Skips

We've just spent a few days clearing out all the rubbish that we created over the past few weeks while breaking down walls and taking up floors to see what was behind and underneath.

The first skip was 6 cubic meters. As we had a lot of rubble to shift from both houses, we decided to get a rubbish tube to go down to the skip. Installing this tube was a lot easier in planning than it was in doing. The frame to hold the tube is too large to fit up the narrow stairs, so we had to attach a rope and pull it up the outside. It's also very heavy and only narrowly fits into the small windows that we have. It took a while to get it attached but we managed it between the two of us. That was only the frame though, we had to get each of the tube sections connected one by one afterwards too. This turned out to be more difficult than the frame, it took longer but we managed this too.

After getting the tube set up, filling the skip seemed a lot easier. It was filled with mostly rubble from the building that it was attached to, but there was also rubble in the other building, and as the only access between the buildings at the moment is either in the roof or through the front doors, there were a lot of stairs climbed! We managed to fill that one in just over a day and still had a lot of material to get rid of, so a larger skip was ordered. This time 20 cubic meters. With virtually no rubble this time and most of the rubbish being larger pieces of wood that could be thrown from the windows directly into the huge skip, we managed to nearly fill this one in one day. We think that we'll still need one more 20 cubic meter skip to finish but at least we now have the space to do the rest of the work. Below we have a few before and after images. After taking a look under the floorboards, we found another tiled floor around 30 cm below the wooden one. We're going to open it up completely and use the height of the tiled floor.

There was a small cupboard set into the wall. There was a theory that it was once a doorway into the house next door, although we don't know why. So we removed it to take a look behind, and it looks like someone else did the same thing not so long ago and blocked it off completely.

The floor covering and ceiling tiles have been removed as well as the door frame in the middle of the corridor. Part of this floor will be lowered to be the same height as the room to the left.

One of the kitchens. The ceiling has been removed to reveal some really shoddy work and some water damage. We've removed the wall completely, part of it was water damaged. We wanted it to go anyway, but it had to go too. The kitchen units have just been removed and next is the chipboard floor.