Idle Thoughts

By late March 2006, the building work was about halfway through. The bathroom had been excavated out to a decent size and it was usable, in a rough and ready kind of way (provided you had a torch handy, and could whistle).

The next major initiative was to turn the tin-roofed store room

in the extension into a usable room, which I planned to use as an office / playroom. The major piece of work for this room was to raise the ceiling height by 30 or 40 cm. At the same time, install a proper external door and some glazed windows. Now, I have dome a little brickwork in the past but I know my limitations and installing a flat roof is well beyond them. The only two things I know about roofing is that it needs more than one person and it's a job for the experts. Therefore I was quite happy for the builders to take the lead on this one, too. The picture below gives an idea of what was involved.

As you can see, there is a new layer of block work above the existing wall, the new flat roof will sit on that. The wall of the room was also altered to allow for framed windows and a larger door. Quite why I ended up with a barn-door, rather than a one-piece is one of life's little mysteries.

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Update, 2009
One thing about the office. It suffers badly from condensation, probably due to the lack of ventilation. I have noticed on many trips back - particularly during or after the summer, that there are extensive patches of black mold on the walls and sometimes on the furniture too. While these are not structurally significant, they are a pain and I can't help thinking that the 100% humidity that my weather station reports for that room, coupled with the midsummer heat has contributed to a lot of the equipment failures I have experienced in the past couple of years.
In an effort to get some ventilation into the room, I installed a bathroom extractor fan in the north-facing (i.e. the wall opposite the one in the photo) wall. It's connected to a timer which runs for an hour every morning, at the time when the humidity has been at it's height. Time will tell if this works!