID-ing wood) which I'm guessing is old but not original.

An original mid-late 1800s pattress in that spot would likely have supported an oil or gas lamp which would have caused it to discolour with carbon build-up and scorching over time, but because there is none of that I'm assuming it was put there to support an early electric light - maybe around the 1930s when the National Grid first made an appearance.

It's not terribly important to us to find out minutiae like that, but we're happy to think of it as something worth keeping when we come to install the new lights. We're yet to decide whether or not to stain it to match the light or keep it as natural wood against the white ceiling.

Out in the garden

We could do little but shake our heads at Sausage in the hope he'd get the message

Months ago I knocked-up a couple of raised veg beds for Dawn in the front garden by the shed, and although that particular area could do with quite a lot of care and attention at the moment, the greens are coming along a treat in the one which has been put to use.
I know nothing about growing veggies other than celery is evil and shouldn't be entertained, but I'm told there are peas, mangetout, yellow courgettes, butternut squash, leeks and tomatoes in there.
Before it was planted there was also a SausageTheCat in there more often than not - doing what cats do - but a couple of dozen well-placed wooden BBQ kebab skewers soon convinced him to go elsewhere. It's not like there isn't a million acres of woodland on the doorstep.

Fertilised

We've been donated a ride-on mower which has pleased Dawn no-end because she has wanted one since she was a puppy.
The fact that the carbs need cleaning out regularly, the battery doesn't hold charge, the 'key' is a screwdriver and one of the rear wheels literally falls off every 10 minutes is of no matter. It's a ride-on mower and that's all that counts...

This is a 'pre-loved' Westwood Gazelle which, when one of the rear wheels overtakes you
and heads off across the grass, becomes a Westwood Donkeytrike

I didn't realise until it started to fruit last year, but we have a large wild cherry tree in the front garden which is extremely productive.
Not having made jam before I didn't want to jump straight in to it without doing the necessary reading, so I waited until this year before picking a whopping 2lb of lovely ripe cherries, pitting each one by hand over an entire afternoon (they're too small for a hand-held de-stoning thingy), throwing a load of sugar, lemon juice and pectin at them, boiling them up and producing a paltry two-and-a-half jars of surprisingly-lovely jam that's absolutely jam-packed (pun intended) with fruit.
I'm quite proud of my first ever Country Kitchen moment, but I'm not sure I can be arsed to do it all again even though there are still thousands of beautiful dark red cherries on the tree.

By the time I was finished pitting them I was sick of the sight of wild cherries

I keep getting wood

I'm not complaining - at all - but we've now got more wood for the log burner in the Living Room than I know what to do with.

When I first built the woodshed I figured that four decent-sized bays full of split logs would get us through a couple of years on rotation, with one or two bays providing seasoned logs while unseasoned wood in the other two had time to dry. I'd either scrounge or buy wood over a period of time to keep it all topped-up and things would tick along nicely.

However, for a start, we're rattling through wood like nobody's business. Up until the last couple of weeks the British summer has been nowhere near warm enough to heat the (stone) house on the inside to any kind of survivable standard so we've had the log burner on during the evenings to keep the place warmish and the damp at bay.
I'll admit that being male I'm somewhat enthusiastic when it comes to fire, but we've already emptied one seasoned bay and started on the other - wasps' nests and pied wagtail nests notwithstanding, meaning I need to get chopping and fill the first one up again with the sycamore cross-sections we've had stockpiled to the side of the woodshed since early April, of which there are many.

Holy cow... and there's another truck-load coming tomorrow

Except the tree surgeon fella from further along in the woods (one of our distant friendly neighbours) has decided that he doesn't want some of his latest good-but-not-great-firewood acquisitions and donated a flatbed full of willow a couple of weeks ago.
Just today he's dropped off most of a 90-year-old lime tree in the form of branches and trunk sections and another load is due to arrive tonight or tomorrow. Again, I'm not even close to complaining, but I don't think I've got the strength of character or the muscle power to work my way through it all.

So if anyone has a decent heavy-duty hydraulic or electric log-splitter that's either dirt-cheap or even going free please let me know. My back and arms will thank you.

Installing a slate hearth

Having installed the reclaimed oak beam as a fireplace lintel/mantelshelf successfully, it was time to turn our attention to the remainder of the fireplace.

We've already chosen our stove; the chimney flue liner (long-lasting 904 grade, both to allow for longevity and the fact that Muz is a pyromaniac) was put in as soon as the chimney pots were installed; and the register plate and flue liner adapter (we put a six-inch flue in the chimney, and the stove output is 5-inch - future proofing in case we ever get a stove with a bigger output) are now in too, so we pretty much just needed to put in a hearth and then the stove can be installed.

Our time capsule now lives in here.
The brick 'step' at the back had to be lowered by 25mm
so the new hearth would be level with the floor in the room.

I spent some time researching on the brilliant stovefittersmanual.co.uk website to find UK hearth regulations. Having done that, and established what size we needed, we were ready.

We decided we'd like to use a single slab of slate, having seen some at the same reclamation yard that we bought our beam from. Unfortunately when we rocked up with our measurements, the largest slate they had was still 80mm too narrow so we skulked back home with our tails between our legs, and started Googling for a Plan B.
Then my mum came up with a genius idea, by suggesting that we try the same place that had made our house sign. Replacing the rubbishy wooden house sign with a nice coordinated sandstone version was something we did back in the summer, courtesy of an excellent stonemason called Thomas - who we then completely forgot about. Doh.

Sharp, square-edged (not chamfered) and cut to exactly
the same width as the mantel above it. The devil
is in the detail, apparently.

Off we went and yes, they could do what we wanted for not a lot more than the slate from the reclamation yard would have been. We ordered it, expecting to get it early in the new year. But on the 23rd December, we got a phone call - it was ready to pick up if we wanted it before Christmas? Absolutely we did, so one slow and careful car journey later and the hearth was propped up against a wall waiting for it's final resting place.

And what better time to install it than the random bit in between Christmas and New Year? Especially when a handy bank holiday Monday was available. Unfortunately Muz came back from his family Christmas with man-flu and was forced to stay in bed. 

So my dad, aka Terminator Trevor, came round and the two of us got cracking while Muz took copious amounts of Beechams and occasionally appeared looking sorry for himself before heading back to bed (EDIT: I evaded the Grim Reaper by a mere whisker - Muz).

We'd already filled in the void under the hearth with a combination of our time capsule, old bricks, gravel and sand. Before we started setting the hearth stone in place, we first lifted a few of the quarry tiles from directly in front of the chimney breast, where the edge of the new hearth would rest. One tile was badly broken and some more had sunk quite significantly in to what appears to be a (surprising) thin lime bed on top of sand, so we swapped the broken one for a different tile, and put additional sand underneath the others to level them up.

Glazed tile chunk

We also needed to chip away a small, slightly raised, area where the previous hearth had been, in order to get our new level. This turned out to be a small fragment of old glazed tile - we guess from around about 1900.

I spent some time Frogtaping (like masking tape, but better) the edges of the hearth slab that would be exposed, and then covering the remainder of the top surface with newspaper, to save any splashes of mortar discolouring the stone.

To set the hearth in place, we then made a lime mortar mix, using 2 parts sharp sand, 1-and-a-bit part NHL3.5 lime, plus water, having read this interesting article around commonly used 1:3 mixes and that fact that hydrated volumes change the ratio.

Moisture content beneath ground level inside the fireplace came in at 100%+, so the lime mortar was laid thick to
give a good level, solid grounding and plenty of breatheable material through which moisture will naturally wick. This
will also be helped by a 20mm lime mortar-pointed gap between the bricks and slate when it's in.

Yet another tea break for Terminator Trevor

Using some narrow pieces of wood to set the correct level, we spread the mortar in, and leveled it off. 

We then removed the wood levels, filled in the void left behind by those, and then man/womanhandled the mammoth slate into place. A bit of pointing around the edges and we were done!

Now to wait a week or so until it's gone off and the stove can go in, although we need to paint the register plate and possibly re-point some of the mortar first.

Ta daa...

The thick lime bed should help the naturally damp materials beneath, especially towards the back, breathe

Olivine blasting - it's the future!

Q: Take a man on a mission, 7 bar of pressure, a quarter ton of (Mg+2, Fe+2)2SiO4, half a dozen cups of tea, one trip to Pizza Hut and 12 hours of hard graft and what do you get?

A: Complete sensory deprivation, hundreds of dead flies, a huge mess, a very late night, massive changes at The Lodge and two very happy homeowners.

It all started a few weeks ago when I went to visit my parents for a few days.
Rather than sit through another 2006 re-run of Bargain Hunt on telly I turned to Google for my entertainment and started searching for info about sandblasting. That's what renovating a house does to your 'spare' time.

The Living Room fireplace was a mess of soot,
paint and gypsum plaster residue

We had known for a while that we wanted quite a lot of bare brickwork inside The Lodge so we could make features of some of the walls and three of the four chimney breasts (we can't reach the fourth yet because the Dining Room is being used as storage), but removing layers of thick plaster had left the bricks damaged and very messy. As well as that the Living Room fireplace had large patchy layers of lead paint where various decorators had plied their trade over the generations.
I had already made an attempt to clean the walls with brick acid and elbow grease but it was slow, less-than-perfect progress and it quickly became obvious that I was fighting a losing battle on both the plaster residue and paintwork. Drastic action - up to and including napalm - was required.

The term 'sandblasting', as it turns out, doesn't usually refer to the media of sand these days and is instead used as a catch-all for 'abrasive blasting'. In basic terms that means taking your material of choice and shooting it at high velocity at whatever surface you want roughened, smoothed, stripped or, as in our case, cleaned.

Surprisingly there are a lot of unexpected materials that can be used for blasting so for educational purposes here's a short list:

• Glass
• Plastic beads
• Silicon carbide
• Dry ice
• Steel shot
• Ground possum teeth
• Pumice
• Walnut shells
• Olivine
• Flash-dried unicorn tears
• Corn cob

Disclaimer - two of those are made-up.

The problem we faced at The Lodge was that our bricks, being made of less-stern stuff than more modern ones, are naturally soft and crumbly which ruled out pretty much everything we could chuck at it. Steel shot, for instance, would easily clear away the paint and plaster, some of which was many millimeters thick, but where it touched the bare brick it would very quickly eat away the surface and make a right mess of the walls that we eventually wanted to show off.

Heston Blumenpillock

So after much searching and many YouTube videos I finally decided that dry ice blasting was worthy of a punt.
Everyone knows about dry ice - it's the misty stuff they used on Stars In Their Eyes when a bloke with a gammy eye and a limp would walk on stage in a wig proclaiming he was Tina Turner. Witches use it in their cauldrons to make themselves look more evil. Heston Blumenthal uses it to draw attention away from the fact that he's a pillock.
But more to the point dry ice, which is actually carbon dioxide at about -80C, isn't abrasive and would therefore be kinder to our walls because it simply 'lifts off' the contaminates in question. It also became apparent that it could well work on our terrible quarry-tiled floor in the Living Room and the painted sandstone windowsill in there!

I started to get excited so I made some phone calls.

A few days later the first quote came in and it made for sobering reading.
At thousands of pounds (more than one but less than five) to hire the stuff for a minimum of seven days, transport it to The Lodge, get trained and buy the dry ice it worked out much cheaper to actually pay a man to come over and do it for us in a fraction of the time.
So much for our 'do everything possible ourselves' ethos. And it meant I wouldn't get to play with new power tools <sad face>.

A week-or-so after that a very friendly chap in a van turned up towing a giant compressor to try test patches before we committed to the process. He set everything up and donned overalls, a full-face mask and ear defenders. In hindsight this is because he knew what was to come.
Me being me and despite advisories to the contrary, I was dressed in my many-pocketed Man Trousers and a T-shirt and was wearing a disposable mask, leaky goggles and ear plugs. Not exactly full PPE but as an enthusiastic DIYer I wanted to watch regardless of my own safety or comfort. This turned out to be something of a judgement error.

Olivine

When Mr Dry Ice started blasting it soon became apparent that it wasn't doing the job Dawn and I had hoped for. Starting with the concrete-tough filth on the quarry tiles by the Living Room fireplace, he managed to shift some of the unpleasantness but it left behind gray stripes where the rubber underlay had been glued to the surface for decades. One or two tiles came up well, but overall it was disappointing. The thick lead paint on the bricks saw a similar result with some of the paint vanishing in an instant, but not all of it. The same went for the thick ingrained soot in the back of the firebox and the sandstone windowsill. Close, but no Cuban cigar.
Determined not to be outdone, he tried various chemical remedies here and there, none of which helped much. Blasting those same areas afterwards shifted a little more muck and paint but still the results were less than perfect and even if they had worked the price was staring to go up.

Undeterred, out came the trump card.
As I'm sure you already know, (Mg+2, Fe+2)2SiO4 is a natural mineral commonly known as olivine. With individual grains being around three times smaller than sand grains it's much less abrasive than sand and although still classed as an abrasive we were running out of options. It was now or never. It had to be done.

The Living Room in the middle of the day
There are four things in this picture:
A lightbulb, a man, a window and lots of dust

As soon as Mr Olivine started blasting I realised why he had raised an eyebrow about my attire. Whereas dry ice literally vanishes on impact, olivine doesn't. It creates dust - especially when it hits the soft lime mortar between bricks at 20,000 mph.
And when I say 'dust' I don't mean the thin layer of skin cells you wipe off your TV screen every six months so you can see afternoon repeats of Magnum PI better. I mean dust. Thick billowing clouds of eye-scratching, nose-clogging, skin-exfoliating, tooth enamel-removing, cat-burying dust that settles in layers over everything you own and also over surrounding towns and villages. The kind of dust that diverts aircraft.
It was only 10 minutes after he finished that I realised it was still daylight outside and could find the door.

But it worked!

Test patches on the chimney breast, floor and windowsill came up so well that I almost hugged Mr Olivine and told him I wanted him - and the last time I did that I got community service for a month.
The painted bricks were no longer painted but still looked like they belonged to an old house; the soft lime mortar between the bricks had taken a hit but was almost white again rather than a grubby grey; the quarry tiles were reddy/orange with white marbling beneath the glue and the sandstone windowsill was blemish-free. It was perfect.

So he rocked up last Wednesday to do the lot.

An oak beam and a vaulted ceiling
This is the kind of thing you find when you have a couple of hours to kill

Dawn had decided to work from home for the day and during a delay in proceedings (Mr O was having van trouble) we, on a whim, pulled down a suspended ceiling in the hallway by the front door and ripped off a load of lath and Artexed plaster next to it.
In doing so we discovered that above the suspended ceiling was a steep vaulted ceiling all the way up the sloped porch roof, with the limed house-side wall propped up by a beautifully-aged oak beam.
So, flying by the seat of our pants, we pulled off all of the lime down to the brick on that wall (it was badly cracked anyway) and prepared it for blasting. The whole process from "I wonder what's above this ceiling" to the whole thing being ready happened so fast that it left my head spinning. I like to plan things, you see, not act on impulse. But the prospect of Mr O's imminent arrival had us both giddy with excitement so within a couple of hours it was done.

Rather than bore you with more words I'm going to tell the next part of this tale in before/after pictures.
You should know that Mr Olivine didn't leave until gone midnight, and in the 12 hours he was here he barely stopped. Other than cups of tea his only downtime was for a pizza we forced him to eat in case he passed out.
I did take over for 10 minutes in the Living Room while he had a cuppa, but that was only so I could say that I managed to do a bit despite us having to get a pro in...

Although some work still needs to be done, especially on restoring the quarry tiles, the result is outstanding and has marked one of the biggest and most encouraging steps forward in the whole project.

No

One final thing - the clean-up took us four days and I'm still getting dust out of my nose. Andy and SamTheDog popped over for half an hour during the work and he said he could see the dust cloud before he could even see the house. That's how bad it was.

Having stayed in each room to watch the work with my inadequate goggles and mask, there was a moment in Bedroom 1 when I couldn't hear anything but the blaster and literally couldn't see my hand in front of my face while I was being bombarded by dozens of disoriented flies. It got so bad that I couldn't tell where I was in relation to anything else and I started getting vertigo... that was an interesting moment, it has to be said.
I had the last laugh though because they were all dead in the dust next morning <happy face>.

Anyway, the pics.

Living Room

Hallway

Bedroom 1

Bedroom 3

Best/worst of the rest

Even the walls needed to be vacuumed