The 'big project' that I hadn't really thought about or planned for...

[James Harrison]

I think that calls for a drink.  Pity the boiler setup doesn't dispense gin 

[Sir Henry]

My apologies for the delay; welcome to my nightmare



I am not happy that it has taken me 18 months to get this far, but at last I have finished restoring the attic to something rather larger than its former glory.

When it was first built it was two separate attics, each with a staircase and a couple of rooms - one in the middle of the space with the staircase down and one with the dormer at the front. The dormers were interesting in that they were glazed on the sides as well as the front, so the views would have been wonderful.
Unfortunately, since then skylights were added above the stairwell and then tiled over again. Then the two houses were joined, allowing for a door between the two spaces and the removal of one staircase.
At a later date, probably the 1980's, the walls were taken down and the sides of the dormers were replaced with plywood sheets, the floors taken up and insulation put between the floor joists. The remaining staircase was boxed in and the whole place was ignored for the next 40 years.



This, of course, is the best thing to do with a roof space; the deterioration allows access to birds, rain and all sorts and there were so many holes in the roof when we arrived that you could happily stargaze from inside as long as you were very, very careful where you put your feet. On the plus side, the layers of fibreglass and recycled paper insulation had kept the joists surprisingly dry, along with the desiccated dead birds.

Then we arrived. I think I have already posted about removing the dormers so we could have solar panels, discovering that the second (abandoned) stairwell had no joists over it, just a few legths of 2'x3' nailed at their ends to the existing joists but not the sheet of drywall underneath to stop people from falling through. After sorting out the wiring )see posts above) I levelled the floor as well as I could and boarded the whole space, somewhere near 80 sq.m./100 sq.yds.



It was shortly before the delivery of all the boards that my best friend and helpmate slipped a disc and had to give up helping for good. So it was at this point that I started to change shape. Also, throughout the rest of this remember that I am also a carer (for two adults with multiple problems), cook, housewife and mediator which is why it was such a slow job.

I don't think I mentioned the largest part, by far, of the job - installing a double layer of insulation between and then below the roof joists. I used solid insulation because there needed to be an air gap between the under tile sheet and the insulation but the insulation needed to be airtight so spray or Rockwool wouldn't have worked. None of the joists were parallel so every section needed to be measured and cut to millimetre accuracy and there were 4 sections of insulation to each inter-joist gap, floor to peak. The peak is about 16 ft. up - did I mention that I have a fear of heights?



Spring, summer and autumn, all day in a breathing mask and the space getting hotter and hotter - never again! Impressively it wasn't until the two days when I stuffed all the fibreglass insulation that had been on the floor into the 3-foot high (at the apex) roof voids that had been created, wearing a hazmat suit, breathing mask and close-fitting goggles in the height of summer, that my breathing problems started.
So while the insulation is mostly 250mm/10 ins., at the top it is an impressive 1250mm/50ins.!


If I were better at plastering I wouldn't need to sand so much!

After that it was just a case of removing the chimneys, building the stud walls (parallel studs for easy insulation!) and installing a fuse box and sockets throughout. This entailed learning a bunch of skills that would have been so useful had I learned them 40 years ago, but we didn't have the internet back then, so information was more limited. Having used multiple youtube videos to learn all of this was a bit worrying, but when the electrical inspector came to check all my wiring he was very impressed, commenting that it would be great if more of the new builds he inspected were up to this quality.



became


So now we have two huge spaces, each about two thirds the area of a floor of the house (the other third is under-eaves storage) to be used as maker spaces, one for me and the other for my wife. Mine is totally undecorated because that will have to wait until I have finished Phase 2. This includes emptying some of the rooms downstairs of boxes of stuff, putting them in the attic storage spaces, then decorating those rooms. Roughly in this order: kitchen, front hall, living room/library and bathroom. Oh yes, and the garden, but that's an epic post of its own.
After I've done one about the stairs and banisters.

There is a good chance that I won't be able to wait that long for some of my ideas. For instance the entrance to the storage space at the front of my attic room is 1/7th the width of the whole wall and positioned so that if I put in panelling with 7 panels, one of them will cover the gap perfectly. I may need to do that at some point to cheer myself up. The depression is also why I've finally sat down to write this up - I've found that working in this state of mind leads to mistakes and injuries, so best avoided.

[Madasasteamfish]

A very compressive and impressive update Sir Henry. My compliments on the work accomplished so far and commiserations on the cowpats that have been strewn along the path of your life (my own struggles with mental health have shown me how difficult it can be to actually complete projects).

I'll try and refrain from expressing my extreme envy at your property...

[James Harrison]

Wow.  Very, very impressive indeed.  16' ceilings in the attic really gives a sense of the scale of the project. 

[Sorontar]

Nicely done. Slow and steady(ish) wins the race.

Sorontar

[Sir Henry]

I've only just realised (l'espirite de l'escalier) that the title of my last post should have been

The Neverending Storey



I'll get my top hat...

[Cora Courcelle]

I've only just realised (l'espirite de l'escalier) that the title of my last post should have been

The Neverending Storey



I'll get my top hat...

Nooooooooo         

[Sir Henry]

One of the first things that I realised when we thought of returning the attic to its former glory was that the opened-up stairwell would need bannisters around it. We did consider solid sides, maybe book shelves or similar, but quickly realised that the stairs needed more light than that would allow.

So I kept an eye out and after a few months came across a place that was selling spindles and handrails cheap. They were 'seconds' so needed sanding and there were a few rather prominent knots and so on. But they were delightfully cheap so we got a load.

In order to hide the more egregious flaws I decided to stain them, but what colour. As you may remember, I have a large selection of wood dyes to choose from. Darker would hide the flaws better but lighter would be better for the room. Then I thought of all those Natural History museums from the 19th century with pillars of different types of stone and the decision was made.

Much later, when it came to doing up the stairs themselves I found that the original stairs were such a mess that covering them was the only sensible option. As I had a few laminate stair steps left over from downstairs I didn't need to buy a complete set, just another 7 steps. And as they were being bought individually they may as well also range in colour, going from dark on the half-landing to light at the top ("Go towards the light!"  ;-)  )

And I think it turned out rather well:

Spoiler: ShowHide

[Sir Henry]

My apologies for the late update. It was well over six months ago that I had my slight accident with my thumb* and it has taken a while to get back into the swing of things.

I have finally finished the kitchen (well, other than designing and making new door fronts for the cabinets) and thought you might like to see it.

The main part was building the shelves - they're made with wood recycled from a platform bed I made for my daughter well over a decade ago and before that the wood was leftover flooring from a project. It's Indian soapwood, so it looks like mahogany but it smells gorgeous (I use the sawdust as a pot pourri till it loses its perfume). I also used some copper pipes left over from putting in the heating. I put 12mm dowels inside the pipes to increase their strength and screwed the shelves to them using 'headless' screws, intended for screwing down floorboard invisibly. They turned out alright.


The spice rack you can see through the door's window was the original inspirational spark for the whole kitchen as I had some old scraps of the soapwood to make something out of. Sadly, we have more spices than would fit in the space of the window, so it grew.


To the right of the door are a few more small shelves to match. Again, I designed and made these before the big shelves and used the copper pipes because I had to minimise the number of screws I put into the wall, so needed something to bear the weight of all the storage jars.


But the part that people always mention first is the floor. It worked remarkably well as a proof of concept. There were some major problems due to the order I laid them but I won't make that mistake next time. I laid out 5 sheets of 3mm plywood and cut them to be a perfect fit. Then I glued the smaller stained sections to those sheets and hard wax oiled them. Then, after laying the floor I wax oiled it again and buffed it up to a dangerous sheen. It's remarkably comfortable to walk on in socks or bare feet as it has a tiny amount of give so is soft like modern lino while still having the warmth of wood and being totally waterproof.
I had planned on laying an underfloor heating system under it but, with the thumb, it suddenly became too much work, and unnecessary, it turned out.


That's the back door. The floor is all stained with wood stains from that corner, but as it gets to the opposite corner and the door to the rest of the house colours start joining in until it's all coloured. I originally planned to carry on the colour version down the hall but my wife thought that that was going too far.


All in all, I give it a thumbs-up as I'm quite happy with it. Happy enough to start work designing the floor for my workshop which is about twice the size.







* It has healed as much as it ever will but the nerve damage means that the top of it has only partial feeling and if anything touches it, it feels like stinging nettles, but it works. Mostly. I still have problems with opening packages (I now hate cellophane), shuffling cards and so on but I'm slowly learning workarounds.

[Sorontar]

Nice! The floor looks like it was a lot of work if you had to individually lay out each shape.

Sorontar

[Hez]

I love the floor but I'm curious if there is a story behind the shapes or if it is just an aesthetic choice.

[Sir Henry]

Nice! The floor looks like it was a lot of work if you had to individually lay out each shape.

Sorontar

The main aim of this process was to minimise the final laying-out, so I made the floor out of 59 repeat sections that I glued to the base board before laying those in the kitchen. The size of each section is one full repeat in each direction so that putting it together was as foolproof as possible.



Each section is made out of 3mm plywood with the lines of the pattern cut to 1.5mm deep. This means that each cut goes through the first layer of glue (which is impervious to water) on the ply. This is important because when staining each area, the stain doesn't bleed from one area to the next - in fact you don't even need to colour up to the lines as the stain will bleed up to the edge and no further, making the process much easier.

Now that I know it works, the next floor will be made using full 8ft. by 4ft. plywood boards - unwieldy but much simpler to lay out. And with 15 of them for the full design, anything smaller would be a lot of work.

I love the floor but I'm curious if there is a story behind the shapes or if it is just an aesthetic choice.

For the pattern I wanted a simple fill pattern with no straight lines and as I had made vector versions of all 100+ designs from Bourgoin's Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design (Z-Library) during lockdown, this was one of about a dozen that fitted the bill. I have been interested in basic geometric patterns and fill patterns since working out the geometry of Celtic knotwork decades ago.

The next one will be closer to traditional over the top decorative inlay floors with an overall design rather than just a fill pattern

[James Harrison]

I love the shelving and the copperwork, something to think about in my own kitchen when I reach that point. 

The floor looks excellent as well, had you not mentioned it's large panels I would have thought it was individual little pieces.