A-Z Challenge 18: Refurbishing

Normally, my skiing season lasts from Early November to 1^st of May, and then my handyman season starts and goes to next skiing season. That’s what it’s like to live in a 100 year old house; you automatically get a hobby, a handyman-hobby.  There are always things to be fixed, repaired, and maintained.

The last year has been somewhat different, because the handyman season that started last spring never ended. We have been refurbishing, and in fact, it’s still going on.

We ripped out everything on the 1^st floor, the ceilings, the panels on the inner walls, and the wooden floor. We removed all the clay and ironwork-waste between the bars in the floor, tons of it. In the old days this was used to block the sound between different levels of the house. It’s a really dirty and nasty job, not the kind of things you want to do by hand. We hired a company with a huge vacuum cleaner on a truck to do this.

Then we built everything up from scratch, insulating and leveling the floors, walls and ceilings, putting in water-borne heating, replacing the kitchen. I didn’t do all of this myself, of course. We hired professional handworkers to do the difficult things. All the easy and time consuming things, we did ourselves, like the demolishing, and cutting and putting in the insulation.

But of course we didn’t give up the skiing season (little boy would never allow it), so this winter it’s been going in parallel, the skiing and the refurbishing. It’s OK. I enjoy doing both.

(I try to take some pictures at every step of the refurbishing process, just to document what has been done. )