Attic Plans

We have plans for the attic. While our house has an upper story, it's all within the roof - there's only one room up there, and the one window is in the gable wall. The room doesn't occupy all of the attic space, though - it goes from where the height rises to about one metre on one side to where it falls to about 1.5m on the other side. Now, that's uneven - because there's a section of actual "attic" there too, accessed through a door in the back of a built-in wardrobe. It's bare rafters at floor level - you put your foot through onto the plasterboard ceiling of the sitting room - and insulation more-or-less held in place with a sheet of clear plastic tacked to the roof rafters.

The access doorway is very narrow, and it's a pain in the neck (and sides, leg, and some other parts) to get anything large through, because once you're through, you have to twist the thing or hit the roof pretty much immediately. It's also partly full of stuff - spare mattresses, boxes of seasonal decorations, and stuff in storage for a charity bring-and-buy stall we run at conventions.

The plan is, essentially, to take out the dividing wall entirely, or as much as possible, and extend the bedroom floor and ceiling down into that space. We can then put screens or a curtain or something across where the wall was, if need be, but mostly it'll be storage space. A skylight will let in some light, the mattresses can lie flat, and we might even get a small desk or the like in there as well. And it'll be a matter of walking in, crouching a bit at the far side, but no more struggling through the narrow access door - and it'll make the master bedroom about 30% bigger.

The upstairs floor is chipboard under the carpet, and I think we'll replicate that in the soon-t0-be-ex-attic space; we can put down something nicer over it later on. The ceiling will almost certainly be tongue-and-groove panelling, which we both like, and which worked well in the bathroom. I'll need to leave access to the water storage tanks, but that can be behind a door, or maybe even a hinged set of shelves - access there won't be needed often.

A light fitting, or maybe some wall-mounted lamps, a socket or four, and it'll be a very nice extra space.

Long Project Is Long, But Complete

So, the downstairs bathroom is finally done. This project has taken a very long time to complete. Most of this was due to my doing the woodwork very slowly, over a period of months, in spare time here and there. Some more was due to doing the tiling ourselves. I am becoming convinced that except for small jobs, the piecemeal attempt is really not the way to approach them - trying to set into a task during an evening or weekend when you have other things on, or when you're already tired, is asking for trouble. And then the setup, bringing in tools, and the takedown all cut into the available time. Next time I'm working on something like this, I'm going to take a chunk of time off, and do it in one run.

So what did we do? Well, we removed the original bathroom fittings (more strictly speaking, my brother came in and removed them, blocking off pipes as necessary). The fitters from B&Q came in and fitted a new bath, shower, toilet, and sink. We tiled the areas over the bath, and then we fitted tongue and groove wood panelling on the walls. A few low shelves went in, to hold all the paraphernalia that happens in a bathroom. Finally, we painted the woodwork, in the Scandinavian style.

The new bath is much larger, and can comfortably fit two people. The new shower is a work of glory, even if it's not the self-heating shower we wanted; fitting that would have taken extra electrical work, which would have been very complex. The people from B&Q, aside from some problems with getting stuff from warehousing to us, and timing everything, were very good.

The tiling was painful, though. I am very close to saying that I will not do tiling ever again, but I think that might be an overreaction. The issue was, essentially, that the room does not possess any right angles, neither in the walls nor in the corners between wall and floor. This meant that with the best will in the world, starting from a level line (the edge of the bath), and a supposedly vertical corner, by the time we got to the next wall, the tiles and that wall disagreed strongly as to where "vertical" was. However, they're tiles, they're in place, and we've disguised many of the issues with woodwork.

The woodwork was slow. Part of this was tools; until quite late in the project, I was using only hand tools, and turning screws overhead by hand, when you're not used to such an action, can result in violent and peculiar cramps in the forearm and hand. Mitre cuts for the edging were completely impossible with the tools I had, so for that, we had to go out to a friend who has a table saw. And so on, and so forth. However, it's all in now, and I'm happy enough with it to let it be, even though there are things I'll do differently for the next project.

Pictures will follow, once I extract them from the camera!