The mill room renovation

Oops just realised that we never published this post - it has sat quietly in drafts since January!!!! Well here it is now....

Wow, don't fall over but this is another blog post within a week.  I guess it is the dreadful weather we are having that has driven us indoors so we are catching up on jobs.

In the Autumn, we started work on the mill room; we were in desperate need of a second living space as the kitchen was starting to feel small what with the dining table, dresser and a sofa in there and no other rooms except bedrooms.  We have another room to develop - the room we call the threshing room (in reality it is a winnowing room) which lies beyond the mill room and together they formed the "industrial" part of the building as oppose to the living accommodation.

These are the before photos albeit with the electrical conduits in place and new windows;

During Winter 2011/12 we had already replaced the suspended floor in the mill room; this is the floor that spans the mill wheel area under the mill where the drive is created to turn the enormous mill stones.  The previous floor was constructed from seriously heavy oak beams laid flat onto two veritable tree trunks set into the stone walls. Unfortunately they were in part rotten with gaping holes and no insulation from the flowing water below. Once they were removed we added further treated pine beams set into the walls and linked them together with cross beams to create a solid grid of beams.  Onto this, we laid boarding with insulation and a vapour barrier.  The other prep work was knocking down a wall that had previous housed part of the bathroom that we renovated in spring 2012.

The work was mainly the plastering of the walls, decorating, cleaning up and treating the ceiling, cleaning up of the mill stones and their support structure and the tiling of the floor with reclaimed terracotta tiles (these also needed cleaning).

The walls were the big job so we started rebuilding the window and door frame corners and covering the previous rough plaster (made out of mud and straw stamped together) with a lime mortar.  These photos are after most of the lime mortar had been applied (note the laser level for the new floor - the only straight line in the room!!!)

 

 
Before the plaster could be finished we needed to clean up the mill stones as we knew this would create masses of dust.  The clean up of the mill stones was tough - they are simply not designed to be a feature in a clean living room and they didn't give up the grime and plaster without a struggle.  Several dessicated rat and mouse corpses, countless wheelbarrow loads of old cereal detritus and centuries of dust and spider webs and the result was pretty satisfying.  Hey its about the journey man!  We discovered that the stones are made up of 4 pieces of flint held together with metal bands and plaster  - it solved the mystery of how the millstones had got into the millroom - in 4 pieces instead of the unmanageable stone in its entirety. We also uncovered some beautiful wooded axles inside the mill stones;

The painting was done in 4 coats of a very watery mix of white lime, water and wallpaper paste (to set it better) and it went on quite easily. We used a special varnish called a patine on the metalwork of the mill stones;

The ceiling and wooden structure that supports the mill stones was treated with insecticide and then two coats of linseed oil;

As we completed the decoration ahead of schedule, we decided to clean up our stock of reclaimed terracotta tiles and lay them on the former wooden part of the floor and on the concrete of the old bathroom floor area.

The clean up job on the tiles was a dog - it meant soaking them in 5%  hydrochloric acid for 24 hours then laying them all out on a tarp and power spraying them to clean the worst of the dirt off.  The dirt was old lime mortar, red paint and general filth.  Then came the sorting them into 3 sizes to try to lay the same size on each row.

We glued the tiles on to the wooden and concrete flooring using double layered high performance tile glue.  This is a big no-no for purists as traditionally these tiles are laid onto sand using a weak lime mortar but that method won't work on wooden boards so we had to compromise.  Finally we will oil the tiles with warmed linseed oil to protect them from spills once the entire floor is complete.
 

We didn't expect to get all the floor tiled but we did the majority of it before Al's parents arrival for Christmas.  Ruth and Graham drove out from the UK so we shamelessly took advantage of them and ordered loads of kit including 3 laminated glass panels destined to be set into part of the rebuilt wooden floor.  We already installed a projector light down there so the panels will enable a view of the water wheel and a future potential hydro-electric generator (Al's pet project) underneath the floor.

This room has really changed our lives.  Overnight we had doubled the living space and finally we have a lounge that feels homely and spacious.  When it is finshed with the glass panels in the floor and the final few bits of carpentry completed, it will really make the place. We also fitted a temporary dividing door between the mill and threshing room for the winter. Here is the (almost) finished product;