Category: Architecture

Avatar Shake your fist harder, boy!

I am knee-deep in the middle of lots of boring house chores. This is my first time on the house purchase bandwagon so whilst I have had some experience painting, decorating and very basic DIY from living in my flat, there’s still a lot that I don’t know.

That’s fine, nobody comes into the world with a drill and the ability to rewire a kitchen. I do what I can and accept help from others when it’s necessary to do so. What I am learning though is that wallpaper is a pain in the arse and should never ever be considered.

Why’s that? What’s so wrong with wallpaper I hear you ask? It looks great when it’s on the wall but flip reverse that sandwich and consider when taking it off. Vikki used the wallpaper remover which turned the room into a sauna from all the heat. Even then, you still have to scrap it off. Once that’s done you have to prepare the walls because you can’t paint over that. This is where the big scandal comes in.

Sugar soap is awful. It’s useless. I think personally it’s the biggest con. You spray or wipe this gunk on the wall to help remove the old wallpaper paste and clean the wall so you don’t have ugly bumpy bits when painting. That all makes perfect sense. You know what’s actually doing all the work though? A combination of the warm water, the sponge / scouring pad and my fucking arm. It’s got nothing to do with the bright yellow liquid we’re forking out 3 to 4 quid a pop on. I had one of those squirty bottle versions and it was three quarters done on one bedroom. The label itself says to, “use liberally”; no doubt to send whatever poor sucker who purchased it back to the shop to buy more of it.

I am never, ever using wallpaper. I have made this decision based on scrubbing eight walls in two rooms and not seeing any difference. Wallpaper can get to fuck. Sugar soap can get to fuck.

Old man rant done. Over and out.

Avatar Tile Saga: dénouement

Time to wrap up this saga. The tiling is complete, at least until I get round to starting the other bit of tiling around the worktop at the other side of the utility room.

Here’s the epilogue, expressed in short form because life is short:

  • Grouting is great. Tiling was a pain in the backside but I could spend a lot of time grouting. It’s not difficult and the results are instantly gratifying. Slopping grout into all the gaps covers a multitude of sins, instantly makes your tiles look good, and ten minutes later you wipe off the excess with a damp sponge and the job is done. All DIY should be like this.
  • Silicone sealant can mack right off. I’ve dabbled in this before, and hated it. Now I’ve done it more extensively to finish this tiling job and I hate it even more.
  • I haven’t yet sealed one side where the tiles meet the back wall of the room, because I put super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape on the wall to protect it from the grout and when I carefully peeled it off according to the instructions the super gentle non-peel expensive Frog Tape took all the paint off the wall, which I only painted a couple of months ago. So now I have to repaint that part before I can put a line of sealant there.

Now I get to move on to another job, and commence Raised Bed and Gravel Path Saga. Watch out for this year’s longest and most self-pitying read, coming to a Beans near you this autumn.

Avatar Tile saga

Would you like to have a go at tiling? You should try it, it’s very satisfying. The only thing you need to consider is that your first project should start off small so you can get the hang of it.

Our utility room has a toilet and a tiny microsink, but the sink was on a painted wall so water would splash on the paint all the time. It needed some tiles. Do a bit of googling and the entire internet will tell you that tiling a splashback is one of the simplest jobs and a great way for a beginner to learn tiling. Great, I thought. I’ll do that then.

The project scope expanded a bit, so now we are tiling the wall around the sink, and the windowsill which didn’t have an actuall sill, and the wall beside the toilet because it’s just a big empty wall and it will look nice. No problem. Bigger than a splashback but that’s just more tiles to stick on, not more difficulty.

Chris heroically tiling a wall

All of the above is incorrect. It turns out that I have selected the world’s most fiddly tiling job as my first foray into the world of tiling. This isn’t an easy beginner’s introduction. It is a Tile Saga.

  • The sink is hard up against the side wall, so ideally would be removed so that the wall to the side and behind it could be tiled and the sink re-attached on top of the tiles. But it would have to be replaced slightly to the right, which is further than the pipes will reach, so it would all need re-plumbing, which I am not prepared to do.
  • Therefore the sink must stay in place and have tiles cut to go around it. But the sink is entirely curved – every part of it is curved, even across the top, where it could easily just be flat. So all the tiles around it must be cut with very specific and unique curves in them.
  • There are three pipes underneath and another pipe coming out of the side wall for the toilet cistern overflow. Tiles must be cut around these, requiring more curved cuts.
  • There’s no point getting an extremely expensive tile drill because they are for cutting circles in the middle of tiles, which I don’t need because all the pipes meet joints, and anyway the pipes are all different sizes and the curves are all unique and not even a consistent radius, so every curved cut needs to be done manually.
  • I have therefore invested in an angle grinder with a diamond cutting disc, which lets me cut very thin slices, and gentle curves, and notches out of tiles to go around the corners of the window. The angle grinder is the single most terrifying object I own because it cuts through ceramic tiles like soft butter and would remove fingers or even whole limbs if given half a chance. The tiles are small and must be held in place when you cut them so your fingers are very close to the blade. I am scared whenever I have to turn it on.
  • The angle grinder still cannot cut tight enough curves to get the pipework or the tighter sink edges right, so those bits must be manually filed out of the tiles using a file, which can take up to 20 minutes for a single tile and produces huge volumes of ceramic tile dust, as does the angle grinder now I come to think about it.
  • I didn’t think about the dust until I developed a dry cough which has mostly gone now but still occasionally rears its head.

The tiles arrived in April and I have now finished tiling the two walls and the windowsill. They still need grouting which is another new skill I am now approaching with some trepidation because it must surely hold further unknown pitfalls.

The other windowsill and the backsplash around the worktop at the other side of the utility room need tiling too, but that can now wait for a few months because I need to do some jobs in the garden and tiling the utility room has used up all my DIY time so far this summer.

The tiling looks nice.

I am pleased with the result.

I am glad I don’t have any more pipes or curved bits to do.

I’m pretty sure I am now due an honorary doctorate in tiling.

Avatar Where has Kev been?

You know the deal, I disappear for a while, then I come back full of beans then disappear again. Its a story as old as time. Well this time you may be forgive for thinking that I’d just been too busy doing a masters degree or looking after kids or some other made up nonsense, well no. Not this time.

For the last 5 and a bit months I have in fact been trapped down the character hatch. I know, I know, you’ve both told me to leave it shut, but sometimes the curiosity gets too much for me.

Now those of you with a keen memory may remember the last time I went down there, got stuck and was abandoned by Ian who was too busy demanding ham I had no means to provide. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, but no. I opened the hatch (with a pack of ham in my bag just in case) and sank down into the Old Beans.

I spent a few hours wandering through the ornamental gardens, had a picnic by the Zorse monument and whiled away another hour or two doing a sketch of the bell tower in charcoal. The tower’s looking in quite bad shape these days, and you can just make out the corpse of a recently deceased zorse leaning against a wall.

Anyhow, I was just about to come back home when I heard that sound… you know the one… The sound of moody guitars, breaking glass and arty poetry that could only mean… Pete Doherty. He spotted me immediately, he had the mad faraway glint in his eye of a man who’d been forced to exclusively eat zorse meat for 13 years, and he was pissed. In both senses. I think he’d worked out how to distill zorse piss into a kind of hooch. Anyway after chasing me round the great hall, the gardens, across the old Loinsford campus and back to the clock tower he eventually caught me and pressganged me into forming a new band with him and doing a tour of the forbidden lands, (the Cockall Archives, the Saint Kingdom and the Savannah of in-jokes).

The band was just us two, and all I could play was the recorder and the demo button on the keyboard. It was awful. Pete wrote some witty satirical lyrics about Ian’s love of ham and the fall of Chris Industries, and off we went. We played 700 gigs, mostly to empty rooms. Occasionally the zorses would come by, and then quickly leave, but mostly to empty rooms.

For whatever reason, when we returned, Doherty was sated. His anger subsided, the punching stopped and he just wandered off into the mist surrounding in the Loosh Vestibule. I was free. I made my escape and resealed the hatch. I’ve learned my lesson (for now), and I’m back. Hopefully.

Avatar Fivewide

As a grown up who doesn’t have any children, I am at liberty to while away my days as I see fit, perhaps enjoying a round of croquet on the lawn now and then, or devoting an entire day to perfecting my butter caramel technique.

This means I am free to buy Lego if I want, and build it all on my own, without any meddlesome children to spoil the experience. Lego is wasted on children anyway. They don’t get it. It’s a sophisticated product for adults like you and I, and long may it remain so.

Not so long ago I treated myself to a new set, thanks in part to a Lego gift card I was given for my birthday. (This is further evidence, as though it were needed, that everyone agrees with me about Lego being for grown ups.) The new set is excellent, for the most part, but in one of its bags I found something that made my blood run cold.

We have long spoken with disdain about the horror of the sixwide Lego car.

Now behold the fivewide brick.

Avatar Mind your step

There’s a restaurant near us that we sometimes go to, which is in an old building. You’ve been in places like this before: it was an ancient thing to begin with, all wooden beams and low ceilings and big oak beams everywhere, but then it’s been extended by knocking through into bits of other buildings and there’s more bits taking it through the back into what used to be an outhouse of some kind. Now it’s a rambling maze on the inside, full of little rooms and cosy nooks. It’s nice.

Anyway, there’s one table tucked away in a little space of its own, surrounded by oak beam walls and artfully exposed ancient masonry, and whenever people go to sit there, they find themselves having to go up two steps and then go back down one step again. It’s like a little barrier on the way in that is a positive invitation to trip up and go headlong into a table full of unsuspecting diners. The floor level on both sides is barely any different, so it’s just in the way.

Anyway, I’ve noticed this several times and always thought it was odd. Turns out they must get asked about it a lot, so they’ve put a sign on the step to explain why there is a step in this eminently stupid place.

Avatar Damp saga

You’ve heard of tap saga. Now prepare yourself for… Damp Saga. The story of one man’s quest to conquer the Forces of Dampness that threaten to overthrow his way of life, turning everything slightly moist and, upon close inspection, slightly mouldy.

I am currently battling dampness on four war-torn fronts.

From the north, the paint on the bathroom windowframe and windowsill has worn away to a point where wood is visible. This is because, in their infinite wisdom, previous owners of the house positioned the bath under the window, so when you have a shower you spray the whole window area with water.

From above, the new loft insulation I fitted last year is keeping the house warm, but it’s also keeping the loft damp, with condensation forming to such a degree that in very cold weather it effectively rains in there. Everything we store in the loft is now under tarpaulins, except for the things we didn’t cover in time, which are ruined. I have fitted new vents to the roof to get some fresh air through it and eliminate this unwelcome indoor microclimate.

From below, the very high water table in this area (the whole housing estate might be built in what is technically a lake) means that in anything less than drought conditions the lawn is often under an inch of water. My neighbour has an elaborate plan to resolve this by digging big holes, creating new soakaway pits and laying pipes, though I can’t help feeling that his plan will only succeed if they are big enough to absorb all the rain in this area of Hampshire.

And from the west, water running downhill through a series of back gardens is now making its way through the wall of the garage, where it turns out the woodwork starts below ground level. This means that, now the monsoon season has arrived in the loft, we have nowhere to store anything that we wish to keep dry. A big damp patch is creeping across the floor and fixing it is going to involve removing a whole line of garden fence and digging up part of next door’s garden. I have made a half baked effort to deal with the symptoms using wood preserver and cutting holes in the garage wall to allow air in. I do not feel hopeful about this.

Unlike #tapsaga, there is no satisfying ending to this where, after a hundred frustrating steps, everything works out. This saga is just an ongoing list of damp situations. Thankfully the inside of my car is still dry, most of the time, so I have decided to live there instead. Please send towels and talcum powder.