That 'big project' I've been banging on about for a few years now....

[James Harrison]

[snip]

But if I take that fence down and replace it with a wall, it looks like anything over 1000mm above ground level needs planning permission and over 1200mm tall needs a structural design.  But this means I could build something 1000mm high without a design or permission and yet be within the law if it were to fall down and hurt someone or cause a road hazard.  Something doesn't seem quite right there... This is not necessarily a goal for 2026 but probably something I'll at least enquire about next year with the local council.

That's due to structural concerns. Across the road from us they've built a 1.5m high brick wall, one brick wide, with square brick columns every 3 metres. All it took was one small child climbing onto it for a section to collapse.
All the council will want to know is that (if it's tall) the wall is two bricks wide and is buttressed or has columns at a safe distance from each other (I think it's up to 2m apart). Up to 1m high it's not as likely to fall or do damage.

Other than that, it looks like you're well on your way to being able to sit back and look smug by this time next year.

Well, I've done a little bit of reading about that. 

My Local Authority's planning website talks about 'permitted development rights' with a link to the UK's national planning portal.  I had seen this before and that's where my 1000mm and 1200mm dimensions had come from, but you never quite know whether your local council has other ideas.

So it reads as though my local council basically takes the view that garden walls are 'permitted development' and tells you to look at the Planning Portal, which says

https://www.planningportal.co.uk/permission/common-projects/fences-gates-and-garden-walls/planning-permission

I've got an existing 1800mm (ish) high wooden fence along there, so my reading is I could have an 1800mm high brick wall without needing planning permission.  But then the taller the wall, the higher the wind loads on it and I know from professional experience that a long straight wall subjected to wind load is not exactly stable - or at least, can't be proved stable numerically. 

So. I'm starting to think about going for something tall enough to keep people out, but low enough that the wind doesn't destabilise it.

[James Harrison]

When I said 'I have ideas for the corner'...



It's almost like it was built to go there.

[James Harrison]

One of the drawbacks of my 90% approach, is that it leaves loose ends and rough edges everywhere.  And unfortunately these tend to get left until such time as either I get sick and tired of being reproached them, or I forget about them. 

One of these loose ends is the bay window in the sitting room.  Technically, I suppose you could say there are three loose ends here;
1. The water stain on the ceiling from when the roof used to leak;
2. The holes in the plaster from when I took down the curtain rail;
3. The frankly awful pelmets above the Venetian blinds. 



Point two I did start on a few weeks ago, patching the holes up.  But then the Christmas tree went up, which blocks one of them, and with that any intention to smooth back and paint over right now died a bit of a death.

Well, I broke up for Christmas on Friday and pretty much all I've done since then is loaf around on the sofa desultorily browsing the Internet.  Which seems a tragic waste of precious holiday time, to be honest.  I remember that when I was living with my parents I used to set myself a little Christmas project - ordinarily something in the model making line of things - and it used to be a healthy distraction away from screens.  So I've decided, as an experiment this year, to bring it back.

I've set myself a goal then of replacing the pelmets over Christmas week.  I'm going to make up a piece of trim from a length of profiled skirting board, which is going to fit over the blind cartridges once the existing pelmets have been removed.  I'm also going to have to sand down and paint over the filled-in holes in the wall. 

That's going to neatly tick-off two of the rough edges and it's going to open the way to ticking off a third, and progress one of my smaller goals for 2026 into the bargain. 

[James Harrison]

I think I've taken this as far as I can, for today at least.



I took the existing pelmets off and exposed the blind cartridges.  Then I took the velcro off them.
Next I sanded down the patching plaster and gave it a coat of eggshell paint.  This needs six hours to dry, hence my 'done for today' comment. 



Meanwhile things are progressing with the timber profile.  I actually stained it last night, but it's still tacky now.  So I'll probably leave it for the rest of the day to dry out fully, and aim to cut and install it after Christmas. 

I'm also wondering if I can do something about the water stain now.  Might go and see if I can pick up some suitable sealer/primer whilst the shops are still open.

[James Harrison]

Well...



That was a bit of a struggle, and it's not quite how I intended to do it (but I can put that right after the festivities).

I 'forgot' that nothing in the house is square, or straight, or level.  I also forgot that if you cut a diagonal, the hypotenuse is longer than the opposite and adjacent.  My original intention was to cut the main centre piece square and the shorter end pieces on the diagonal, and butt them together. 

But the angles didn't quite work, and when I eventually got it close I found the hypotenuse issue.  After a lot of frustration I threw in the towel and just cut everything square.  Hence the gaps in the profile.  I'm going to make these good with some filler, later (much later).  On the plus side, I think I've learnt a thing or two that I'll need to remember for another project I'm planning for the bay window.   

I've sealed and primed over the water stain in the ceiling and that doesn't seem to have come back overnight, so fingers crossed that problem is dealt with. 

[James Harrison]

I spent the holiday period at my parents, and came back today.



Oh good, it didn't fall down whilst I was away.  I've now filled in the gaps, and the next stage is going to be to sand it down and then stain it.

[James Harrison]

And... done!



Much better. 

Stretch goal; repainting the sitting room ceiling. 



You might, just barely, be able to tell that I'm painting the ceiling in cream rather than white.  This is heavy on the eyes, especially trying to paint with the lights on, because until it has dried (and being viewed in natural light) it is difficult to see where I've been and whether patches have been missed.

Whilst it would be nice to get this finished by New Year, I'm not racing to meet an arbitrary deadline and if it takes a bit longer, well it takes a bit longer.

[Cora Courcelle]

I'm not sure that this really fulfills the criteria of 'a little Christmas project' James, but it does look lovely.

[James Harrison]

Thank you!

It would be nice to have it finished by the end of the holidays, but if it takes a bit longer it's no real hardship.  The real difficulty with painting the ceiling is access, I'm on a ladder and (because the steps are at fixed centres) either too  close or too far from the work.  And working away at it with a small brush, and using a colour that's not far removed from the existing white.

I've got a respectable portion of the work done, and I reckon if I could just knuckle down and spend a full day on it I'd probably have the back of it broken.  But that feels too much like a chore.   

[James Harrison]

Actually...







... it was surprising just how quickly the paint went on.  An hour last night saw a large part of the middle of the room done, and then another two or three hours this morning got the work finished off. 

At this point I think I'm calling a halt.  I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the last few days of my holiday without castigating myself (if I can) for doing nothing.

[James Harrison]

I think one of the nicer aspects of working in the spare room is going to be that unlike every other room I've dealt with so far, it's not a space that I need to be using on a daily basis. 

For instance, one of the factors why I felt a certain emotional drain during the 2024 and 2025 programmes was that the main focus of attention in those years - the bathroom and the master bedroom - were rooms that I had no choice but to use every day.  When the room is halfway wrecked and you know you've still got the harder part of the job to do yet, and that it's going to take months to put it back together, you pretty quickly start questioning
A) what possessed you to start in the first place
B) why it's taking so long
C) your ability to put it back right again

And whilst you can keep those thoughts at bay for a little while, over time they start to gain traction.  As they do that, your enthusiasm wanes, which makes it harder to find the motivation to get the work done, which means it takes longer, which lets the heavy mood get heavier.

By way of contrast, the spare room is one I can progress at a pace we'll call, charitably, 'as and when I feel like it' - if it starts feeling too much like a chore I can just shut the door and ignore it until the enthusiasm comes back. 

Case in point - I expect (famous last words) that the worst part of the job is going to be cleaning up the fireplace and surround.  I had an identical specimen in the master bedroom and we all recall that that took months to properly sort out.



I've made a start on it this evening, broadly following the same process as the previous one (except no cheap Dremel wire brushes this time...) I've given it a first dose of paint stripper and I've covered that up with clingfilm to try to encourage the solvent to hang around and damage the paint rather than just evaporate into the atmosphere.  We'll see how that goes tomorrow. 

[Sir Henry]

[snip]
At this point I think I'm calling a halt.  I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the last few days of my holiday without castigating myself (if I can) for doing nothing.

That aged well     

A happy and constructive New Year to you, sir (and to all your readers).

[James Harrison]

[snip]
At this point I think I'm calling a halt.  I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the last few days of my holiday without castigating myself (if I can) for doing nothing.

That aged well     

A happy and constructive New Year to you, sir (and to all your readers).

Well, I got bored 

Likewise, Happy New Year!

[James Harrison]

This is surprising.  You recall how it took weeks to get paint off the master bedroom fireplace?

This is the hobby room fireplace this morning, after being left sitting in paint stripper overnight and then being washed down and scrubbed with a wirebrush. 



And then a few hours later after I'd worked over it with a scalpel blade and got a bit more paint off. 



It's not finished yet - not by a long shot - but it's reached a point in a matter of hours that the last fireplace took weeks to get to. 

[James Harrison]

Happy New Year!

Forwards, into the seventh year of the project (I did say, back on page 1, that this was going to be a long-term thing...)

I've spent some time this morning cleaning up the side panels of the fireplace, and then I dosed the front with more paint stripper (really worked into the cracks and crevices with a wirebrush).  I'm now going to leave that a little while so it can do its thing. 

This is the current state of play;







I'm not going to be able to remove all of the paint of course but if I can get the whole fire to this sort of state I'll be very happy.

[James Harrison]

So, that's not quite all of the paint removed, but all of the gunk that can be reasonably reached.  There's still stuff lurking below the carpet line, but that's going to wait until the carpet is taken up (and that's not happening until the latter stages of the work because it will act as a handy dust cloth in the meantime). 

Next stage is going to be to start start cleaning down skirting boards and then I'll see if I can remove some stickers from the walls (which were there when I moved in 6 years ago...)

[Dragon Scientist]

it was surprising just how quickly the paint went on.  An hour last night saw a large part of the middle of the room done, and then another two or three hours this morning got the work finished off

Now that's a simple one. I had the honour of painting two ceilings with a rosette attached to it. In a 3.8 metres high room. Twice because the former lodger lived in there for 15 years, was a heavy smoker and didn't care for renovation, so I had to apply a nicotine barrier coat first before moving to the actual colour. It took me 2 days for the walls and 3 for ceiling and surrounding. Initially we had the idea to fill the ceiling between surrounding and rosette with a contrasting colour, but as time ran away, we just skipped that. You go a step up on the ladder and see a yellow spot on the stucco, another step and you can't see the spot anymore...

...anyways, looking good!

[James Harrison]

Sitrep.



I've found that the spare room was, at some point, replastered in gypsum.  So, that's a green light just to crack on with ordinary vinyl emulsion.  Which is great, because I've got a couple of tins of cream paint that are just sitting idle in a cupboard...

I can only work on an area about 4' wide in one go because of trying to move stuff around to clear space to get the work done.  So this is going to be almost painfully convoluted.  At this point, I've got the front of the chimneybreast painted, and I've cleaned the far end alcove to prep for stripping paint from the skirting boards and then repainting that part of the room. 

[James Harrison]

2 weeks into the 2026 programme and progress so far;

- I've got a little bit further around the room.  My intention is to get maybe halfway along the back wall, and then I'll think about removing a bit of the carpet and finishing off the skirting board in that far corner. 

- I've approached my first-choice contractor for the external works and am waiting for their reply.  I'm going to give them another week, then I'll chase up if I haven't heard anything from them. 

[James Harrison]

Another week down and in terms of progress...



Another 3' or so of wall finished. 
Each little section needs
-A first clean down with detergent to get sellotape and adhesive gum residues off the walls (because the previous owner's children put stickers and the like all over the walls)
-A second clean down with water to get the detergent residue off the wall
-The skirtings being dosed with paint stripper to start the process of getting them back to bare wood
-Then the skirtings need to be scrubbed down to get the paint stripper off and some of the paint off
-Before two coats of paint are applied to the wall.

And then when I've done enough short sections to make it worthwhile, I cut the carpet away and take that out, finish off cleaning the skirting board, and stain the skirt and the floor. 



Which leaves me with something like this. 

So it's taken about three weeks to get this first corner done, and I've now ordered some of my 'house standard' bookshelves and brackets from IKEA to fit in that alcove. 

As I'm intending to turn the room into my toy train and hobby room, I've also been discussing with other model railway enthusiasts about things that I need to consider to make the room usable for toy trains.  Such as
- more (and focussed) lighting
- more plug sockets
- somewhere for a modelling bench
etc etc etc

So - I think I have a plan to deal with those requirements, but it might mean that I get 1/4 to 1/3 of the way around the room and then have to stop until someone can come in and install the extra electrics I'm planning. 

[James Harrison]

This week then;



Firstly, that's another 3' or so of the back wall cleaned up and repainted.  I've got another approx 3' to go and then I'm in the corner.  Once I reach that point I'll probably stop a little while as I've got other plans. 



Secondly, I bought and installed some of my 'house standard' bookshelves ('house standard' because they match the ones in the library sitting room downstairs).  My thinking is that if I use repeated details and motifs like this it will serve to tie all the rooms together into one coherent space.  Not photographed is that I also bought some new plug sockets and light switches, and they likewise have the same brass appearance and bevel detailing as the ones I've used elsewhere.
 


Thirdly, installing said bookshelves means that I was able to dispose of one of the bookcases in the room, freeing up a bit of wall space.

I have to admit that constantly having to try and work in and around all of the books, fixtures and fittings in there is starting to become an issue.