Thursday, May 29, 2008
DIY day continued
After some years good service and then rather more years no use, the green stove has now been expelled from our living room. Chimney to the tip - perhaps the sort of thing a travellor might use - stove to the back of the garden next to our heritage iron bath (with chicken feet legs). And then there is the question of making good. Hole in the side of the living room and damaged floor where the hearth was. Outer skin of wall now half patched - doing it all in one go being beyond my rather rudimentary bricklaying skills. Also went to the bother of drilling out the yellow plastic plugs from the wall and filling the holes with mortar. Yellow plastic plugs not much good. I think they were too hard and didn't grip the surrounding masonry in quite the way one might like. But I suppose the up side is that you can get them out quite easily. Inner skin of wall awaiting patching - and this will be a test of my very rudimentary plastering skills. Damaged floor maybe tomorrow. At the time I installed the thing, thought it would be a good idea to lift the lino tiles in the middle of the hearth so that the rather thin concrete under the rather heavy fire could bond direct onto the screed under said tiles, thus reducing the chances of cracking. The catch being today that the hearth concrete on tile lifted OK, while the hearth concrete on screed took rather more work and made rather more mess. Even to exposing some pipework - which had been bedded in the screed rather than in sand. With that wonderful thing, hindsight, I think it would have been better to lay the concrete hearth straight onto the lino tiles!
The rather attractive mixed pale green tiles - about four inches square - laid onto top of the concrete came from some tile shop in Taunton and I now learn that the bond of the tiles to the tile cement is a lot stronger than the bond of tile cement to concrete - despite what looks like Unibond between. Tiles and cement came off the concrete in slabs. Fire itself from Godin via some defunct fire shop in Marylebone High Street. Concrete and so on perhaps from Travis Perkins. The oak surround - maybe 5cm by 2cm - was suprisingly easy to smash out with a crowbar. Maybe old oak recycled from old bed heads is not as strong as young.
The fire was good fun for a bit. For a while the challenge with the sprogs was to see how long one could keep it alight. The fires were given names, the first fire starting with A, the second with B and so on. I even kept a list of the names - which is now in the roof somewhere. But I do remember that E was for some ancient Greek general, perhaps Epimandus. Took quite a while to learn how to set the thing up for keeping in overnight, it taking quite a while to work out that having some ventilation in the room was a good idea. So we got through quite a lot of names in the first few weeks. I also remember being slightly nervous about matters carbon monoxide and not being very keen on people sleeping downstairs when it was on. No doubt I would be had for child abuse now.
Then came the expense. Although we were lucky enough to be very near one of the few remaining Charringtons depots, the antracite they sold - in natural lump or in unnatural pellet form - was very dear. Cost more to keep this fire going than we were spending on gas and electricity. And then we got fed up with the palaver of lighting the thing. We had opted for an install-yourself external steel external chimney rather than a brick chimney - finding out too late that while the external chimney was fine when the fire was alight, it got very cold when it was not. This meant that lighting the fire took about an hour of smoke across the garden and with a fair bit of smoke in the house. All a bit dirty and smelly. Neither BH nor neighbours too impressed.
Being a glutton for punishment then moved onto upgrading the PC. Decided that I needed to move from XP service pack 1 to XP service pack 2 and rather to my surprise found that I could do this free over the Internet. All went splendidly until the very end when it thought that a file was open and would not close down. Reduced to power down. But restarted OK and all seemed splendid, even to neither trashing the C drive nor losing favourites. But then moved on to Norton - the upgrade to which had propelled the service pack upgrade. This seemed to be a lot more fiddly, interacting in a confusing way with all the automatic updates that Windows has now started doing. After about four reboots got there and now have a very loud Norton icon on the right hand bit of the task bar. Not at all discrete. Now must write the date down in a safe place so that I am not surprised when Norton next announce that they want some more money out of me.
The rather attractive mixed pale green tiles - about four inches square - laid onto top of the concrete came from some tile shop in Taunton and I now learn that the bond of the tiles to the tile cement is a lot stronger than the bond of tile cement to concrete - despite what looks like Unibond between. Tiles and cement came off the concrete in slabs. Fire itself from Godin via some defunct fire shop in Marylebone High Street. Concrete and so on perhaps from Travis Perkins. The oak surround - maybe 5cm by 2cm - was suprisingly easy to smash out with a crowbar. Maybe old oak recycled from old bed heads is not as strong as young.
The fire was good fun for a bit. For a while the challenge with the sprogs was to see how long one could keep it alight. The fires were given names, the first fire starting with A, the second with B and so on. I even kept a list of the names - which is now in the roof somewhere. But I do remember that E was for some ancient Greek general, perhaps Epimandus. Took quite a while to learn how to set the thing up for keeping in overnight, it taking quite a while to work out that having some ventilation in the room was a good idea. So we got through quite a lot of names in the first few weeks. I also remember being slightly nervous about matters carbon monoxide and not being very keen on people sleeping downstairs when it was on. No doubt I would be had for child abuse now.
Then came the expense. Although we were lucky enough to be very near one of the few remaining Charringtons depots, the antracite they sold - in natural lump or in unnatural pellet form - was very dear. Cost more to keep this fire going than we were spending on gas and electricity. And then we got fed up with the palaver of lighting the thing. We had opted for an install-yourself external steel external chimney rather than a brick chimney - finding out too late that while the external chimney was fine when the fire was alight, it got very cold when it was not. This meant that lighting the fire took about an hour of smoke across the garden and with a fair bit of smoke in the house. All a bit dirty and smelly. Neither BH nor neighbours too impressed.
Being a glutton for punishment then moved onto upgrading the PC. Decided that I needed to move from XP service pack 1 to XP service pack 2 and rather to my surprise found that I could do this free over the Internet. All went splendidly until the very end when it thought that a file was open and would not close down. Reduced to power down. But restarted OK and all seemed splendid, even to neither trashing the C drive nor losing favourites. But then moved on to Norton - the upgrade to which had propelled the service pack upgrade. This seemed to be a lot more fiddly, interacting in a confusing way with all the automatic updates that Windows has now started doing. After about four reboots got there and now have a very loud Norton icon on the right hand bit of the task bar. Not at all discrete. Now must write the date down in a safe place so that I am not surprised when Norton next announce that they want some more money out of me.
# posted by Jim @ 10:57 AM 
