Ill

unfortunately I was ill on Saturday until today so I missed all work from last Friday onwards.

Flooring

I have started the flooring now that I have done all I can on the doors. We as a group have been working a lot with varnish allowing us to use natural wood grain to our advantage and I have used this effect with our flood. Originaly we were planning to use 6mm MDF to make our flooring but it either didn't get ordered or it was uses so i was left with ply wood which unfortunately bows when painted. I started the process off by staining the wood with one coat and by the time i had just finished one board i could then re stain from the dry end. this gave me the dark wood that worked very well with the rest of the room. once the varnish was tacky i then started to use a pen to mark out faint floor boards and i continued this until 7.

Overall work.

I feel really glad to be apart of my group. The fireplace is now done and all of the tiles have been stuck on by Fiona as I have been focusing on the doors. The doors are almost finished and me and rob have finally hung the first two compleatly although they seem to stick at the top. I am planning to sand this down some point soon. I am also ready to start the flooring. Most of the furniture has now been finished or is on its way to being done all that is left is the floor and the pannaling which seem to be the most daunting. perhaps that why we left them to the end.

Doors and Tiles

I have now been working on the doors for about a day and a half. The doors are built in very much the same way as the flats but all of the wood is laid flat. All of the doors are 8ft by 2ft to fit in the 4ft gaps. Unfortunately the gap into the study is off so badly the doors will never meet up so I had a chat with Andy and he suggested that we keep the doors open all the time. I eventual plan to stain the doors dark brown and Fiona has mentioned that she has an idea for the centre of the doors.

All of the tiles are now painted but we are trying to get the right amount of shine on them which at this moment is proving troublesome.

Fireplace, Curtains, London and Paint

I feel that my fireplace is coming along very well Fiona and I have finally base coated the tiles and Fiona has started to work on her exquisite Dutch imitated patterns that the Russians were quite fond of at the time. The tiles are white and blue and have specific patterns on them. The fireplace itself has finally got a top and bottom that have been routed to look nice. I have also painted the base white so that it blends with the tiles.

Four of us also went on a trip into London on Henrys suggestion so we can buy some cheap material for the curtains. After much haggling and cheekiness we managed to get the curtains for £130 which was the cheapest we could find in the area. I feel annoyed as others in our group don't seem to be happy with the fact that we spent £130 for curtains but I feel we relay tried and as henry said if we want to be serious we have to go to these places.

On a cheeryer noat the paint has gone up and I love the green.

Wallpaper

Today the wallpapering went up. To keep budgets down we decided to buy simple wallpaper and then stencil it afterwards. As I was concerned with my fireplace I stayed away from the wall paperers but I agree that their work is brillent.

The Rooms

Today we finally erected our rooms. We started with a corner in the study and tried to work our way out from there. Unfortunately we hit a hitch when we noticed that somewhere along the line we had miscalculated and made one flat to little. This became a big problem for us as we couldn't complete too much of the room until the flat was made. After the flat was made we hit another problem when we noticed that the floor was not level making our flats wobble and our walls rise. We fixed this by putting a door jam under one side and making the flats level.

While this was going on we needed to construct braces to go around the walls and stop them from swaying and wobbling. These were made by screwing two bits of pine wood together to form and L shape this is then added to the back of the flats. the large room needed two sets of braces while the smaller room needed just one.