It's been awhile since I've posted anything here - May, to be exact. Not all that much went on since May, all the same. I had just finished a small corner where the ladder up to the attic is last time. After that I got working on the gallery. In one of the previous posts I showed how I hid the cables for the electrics in the pointing in the gallery back wall. Once the pointing was done, I was able to get working on paintint up there. The brickwork itself wasn't all that great and I didn't pay anywhere near as much attention to the pointing as I had in the kitchen as I knew I'd be painting anyway. I used a whitewash paint (lime based) which was supposed to have some kind of additive to make it easy to wash/clean. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as easy to work with as paint - it tended to get very thick. Even diluting it a lot with water didn't thin it out enough. One advantage of the thick paint was, however, that it was easy enough to fill gaps with it that normal paint would not usually fill. Because the paint was not all that easy to work with, it did take quite some time to finish the job.
In the picture on the right, roughly half of the work was done - the easy bit. The brush was wrecked after that much so I ended up having to get more. No amount of cleaning would have saved it. There are four triangles in total - you can see only two of them in the picture. It was very hard to paint these - I was trying to get too much paint on either the ceiling or the rafters, but given the limited space for manoeuvring, this was not easy at all. After a couple of late nights, the job was done. I'll have to stick with whitewash for the future, I think, because I doubt any normal paint will stick to a whitewashed wall.
Once the back wall was done, we had to decide on what to do with regards access to the gallery. I have a fine new ladder for getting up to it, but that isn't really a permanent solution at all. The solution we were looking at was a hole in the gallery floor with a retractable ladder. I wasn't really looking forward to that work at all and to be honest the solution wasn't all that good. I got Stuckenberger over to have a look and he decided that we could cut out the chest high beams provided that the roof was secured above and below that properly. To do this, we had to expose the floor joists next to the roof supports, so that they could be bolted to each other. This prevents the roof from collapsing outwards. It was a fairly easy job to take up the OSB - I just cut it along the joist to make it easier to put back afterwards.
Stuckenberger had already measured, cut and brought me over new beams for overhead. I painted these with the same linseed oil paint that I had used for the rest of the rafters. It took three coats to get them the same colour as the other ones. Today, two of Stuckenberger's men came over and installed them. Between installing the new beams, securing the floor and cutting out the old beams, it was about three hours' work for two men. The end result will take a bit of getting used to, but it allows me to finish off the floor up in the gallery and to contemplate what stairs we will use to get up there. There will also be a railing up there, so that will change the look of it a bit as well. Below is a picture of the finished job (well, inasmuch as I still have to paint the cut ends of the timber).
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