Posted in House renovation work, tagged leadlight windows, paint stripping, sanding, undercoating, window ledge, window sill, wood fillers on 09/09/2013| 2 Comments »
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a ‘how-to’ post or a show-and-tell story.*
We’re getting four of our five leadlight windows completely replaced in a few weeks, and the existing window ledges all needed to be stripped, sanded, filled, sanded, undercoated and sanded ahead of the new windows going in.
Our leadlight windows are lovely – from a distance.
Up close they’re a mess. That’s why we’re paying someone for new ones.
Posted in House renovation work, tagged industrial vacuum, insulation, retiling roof, roof, sarking, strengthening roof frame on 14/04/2013| 5 Comments »
Over Easter we finally got around to moving some stuff out of the garage and into the roof space. It’s so clean and tidy up there these days it makes me proud to be, er, a perfectionist.
Mid-2011 was roof re-tiling time. Our terracotta tiles were brittle and the roof leaked during heavy rain. And the whole roof frame needed strengthening and straightening. And the old insulation had to be cleared out, and the ceiling surface vacuumed and tidied before new insulation could be put down. The project was finally wrapped up in January 2012. Gotta love the scheduling blowouts on what you think is a quick home renovation project.
Job number 1 was installing attic stairs because getting everyone up into the roof via the small hole above the shower was never going to work. Roof tilers, structural engineer, builders, insulation guys, electrician … and us.
The roof space was absolutely disgusting. Ninety years of fine dust and muck covered every surface.
Call us mad but the first thing we did after the stairs went in was to sweep the dust off every roof beam. We suited-up in full breathing masks, goggles, overalls and gloves. These photos give you some idea of what we were dealing with.
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Third bit from the right 