Blocking a Doorway

The second half of the day didn't go too smoothly. We grabbed various additional supplied we had at home (like joint filler and screws) and set to work.

You're supposed to cut the steel studs using tin snips, that hardly worked at all at least with our tin snips - lots of cursing there. Once we had the U-shaped parts that go on the floor and ceiling cut I started to screw the first piece down. The screws we had, leftovers from a job my parents had done in 1987, were much too long and didn't really want to go through the steel so I first banged them in with a hammer and then used the drill to sink them. Once I had the first three screws in I realised I'd forgotten the foam tape - oops!
The picture is a bit blurry, my small camera has trouble focusing in some situations, but you can see how the U-shaped bit attaches to the floor. The C-shaped studs are then slid into these tracks and are supposed to be screwed together. That hardly worked at all, even if I managed to get a screw through the channel the stud just moved and bent. It's been a while since I last watched professionals build a wall like this but I seem to remember they used pop rivets rather than screws.

Installing the plasterboard wasn't much easier. The screws went through the board and that was it. Occasionally one went through the stud just like it was supposed to but most put up a big fight. Several times I was ready to throw my drill in frustration but chose not to although it might even have survived. With lots of cursing we managed to get each side boarded once, the fibreglass in without too much itching (including an emergency trip to the DIY store because we'd bought 100 mm insulation instead of the proper 75 and as it turned out we'd also gotten a type only suitable for ceilings. The stuff for walls only comes in MUCH larger packs, we hardly used a quarter of the expensive roll) and the joints filled. Tomorrow we'll add the second layer of plasterboard, fill and tape the joints and maybe paint (or just put some furniture there). Either way, once the filling is complete my work on that part of the project is done.

My brother got about half of the old floor out rather quickly but it was already late and around 8 a neighbour showed up and nicely asked us to stop so his kids could sleep. Tomorrow we'll remove the remaining bits and try to install the new floor down.
The construction of the floor was roughly what we expected and has some of the typical issues. For some reasons, probably mainly for sound deadening, the usual method for building floors back in the old days was a bit more elaborate than in most other countries. First they'd build a complete beam ceiling with 1" rough sawn boards or - for added fire resistance - entirely build the ceiling from logs  cut in half and hewn or planed on three sides, round side up. Since the logs are thinner than joists would be for the same span, those dowelled log floors are considerably more bouncy than regular wood ceilings.
On top of that they'd put a layer of some 10 cm of dirt, sand or whatever they had at hand, including broken bricks, pieces of china, tramway tickets, chicken bones from lunch etc etc. The actual finished floor is held by 2x3s floating in that dirt, not supported by anything else. Since the finished floor isn't really structural the builders in the old days skimped on anything you couldn't see and sleeper spacing is often a bit erratic and far more than you'd expect for 19 mm thick pine planks. In this case they were either pissed or one sleeper short or both as spacing varies from 55 to 115 cm. The largest gap is almost in the middle of the room and that's where the old pine floor was most damaged. Some of the tongues and grooves had actually broken because the floor was bouncy and not really supported by anything! So one of our fun tasks tomorrow will be to add one more sleeper by digging out dirt and somehow levelling the new timber.
Removing such a floor without disturbing the sleepers is tricky too because prying up the boards tends to pull up the sleepers too and then dirt seeps under them and they won't stay down. Today we worked as a team, some people just weighing the sleepers down to prevent that but we'll see how many people we're tomorrow.

Now I'm absolutely knackered and ready for bed!

Ugh

I'm back from a 10 day family holiday that could have been more relaxing - lots of driving, terrible traffic (German railways have become a bit unreliable but they're still a lot nicer than the motorways!) and too much in too little time.

Plans around here change every five minutes and the most important change is that my brother isn't going to move downstairs but two of my brothers rented a flat some 15 minutes walk from here. That does have some advantages as we now get spare rooms here so we can shuffle around stuff while we renovate and possibly even clear out the downstairs flat completely but it means yet another project!

The wiring was just redone but the walls need to be painted at least in some rooms and the floors are in rather bad shape. The smallest room is the worst, narrow tongue and groove pine planks painted brown and in spots worn down right to the tongue! We also need to block the door that connects the  large bedroom and living room, while it looks nice it won't be used and lets a lot of sound through. Yesterday we went shopping for tiles (some of the godawful 70s tiles in the loo were damaged when some plumbing work was done, thankfully the tiles and repairs paid for by the landlady). I don't really have anything to do with the place but I'm the DIYers so I took my brothers to the various stores and offered some advice.

Today we rose early (at least for a summer holiday) for another extensive shopping trip. Knauf UW and CW studs (sheet metal studs for partition walls), 8 half-sheets of plasterboard (2.6x0.6 m), mesh tape, some kind of foam tape that goes between the studs/base and top plate and the door jamb, fibreglass and last but not least 5 packs of 19 mm thick pine t&g flooring, 4 m long. At that point we could barely move the cart any more and it became clear that we wouldn't be able to fit all that into the family van. The large DIY stores run their own van rental so we asked about that, only to be told they were all booked out until Saturday. Then we asked about delivery but that'd have taken at least two days and one of my brothers would prefer to move in today or tomorrow. So we paid for our stuff and set on to making two trips with the small van. Just as we were leaving the store we heard someone calling out for us - someone had cancelled an appointment for a van and we could pick it up immediately!

My dad completed all the paperwork and since we'd just shopped for more than 250 Euros we got the van for free. It was a medium-size Iveco with a tarp-covered bed something over 3 m long so the plasterboard fit just fine and the floor boards didn't stick out much, well below the 1 m limit (if you exceed that you need to attach a red flag to the load). Driving it was annoying, Ivecos are odd beasts and being rentals doesn't make them any better but we arrived safely. Carrying the plasterboard to the third floor was a royal pain and we still have to get the five packs of floor boards up. My arms are already numb just from maneuvering the plasterboard! The stairs are a bit tight so the sheets barely fit and the floor boards are much longer! We'll have to lift them up and over the banisters every time we round a corner.

I'll definitely NEVER plasterboard anything unless I absolutely have to or unless someone else carries the stuff up the stairs!

In a while we'll leave again to close up the door (yay, itchy fibreglass!) and remove the old floor. That'll be a bit tricky because some of the boards extend under the plaster on the walls.

That Other Project

There's a reason why so little has gone on at the farm. I'm the oldest of 4 brothers and 3 of us are still living at home in a kind of flat-share arrangement with my parents. In late 1990 we were only two children but living in a rather cramped flat (bedroom, our room, living room) so my parents seized the opportunity when a neighbour passed away and rented his flat one floor below to use as an office. The place was quite a mess, no central heating, bits and bobs of wiring done between 1914 and the early 80s, mostly by people who had NO clue what they were doing and cosmetically a wreck.

There are three rooms (or 2 1/2 as the Germans would say), two facing the street and one to the rear. The large front room (about 4x5 m) had a 1970s vintage tiled gas heater, a HUGE beast that blew as much gas heating a single room as the combi boiler upstairs did for heating a space almost 5 times as large. Occasionally when the thermostat kicked in it didn't ignite properly and sent an 80 cm wide and 40-50 cm tall flame shooting out of the front. Quite spectacular and a miracle it never set anything on fire! The small front room is only about 2x5 m and didn't have any heat at all. The former bedroom has a tiled wood stove from 1932. With the connecting door open the gas fire was just enough to heat both rooms but it was far from ideal. The kitchen had something I loved as a kid, a wall-mounted catalytic gas heater. These things have a rectangular vertical burner made of some kind of ceramic material with holes like a sieve. When the gas is lit the whole burner glows a nice deep red. It had zero safety features, no pilot light, no thermocouple, nothing. Open the gas cock underneath, turn the big knob to "Open" and hold a match to the burner. Scarcely used it gave a unique smell of charred dust every time it was lit. Aaah, memories of the past!

Every room was wallpapered all over, including the ceiling. The living room had some kind of glossy, embossed beige paper, really fancy stuff! The bedroom had huge (think 20 cm) green flowers all over, the hall brown, green and yellow leaves on a grey background and the kitchen... woodchip! All doors and windows except in the kitchen were painted a dull grey and the furniture they'd left us was a weird yellowish green. All rooms had the original oak herringbone parquet but not all of it in good shape. The finish in the living room was dull and brownish the day we got there and the hall wasn't much better. To make matters worse. they hadn't finished the floor where they had a runner, probably to keep the runner from slipping. With the runners gone it looked horrible!

At that time it wasn't sure how long we'd be able to keep the place so my parents only put a minimum of effort into it. They had an electrician replace what he considered the worst of the wiring (if it actually was it must have been seriously shoddy because what's left is horrible enough to me), the bedroom stripped and painted, the living room and small room repapered (woodchip paper) and the hall painted over the wallpaper. The living room became the office, the bedroom was turned into our guest bedroom and the kitchen was dubbed our workshop, the remaining cupboards filled up with tools and materials.

In the late 90s the gas fire failed for the third time in a row and my parents refused to spring for another expensive repair of that useless beast, opting for a combi boiler and radiators instead. The plumbers who'd installed the heating upstairs were called in and spent three days running exposed copper pipes and installing radiators. My mom was less than pleased when she discovered that the coat rack in the hall had become useless because these geniuses had put a 90x90 cm radiator underneath. When she complained she was told "Madam, we have to use a radiator of this size, otherwise the room could remain cold and you could sue us!". Well, aren't there different sizes and shapes of radiators with the same heat output? They could've used a deeper model instead and they could've put it somewhere else. The kitchen was almost as bad but I'll show that later.
They also opened the hall floor in spots to run the pipes, with catastrophic results. Not that the floor looked that great to begin with (note the odd lengths and mixed widths) but the plumbers broke several boards trying to remove them and put everything back even more rattly than it'd been before. One board seems to have lost its tongue and groove and can almost be pulled out now. The original parts of the floor have rather big gaps too and are uneven so sanding isn't really an option any more.

We're all thrifty people so if things might be useful again at some point we don't throw them away. Unfortunately stuff tends to accumulate and ideas whether something might still be usable change over time. Bluntly speaking, the place eventually filled up to the ceiling. The small room became home of my vintage computer collection, my dad's double bass, part of our old toys etc. When my granny moved permanently into the guest bedroom in late 2004 the computers and toys were joined by boxes and boxes of books up to the point where you simply couldn't walk through the door any more. The workshop suffered the same fate over the years, although a path towards the window was kept aceesible since we occasionally needed tools and materials. Besides, the door opens inwards, so we couldn't fill up the room to capacity. When my granny moved upstairs in 2006 the guest bedroom received the remaining toys and lots of other stuff. The hall held our skiing equipment, half a tonne of printer paper in all colours of the rainbow etc. etc.

The big crash came when my youngest brother begged to move down there when he turned 18 last year. That meant clearing out the guest bedroom, the hall and the workshop-to-be-kitchen-again. Completely. We started that mammoth task last autumn and are still far from done. Twelve tip runs with the family van filled up to the roof and I think there's still lots of stuff left that'll have to go. Countless boxes of inherited baby and kid clothing were sorted through, binned or donated to a charity. My mom was showered with bags and boxes of clothes by everyone, some of it 60s or 70s vintage. We wore some of it but nowhere near everything - some of the stuff was too clearly designed for girls even for my mom's liberal tastes and some of it was plain useless but she thought the owners might want it back for future grandchildren. When our youngest outgrew everything she still clung onto it for somewhat superstitious reasons but anyway. Now she changed her mind and we drastically reduced the pile. I couldn't resist keeping some of the extreme retro stuff (think red corduroy overalls for toddlers) but I'd say we got rid of 9/10 of the stuff. The majority went into the bin and everything else was donated.

By now the kitchen is empty and the hall sort of so we're about ready to start some serious renovations. We should also clear out parts of the cellar to have them renovated so we can store paint and other stuff there. Currently that part of the cellar has a dirt floor, unplastered walls with crumbling mortar and uninsulated water pipes that sweat like crazy when it's over 20C outside. There's an old rotted broom cabinet in there (again inherited), piles of flower pots, lawn furniture (taken out of someones hand at the tip before it became city property), roughly 10 bags of mixed wood, mainly leftover parquet flooring, door casings, subfloor boards we removed during the upstairs renovation (now growing all kinds of fungi) and a stack of original window casements that were removed from the twin house next door - our windows facing the courtyard were replaced in the 70s and now sport lovely aluminium hardware instead of brass and I'd love to turn that back to original. Unfortunately the replacements do have a few serious advantages like being more raintight and easier to clean without climbing out onto a 15 cm wide ledge 10-12 m up in the air. Now I'm totally lost what to do with the old windows.

I'm also in the process of reducing the computer collection. Thankfully I found a collector who'll buy most of the Amiga and Commodore collection and the entire Atari collection but I still have to find someone for the Apple stuff. Today I'll try to copy some of the stuff from the hard drive of my broken Amiga 2000 by putting the hard drives and controller card into another A2k. Fingers crossed that'll work, the other 2k has newer Kickstart roms and I generally handle Amigas with velvet gloves because I've never really understood their inner workings. In a 1989 Mac you'd just stick in any SCSI drive with the proper ID, boot from the Utilities floppy, format the HDD, install the OS and it'd boot straight away. Installing a hard drive in an Amiga seems to imply chnaging miles of startup scripts etc. etc. - scary! I suppose that's partly because the Amiga wasn't really designed with hard drives in mind but the mac was.

Ooops...

 I just realised that I'd actually written this post but never published it! If you read the previous two posts you'll have guessed that some of the points from this posts have already been crossed off the list but I'll add a summary at the end of this post. Now for the original post:

A while ago I was actually told to update my blog, so it seems like I do have at least one reader.

Work on the house sat on the back burner for a long time, but finally there is some progress to report!

In 2012 I tiled the WC. We chose the same pattern as the bathroom, white 8x8 tile with a black 2x8 border below the top course and 2x8 black base trim. It's essentially modern but at least it has a traditional look about it and it was CHEAP. The floor is black and white checkerboard. Unfortunately, only after opening the boxes we dicovered that the black tiles were considerably smaller than the white ones! The store told us that we had to expect 5% size variations, but that was way beyond 5%. In the end we grudgingly went on installing the tiles using creative spacing. With white grout the end result looks a bit like black tiles swimming in a sea of white but black grout tends to get dirty rather quickly so I suspect we'll use white for the bathroom as well.

We also tiled part of the bathrooms walls, so the plumber could install the toilet and all radiators. So we finally have a working toilet! It still lacks some minor details such as a door though...

We then installed the final hallway floor and refinished it. I posted about the experience here:
Saving a Floor

Once the floor was down the plumber could install the boiler and water heater, so we finally had heat! He also installed the bath tub at that time.

In late 2012 work ground to a screeching halt as we first had a new heating system installed in Vienna and then had horrible water damage after a fire two floors above. Replacing the floor and fixing everything else in my bedroom kept me busy well into the summer of 2013.

We then puttered along with the house but didn't have much time to spare. Yesterday I finally managed to finish tiling the bathroom walls. The last fiddly bits around the door, the window and the bath skirt took forever! I spent two days just tiling the bath skirt and those fiddly bits, then got more than a third of the floor done in one evening. Our carpenter had installed some salvaged trim, but apparently his vision is slightly impaired, at any rate he managed to use three(!) non-matching pieces. Besides, he was - despite of having been told otherwise at least three times - convinced that the door was to swing out into the hallway. Long story short, I had to take all the trim back down.

Things left to do:
- finish tiling: Done
- grout: Done
- caulk: about 3/4 done
- strip and install door trim: done
- have door hung or hang it ourselves: mostly done, still needs a strike plate and lock
- paint: walls are done, door isn't
- install window handle
- have plumber install taps and sink: done, everything in working order
- scrub various paint and mortar splatters and dirt off the wooden ceiling: partially done.

Unfortunately the mortar and old paint bleached the wood so even if we get the ceiling clean there are lighter spots. Not sure what we'll do about that.

We did choose black grout and so far it's holding up surprisingly well.

Progress

Some thing actually got done in the meantime. We started caulking the bathroom (but ran out of silicone and didn't want to open the second tube before we can finish the job properly, i.e. after the door frame is painted). Also note that the wiring is finally finished! The lower single socket is for the washing machine and the double is for hairdryer, electric toothbrush etc. I'd have liked to have that next to the sink but that'd have been too close to the bath (60 cm minimum distance).

The bathroom door was a major pain in the rear. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before but it nearly made me give up. We somehow miscalculated the opening size and had to cut down the door to make it fit. The door has a rabbet (like all vintage and most new doors around here) so the curcular saw is mostly out. I gave the router with a rabbet bit a try and it sort of worked but didn't get too smooth, no matter what I did. It took like 5 or 6 passes and some work on the casings to make the door sort of fit (the walls were already tiled so I had to plane down the casings and then even cut down the tile slightly). Then the hinges gave me trouble. I'm using traditional pocket mortice hinges and that's a bit tricky. The hinges I had didn't really match the ones already on the door either so first I had to shorten the pins with an angle grinder. Then the hinges ended up being a bit off so hanging the door was quite tricky. Trying to fix the bottom hinge in place I broke two drill bits. Then I realised the hinges were too close to the opening and I had to cut down the door even further. The final straw was the lock. It's a door with glass panels and the stiles on either side of the glass are unusually narrow, requiring a non-standard mortice lock. Unfortunately some moron had kept the lock when he ditched the door. I even had some locks that are the right size but for the wrong door swing... ugh. We'll likely use a modern lock for steel doors which fits but takes a cylinder rather than a skeleton key (and costs three times as much). And that's not even all the trouble we had. That'd include ripping up the wall in order to sister the frame because one of the hinges had ended up in the aerated concrete block wall rather than in the timber.

That's the door I talked about in the last post. I think at the top right corner I used the heatgun for some reason but not sure about that.

While I messed around with stripper my dad and my brother stapled up the vapour barrier on the hall ceiling. Actually I should say nailed because the staples just shot through the plastic and they had to use nails instead.
When the plasterer came he just cut off everything below what he considered the finished ceiling level - in some spots above the goo that's supposed to seal the plastic to the wall. I hope he added some more before he plastered, otherwise we might get a nasty surprise in a few years.

Both the hall and kitchen ceilings are plastered now, that's the biggest news. I'd have preferred a full plaster & lath finish but the plasterer convinced us of letting him use Heraklith board instead of lath, pressed wood shavings mixed with cement. It only takes one coat of plaster so it's much faster to do. I'm a bit worried about cracking seams but they used fibreglass mesh, we'll see how that works out. I think Heraklith was invented in the 20s or 30s and had mostly replaced wood lath by WWII. It comes in thicknesses from 15 mm to 75 mm I think. The thinnest stuff is for ceilings with plenty of support and the thickest blocks can be used for partition walls like huge bricks. The narrow hall was done with 15 mm board and the kitchen with 25 mm.

We have another monstrous project in the works at the house in Vienna but I'll dedicate another post to that. Or rather a series of posts I guess.

Still crawling or just standing?

The beginning of a new university semester, along with the usual leftover exams from last semester (according to Austrian law you have four chances to sit a lecture exam, one at the end of the semester, one at the beginning of the following semester, one in the middle and one at the end, half a year after the first. It's your choice which one you pick, although the longer you wait the less you remember of the lecture and if you happen to fail one sitting, you can always re-sit the exam - provided you didn't fail the fourth sitting). That was quite stressful and kept me from working at the house.

Last weekend was dedicated to the renovation again but not much was done. First I tried the chemical paint stripper on the bedroom door. My verdict: never again! The manufacturer/distributor didn't bother to provide a proper MSDS sheet so I was left to guesswork, but my dad, who studied chemistry, said the stripper is probably ethyl acetate based. Not very toxic, but incredibly smelly and it can make you slightly dizzy.
Worst of all it didn't work. Not too well at least. The first side of the door was covered with stripper and then cleaned up with a scraper one hour later. The very top coat bubbled up nicely and prevented the solvent from reaching all the others! It was possible to remove the top coats of white modern oil paint with some (considerable) effort but the original grey linseed oil paint just laughed at me. Fair enough, at least it's smooth enough to paint over.

The second side was even worse. This time I covered the stripper with a polythene sheet and let it sit for almost four hours, hoping the paint would soften more. Ha! This side had three layers instead of two, the top coat(s) of white oil paint, an unknown yellowish layer and the grey linseed oil paint. The white separated, as before, the yellow gummed up and turned incredibly sticky and the grey didn't budge, not even in spots where the other layers had chipped off and I applied the stripper directly to the linseed oil paint. It took hours with a scraper, steel wool and paint thinner to get most of that crap off. That leaves sanding, some filling and painting.

I also fixed the attic door. Apparently some time after installation the door expanded and popped off the casing with the strike plate. I completely removed that, removed some plaster so I could move it slightly outwards and then nailed it back into place at a slightly different angle, moving the bottom away from the door by a few millimetres while keeping the mitred joint at the top more or less tight. While doing that I discovered that the door had an incredibly thick layer of paint and wood filler in spots (I swear, some of it was several millimetres thick!) that prevented it from closing properly. So I grabbed the heatgun and removed some of that. Turns out the door was originally shellaced and cleans up rather nicely! I ended up stripping half of it in just a few hours. I'd love to take it back to exposed wood but we'll see how that goes. There are three doors in that section of the hall, one was simply painted over the original shellac (perfect for stripping), one had the shellac mostly removed but enough left for easy paint removal and the third, unfortunately, has always been painted. Maybe I'll just repaint that a dark brown to match the other two doors as closely as possible.

No pictures unfortunately, as I was in quite a hurry.

Crawling Along

We're still working on the house but completion doesn't seem to be any closer. We've arrived at the stage of a thousand tiny little things, at least as far as the rear section of the house is concerned.

Here's what happened so far:

The bathroom floor is grouted. We used black grout and it was super-messy!

Getting all the black stuff off my fingers took TWO weeks! The floor is done except for the silicone along the walls.

We also did a lot of time consuming wood repairs. Thankfully one of my brothers actually had to do some basic carpentry practice at the university so he knew what he was doing to some extent. Our selection of tools is a bit limited. The table saw is an Aldi special from the late 90s and while I've used it to install over 800 sq. ft. of solid oak herringbone it definitely lacks features (fixed cutting depth) and precision. Our B&D handheld router was on clearance "as is", i.e. with a worn bit stuck in it and without any accessories. We do have a set of decent chisels and a Japanese saw that makes very smooth and straight cuts. This was used for cutting the tenons.

 

 Originally the door was assembled without any glue, only wedged mortice and tenon joints. I'd have liked to keep it that way but since we had to cut off one of the stiles right at the tenon we needed to use some glue. Since no one keeps 2 m C-clamps at home we used a few ratchet straps to pull the glue joints together. The work would have been a bit easier with quality lumber but we wanted to make do with what we had at hand and that was scaffolding planks - awful stuff for finish work! We had to use them for the door frames because they're essentially the only kind of 5 cm thick lumber wider than 8 cm (i.e. larger than a 2x3, 2-bys aren't standard in Europe except 2x3) and had some leftovers we used for the door repair. 2x3s would have done the trick but those we had were even worse. Here's the almost finished product minus cutting the tenon to size in the rabbet and sanding down the patch a bit with the belt sander. For some reason we cut the patch too short so we had to add onto the other side as well. The last patch was further up the door were a huge knot (3 cm in diametre or so) had fallen out during paint stripping.

Then we cut the casings to size, nailed them to the frame and I could hang the door, a first for me. As the door has a rabbet you can't simply screw hinges to the jamb. The modern solution is a screw-in hinge - essentially a 6 mm machine screw drilled into the wood. You can probably imagine the equation wood + machine screw + heavy door = trouble. Those hinges twist under the weight of the door or even rip out. The result is far too often a door that scrapes across the floor. Besides, compared to the old large hinges the modern ones look pathetic.

https://webshop.schachermayer.com/cat/pictures/derivates/4/103/377/DV004-ppic_Einbohrband_Zylinderkopf_270.jpg

That's why I insisted on using traditional hinges. As you can see these are a bit more tricky to install as you need a long and very narrow (1.5 or 2 mm) pocket in the frame.

http://www.rm-bauelemente.de/shop/images/cbandsk2cols3.gif

This pocket is made using a special chisel that is half chisel half rasp. Since these hinges are far more labour-intensive to install they fell out of favour in general construction in the 1960s and today only few carpenters still know how to work with the old type and have the tools. We did find a carpenter who hung two doors for us but he refused to do the bathroom and WC doors because he was afraid the frames would fall out of the wall. Long story short, after much hemming and hawing I bought a 2 mm chisel on eBay for little more than a cheap lunch and tried my hand at hanging doors. The first one was relatively smooth although I hammered the hinges a bit too far into the wood. That was easy to compensate by bending the hinges on the door.

The bathroom door was more problematic. If you look at the drawing in the second link above you'll see that the actual hinge is rather far from the opening on the left-hand side. Since we had mis-measured we widened the rabbet on the frame and that moved the hinges even further left. That means I ended up morticing the hinges into the wall instead of the door frame... which means we have to open the wall from the other side, double up the frame and replaster. *sigh* I also had to cut down the tiles so I could fit the door casings. First I tried a carbide file but that didn't work too well against the wall. Then I used a Multimaster knockoff with a carbide disc that had been sold to me as "good for tile". Needless to say that after roughly 60 cm of soft wall tile the disc was bare.

We already decided to rip out the kitchen door frame and widen it by 2 cm instead of playing this stupid game again.

I also discovered that every single door needs to have the paint stripped off. Some of the old paint jobs (or the prep underneath) are flat out horrible! One door has more than 5 mm globs of wood filler in the corners! It's a miracle the unknown painter didn't decide to fill in the panels completely to "modernise" the doors! Unfortunately more than half of our doors are from the same place and were painted by the same fool. Even worse, there are three coats of paint and the first two are crackled and chipping but in general rock-solid linseed oil paint. The heatgun doesn't do much but gum up the old paint. I bought a bottle of solvent-based stripper two years ago so I guess I'll give that a try. I just need to clear enough space and build some kind of large tub to catch the softened paint and stripper for disposal.

On the bright side the bathroom, rear hall, WC and small bedroom are whitewashed and look fairly finished!