Gulp.
Damn it.
While demolishing the master bedroom wall to open it into the attic, I came across this - I know it is a terrible photo but it was a very bad angle through a little hole made with a crowbar and in the dark - I will forgive you for having no idea what it you are looking at.
It is a swallow nest - complete with little babies chirping away... :(
It is supposedly very rare to have swallows nesting in a house here and we have several families - but I am guessing that this will be the last year for them as the noise and commotion might scare them away. I don't know much about swallows, but they are incredibly fast and agile birds and seem to work hard for their young. I hope they stay.
This is what I got up to today.
2000+ calories is not too bad to burn in a day and as you can see, across the three sessions where I was working, my average heart rate was above 100. It would have been a pretty good fitness day - if I hadn't eaten a couple handfuls of candies.
As said, I was opening the wall between the bedroom and attic as we are heating the attic space and turning a large part of it into a walk-in wardrobe (the door will be to the right corner). This picture was taken a little after I started as I had already removed most of the wood paneling on the inside. I was going to get a circular saw to make the job easier, but you might notice that there is a chainsaw in the bottom corner, which I used to cat the panels into more manageable sizes. The attic behind in this section is quite narrow (about 110cm) so it isn't suitable for a wardrobe due to the slope of the roof, but should make for an interesting feature in the room later.
The door to the left is the previous "cupboard space" - a small wardrobe that wasn't heated, which meant that in the winter, it was about minus 15C in there. Not very practical.
Once I broke on through to the other side, I took a picture to show what is going on behind the scenes. Those posts that are currently holding up the roof will be replaced by a supported cross beam and you can see that the wall and ceiling insulation has already been added to most of it. It is obviously very important to have decent insulation here. This will keep the house warm and reduce energy costs, as will the new windows over time. We have a new heating system too and there will be a centrally-heated water battery put into the closets once they are ready.
This next one I added because you can see the floor.
and now you don't.
We are replacing the attic floor to make sure that the interior and exterior floors are the same height and will be in good condition, since it is now becoming living area. Each attic (one either side of the house) is 20m2 or so and in this following shot you can see where it widens and this will become the walk-in wardrobe area. This wider section is about 4.5 x 1.6 metres and it will have open shelving of some kind. You can also see that there is a window (the new ones) in there too and on the other side of the house, there are two windows, one will be in the walk-in wardrobe area for @smallsteps, the other will be opened into a living area/lounge room space, once we open those walls up too.
As you can see, there is a lot of sawdust and the entire house is insulated. What was interesting was that even though this space was slightly open to the elements through a space in the roof (where the swallows were nesting) there was no sign of moisture at all and the thick floorboards were so dry they cracked quite easily when I was lifting them. Not easy easy, but easier than I expected.
The rubbish skip is close to full now with only wood and I am continually amazed how much wood I have pulled from what is a relatively small space. The skip is massive.
And look, I even had a helper for a short period today - Well, my wife was there for about an hour cleaning and doing a bit to load the skip (This is on the second floor and I carefully threw the wood out the window to save walking it down the stairs ten thousand times). Someone has to spend time with Smallsteps as even though she is okay to play by herself for some periods, I spent 9 hours working there today and a lot of it was too heavy for my wife to do that much, even with pink rubber boots. While this all looks like a mess perhaps, I see what it is going to become and I am looking forward to it.
Now though, it is time to call it a day and go to the sauna, as my body is filled with dust in places that shouldn't be dusty at my age, and my muscles are aching. I am not used to putting in such long physical hours consecutively and I think I am going to be feeling it tomorrow - which is great, considering I have to do it all again on the other side of the house....
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]