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Anyone out there do mosaic?
Or any other hobby that uses lots of tiles?
Cos I have just smashed down a whole wall of the buggers and there are quite a lot of little pieces of blue ceramic that would make a lovely Grecian or Roman sea on some floor in a villa somewhere :)
You can pick them up from our front drive if you want them...
The big annoyment here is that the previous owners, rather than do what I just did and spend days with a hammer and chisel chipping at tiles until one comes off so you can start levering the rest off, decided to just tile over the previous tiles. This not only meant that my job was all the more difficult (the reason the bonding on the adhesive was so strong was because it was bonding to more tiles not the wall and the double thickness did not help...) but our wall was apparently almost a centimeter thicker because of the tiles. Yes, we now have an extra cm of space in our kitchen. I wonder if this extra thickness explains the really bad mobile signal in there... :)
The only consolation is that this house is not old enough for the original tiles to be something like Regency or Victorian ones worth thousands to some collector or museum so I haven't just smashed up thousands of pounds worth of antique wall covering. Just in case, I did check... The date on the back of one tile says '1979' so not even as old as I am :).
I also have so far failed to find any satanic emblems, ancient indian burial mounds, portals to other dimensions or the fossilised remains of the previous tenant's children. According to film Law, I should have found at least one of them.
Surveryor came this morning to find out what the situation was with regards to the kirchen fitter not being able to carry out the job. For those who don't know, the fitter turned up yesterday, started breaking things up and then stopped as he percieved there was a problem with the plan. He claimed it would not fit and that there was no room for the pipes. He refused to do any more until the surveryor had been back to check the plan. He then left and has apparently now been assigned another job...
Surveryor took a look, measured things again, looked at the plan, re-read the instructions he had left and looked baffled as there was nothing wrong with them. The units fit perfectly in the space, exactly as he planned it, assuming that the fitter bothered to read the bit of the plan which read 'remove all plasterboard around entrance to extension and recover with a smaller space'. You see, the stench pipe is behind some plasterboard and this plasterboard is covering an area more than twice the size needed to house the pipe. If that is removed and blocked off squarely it adds several extra inches to the wall length.
As for the pipes, here he got sarcastic as the fitter had questioned where the waste pipes were supposed to go to. He told the head office when he rang them that if the fitter had bothered to look out the back door he would have seen a drain... He'd also said there was no room for the pipes behind the units. However, half the pipes need to be taken out, most of the remainder can be reconfigured to better fit the space and generally it would only have taken a little bit of intelligence to figure this out.
Anyway, we are currently in a process of waiting for confirmation of when the fitter is arriving again (or if we can get a new fitter who knows what he is doing...) and also taking steps to claim compensation for my lost work and other expenses incurred (take away food, for example).
Looks unlikely at the moment that we will have a working kitchen by the weekend as current estimates are start of work Monday...
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Cos I have just smashed down a whole wall of the buggers and there are quite a lot of little pieces of blue ceramic that would make a lovely Grecian or Roman sea on some floor in a villa somewhere :)
You can pick them up from our front drive if you want them...
The big annoyment here is that the previous owners, rather than do what I just did and spend days with a hammer and chisel chipping at tiles until one comes off so you can start levering the rest off, decided to just tile over the previous tiles. This not only meant that my job was all the more difficult (the reason the bonding on the adhesive was so strong was because it was bonding to more tiles not the wall and the double thickness did not help...) but our wall was apparently almost a centimeter thicker because of the tiles. Yes, we now have an extra cm of space in our kitchen. I wonder if this extra thickness explains the really bad mobile signal in there... :)
The only consolation is that this house is not old enough for the original tiles to be something like Regency or Victorian ones worth thousands to some collector or museum so I haven't just smashed up thousands of pounds worth of antique wall covering. Just in case, I did check... The date on the back of one tile says '1979' so not even as old as I am :).
I also have so far failed to find any satanic emblems, ancient indian burial mounds, portals to other dimensions or the fossilised remains of the previous tenant's children. According to film Law, I should have found at least one of them.
Surveryor came this morning to find out what the situation was with regards to the kirchen fitter not being able to carry out the job. For those who don't know, the fitter turned up yesterday, started breaking things up and then stopped as he percieved there was a problem with the plan. He claimed it would not fit and that there was no room for the pipes. He refused to do any more until the surveryor had been back to check the plan. He then left and has apparently now been assigned another job...
Surveryor took a look, measured things again, looked at the plan, re-read the instructions he had left and looked baffled as there was nothing wrong with them. The units fit perfectly in the space, exactly as he planned it, assuming that the fitter bothered to read the bit of the plan which read 'remove all plasterboard around entrance to extension and recover with a smaller space'. You see, the stench pipe is behind some plasterboard and this plasterboard is covering an area more than twice the size needed to house the pipe. If that is removed and blocked off squarely it adds several extra inches to the wall length.
As for the pipes, here he got sarcastic as the fitter had questioned where the waste pipes were supposed to go to. He told the head office when he rang them that if the fitter had bothered to look out the back door he would have seen a drain... He'd also said there was no room for the pipes behind the units. However, half the pipes need to be taken out, most of the remainder can be reconfigured to better fit the space and generally it would only have taken a little bit of intelligence to figure this out.
Anyway, we are currently in a process of waiting for confirmation of when the fitter is arriving again (or if we can get a new fitter who knows what he is doing...) and also taking steps to claim compensation for my lost work and other expenses incurred (take away food, for example).
Looks unlikely at the moment that we will have a working kitchen by the weekend as current estimates are start of work Monday...
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One of the reasons we've not redone the bathroom yet is the previous owner did exactly the same with some of the tiles here too.
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But at least there were no satanic symbols. Though I still have most of a wall to do...:)
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Or according to Doctor Who a message reading "Duck!"
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You know, I have yet to see blink... even though I am nerdy enough to recognise the reference. We were away the weekend that was on and I haven't yet been able to download it... Will probably get round to it before I get the box set at the end of this year...
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In a similar story my brother has found that his bath has no waste pipe - just a hole under the plug. It just drains out through the floorboards and outside through the wall. Yeep
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I did find a spoon under the waterproofing. It was one of ours we lost a while ago. Funnily enough we lost it about the time we were putting new waterproofing at the back of the sink...
I think your brothers inept plumbers beat ours by a small margin. The race is still tight, though. And I think we beat anyone on really bad DIY in general :)
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One of the flats we decided against buying had bare wires sticking out of a hole in the bathroom wall, as the owners had been planning on putting in a power shower but never got around to it and had seen no issue with leaving uncapped wires sticking randomly out the bathroom wall. They proudly declared they had done thier own wiring throughout. We smiled politely and left.
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Portal sounds fun. Maybe into Johnny Depp's or Sean Bean's head...
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(Anonymous) 2007-09-10 12:45 pm (UTC)(link)Only if you were living in America. And dependant on the tiles.
I could tell you the technical reasons, but it's funnier to be enigmatic.