No more bedroom (April - June 2007)

Since April we have been sleeping in the living room. Needless to say, it's pretty cramped! The entire contents of our bedroom are either in this room, the attic or the tip. The computer sits on top of a chest of drawers containing T-shirts and jeans. It's actually surprisingly comfortable, and you certainly don't have to travel far to get a drink in the middle of the night!
What was once our bedroom is now a proper building site. We ripped out the south side of the wall between the bedroom and kitchen/living room, in order to build supports for the rest of the joists.
The demolition of this wall created lots of mess, and firewood! The amount of heavy rubble and loose concrete inside the wall was quite staggering. Around this point we gave up trying to keep the floors clean all the time. No more bare feet in the house. We do our best, but as soon as we do any cleaning, the dust comes straight back again. The kitchen/living room doesn't escape a dusting whenever we're working in the other room, because the wall between the two rooms has a big gap along the top and side. Every time we need to use anything - clothes, shoes, computer, kitchen items, books - it has to be wiped clean first.

The next thing to be removed was the carpet and underlays, revealing old, splitting floorboards underneath.
The back room is now completely open to the stairs, as is the bathroom. This is not a place for the inhibited! When one of us really does need privacy in the bathroom, the other person has to either go outside or stay in the living room with the door closed.

We took up all the old floorboards and discovered a maze of old pipework and electric cables. There was a huge amount of rubble lying on top of Claire's ceiling between the floor joists. We also found old junk left behind by previous builders, and even a chisel which we believe dates back to Victorian times!
New soundproofing
Disaster! For weeks we had been tiptoeing around the stripped out floor and being really careful to step only on the joists. Just as we were putting the new floorboards back down, I slipped and put my foot through Claire's ceiling! You can see through the hole to Claire's bed directly below.

We had to get an emergency builder to fix the hole, one extra expense that we didn't need. Oh well, it would probably be impossible to get through a DIY project as big as this without having any mishaps!

Wallpaper stripping. Our iron was sacrificed for this task, a small price to pay for getting rid of that awful orange.