Monday 24 September 2012

Week one - appearances and disappearances

What a difference a week makes.  A week, four men, and a packet of HobNobs.

The hideous fireplace in the sitting room has GONE:


The walls blocking off the library have GONE, as has the bathroom suite in that room - GONE:


The kitchen has (almost) GONE:


And the ceiling has GONE:


Things have have appeared have included - brace yourselves - MORE WALLPAPER!


Look at that!  A whole new breed!  

Discovered by this man, who is hiding under the stairs, painting the bricks with milk.  Or at least that's what it looked like to me.


Now upstairs caused Rob and I to actually gasp, Grand Designs style.  We somehow seem to have managed to do a reverse building job on the upper floor, in that we appear to have gone from a completed bedroom level to the beginning stages of a loft conversion.




That's big piles of insulation there, because it turned out (don't know why this surprises me at this stage) that there was absolutely no insulation in this house.


Not easy to show in a photo here, but this is the eaves storage.  Extra exciting that Ilyian and his team 'found' some more space in there, so we will have even more cupboards to 'fill with Siobhan's tat' as Rob charmingly put it.


Hopefully Ilyian will be filling in the floor before we move in.



You may have noticed that the walls have all been stripped right back to the brick, or even completely down to the wooden studs.  This is because (again, why is this a surprise?) it turns out that every single piece of plaster work done in the slum was complete rubbish.  

Apart from three walls.

Three hero walls.

Three walls that have not GONE.

Three walls that are standing tall, taking one for the team, defying the chaos going on around them.  

Three walls Kevin McCloud would be proud of.

Here they are.


BOOM!


BOOM!


BOOM!

Well done walls.

Not doing so well on the actually-behaving-like-a-wall stakes is the wall making up the bike storage cupboard.  You may remember I commented a while back that it appeared to be made in the style of Welsh dry stone walling, and was being held together by the sole strength (considerable strength, I'll grant you) of wood chip wallpaper.

Turns out I was right.


It wobbles when you push it.  And, to be honest, when you don't.


It's going, don't worry.

Finally, something that hasn't GONE but has ARRIVED - we have a skip!  A skip of our very own!  

It's not big, but small is beautiful. 

It's also in camouflage, so I'm helpfully pointing it out here in case its disguise is so good you can't spot it.

   


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