New Windows and Doors

Mum and Dad were delighted to get back in their taxi from Knock airport to be greeted by the sight of the house, resplendent with new door and windows all along the front looking gorgeous in the slanting evening sunshine. Sparks had been hard at work while they'd been swanning around England and the window fitters from Munster Joinery had been in on the 1st of the month to fit them. There was one small issue as you can see from the back of the house, in that they had made a mistake swapping measurements for some of the back windows with type for the front, in that they were trying to fit fire escape windows downstairs at front till Sparks pulled them up. No points there! The fitter apparently said "Ah, I did wonder why we were doing that" but hadn't stopped and asked the question. Tart. No matter, they will return in 2 weeks with the correct size and type, with fire escape stylee upstairs at the back.

At the back you can see that we have the new back door and the new windows in bathroom/loo (now all one room) and you can see here Sparks has blocked up part of one bathroom window where the big shower booth will go. These windows are a big improvement on what we had, first of all by being double glazed as opposed to old aluminium single glazed panels with the rubber beading falling out. They are also argon-filled rather than vacuum (Sparks gave Dad some technical explanation as to why this is better, but he can't recall now)and the front and back door re seriously re-inforced with steel and have 4 or 5 hinges and big multi-bolt locking. We are not paranoid about the locals - that just seems to be how they come these days, as opposed to the flimsy, light weight doors which were in already.

Better still, you will recall, these have come in well below our tentative budget, the best result so far. We think it improves the whole look of the place, brightening it up and making it look much neater. A real step on the re-build road.

Deefer

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