New front door
A purchase from our local salvage yard.
Needs a lot of work to get it in good condition. First all paint needs to be stripped by hand (don't wont to risk the joints by dippping). Then some sanding before scarfing in lots of new bits. Then it will be onto paint. I'm going to spray the door, as it is going to take lots of coats, probably in this order: primer (sanding/filling), primer (sanding), undercoat, undercoat, 3 top coats. I'm going to try and get a really good finish with a high shine on it which is going to take lots of coats and sanding.
We struck hardware gold in Trago Mills last weekend and bought all the fittings for the door at great prices. I'll post more pics as this one progresses.
New CU & Meter
We've just had the electric board (or whatever they're called these days) out to change our meter for a shiny new one. The request was actually to move the meter to a new location - a turn through 90 degrees and onto the wall above the back door. This will mean that we're able to remove the old wall it was on. We've also had a new, much larger, consumer unit installed. This is not in use yet. It wasn't easy to find a CU with enough slots for all the rings we are going to need - 18 in all. It seems that most stop at 12 or 14-way which isn't enough for our future requirements. This unit came from TLC and seems to be a well made metal unit.
The first pic shows the new bits. In the second you can see the old location of the meter as well as the spaghetti which will need to be removed when the time comes.
The last of the storage heaters
I've posted previously on storage heater removal. These were the last two. A little more detail this time. If you've never removed a storage heater then you won't know what a right royal pain the backside it is.
Here is the offending heating device in an upstairs bedroom:
First job is to remove the front cover by removing many screws from all round the front edge:
This reveals the firebricks - heavy lumps. You can't lift more than one of these in each hand!
Spaghetti Junction
Being an old house the electrics are not particularly pretty. In fact they're a complete mess and with need to be totally replaced at some stage.
The first step is to remove some of the consumer units that are dotted around the place!! I think there are 4 at the moment, ideally these will be consolidated into one. In the pics below you can see some of the mess. You'll also notice some faded squares of wall where a meter has just been removed. This was the meter for night storage heaters which we're no longer using.
This last picture shows the mounting position of the new meter and consumer unit. The position of this is above the current backdoor. Eventually this will be blocked up and a cupboard created to house the meter and also coats etc:
Recycled Stairgates
When we moved from Meadowside we brought the stairgates with us. These were the standard 'off the shelf' type which adjust to fit different width stairways. . . . . or so they would have you believe. The stairs at Ponsforth however are much too wide for any shop bought gate to adjust to.
So, needed to make something to stop little monkeys practising their mountaneering on the stairs.
Fortuitously when we removed the wet room we salvaged a number of pieces of 3x2 which I reused to make some stairgates to fit our stairs.
Very basic joinery here. Screws, glue, butt joints and edges rounded over with the router. Very simple but very solid and very effective. So far neither of the two 'inmates' has escaped through them 
2 Flats no longer
Before we moved into the house it was let out during the summer as 2 flats. In order that this could happen there was a very odd diagonal type wall in the rear hall. Leaving not much room for actually getting in an out of the back door.
Below you can see the removal of some plasterboard from one side of the wall. Note the bandit electrics - one fuse box this side of the wall and the rest the other - nice!
A bit more pb removed and view up to lovely glazed section above.
Getting there now - you can see through to the door which leads under the stairs.
Finally the wall gone - all that is except for the glazed unit above which proved to be very stubborn. Why is it that some things are a complete bodge and others have belt and braces where the don't need them?? I had to get the crow bar and my big hammer out to persuade this window down
