Friday 16 May 2014

Making a start on the basement and cellar






Whilst we have the electrician and plasterer working in the kitchen we thought it would be a good idea to keep out of their way and work elsewhere, so we embarked on the basement and cellar project which will eventually be home to an enjoyable pool table and an array of punishing fitness equipment. This room is dry without any major issues such as damp or condensation, having a radiator in here and two windows which allow air and light in are a real bonus. You cannot see from the photographs but we have another smaller room adjoined which originally was the coal store, this is also receiving some attention and when renovated will become a bespoke wine cellar.
As you can see the original space had become a very typical dumping ground for things "not needed now but may come in useful later", well, as you know, very rarely does anything revert to "useful" once it has disappeared down below so we bit the bullet and had a through clear out, you can count on one hand the number of "useful" items that have survived! 
All the storage shelves were removed and disposed of, a dividing wall was removed to create a full open space ready to set about cleaning and treating the walls with a specialist cellar paint prior to boarding and plastering.
We knew we had some sort of tiled floor but had never really been able to investigate very much due to amount of stuff down there, after the clear out we started to clean a small area and were amazed to find the floor to be original beautiful red Victorian Quarry tiles which over the years had been neglected and become discoloured. We had researched renovating old floors and found various methods ranging from hand scrubbing to brick acid, all required a lot of time, patience and hard graft and just whilst we were contemplating how we were going to get the floor back to "as new" it happened that Charlie, our chosen stone cleaning specialist was carrying out a site visit prior to starting his stint on the exterior. During a casual discussion about his cleaning methods and capabilities it quickly became clear that his "eco Farrow System" could clean absolutely anything! so without delay he was shown the cellar floor and kitchen floor and we agreed he could add these to his list of jobs taking no more than a day for both. We latterly discovered the downside to his wonderful eco system is that it uses a tremendous amount of water to supposedly supress dust, well, operating outdoors is fine, the water falls to the ground and drains away into the ground. In the cellar is a very different matter, the water has nowhere to drain to...  I arrived home from work to find 2" of water in the cellar which needed pumping out and then we were left with bucket after bucket of sand to clean up!!!!! but as you can see from the last photograph the floor is going to look as good as when originally laid, absolutely stunning. I will post further photographs as we move further on with these 2 rooms as well as photographs of the exterior stonework cleaning.
Incidentally, the pump used to clear the cellar was one of the handful of "useful" items that survived the original clearout!!

          

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