Throwing good money after bad

The sun is out, the cuckoo is back, our swallows are crapping all over the courtyard again and I thought I'd do a quick update just to show that things are beginning to move again now that spring has sprung.

First of all, following Dawn's brief sojourn on to the roof to check out a duff tile, Terminator Trevor directed us to a couple of chaps who he knew would get up there and get our tiles sorted out without the need for expensive scaffolding, ropes, Health & Safety assessments or any of that trivial fuss. All they needed was a couple of ladders and simian reflexes.

Like rats up drainpipes, they were

The pair in question turned out to be Harry and TIMMY!, an old-fashioned father and son double act with about 180 years between them, most of it spent up on roofs.
They only came over on Tuesday to take a look and give us a quote but within 20 minutes had actually started work and were getting the first tiles off. No messing about. The bad news was that every single ridge tile along both ridges was loose and as a result the tiles immediately below those were starting to crack, so large parts of the roof were gearing-up for relocation.

BENNY!

Basically, sorting it out was a job that the woefully-inept and bone idle Roofer #1 should have done last year when the scaffolding was up for the chimney-rebuild but "no," he told us, "the roof's fine". It clearly wasn't - he was too interested in seeing the inside of the pub and taking our money in return for his name in 10ft letters hanging from the platform on a banner for the passing traffic. Not that I'm bitter.

Harry, who was one of those fragile-but-not old-timers who never leaves the house without a shirt and tie on (even up on the roof) and TIMMY!, who I swear was the double of Benny from Crossroads (I don't mean that insultingly - he actually looked like him), not only re-mortared all of the ridge tiles firmly in place but also sorted out Roofer #1's mastic bodge on the west chimney stack's lower pointing; fixed the ropey lead chimney flashing that Roofer #1 was asked specifically to repair (rain still leaked through to Bedroom 1); removed all of Roofer #1's flash band that was just kind of resting against the bricks rather than stuck to them; cleaned and fixed the gutters that Roofer #1 should have done but didn't and replaced more than a dozen cracked tiles that Roofer #1 was also asked to do but also didn't. I'm really, really not bitter about all that wasted curry money.

And they did that all in a day-and-a-half, working non-stop.
No tea, no butties, no fag breaks, no nothing - just graft. It's a method of getting on with the job that I've really only seen once before at The Lodge, and that's Trevor who is also not quite right in the head, although even he pauses briefly for a cuppa now and then. It must be a generation thing.

Note to self: employ more pensioners.

I forgot to take a 'before' picture so this is the best
I can find from back in November when we had
Mr O in to blast everything

So while they were doing that I set about stripping the Living Room's pine door frame. I've already started scraping out the chimney breast wall lime pointing but it's such a tedious job that I've decided to do it in stages to stop me going bananas and running screaming in to the woods. Probably naked.

We've already tortured the (original) pine door by soaking it in a fizzy warm caustic bath before attacking it with a Stanley knife and giving it a liberal smothering of beeswax, so it was time for the frame to get the same treatment, minus the bubble bath bit because it's nailed to the wall.
I started off with a heatgun and scraper to dig my way through the many layers of yellowing rubbery gloss white paint then, when I'd got as much off as was going to come off without causing damage, I glooped thick splodges of gluey paint stripper all over the surfaces and worked it in to all of the holes and splits with a paintbrush, leaving it for a few minutes to get to work.

It's not easy to photograph, so I didn't, but as you come
in to the room there are scuffs and small marks on
the left of the frame near the bottom, The same goes as
you leave the room - scuffs and marks on the left near
the bottom. My theory is that it's from someone right-
handed carrying buckets or coal scuttles in their left
(opening the door with their right) and banging whatever
they were carrying on the woodwork.

Once that was all washed off with sugar soap and I had repeated that part of the process again, out came the trusty Stanley knife and I tested out my kneepads for many-an-hour as I pick-pick-picked at all of the tiny flecks and recesses of white, getting the wood as clean as possible.
Then it was on with a light hand-sanding with 240-grade paper and another wash-and-dry, and I finished off with two coats of Flag Classic Wax 'Antique Pine' professional wax as recommended by the restorer who dipped the door, buffing thoroughly between the coats and to finish off with a soft brush attachment on my cordless drill. And when I say "thoroughly" I mean 'four full battery charges'.

After that I gave the door another waxing/buffing and temporarily re-hung it, discovering something amazing in the process - nothing creates a room more than filling that gaping hole in the wall with a door with which you can shut off the rest of the house.
We've now got a real Living Room and I can't wait to crack on with the rest of the jobs (apart from the ones I'm scared of).

Finally a couple of random photographs for no reason whatsoever.
Dawn and I went for a walk across the fields and through the woods this evening, setting off just 10 minutes before three opposing thunderstorms rolled through, bringing with them all of the associated rain. Fortunately, being Country, we were armed with foresight and were wearing our walking boots and waterproofs. It's boring being all growed-up.

...one year later

Today marks exactly 8,760 hours since we moved to The Lodge and started trying to knock the place in to shape.

Other than the fact that living in a shed for a year isn't as bad as you might think (for the most part), we've learnt a lot of things on the way that we thought we would share to mark our anniversary, so we’ve put our thinking caps on and concocted a list each, which I’ve mixed together below. If you're considering setting sail on a project of your own, take heed because I guarantee that almost all of these will prove to be relevant one day.

We also thought we'd share a few random photographs that haven't made it into the blog before, mainly because I had no idea what to say about them. Nevertheless, many still tell tiny stories all on their ownsome.

So, our one-year anniversary. Some of you may be wondering how we’re going to celebrate this landmark occasion.
Well tonight we’re going to cook pies, peas and chips and eat tea in our camping chairs in front of the wood-burning stove which has been lit just once in the last 10 weeks. We’re going to sing Kumbaya, spend a fruitless hour looking for the Scrabble board then talk about light fittings.
(Disclaimer: some of this is not true but the pies, peas and chips in front of the fire bit is).

Dawn and Muz

putting the why? in to DIY since April 17, 2015

---

Yesterday
Dawn decided to go scrambling around on the roof to look at a missing tile.
She does that kind of thing whereas I don't. Ever. She found three in all, knocked
a fourth one off herself then came back down having waved at passing cars.
I've told her she's not going up again. We're getting A Man in to sort it out.

• Your 'best' T-shirt is the one you've done least angle grinding in and/or has fewest holes
• Tradespeople are utterly hit-and-miss. If you find a good one, keep hold of them
• Hooting and screeching owls are wonderful at 10pm but an air rifle target at 4am
• Small talk gets easier - although not easy - with practice
• Glamping is fun. A big shed with your own bed is way better than a poky old caravan and much more versatile when you move out
• Glamping is less fun after a year of getting fully dressed and traipsing to an entirely different building every time you need a wee [EDIT: not every time though, eh? Dawn? Eh?]
• Consider putting a Portapotty thing in your shed

June 2015
After the bee swarm emergency in the front garden a small colony stayed behind
to set up shop in a pile of patio slabs for a few weeks. By the time we returned
from holiday they had left for warmer climes.

• Tradesmen don't always know what they're waffling on about but will still try to talk you in to doing it their way. If you know you want it a different way, don’t cave in
• Friends are excellent providers of food, shelter and gin
• If you stand in the shower long enough your eyes will actually prune
• The things you need most will be: tape measure; Stanley knife; gaffa tape; pencil; bumper box of screws; cordless driver
• The things you will lose most often will be: tape measure; Stanley knife; gaffa tape; pencil; bumper box of screws; cordless driver; patience

August 2015
Bedroom 2 has been a no-go zone since the beginning when we decided to use
it for storage. One day Dawn went missing. I found her trapped under an avalanche
of boxes, where she had been for 20 minutes. She was less than impressed
that I then made it 21 minutes by taking a photo or two. Or three.

• Time is fluid. If a tradesman tells you he'll be there at 9.30am today, expect him a week on Tuesday when you're getting in the shower at 7pm. If he tells you he'll see you tomorrow... don't bank on it
• Randomly turning up on people’s doorsteps in similar situations to yourself can end up in unexpected friendship, sometimes with added coffee cake*
• Oil-filled radiators take all of your electricity, chew it up, spit it out and demand more NOW!
• Mentioning 'Blue Tits' (the bird) continues to be amusing even when you’re surrounded by them day in, day out
• You'll know it's time to change your jeans when you forget which month it was when you first put them on

* Not a guarantee!

October 2015
British Telecom has the worst customer service in the history of the universe.
After problems, complaints, compensation and more problems relating to half a dozen unconnected things (sometimes literally) we eventually got hooked up to BT Infinity Broadband. Or did we?
Here I decided to set Dawn a fun text quiz to work out this week's excuse for why the engineer, who was at the door, couldn't make our broadband run any faster after we'd been paying for it for six weeks.

• Parish newsletters (available by wandering randomly into your village church and posting 50p into a slot), are a handy source of local tradesfolk
• Productivity decreases dramatically as the weather deteriorates and picks up again when the sun comes out
• Using your own two totally unskilled hands to make something out of wood - which doesn't then fall apart and/or over - is incredibly satisfying
• Community Facebook page recommendations for tradespeople are often just nods to their useless pals rather than actual useful tradespeople. Don't learn this lesson the hard way. Ask your neighbours instead
• Shaving is for office workers
• Even if you aren’t full-time ‘on-site’, you will find yourself living in a uniform of walking boots, thermals and waterproofs most of the time

June 2015
This is on our doorstep. Literally almost literally literally on our doorstep.
It's easy to forget how gorgeous it is come winter when the rain drips through the Living Room window and you can still see your breath in the shower.

• Flytippers, who are much more common that you'd care to think, need to see the business end of a shotgun
• The most important question to learn during a renovation project is: "Do you have a cash price?" but because circumventing VAT-based legal stuff is generally frowned upon by the Government, make sure the words don't leave your mouth unless you're in a soundproofed room by yourself
• When you don't watch UK television for a year (apart from the Moto GP) you realise how mind-numbingly banal most of the shows were anyway, but...
• ...an Amazon Prime subscription is a sanity-saver

October 2015
At £400+ a pallet of 120mm Kingspan (seconds from eBay) isn't cheap - and Dawn needed some persuading - but it made the winter more than bearable in the shed, it made it pleasant.
We only covered about a third of the inside in all, concentrating on the bed end, and the rest of the packs are still cluttering up the Dining Room where they are likely to stay for some time yet. When the shed eventually becomes our workshop we'll get the rest in then.

• Deep in the countryside, wing mirrors are sacrificial
• Your best 'casual footwear' will be walking boots that you have to run under the outside tap to get the plaster dust off
• Neighbours whose houses you can’t even see are often exceptionally friendly
• If you want to meet said neighbours, owning a dog - or them having a dog - greatly increases those chances. If neither apply, take cake

February 2016
Back when we had some form of heating in The Lodge

• Blue Tits

March 2016
Dawn's IKEA bag full of soggy washing can't save her from a trip to the iPhone repair shop courtesy of an untied pair of bootlaces. Again.

• Kevin McCloud is right - every job you do will cost 3.6 times as much and take 73 times longer than you think it will
• You won't be in by Christmas
• Cats are lovely when they're all curled up asleep at 10pm but when they're scratching to be out at 4am only to want back in at 4.05am you'll consider lining them up next to the owls

March 2016
Having looked at old maps as part of our research, we found an old quarry (1700s-1800s) within the estate boundary which was just a half-hour walk away through the woods.
It took us nearly a year to make the journey but we found a gorgeous 60ft steep-sided horseshoe-shaped scar in the sandstone, beneath which were deep pools inside low caves that we couldn't see the end of.
The best thing about the place isn't that it's almost untouched by latter-day humans (other than a tiny bit of fly-tipping) it's that the sandstone is pinky-red which is exactly the same as that used back home on the outside of the house.
We're now thinking of this quarry as The Lodge's birthplace, which is ace.

• Don't assume that getting hooked up to gas will cost an arm and a leg - check with the National Grid before you buy a million litres of fuel oil for a smelly old boiler that heats neither water nor radiators. It might be much cheaper than you think
• An electric blanket will take the immediate sting out of winter, but…
• …when your other half suggests spending good money on good insulation for the shed that you were only planning on spending the summer in, just agree. You won’t regret it
• Surrounding farmland throws up all manner of new and overwhelmingly-nauseating smells but sometimes, just sometimes, it's you

• This is the final bullet point. On to the photos:

April 2016
This, I think, is a female Smooth Newt.
I found her on the driveway at the back a week ago, hidden in some damp leaves under a bag of rubbish.
She was very dry and nowhere near a water source so I took her to the front garden where there used to be a koi pond in the 80s. Underneath a bush there's a small murky pool-thing which used to be a water feature of some kind to feed the pond. It's permanently full of rain water and leaves and yummy newt stuff so after spending 10 minutes on a leaf making her mind up, in she plopped never to be seen again.
No calls, no emails, no chocolates, no nuffin'...

*

March 2015
The INCUBATOR MORE sign takes a sinister turn

*

March 2015
Technically-speaking we started work before we officially got the keys. We can probably legally admit this now that a year has passed but telling you how we got in will likely get us jailed. I must brush up on my property law.
One of the very first things we did was to set my folks (let's call them Viv and Ken for legal reasons) to work stripping wallpaper in the Living Room so we could begin to work out what we were dealing with beneath. This pic is shot through a window looking in to the Pantry from the Courtyard, in case you get confused.
Important note: we're outside, not inside. Outside of the building. Completely.

*

March 2016
Beyond the woods are thousands of acres of farmers' fields followed by more woodland. Living among that lot are muntjac deer which are no bigger than old, fat labrador dogs but more delicious to eat with a little rosemary and ground black pepper.
This one couldn't have given a stuff that I was there and came to within about 30ft before meandering off, chewing the crops with little more than a sniff in my direction.

*

April 2015
Just lined up in jars, looking all squidgy and that.

*

March 20, 2015
Total eclipse of the sun over The Lodge.
You can only really tell because of the lens flare towards the bottom right, though.

*

May 2015
A few miles away is The Old Post Office, which is in a different village altogether.
Identical in almost every way to The Lodge and also a former Crown Estates property, it had just been bought by John and Jess (who we later made friends with) and was about to be gutted. We reappropriated much of the skipped timber, some of which was used to build the woodshed.

*

July 2015
Just two samples of the wallpaper which once tastefully adorned every vertical surface in the Living Room.

*

June 2015
An early version of our NatureCam CCTV caught a tawny owl landing on a patio chair which had previously been used to dry washing in the front garden.
Despite NatureCam moving elsewhere every now and then we've never seen another one on the cameras.

*

October 2015
After a brief stint as 'OUR BACON REMIT' this is how the garage door
sign has remained ever since.

*

NOW
Dawn is giving the front garden its first mow of the year while I sort this blog out.
In fact I've just heard the mower go CRUNCH!
When I set this post live I'll pretend I'm still doing it so I don't have to help because I'm mean like that. Besides, I've pulled my neck, etc...

EDIT: Monday, April 18

By coincidence, after my thoughts about flytippers not 24 hours ago, I drove past this today. It's about a mile-and-a-half from here on a beautiful country lane, right in the gateway to a field and around the entrance to a peaceful footpath/bridleway.

Seriously. There's just no need. I can normally at least understand how other people think about certain things even if I don't agree with them (see my fox hunting posts) but this... I just don't get it. I mean, that's a perfectly decent bucket.

Beam me up, Scotty!

“You’ve missed a bit,” is a phrase that tends to incite violence from busy people who find themselves dealing with idle bystanders with nothing better to do than poke fun.
Take cleaners, for example. I have no doubt that many-a-mop has been wished where the sun doesn’t shine. And painters – those bristles must be difficult to pick from between the teeth of people who think they’re God’s gift to comedy.

But when it’s a nagging voice in the back of your head there’s little you can do other than tell it to get stuffed, which invariably fails miserably.
I had such a voice when I finished the Artex in the Living Room and Bedroom 1 - sorry to keep banging on about the bloody job. The voice kept telling me I had missed a bit, and it was only when I actually paid attention to it that I realised I had. I’d missed a bit.

Baywatch

There is an oriel window (a cantilevered bay window for those not up with the lingo) in the Living Room that I don’t think I’ve really mentioned much in this blog yet. The bay itself extends out from the front of The Lodge and sits on a very old and very thick externally-delaminating slab of sandstone with two fancy sandstone corbels underneath which stop it dropping off. The inside of the slab forms a large wide window sill that no doubt gets terribly cold in the winter. I’d had partial success in attempting to strip the three or four layers of white paint off this a few weeks back only to find that much of the inside area that was delaminating (flaking away in layers of flat shards where it meets the frame) had been bodged and filled with bathroom silicone, of all things.
The window itself comprises a total of 12 single-paned glass panels arranged in an old (but we’re fairly sure not original) three-sided wooden frame - the only one in the house (the rest are ugly double-glazed uPVC), with one side opening out towards the main road.
There is also a suspended ceiling inside the bay, the surface of which was covered in yet more Artex. More swirls of carcinogenic misery that I had missed in my delight at supposedly finishing the removal job a little while ago.

Artex on top of plasterboard on top
of original laths

When I came to remedy this glaring error last week I made a welcome discovery – the Artex was on top of gypsum plasterboard, and because we don’t want such useless material in the house I needed to get rid of it. Which I happily did. Down it came in the blink of an eye and two cups of coffee.
What I discovered in so doing was that the boards had been attached straight on to the original laths and the lime plaster surface of the original suspended ceiling had been removed, leaving only lumps of lime above the laths.

The naturally nosey among you will want to know what else was up there with it being an original ceiling and all, and I did too. I was hoping there would be more Georgian gutter brackets from the original single-storey cottage that The Lodge was eventually built-up from, for instance. Or maybe a forgotten fortune.
Alas it was only this: the dirtiest job of the renovation work to date. And lest we forget that I’ve pulled out years of accumulated filth from three formerly-covered-up fireplaces and we’ve de-lagged a loft.

I lay on the floor to take this
Have you SEEN our floor?

The first thing I found, before I even started removing the laths, was that they were nailed to quite a hefty chunk of timber which, on the inside Living Room face, had been patched over with more gypsum many years ago. Chipping this gypsum off revealed yet more laths which were nailed lengthways along what appeared to be a substantial beam.
I carefully started removing the laths that ran away from the beam at right angles towards the window frame where the suspended ceiling had been, hoping to be able to salvage some to repair a hole that I had sawn in the Living Room ceiling a few days earlier to widen a long ragged hole that was already there, only to discover that decade upon decade of moisture build-up above the ceiling had resulted in a manky carpet of green and black moss from one side to the other, and front to back, that was easily six inches deep at its shallowest.

Mmmmoss. Not even half of it.

On top of this was a thick layer of dust, dirt and cobwebs, on top of which was a layer of old lime and cement that had crumbled away from beneath the tiles. Above that lot, still attached to the underside of the bare tiled roof, were many sticks of long-dead wisteria that had once adorned the front of the building and 150 years of utter, utter filth clinging to attic-grade thick black cobweb sheets that could easily wrap up and suffocate an albatross. And among all that I discovered the delicate remains of three unfortunate mice - complete with long, fragile tails - that had squeaked their last many decades ago. One was even mummified.

And unsurprisingly, the lengthy clean-up job was grim. Very grim.

But once that was done I turned my attention to the beam the laths had been attached to, and started removing the horizontal ones covering the Living Room face of it.
This made up for all of the previous horribleness when, eventually, I uncovered what turned out to be a beautiful sturdy 6ft length of chunky oak above the bay window with a lovely shake down its centre where it has been ageing over at least 150 years and supporting the entire front wall of Bedroom 1. The stonework to either side of it hadn’t aged so well, unfortunately, and one end has been chocked with chunks of wood before it was all plastered up, but with a good clean-up and some TLC we’re going to turn it in to one of the room’s original features on display for ever more. Lovely.

The old oak beam was a welcome surprise and will make a
terrific feature, especially if we don't replace the ceiling

The rest of the bay’s ceiling is still open to discussion, but for the moment it seems that we may be leaving it uncovered and making a feature of that too, as the old timbers supporting the roof are still on show there. Some more TLC, a little insulation between the woodwork and a soft light or two may well see that come good in the end. 

The one fly in the ointment, however, is a single feature of the oak beam that we could do with sorting out before we finalise our plans.
When I pulled off the horizontal laths I discovered a fourth and final mouse skeleton, wedged tight between the thin sticks and the beam. Unfortunately, when mice and no doubt any other mammal passes on to the next world, they leave behind an organic mass that tends to degrade somewhat. That process of decay has a habit of releasing unpleasant fluids which, if compacted against the surface of porous wood for some time… can you see where I’m going with this?

Not to put too fine a point on it, there’s a horrible greasy blob on the oak that used to be a mouse and I don’t want my gaze to keep drifting to it when I’m trying to watch Homes Under The Hammer in my PJs while I’m eating toast and chocolate bourbons every morning. It’ll put me right off my brekky, it will.

Mouse of horrors
Happy Hallowe'en!
(on Saturday)

Oh, rats!

An unlikely combination of our weekend shenannigans in the loft and SausageTheCat has caused us a little bit of concern today.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Dawn and I ventured into the loft on Sunday and dragged out all of the fibre glass insulation to help with moisture problems.
At the time we noticed what we thought were mouse droppings as well as a couple of empty poison sachets, but we didn't hear or see anything else to suggest there was an ongoing issue.

In retrospect this may or may not be related, but less than 24 hours later my dad and I twice heard clattering downstairs in the house that we couldn't quite place, but as it was raining pretty heavily at the time I assumed it was chunks of cement throwing themselves down the drainpipes from the gutters (which hadn't been cleaned out by Roofer #1 despite him promising to do so).

But SausageTheCat's latest rain-soaked gift to us today has raised some questions.

Kids these days - too much pocket money

It's not a vole, it's not a shrew and despite its humongous ears it's definitely not an elephant... so what is it?
Although I have recorded it on the StC Killboard as a mouse he's yet to actually present one to us after four months here - so could it be a baby black rat? A ratlet?*

The Rentokill website says that black rats (Rattus Rattus - imaginative) have tails that are longer than their bodies, and with our little thing here measuring-in at 5.5" in total with a 2.5" body it certainly fits the bill. They also, apparently, have big old ears going on and as you can see in the picture these are like yacht sails, although they look a lot bigger than any of those I've seen on Google Images. Perhaps his mum said he'd grow in to them...

The main reason for our concern is that Rentokill also says that black rats are known commonly as 'roof rats' because they're climbers and can easily get up there. And as The Lodge doesn't have cavity walls to provide an escape route, did my dad and I hear one abseiling down the inside of a drainpipe?

Mischief

Have we disturbed a nest in the loft?
Could it just be coincidence?
If I scrub that pound coin with Swarfega will I still get bubonic plague?

Dawn wants to chuck more poison in the loft whereas I'd rather they didn't expire up there and stink the place out (flies, too) so I want to set some traps before we get replacement insulation so we can know for sure.
It's likely that we'll do a mixture of both, so watch this space...


* Yes, I know they're called kittens but I didn't want to confuse anyone.

It's a dirty job but someone has to do it... Dawn

The creepy crawlies here are a regular source of fear for me as well as occasional (but rare... in fact, only once) amusement.

In the latter category, one night last week after I finished a bag of Marmite crisps while in bed I tied a knot in it and threw it at the bin, missing by a country mile. At about 2am next morning I was woken by a tiny insistent clicking sound and put the light on only to find a black beetle carrying it aloft to an unknown destination. It was struggling, admittedly, but it was making impressive progress nonetheless.

In the former category was the rather pretty but utterly terrifying black-and-orange sexton beetle that Dawn and I spotted on Saturday afternoon as it literally rolled the corpse of a vole around on the owl perch. I like to think it was checking the unfortunate rodent's pockets rather than dining on its squishy insides because that's what nightmares are made of and The Lodge is giving me enough of those already.

And then, in a category all of their own, are spiders.
I've mentioned before that I don't get on with spiders, and I'm not kidding. At best they're accomplished and powerful pugilists and at the other end of the spectrum they are lightening-quick insatiable carnivores which will attempt to swallow you whole given half a chance.
I've even been known to scream and throw a laptop computer at such a beast in our old house when it caught me by surprise as it scuttled across the carpet by my foot. It was so big that I heard it before I saw it. The spider lived whereas my Sony Vaio didn't.

So that's why I was more than delighted for Dawn to venture into the loft on Sunday to pull out all of the fibreglass lagging while I played the role of trembling wing-man below the hatch in Bedroom 1.

My folks half-way through a 500-mile round trip... to paint a shed.
At least it keeps them off the roads.

My parents (who live a couple of hundred miles away and haven't been here since March, before we got the keys) were over for the weekend, and they can't do much in the way of heavy manual labour so we put them to work painting the shed to keep them out of mischief.

Meanwhile, in order to support my fragile ego, I was determined to spend at least a few minutes in the loft with Dawn - who was much more eager to get up there than she should have been - so whereas we both dressed sensibly in thick disposable hooded coveralls, masks and gloves, I added to that a balaclava, goggles, a Bible and gaffa tape around the wrists and ankles. I also asked my folks to check in on us on the hour, every hour in case we were being devoured while encased in giant Temple of Doom-style webs.

Sexy

The idea behind the loft incursion goes back to a previous post about managing moisture in the house. Fibreglass is a man-made material that is pretty much impervious to moisture so won't allow it to escape upwards and outwards, and when the weather gets chillier the moisture in the warmer air rising up will condense beneath it and create problems with damp, as evidenced by heavy marking and cracked Artex on the ceiling just outside the bathroom doorway.
Ripping all of the lagging out was one of our priority jobs when we first moved in but we were initially distracted by other things and, because it was going to be thoroughly messy and horrible, we had planned to throw it straight out of the window - a plan thwarted by two months of scaffolding blocking the casements in Bedroom 1.

Our only knowledge of the loft up until this point was from the day of our survey when we poked our heads through the much-too-small hatch and saw formidable darkness, lime-torched laths beneath the roof tiles and the evil insulation, so we were keen to see what surprises lay in store other than certain death.

Horrible work performed by a lovely lady

Dawn went first, naturally, and I waited below to receive the first installment of what turned out to be two thick layers of lagging. In a house which has seen precious little cash thrown at it over the years, this is one area where no expense seems to have been spared.
After the first few rolls of the filthy stuff came down and went straight out of the window the intrepid explorer came down for a quick breather and to explain what she had seen up there, which amounted to precious little other than cobwebs.
Buoyed by her unlikely survival I ventured up alone and bravely pulled out a few rolls of insulation myself, in the process discovering a fair amount of straw scattered around below it which, as Dawn quite rightly suggested, turned out to be The Lodge's 150-odd-year-old original insulation, great wads of which were still packed tightly beneath some of the harder-to-reach rafters. The irony is that straw is an excellent natural insulator that breathes, so it would have been far more effective overall than the rubbish that replaced it. But hey ho.

Original straw insulation stuffed under the beams among the filth

Almost at the same time that I spotted large amounts of mouse droppings among the filth on the upper surface of the lagging I also found part of a sachet of poison beneath it, so the message there was pretty clear although there didn't seem to be any evidence of recent rodent activity in terms of nests or... well, I don't really know what else. A tiny kettle still hot to the touch? A miniature smouldering cigar, abandoned in the rush to evacuate? A copy of Good Mousekeeping, complete with date? I'm no pest expert, as you can probably tell, but there were certainly no furry rodents scurrying away in the torch beam and we heard nothing suspicious during the whole time we were up there. There were no bats either which was a blessed relief because, as a protected species, that would have thrown a right old spanner in the works.

The King Post

Other than two very small abandoned wasp nests, some V and IIII carpenters' marks on the woodwork and a very old piece of honeycomb which had survived remarkably well beneath the fibreglass there wasn't much else to see so, acutely aware that I was being watched from the darkest recesses, I all-but fell out of the loft and let Dawn get on with it, occasionally nipping back up quickly to take a few photographs.

One thing that the wife got excited about was the rediscovery of what our surveyor had described all those months ago as a King Post in the roof, which is a curiously-shaped vertical column that goes from the apex down through the wall between Bedrooms 1 and 3 and does things I don't understand for reasons I understand even less, and as a result I can't get all giddy about it myself, to be honest. But it's a good-looking piece of timber so should we ever knock the two bedrooms through it would be nice to keep that exposed as part of the original fabric of the (extended two-storey) building. Maybe I should look it up.

Anyway, too many hours after we first started we were left with a massive pile of lagging on the ground at the front of The Lodge which we piled onto the old carpet we had removed earlier in the day from Bedroom 2 and dragged around the back. We're finally getting a skip at some point today so that'll be the first thing to go in there.

The result of many hours of hot, sweaty, dirty work

Which left just one more job.

3MP IR HD
The business

Because Dawn hadn't been dicing with death enough in the loft she went back up to run the cables for the CCTV cameras through holes in the torching underneath the rafters.
Up until Thursday the CCTV system we bought in the wake of our unburglary had been temporarily attached to the scaffolding, but its departure meant that we had to sort it out on a more permanent basis which required proper cable routing.
I installed the cameras in their final positions around the house and property yesterday and hooked everything up again so we're back online in that respect, which is nice because I felt naked without them up-and-running. It's surprising how much peace of mind they offer.

So that was it - we're now ready for sheep's wool insulation when we work out if we can get a grant for it or not, which would be helpful, and we can watch the comings and goings of SausageTheCat from the comfort of our camping chairs should we so wish. Lovely.

Two down, more to go

Meanwhile the shed is looking all fine and dandy with a lick of green paint highlighted with white bits, courtesy of the olds, who left for home yesterday afternoon with the warm glow of satisfaction that can only be earned by a job well done.

So pleased were Dawn and I with the glammed-up shed that we played host and held a mid-point celebratory barbecue on Saturday night, and as all good BBQs should go we warmed home-made lemon and chilli burgers gently for two hours over the tepid coals before chucking them under the grill in the house then ate them reluctantly while very aware of the possibility of food poisoning.

I think we're in the clear now though.