I don’t have a photo of today’s work in the attic. That’s because you can’t really see what I’ve been doing.
In fact I’ve been doing some of the finicky work up there. I put on the plasterboard cladding around the door pillar (I forgot that last night) and then cladded all the exposed ends of plasterboard with plywood. I know that you are really supposed to put plasterboard across all the ends and then join them together with this “L” profile strip, but Terry and I talked about this last night and he mentioned that four-letter word “skim”.
Now my plastering technique is awful so skimming anything is out of the question, but wood is quite nice and I can do that.
After that I built the window inset for the hole in the wall that I made yesterday and then cut the perspex to fit. And it looks quite nice too.
Once I’d finished that I boxed in the window at the end of the room near where the woodstove is going to be installed. And talking of the woodstove, Liz and I unpacked it this afternoon (Liz came round to visit and to borrow a spare telephone as hers has stopped working for some reason). The stove is ever so dinky and even though I chopped up the wood into small 30cm (12 inch) lengths, I can see me having to cut it up smaller.
And the stove needs to be run in, too. You have to light a small paper fire and gradually increase the heat – gradually as in something like 20 days. It’s quite a task.
But I’ll be needing the heat very soon. The temperature outside dropped to 4.4 degrees last night and in the heat exchanger it dropped to 1 degree. Winter is here. In fact I nearly had the heater on in here tonight but I put a fleece on instead. I’m going to have to sort my nightie out if the temperature drops any lower.
Sounds like a cast iron stove. What you could do is to use tealight candles. Start with 1 then build up. They burn for about 3 hours each and they’re dirt cheap. I’ve seen bigger versions that run for 12 hours too.
Yes, I might well do something like that