Rip it up and start again

We pretty much had the day off yesterday to recuperate after the very late night. My Nottingham mates, having stayed over the road with a neighbour, arrived for breakfast around 11.30 (about an hour after we'd got up) and departed shortly after 1pm, full of coffee and toast. We headed to the Trafford Centre to stock up on a few essentials (like thank-you cards!) and then crashed out in front of the TV with some chicken tikka wraps.

Having gathered our strength, today was the day for starting to rip-out the study. We're having it completely plastered out later this week and before that we have to take off the picture rail, skirting boards, radiators, sockets and switches, and any blown plaster.

Radiators. Yes. In theory, the removal of a radiator is a simple process involving turning off the valves at each end, undoing the connections on the radiator side of said valves, allowing it to drain and then lifting it off its brackets. In practice it's not always that simple, especially when the radiator is old, the connections are corroded, and there's only a fraction of an inch of pipe between the valve and the floor. So it was no surprise when I got to step 2 of the above process, and sprung the seal on the pipe side of the first valve.

The leak was not serious enough to call out an emergency plumber, but it demonstrated beyond doubt that the task was beyond my limited plumbing capabilities. If I loosened the valve too much I would have no way to stop the flow of water from the pressurised system and I knew I'd be in real trouble. I decided to wait and call in a professional.

So we turned our hands to the less demanding task of ripping out. The picture rail came out very cleanly, despite being nailed into wooden wedges that had been jammed between bricks. The skirting boards were not such a simple task. In many places they weren't only nailed to the walls but to the floorboards too. And on the internal walls, still the original lath-and-plaster, it was quite tricky to lever the skirting away from the wall without destroying the wall in the process.

Removing skirting often dislodged some of the plaster too. I already knew it was blown on the right-hand side of my window, but I wasn't prepared for how much of the chimney breast on Nikki's side was beyond salvage. Having checked with the plasterer we've agreed it will be easier to remove all of this and dry-line the chimney breast rather than try to patch what's there, so the rest of this will be coming off tomorrow. The plaster beside Nikki's window is fine, but the left-hand side of mine proved as bad as the right. The whole lot had to come off.

We took off the dowelled corners from both chimney breasts too. This is an original feature but makes it much harder to get a decent finish on the plaster, and we're not attempting a renovation here. The study will be a modern room filled with computer gear and such, so we want nice crisp lines.

All the plaster debris had to be shovelled into rubble bags and the nails punched out of the timbers to make transport to the dump tomorrow easier and safer. By 5pm Paul and I were both knackered, so we took turns for the shower and then tucked in to the wonderful beef bourgignon that Nikki had been cooking all afternoon.