We Destroyed Mat Armstrong’s Dream House

This is Matt Armstrong and one year ago I bought my dream house. That was the first time that we met Matt Armstrong and we built him the ultimate man cave and we nicknamed it the paddock. Now we are back and then Rex the place and he lets me talk. Should we go inside? So this is actually the front door of the house, kind of the front door but it's the door that everyone goes in. The front door's in another location but it's on the bottom floor. The house is three stories and we have an issue at the minute which hopefully the guys on the Home Improvement Channel are going to solve for me by the end of this series. In we come guys like MTV. So right here is the place where everyone walks into when they first come into the house and the reason we bought this house is so we can entertain other people, have other YouTubers come over but we find that when people come over, which sometimes it's a lot of people, everybody is stood in here like sardines packed into a can. But we do have a bigger room in the house which isn't used and we feel like it could be utilised a lot better. So if you follow me through, the house is quite quirky and it does have up, downs, the left and right. It used to be a chapel. Keeping the tiles and the stained glass, don't worry. And this is one of the biggest rooms in the house which is the dining room. And utility room. And what is a shame in the here is we've got, well it's not a shame, it's nice. You've got a massive, really nice open view of all the countryside there but then all that's in here is one table that no one ever uses because they sit at the table inside the kitchen area. And it's quite cold in here as well I feel. Yeah, it is cold in here. And then here as well which is the stood wall is a utility room which again it's quite dated compared to the rest of the house. And here is a toilet. Cool. Now we've been thinking and big braining it and we thought this would be an amazing kitchen. It's a big, big part of the house. There's doors which open up into the garden and all the view. Everyone can stand here and be communal in here rather than be communal in the smallest room in the house. And that's why we've got the home improvement channel to come down and start smashing this up and making our dream kitchen. We've got a month to do this which sounds unbelievable. There's walls to knock down, there's floors to put in. This sounds unrealistic. And I just keep adding stuff. Yeah. Oh, we've been here an hour. Hannah just added on the floor heating. You've also been here an hour and nothing's happened so let's get going. We are removing these two walls in this build but behind these two walls there is a utility room and a bathroom that we need to decommission. I'll do that then, shall I? In this world there are two types of builders. There are people like Peter who are calm and collected and then there are people like Liam. Oh my god, I totally missed it. Destruction is fun. While Peter is still being nice, calm, collected and being very methodical Liam was on the other side of the wall collecting more asbos to join him in his demolition. However, I'm sure Pete would love to smash everything in here but for him he's got a lot of water to deal with. It turns out that even Hannah is team demolition. We have had structural engineers in to look at these existing stills. They have got to be removed. We have got to put a new one which spans the full width so that we can take these walls down. If you haven't watched our channel before that is Dan from DB Builders and his brother Aaron. They're helping with the main structural beam that we're going to be installing because the originals that are above this wall are no good and you'll find out why a little bit later on. We've got a pier here that is holding the joint to the ends of the stills because we've actually got four. We've got two each side. This holds the other end and then that holds the other end so that is doing nothing. So we're going to knock it down. Dan is, not me. When he says we, he means me. It might look like we're just gun hoeing everything but believe me, we do know what we're doing. I know we don't look like we do. So if you are going to attempt anything like this don't go smashing down any walls willy-nilly. You need to make sure that nothing's supporting the walls above. So we're trying to currently isolate that water. Me and Pete, we found this stopcock which looks like the main one for the house. We've stopped, we've locked that off so that, oh, oh god, I didn't mean to do that. So we've locked the water off so we can start working on the system. Pete, how's the water pressure? Yeah, that doesn't work. Oh my god, that is so powerful. Not good. Yeah, not good. What do you reckon we're going to have to... I'm not doing that live. Where are we going to have to start looking? Up the front I reckon. In the road maybe. Yeah, all right, let's go. I don't know what that stopcock does though. Me and Pete are really trying to stop the main pressure water from somewhere, but they do have a main front door in this house, which I'm hoping, hoping that the main water is outside this door somewhere. Because this would have been the main door at one stage. So fingers crossed, we could go out the front and find the stopcock. Have a go at the world's biggest key. Yes, right, hopefully we can find water out here somewhere. Nothing, brilliant. What's that? We're hoping we don't scare the gardener. Have you seen a water stopcock anywhere? You've seen it so many times, haven't you? Lucky for Pete and Brad, Danny the gardener was actually around, so he helped them find the stopcock. It looks quick in this clip, but it actually took about 45 minutes. So far, we couldn't find nothing out there. We're hoping that the gardener can help us find it. If he finds it, touch. If he does, make sure you give him a follow on Instagram. If you don't, don't. I always think about that. Yeah, I agree. We've isolated the hot, so we can cap the hot in here, but we haven't isolated the cold yet. We're waiting. What does people think of Pete's white wagon? It's a Toyota Hilux. It's bloody lovely. It's lovely, isn't it, Pete? Yeah, mate. What do we think? Has it got enough to be a plumber? Why have you got that? What pipes are you cutting? No, that's yours. No, we're going to solder it all properly. No, no, no, the solder cap's already in there. Danny! We're coming! Right, my deal when I walked in the house was that you guys should give this man a follow on Instagram if he finds the water stopcock for the house. Tell him your Instagram. That's DJ's garden maintenance. We would have never found that. Huh? Buried under the ground. Hold on. High five, Danny. Danny, high five. Now that Danny's saved the day, Pete gets on with removing the rest of the plumbing. Can I just yank it? Yes. Dan and Phil have removed this bit of the wall. Now there is this bit of plasterboard left here and our good friend DB at DB Builders, he's going to run through it. Yeah, I'm just going to go and push it through. That's why if he makes it through without hurting himself, you should subscribe to DB's channel. It's on the back. Brandon's on point. Now that that's done, we're just going to remove the rest of the wall. Don't go doing that if you're at home. Danny's just being a bit of a silly Billy, but he did remove the wall. So now that that's out of the way, they can move on with more of the plumbing that needs to be removed from this job. You've done really well. I can earn a handy folding bucket. No. Another wall that needed to be removed was the one dividing the utility and the toilet. Again, this isn't a structural wall. It's just a dividing wall. Make sure if you're ever going to remove walls, they're not structural. The only one we need to keep in place is the big pier in the middle. That's another wall out. We're going to move on to the main one. But before we do that, there's a load of electric cables that we've got to expose and make safe before we take down the wall. Liam, where are you? Here he is. So Liam's going to be doing all of the electrical work on this job. And it's quite a lot because we're practically starting from scratch. This building is very old and it's been updated multiple times. So it's going to be better to rip it all out and start from the beginning again. We did a lot of work. What is going to happen next? Right. First thing, flooring up. Ceilings down. Cupboard ripped out. We've got a lot to do. We need to strip this place completely. Shall we get on with it? Let's go. Let's do it. This is where it becomes clear that the kitchen itself isn't the main project. It's actually redesigning the opening. So removing stills and removing all of the plasterboard. Aaron, what's happened? Did it go boom? It went bang bang. What did DB just do? He just went bang bang. What happened to DB? I've left you for five minutes. So go and cook some food. And I've come back and the electric's off. You've cut through a cable. Look at that. What happened? Tripped it out. It's cut through the cable. Look at him. I'm not happy. At least Liam didn't make a big deal of it. So once he got there, he repaired the cable that Dan had accidentally gone through. And to be fair to Dan, it wasn't in a zone. We get all the fun jobs. We tried to keep the insulation in the floor above, but it kept falling out and it was a bit old and tatty. So that is going to get replaced. I'm just going to drain these red tile drops just to get the water out into a bucket. And what he's draining here is actually the whole house because it's all connected. I'm just going to take this radiator off. Okay. We're removing all of the radiators in this area because they're not going back. We're going to be having underfloor heating. LP's taking the rad off. We're going to start ripping up this floor. This is engineered oak flooring. So it's actually a really good floor, but it's had its time. Now, normally these are an absolute nightmare to remove, but this one was quite easy. And sadly, Pete, who used to be nice and methodical, has turned to pure demolition. We have uplifted the engineered flooring. Now this has uncovered a very big, big, big problem. Now, Dan, can you just smack the floor for us and show us? That's not good. Not good. Joe, Screen Puppy is a specialist in this and he's going to help us. So obviously we've got hollow spots in the floor, as Dan just showed you. This has all got to come off and be replaced. What should we do? Rip the floor up. When it comes to big jobs like this, this sort of thing isn't uncommon. You're always going to discover extra work. Do you want to know what my little secret weapon to keeping everyone working and not running out of energy? It's holy. If you don't know what holy is, it's a better alternative than your typical soft drinks and energy drink. One of the drinks they do is a hydration pack. I'm always dehydrated at work and this solves the problem because I put one of these with 500ml water in my shaker, give it a shake and I'm hydrated for the whole day. The good thing is this has electrolytes, which I'm always missing. Brad has the hydration, but I have the energy drink because I have to do all of the actual work. 500ml in here, one of these sachets in here, bash, oosh, energy. They also do milkshake and my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. If you're not sure what flavour to order, make sure you grab the starter set deluxe because you get all different flavours in the tea, the hydration, the energy and the milkshake and you even get yourself a shaker. If you want to buy some holy, use the code THIC5 for £5 off if you're a new customer and through November, you get an extra £10 off on the starter set deluxe. If you're an existing customer, use THIC and you get 10% off, okay? Enough of that, let's get back to fixing or ripping up that floor. One day in and they've wrecked the place, literally wrecked it. Can we have a professional explanation of what's happened? Oh yeah, okay, so basically what I've done is I've come in and I did a lot of it and then they just jumped on the camera and carried on. So we knocked out all of the utility area, I took out the toilet and de-plumbed all that sort of stuff. De-plumbed, yeah, de-plumbed, I like it. I also de-plumbed that, I also come over here and decided to cut through a wire to cyber attack my internet. So really what's going to happen, one big steel is going in, then we can get rid of this wall, do a full wall delete which will open this up, nice. So then hopefully we do get a kitchen where loads of people can stand in. Before Christmas. There's going to be water in this, isn't there? No, there shouldn't be. There's going to be water coming out of there. No, it's not, it's not. Oh my God. No, no, stand back. I've just de-plumbed that area but it's like taking your thumb off the top of a straw when there's water in it and now it's draining into what? A handy folding bucket. We're going to trim the other pipe off. We might need another handy folding bucket in a minute. Can we have a handy folding bucket in a minute? Handy folding bucket, handy folding bucket. We need another one. Handy folding bucket. Handy folding bucket needed. Small leak but no problem. Everyone's panicking, just a bit of water, just flood the house. You can tell he's done plumbing before because Matt didn't panic at all. Panic over, we move on to removing more of the ceilings. So they was all at sort of different levels because they were different areas but now because we're opening it up, we want flat ceilings. So we're removing everything including a lot of random bulkheads hiding just random pipework. So Pete is actually going to be relocating all of the pipework so that our ceilings can be nice and flat. The two pipes that he's cutting here are the main flow and return from the boiler so they will need to be replaced. That's all the pipework cut out and now I've just got to put it back in, in a different place. Like I said earlier on, it seems like things have just constantly been added to this build. So when it was plumbed, they just put it on the ceiling rather than up in the floor space where it should be. So that's what Pete's doing here, he's moving it up into the floor space when we put our ceiling on, you ain't going to see any of the pipework and you don't need to have any random little boxing in everywhere. We're also going to be running these pipes alongside the new still so that's why they're positioned there to get across to the boiler. It's only temporary, don't panic. Temporary? It might be, it might not be, who knows with Pete. So Pete has hooked up the plumbing temporarily with the push fits because obviously we've got to put the still in and then we're just going to fill up the system to make sure that they've got heating and hot water otherwise they're going to be very smelly. And unfortunately for Brad, the filling loop was up in the loft. So off you go. I'm going to bleed the rads while he's filling the system up and I can just leave him up there. Smart move, a little bit of peace. Nice rads aren't they? They are nice rads but they're also very big rads. So bleeding the system does take a while and we actually had to do it multiple times. Whilst we're waiting for the still to arrive we're going to make a little bit of progress and a little bit of mess. We are going to be installing two acros. One this side and one this side. Once we've got them installed we can remove this pier. It might not be clear in the video but what has been done originally is four stills. We don't know why but it has four stills. It has two on either side and they're not even the same size. They're two different size stills. So by putting the acro across the pair on each side we're actually supporting the floor above and we can remove this pier ready for our new still. We are now floating two props either side holding the still up. Now we can go ahead and get the rest of this out. And of course we do that from the top down because that's the easiest way to do it. And with the pier slowly being removed you can see how big the space is that the new kitchen is going to sit in. So we're going to be able to have some pretty good parties. I've got to drain the heating system out again because I need to get all this pipe work out so they can remove this still. And that will just make it easier so I'll do that. Unfortunately Peter we can't leave them with no heating and no hot water so we have had to reconnect this each time we've left. It's quite a lot of extra plumbing but it has to be done. Plus the original pipes used to go around the pier that's no longer there. So now we need that run to be nice and straight. So when we redo it we won't have them little kinks in it. Whilst we're waiting for the still to arrive we are going to install a timber underneath the ceiling joists so that then we can put acros in to hold this up whilst we take the steel out. Let me explain what this still is doing. Above this room is a living room and it's practically the same size. So that still holds the two halves of the floor that's above. And that's why the still's there because this is two separate floors. Steel's here. Been waiting for it. It's finally arrived. So now what we're going to do is lift it off. I was going to lift it myself but I'll leave that. You're giving them a chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to lift it onto the timber, slide it off, get it in and then that will be holding my living room floor up rather than two poles that are in there at the minute. Are they still sliders? Yeah, yeah, they're the ones that you can't tell. You can't tell. Now that we know Matt's got safety footwear we go on with lifting out the still. This wasn't the heaviest still ever but it was still a couple of hundred kilograms. So you have to be pretty careful. What's he doing now? So now they're going to measure it to cut it because we are really behind we want to start cutting it and put it in straight away. The guys over at Rapid Metals could have cut this to the exact size but we needed to cut it back ourselves. That's going to take a while. We're already beyond schedule so the re-zip's coming out. And that was because the original still is buried inside of the chimney. So we're going to have to cut that down and leave a section there and that is the amount that we're cutting off. The legends over at Rapid Metals have actually supplied you guys with a 20% discount code so if you do want to grab some stills make sure you check them out. We'll put the link in the description below. Back on track, we're back on track. With the still cut down to its final dimensions we get it slid into position ready to be lifted up into our new opening. We are currently removing the temporary plumbing that Pete's put in for the, how many times Pete? Oh this is the third. The third time. So we're going to remove this so we can get the still in. You can see how happy Peter is to drain the heating again but you know it is what it is. So with the still in position Dan and Aaron get some more props on each side of that floor ready to remove the stills. So our back acros are in. We're now going to get the material lifts in set in position. So we got these pair of material lifts in. These are actually going to be the tools we use to lift up the still and we're actually going to use them to lower down the stills as well. Oh what you big strong man. We got the pair of these from Safety Lifting Equipment and they are pretty much the only thing you're going to need to lift or lower stills in our case because we are going to be lowering four stills first. The still that we're putting in is on some blocks so we can slide the feet underneath it and then we're going to higher or heighten the lift all the way up to the four stills. Hold the weight of them and then get ready to chip out the blocks that are underneath. Normally these are on pad stones but we found out they're not. They've just been installed on normal bricks. So we're going to get them chipped out and get these stills removed. This part we need to make sure we're being super careful and that the lifts have definitely got the stills and once they're free we can manoeuvre them and take them out and because they're so light we was able to pretty much do that by hand. That's the first stills out of the way. Now we're going to move on. This one's a little bit trickier because we're going to have to cut the existing still back to allow for our new one to go in. So you remember when we cut off that little section of still? Well this is why. So these stills go all the way back into the fireplace that's above in the living room. We don't want to disturb that because we don't need to. So we're going to cut it back, make sure we've got enough to put our new one on and then we can remove the two old stills. Now that the old stills are fully removed and cut back to allow for our new still we're going to lift this on to the material lifts. One here, one here. It's going to be a bit of jiggery potpourri but let's get it on there and get it up. We got kind of lucky with this because the building opens up slightly behind where we're going to be putting the still. So we was able to lift it up square and then slide it into the pockets that we've created. Now there isn't anything to put them on yet so we just need to crank it up all the way onto the floor above. The still is now up but one thing we've got to do is make sure it's running parallel with the extension that side. So we're going to put measurement here, measurement here. As soon as it's exactly the same, up we go, brick it in, job done. The original stills actually had 100 millimetres of bow through the middle so we want to make sure the new one is perfectly parallel to the doors at the front. Now the still is where it needs to be I can finally do my plumbing and hopefully this is the last time because if it isn't I'm going to kick right off. We're currently looking for new plumbers as we need to drain the system again and we're too scared to ask Peter. Only joking, we'll just make him do it again. So Pete gets on with re-plumbing that pipe for the third time I believe and this time he's doing it permanently and connecting up all of the rads that are fed for the room above where we're working. Obviously we're not connecting the pipe work that feeds the kitchen or what will be the kitchen because it's going to be underfloor heating and while Pete's doing that Dan is installing the brickwork and the pad stones that are going to be holding up the still. Pad stones are basically a big concrete block that sits on your brickwork and it helps spread the load of the still and it doesn't compress like some bricks do and we've got one of those on each end of the still, obviously. So with those in we're not going to be lowering down that still just yet because that needs to fully dry and then we will need to install some metal shims and all the while Pete is wrapping up the plumbing. The plumbing's done, well done me. That is the still in place for now. We're going to be removing these acros that are in the way because we want to start tackling the floor. So that we've got more space to work we decided it was best to remove the props holding the floor and just install two on the still instead. The deep section that's had all the broken concrete lifted up we're going to hit that with a bit of grip primer that's to help the smoothing compound stick and we got this from Instamax. So this primer is brilliant, it's going to help stick the surfaces together and make them one just like Spice Girls. This is going to be one of quite a few pours because the floor ended up terrible by the time it all broke up. So we're just doing this to fill the deep section. The primer is fully set. This is the area that we're attacking before we go home. We're going to hit it with the level it renovate. We're going to mix it up and we're going to fill this area up. We've done quite a lot of flooring throughout the years and we've done quite a lot of floor prep which is what this is and we've never used this particular smoothing compound but after using it, this stuff flows pretty much like water but it's a high build. I believe it goes up to nearly 50 millimetres and as you can see it flows so easily. Normally we trail this stuff about but it was moving so nicely we decided to just keep pouring it in and let it do its own thing. So this pour I'm pretty sure was about 40 millimetre build up and this is just going to be the first of many. That is the house destroyed. Make sure you catch us on the next one where we might put it back together. I don't know yet. For now, I'll see you later. Just make sure you hit the like button and the bell notification to get regular videos to see if we actually do. Bye. Have you seen this product from Beer Plumber Services? It's a handy folding bucket so buy one you little weasel. Link in the bio.