Redwood Renovation

It seemed like a good idea at the time….

Take the chimney out, remove it altogether. Not just a chimney breast, or the stack, I mean all of it. From the chimney pot down to the ground. This would affect four rooms, as there are four fireplaces to take out, two on the ground floor and two on the first floor.

The idea being to create one large room on the ground floor and then on the first floor, using the space created by the removed chimney to have an en-suite to one of the bedrooms.

The amount of bricks, stones and rubble that has come out of this structure has been surprising!

Here are some pics!

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It’s an old fire range, around the mid 1800’s by the look of it!

The chimney was coming out and this was behind the chipboard. The original surround, which would have been cast iron, has been replaced by a sandstone surround.

It’ll be going on ebay really soon!

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The scaffold was completed on Monday 2nd December, some 6 weeks after it started!

By the end of Wednesday, most of the main roof and all of the small roof has been stripped of it’s covering.

If you have a look at the picture below, you can see the charred rafters on the right hand side.

This is inside the canopy and the area inside is quite dry. Just as well really, as there is nothing else to stop the rain getting in!!

Also, the contents of the house has been put into storage, so there is nothing to stop the inside of the house from getting stripped out!!

Progress at last, almost five months to the day of the fire, work is starting in earnest!

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After waiting nearly three weeks to get a price for fast tracking the electric cable shrouding, NEDL turned up at 7:15pm to carry out the work, in the pitch dark!!

The price for fast tracking the request, £250, was the original price mentioned almost three weeks ago, but we had to wait for the official quote, which was £250!!

After the fax was sent back to NEDL, they came out the same day! Or rather night….

Fast tracking creates a two tier system of service, those who can pay and those that have to wait!! I’ve been quoted around 10 to twelve weeks to do this sort of work, unless you pay the money!

Anyway, the NEDL chaps had the work done within 15 minutes, and were away sharpish!

So in essence, we waited almost three weeks fo the electricity board to confirm the price of £250 to fast track a job that takes 15 minutes to do, which they can get sorted the same day!

It took several phone calls and a formal complaint just to get the price confirmed. The mangement at NEDL got their fingers out, at last!!

Here’s a photo of the shrouding;

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At last, on 26th October, the scaffold starts to go up on the building.

It will take two to to three weeks to erect. It will have a pitched roof on top of the original roof to protect it from the elements, as the main roof will be stripped of it’s covering!!

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After the initial rush and madness on the 4th July, the fire day, it’s all gone quiet.

The loss adjuster from Davies in Newcastle made his initial visit on Tuesday 7th July and informed me that he needed to get a surveyor out to look at the extent of the damage.

On the Friday after the fire, 10th July, our next door neighbours insurers had arranged for scaffolding to be put up around the building. Their insurance company is Halifax, who seem pretty good, I wish were had the same level of service. On the Monday, they had arranged for builders to create a temporary roof and cover it with plastic sheeting.

Some of the tiles have slipped on our roof and the rain is getting in. We aren’t allowed to turn the electricity on until it’s been inspected by a qualified electrician. Not good!

Our insurance was arranged with AA Insurance, which I thought that it meant the we were insured by them, but alas, not!

We have one company for the contents (NIG) and another company for the buildings insurance (Allianz). It now transpires that the NIG insurance is underwrittern by RBSI (Royal Bank of Scotland Insurance).

On the following Tuesday, 14th July, Andy Hall of Davies Surveying Services came out to inspect the damage. After his assessment, he concluded that an engineer was required to create a bill of works and decide on the leve of repairs needed.

HPS building services arrive with Andy, to assess what short-term repairs are needed, so that we can get back into the property and out of the hotel. They arranged for an electrician to be on-site for Friday, to see if he can check the safety of the electricity and to repair the upstairs power/lights so that it’s reasonably habitable.

On Friday, two electricians turn up to sort out the electrics. After an hour or so, they conclude that it’s too much of a health and safety hazard to work in the loft, as there is so much water up there! They tell us it’s safe to put the electricity on in two rooms only. As such the house is still uninhabitable.

Keep in mind of course, that during all this time, we are still living in the hotel. Keving Cummings of Davies Loss Adjusters seems to be in no hurry at all to arrange for a static caravan to be put onto the garden!!

It’s a bit of a mess!!

Here’s some photos of the inside of the roof;

Be patient, they are high res!

Front of Roof

Charred wood!

Rear part

View from the main roof

I’ll keep the blog updated on how things are going!!

Cheers

Graham

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Yes, it’s bad news I’m afraid!

Next door had an unexpected electrical fire, which spread through to our roof. It took the firemen 15 minutes to break down the front door to get in!!

Here are some of the photo’s on the day.

Roof damage next door.

Major Fire Damage!

The door, after the Firemen used their 'key'...

Door with it's repair...

Luckily, it was the middle of the day and nobody was at home. It took four fire appliances, 90 minutes to put the fire out.

We got booked into a hotel in Durham city centre. We needed to get a family room, with having two small children and we were lucky to find one!

Then, lo and behold, 10:30pm that night, the fire alarm goes off! The kids were in bed and the wife was in the bath!! Oooh the irony….!!

Cheers

Graham

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Why pay a professional to do it, when you can destroy it yourself…??

At the same part of the house where we discovered the hidden doorway (and the fifty year old hidden message) is a downstairs toilet.

It was put in around the early seventies and is looking very tired indeed!

We are going to put a downstairs toilet in another part of the house, so this one can be removed, as it will widen the hallway and make a good entrance into what will eventually be the new kitchen.

Also, in the corner, opposite the toilet is a full height cupboard, which looks like it’s been there since the fifties, so that is coming out at the same time. It has no ventilation holes in the cupboard and it smells a bit damp, which will dry out once it’s had a bit time to breathe.

Most damp problems are caused by either water penetration or through lack of ventilation.

First thing to do is to remove the toilet door, this lets us move around a lot more. Then remove the architrave and skirting. As there is a built-in unit around the wash hand basin, that one comes out next.

Then, it’s a case of removing the gypsum plaster board, with a hammer, crowbar and at one stage, a shovel!!

It didn’t take too long, so after that I then removed the cupboard in the corner, which houses the electrical meters etc.

Here are some pics of the before, during and after.

I’ve also captured some of the work I’ve done on video and I’ll be editing it and then posting it on in the very near future!!

Cheers

Graham

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Or perhaps two…

We’ve discovered a safe!

It’s hidden in one of the bottom cupboards, in what we call the Major’s study. It’s probably been there for around 100 years. Problem is, we don’t have a key and I was looking in the built-in cupboard (some might call it a closet), in the hallway, at the back of the house, where there are a load of random keys, just hanging there.

After trying several different types of keys, it became quickly obvious that not one of them fits!! So it’ll have to remain locked for the time being. There’ll be nothing in it, so I’m not that bothered about it.

Whilst I was going back and forth with different keys, I did notice something about the cupboard that seemed a bit odd. The floor was tiled.

This may not seem the slightest bit unusual to most people, but, for me, I asked the question. Why go to all that bother of tiling a floor, when you are going have the door shut 99% of the time. It is a cupboard after all, it’s got several built in shelves at different heights, although it does have a full size Victorian panel door….

I discussed this with my wife, Michelle, who agreed that it did seem a bit extravagant to do this sort of thing on the cupboard floor.

So, being the sort of inquisitive chap I am, I decided that I would drill a couple of holes through the wall, to see what it was made of. Several holes later, it appeared that the back of the cupboard was a brick wall. Keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a stone built house, I thought that it was highly likely that this was an original doorway into the dining room, but was at some stage in the past, bricked up.

After talking this over with Michelle, we agreed that I should go ahead and remove the back of the cupboard and return it to it’s original purpose of a doorway.

One easy way to see that a doorway has been blocked up is to look at the skirting board. Usually, there’s a piece of skirting board pieced into the original to fill in the space where the door should have been. However, on the other side of the wall, the skirting board was almost in one piece!

After removing it, I found a Players cigarette packet, with some writing inside!

It has two names written inside, (J. Robinson, cannot make the other one out) the date (March 15th, 1950) and the quote of “What a bloody job we had!”.

A message from the past, very surreal!

Anyway, using the breaker, I got the brick wall down in about an hour, including removing the rubble as I went.

The new doorway is in the middle of the dining room wall and is just where I was going to put one! So a lot of time and money saved there.

The pictures below show the cigarette packet and the eventual removal of the brick wall from what was the hallway cupboard!!

All that’s left to do is put a new doorframe and door on the other side of the doorway, with the door opening into the dining room and not the hall.

Oh, the second hidden door…. It’s in the upstairs hallway, which is for the fourth bedroom. Ironically, it’s in the exact place where we were planning to put one into the fourth bedroom!! I found it the day after I found the first one!!

See ya later!

Graham

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Well, this week it’s time to get the chimney sorted and cleaned in the room that we are temporarily using as the lounge, originally it was called the morning room.

There are loads of newspapers stuffed up into the chimney space and I’ve already pulled one or two small bits out, but as I’ve done so, the amount of dirt and soot that’s fallen down has been pretty spectacular.

Unfortuately, we also found out that there have been quite a few jackdaws nesting in the top of the chimney, which, for one reason or another, got stuck and then died where they were! Here is a photo of two victims, now known as the Chimney Jackdaws.

When we had a look at the newspaper dates, it appears that it was blocked up in 1980. For what reason we’ll never know.

Gary, the chimney sweep did a great job of sorting it out and filled two black bags full of soot and around a dozen jackdaw skeletons….

Now that it’s clean, we’ve started to use the fire, burning our own home grown wood from the numerous logs that have been left lying around the grounds. There are quite literally dozens of them, some of them are piled together, others just left lying where they have been chopped off part of a tree!!

As for kindling, you only have to walk a few yards and you can pick up armfuls at a time, there’s absolutely loads. We’ll not be running out, anytime soon.

Well, this was an eye opener for starters and I thought that having a chimney swept would be a quick, straightforward thing to do. But not at Redwood Renovation, the voyage of discovery just keeps on rolling!

See ya later!

Graham

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