First-time house renovation

lisal0u

Hiya,

latecomer - :T Congratulations on the job!

andrew-b - Your bungalow looks very smart now! They have done an excellent job!

TomsMom - Your garden is looking lovely! Looks like it will be very productive!

I spent the weekend painting and my arms ache a lot today! We bought paint sprayers from aldi that turned out to be absolutley hopeless! They were really loud, vibrated badly and dripped paint everywhere. I was quite annoyed because we'd spent ages masking everything up! Resorted to the paint runners (you fill the roller head with paint) and they were really good. Quite quick and no messing about with paint trays and not a single splatter or drip!

We are having the boiler serviced soon and asked how much it would cost to do a full chemical flush. It includes partially draining down the system, introducing X800 chemical system cleaner and flush out, then refil system and add Fernox Protector. The price quoted is £141.45 plus VAT. Is this reasonable and is it easy to do youself? I'm sure I read on here that someone had done it themselves!

Lisa

Shimmyhill

I was told to be wary of flushes on older systems - my gas man said that any pin holes (that have been sealed over time) or weak spots would turn to leaks ! Some of the rads here are quite old so decided to not flush it until i had replaced the oldest rads !!

Canucklehead

lisal0u wrote: »

Hiya,
We are having the boiler serviced soon and asked how much it would cost to do a full chemical flush. It includes partially draining down the system, introducing X800 chemical system cleaner and flush out, then refil system and add Fernox Protector. The price quoted is £141.45 plus VAT. Is this reasonable and is it easy to do youself? I'm sure I read on here that someone had done it themselves!

Lisa

Good afternoon: Your RGI would be mixing products from 2 manufacturers...best to stick with one. Sentinel strongly advises the use of a powerflushing machine with X800....you would be better off with X400. It can be a DIY task but as always, depends on competence.

HTH

Canucklehead

lisal0u

The boiler and radiators are only 4 years old so I'm hoping they will be ok. The reason I was thinking a flush might be a good idea is because the house has all been re-plumbed and also with us knocking down walls and plastering etc I though quite a bit of rubbish might have got into the system.

I haven't really got a clue about this sort of thing so not sure if thats a fair price or not.

TomsMom

Shimmyhill wrote: »

I forget who, but i remember reading someone else sprayed the timber in the loft - did you do just the roof or all of the joists etc ? Concerned about spraying around all the electrical cables.

Could have been us Shimmy. OH sprayed the timbers but as we were having an electrical rewire he didn't worry about the cables that were already there. He reckons that about 75% of the timbers were eventually ripped out when the loft was rebuilt, but as it only cost £25 for the tin of timber treatment he hasn't lost a lot of sleep over it :rotfl: .

I've taken a few more pictures of the garden today (not much else to photograph at the moment) so I might have a play around with the blog tomorrow when OH goes back into hospital.

latecomer

(Be warned this could turn into an epic post)

Wow looks like everyone has been rather busy over the last couple of days.

Shimmyhill wrote: »

I forget who, but i remember reading someone else sprayed the timber in the loft - did you do just the roof or all of the joists etc ? Concerned about spraying around all the electrical cables.

Twas me. I sprayed all timbers in the area including the sarking boards. I didn't worry too much about the electrics as most of ours is in the old steel conduit and hence it didn't matter. that said I did take care round the couple of exposed cables that I did come across.

Andrewb - what a difference that makes to the house. Looks fantastic! First time I looked at the blog update I thought the finished pictures were at the top and didn't think it looked that great. :rolleyes:

@lisal0u - we flushed ours through ourselves too. We ised Sentinel x400 and left it to circulate for about 3-4 days before draining down. We also removed all the radiators and flushed them through outside with a hosepipe. That seemed to get rid of more gunk than draining down the system. We then refilled and drained again.

@BB1984 - good luck in the new job and enjoy your week off. I'm planning on having 2 weeks of doing very little before starting the new job but that depend on progress in the bathroom.


Our progress has been slow but reasonably steady. Had lots of problems getting the bath/shower plumbing sorted out. Thought it would just take an hour on saturday morning but in the end it took us nearly 1.5 days! After much messing about FIL decided the channel in the wall needed to be deeper for the new tap so I dutifully dug out another bit of the brickwork to accomodate the tap. Then we went about trying to route the pipework to the new location. Hindsight being wonderful, at the end I realised that the best way to do it would have been 2 vertical channels but thats another story.

Last thing on saturday we attached the new tap and found that we couldn't get it to seal around the unions. Tried everything we could think of including about 20 turns of PTFE tape but still no joy. I decided it was the wall plate elbows we got from B&Q that were at fault and hence first thing on sunday we were off to Screwfix to get some Yorkshire fittings (and more PTFE ). They worked a treat so we finally got the pipework finished...... then the tiling was about to start and we found that there was a problem with the wall higher up and hence the tiles around the tap would need to be built out from the wall to compensate and hence off came the taps and we had to pack out behind them to approx where they had been to start with! Arrrghhhh.

Anyways once we got that sorted out , the tiling finally started. First tile took ages t get right but once that was on MIL made slow but steady progress. She is a perfectionist when tiling and every tile has to be right. Takes a long time for anything thats tricky but the finish is well worth the wait. Next problem we came across was the border tiles. We had picked some brown tiles which look like 4 small horizontal strips to run a column up the wall and give a contrast to the cream tiles.

The idea was to split some of these small tiles into the individual strips to use for the border. Great idea but also created some problems - main one being that the cutting wheel on the tile cutter was too wide and caught the edge of the tiles which damaged them. The score and snap cutter's wheel wasn't big enough to score into the grooves. I scored one by hand and then tried to snap but ended up with it breaking across the middle. OH went to B&Q and came back with a glass cutting wheel for the tile cutter but it was the same width as the normal tile one.

Finally decided the only possible way to do it was to cut through from the back by hand using the tile scorer and then use a hacksaw to start the cut down the groove and finally use the score and snap cutter to break them apart. Worked a treat although it took about 10 minutes per strip. Next problem was that the edges that it snapped along were not clean and hence wouldn't sit straight on the wall.

Gave up overnight and in the morning I decided to use the electric tile cutter to clean up the edges on these small strips as I couldn't see any way of getting round it. This works although obviously have to be rather careful as fingers and diamond tile cutting wheels dont mix. Took me ages to get the first one done but it works and we can now get on with tiling. Thankfully we only(!!!) need about 20 of these strips cut so I spent yesterday morning cutting enough to do the 2 walls around the bath. I then had to go do some job related stuff including dropping in my signed contract for the new job :j

By last night its starting to look like a bathroom. Its amazing the difference it makes when the tiles start to go on. I've taken some pictures for the blog but the camera batteries have died and hence I'll post them up later. I'm off to Dublin on a course for the rest of the week which is bad timing but should be good for the new job and it was a great deal. Getting back on friday night so hopefully going to get lots of progress over the weekend. Going to be taking the laptop to keep in touch while I'm away so you'll all need to post lots to keep me busy

latecomer

Could everyone post a link to their blogs as my links for them were all on the my work PC

thanks

TomsMom

latecomer wrote: »

Next problem we came across was the border tiles. We had picked some brown tiles which look like 4 small horizontal strips to run a column up the wall and give a contrast to the cream tiles.

We saw those tiles Latecomer, and they were high on our list when we were looking for our bathroom tiles. We were told by the tiler in the showroom that they were easy enough to cut, ooh they do tell a few porkies don't they! I'm glad you got it sorted in the end (and the plumbing), and respect to your m-i-l for how much effort she puts into getting it right. She could teach the builder who tiled our bathroom a thing or two. He had to do it as they couldn't wait for my son to fit us in, it would have held them up, but although he could tile he wasn't a tiler and I know the finished article isn't as good as my son would have done. He buttered the back of the tiles with adhesive for a start, goodness knows why when there were very large expanses of walls and no sanitary ware fitted, nothing fiddly and definitely not a titchy bathroom, and he should have applied the adhesive to the walls instead :rolleyes: .

I'm looking forward to seeing your pictures of the bathroom.

My link is here and I've got some new pictures (including one of the hob - how sad!) so I'll probably do another update sometime today.

Hope the course goes well.

Oh, and a tip for anyone whose CH pipes tick on heating up/cooling down and annoy you. This has happened with ours, the plumber (one of the builders, not our CH chap who couldn't keep popping in every time they needed him) laid the pipes so close together that when they expand/contract they rub against each other and cause the ticking. HAIR FELT. Comes in rolls about 3"-4" wide, £1 a roll from plumbers' merchants. Wrap it around the pipes so that it separates them. Stuff it in any other gaps you can find, even lay another layer on top of the pipes before screwing the floorboards back down (OH has enough left to do that when he gets back from hospital in a few days). So far it has made a great difference, not completely silent yet but much reduced and hasn't annoyed me too much this morning when the CH came on (it comes on about an hour before we get up). Hopefully by the time OH's finished we wont hear anything. Of course, you may already know this or your CH chap has already done it.

latecomer

Thanks TM. Garden is looking great BTW

Cutting the tiles really was a pain but its well worth it when you see them up. Pics coming soon as the batteries should have enough charge to upload them.

Spicey

Latecomer - good luck with the new job, well done.

Andy - Facias looking good, actually out side of bungalow looks great now.


Well still stripping wallpaper :eek: just master bedroom and bathroom to finish, so starting to see the end of the tunnel.
Just one problem- after sripping the paper it appears the walls have all been painted in this yellow paint, which is flaking and peeling. Anyone got any suggestions as to what to do, if I paint the walls I will possible have an uneven finish or forever be redoing when bits peel off. DH thinks we should wallpaper, but having spent the last 4 weeks stripping them its not something I am keen to do. Help!

Plasteres are back this evening and there mate thats doing the coving started last thursday, he seems to be catching them up (he was to follow round behind).

Having to wait in today (at rented house) as having new washing machine delivered, my last one died yesterday, it was only 3-4 years old, the bearings had gone so not worth fixing. So I decided to pay more for a better quality machine this time.