The end of the beginning

WE'VE FINISHED!


By which I mean - the flat is empty of rubbish, finally!  Rob found some nice Polish men to get rid of all the detritus for us.  I wasn't there, but I understand he was kindly helping them out with the removals by leaving them to it and going into Nunhead for a fry up.  


All those months of scraping, stripping and steaming are over - now it's over to the professionals.

No, not Rob - he's just enjoying walking on a patch of floor we haven't seen in three months.


Here's another room we haven't seen the inside of since we started this project:

That's the manky-carpet storage room.  


Hang on a minute - what's that I see?  MORE WALLPAPER?!


Before you all start hyperventilating on my behalf (not the best idea here as those walls are covered in mould) - this is a type of wallpaper that is actually coming off very easily (helped by that mould).  I am an expert in this now - I can tell from ten paces away exactly what level of difficulty a particular paper patch will present.

The reason this room is so damp is because daylight is coming up through the floorboards:

You can't really see from that photo - you'll have to trust that wind was blowing up my trouser legs whilst taking this.


So.  Our thoughts are now moving on to the fun bit of this project - the interior design.  We've had some ideas:

This is the kitchen, and we are thinking of having a breakfast bar under the window there - it's too low for a worktop, and it looks out onto the garden (which is currently full of dog poo, but that's another story).


The former bathroom will be a library (yes, A LIBRARY!):

I want to get rid of that cornicing (?) at the top of the arch first, and we are going to remove the walls and the doorway:

Our architect is getting builders into tender for the project on Tuesday - hopefully we'll be off and running soon!


We have also recently learnt that the slum is in the Nunhead Conservation Area - oh yes, we were shocked too.  And apparently the area had this status before we decided to move in.  So that's all very lovely, but it means that replacing the windows is going to be an expensive problem, as they have to match what is there already:

Presumably not down to the peeling paint job.


So now, blog fans, I'm off to put the overalls in the washing machine, re-patriate the dust pan and brush to our Peckham flat, and disinfect three months worth of Rob's tea mugs.


Hurrah!

Some unfortunate discoveries and a step back in time

I can't go as far to say that the plan for today was misogynistic, but it was certainly gender specific.


Rob was planning to knock down a wall, and I was detailed to sweep up after him.


The wall in question needs to come down because we've realised that it is concealing banisters at the top of the stairs - and otherwise we'll have to pay to get them replaced.  So down it was coming.

Here is a close up - so it's a many layered affair:

Step one was easy - and there are the banisters!  Hurrah!

But wait - what's that?  MORE SHINY WALLPAPER!  Nooooooo.....


Rob then reminded me that this was the only bit of wallpaper in the house that it wasn't necessary to remove because we were taking the wall down anyway.  So I stopped sobbing.


It also turned out to be the only bit of wallpaper in the house that was actually easy to remove, of course.

The next steps were trickier, mostly because there is an electrical wire running up one side of the wall, and Rob had his sensible hat on and didn't want to split it accidentally.  So he spent a considerable amount of time staring the wall out, like this:

Unfortunately he proved unable to topple the wall using only the power of his mind, so he used the claw hammer instead.

Now we started to wonder at this point whether those grey stone tiles (why would you use what are apparently floor tiles to create a wall?) were asbestos.  After establishing that we couldn't tell (asbestos doesn't smell of anything) and that although we did commission an asbestos survey they wouldn't have been able to tell either (this wall was hidden when they did the survey) we took a deep breath and carried on anyway.  Then we realised deep breathing might be a mistake.


Anyway, it's gone now, leaving this:

Whilst taking the photo above, I noticed this hole in the ceiling which wasn't there before Rob starting messing around with that claw hammer:

He assures me that it's fine, because that's going to be a sky light anyway.  Or at least it is now.


The last bit of this quadruple-layered wall was dispatched with brute force:

And now we have light upstairs!  


Whilst Rob was throwing himself at the wall, I continued sweeping.  And discovered more newspaper, this time stuck to the walls inside the eaves cupboard in one of the bedrooms:

Yes, that's Friday 2nd September, 1932.


Goring and Hindenberg were in charge in Germany, and whilst we (and the French) seemed worried about it, the Yanks apparently weren't bothered:

Going further back in time, the other walls of this cupboard seem to have been created from wattle and daub:

According to Wikipedia, this either means that our cupboard was built in the neolithic times, or is very forward thinking and eco friendly.

Having swept the room out, I then noticed another section of wallpaper we'd missed.  So I pulled at it.  And the wall came off in my hands.

Oh dear.  That's another fire place.  And it's full of dirt/soot/mud/bricks.  And, I could see daylight coming through...

I was a bit concerned that I might have discovered the hiding place of the body that belongs to the concrete-shoe we found, but fortunately not.


I began to wonder if we'd missed anything else - surely not?  But we had.  We'd forgotten all about one of the cupboards in the green bedroom, because we'd piled a whole load of wood outside it.  And guess what was inside?


The rest of that body!  


No, just joking.

A whole load of mid-90's children's toys.  Such a haul would not be complete without a Mr Frosty:

And I was very pleased to see this, as I could do with a new laptop:

Who needs a Mac Book Air when you could have a pre-computer 2000?!  All you people with just 'computers' are so out of date.  I now have a precomputer.


We also found this philosophical essay:

Deep.  I would have asked my pre-computer for the answers but its batteries weren't included.


Thankfully the answers were provided inside the booklet.


What am I?  = Father Christmas.  
The child who wrote this was clearly clever enough to understand that Santa is not a real person, but a myth and therefore 'what' not 'who'.


Who am I? = signs.  
This confused us, but perhaps we are just not on the same intellectual level as the author.  Clarification was given - this is apparently signs such as road signs and 'supermarket' signs.  We are none the wiser.  Perhaps helpful notices that guide you in life should be viewed as a benevolent presence, and so a 'who'.


What are they?
No answer was given to this one... spooky.  Where has that cat-mask got to?!


All that philosophising tired Rob out, so he had a quick break, settling down for a bit of a read:

I had to tear him away from the ribbeting (!) tales of Toad and Mr. Hedgehog, because we still had clearing to do.

So we are finished.  But we are left with this:

This:

This:

And all this:

If anyone would like a large amount of smelly, dirty carpet, 27 bags of woodchip wallpaper, or an enormous quantity of lino in various shades, do let us know.

A Retrospective

 Hi all,

These are the pictures I promised weeks ago.

Here's the upstairs area which will be the main bathroom.  As you can see, I've ripped out all the cupboards.  Also, check out my pants.

Remember those cupboards in the eaves which are accessed from the upstairs bedrooms?  I thought I'd climb inside:

Among the items I found in the cupboard was this:

Yep, that's a shoe embedded in cement (just a shoe, there's no foot inside).  Mum and Dad were so puzzled, they had to have a cup of tea.

Anyone who can offer a credible explanation, please do so.

More soon....

Tiresome jobs come in small segments

Dear blog readers, it has been some time.


We have been occupied over the last few weekends with a stag do (Rob), birthday party (Siobhan), illness (Siobhan) and third world non-existent country (Siobhan).  So little work has been done in the slum - obviously whilst I was away, Rob was indisposed pining for me.


We have done a little - and when I say a little, I mean that little was achieved over a very, very, very, very long period of time.  Not because we weren't trying - the last sections of wallpaper to be removed were obviously papered by Beelzebub.

See those tiny, 5mm by 5mm squares of paper?  That's what we were managing to scrape off.  It took me four hours to clear a one metre square area of hallway wall.  I might mind slightly less if the paper was less offensive to look at for all that time - but it's dried mustard coloured, furry, 60's, and horrible.


And it's glued on with super glue.


The only way, and I mean the only way to get it off was to basically melt it.  I've never felt so close to a wallpaper steamer before.  Unfortunately I can't recommend the wallpaper facial as the latest in beauty therapy - too much risk of burning the extremities with very hot bits of wallpaper.  (You'd be surprised, dear reader, to know just how hot those tiny squares can get.  The scars on my legs can testify to this.)


The walls themselves don't think much of the melting strategy either - they start crying, see - 

Something else you'll notice from this photo is that large patch of no-plasterboard - the most galling part of this process is when large parts of the wall you've just painstakingly stripped of paper then falls away in your hands.  I feel like crying as much as the wall is.


Anyhow, away from the downstairs steam bath, the architect we have employed has started to renovate the upstairs bedrooms.  This appears to involve knocking holes in our walls and ceiling...

Oh dear.  And we loved that wall colour so much.

Delegation

Once again, Siobhan's off (this time in Somaliland - which isn't even a proper country). In her absence I have incarcerated my parents at the Nunhead labour camp.

This is them at the slum on Friday, when I wasn't there to supervise. My absence may explain why they are looking quite jolly and having a break. Dad's 'dust mask on head' look brings to mind the tiny party hat of Mr. Jolly from "Psychoville".

Anyway, Dad thought our readers would be interested (as a break from the usual wallpaper monotony) to see some of the 300+ unexplained nails found projecting from the floorboards. I am told he removed more than 49 from the WC alone.

In the picture below, Dad is pointing to an area which he considers might be used to conceal a "priest hole", to be used for sheltering recusant priests from pursuivants, should this be required. I accept that this could conceivably 'add value', but I think the chances of there being both (i) a new 'rising of the North'; and (ii) of my converting to papistry, are both slim.

The photograph above is a view through the crack in the floor into the 'priest hole' area. Thanks, once again, to John 'Nicholas Owen' Blackett for this one.

To round off the pictures for Friday here's a picture of Dad looking a bit 'Lecter'.

Overall, I get the impression that too much fun was had by all on Friday. Fortunately, come the weekend, I was there to supervise....

*****************************

I also have an extensive pictorial record of the rest of the weekend's activities at the slum (mainly ..... wallpaper stripping). These feature an unsolved mystery object found hidden in the attic, the discovery of a massive area of wallpaper I hadn't realised was there, a demolition derby in the creepy kitchenette and, as a special treat, a picture of my pants.

Unfortunately, most of the photographs documenting this, er, excitement are in a 'portrait' aspect and, despite lengthy efforts, the editing software on this rubbishy website will only let me upload them as landscape. I will try and find a fix for this, and write another installment tomorrow.

Assuming I have recovered the will to live.

R

A Mexican Discovery

I really wish I could tell you that we did something more interesting today than stripping wallpaper.  But we didn't.  We did have a nice lunch in our soon-to-be-local pub, but that's as exciting as it got. And we listened to a lot of Radio 4.


This is me back in that awful, lime coloured, asbestos filled bathroom - and looking happy about it for some reason.  The asbestos must be getting to me.

More worrying in Rob's opinion is that my clothing choices have started to be influenced by the scheme in the flat:

He knows nothing.  Colour blocking is so in.  And if I didn't wear bright footwear, I might be lost in the mountains of wallpaper that is gathering everywhere and threatening to drown us:

I've finished the toilet now (that last wall is painted).

I have also tackled the stairway, which it turns out was originally wallpapered by the Aztecs.

How weird is that?!  We are non-plussed as to the actual consistency of this stuff.  In parts it's been plastered over, and the rest of it is three layers of wallpaper, some of it woodchip, and several layers of paint.  Rob thinks one of the layers was flocked, hence this odd pattern.  


That, or we actually have bought a house that is built on an ancient Indian burial ground.


More worrying, we are not convinced that we are even down to the wall yet - the stuff that has come off is really stiff, feels-like-slabs-of-plywood stuff:

But the wall that is left doesn't look, well, like a wall?

This has resulted in us doing a lot of standing around, looking at the wall, tapping the wall, scratching the wall, scraping the wall, smell- oh no, not that yet.  In a possibly-asbestos-induced moment of madness, Rob was going to eat a part of the wall.  It's ok, I stopped him.  

So, moving back down to the lower ground floor, I've removed all the paper I can reach.  And accidentally some of the wall with it.  Ooops...

It totally just fell off, honest!  So we appear to have a house that is being held up by wallpaper.  Hard-ass, super-strength, extra-thick wallpaper admittedly, but still.

Where the house is not being held together by wallpaper, the previous owners seem to have dispensed with conventional ideas of building construction in urban areas all together, and instead gone for a Welsh dry stone wall effect instead.  Which I appreciate, but perhaps not around our front door.  On the INSIDE.

I have also uncovered some more scary cracks, allowing me to post some 'pointy finger' photos, which I'm deciding I'm a fan of: 

That last one is actually to demonstrate what I first thought was an odd strip of black wallpaper (not so odd, you might think in this house-that-interior-design-forgot, I hear you say - but think again about the favoured colour schemes so far!).  But no, it's a lovely big patch of mould.  If you can say anything positive about a damp patch, I would say that it means the wallpaper comes off more easily.

So, we are nearly, but not quite, there.  We now spend a lot of our time talking about how much there is to do, and reassuring ourselves that it's not that much.  But then we remember the ceiling in that room.  And the patch of wall in that room.  And the bit in that corner.  I think that's the reason for Rob's pondering gaze in this photo:

And his very weary one here.