Brewery Update #2

Progress has been slow on the brewery front since my last post in Brewery Update #1. As the weather has got increasingly colder and the festive season has drawn in the needs of our residential building have unfortunately taken priority. Walls have needed re-pointing and our recent decision not to install a wood pellet boiler due to a lack of space has meant that we've needed to source a new heating system before winter. Despite this fact I do have some progress to report.



The office and the storeroom have now been plastered, skimmed and painted with super duper ultra-durable anti-bacterial paint ( thanks Clements Aberystwyth ) so they are looking pretty smart. I've also installed uPVC skirtings around each of these rooms in a hope to reduce the amount of scuffing and damage done to the walls. This process naturally took a while as the drying times of plaster, skim and paint have been much longer in the colder temperatures. With each of these rooms now broadly finished it was time to begin the process of emptying the main room.

Sadly the main room of the brewery had become a dumping ground for all the items we didn't want to, or had not got round to storing in the house. When you've got around 90 square metres of floor space you aren't worried about throwing things out either. Odd pieces of wood that you think might be useful form increasingly large piles along with old pipe and sheet materials. The whole room had become a bit of a mess so it became my titanic job to clear the floor. Luckily there was a good deal that could go straight to the house with the unfortunate side effect of filling our bedrooms with piles of boxes! A few trips to the tip made a small dent in the rubbish that I'd been hoarding and there is a good deal that could be scrapped at a future date. I've been collecting any rubble that might be suitable for filling in the floor and the builders dumped a couple of fireplaces in the main room that needed to be broken up with the trusty SDS chisel.



All in all the floor is looking much clearer now. There was enough free space to start disconnecting the seven storage heaters that were bolted to the walls and begin wheeling them outside. To be honest dealing with storage heaters is not my favourite job in the world. Each of the corpulent, squat, incredible dated cabinets (1985 ) weights around 175-200kg and provides a nest for a whole host of grisly crawling things and the remains of what they've been eating. It's necessary to open the units to remove the heat bricks in order to have any chance of lifting them without a crane. The first stage is to undo the host of screws that secures the front panel to the unit, whereby a large sheet of white powdery material will fall out on to you in a hazy cloud. Luckily this isn't a decaying package of asbestos ( i've checked the Asbestos Institute's Website ) but a compressed sheet of Silica in a Hessian bag that has long since bio-degraded. Next we remove the sixteen heat bricks from the unit, eight of which are behind the heating elements. Surprisingly only two small screws now stand between wrenching the carcass off the wall and finding out what else is living behind the unit.



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The school used an electric immersion heater in a tank stored in a cupboard to provide hot water for the children to wash their hands and for washing up in the kitchen that I've already torn out. This tank now needed to be drained as unfortunately none of its valves were turned off when the water was turned back on when we bought the property back in February. Luckily there was a drain valve on the tank, so repeatedly filling a trug with around 15-20 litres at a time and pouring the water down the drain did the trick! The connections to the tank were easily disconnected and the tank removed with no problem. I then setting about breaking up the cupboard and disconnecting the electrics that fed the heating element. A combination of saw and pry-bar made short work of the cupboard but exposed the ruined wall behind that I'll add to the list of walls that need replastering once the floor has been done. It also seems that the mains water pipe is actually somewhere underneath the wooden suspended floor so I guess I'll hunt for it once the floorboards have been removed.



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During my excavations I was hoping to find some hidden treasure long-buried and forgotten about in this old welsh school. So far though, only some crayons, a marble, a lego door, and old sock and what seems to be one of the very first tubes of toothpaste to have fluoride added!





I'm hoping to achieve a bit more before Christmas and New Year and hopefully will be able to report the removal of some or all of the floor in brewery update #3!



A Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to you all!