Extension post #6 – week 5

This week has been VERY exciting. The walls have finally come down and we can now really start imagining the space

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Goodbye old kitchen

Last weekend, in preparation for the knock through, I smashed up our kitchen. The original plan had been to sell our kitchen dirt cheap/free for someone who could take it away and use it in their garage or summat. However, despite gradually reducing the price it was listed at online I got a grand total of zero messages. So I ended up taking a sledgehammer to the kitchen which actually turned out to be incredibly fun.

It’s now sat on a bonfire, RIP. Alex the plumber came to disconnect the gas hob and shift a couple of radiators in preparation for the wall coming down.

The knock through

This week was all focussed on preparing for the steels, knocking through, and hoisting the steels into place. The first step was to cut into the side walls of the extension so that the pillar that would support the main steel would be set into the wall. If they hadn’t done this we’d have a great big pillar protruding out into the room. By cutting into the existing walls, the pillar will only jut out by around 12cm.

With the pillars prepped for the steel, it was time to knock out the back wall. Every time I nipped downstairs to offer the guys a brew there was another section of house missing! They’ve preserved as many of the bricks as poss to fill in the current side door and for some future projects I’ve got planned.

After spending months trying to work out what the space is going to look like, we can finally see it. It looks way bigger than we expected, although that’ll soon change once there’s a kitchen and furniture in.

Steels

There’s definitely a certain amount of anxiety involved in seeing the back of your house propped up by a few acrows… So I was delighted to see the steels arrive on Friday, along with five blokes and a couple of ‘genie lifts’ to hoist the steels into place.

Turns out that a 5.5 metre steel beam is pretty heavy. It took all 6 of us + the genie lifts around an hour to get the steels up in place. I say 6 of us because I spent around 45 seconds helping lift one of them…

Once the main steel across the back of the house was in position, a smaller steel was added perpendicular to it over the wall that previously separated the kitchen from dining room.

One side effect of the steel installation is that cracks have appeared on our bedroom wall above where the house was knocked through. I’ve read about this before and apparently it’s quite normal so I’m not worried about it, unless they get any bigger! We’ll just ask the plasterer to sort it out when he comes in a couple of weeks and if for whatever reason the plasterer doesn’t do it, Haz and I are blackbelts in filling cracks so will sort it ourselves.

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We were like excited schoolchildren this week. Seeing the wall get knocked through and the full space opening up was awesome. The noise and mess are pretty horrific, but I reckon sanding our floors was worse.

Another busy week coming up with plumber and electrician coming for first fix, side door being blocked in, partition wall into utility being built and various other bits I can’t remember. Stay tuned!