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Took last Friday off so I could get more work done on the house. Moved 1.5 tonnes of gravel with the help of a spade and wheelbarrow; sorted out the parking bay and all the gaping holes behind it. Got three quotes from estate agents, and had the place measured for carpeting. Did some touch-up work on gaps in the architraves, skirting etc.

Saturday saw the moving of Mum and Dad from the flat to their new house; 2 loads in a 3-ton van, and a bit of extra in the car. Unpacked stuff too. Fell in to bed.

Sunday saw more work on the house. Radiators are back on, but not yet tested. Rented a two-stroke powered disc cutter to chop the top off of some posts; hot knife through butter type effect. Wanted to use it to take a post out at the front of the parking bay, but it wouldn’t have been possible, and the post is bedded in several cubic feet of concrete. Therefore, the post got left in peace.

House painting is well under way, living room is done, back bedroom is done, hallway and landing are done.  Front bedroom, some architraves and doors, a closet and the kitchen remain - the front bedroom has had the undercoat done.  Representatives of 3 estate agents will be viewing the property on Friday to give me an estimate (and I’ll be getting their % costs etc), along with the carpet fitting company.  Need to order two 1-tonne bags of aggregate for the parking bay, put in a cement slab and cut out a post, and job done.

I hope.

I also ache from working on the property yesterday - building a surround for the gaping hole that is the upstairs fireplace, fixing some skirting board, fixing some broken flooring and general cleanup.  Couldn’t have done it alone though, had help from Mum and Dad.

As I was preparing to depart sunny Newcastle-under-Lyme for sunny Leamington Spa (that’s sarcasm folks), my neighbour mentioned that he was getting a mate of his to do his guttering, and asked if I was interested. I said, sure, and asked the gent in question for a quote. £500 all in says he - including the removal of all the junk.

In the end, it was £550, but that was new everything front and back, as well as some replacement tiles for ones that were broken (and I knew they were broken), and re-fitting some tiles that had slipped and were letting water in through the roof (which I didn’t know). Not complaining about that price at all, and the work looks fantastic.

So I’ve got the steamer again, and my muscles are muttering about a pre-emptive strike to stop me from using it.  I pity the fools (and I’ll pity myself by tomorrow evening!).

Amusingly enough, the steamer is made by the same company that makes the household steamer that my mother has.  Small world.

I’ve managed to get a few quotes from various tradesmen for the work that I need to get done - there’s no way I’ll have the time or expertise to acquire and hang 7 new doors, or replace the guttering, fascias and soffits.  If I can get things lined up properly, the inside of the house should be done come August.

So, Tuesday I call the company I ordered a skip through, and asked for it to be picked up on Friday morning. This would let me park the car in the driving bay, and back the van up to just outside my house. Imagine my surprise when I got home yesterday and found that my skip had mysteriously turned invisible. After walking through where the invisible skip was, I concluded that it wasn’t actually invisible, and was in fact not there any more. A quick word with my neighbour confirmed that the local depot had come back that morning and removed the skip.

So, a quick call to the national company I used, and a very polite jumping up and down over the phone, and I’ve got a skip coming tomorrow, pickup on Monday. Gratis. So I can finish throwing stuff out on Sunday.

Dad dropped by yesterday to give me a hand with de-wallpapering the front bedroom.  The first steamer was a bust, it appeared to have thermostat problems.  Quick trip back to HSS, and I had a working steamer (2.7 kW heater + tank of water).  In about 6 hours, with a pause to take the radiator off of the wall, bust the valve-pipe mating slightly and scramble to find a fix, we manage to de-paper and de-paint the entire front bedroom, which is something like 980 square feet of wall.  There were 2 layers of paint on every wall, followed by 4 layers of wallpaper (on one wall at least), followed by another layer of paint.  The plaster looks so much better!

Needless to say, Dad and I were knackered after that event.  I actually had trouble getting to sleep due to the complaint from my muscles, and ended up taking some aspirin to make it possible to sleep.  I believe my muscles have filed an injunction against me, prohibiting their use in such a manner again.  Little do they know that I have every intent of doing 3 more rooms by the end of June.

Just had the friendly plumber over to look at the downstairs ex-loo.  He reckons the cap on the sewage will be newspaper and cement, so not a big issue to clear out.  I had been thinking of dropping two pipes down from the bathroom/airing cupboard to feed hot and cold water to the bathroom, but had totally forgotten that there’s a cold feed coming up through the floor in the form of a lead pipe (and the feed to the house is a lead pipe, don’t even want to think what the labour costs to replace it all will be).  Hot water won’t be an immediate necessity in the downstairs loo, so I’ve asked him to get me the price on a bog-standard bog.  He reckons it’ll be about the same as his labour estimate (which was a decent 75 quid [normally 100, but 75 for you]).

Mulling it over with Dad, I’ll probably tell him to include a slimline basin as well.  Hopefully they make ones that use a mixer tap that can have a single feed initially, and upgrade it to a double feed later if I feel like it.  Should have the rough quote tomorrow, and he said he can probably do it between jobs in about 2 weeks.  Good timing, I’ll have another paycheque by then!

The only other things to sort out down there at that point will be the wall colour, sorting out the bad paint job on the door frame and window frame, and doing something about the floor (which is rough cement at the moment).  The loo is on the ‘outside’ of the house, between the kitchen and external wall, and is accessed by the ‘hall’ that leads to the outside door.  That means I need a hard-wearing surface, and I’ll probably want to go from loo to outside door in one fell swoop.  I could also raise the hall to the same level as the kitchen, but that’ll play havoc with the external door, so I think I’ll leave that as it is.

Not going to bother with heat for that room, not now at least.  I’ll probably (per Dad’s suggestion) put some coat hangars in there though, so it becomes a functional loo.  If I can box the cistern and pipe in (the pipe is very ugly, covered in different layers of paint, and juts at an angle), I might even be able to build in a shoe locker to the side of the cistern where there’s no pipe.  That’d also give me a shelf on top of the toilet for storing toilet paper and other sundries.

I reckon I’m looking at 200 quid for the bog, sink and labour.  If I can get the guy who fitted my kitchen to do me a good quote for the boxing of the cistern, I should be able to add a good bit of value for minimal expenditure.  I hope.

This also means I can get off of my lazy arse and (a) contact the plasterer to fix the wall in the bathroom, (b) put down the flooring in the bathroom and (c) finish the boxing in the bathroom and declare it job done so I can move on to another room.