| Once the builders had finished
the front of the shops it was down to us to complete the rest of
the conversion.
Spiral Staircase
Having decided on a rough layout inside we
need to remove the existing staircase from the big shop and install
a spiral staircase nearer to the centre of the room because of the
limited headroom upstairs. We had been lucky enough to spot a suitable
staircase on Ebay shortly before Christmas, we won the staircase
on late on Christmas day for £225, probably because noone
else was thinking about staircases after Christmas lunch. We travelled
up to near Keswick on boxing day to pick the staircase up not knowing
that much about what was included with the lot. As it turned out
it was a bargain, seventeen steps with hardwood treads, plenty of
metal balusters and a quantity of straight hardwood handrail which
we later sold on Ebay. The whole lot probably weighed over a ton.
I knew nothing about installing a spiral staircase
so it took some working out, the first job was to dig a metre square
hole on the floor and fill it with concrete to act as a solid base
for it. This protruded a 100 mm above the floor to line up with
the revised floor height we had planned for once the underfloor
heating was installed. It took more than a couple of attempts to
get the tread spacing and placement correct but it was certainly
worth the effort.
Much of the rest of the job was welding practice,
although it was extremely tricky getting the handrails made up (these
were missing from the original auction lot). A company in Batley rolled
them out of 50mm tube, but knowing little about stairs I was worried
that I hadn't measured up correctly for these. Luckily they fitted
with only a couple of minor modifications. The landing was made up
from similar type balusters.
The Dry Stone Wall
Now that we had spent so much on the shop fronts
we wanted to enclose the front garden area to prevent damage to
the new walls. There were two options for a wall, the first a coursed
stone wall with metal railings set into it. The second, a conventional
dry stone wall. The options were weighed up, but with the first
costing between three and five times as much as the second it was
an easy decision. We gave our mate Dan a call and ordered twenty
tons of newly quarried stone from nearby Johnson's quarry.
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