Wednesday 4 March 2009

A task finished

Welcome back to Simon's Wonderful World of Breaking Stuff!!

Eighteen months ago I started removing the expanded polystyrene backed plasterboard from the utilities room. I know when it was because I blogged about it at the time. The mess I made was obviously so traumatising for me* that I left the job half complete and got on with other stuff.

Because of the problems with our water supply, and not actually knowing where the pipes went, we decided to remove the remaining 2/3 of the sheeting and find them. This I proceeded to do with my customary caution (I didn't know where the pipes were, after all...) but was soon hacking and bashing like the all action hero I am. It soon became evident I had nothing to worry about plumbing wise as the pipes went across the ceiling (which will have to come down soon, oh joy).
Having Susan around really helps me
motivate for the jobs I am trying to avoid
We got confirmation that our utilities room window was once a door, which had been really badly blocked in and needed half a can of expanding squirty stuff to fill in the three inch square gaps (I jest not!). More excellent news is that the worlds hardest cement, which had been laid over the stonework I uncovered last time, wasn't present on most the walls we exposed this time. This cheered me up, as removing the cement was a job I wasn't looking forwards to.

Our laundry door/window. We flirted with the idea
of opening it up again, but it's below ground level
Of course, removing the panels created a huge amount of stuff we need to take to the tip. It's amazing how much rubbish you can take out of one very small room. This is a further impetus for us to buy a trailer (my parents bought us a towbar when they were in Preuilly in 2006, and we have hired trailers in the past, but it's quite expensive) which will enable us to take ALL our rubbish to the dechetterie in one go, and also to buy proper lengths of wood and new plasterboard, rolls of insulation and all the other big butch stuff we're going to need.

The upshot of this is that I was able to wipe one of the things off my "to do" list by the front door.

Simon

*Actually, it was cleaning up that was traumatising, but Susan was here to help this time :¬)

2 comments:

wcs said...

Ken and I keep talking about getting a trailer, too. But the hassle and expense keep putting us off.

We don't have a tow-bar on the car. But it sure would make life easier at times to have a trailer.

Simon said...

More news will be forthcoming on the trailer front soon, but I have to say the tow-bar was more expensive than I had bargained for.

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