Loft

Of late we have been trying to get both the loft and the garden in order.

We want to use the loft for storage so we want to keep the temperature more even inside the loft space itself.
So we have been looking at addition insulation to the pitch, as if we were going to use it as a room.  This will also help with the house as we were warned by the surveyor that the insulation under the loft boards was not up to current standards.
In addition the loft is only boarded in the centre so we need to finish that.
We chose to use SuperQuilt in the pitch as that seemed to be the best we could afford.
As we have quite a lot of stuff in the loft already and we want to finish the boarding we decided to tackle this project one pitch at a time (there are three pitches, front, side and back as we are have a semi-detached house).
I had already started to board out the back, so once that was complete we ordered 4 rolls of SuperQuilt, some staples and a staple gun.
We cleared the back of the loft, including the old water tank, ready to nail the quilt up and as we had the area clear for the first time since we moved in we thought we would just quickly check that the insulation under the loft boards was okay.  Only to find that it was not! Some bits were as we expected, some bits were very poor quality, some had no insulation at all and one section was filled with old expanded polystyrene ceiling tiles:

Fortunately there was an excess of loft insulation placed around the eves, which the surveyor had warned us that we should move, so we were able to use the excess instead.

We also had a hole in the party wall at the top of the pitch that the surveyor had advised us to put a brick in, so Kate had shown off her brick working skills:

The roll of SuperQuilt ready to go up:

The first strip, which took about two hours (despite claims on the website about it taking two hours to do the whole loft):

There is a beam running along the pitch about halfway, so we had to split the next strip along its length and sealed the join with aluminium tape:

Then we had to do the same again for the part of the pitch under the beam:

We had to give up before we had fully finished because the supplied staple gun was really crap and finally gave out.  We bought a new stapler at Screwfix the next day and were able to finish that pitch.

Easter Weekend

We have spent most of this weekend sat on the patio enjoying the wonderful weather.  Despite this we managed to get our bedroom ceiling skimmed and it and the walls sanded down.  It is starting to look okay.

Sanding down the ceiling proved to be a messy business though:

Now we have to fill the cracks in the ceiling with flexible filler, sand down and paint the woodwork and then paint the ceiling and walls.  I say we but what I really mean is that Kate will do the vast majority of the work (despite having injured herself falling over after lunch in Yo! Sushi on Saturday) while I bravely make tea.

We had visitors for Sunday Lunch, which gave a welcome break from the DIY and an excuse to laze about in the garden all afternoon.  Our friends Mark and Kerry who brought with them as a housewarming present a USB Barcode scanner.  No more having to type the ISBN numbers in by hand:

Decorating

Kate asked me to fill the cracks in the ceiling as part of the work she is doing to decorate our bedroom in our new house (we have been sleeping in the spare bedroom since we moved in).  On reflection it may have been a mistake to leave me to it.  The ceiling while not actually Artex'ed was covered in a thick layer of bobbly paint (about 1mm).  Sanding down and digging out the cracks in preparation to filling them with flexible filler left smooth lines in this paint.  I managed to get halfway across the ceiling before the inevitable happened and a large flake of paint just fell off.  Of course, I compounded this by poking at it and before I realised it I had a patch of bare ceiling about a foot in diameter!  It was at this point that I realised that it would have been a good time to involve Kate about 10 minutes ago.  After inspecting the damage Kate informed me that the choices were to either try and match it or remove the rest of the paint.  Well, I wasn't happy about the smooth lines or the bobbly surface and it seemed to come off easily enough...

After two nights of hard scraping I had managed to clear about one third of the ceiling.
I also came to the conclusion that I was not the first Idiot to do this as when carefully lifting a patch of paint (and it mostly came off cleanly) I found scrape marks that I had not made, frequently continuing on under paint that I had yet to remove.
Today, Sunday, Kate and I set to and spend most of the day (with occasional rest periods in the sunshine) scraping at the ceiling and we've almost finished removing the paint.

 Mostly done but guess what I am doing tomorrow night!

While we were having lunch I saw a heron sitting on out next door but one neighbours TV aerial: