The previous owners' lack of interest in maintenance did not, sadly, indicate a general lack of interest in DIY.
These pictures show how the they tackled the problem of insufficient mains power outlets (click on a picture for a larger version). Here we can see a mains sockets nailed into a slot in the skirting board, and connected to the rest of the ring main (if there is a ring, as such) using insulating tape. It's worth bearing in mind that our house is within 10 minutes' drive of two electrical wholesalers and two large DIY outlets, one of which is the largest in Europe. Also, a 30-amp junction box costs about 50 pence.
A lack of attention to safety does not appear to have been compensated by an increased attention to comsetic matters, as this picture shows. Throught the house there was a general lack of regard for squareness and alignment.
A similar unorthodox approach seems to have been taken with the plumbing. If you look closely at the first picture above, you will see that two pipes have been run between floors by the simple expedient of smashing a hole in the lath-and-plaster ceiling with a hammer (fist? head?). The foot-wide hole was then concealed with a strip of wallpaper. The second picture demonstrates the approach taking to central heating calculations: don't bother. It seems amazing to me that anyone would consider that a two-foot radiator would be sufficient to heat a 30-foot room. There was a gas fire as well, but I had to shut off the gas at the mains within a few days of moving in, as there were gas leaks everywhere. Incidentally, all of the central-heating pipe joints were made with compression fittings, and they were all leaking. It isn't obvious from the photo, but the skirting board around the left-hand leg of the radiator was rotten, where water had been dripping on it, probably for several years. Worse, the whole front wall of the ground floor of the house had suffered extensive damp penetration. It turned out that a previous owner had built an extra skin of brick at the front of the house (why?) which had bridged the damp-proof course. Oh well.
Anyway, our first job was to redecorate the lounge, in the hope that at least one part of the house could be made habitable. Of course, this implied that it would need to be re-wired, as the existing wiring was of the kind that starts fires. And, of course, the radiators would have to be replaced. I also wanted to remove the nasty, leaky gas fire and re-open the old chimney for a coal fire.
The preparation of a room this size for decorating is no trivial matter. What made it worse was that clearly no-one had ever stripped wallpaper in the house before, preferring instead just to paint or paper over the top. There were four layers of wallpaper, each of which had several layers of paint over the top. As the top layer of wallpaper was textured with a ghastly flower pattern, papering or painting over the top was an option not open to us. So began four days of back-breaking, dull labour, getting access to the original plaster surface. Then another couple of days of plaster repairs to give a surface suitable for decoration. I also sanded the pine flooboards to a state where they could be varnished.
It was at about this time that the first complication arose. Removal of the wallpaper around the rather ugly arch structure (above) revealed a crack in the wall about a half-inch wide, tapering up to a long crack in the ceiling. It looked very much as though the arch -- which was created by knocking the front out of a chimney breast -- had been created without proper support for the chimney stack above. Since this probably weighs several tons, this was probably not a sound move. Anyway, we had to arrange for the ceiling to be propped up while the arch was demolished and replaced with a complete brick wall, strengthened by a steel lintel.
The next complication came soon after. While attempting to remove the ugly radiator, one of the downpipes came away from its joint below the floor, starting a flood in the cellar. It turned out that the weak compression joint fastening it to the rest of the system had snapped. Although this problem was easily rectified, inspection revealed that all the plumbing joints were in the same state, and the system was simply not stable enough to re-fill with water. In any event, the gas boiler was about twenty years old, and needed replacing.
As winter was approaching, and I did not feel up to installing a gas boiler single-handedly, I had the initial part of the plumbing done by a professional plumber, although I have since done all the rest of the plumbing myself.
The lounge was finished without further major complications, and now looks like the picture above. Next in the order of work was the kitchen, and this was a biggy. The kitchen was superficially acceptable, but apart from being dark and gloomy there was extensive damp damage, gas and water leaks, an uneven and creaking floor, unspeakably awful wiring, and general crookedness. The only solution was to demolish the kitchen completely, back to bare brick and floor joists, and build a new one.
There is an excellent Web site called Hometime containing all sorts of useful DIY information (I believe it accompanies an American TV show). If you look at Hometime's section on refitting a kitchen, you may be led to believe that a kitchen re-build can be accomplished with a minimum of mess by cheerful, smiling people wearing their best clothes. The photos above -- which show the state of the kitchen on day 1, day 5 and day 10 of the operation -- show what a major kitchen re-build really looks like. Of course, wrecking a working kitchen is never a job to be undertaken lightly. In this case the work was complicated by the fact that we had to have somewhere to do kitchen things, meaning that we needed to retain a working sink until the very last possible moment. This is why the sink is still standing in the last picture above, while everything else has been stripped. The electrical wiring and fittings are, of course, all new.
A major part of the kitchen refurbishment was the laying of a new floor, to even out of the bumps in the old one, and given a surface smooth enough to tile. In places there were height differences of two inches between adjacent floor joists, so I had to use 19mm plywood panels supported on chocks of wood.
The hot- and cold-water plumbing all had to be replaced, as did the gas pipework.
In the end the whole job took two months, working evenings and weekends. Next job: bathroom.
The bathroom was in a similar state to the kitchen: cracked, stained and uneven tiles, water damage, uneven floor, and dubious plumbing. A special feature (visible in the photo above) was the thick, opaque plastic coating that had been glued to the window. Presumably the usual blinds or curtain was not felt to offer sufficient privacy.
I was amazed to find that the water pipes to the bathroom were lead, indicating that they'd been there for at least fifty years, so these had to go. In the end we had to replace all the plumbing, fit a new radiator, lay a new hardwood floor, re-tile the walls, strip and paint the woodwork, and (with the help of my father) replace the window -- as there was no way to get that plastic coating off without breaking the glass.
The photo above shows the state of the job at the end of the first week. Most of the tiling is finished, and the plumbing replaced. Still to go is the wiring, sink and lamps.
In the end, refitting the bathroom took about two weeks, with the supervision of Bryony (aged 6 months at the time).
Other jobs have included the conversion of the loft (above) to a useful space
(currently used as an office and workshop), decoration of the entrance hall,
strengthening and decoration of the stairs (when we moved in, one of the stair
treads sank an inch when was stepped on), rewiring the garage, re-plumbing
one of the WC/shower rooms, and decorating the bedrooms.
[Update 08/04 -- and when we left, the whole basement/cellar area and
the bathrooms were untouched from when we moved in; the garage was still
almost tumbling down, the kitchen extension was sinking into its inadequate
footings, the whole exterior needed re-rendering, the brickwork repointing,
and so on, and on. I won't be taken on a job like this again!].
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