As I mentioned in the first blog post, these cottages all had them and they had a coal shute from the front garden. Ours has now been blocked off and the wall made good. But there is quite a lot of work to do down here. OH is quite excited by it as most of the wiring and plumbing runs under the floorboards so are easy enoght to get at and be easily accessable when he starts changing it all around and updating it.
There are storage cupboards at the end. The rubbish bags have now gone. You can see the waste pipes from the bathroom which is above this corner of the cellar. This is looking towarads the back of the house, left hand side.
This is the bottom of the stairs at the front and to the rear.
You can clearly see the damp in the big post. And the missing step at the bottom. The handrail is wobbly and the treads are quite small.
A mishmash of supports.
Strangely, the beams across the back half of the house are all much larger than the front and seem in good order. Those at the front are smaller and most have had their ends added to, to give support.
These all need replacing.
The next problem is that there is water leaking in at the front corner to the right of the coal store. When we had the heavy rain last week, it was running down the walls and it is quite wet on the floor. But as it is a dirt floor, it is soaking away.
The rest of the cellar and walls are suprisingly dry and seem fine.
We think the first job will be to sort out the beams and see if we can prevent the water entering from outside. One builder has quoted
Front room
- Take up existing floor and joists and dispose of waste;
- Install new 195mm x 47mm treated joists (a Structural Engineer may be needed to establish what size joists to use, I have got this size from a building regs guide);
- Lay 24mm chipboard flooring to complete floor;
It is likely that the skirting board will need to be removed to take the existing floor up. Care would be taken in doing this, but damage may still occur to plastered walls. Any obstructing services in the existing floor are to be removed by the customer.
£2600.00
But we are thinking that we should be able to do this ourselves once we know what to do (obviously) and we are looking to get the OH's ex-brother in law down who is a very experienced builder and specialises in building bridges. He will hopefully help wth what to do and what sizes to use and at what distances. It would be nice to be able to remove the props.
Another thing to decide is whether to dig the floor out or not. If we do, the time to do it will be when the front floor is up as we could then lift up the material through the front room, rather than the long carry, up the rickety stairs, round the corner into middle room, through to the front and out the front door. However, there is still the issue of getting rid of all the removed soil which will have to be done by wheelbarrow to a skip on the road, about 100m away. And will it realy add value to the finished house? More investigating to do with maybe a couple of companies coming round to give some quotes. We also hope to be able to visit the other houses in our row and see what they have all done.
Cinema room/Wine cellar/kids play area? We dont want to get into the problems of making it into a habitable room as that brings issues of how to escape should there be a fire and complying with all the building regs. So we are leaning towards making it dry and tidying it up and just using it for storage.
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