Shady Goings On

I’ve had my hands full these last days, but not with anything pleasant!

I stepped on a manhole cover at the front of the house and it fell from under my feet, and I went down with it. Luckily I was unhurt and in a way I’m quite glad that I fell down, otherwise I wouldn’t have found what was there.
The pit is about a metre wide and has a pipe across the bottom, the pipe had a 80cm hole running it’s length. It didn’t take long for me to notice the 10/15cm of raw sewage floating about at the other side of the pit.

This weekend we did have some other diy jobs planned, but this over-ruled the lot. Paul come round with some tools, materials and know-how on the Saturday morning and the two of us spent the morning fixing the broken pipe.

The first problem was that the break went right up to the pit wall. This meant that the wall had to be taken down, as you need something to connect the new pipe onto. Paul made a start on digging the other side of the wall out while I picked up some more materials:

• 1 roll Denso tape
• 4m plastic pipe
• 20kg cat litter
• Cheap washing up liquid

The next issue was that Paul found the main gas supply for the house, this runs alongside the wall to be removed. We as to be very careful not to damage it during any of the work. Also the main water supply to the house runs alongside the broken pipe complicating things further.
Most of the wall was removed with the SDS hammer drill, hammer and chisel and a stone cutting saw. This took most of the time as it was hard work in the small pit especially with the gas pipe being there.

Once we got down to the pipe it was a fairly easy (but very smelly!) job to bail the sewage behind a breeze-block ‘dam’ and remove the broken pipe section. A coupler was used to connect the plastic pipe at each end.
With most of the work done, me and Paul got cleaned up and had lunch.

That was Saturday and today I’ve been rebuilding the wall and making a trench for the pipe. I made a small wall and filled in the gap with pea-gravel and topped off with sand. Tomorrow I’ll lay a stone slab across the trench.

Last weekend we made a start on fitting the central heating. I’d already fitted most of the radiators to the walls and so we took up some floor boards upstairs and put the pipes in place. We ended up using PolyPlumb plastic pipes as the copper is really difficult to fit through the joists. We’ll use the copper pipe for running in-line with the joists (as you don’t have to bend it), dropping down through the ceiling to the downstairs radiators and the 30cm or so from under the floor to the radiators upstairs.
It’s pretty hard and dirty work so we didn’t get as much done as we hoped. Each joist the pipe passes through has to have a hole drilled for it, and of course the floor boards have to be cut and lifted in the first place.

Regular visitors will have notived that I’ve been a wee bit quiet on here recently, the reason being that we’ve been so busy working on the house.
So we have:

• Fitted a mixer shower
• Stripped the 3rd bedroom
• Started to wallpaper the third bedroom
• Papered and painted the ceiling of the third bedroom
• Painted the skirtings and doorframe of, yes, the third bedroom
• Put up curtains in our room
• Started to strip the 2nd bedroom
• Dug all the flower beds over and removed all the weeds and grass
• Fixed a leaky overflow on the cold water tank
• Fitted a gutter and water butt on the greenhouse
• Fitted a new back door

… and plenty of little jobs I can’t even remember.

Still on the list of things we have to do:

• Finish wallpapering the third bedroom and sink the sockets and switches into the wall
• Finish stripping the second bedroom
• Install radiators and piping in both the second and third bedrooms.
• Install a boiler for the radiators and hot water (actually we’re paying someone to do this for us :-o)
• Install radiators and piping to all the other rooms
• Carpet upstairs
• etc …

I’m hoping to have photos of all the above as we finish them, but this will not be for a while as we haven’t even set the computer up yet!

Here are a few snaps I’ve taken since we moved in our new house.

Here is the rear of the house (I don’t have a photo of the front yet). Rooms are (Left to right, top to bottom): 2nd bedroom, master bedroom, kitchen, livingroom. The small building on the left is an out building that we may convert to something else, currently it has a makeshift greenhouse on the rear.

The two photos above have been taken from an upstairs window, looking out to the back garden. The garden is quite big, great for parties and barbques, maybe not so great for weeding! We may put a patio in the far left corner as that gets the last sun of the evening, but that’s for next year.

This photo is of Steve and Jess who both the helped us move loads of out things across from out old place.