Laminate floor laid

(not on the boat.) Some of what we've been doing here in Birmingham over the last weeks is sorting out a floor in a house we let near the Stratford Canal. What we're now calling a utility room is a monopitch roofed 18' by 6' extension behind the kitchen. This appeared to be an unfinished project by the previous owners of the house in that, before we attacked it, the room had no insulation in the ceiling, a garden gate for a door to the side alley and water pipes running diagonally across the bare concrete floor. Oh, and the window frames and the clapboard exterior wall were rotten.

A few years ago we had the rotten wood replaced with white plastic, the windows were replaced with double glazed units, then I insulated and pine clad the ceiling.  I installed lighting at the same time.

On Monday last week we removed the severely delapidated side door and boarded up the hole. Tuesday's job was the removal of the copper pipes from the floor and replumbing in plastic around the edge of the room.
On Wednesday we cut and laid the sheets of 18mm ply we'd squeezed into the car the previous week. And on Thursday - at last - we could lay the laminate flooring. Never having done anything like this before, I must say I'm pretty pleased with how it went.

And here's the finished result.

It's not perfect. We found that the concrete was rather uneven, leading to the ply sheets not lying very flat. But - fortunately! - the laminate on top seems to have sorted it out. There's just a small bit of 'bounce' when entering the room from the kitchen.

Our next job is to box in the pipework where it runs across to the washing machine. At some stage we will have to tidy the end walls, but that can wait.

Today we went to Yardley Wood Parish Church for the 0930 communion service and explored the extensive churchyard afterwards. This gave way to informal paths through a forest of fern, and then this vista of rosebay willowherb.

Immediately behind the camera is a steep bank down to the canal some thirty feet below.