Teaser Taster

I thought I would offer you lovley people a sneak peak at next weeks Big REVEAL.

I can hear how excited you are. I have loved converting our Garage in to our Livingroom and as the work nears an end I cant wait to share it all with you.

But just for a sneaky peak below are a couple of teaser images to wet your appetites. I thought I would also take the oppertunity to introduce you all to our latest family additions.
Enjoy xx

This is Leon age 8 Weeks. A lovely rescue kitten from a local shelter.

He is starting to look really grown up now at 3 months old

But he is still quite dinky really.

Favourite past times include hiding in paper-bags and baskets. Chasing his own tail. Licking his backside (seriously - you think he's all cute and then up comes the leg- even in the most polite company) Cuddles from absolutely anyone. Pooping in the litter tray literally seconds after it has been cleaned out (that one always makes me giggle - mainly because my husband deals with the tray!)

Oh and surveying his territory ....

This is Pippa, she is 3 weeks older than Leon and very different. Super shy we are working really hard at drawing her out.

Hobbies include playing with Leon and snoozing on blankets. She is not fussed by most cat toys but LOVES hairbands? She was born on a farm so she longs to be let out again (once their injections are done she will be).  She only likes cuddles when she is sleepy. She has scarily good balance on her back legs. And fur so soft she could be a chinchilla.

Quieter but infinitely less bothersome than Leon (who is currently sat right in front of the screen following the mouse cursor!)

They have settled really quickly and love the living room which has been completed since we got them.

Leon snuggled up for a quick nap!

They love each other!

Welcome Break

Hello hello
Tonight's blog post allows me a welcome break from editing pictures, which can become somewhat choresome in the quantitys that we work with. My husband and I run a small photography business (mostly children and families). Whilst I enjoy taking the pictures the endless editing this then affords can become tiresome - especially in the pre- christmas rush when all I really want to do with my evenings is relax and craft!

But less about that and more about this floor. When I left you we had just ripped up all the boards and were about to begin the scary and laborious job of re-laying them. They looked quite a state as they went back down and they were very stripy. We used a specialist wood glue called Rewmar (Remwaar - as I pronounce it) adhesive. Its incredible stuff but expensive and just impossible to get off your hands!!

Once it was all down we then took the sander to it. It got an amazing 10 passes with the big sander and then a good going over with the edge sander. We used 40 grade for the first 3 , 80 for 3-6 and 120 on the last 4 to make it smooth. It was SOO dusty and really quite scary seeing it come up so orange. The smell of pine was pretty intense.

  We had to hover up about 6 full loads of sawdust. We kept back a bag of super fine dust for the filling of the floor. We used another specialist product  Blanchon resin filler mixed with the finer dust. There were A LOT of holes to fill - all the nail holes plus the gaps beween the joins and the boards where the tonunge and groove was damaged. But we got there in the end.

This is a pretty good sample of what we were left with. After we finished it with wax (another mammoth task)

The Cost break down like this

Adhesive x 3 Tubs at £85 = £255
Resin for filling = £60
Sander hire for both sanders and sheets of paper =£160
Nail remover = £40
6 small tubs wax £78


Total cost for whole floor =  £593 (plus 2 weeks hard slog ) Or £16.47 /m2


Less the cost of an actual holiday because we spent all our annual leave in the loft..


Equals Money Well Spent!

Dust Anyone?

Howdie (just thought I'd try that - I'm not sure I can pull off a Howdie...)
Hope you are all fine and dandy (I'm committed now). As promised I am back to tell you all about the remaining floor saga. Taking photos for the blog was pretty much my rest whilst we did this. We had to work across the room in a slightly random way as the boards were overlapping lengths of tongue and groove.

My husband hardly picked up the camera but I really did lift about half of the  boards...("yeah yeah" I hear you say!)

As we make progress along the floor the collection of nails we pull up goes like this:

Eventually we get so far we have to start relaying boards for us to work from so we get some insulation in there too at this stage.

And we start sorting our stacks of boards by quality.

(seen above the first few boards stacked next to our Granary winch (which will eventually hoist a candelabra)

We were cautiously optimistic about the boards. It would be hard to tell what they would be like until it was all finished and a lot of man (and woman) hours and expense wasted if we hated them!

Oh and just as proof that I didn't let my poor husband do all of this dusty work...

 

Until next time take care!

Bee-n busy

Hello lovelies,

Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth for a few days. Been poorly with the usual Autumn/winter bugs. But I'm back and raring to go.
 Quick Refresher - Here is where we are up to.

BEFORE:

So FAR:

So the floor - ah the floor. A mammoth decision in a project like this and it took as ages to get it sorted. We wanted a wooden floor for the living room. We plan on having children and we already have 2 cats so durable was essential - as was easy cleaning. We are also in a flood zone and the property flooded 3 years ago in the big floods so we wanted a floor that would be able to survive some water if required.

Ideally we wanted hard wood or engineered wood. But its a big room and we are pretty fussy when it comes to colours. So we really wanted this :

Natural 20mm Oak Ironbark Treasures Engineered Oak Wood Flooring 

Lovely wide boards and a country cottage creamy colour. But alas at £33 per M² it was never going to fit our budget, the living room and hallway together are 40M².

We decided to try and use the existing solid pine boards from the room above ( a full size loft). The plan is to convert it in to a master bedroom suite but we have already decided that we would like carpet up there. Those original boards would be wasted.

I haven't shown you upstairs yet - so quick layout. Marked in red is the door that my dad knocked through in to the loft.

As you can see - converting the loft will double the size of the upstairs. Plus we have "Loft" above the study, bedroom one and two and the bathrooms too.

I'll show you all what we plan to do with the upstairs another time. For now welcome to our loft Master bedroom to be.

Easily my favourite room in the house - bursting with potential (and Cobwebs). The ceiling will be left vaulted and some sky lights will go in to let in more light.

Things to note:
Original Granary winch in fully working order next to the original granary doors
The super polite graffiti spray painted on the walls "hello pretty" and "Good Evening" being my favourites

So the loft is going to be a fun project. But for now its the floor we are after. The boards show a lot of wear and tear (as you would expect after 130 years!) but some portions were in really good nic.

Once we had cleared the loft (most of it already cleared in the pictures above) we inspected the floor. We knew that as the loft room was the same size as the living room and hallway below that should have been enough floor. However there was a large section missing where the stairs came up as well as a granary loft hatch that has been filled and some cut outs from where the RSJs for the living room were hoisted. We decided just to floor the living room. That also took the pressure off in terms of damaging the boards while lifting,

Some boards were fine -

Some areas were not so fine.

This large section was covered in spilled paint tins. It chiseled off with a lot of effort but it was mixed in with melted plastic? We couldn't afford to loose this large area. After a hour or so having made little impression my clever husband suggested that we may be able to use the other side of the boards.

Genius.
 So we started removing the nails. The boards were quite delicate so we had to pull out as many of the nails as possible before trying to lever up the boards. We made the rather foolhardy brave decision to sand the boards in situ in the living room so that the floor lay flat and even. This effectively meant moving this grotty boards of unknown colour and damaged quality in to my clean white room. I was very nervous about this. But it was a much less expensive option and I love the idea of keeping as many features as we can.

Removing the nails was harder than my husband expected, naive optimistic man that he is. We used a weeks annual leave from our jobs to get the whole job done. On the 5th day we were still pulling up nails and my patience was wearing thin. We haven't had a holiday this year ploughing all our spare money in to the house. To  be honest I could have enjoyed a week off just pottering about the house in my pajamas but My husband had other ideas.

So why did it take so long? Well there are 2 nails for every foot of board (sometimes 3) and they are old cut nails well rusted in and about 2 inches long. They all had to be pulled and we found the best tool (in terms of least damage to the fragile boards) was a combination of a hammer and pliers. In involved hammering one side of the pliers under one side of the nail head using the cast iron end and then levering the nails out. Each cut board took approximately 20 mins to get up - the longest taking 28 mins and the quickest being 8 mins! But each board exhausted us and our arms ached something crazy.

Check it out!

The boards were great but the effort really took it out of us. Especially by day 5. We were 3/4 of the way through pulling the boards up but we still had to cut out the damaged bits and cut them to fit, adhere them downstairs, Sand them (at least 5 times), fill the holes (of which there were hundreds) and then wax!

More on the next post!!