Plus ça change?

Silence. It's the sound of hard work, at least in the blogosphere.*

A lot has happened since the last update. We’ll come back to our role in this progress in a later post, but let’s start by getting up to speed.

If you’ve been following the last posts, you’ll have a better idea about how the ground, first and second floors are laid out. So how are they now?

Well, the biggest visible changes inside the house are on the first floor. The dog peed floorboards have come up and are in the process of being replaced by new floorboards. This is a bit of a process, as some of the joists have to be braced and levelled; rockwool is being put between them; and the new floorboards are being laid on top of a plywood subfloor.

Old floorboards out!

Rockwool between the joists to try to cut down nosie transmission.

Plywood subfloor down

And next door.

Finally, these will go on top.

The other big change on the first floor is the bathroom. We’ll wait till later to do a full reveal of this, but let’s just give you a teaser or two. It is very close to basic completion.

Metro matt and a black and white cab...(inet).

Oh, these tiles. It took us a looong time to find them.

On the ground floor, nothing has changed at first sight, but on closer inspections there are a lot more sockets/switches and fewer loose wires than earlier. That’s right, everything on the first two floors has been wired up! Radiators have also been installed, but not connected.

It just looks like a messy store, but on closer inspection..

there's a radiator...

  

and it's almost fully wired.

Which brings us to…. THE BASEMENT! Oh yes, you’ve never seen the basement. Well, we’ll just see one room today but it’s the most important one because…..

Boiler room.

…. there’s a boiler! Half connected at the moment.

Up to the second floor. Not much changed. But that is about to change. As we spend our loose change. Confused? Don’t worry. It will come clear very soon. There is a hint already as we look up the stairs to the so far unvisited attic in the third photo.

Only changes - door blocked off and radiator in.

Ditto.

There's a hint to the riddle in those walls.

So that is where we are indoors. What about outdoors? You may remember we “took back control” of our garden. However, as is currently become clear back where I come from, that feeling of taking back control can be strangely temporary.

Did you stop to think “where did all those dog peed floorboads go?!” They now stink out the garden.

 Yes, it’s looking pretty bleak. But it’s probably something that a huge skip and a lot of hard graft can rectify. Who knows, maybe the same formula could find a solution to the UK’s current woes too.

What you might not realise though is that under all that rubbish, there is a new patio! Here’s what it looked like before we covered it all in rubbish.

When literally just finished. Changed, a bit, eh?

So now we’re up to speed. Next time we’ll do a short post on one of the bits we’ve been doing in this process.

* An infinitely watchable world cup may also have played a small role in that silence!