December 26th 2019

[H] The last month was rather taken over by other commitments so Cragside has been neglected for a while, but we're now back to work. The task at the moment is to strip out the interior of the house. We plan to crush the concrete components of the house and use the crushings as hardcore on site but this means we have to strip out everything else before the shell is demolished, which means removing all the bathroom fittings, tiles, kitchen units, doors, cupboards, all the joinery (shelving, architrave, skirtings, door frames), internal stud walls, all the pipework, all the cabling that's buried in the walls, the plasterboard, ceiling tiles, loft insulation and more. It's quite a job and is taking quite a long time. We had yesterday off (it was Christmas Day!) but were back at Cragside today doing more of the same. The copper and lead and even the cabling and other scrap metal is worth something so we're setting that aside, some of the timber is re-usable or suitable for burning on our wood stove, some of the doors, joinery and sanitary wear we can re-use ourselves and we've been putting quite a few things on freecycle. What's left unfortunately will have to go in a skip but we have tried our best to keep that to a minimum.