1. The foundations are injected with resin.
The first lot of work involved drilling into the foundations through the inside of the basement, next to the retaining walls. Then resin is injected in to strengthen the foundations.
Before this happened, we had to empty the garage, workroom and downstairs bedroom, at our expense. So a local removal company came and packed up and took everything away to store for us.
Above and below - the holes being drilled were up to about 5 foot long, the length of the copper rods. You can see the size of the drill bits below!
The covered over area outside the bedroom and workroom. The hose is for the resin injecting. The guys had their own generator as the resin is injected under high pressure into the copper rods, each of which is cut to a different depth, so that there are different depths of resin. You can see the metal rods sticking out of the holes and excess resin around them which was trimmed off afterwards, plus the rods are removed at ground level.
There then followed a gap in time as there was a mix up over the date for the tilers to commence - all the fault of one lot not talking to the next lot in the order of works to be done (all three businesses involved in the different stages were all under the same parent company). The first lot of guys left everything really clean, including the already filthy garage tiles - which were about to be removed, so they really didn't need to wash them - but I was really impressed!
2. The tilers commence
All these rooms had to be retiled as the drilling had to happen indoors, through the existing flooring. When I was first told what would happen I freaked thinking about what state my guest room floor would be in afterwards!! Then I breathed a big sigh of relief when they said they would retile the floors!
Tiles removed from the spare bedroom above (only to find some old tiles beneath) and garage below.
Self-levelling cement was laid in all rooms before tiling could start.
Looking through to our workroom from the garage.
Our tiles arrive! And that is a serious bit of kit, having a crane on the back of the truck. So handy.
Eeks!
It's an ever expanding crane! The good thing is that we got several brand new pallets to keep, whose wood will come in handy. (I'm planning a few little veggie beds for next year.... watch this space 😀).
Garage tiles are a mottled brown/grey colour - far more sensible for a garage floor which will get dirty with a car coming inside.
Outside the spare bedroom - the tiles are a beigey/grey mottled colour.
The guys did such a good job, love how they have done this step here.
We paid extra to have the tiles laid on the diagonal in the bedroom, as the old tiles were staying in the bathroom and were a slightly different size. This way where they meet it looks neat.
Not the bathroom! The entrance to the bedroom from the basement hallway.
I asked for tiled skirting too, as it's much nicer than the boring cheap white wooden skirting that was already there. (I'm going to repaint after Christmas - I hadn't realised how grubby the walls were without furniture in the room, and I did wash off any dirt from the foundation works).
3. Outdoor work commences
Onto stage three. First of all the rootballs of all those shrubs had to come out.
The big one was the bay tree. (It's sitting in front of a Tamarisk tree).
The grass got a bit scuffed up (it got worse!).
To be continued... 😀
No comments:
Post a Comment