Redesign of inside of house

Not much to do on the boat in January and February so I started on the re-design of the downstairs part of the house. We bought the house with a lounge which had double sliding door access into the dining room. I changed this in the early nineties into a single hinged door access. This door was rarely closed and we found that the loounge was used as a thoroughfare from the hall to the dining room and conservatory. Eventually we got fed up with this arrangement and hence this project to close off the access door.

4 x 2's, three layers of giprock plaster board, rockwool and three coats of plaster each side later we had a solid wall instead of a wall with a door. This only left removing the dark brown painted dado rail,replacing the old brown painted pine skirting with new light oak skirting, replacing the window sill to match the new skirting and building an oak fire surround to finish the look. Oak skirting and sill was provided by MGM and Jewson (neither had enough good quality stuff to do the whole job) and I bought some kiln-dried brown oak from Fairlie sawmill.

Jim and Kenny are great guys at Fairlie sawmill and after a quick search through their kiln-dried stock we found the ideal piece for my new fire surround. When I got it home I cleaned it up a bit and sawed it into the 4 parts required to complete my design for the new fire surround.

This sawing process was a bit smoky and smelly because when I put a new band on my bandsaw to do the job I didn't notice that the band was coiled inside out. This meant that when I fitted it the teeth were pointing up and not down !! How it managed to cut 60mm brown oak like this I'll never know but it was a pretty slow job and I remember thinking that this sure is hard oak !! Stupid me - you live and learn as they say. I guess when I put a new blade on I will always remember to check the direction of the teeth. I only realised the problem at the end of the cutting process when I went to cut up one of the old bits of pine skirting and it started smoking too!!
Anyway, my thicknesser cleaned up the blackened edges of the "sawn" oak pieces easily and I proceeded to dowel the pieces of the fire surround together to make up my design. Installed it in place and gave it three coats of Tung oil to seal it and bring out the beauty of the wood.

Removing the old sill was a bit of a pain as I think the guy who installed it had a freebie that day on 2.5inch nails!

See the following slide show to view the finished rooms - sorry didn't remember to photo the build up of the wall and the making of the surround - the smoky sawing would have made an impressive photo!!

The oak skirting had to be drilled and nailed on as the modern "no more nails" products wouldn't stick it in place although I did use some to augment the drilling/nailing process. (Tip - don't try nailing oak without drilling as it will split).