House Renovation

Like most people these days when we bought our first home we searched for a cheap mortgage from UK banks and building societies.

We searched for the best UK mortgage rates on various comparison websites and found some good/cheap mortgage deals. Unfortunately as I’m self employed and lazy with my accounts (couple of years behind!!) none of the UK mortgages we found was suitable (all wanted proof of income).

So we kept hitting a brick wall when it came to finding a mortgage company that accepted the self-employed that didn’t have up to date accounts We did have a nice sized deposit though (£36K).

Prior to purchasing the house we are renovating (it’s taking soooo long!) we rented a property from Havelok Homes Housing Association for 5 long years.

We moved there through what’s known as a homeswap, basically you find another Housing Association tenant willing to swap with you. At the time of the move I’d recently started a new business that was going really well and purchasing a new property wasn’t far on the horizon, but we lived in Newhaven (East Sussex) and so to get more for our money (and because we didn’t like the south) we moved closer to our roots.

Anyone that’s followed my intermittent posts (sorry very busy with SEO consulting work and I’ve hurt my hip, so work ground to a slow crawl) will know we had our flat roofs replaced by a company called Rooftec and we had a few problems.

We eventually got things sorted, unfortunately one of the flat roofs started to leak (or more likely been leaking for ages, but took a while to show via a damaged ceiling).

We have a large flat roof over a 2 storey kitchen extension, the Rooftec system involved replacing the roof boards (though for this roof we agreed to let them overboard what looked like good quality OSB board) and then fiberglassing over the new wood. Fibreglass is used on boats, so in theory should be better than a flat felt roof.

Tags: Roofing

We planned to overboard the ceilings (meaning we leave the old ceilings in place and add new plasterboard over them) because the current old lathe and plaster ceilings (probably the original ceilings so well over 100 years old) are at the beginning stages of falling off in some rooms!

Near enough anywhere the previous owners had run water pipes over a ceilings we find problems, since this is an ex guesthouse with running water in most rooms this means most ceilings have problems!

Covering a few days of roofing work here.

Early Tuesday morning two Roofers from Rooftec (same ones we met on Friday, in the end they did all the work below) arrived at the house and started stripping the front dormer window roof. Would have took photos, but lost the camera!!

This is what they took off-

Their new OSB/Sterling board with associated fibreglass system attached (so they did at least overboard and not as I first suspected, just add the fibreglass to the original roof (so that’s not as bad as I thought).

Below that was what appeared to be a bodged overboard attempt with felt roofing. So someone had fitted a new flat roof over the old flat roof, though the wood used seemed to be a mix of various types!!

Tags: Roofing

All I seem to do is think about flat roofs this month!!

OK, Friday morning 8:30am ish Rooftec roofers give us a call (we are at home getting ready to go to the house) they are on site and can’t start the job without access to the electrics, so I tell them we’ll be there is just over an hour (it’s a minimum 50 minute drive, though an hour with son number 2 in the car as he gets travel sick :-)).

Would have been there at 8:30am, but the owner of Rooftec I spoke to the other day said they could do it without access. Plan was to turn up at around 10am when they’d made a significant start on stripping the flat roofs (I hate early mornings since I tend to work until 5am so an extra hours sleep means a lot to me:-)).

Tags: Roofing

One of the owners of Rooftec came to the house on Monday, showed him the underside of the two flat dormer roofs that had been done wrong.

He tried to convince me the roofs would be fine, apparently wet mushy roofing boards with black mold on them is fine, our kids are going to be sleeping in these rooms so it’s far from fine!!

It was obvious from his approach he knew it had been done badly, when something is acceptable, you don’t agree with little argument to rip it all out and start again without additions payment (I wouldn’t anyway). Although I hadn’t paid yet, so that was probably a factor.

Continueing on from the last post Flat Roofing by Rooftec (Glass Fiber Flat Roof) regarding the replacement of our flat roofs.

Ran into a big problem with the last two flat roofs (on dormer windows), the Rooftec roofers didn’t do the job correctly (looks like they fibreglassed over the old felt, which is the wrong way to do it).

We removed some plasterboard and discovered siginifcant water leakage from the roofs (long term roof leaks not new) as well, so someone from Rooftec is coming to the house on Monday so I’ll post what they did wrong and the solution then (got a lot of pictures to post showing the problems).

Despite the positive nature of this blog post RoofTec are not a roofing company I’d recommend, please read all the comments at the bottom and read other relevant posts before hiring RoofTec. It sounds like their guarantee is not worth the paper it is printed on.

A year later and the roof below has leaked in two places due to a design flaw in their system, or to be more precise not following the system they say they use on their website. This has had me on the roof several times patching small gaps which water can splash/be blown into between the roof and the main building wall.

When it comes to the plaster in the house it’s a mess, near enough all the ceilings are failing (the old lathe and plaster ceilings) and many of the walls that are plaster, not plasterboard have problems due to years of neglect.

I’ve never plastered before, closest to plastering is filling the odd hole with polyfilla, so I had no idea how hard/easy plastering could/would be. So we prepared a small wall, bought some one coat plaster from Wikes (10KG bag) and I tried to plaster a 4 foot square test area.

OK I have a hidden agenda posting this right now. Was checking the sites logs and had a hit from Google for “how to strip woodchip” and another for “removal of woodchip wallpaper”, so checked the SERPs in Google and this site is number 1 and 10ish for the two SERPs By posting this post about woodchip wallpaper we should keep those SERPs long term (that’s the theory anyway).

I guess the poor people searching for a way to strip woodchip wallpaper didn’t find the site too helpful, so I’m hoping a combination of our hard earned knowledge and maybe someone kind enough to comment on how to do it without replastering will step up (hint, hint :-))

Tags: Decorating

Have been too busy with work and the house (was there Wednseday and Thursday) to find time to write a post!

Finally our eldest son (14yrs old) is helping me. One of his younger brothers had punched him between the legs about a month ago which resulted in a very tender swollen testicle (OUCH!!!). So he wasn’t able to move for two weeks and Wednesday was the first day he felt able to help. At last some help and company, getting tired of listening to sixties radio DJs

The wife wanted to have a look at the house and so we all went on Wednesday (first time she’s seen it since we bought it). The wife and the two younger kids tried to strip woodchip wallpaper from one of the rooms, but didn’t do so well.

After the wash basins had been removed from the top floor I then had to remove the copper hot and cold water pipes that fed the basins and the PVC waste pipes that took the waste water away.

The pipes were laid under the original floorboards of the house, so I had to lift a few floorboards. This was made much easier by who ever installed the plumbing as they hadn’t bothered to secure the floorboards correctly after completing the job (who ever worked on the house was a bodge job expert, nothing done to a high standard)!!

Tags: Plumbing

The house is a former guesthouse, so most of the bedrooms (6 on the top 2 floors for starters) have a wash basin with associated built in wardrobe and under wash basin cupboard.

The quality of the work is very low for the wardrobes etc… (bit of 2 by 4 timber with thin plywood skin, the wardrobe hanger bar is a peice of copper pipe!) and we don’t need a wash basin in the kids bedrooms, they’d wet everything knowing our kids!!

So I’m in the process of removing them.

On Saturday I finished removing the last remenants of the three wash basins on the top floor. Thought it would take much longer than it did, but once I had the confidence to start cutting copper pipes it went quite quickly.

Tags: Plumbing

The purchase of the house hit a few problems on the way that others may learn from.

First mistake and it may seem minor when purchasing a house, but make sure the current owner of the house plans to remove everything you don’t want left there, and get it in writing.

This house was fully furnished when we viewed it, though no one had lived there for at least a year. Now the owner had listed on the inventory they planned to take all the furniture, but a week before completion it became clear he intended to leave a LOT of stuff!!