Yee-har!

 

Yes, that is a big stack of imperial measure veneer blocks. And yes, they are the ones that we need for our house.  But the best bit?

...they are sitting at the bottom of our path, all ready to be put on our house....

Another source of tiles?

I received a tip-off yesterday morning about a Warren & Mahoney house that is set for demolition (thanks, Justin!).  I was on site within an hour to meet the foreman and have a look and see if we could use any of the materials for our house. Fortunately, the whole property was clad in the concrete blocks we need, so now our builder is (hopefully) organising the retrieval of enough to fix our place. 

I was also looking for the quarry tiles for our floor. I think I forgot to mention at the time, but when the underfloor heating guy came to mark out the coils for the floor re-leveling, he found a fault in the electrics of the underfloor heating. Not a major issue, but it will be eventually. The only way to fix it is to remove some tiles and dig right down to the coils.  So, we are not going to go ahead with that until we have a source of replacement tiles.  Unfortunately the house above didn't have any.

They came, they levelled, they left..

Well, despite my very low expectations, the guys (specifically Viktor from Sweden and his men) turned up on Tuesday to re-level the floor. A huge truck parked outside and offloaded the rig (which just looked like a shipping container to me), then they ran all their special hoses up to the house.

They drilled lots of little holes (hoping to avoid the underfloor heating coils)..

Then started injecting their special goop which spreads under the floor, gently lifting it as it goes.

There was a bit of a 'moment' when the tiles all seemed to start cracking:

 

But with a bit of fiddling, they managed to squish them back together so you can't notice:

 

 

Floors are a bit tricky to photograph, when it comes to levelling, but here is a before (it was down by 26mm in the corner there):

 

 ...and after:

 

Before in the living room (again, about 25mm):

 

...and after:

See? It's kind of hard to appreciate, but we notice it immediately when we walk in the room now.  And, the best bit is that the underfloor heating is still working....

Only one gripe - they were supposed to fill in the drill holes with grout, but were in a bit of a rush so missed some.

It's not repairs, but..

We are inching ever closer to work actually starting. The floor-leveling guy came yesterday, as did the underfloor heating electrician. Together, they marked out spots for drilling between the tiles (in basic terms, they will drill down into the fill beneath the floor and inject something that slowly and precisely lifts the floor). We are in big trouble if they accidentally hit the heating coils on the way through.  The actual repair is scheduled for next Tuesday.  I'm sure that it won't actually happen. Either the machine won't be fixed, or today's snow is bound to hold things up.

Of course we're not..

The machine for leveling our floor broke, and needs repairs. So we are not on tomorrow, as previously reported.

BUT in better news, the painters have said they will paint our house despite the cold, provided we wrap the whole thing (including scaffolding) in some sort of plastic wrap to keep it warm. True story.