Category Archives: House

Jukebox

I’ve missed having a jukebox ever since I sold our old one following its death. Regrettably, my attempted repair was a failure and it was taking up a lot of space in a small house.

After a few years, I found a suitable replacement, several weeks ago. Due to impending decorating, the new jukebox was stored in the spare room. Unfortunately, decorating was delayed by the need to work on the van.

But, now, decorating progress has been made, allowing the jukebox to be mounted on the living room wall.

It’s actually older than the old jukebox, early 70s rather than mid 90s, but it’s a lot smaller and has passable built-in speakers.

Best of all, it has had a hard drive fitted.

Roof

Well, the holiday’s over and it’s time to focus on house stuff again.

One way to raise the value of our home, we thought, would be to install a swimming pool. We’d be the only house on Sheriff Hill to have one.

It’s currently filling up nicely, aided by heavy rain.

News Chronicle

A dozen or more years ago, I found an old enamel sign, buried in the garden. It’d had a hard life and parts had rusted away. But it’s still a cool thing and would have originally been fixed to the front wall of the house, in the days of its life as a shop.

For a while, the sign was hung at the top of the stairs, but redecoration resulted in its retirement to a dusty corner.

However, As of today, it now sits proudly in the bathroom.

The sign originally advertised a daily newspaper, News Chronicle. This went bust in the 1930s, so the sign’s most likely from the early 1900s. Beamish museum has a more complete version.

I’d imagine that it was relegated to the garden in the early 60s, when the shop moved from its long time newsagent role to one of general dealer.

Floorboards (part II)

I took no pictures of yesterday’s floorboard removal. While I did manage to create a path across the house, avoiding lifting the bathroom floor, the old floorboards in the spare room were pretty old, so they didn’t react well to my crowbar.

Which meant a trip to the tip was necessary, followed by B&Q for new boards.

I’m really not looking forward to putting it all back.

Floorboards (part I)

This afternoon, I removed some floorboards. Apparently, our boiler has an incorrect width gas pipe, which is unfortunately buried in concrete.

So, the new boiler requires a larger pipe and the easiest way to fit one is to follow a path from the front of the house, upstairs and through bedrooms, before returning through the kitchen ceiling at the back of the house.

In a bad situation, there’s often a positive. It was interesting to see that joists had been connected with pegged mortise and tenon joints.