House Build 5

Now the house was fully built I got on with the time consuming but straight forward tasks of plumbing, wiring and decorating.
One of the most difficult tasks was laying the small tiles on the floor of the showers. I had bought shower trays which you lay into the floor and provide you with the correct fall in each direction towards the drain but laying tiles on this, not quite straight, surface was very difficult.
More successful was the purchase of an old cast iron bath which was in next doors garden, we had it re-enameled and it now looks great.

Some years ago I paid a plumber over £4,000 to install a new boiler at the Porch House. He did all the "easy" bits like running in the pipes and connecting it all up and then got an expert in to commission it. I could have done that so this time I bought the boiler myself, installed it, which took me three or four days and then got Steve the boiler man to check my work and commission the boiler. £2,000 saved.
In the picture you can also see the wood flooring being laid. Downstairs I laid ceramic tiles throughout, this was two weeks of back and knee breaking work.

One major investment which we took a long time over and several visits to different suppliers was the stairs.
The rules about the size and angle of staircases are, quite rightly, very tight but this constrains what you can do. We were thinking of having a spiral staircase with the aim of saving space but no matter how we configured it it always looked wrong so in the end we bought a more conventional staircase from Pears Stairs in Welshpool.
They were very easy to deal with and delivered the stairs as a kit of parts which slots together, the end result is very pleasing.

While I was busy in the cottage Gill spent days at home stripping the paint of the railings and then repainting them. Once she had finished we replaced them in their original position in the front garden.

By July 2016 all the work on the house was complete (we still had the garage to build as described on the next page) and we agreed that our tenants Lucy and Ben could move in from 1st August, 15 months after we started work.