Wednesday 21 November 2012

Marching on through November

November has arrived and the weather remains mild, I thought it would be much colder by now so the central heating has been switched on to keep the house warm. I have to say this has not been as straightforward as you might imagine, you see, we had removed several radiators to enable the plasterer to do his work, we re-fitted the radiators but have had to bleed and adjust valve settings numerous times to get the system balancing correct, I think there is still work to do to get the heat distribution correct but I will deal with this after all the business of radiator on and off for plastering and decoration has been finalised. At least we have a warm house.
  During the last couple of weeks the plasterer has been doing his magic, I have to say this really is an art getting old walls to look like new and perfectly smooth, so far he has completed some new boarding and preparation work and has started to spread the new stuff, we have several walls on the landing areas completed including the beautifully curved wall on the first floor which is a massive relief as we thought this might have been problematic to retain the shape.
As fast as the plaster works we are trying to keep in front of him by updating the electrics, such as new  sockets and wall lights in the hallway, so far we have managed to get the cable run cut outs completed for the wall lights and new wiring, I do think sometimes what would we do without power tools, particularly the SDS drill and chiselling attachment which with very little effort cuts out perfectly 30mm wide by the 25mm of old plaster ready for the wiring. The next job this week will be to drop a supply from the hallway ceiling light which we have accessed through the first floor floorboards, fortunately the lighting circuit is of the junction box type which makes the job a little bit easier to connect to and then run the new cable through the floor and into the wall. 
You will see from the phoptgraph that whilst cutting out for the cabling we came across loads of old redundant cables buried into the wall, there are two editions here which I will do some reasearch on at a later date, there apperars to be the original single wire type in metal conduit and another version which looks like modern wires but in a lead sheath? as opposed to the modern variant of 2 core and earth in a plastic sheath, it would appear that all these cables came together here into an old type of fuse box which is a little strange as the unit would be 3m above the floor level?


large cut out where the old fuse box used to be
new cut outs for wall light and switch

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