…finishing touches…continued…

Cosmetic pointing: I completed the small but time consuming amount of cosmetic pointing that needed doing to fill the cracks caused by cutting the openings through the internal masonry walls. This was a case of touching-up and filling cracks with a ‘carefully’ blended lime mortar that I made up from crushed up sweepings of the dried mortar that had crumbled off the wall, pit sand and some fresh lime putty. Read more on my cosmetic pointing post.

Tiling the window sills: I used left-over travertine mosaic & small brick shaped tiles to tile all the remaining windows sills – the kitchen one had already been done. I was nice to get back to tiling and to use up the tiles, adhesive and cleaning & coating chemicals that we had left over from the kitchen and floor tiling. I’m pleased with the finished job, even TC, who didn’t see the need for tiling the sills has expressed approval.

Painting the door frames: Although the internal doors have been in for a while now, I never quite got around to painting the frames. Priming, undercoating and glossing being three of my least favourite activities. But during February I bit the bullet and had a go at the first one – the door between the utility room and the kitchen. I wasn’t entirely sure which parts of the door to paint, which to leave untouched and / or which to whiten and wax so a proof-of-concept was in order. As it transpires, I think a simple white lining, frame and architrave looks best with the untreated, natural oak doors.

Flue Guard: I’ve been working on this for a while and have eventually finished constructing a guard to go around the flue that runs through the second bedroom. The purpose of the guard is to stop anyone (especially small children) from coming into contact with the flue when a fire is burning in the stove and the flue has become hot. I couldn’t find an off-the-shelf solution that exactly fit the bill so I made my own from perforated sheet metal, aluminium ‘L’ shaped strips and a wooden base with the metal parts attached together using a resin based ‘welding’ gel (basically two tubes of paste that you mix together, apply to the surfaces you want to join and allow to set). Hopefully it will fit the bill as far as building reg’s are concerned. The reg’s (Document J Building Regs 2010, section 1.45) state:

‘where a chimney passes through a … storage space … providing a guard…’

Photographs to follow.

A couple of interesting posts on the much neglected forum recently…

Justin is a cabinet maker looking to gain experience from a barn conversion – post on his forum topic if you think you may have an opportunity for him.

lornapotter is looking for options on how to open up the first floor of barn conversion that she is about to undertake. Waist high tie-beams currently make the space unusable. I attempted to point out some of the options, but I’m sure there are more – please take a look at the More head height required topic on the forum.

I originally thought that butterflies first made their appearance later in the year than this, associating them more with childhood memories of hot August days than the very start of spring, but apparently March is quite usual. Having spent the winter as a chrysalis, this little blighter was crawling around on the kitchen window yesterday morning as I tried to finally fix the kitchen window blind.

From Barn Conversion 2012

I also got the blind fitted, after filling all the holes I’d created in the plasterboard trying to ‘adjust’ it with a screw driver!

As I mentioned in my January building progress update, I’ve been pointing the internal cracks in the mortar of the exposed masonry internal walls.

We to put in two openings, one at ground and one at first floor level, from the main room of the barn into the smaller, two storey section that now houses the kitchen (on the ground floor) and a bedroom (on the first floor). These ‘doorways’ go through an internal wall that has been left as dressed stone on one side and was bag pointed (that is coated with a thin lime based sand render) on the other. The violence of cutting the openings had cracked some of the mortar so some touching-up and filling of cracks with a carefully blended lime mortar was in order.

From Pointing

I made a ‘carefully’ blended mortar from the sweepings of the dried mortar that had crumbled off the wall, lose pieces of mortar taken from the wall and crushed up, some of the original pit sand that I scavenged from the small amount left in a corner of the yard and some fresh lime putty. Scraping the joints clean, I carefully pointed with a small tool (pictured), then smoothed with a rag to get a more blended finish.

From Barn Conversion 2012

This, along with filling the edge between the masonry and dry lined walls with a flexible filler means that the internal masonry walls are completed (although the oak lintels could do with a clean, there’s a concrete lintel to cover … There’s always something!)

Having spent a few hours cutting out tongues (from floorboards nothing more sinister), lifting boards, rummaging around underneath them, padding and separating copper pipes with insulation, rescrewing and renailing, I discovered that in fact the easiest way to quieten down squeaky floorboards was to simply rehammer the heads of the nails that hold the boards in place. The boards had worked slightly lose over the last 30 years and a tap or two tightens them up by the half a millimetre or so needed to put them back into place.