Skirting the issue

CONFESSION: I wrote this post bloody months ago but hadn't sorted out the photos... then my phone (on which reside said images) wouldn't connect to my laptop... then I forgot... then I had stuff to do... then my parents started badgering me about blogging more... then I got a new phone... then I had more stuff to do... etc.

< sad face >

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As pretentious as it might sound, my mini-mantra when making decisions which affect the finish or overall result of a job is always "if we do ordinary stuff we'll get an ordinary house".
This is true, too. I actually use those words out loud in the direction of Dawn's rolling eyes sometimes.

Luckily she also (usually) agrees with my great wisdom, which is why rather than slapping a load of pine around the bottom of the Living Room walls, we decided to pay a little bit extra for European oak skirting and architrave to compliment the beams and window sills, which were yet to be made.
Other than our Kitchen of the Future the Living Room will be the main place in the house for relaxing or praying for our guests to leave, so we didn't want to cut any corners which would be obvious or make a difference to the end result.

Workshop porn

But because we don't like making things simple for ourselves we also decided to take a round-trip of almost 400 miles to our friend Will's sawmill near the south coast, which isn't a kick in the behind away from France, where he agreed to let us help make the 7-inch straight-edged oak boards and matching chamfered architrave for around the inside of the door frame.

Despite appearances, Will's fingers are
all of the requisite length

Will is a tremendously-talented and knowledgeable (and friendly) chap, by the way, and we're not just saying that because we kind of e-know him (long story - it's a web forum thing stretching back more than a decade) - if he wasn't much cop we wouldn't have bothered asking.

His website is here. You should take a look. And yes, that's a bare-faced plug because I want some wallnut and olive from him soon for my latest endeavour.

So, passports in hand, off we went to Billingshurst in West Sussex which is home to Woodlouse Industries and more wood than you can shake a... lots, anyway.
Will had already cut the rough and filthy boards to size and although we didn't get our hands as dirty as we did making the companion set (there weren't so many steps to follow where we could get stuck in) we helped to run them through the four-sided planer which churned out beautiful, smooth timber at the other end.
As the Clumsiest Woman in the World messed around on the bandsaw with sacrificial offcuts and flailing fingers, Will ran the architrave, which is narrower than the skirting boards, over a router table, trimming off the corner edges at 45-degrees.
He chucked in a little extra oak - just in case, a couple of boards and a sycamore chopping board that he just happened to have lying around and we strapped them carefully to the roof of the ManTruck, had a quick farewell pint, and made the journey home.

Poised and ready to transform in to a
gigantic mathematical headache

A couple of weeks later, after the decorating was done and the floor was given its penultimate finish, it was down to me and the ever-present and helpful Trevor to get them fitted.

It took a couple of days to do - cutting to length and mitering (with a 100-tooth chopsaw blade for a smoother cut) - but before long, yet still after much head-scratching and disagreement, we had glued and screwed everything in place, using a couple of 'plinth blocks' for the transition between the skirting and architrave around the door. These blocks were 2mm thicker than the skirting - and hence the architrave - so they stood a little proud without getting in the way of passing toes, and I cut them 20mm higher than the skirting and 20mm wider than the architrave.

Instant grab adhesive. Not so instant.

While fitting the architrave we had to deal with a couple of issues, both of which had the same solution.
The first was that the plaster on the walls rounds-off before it gets to the door frame, which would have left a gap of up to 12mm between the back of the architrave and the frame. To minimise this we left some of the original pine frame's edge exposed as a kind of feature (it was waxed and buffed as the final job) leaving a gap of around 5mm between the architrave and frame which would need to be filled later on.

The second consideration was that, whereas architrave is generally supposed to hide the frame edge and cover the door hinges, we wanted to keep the hinge screws exposed in case we ever needed to remove the door. This was also solved by keeping around 75% of the frame edge exposed.

It's not easy taking pictures of fitted skirting
so here's one of a radiator valve and
polishing piping

Once everything was in place I mixed some of the fine oak sawdust from the mitre saw's collection bag with a little five-minute epoxy glue to make a paste then filled the countersunk screw holes. I left it all for 24 hours to go off fully, then because epoxy sets harder than stone I ended up foregoing sandpaper and took the grinding wheel of a Dremel to the rough surfaces, finishing off with a once-over with 240-grit sandpaper to make it all flush.
I'm slightly disappointed that the finish is darker than the surrounding wood but it's not terrible so I'm pretty happy with it.

Finally, because a straight, smooth wall in an old house is a thing of myth and legend, I masked off the edges of all the woodwork and ran a bead of decorator's caulk around the tops of the skirting and edges of the architrave, just to join everything up to the plaster.

And that was it.
We're delighted with the final result and although the skirting has a contemporary feel to it with its straight lines and square edges, the 7" height of them still keeps that Victorian thingummyjig going on.

Things of note:

1. Plinth blocks for the skirting/architrave transition
2. Countersunk screw holes filled with epoxy and oak dust paste then sanded flush
3. About 75% of the door frame's edge is exposed to counter the problem wall edges
and leave the hinges exposed. 

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

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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.

Gertrude wreaks havoc - a round-up

Do storms in the UK feel worse now that we've decided they need names? They do, don't they? Is it just me?

It has been a few days since I last updated the blog so I thought I'd do a quick no-particular-order-round-up of what has been going on.

Simply-put, quite a lot of things have been happening although nothing worthy of a post on its own yet. So here's a wee summary while I wait for Dawn to get her hair cut and return bearing both a bonny new barnet and pizza. It's warm here in the shed with the electric blanket and SausageTheCat curled up at my side. It's bloody Baltic out there.

We've bought a horse

A workhorse, that is. Although it's more like a wallowing hippo.

The assorted misfits bid a tearful farewell to their
quadruplet chums. Whisked away, crammed in to the
boot of a Renault Megane. The shame of it.

Back in the excited planning stages before we bought The Lodge we pondered the merits of getting our hands on a cheap van to haul dirty stuff around during the renovation - bags of lime, pallets, timber, bricks etc.

We never quite got to the completion stage of that idea though, and instead settled for pretending our regular 'town' cars - my Renault Megane and Dawn's Ford Focus  - were Transits, getting them grubbier and grubbier. We got to the point where a boot full of sawdust and mud was a good thing because the mess hid the rips and scratches. With the benefit of hindsight that really wasn't very good at all.

So having thought about it for a few weeks we finally took the plunge and bought a 2.5l Mitsubishi L200 4x4 pickup with a tow bar and roof rails. A truck. We've bought a baccy-chewin', ale-swillin', arse-slappin', mother-cussin' ManTruck.

In hairdresser white.

Don't judge me.

I almost did myself an injury getting up there, mind

It's a few years old, a bit lived-in inside, has windey-windows, 116,000 miles on the clock and has been used for its intended purpose, but these things are (hopefully) bombproof and with a good valet and engine steam it should do us for a year or two. The bonus is that because the Megane is getting the elbow to make way for it, we should get a little money back to put in to the house.

The downside to that, of course, is that this thing is huge and I'm a bit scared of it. It's the size of a bus and I can't see out of the back window so I'm going to have to investigate getting parking sensors fitted just to underline the whole 'hairdresser' thing.
Also, you know in old movies when someone's steering a car by turning the wheel a few inches left then right over and over, but the background shows a perfectly straight road? It drives like that.

Too grrr to give it a name, The Truck is currently being used to store a couple of m2 of dry (bought) wood because we've got nowhere else to put it without it getting wet. It's a mobile woodshed. And I've already pancaked a meandering pheasant with it. I'm not sure who was more traumatised.

But anyway, as an impressed neighbour said the other day: "Well done - you're Country now." Just wait until I get it stuck in the woods on a joyride and I have to trek to their farm begging to be winched out with a tractor. That'll show them just how Country I am.

War is declared

We are fighting them on the beaches, we are fighting them on the landing grounds, we are fighting them in the fields and in particular we are poisoning them at the side of the shed rather than above the kitchen ceiling, where the expected bloodfest failed to materialise.

Rats.

As a very quick recap, I mentioned a while back that we had rats in the kitchen ceiling and we were setting traps baited first with lemon curd, then lemon curd and raisins, then finally peanut butter in an electronic rat trap. Yet we only caught one rat back in the early days of the problem - and that was with a mechanical snap trap.

We heard them a few more times after that but failed to bag any more, and eventually I killed the plastic electronic trap when it dropped out of the hatch and shattered everywhere on the tiled floor.

We haven't heard them since Christmas Eve and we still haven't found where they're coming in... although we haven't looked very hard, to be fair.

Procrastinate all you want, Mr Shiny-eyed MouseRatThing,
but your fate is sealed. Sorry and that.

Meanwhile a couple of weeks ago, when Dawn and I were lying in bed one night watching yet another US TV series on the laptop (we've just finished Transparent - it wasn't great), we heard something nibbling away at the aviary mesh around the bottom of the shed between the railway sleeper footings, which is there to stop anything setting up home under the floor. It spent a good 20 seconds sharpening its teeth and only paused briefly when we banged on the wall.

Next morning we decided to take no prisoners and out came the big guns in the form of a 5kg tub of bright pink poisoned grain and two horizontal drainpipe-type bait stations with clear vertical feeder pipes offering tasty death from above.

One went in the front garden on the far side of the shed near the back corner (mere feet away from Dawn's side of the bed), and the other went at the very end of the back garden area on the other side of the house as far away from the building as possible to minimise anything crawling back to the kitchen ceiling and going toes-up. Although not many, we're still getting flies in Bedroom 1 after something died in the chimney four months ago and we want to reduce the risk of it happening again, naturally.

Now I know I can be a bit odd from time to time, so it should come as no surprise to learn that I decided to set up a spare CCTV camera to watch over the shed poison to see how popular it was.

And crikey, was it popular. It was like a food bomb had gone off.

We forgot to watch it the first night, but by the second there were frantic comings and goings all night with rodents (Mice? Rats? Voles? Shrews? All of the above? It's difficult to get scale from the CCTV) scurrying back and forth like mad, then sometimes just sitting in the pipe filling their faces for five minutes or more. It was genuinely fascinating and has given me a whole different view of the beautiful countryside - it's riddled with rats and stuff. Riddled.

Anyway, I had to refill the shed bait station after just a week, but activity understandably started slowing down a little after that. The back garden station isn't quite so popular but it has had a half-refill and I keep finding pink areas on the ground nearby where a feast has taken place and only the husks are left. So hopefully the kitchen invaders are among the greedy masses somewhere, God rest their furry little souls.

Gertrude and Henry leave a trail of destruction

I wrote about our wood woes a couple of weeks ago here, and in an effort to plan ahead for next year I started work on a woodshed made from reclaimed timber, pallets and box profile steel sheets (essentially corrugated iron, but a bit less 'chicken sheddy').

Unfortunately I didn't check the weather forecast first, and before I knew it along came Gertrude, with Henry hot on her heels...

Before
Resting against the wall, testing things out for size

After
Mother Nature, you cruel, cruel mistress

It was carnage. New Orleans all over again.
When it was safe to venture outside without risk of being decapitated by an airborne cow I had to stand all the pallets back up again, which literally took minutes.
After that I decided to actually screw some of them together, chop some bits off and kind of loosely connect sections with lengths of timber, screws and blind faith, but I've only got a corner done so far and even then I'm not sure how to plan the roof in such a way that it doesn't end up in the village next time the breeze picks up.

I've taken some pics of the progress and would eventually like to write a post explaining how to make such a beast, but as I'm totally winging-it already I'm not sure how useful it would be. I'll see how it all pans out when/if it gets finished.

£90 for a bag of old junk?

With progress in the Living Room hitting a near-glacial pace (until this week*) we idly turned our attention to decor. Specifically arty farty stuff.
The fireplace and exposed chimney breast is lovely and all, but what do we want above the mantelpiece? We'd both like an original piece of art of some description but both of us are a little vague about the details, so we decided to keep our eyes open and our thinking caps on.

They even smell nice

Meanwhile I discovered an online auction site that isn't the one you think, full of fascinating stuff up for grabs - everything from Bulgarian farms to defribrillators to actual tanks and Royal Air Force 'practice bombs' - among which I found a lot offering 32 antique pocket watches in various states of disrepair, although there were no other details - just general photos of the collection which was nestling in the bottom of a Sainsbury's carrier bag.
"Aha!" thought I. "They're likely to be Victorian or thereabouts and we could do something pretentious with them!"

So we bought them. And they're absolutely lovely.
All but two or three have a beautiful patina of age, appearing very old indeed in Watch Years, and all of them are missing bits and pieces somewhere: glass fronts; metal backs; hands; cogs (gears?); springs; numbers; most of the above etc, and although some are pretty similar there are loads of different designs and sizes. Some even have small hand-engraved inscriptions inside: BA, EH and Queens 1974 (not an antique, I know, but it still has history). All the auction place could tell me when I asked was that they came from a house clearance, so not much to go on.

The plan is to display them somewhere - maybe or maybe not above the Living Room fire, and although we have a vague idea of how we might do that we're still on the idle hunt for alternative ways in case we're missing something obvious, which is entirely possible.
We're in no rush though, so shrouded in a 5p bag of bright orange modern-day corporate greed they shall stay until we're ready for them.

*We're getting plastered!!!1!

Oh, Mila.
Mila, Mila, Mila.

It's finally happening!
The lime plasterer is here!
Hallelujah!

Andy S, our very own Restoration Man, has spent the last four or five days prepping and plastering the Living Room and fending off stupid questions from yours truly.

Conversations have included serious highbrow issues such as the legal and moral obligations of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and the considerations and problems faced when referring to an Ulaanbaatarian in polite conversation.
Slightly lower-brow, yet arguably more important, topics have included: 'Other than our respective partners, Mila Kunis is the most beautiful woman on earth - discuss', the importance of waterproof pyjama bottoms, 'Steve Wright in the afternoon - eaten alive by tortoises or trampled to death by dachshunds?' and gimp suits.

We had help

Meanwhile I have been lifting, carrying, collecting supplies, generally skivvying and regularly spraying the plaster down with water so it doesn't dry out too quickly... and the room has been utterly transformed. I can't stop putting the light on to look when I pass.
I'll save the details for a post of their own when it's all finished, but it's safe to say that we're delighted with the progress so far and there's still a week or two - and another room - to go.

...and finally

Randomly, here's a photo of Terminator Trevor, pictured yesterday during a quiet meal in a country pub, demonstrating how he motivates me when I'm flagging. Never off duty, that man.

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.