New central heating, in pictures
As anybody who has been following 561's blog will know, we have had our central heating replaced over the last week. Mostly things have gone well except for the discovery of more exciting features of our house (cracks and woodworm).




We started by removing the skirting boards and lifting the (cheap) laminate flooring in the lounge, this turned out to be hard work, especially as the screws attaching the skirts to the battens were covered in what appeared to be epoxy plumbing putty rather than say wood filler. The laminate flooring was of the old, glued together type so (to my relief) we decided to abandon any hopes of putting it back down again and ripped it to shreds (this was fun after the hassle with the skiring boards).


In the process of getting everything up we found some interesting things including the 1980s majorette truck which fell out from behind the radiator and obvious signs of woodworm in some of the boards in the lounge.



On monday they arrived with the radiators and a large amount of pipe. We had to rearrange the spare room (again) to give them access to the floor boards not having finished unpacking yet, this was not much of a problem. During the day they put in most of the new pipework upstairs, including routing the gas pipe around the kitchen to get to the new boiler.


On tuesday almost all of the radiators went in except for the spare room. When they took the radiator out of the lounge, a number of exciting things dropped out including 16 matchbox toys, a child's slipper and a bart simpson doll.


Wednesday was mostly spent installing the new boiler and connecting it up the gas and it's new pipes, by the end of the day we had both heating and hot water.


Thursday was all about removing the old system, they took out the old boiler and rough-plastered the fire place (we might open that up again when we finish the lounge). Like me, the boiler was manufactured in Preston and around 30 years old and aparrently well onto it's last legs. We were left with a big pile of stuff outside the house which they came and collected on Saturday.


One of the installers noticed what appeared to be some slipping behind the wallpaper upstairs and suggested that there was probably a crack underneath which of course there was. Just one more thing to look at.


Leaving the house to one side for a few days, on Saturday I hired a petrol hedge trimmer and opened a new front in our ongoing war against our remarkably vigerous Leylandii (which I've now sworn to chop down when funds/time allow). Six hours and fourteen garden recycling bags later, the hedge had been placated for another year. In the process of doing one side I got a bit carried away and cut through a section of the chain-link fence, hedge trimmer didn't blink an eye.