Toast

Tags

happiness, home, house, insulation, marriage

I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write you a shorter post.

My life has taken a turn for the better and things are looking up at last. We suffered a most depressing winter, with plaster everywhere, and every room in turmoil. A local plumber and a local decorator have forged my faith in tradesmen anew, after the debacle with the saboteur plasterer. I still have the spare bedroom to decorate and the lounge flooring to sort; but things are back to normality again. I can take a shower, find my clothes, get to my guitars, and cook a meal.
I believe it was worth the trauma we suffered, to get to the levels of insulation we now enjoy. You may recall, the reason we embarked on this adventure, was to fit foam-backed plaster board inside all of the exterior walls, to make up for our lack of a cavity. Previously, the boiler was running at full tilt and we were still cold. Now, I’ve turned down all of the radiator valves, I hear the boiler fire up only intermittently, and we’re as warm as toast: result!
I didn’t realise just how much the situation at home was getting us down. We were snapping and snarling at one-another, falling out over nothing. I was looking for excuses to stay late at the office. All tribute to poor Maeve, who had no such escape available.
“All’s well that ends well” said Billy the Bard. We’re smiling now.

Dust

Tags

Experience, life, musings, rants, thoughts

Eventually, we bit the bullet and opted for the interior insulation option for our home. You may recall this necessitates removal of picture rails, skirting boards, window ledges, carpets, radiators and electrical sockets from all exterior walls, to faciliate fixing of foam backed plaster board, followed by a skim of wet plaster.

Dave, our local friendly plasterer, skims to perfection.  I cannot fault his skimming skills.  Elsewhere, he falls short of good customer care and quality work.  The mess was unbelieveable.  The rubble swept under furniture was a nasty surprise.

I wondered why the reaffixed skirting boards were half an inch higher than those undisturbed.  A little investigation showed that Dave had reseated the skirting boards on top of the carpet gripper rods.

The bathroom ceiling was one of the first to be skimmed but was the last to dry, by more than a week.  A closer examination revealled that the ceiling was no lower (easy to see against the tile grout).  Dave had not fitted any foam backed board but had merely skimmed over the existing ceiling.  The bathroom ceiling, not surprisingly, was where we suffered the worst condensation problem, prompting the dry-lining option in the first place.  I find it difficult to believe that this was a geniune mistake on Dave’s part.

Last week, I found Dave trying to cut up a new window sill on my front door step, so I offered to open up my garage to give him access to my work-bench.  Dave placed the window sill on the bench and started cutting.  “You’re not going to saw holes in my bench are you Dave?”  I pointed out that there were piles of scrap wood, a vice, clamps, everything he could need to do the job properly and left him to it.  On Christmas Eve I went into the garage to find some wine for dinner.  My bench looks like it’s had an argument with a mad axe man.

The house looks like someone picked it up and shook it.  There’s dust in places you wouldn’t think dust could get to.  I’ve tried to start redecorating but it’s not easy.  It seems I’m waiting for Dave on every front.  Never mind: we will get through it and Smudge still loves me.

Insulation

Tags

building, home, insulation, life, musings, thoughts

It seems strange now, but most pre-WWII houses in the UK were built solid brick, i.e. without cavity wall. My little three bed semi was built in 1936 and so has no cavity. This means that the walls are cold, even when the house is heated and we tend to get condensation and fungal growth where the air is still, behind furniture and in corners.

There are two solutions to this problem on the market: dry lining and insulated render, or inside and outside.

Dry lining creates a plaster board stud wall inside the exterior wall of each room. This process is very simple and cheap to execute. The problems associated with it are numerous, though:
All of the skirting boards, curtain rail supports, radiators and pictures rails have to be removed.
Because the finished wall will be circa two inches thicker, the carpets are too big and the window sills are too small.
Any electrical sockets have to be either moved or refitted to the new wall.
The plaster board has to be skimmed with finish plaster.
And, after all of that and cleaning up the mess, we can think about making good and redecorating. Price circa £3,000.

Not surprisingly, the exterior solution of an insulated render seemed attractive: any mess would be outside. This system consists of an insulating board studded to the existing wall, covered over with a cement, into which is pressed a retaining mesh, which is covered with a final self-colour waterproof skim. It all seemed so simple!
The catch is that the walls have to be clear to enable the system to be applied. So the lean-to garage that I built, my bench, all of the shelving, the lighting, and electrical sockets, the sink, taps, and soil pipes in my brewery, the mains power supply cable to the house, the internet fibre optic, the telephone cable, the television aerial cable, the soil pipes from toilet, bath and wash-basin, and the exhaust vent from the central heating boiler all have to be moved.
I have nowhere to store all of my tools and brewing equipment for the two weeks (estimated) that the work will take, so any passing ne’er-do-well can help himself. Price circa £9,000.

Maybe I should move house.