ajft

Before

After

We're getting there! Slowly, every so scarily slowly, the front room is progressing from a disaster zone to a bedroom.

The floor is in, the skirting boards replaced or reattached, the timberwork has all been primed, now the walls have been painted. Carpets and curtains and painting the trim remain... and the deadline gets closer.

Ok, now that we've actually got the ladder into the attic we can start to use it! I'm not sure what I expected, maybe thought the installation would all be over by lunchtime yesterday and we would simply put all the stuff from the front room up into the roof space....

Looking around inside the roof of the 106 year-old half of the house revealed some interesting features. The ceiling of the front room — the room we never use — was covered by very thin insulation bats, but the bedroom and lounge — the two rooms that we do use — had no insulation! Unfortunately the carpenter hadn't told us this yesterday before he nailed boards down over some of the empty space or we would have put more insulation in ahead of him. As it was, today I spent most of the afternoon crawling around from rafter to rafter like a deranged monkey, dragging itchy yellow insulation bats into place and sweeping out piles of leaves, scrap timber, 50 year-old wiring, and all the other crap that the previous renovation had simply left inside the ceiling.

We've finally got the attic ladder in place, but not without its fair share of trauma, worry, and general tradesman-inspired angst. The carpenter was initially to come on Thursday, a destroyed wheel-bearing put paid to that appointment. Early Saturday morning, nine to nine-thirty, was the new time. Only a five minutes late, Mat turned up as we finished breakfast, verified that we really did want the ladder where we'd said we wanted it — apparently he'd once installed one where the customer had said, only to be told later by the customer's wife that that was not where it was wanted, and it should be in another room — then got to work.

Banging, crashing, sawing and hammering; after ensuring that there was a dust cloth over everything still in the front room we retired to the other end of the house and did our best to ignore the destruction/construction.

The electrician turned up around noon, all set to install the light once he had access, then discovered problems with the existing lights.... As with everything else in this house, as soon as we look at something, anything, that the previous owners did when they renovated, we discover corners that were cut, dodgy practices exposed. In this case it was the lights from the hallway and front room, both of them had their earth wire cut off and tucked away, and both of them had their wire joins exposed and floating around in the ceiling, and not (legally and safely) inside the light body.

“Can you connect the earth to them for us?” It seemed the obvious question, especially when we found that it was only a very minor extra cost! “Sure, there's a main earth running along the beam right next to the light”. Bizarre, why the hell didn't they connect them to the earth the first time? I guess the same mentality that had them paint the bathroom and not bother to unclip the plastic light fitting or cisterm lid.

I'm not sure how long I'd expected the whole installation to take, maybe half a day, it was almost five o'clock by the time the electrician was finished, and he very nearly finished himself off in the process! Sitting across the open hatch and resting his foot on a piece of timber that he thought the carpenter had nailed down, the timber slipped, his feet shot forward and he fell backwards and headfirst down the ladder, one big graze from elbow to shoulder, a second from ankle to knee. He finished packing up and hobbled off home, promising to get us the compliance certificate — and the bill — some time in the next week!

Phew, done. At last....

Last night an hour or two spent clearing enough space in the front room for the ladder to be installed, today I'd arranged to work from home for a few hours, from 9 o'clock until whenever the installation was completed.

Good news or bad news? Good news is that the front room is now as clean as it was last night when we finished tidying up. Second bit of good news is that I got in to work well before lunchtime.... The bad news, of course, is that the tradesman didn't actually turn up — a phone call ten minutes before he was due to arrive explaining that he had destroyed a wheel-bearing in his car and was being towed to the garage, he might make it in the afternoon, it might be Saturday.... Nothing is ever easy.