Garage jobs

You might wonder why we are doing jobs in the garage at this stage of the project but we need to do some preparatory work so that we can put some new steel work under a couple of the old beams that hold up the first floor.  As far as we can tell, the old steels that hold up the floor and the roof are actually made of old railway lines!  These seem rock solid but they do have some surface corrosion on them. We have therefore agreed with Andy and Ross, the structural engineer, that we will clean them up and paint them and then put some new steel reinforcements under a couple of the key ones.  So, yours truly has been cleaning up the old steels.  We originally thought we would put some cold galvanising paint on these but it seems that this requires a bright metal surface and, although the old steels have cleaned up pretty well, this just isn't going to happen.  Plan B will therefore be a couple of coats of good old Hammerite, instead.

Meanwhile, Diane has been working on the end wall of the garage.  This is an old stone wall with some rather fragile lime mortar holding it together   As it is one of the original features of the property, we are keen to retain it "as-is" as far as possible.  For the past couple of weeks, Diane has therefore been chipping away at the loose paint so that we can do some a small amount of repair work before stabilising all the old mortar and re-painting it all.

Whilst we have been doing all this, Steve the plumber has moved the old combi boiler (it's pretty new actually - that's why we are re-using it) to it's new location on the back wall of the garage. This is the first stage in the creation of a new central "services spine" to supply hot and cold water and power to.the rest of the building.