Nearly Done

We are now, without a doubt, running in towards the finishing post. This is a short week. Sparks, the main builder is booked off on a boating trip up the River Shannon with a bunch of mates from Thursday and the extra hours and long days we have seen recently were all about trying to finish by then. Well, we didn't quite make it but we were close. We have in fact a few 'de-snagging' jobs to do and a couple of bigger ones, maybe half day tasks. Sparks will come back and spend another week with us after his boating and after he's done a week of 'real work' up in Dublin. Our left over bits include creating the 'hems' round the edges of the tar felt roofs on extension and utility room, doing the gutters, installing the outdoor lights and wiring and plumbing in the outbuildings (just a couple of double sockets each and a terminated pipe for the tígín just in case we need water there one day), reassembling the fire place and finishing some skirting boards and finishing a couple of doors. For Sparks it's a week to practice his carpentry skills as he gets involved in creating the banister for the stairs - lots of interesting angles and funny measurement of sloping hand rails etc. From there he's on saddle-boards (Irish expression for the threshold boards in a doorway) and then hanging internal doors. This proves an interesting job too in terms of angles and cutting. The bathroom door 'hole' is less tall than standard and the aperture, like most of the walls and surfaces in this house is neither straight nor plumb. We end up offering the door up to its frame then drawing a guide line. We have a bathroom door with a slight (couple of mill) belly in it's lock side but you'd never know. It looks beautiful in its light oak finish and makes the stairs look finished. Sparks has another couple of tasks too, to keep his hand in at the 'real job', electrics. He must wire in the 5 amp lighting sockets which, in Ireland, are generally done with small round-pin 3-pin plugs to make them not inter-change with normal mains plugs. He is also moving the broadband in from the caravan to it final position under the stairs. That's where Dad's now sitting. Finally there was plumbing in of the utility room so that we could have our washing machine back. With the showers and washing machine going we no longer have to foist ourselves on the poor hard-pressed Silverwoods every weekend, descending upon them with filthy dogs, humans and laundry, demanding showers and use of the washing machine like University-age kids at the end of term. We could finally move in properly and actually LIVE here. This was cause for celebration indeed, but more of that in a future post. Deefs

Sparks, Doors and Windows

It's been a big week for us down at the house, with plenty going on, so I'm going to cover it off in a series of posts over this weekend rather than try to squeeze it all into one. If you are seeing this version with no pictures, that's just because the pics are currently on another laptop which is in use. I will load some pictures on soon, so please do re-visit these posts when you get a chance.

The main bit of news is the arrival on site of Sparks, our Project Manager. He'd visited before Christmas and pointed Mum and Dad in the right direction to give us plenty of work over Christmas and the New Year (pulling down ceilings and pulling the plaster board off stud-walls, pulling up the living room floor (wooden) and chipping off some plaster, as well as more superficial stuff like tearing out cupboards, kitchen equipment, the bathroom suite etc.). Sparks is pleased with this progress and compliments us all on our hard work but now that he's on board we can step up the pace a good deal. He tends to go at it all a bit more vigorously than Mum and Dad, making more noise and achieving a whole new level of destructive ability. He wields the big hammer and the longer crow-bar with no fear of damaging something vital where Mum and Dad now look like they were pussy-footing it a bit. The frames for stud walling are ripped from their bases as 6 inch nails are prised free, the bangs and clangs of a lump hammer swinging reverberate and the serious crunch of damage being done to masonry echoes across Roscommon.

Sparks though, is also the project MANAGER, so he has all the planning, measuring, deciding and prioritising to do. He decides whether a floor should stay or go, whether a joist is bad enough for replacement, or needs repair or just needs spraying with the treatment chemical. He knows what order things should be done in, so he has mental time-lines of when to order stuff to arrive by, or on which days to hire equipment. He has the note book and the tape measure and the constantly ringing mobile phone. On Monday he has Nathan from the doors and windows firm (Munster Joinery) coming out to measure us up, let us choose styles and quote for the job. This puts a smile on everyone's face - where we'd all been half expecting the doors and windows to be one of the major expensive purchases, they turn out to be very reasonable. We accept the price and Nathan will send back two of his measurers/fitters tomorrow to measure up properly and dot the i's and cross the t's on the task.

So Monday sees the stud wall frames between the two halves of what will be the main bedroom torn down revealing what will be the final size of the main bedroom and what the Dining Room will look like united with the former 'hall', so that the stairs run up one side of the room and there is space under them for a computer desk. Sparks having had a good look at the joists exposed by our work around Christmas though, thinks we will probably need to completely replace the first 4 joists working from the west end of the house (including a bit of a weird bodge made to accommodate the then upstairs fireplace; we are not going to use the fireplace so we can revert to a simple single house-deep joist beam there). We will also need to re-end or repair a couple above the front door in the short bit of landing, and possibly a couple in the Dining room ceiling. They have suffered rather from woodworm or near windows where possibly because of the single glazing and 15 years being closed up, the condensation has left them continuously damp.

More in the next post
Deefs