Fixing our sagging floor

Finding (or admitting to myself) that the floor in the boys room was not in any way flat or level, was a pretty demoralising time. It happened at the start of a week off which I’d aimed to use to get the room all done apart from the painting; instead, I spent most of the…

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Building character?

Well, this seems like a bit of a problem. I’ve been sort of aware that the floor’s not been right but clearly a bit in denial about the whole thing… I put a level on it today and realised a bit late, that something should probably be done. The floor in here is 3.4m wide,…

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Laying slate

At the end of my last post, the floor was ready to tile, and our slates were all ready to go. I got sorted out with some adhesive, a 10mm notched trowel to make a good deep bed of said adhesive, some 5mm spacers and some grout. First up, since we’re using natural slate, it…

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Preparing to tile

We needed to replace our floor in the new kitchen, and decided to go with a slate floor since DIYing it meant that didn’t get too expensive. We already had to replace the floorboards, because there were quite a few missing and I wanted to save the good ones for repairs elsewhere in the flat,…

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Deafening

In flats, soundproofing is important. There are loads of rules about it in the building standards, but having lived in a modern flat and now in our Victorian flat, I think they did a better job of it 120 years ago. When it comes to soundproofing, mass is your friend. Lightweight materials won’t absorb and…

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Today is a day for taking up floorboards

We’re back in our flat now- a good long cleaning session on Thursday night let us move things back to where they should be so that we can now get into our bedroom- hooray! That means it’s time to ramp up the work pace again, with an aim of building the kitchen cabinets in a…

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We went dark

It’s been a while, but our flat has been a hive of activity for the last few weeks. We had an unexpected visit from my Dad, who helped us get back on track after a low point near the end of November when we thought there was no way that we’d get the room done before Christmas….

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