Day 6 - A Skip Full of Bricks (and timber)

Loads more work done again today, this time it's all on the inside, so not very easy to photograph the progress.

However, the chimney stack is now in the skip:

And the original roof timbers are stacked neatly on the drive:

The floor will be down in the early part of next week, and they'll be working out the position of the stairs on Monday. We have to have a minor alteration on the bathroom doorway before the stairs can go in. We're going to retain an inward opening door to the bathroom (hopefully) by putting the door on an angle. This will make it far safer, as it will be much more difficult to walk into the edge of the door when coming down the new stairs, or when walking out of what will become our elder daughter's bedroom.

Hopefully we'll be able have a look at the inside of the roof space at some point next week so we can start to work out the sizes of the rooms, and plan where the furniture and shower room fittings will go. It's ladders and scaffold to get up there though...

We've clarified a couple of bits on the build - the rest of the roof tiles are going to be coming off and re-laid at some point. The boarding that's on the new part of the roof will be extended under these tiles so that the whole roof is brand new. It's managed nearly 90 years so far, so hopefully the replacement (mainly completed using our existing tiles) should last just as long.
They're going to dye the mortar so that it blends in with the existing mortar (it's black!). When we have to have the house re-pointed at some point in the future, we can then decide whether we want to go with black mortar (and only do the bit below the new bit of wall) or do the lot in "natural".

We've started to do the inevitable comparisons with other loft conversions in the area. Most houses have the chimney on the ridge of the roof, which means that the rear dormer has to be set in a foot from the centre line. Our house has (had!) 2 chimneys. The one remaining chimney is on the front of the roof, so there is no issue with taking the rear dormer as far across as possible towards the party wall. This probably only gives an extra 6 or 8 inches on the internal size, but every little bit helps!

It's the end of the first proper week's work on the loft. The change to the house is amazing. We're just hoping the inside is as big as it looks from the outside!