Lounge

In June 2021, as we moved in, the lounge had quite a lot of furniture in it but also a huge amount of potential. We use this room as our main accommodation and use it for eating, studying, relaxing and anything else throughout the day. 

We have put curtains up, installed insulation under the solid wood floor that we found when the carpet was ripped up and stopped the chimney leaking by having the top removed and brought inside the house. No more rain into the lounge. We have also removed the storage heaters, replaced with panel heaters which turned out to be very expensive to run and then replaced with infrared heating. This we will put into the ceiling when we renovate so you can't even see it. It is much cheaper to run than the portable heaters.

We will have the rest of the chimney removed and then floor to ceiling sliding glass doors installed to open up the view in 2024. The study furniture we are going to be putting into Bedroom 4 we think before that happens and then where the study is now will become a TV area and the lounge will be Kyles viewing area.  Looking forward to that immensely.

It's started!

Week beginning 26 Aug 2024: Sandy arrives to start the major works to the house! So pleased to see him and Neil, his mate. They start by building a temporary partition wall across the lounge so that we can have a room still without builders and dust whilst they can work. They then strip off the plasterboard from the wall between the lounge and the dining room/bedroom 3 to create the doorway between the two rooms and find that the supporting wall hasn't actually been built as a supporting wall and the ceiling is drooping by 25mm. This will need to be fixed as they put the steel goalposts in to support the upper floor. They also take down the ceiling to reveal the insulation that is wafer thin and a live switch that fell out of the ceiling as they worked! The rest of the week they have taken flooring up and put in foundations for the steel, started to remove the fireplace and the rubble that Sandy created when he took the top of the chimney down a couple of years ago and which has been sitting behind a protector in the fireplace. One half of the downstairs is now destroyed :-) as it has no ceiling, holes in the flooring, few walls and very little else. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs though and it looks like we are going to be doing more or less a new build from the inside out!

Week beginning 02 Sep: The week started with the chimney being taken down from the inside and the wooden floor being cut up to enable concrete slabs to be built to support the steels when they arrive. 

The chimney coming down was very noisy and a lot of hard work for Sandy and Neil. The ceiling is now held in place by acroprops and it has also had additional rafters added in order to provide support from where the rafters had been cut into the chimney originally. A steel for the opening will be put into place next week I understand and then the wall can be punched through to enable a much wider window to be put in and a greater view. There will still be a pillar between windows for support as the steel required to take that out was prohibitive in the depth required coming from the ceiling in order to support the rooms upstairs.

The holes in the flooring were cut through the solid wooden floor and the flooring in the back bedroom/dining room. Sandy had checked, double-checked and triple-checked with us that it was ok to cut up the floor. We had long discussions with Sandy as to how to take the floor up and put it down again for renovation. We would also have had to find additional pieces from somewhere to put where the chimney has been taken down. In the end we were persuaded that we use the original floor as a subfloor and put a new floor over the top. By doing this it means we can have a consistent flooring throughout the house and we found that it was actually less expensive to do that than try and remove individual planks, with 3" nails, not break any and get them back down again to then sand and revarnish. It will be a new modern looking floor to come now. The solid flooring will also make a good surface to install underfloor heating over, which we were thinking we would have to put into the ceiling (we are going to use infrared foil). The ceiling would have had many connections having to be installed in short runs of 300mm wide foil running across the room between ceiling rafters, whereas putting the foil onto the floor will mean we can put down 1m wide foil in long runs from one end to another.

Week beginning 09 Sep: A breakthrough in the lounge. The huge chimney that blocked the view has now been demolished. Sandy and Neil  took the outer wall down this week and opened the lounge up to the Kyles of Bute. There will be a pillar put back but it will be so much smaller than the chimney. The chimney stack itself was solid brick, meaning it was excellent at holding everything above it up but a **** to remove and get rid of, especially when commercial waste is paid for by weight! 

The ceiling inside is completely exposed and the see-through insulation taken out. Sandy is doubling up on joists as everything is bending and bowing, as he has shown me, so that when the ceiling is put back up it's not going to crack the plasterboard as soon as someone walks into the bedroom above. Steel joists have been put in over the area where the new sliding doors are going to be placed and the concrete lintel over the next window has been removed until everything is straightened when it can be put back.