I'd love to be a purist when it comes to my trade. I remember when I started, I told Andy (my friend who trained me) that I wanted to only do carpentry and joinery, he said that you can't say this - as to find enough work to pay the bills you sometimes have to do other things. The last two weeks I've been doing some of the other things (as well as carpentry).
The main purpose of the project is to raise the floor in a bathroom of an old Georgian Rectory. but this also involves fixing guttering, changing soil pipe, ripping lath and plaster off the walls and cutting a new doorway through brick wall. The building itself is beautiful and its great to be working on something so full of craftsmanship, but two hundred year old dust gets into places I didn't know dust could get!
Every job we've done has uncovered a little bit of history (and normally another problem), whether its finding newspapers from the '70s (when it was last renovated) or seeing that the timbers used to hold the timber grounds for the lath and plaster are recycled from ships and barns (and to think we think recycling is a new thing!)
This week should be a lot cleaner, today we got most of the joists in for the new floor and tomorrow my workmate should get the pipe work in so we can cover the floor with ply. I've only got to the end of the week here so I need to start to look for some more work next week, hopefully shouldn't be a problem.
