Once that was done we offered up the bathroom furniture to the new stud work, and then ran the pipe work through the stud work ready for its final fittings.  We plumbed in the bath, sink and toilet, and then we were in a position to start tiling.  While Dane was tiling around the bath, I dropped onto one of the other jobs we had to do which was to made good the kitchen ceiling and then gave it a plaster skim.  With the announcement of a hose pipe ban in place it was typical that most of the week we had rain showers, normally when we got ourselves set up with tools and materials out the front!

On Tuesday we moved into the dining room.  We cleared all the furniture, removed and disposed of the skirting, took up the carpet and under lay and then set about laying new under lay and laminate flooring.  The following day Dane fixed and primed new skirting while I hung two new doors, one leading into the dining room and one leading into the kitchen. Unfortunately I had similar issues with these doors as the living room door, more cutting down required!  Over Thursday and Friday we had Kevin the plumber in fitting a new boiler, and while he was doing that Dane and I set about applying two coats of gloss to the skirting and architrave,  I dismantled an old bi-fold door to replace it with a new one and we then moved all the furniture back in.

We started by doing the exterior and the living room.  Dane worked on the exterior while I was working in the living room.  Dane was running in some new lead work because when the roof felt was last done they didn’t do a very good job of making a water tight lap and water has been getting in behind the felt and getting to the timbers that form the bay roof window.  So Dane chased out a channel in the render and lapped the new lead into it and finished things off with a bead of silicon, eradicating the leaking issue once and for all.  After he completed that, he had to sand down the timber facia and associated bay window timber and then apply two coats of gloss, bringing the exterior appearance back to life.

While Dane was outside I was working in the living room.  My first job was to remove the plaster board on the bay window ceiling as this had been damaged by the for mentioned water leak.  Fortunately there was minimal damage to the timbers, so no need for any replacements.  I fixed new plaster board into position and then had some tidying up to do.  When the room was last plastered, who ever did the plastering just plastered up to the heating pipes in the corner of the room and left the plaster piled up behind the pipes and the finish was a mess.  I un-clipped the pipes and moved them to one side and chipped the plaster off trying to get back to the original wall.  Once this was done, I mixed up a batch of plaster and skimmed the bay window ceiling and also did some making good behind the pipes.

The rest of the week was spent sanding the living room and bedroom timber floors.  Dane was using the walk behind floor sander while I was following behind with the edging sander.  Due to the dark varnish that was on the floor it took several runs with varying types of sand paper to finally strip back the floor to its original colour.  Once this was all done we then set about applying two coats of varnish to both the floors to finish things off.

On Tuesday we finished off the second en-suite shower cubicle by fitting the shower unit and running in beads of silicon to apply the finishing touches and make everything water tight.  In the afternoon we dry laid the tile floor ready to lay it properly the following day.  On Wednesday morning I plumbed in a new towel radiator in the en-suite while Dane plumbed in a larger radiator in the kitchen at the clients request.  Once that job was done we moved onto laying the floor tiles.  Thursday was all about working through and completing our snagging job list.

Friday was our last day on site and it was a slightly sad day all round.  We started work on Mark and Hannah’s house three days after they moved in, in early December, so they have pretty much only known that house with Dane and I being there and were probably very excited at finally getting rid of us!  They have been a great clients to work for and we struck up a really good friend ship in our time there.   Their hospitality has been second to none and we have been truly spoilt with coffee’s, tea’s, cakes, biscuits and we even had the pleasure of being treated to a very delicious home made pizza.  As a small token of our thanks we thought it was only right that we got a bouquet of flowers and some wine.  After we said our farewells we cleared down the site, loaded up the van and departed off into the sun set to our next job.  Well, sort of!!

We then moved onto the second en-suite where we were putting a new quadrant shower tray, base and shower door in, plus tiling the walls and floor.  Unfortunately there were a couple of issues.  One being that I have never come across a shower unit that is virtually held to the wall by silicone alone and it wasn’t particularly easy to remove in one piece, and then the second issue was damp to the floor boards due to the installation of the tray.  The tray had been fixed to a base consisting of two kitchen panels and the tiles finished 40mm short of the tray and had been finished with a strip of plastic siliconed to the tiles, not ideal!  Once again the plaster board walls came away when we took the tiles off, so another re-board was required.  We then got the wall tiles laid and grouted and then set about trying to make sense of the quadrant sliding shower door construction.  Once we got going we soon had the door unit assembled and fixed into position, and the sliding doors even worked!  We must have done something right!

Wednesday was a day of various little jobs, mainly snagging jobs we had outstanding.  On Thursday we started refurbishing the shower enclosures in one of the two en-suites we have to do.  We took off the old shower door and stripped the tiles from the walls, unfortunately but not unexpectedly taking most of the plaster board walls off in the process aswell.  So we had to re-board the walls of the enclosure which we did, then we applied a primer to the walls so we were ready to get tiling once the tiles arrived.  We finished the week by tiling the kitchen work top walls.