Tipping point

It feels like one anyway. Today you can walk upstairs without the use of a ladder and it feels good. Today I finished the landing at the bottom of the stairs and the landing at the top, thus joining the two halves of the house together. Julia has been painting the ceiling in the kitchen and scraping the paint off the beams and I have to say it looks fab. Here are a few tasters:

Look you can walk down them: almost like a real house.

The lower landing or "pulpit" as I like to call it.

And the landing at the top. 

A small addition to hide the cross brace.  The stairs are not screwed together on the side you see, so I've put a 12mm threaded bar through the stringers to hold everything together.

Making the staircase; I had cause to dig out my dads old bull-nose plane. I've had this since my dad died over   20 years ago and in honesty never really used it in anger. My dad didn't really do woodwork in that he relied on my uncle Jeff who had his own joinery business. He had a few tools but not many...plane..saw etc. Then he decided to fit double glazed panels to the existing window frames in our house in Ipstones. For that you need to re-bate and for that you need a bull-nose plane. Well fitting the flooring to the landings using the T&G oak flooring is fine but in our damp cold house the flooring has swelled, meaning the T&G boards are very tight. The perfect tool is my old dads bull-nose plane. Just right to "ease" the tongue so the boards fit together nice. I did of course sharpen the blade to "within an inch of it life" and having done that it has been a god-send. The flooring, which is French production oak, I have to say is beautiful. When the floor is down in the salon it will look amazing! 

When this house was built in 1712, the guys who built it spent an awful lot of time and care making the house the best they could........hopefully we are doing the same!