Kitchen window post

This post was a long way coming. Since I have a lot of images to post, I have been experimenting with some code added to the blogger template in order to have galleries to display the images. It is very clunky but it does the job. I should seriously consider importing this blog into my main website blog, but I have to think how and if I'd still like to keep it more separated.

Meanwhile, let us continue.

It has been cold, wet, and miserable. January and February are not pleasant to work around outside here. Luckily Pim and his father do not seem to mind too much, I have bad joints and I just can't work in these conditions, so besides a coat of paint in a small surface while wearing a Peruvian oversize pullover (what a wuss right?) I have done nothing of this project until the windows were in. By March however I have started gardening ;P

In the gallery below we pick up where we left in the last post:

• Sliding door beam concrete-d, bricks removed, edges redone. First time we can really see some of the garden from the house. In this case, a big pile of bricks :D
• Dining room window (where the shed door used to be) beam placed and concrete-d, bricks removed to widen, bricks added to make door into window, edges redone.
• Bit of wall where the radiator goes gets painted, green of course, and the radiator put up (it was in the way, this is one very large and 100 kg heavy motherfucker).
• Existing door widened, some bricks added between the pre-existing door and window for a stronger structure.
• Existing window narrowed and lowered to be as low as the kitchen counter.
• Outer windowsill stones (Belgian blue sandstone) placed. Some of these are very heavy... unlike other windowsills in the house, we had them delivered, but Pim and his dad installed them. I was able to help moving a couple ;P
• Threshold stones placed, same as above.
• After some delay, windows, door and sliding door/window? placed by the window guys today!
• And now PHEW!

And now, onto other kitchen things... walls, floor, insulation...

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Next beam + bathroom closet

While Pim and his father were placing the next beam for a window in the back building, I took everything out of the bathroom closet, we took it apart, and then I cut a bit off the back legs. The floor in this room slopes towards the center and so the closet was leaning forward a lot. I guess I must have take a picture of that at some point, but I don't find it now. The top of the closet was 10 or 15 cm away from the wall when the bottom was close to the wall.

I also glued back a decorative leg piece that had fallen off, and some other parts where the hide glue had fractured a long time ago. I softened the glue with wet (warm water) kitchen paper towels, then scraped the excess off, and reglued with Titebond liquid hide glue. I think I am a convert now ;)

We put the closet back together, which is a delicate operation since the three door are caught by the top, and have to all be placed at once. It is a three man job.

This is how "level" it was

Knife wall

Chunks off

Scraping old glue off

Re-gluing

Quality control

Straight up 

Nice and close to the wall :)

On the beam front, Pim and his father encountered more difficulties than last time.

The beam that the roof guys placed over the entire length, on top of the wall, was anchored to the wall with large bolts. This made removing the old beam over the door a little difficult. This opening had to become much wider than the door so the beam had to be replaced. Pim had to drill around the bolts, concrete will later be placed around the bolts to anchor them again.

The beam was again placed over to flat and level pieces of concrete

Another recycled railway track serving as beam

Sliding door beam

I have not been updating, we've been doing many little and finishing things, and I didn't feel like writing about those. Today however, Pim and his dad started something rather big.
We've ordered the last batch of windows for the house, for the future kitchen/dining room. These take a few months of queue and manufacture, and we've now started actually making the holes where they'll go. On the very end of our house, we're putting a large sliding door that will cover most of the wall. This was the shed, and it will be the dining room. On the picture above, you see where the hole for a beam was started. The wall of the building to the right is the neighbour's (I think it's a horse stable). This is the area where we had the hillbilly tomato roof, which we have now removed.

Pim screwed some extra pieces of wood with very large screws to hold the top portion of the wall up while making a hole and installing the beam. It was all done today as quickly as possible, and the structure held very well (the roof is mostly supported on the back and front walls anyway).

Pim's dad working on the wall. 

Above you can still see the beam that we used. They're repurposed "vintage" railroad tracks. There were several of these in the back/shed, holding up a very strong flat ceiling in concrete that we removed some time ago. The space on top of it as you can see was very small, all in all a little puzzling, it was probably the strongest ceiling of the entire house. Maybe they stored gold bars in there, haha.

The leftover beam.

Pim cut off the necessary piece of beam that we had been keeping in place, and they placed it in the hole over two flat and level blocks of concrete they had placed over the bricks.

Beam in place over the concrete blocks.

Beam in place over the concrete blocks.

More cement.

Reinforced with chicken wire.

To fill the gap over the beam again, Pim placed some recycled chicken wire we found in the garden, then concrete. So in a way it is reinforced concrete. A piece of wood and some plastic closes the gap below.

Reinforced with chicken wire.

This is not the way these things are normally done, everything would just come off and the beam placed, but we didn't want to leave this entire part of the building open to the elements in January for who knows how long... once the date to place the windows approaches, we'll remove the rest of the wall.

The same still has to be done for a couple of windows, also. We have other pieces of railroad for that.

Picture dump

I haven't updated in a while, so I'm gonna do a picture dump with a little commentary.

I started removing paint from the front door. It's a mess!

We'll perservere.

We also installed much needed blinds in the attic windows.

We doubted a long time about the colour, finally went with white.

They absolutely block the light.

Shellac!

There was a spare night table around so I washed it, shellac-ed it,
and it is now extra storage in the attic bedroom.

The bathroom vanity suffered water marks, so I fixed it...

The first layers of shellac I used, I mixed well with all the wax contained in the flakes. I found info that the wax is more protective against vapour, which worried me more than a few droplets of water (we ventilate a lot but showers happen). However it is less water resistant.

I rubbed the spots with alcohol and a piece of cloth, which worked quite well, and then gave a few more layers of shellac, this time skimmed from the top of the mix. There will still be wax, but less. If this doesn't perform well enough (we are trying to splatter less, but we're human), I'll have to bring out the varnish :(

And... workshop! I'm very excited about the workshop ;P but it needs lots and lots of work...

Closing gaps with PUR.

Plastering.

Installing water pipes.

Putting up plasterboards.

Water, yay!

Last week's proggress

Attic: plaster joins on walls and ceiling; finishing around the windows with PUR foam, plasterboard and plaster; finishing the exposed beams (sanding, priming and painting). Pim's dad has an electric plane and Pim has used it to get the worst off (the beams are very rough and humidity protected with some sort of green stuff). I guess most people would either cover them up with plasterboard or nicer wood. I'm just smoothing them somewhat and then some thick layers of primer do the trick pretty well, you can still feel the grain of the wood somewhat. 

We'll keep this room pretty light since it may get quite dark in there in winter. I'll be white (broken white, RAL 9010) and a light-ish grey. I'll also leave the natural colour of the oak on the floor. We were unsure what to do about the brick wall. We've now decided to clean them off a bit and paint them white.

Bathroom: the bathtub is installed! I only have shitty phone pictures. The drains outside are also installed so now you can take a cold bath ;)

Dude comes today to start up the heating/warm water system, so warm baths coming soon! It is also starting to get chilly, so it is a good thing we'll be able to put the heating on.

The closet is also mounted, although it leans forward too much due to the inclination of the floor. We'll have to raise the front legs a bit. The shower tray is installed and tiled around (did I already mention that?) but we haven't installed the glass yet, and we ran out of grout. There also still a few tiles to place around some pipes and the bottom edge of the shower, over the wood.

And we finally decided which toilet to buy and ordered it! it arrived from England this week and we have put it together, but it isn't installed yet. We found out the drain we had prepared for it was too short, so we got an extra piece, and we need some diamond drills to be able to attach it to the floor. Hopefully this week. We have ordered more diamond drills, also to make a hole on the marble to install the washbasin. The bathroom is really coming together :D

Bedroom: keeps on giving me headaches! ugh. Mostly a paint problem after another, too tedious to even write about in detail. Last in the series: please remind me why I hate painter's tape, again?? 

Fresh plaster

Rough finishing

Fine finishing

:(

Drain from the bathroom

Attaching the bath drain (note the earthing)

Attaching oak grills as gas vents
(you're supposed to smell if it leaks)

I'll take better pictures soon

The oak lid is too light, but I am not gonna mess with it right now

One metal piece for the closet hinge was missing,
we improvised. I enlarged the inset...

And we used these strips, which work nicely

Bad photo, my specialty