A shower, A shower.... My landing for a shower.

The problem with having ambitious ideas is that there is a great danger that you may also have the will power to try attempt to carry them out. The expression biting off more than you can chew would probably be one of the more apt sayings for phase 3 of the Great Old Bakery renovations and 'so called' improvements.

Here are a couple of photos of the upstairs landing. In the first you can see through a door way into one of the smaller bedrooms. The second photo shows the same landing with the same bedroom door on the left only this time it is closed.    

 

It is here that we planned to squeeze in a new bathroom. We would demolish the wall with the fire exit sign on it and rebuild the same about 4' further back into the room. Then we would build a wall effectively partitioning off a room size area on the bigger landing and creating a small corridor. Again, have a look at the two plans on my Blog of the 14th December. 

  

Once again I had to commence the project with my sturdy hammer and an old screw driver by attacking the wall that had to be demolished. As before the wall was made from wood studs covered with chipboard that clung to the studs with a passion. I bashed, I crashed and smashed and slashed. I banged and twanged and clanged and I humped, thumped, cursed and grumped and yet another wall came tumbling down. 

We were now ready to commence the re-build and to create a new bathroom. Well actually we would not have a bath in there just a shower, loo and sink.

The small black pipe just visible, on the left hand side of this photo, that disappears into the floor was later to cause  my kitchen ceiling to incur a small seismic shift but more of that later.

With the wall now completely removed the bedroom became an unusually long 'galley' bedroom and just a little exposed.               Under the old carpet and underlay there were several pages of newspapers dating back to 1976. A copy of the Sun had a photo of Jim Callaghan and a headline "Jim declares war on Maggie!" I wonder who won?   Below these some 1970's style lino lay stuck with some bitumen like substance which is practically impossible to remove.        I was 16 back in '76 and had just moved to Birmingham with my parents. My exam results were horrendous and I did an extra year in college to try to improve the situation finishing just months before the Winter of discontent started to blow in.
To me this was a dark and gloomy era being turned down for job after job, it seemed to me that every single person in the country that actually had a job was on bloody strike!    Even Pans People were to leave Top of The Pops, it was indeed a dark time.  However we still had the iconic Bohemian Rhapsody blasting us into '76 and of course my hormones were being prodded by the stunning girls of Abba. Corrrrr...  It is also easy to forget that despite the strikes and financial crisis we had Concorde make it's first commercial flight in that year and even more amazingly the first prototype Space Shuttle, The Enterprise, was rolled out for us all to see. Here is a great Pup quiz question... to the nearest 5 how many times did The Enterprise go into space?
So anyway the world was, at that time, a hub bub of crazyness just as it is now and just as the retired vicar was renovating The Old Bakery then so we are doing now. I am resolved to hide some little time bombs of our own for the next foolish person to work on this building.


I came across another of these time capsules when I pulled a piece of wood from a cupboard above our stairs.

I noticed a piece of type written paper sticking out from the filler and it seemed to have a drawing of The Old Bakery on it not too dissimilar to the ink drawing that I had done. On closer inspection It was clear that this was a letter and so I attempted to extract it but it tore in half and was obviously a letter from the Vicar to his parishioners on his moving away from his old parish to his place of retirement here in The Old Bakery. It was missing half the page which was still embedded in the plaster. He had used this old letter to fill a gap by carefully folding the paper, concertina style, then stuffing it into a gap so he could fill the rest with a filling agent.

It was tantalizing that there was a letter filling in some more unknown information with regards to this building but I could only get the left half of the page. I looked to the right of this and saw another bit of paper tucked even further into the gap but with less filler around it and so little by little I eased it out, finally managing to remove it fully intact. I then unfolded the paper to find I could read the whole letter.






This is it's contents with just a few redactions (a word I had not heard of before the MP's expenses scandal) for the privacy of those involved......

This place is for ever giving up bits of the jig-saw which is its history.

Now with a blank page from which to work my builder began to form the room from wooden beams and plasterboard. Carefully placing the wall as per my plans,,,, gulp!

The plumbers and the electricians started their habitual burrowing under the floor boards to lay their relevant pipes and cables and soon the poor old floor boards had started to give up their ability to function as sturdy floor boards. It quickly became evident that I would need to lay a more solid floor if I was to prevent any movement of the shower tray when in use.

So my builder kindly took on the job of removing the knackered old boards and replacing them with some sheets of sturdy plywood. (The old boards were only half an inch thick).

I was washing up at the kitchen sink when I felt a little spray of dust hit my nose. Instinctively I glanced up to see from whence it had come only to find myself staring at a chunk of ceiling plaster about a foot long hanging about half an inch lower than it should, forming a distinctive crack as it did so.

I went upstairs to inform the builder who was not expecting such news. He carefully continued to remove the floor board that he was working on and then we quickly saw the problem.

It turned out that sometime in the last several decades someone had cut a floor joist right through but had made a make shift 'fix' by tying the sawn through joist to its two neighbouring ones. This in itself appeared to be a very foolish thing to have done. Skip on probably another decade or two and another person had been given the job of placing a waste pipe from my bedroom all the way through to the back of the house via this floor cavity. Well it appeared that this person worked out where the joists were and knocked a hole through the exterior wall. He then stuffed his waste pipe into the hole expecting it to run parallel to the joist but suddenly it became wedged as he fed it through. Unbeknown to him he had met the new cross joist that numb nuts had created previously. So what did he do? Well he chose to use brute force and ignorance and smashed his way through this reinforcing piece of timber which simply splintered into kindling wood! His pipe fed through, the reinforced timber compromised it was now only the crumbling floor boards that kept any form of integrity to these joists.
Another couple of decades and along comes my poor builder whom whilst replacing the dodgy floorboards inadvertently  lights the blue touch paper to this booby trap in the making for some 30 years and whoomf the lath and plaster ceiling takes a fall.

He is, however an excellent builder and has made a brilliant long term fix to the problem, however he has still yet to return to fix my ceiling which is planned for January.


Now we are getting close to the installations of the sinks, loos, showers and the hours of decorating all of which are the subject of the next blog....

WATCH THIS SPACE.


p.s.  It was a trick question as they never launched the Enterprise (named after the StarTrek space ship) into space at all. They had planned to do so but decided it was too expensive to refit the prototype ship and mothballed it instead cannibalising equipment from it for use on the subsequent shuttles, like a guy at a car scrap merchants salvaging an alternator for his VW Polo.

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