It’s so warm we’ve gone topless!
Entry posted by G and J in Da Bungalow
130 views
Da bungalow that is, not us mortals. We carry on sweating in our hi vis.
We were pleased with how the timing worked out - planning to demolish during cooler months so all the neighbours will be wrapped up warm indoors away from the dust, plus it’s hard work so cooler temperatures help comfort. So much for that plan with our mini heat wave!
Steve took pity on me by leaving me recovery time on Monday and Tuesday. Good news from a site clearing and tidying point of view. It gave me time to kick down the last of the ceilings, mostly while the windows were still in, and then for J to pick out all the lathes for safety and for disposal at our nearby recycling centre (I’m old fashioned, I still call it the tip!).
Trevor the trailer was bought for £200 just over a year ago to help clear the mountains of brash from clearing the massive overgrown conifers. Skooby the Skoda was bought as a building vehicle for £700. We now realise that they have paid for themselves many times over in saving in skip costs. If I’d known how much we would be saving we might have bought a car with a working heater, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Monday afternoon was window removal time! Ben arrived bang on time and had agreed to help us remove the windows, though he’d never done it before either. I was relying on Steve’s knowledge. Shame he wasn’t there. So da bungalow now has a series of holes where windows were. Each neater than the previous one. If you look at them in chronological order you can see evidence of two keen but clueless numpties first hacking out a huge hole, taking forever, graduating in stages to the last one which was beautifully neatly and quickly and efficiently removed. Yet another example of experience being the thing that one acquires just after needing it.
So by Tuesday evening we had a clear site, which is incredibly important on such a tight, narrow plot.
And then next morning, Steve returned to the job, so progress exploded again. We stripped the felt and battens off, with muggins of course being the idiot hopping round on the battens for two thirds of the day, with the last third being careful removal of some of the roof timbers. Rather disappointingly, we found woodworm everywhere. So my plan to build my hideaway at the bottom of the garden from reclaimed roof timbers has gone. Some of the timbers came away scarily easily. But those that didn’t put up a hell of a fight - they used huge nails in the 1920s it turns out - and this wasn’t ideal as force had to be used in moderation in case of unseen weakness leading to accident or collapse. We were probably overly careful but better safe than sorry.
The next two days are a blur of heaving and bracing and sledgehammering and chainsawing. Thank goodness for a decent twin battery Makita saw - saved us no end of time - and my little one handed chainsaw - AKA Lightsaber - was slower but brilliant in places too. It’s oddly satisfying knocking off the little bits of wood that hold up the soffits and facias and rainwear - sending the whole assembly crashing down in a plume of dust. Even more satisfying to push over the block gable - the thump when it hit the ground was like felling a big tree, primevally enjoyable.
We did take a break for a site visit from the ground worker. He asked all the right questions which does give confidence, including asking me to gain permission from our neighbours for him to hand dig one shared corner of our frontage to carefully identify where our neighbours services are. He might even have a use for the roof timber mountain we now have! More skip cost saving.
All this is punctuated with other strands of the project. They are vital but hard to find the will to divert onto when mid hammering. In that way J and I are working together fantastically. I haven’t the bandwidth to think - I run to keep up with Steve when he’s there - I run to tidy up when he’s not there to get ready for when he will be - I go home a bit too late each day and after a coffee and a discussion about the day I then bath and by the time we’ve eaten it’s bedtime. Buildhub, apart from my weekly therapy session (oh ok, blog writing) is a distant memory.
So J does the thinking, I do the grunting. That’s a little bit of an overstatement as in my head, when I stop to access it, is a 3D model of everything and every junction and material and supplier and missing quote and little red flag of issue that might become critical path and hence needs sorting before it does. I can and do flick into ‘principal designer’ mode when needed.
But the day to day scheduling and remembering is falling to J. J has given me a little exercise book and my own grown up ball point pen to keep my to do list in. It’s a bit year 5 but it turns out very effective, as long as J remembers to remind me to look at it. Between us we are working incredibly effectively. Long may it continue.
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