Well, the holiday’s over and it’s time to focus on house stuff again.
One way to raise the value of our home, we thought, would be to install a swimming pool. We’d be the only house on Sheriff Hill to have one.
It’s currently filling up nicely, aided by heavy rain.
We’ve been decorating and once more have a functional bedroom.
A dozen or more years ago, I found an old enamel sign, buried in the garden. It’d had a hard life and parts had rusted away. But it’s still a cool thing and would have originally been fixed to the front wall of the house, in the days of its life as a shop.
For a while, the sign was hung at the top of the stairs, but redecoration resulted in its retirement to a dusty corner.
However, As of today, it now sits proudly in the bathroom.
The sign originally advertised a daily newspaper, News Chronicle. This went bust in the 1930s, so the sign’s most likely from the early 1900s. Beamish museum has a more complete version.
I’d imagine that it was relegated to the garden in the early 60s, when the shop moved from its long time newsagent role to one of general dealer.
Today saw new floorboards in the spare room.
They run the full length of the room and we’re a bugger to lay. But we now have floors without gaps.
Isn’t she beautiful? I said she because she will let me down one day.
I took no pictures of yesterday’s floorboard removal. While I did manage to create a path across the house, avoiding lifting the bathroom floor, the old floorboards in the spare room were pretty old, so they didn’t react well to my crowbar.
Which meant a trip to the tip was necessary, followed by B&Q for new boards.
I’m really not looking forward to putting it all back.
This afternoon, I removed some floorboards. Apparently, our boiler has an incorrect width gas pipe, which is unfortunately buried in concrete.
So, the new boiler requires a larger pipe and the easiest way to fit one is to follow a path from the front of the house, upstairs and through bedrooms, before returning through the kitchen ceiling at the back of the house.
In a bad situation, there’s often a positive. It was interesting to see that joists had been connected with pegged mortise and tenon joints.
After putting it off for months, today I started plastering in the bedroom.
The Worley Almshouses has apparently been closed for a few months. According to the bloke outside who said it was due to reopen a few days ago. He was meeting a mate from Malta there.Anyway, it hasn’t reopened yet. Even worse, a missed opportunity.
If only this had happened next year.Anyway, we found another Sam Smith’s pub, the Botolph Arms.
Beautiful.
This was a random purchase, but at least an Eels connection has been retained.
