garden office - access

The final part of the home office setup is twofold really - easy access to the garden and a shorter commute for me. We've been waiting to put french doors out into the garden for a few years now, but the room we want to do it from (my ex-office) hasn't really been available. Now we're at the point where the room is "resting" (as out of work actors would say), so we can finally get at the sacrificial wall...

We have a skip. We did our usual trick of putting all the metal out first, so it soon became almost empty again overnight (except for my old office chair, which made it out of the skip a few times, but always ended up back there again...). It was initially also filled with cast-off camping equipment, gazebo poles, spare awning poles etc (mostly also rapidly disappeared - but to be fair, most people asked). It was time to investigate the boxes of stuff that have been cleared off various desks at various times. Old PC World magazine disks, floppy disks (the little 3 1/2 inch ones, not the really floppy 5 1/4 inch ones) got chucked, old backup disks etc I kept (not that I have the software to restore any of them...) and a few Zip disks for nostaligic purposes (I still have a couple of working Zip drives). The rest is either electrical (including my old Handspring cradle) so can't go in the skip, or paperwork, which needs to be shredded. Long story short, we could have cleared those boxes out years ago and never missed them. I did find the airbed motherlode. We kept the most recently bought single and put the rest (two doubles and a single) out into the skip (weirdly enough, they're still there...). So the exit from the room of requirement was relatively clear, to allow the removal of the masonry through the house. Monday was due to be wet and horrible, so definitely a day for indoor work. We got the dust sheets out, knowing what plaster does when you apply an angle grinder to it. One main one across the room, sealing all the stored stuff safely away, then another kind of across the door, sealed down the "cutting" side and open behind the door, so we could still get in and out. At that point, I noticed that the angle grinder Dave had prepared was somewhat larger than the one I remembered. Bigger blocks, apparently. The existing one not up to the job. OK.
That's the point I left the room, waiting outside with the first aid kit, while Dave donned heavy duty dust mask, support belt, and hove to. It wasn't as noisy or painful as I thought, but did generate an amazing amount of dust (as expected). The door curtain wasn't as successful as we hoped so I was kind of pressing my body against the edge to clamp as much of it to the door jamb as possible. It was even more entertaining when Dave opened the window for the second cut. That seemed to go really well too, so he then decided that a third cut down the middle would be helpful for pulling out the blocks. That was it for the day, with Dave heading to the shower, shedding plaster dust as he went.
On later inspection, the 12 inch disc hadn't made it all the way through the blocks, so the SDS drill was going to be required to persuade the blocks out of their current location.
Tuesday dawned, Tomas was on a day off so we decided not to ply the SDS drill too early in the day. We started after lunch, eventually using the full combination of SDS drill, lump hammer, sledgehammer and crowbar to remove masonry. Tomas and I got to carry it all out to the skip (Tomas carried most of the heavy stuff, bless him). Once the dust had settled (again) I got to ply the Vax wet and dry (in dry mode) on the carpet and actually, the dust came up pretty well, so the carpet is going to be salvageable. It's going to need the wet function of the Vax I think, but it's definitely worth having a go.
So now, we just need to decide whether to remove the remaining cladding and polystyrene so we can chuck it all in the skip and install the door this week, or wait. We can take the cladding down to the dump in £3 lots, but it would be good to get rid of it. Might be weather dependent on the rest of the week.

No wonder it's so cold in there - the quality of the build is as expected, based on previous experience... The overly large angle-grinder can be seen here, along with the very effective Vax.

The window you can see is the one I used to look out of when working in here - you can see the attraction of having a door straight into the garden.