May, 2018 - Disaster Mansion

13/05/201817/05/2018

Skip Four Joy – the Movie

Literally and the fourth skip to be filled!!! I rather like these skip/dumpster movies, even if they are a little disjointed. It’s like the worker bees going about their duties. We also like the cars that suddenly vanish and the moving shadow that the house casts.

The first thing that goes into the skip is our last piles of garden waste, poison ivy, and all (for now). If it looks like we are putting small sticks into the skip, then we are, those are the last of the hundreds of sapling trees we dug up. Next to go in was the rear stairs etc, followed by our rear patio excavation and lastly wall demolition.

Filling up these skips is a pretty good work out, digging, lifting, pushing, arms, legs, back, up and down steps etc. It’s nice in the evening just to feel that nice fatigue sleep slowly envelope you.

The skips/dumpsters are from Kingston Roll Offs, I have no complaints and the Tom the owner seems a great chap and always manages to maneuver the skip onto our drive way. Thanks Tom and thanks to the Major of Ponckhockie, Barry who introduced us.

By the way the two guys in white shirts that appear on the street at around 30 seconds are not having a boxing match as some viewers have suggested.

13/05/2018

Another snake

Found another snake today, this time when I was digging up the old deck. It was underground and under a stone. If it was still in hibernation, it’s not now, but it wasn’t a bad day to wake up. Lucky I didn’t cut it in half with the shovel. It was a cute little snake about the size of a pencil with a beautiful orange underside. If you look closely you can see an orange ring around the neck, hence the name ringneck. We let it go in a safe pile of leaves away from where we were working.

You can see from these photos that the soil is full of debris and junk, hence why we were clearing off the top six inches.

More info about the ringneck can be found on Wiki.

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12/05/201813/05/2018

Clearing up back path and deck

The back deck was gross and the first picture in the gallery pretty much shows how we found it, at least a foot of junk in some places (old plaster boards, kitchen units, roofing materials just rotting and compressing over the years).

The deck is now gone and will never be replaced with a deck. I see a deck as a cheap alternative to a beautiful stone patio which will always look great and never rot (note, I do see how a deck can make perfect sense when you want to get some height or on a slope etc.). Also, this deck was built directly onto bare earth so no wonder it rotted. If they had lifted it up a few inches, supported by concrete blocks, it probably would have been still okay today.

This area is rich with bluestone and as we know a good stone mason, we will eventually be making stone patios. This will be while off until we have the time, money and more importantly how we want the garden laid out. As it is we need to fill the skip and this is good fill 🙂

We are hoping to grade the garden such that the rear windows in the basement have as much light coming in as possible. It won’t be a lot but we can improve on what we currently have.

Going also are the finely crafted cement block walls, skillfully laided by Bodge Builders and Sons. In the UK these people are referred to as “Cowboys”. No disrespect meant to ranch Cowboys.

[UK informal] someone who is not honest, careful, or skilful in their trade or business, or someone who ignores rules that most people obey and is therefore not considered to be responsible:

Those builders are a bunch of cowboys – they made a terrible job of our extension.

I have a 3lb Estwing pound hammer and a Stanely concrete chisel which does take a long time, but you get there in the end. Oh yes, always wear safety glasses when doing this sort of work. I do also have a proper 10lb sledgehammer if needed and today arrived a 30mm x 1.5m monster of a crowbar. In the last picture in the gallery, you’ll see a huge concrete block. I want somehow to get this into the dumpster. It doesn’t look big but I doubt Aimee and I could lift it.

By the way, the walls are really at that angle.

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12/05/201812/05/2018

Marmot Spring Cleaning

From the fresh dirt trailing from this hole, we suspect the marmot is spring cleaning. Be cool if they have a litter. I’m hoping they don’t go messing with the foundations though as this new hole is under the rear deck that we recently pulled up (below the white plastic picket fence in the “Going, going, gone” post).

Here is a good wiki article about Marmots.

I also found some old picks, when I first spotted the hole as I was removing the deck and a hole under one of our foundation walls.

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12/05/201814/05/2018

Going once, going twice, gone

Stairs, a construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into smaller vertical distances, called steps. Well it’s gone now so if you want to bridge that vertical distance, bring a ladder.

We worked on this last weekend as well as two evenings this week. You can probably tell the different days from our wardrobe changes. The visitors are Derrick and Giovanna our main advisors on the house. What a great resource those two are.

09/05/201810/05/2018

Going once, going twice …

We are in the process of pulling down the rear exterior stairs. They aren’t original (no rectangular nails, just the common round nails) and were built to give access to a former upper apartment.

From the first picture in the gallery you can tell that the stairs are slanting away from the house (it’s not the angle of the camera, they really were slanting that much) and the first few times we went up them we expected them to collapse. This weekend I removed some of the lower weather boards and was surprised (I shouldn’t have been) that all the vertical supporting beams had been put down on good old soil. Surprise, surprise the bottoms had rotted out from all leaving them hanging in the air. Gaps varied between 3″ and 24″. I’m amazed that they could take our weight, but that’s probably in part to how well the original was house was built to which the stairs were bolted to.

We are now in the process of pulling 80% of this down and time lapse will follow. Until then marvel at this engineering masterpiece.

I have to say it’s very satisfy to deconstruct all this crap that has been added to the house over the years.

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08/05/201809/05/2018

Hard as old nails

I love the nails used in our house. We’ve probably thrown a lot away but I’m sure we still have hundreds left in the wood we saved.

Our nails, which are rectangular, look like the Type B cut nails, Circa 1810 – 1900 which fits in with when the house was made. I believe these were made by cutting a thin tapered slice from a steel plate. I presume they had a machine that could hammer the end of the nail to make the head.

Manufacture of these nails came about due to steel plate being widely available, again this ties in with the industrial revolution, which in the USA was roughly between 1760 and 1840.

We’ll keep a bunch as I feel they must have a use somewhere and I like how they look.

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07/05/201808/05/2018

The last piles

Finally got the the remaining piles of the garden waste into a skip. It doesn’t look it but it took hours. It’s a pain that we can’t have fires in NY 🙁 Going to have to come up with a cunning way to disguise our bonfires as a rather large bbq. That said not a good idea to burn this stuff because of the poison ivy.

The poison ivy has now started to come to leaf so it’s easier to spot. Aimee in the background is going around marking these buggers with orange paint and also a dash of weed killer, hence the splashes of colour you can see.

Stop press. So it would appear that we can have small campfires, subject to certain restrictions, most of which seem pretty reasonable. What I can’t understand is this restriction, “However, this is not allowed from March 16 through May 14 due to the increased risk of wildfires.” Weather in Kingston throughout most of that has been either cold, wet, damp, snowy or a little sunny. We’re not talking about California drought conditions here.

06/05/201806/05/2018

What is this tree? Answered.

A month or so ago I was trying to find out what this tree was. Well, friends thought it was a sweet maple but the blossom didn’t match the red color, but that let me to the red maple (Acer Rubrum), which I’m pretty sure it is. Glad to find out as these trees are everywhere in Kingston and no one I spoke to knew what they were.

By the way the tree isn’t in our garden, but it does overhang a lot which will give us some lovely shade in the summer.

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04/05/201804/05/2018

Cleaning up the library

This room used to be the library. Locals remember it having lots of built in bookcases etc. Shame nothing is left of them. It would be nice if someday we can find some pictures of the interior.

The library, if you were standing in the street looking at the house, this room is on the right and runs from front to back and is on the same floor as the front balcony.

Top floor also had similar 5′ high heaps of debris, which consisted of framing timber and lath and plaster. The previous owner probably did us a favour in removing all of this. We kept all the good wood.

Through the window you can just see the skip (dumpster for US folk) filling up. This wiki entry gives origins of the word skip.

These are front and back videos of the same room.