It started as a disaster so how bad can it get?
After much non-existent research I have reconstructed the clay pipe from fragments we’ve found during numerous archaeology digs at Gill House.
This pipe was very probably used by Mrs. Gill as she sat on her fancy porch, drinking her fancy wine.
Last week was a bit of a stressful roller coaster, but luckily things are now settling down and the house is reasonably safe.
The daffodils we planted last year with friends Colin, Tim and Lauren are now out and more are sprouting. Later this year we will plant even more and add some clumps of tulips to the mix as well.
By the way, after a long absence, the ground hog is back, I saw him last week disappear into a new hole he/she made.
Shore up is now complete. Took three of us most of Friday to do it. The hard part was screwing in the huge 6″ lag bolts into the hard old timbers of the house.
We sistered up both sides of each floor joist with 2″x8″ lumber and then bolted each floor joist, either side to the rim beam, with some very heavy duty “L” brackets. These brackets will be permanent and add extra strength to the house for the future.
The header of the framing wall is 3 x 2″x10″, the uprights are 4″x6″ and the base plate is 2 x 2″x8″. After hammering the uprights in place we blocked the uprights top and bottom so they won’t move. All in all very sturdy. The diagonal piece is doing nothing, just needed somewhere to put it.
Thank you again Derrick (wearing the red ear defenders) and John Paul (wearing the head lamp).
The house is still standing and I kid you not this could have been disastrous. The ground by the foundation wall running up by the drive was dug away last weekend to access the old sewer pipe and to install a french drain. In the process the trench was dug below the foundation wall (which was very shallow) by a good foot in parts.
All was fine for most of the day and looking at it, the wall just seemed to descend to the bottom of the trench, however towards the end of the day, a huge chunk of what I thought was wall fell away, leaving the wall unsupported. It wasn’t wall that fell away, it was the soil beneath the foundation wall. This is when the cracking started.
I don’t know where my mind was that day, I wasn’t doing the majority of the trench work that day, but that said, I was in charge.
On Monday Matt Alexander a structural engineer kindly came over to look at the house. He thought that the house should be first shored up and then the middle section of wall should be underpinned before being removed and replaced with a new wall, then we should underpin all the other walls, even those unaffected due to the shallow nature of the walls as this would prevent any future issues. Matt suggested we get our architect to draw up proper engineering plans and to that end we met with Dave Toder this afternoon to discuss details.
Tomorrow (Friday), Derrick and his friend John Paul have kindly offered to help shore the place up to make sure that if the wall does fail further, then the house will still be safe. Thank you Derrick and John Paul.
It was good talking to Matt as he did say that he had seen a lot worse and that the silver lining was that we had exposed a future potential issue and this is an ideal time to fix these sort of issues. The trouble with fixing foundations on a finished house is that sometime the house will flex slightly when it’s being shored up leading to cracks in plaster and tile work etc. We have no plaster or tiles so we don’t have to worry about this, also we have no tidy garden or driveway that we don’t mind digging up. That gave me a little consolation but I’m really annoyed with myself for letting this happen.
In this set of pictures everything was all fine and the first three was Aimee and I working on the trench the weekend before. By the way we had started on this trench last year but we had to stop when the ground froze. In the other pictures you can see my helper Al, who if there was ever an Olympic medal for digging, would get a gold.
This second set is where things started to go wrong, the damp soil looked just like the damp wall above it so I wasn’t really noticing that we were digging so much away. I just thought that as we’re on a slope, then bottom of the wall would also slope down. It wasn’t until a huge chunk of soil fell away that we realised that we had dug too far and that was a little too late as very soon, you could hear lots of strange sounds, a bit like rain actually and then we noticed the cracks and the thick bluestone window plinth snap. I have to admit it was a tad stressful. We shored it up as best we could inside and out and then went to call our friend and advisor Derrick.
As it turns out the sewer pipe (which you can see in the first set of pictures) is below the foundation wall so the wall would have had to been underpinned, but had we done this correctly we wouldn’t have needed to replace the wall $$$.
This is the second wall that collapsed, the same thing happened on the other side of the house. We weren’t responsible for this but it’s interesting that it sounded the same – rain drops.
By the way thank you for all of you that send supportive emails.
In the words of Captain Mainwaring:
This weekend I fucked up royally, I can’t even tell you what happened. I have a structural engineer coming around tomorrow to look at the house and have friends Derrick and John Paul to help if need be.
My dad didn’t use the ‘f’ word often, but he did say that there was a time and a place for it. This is that time.
Please don’t email to ask further. I will post updates on progress on what went wrong as I feel fit. Thank you.
This is my darkest day at DM.
Because the chimney stack was attached to the collapsed wall, that had to go as well. Modern building codes are pretty strict so the stack would have to be lined before any sort of wood burning stove was used and an open fire would have been completely out of the question.
On the positive side, the chimney stack did divide the room a bit, so so now with it’s removal we don’t have to worry about trying to find furniture of the right size to fit either side of it.
By the way the thick rods you see to the left of the last image are our sash weights. I can’t wait until we get to that granular level of fixing the place up.
I have some time lapse footage of the wall demolition, but the power line to the camera was severed somehow, hence the short video.
I didn’t think it could get worse but I think it has, but we should get used to future disappointments and keep a stiff upper lip, right Winston?
This happen a while back and maybe something I didn’t want to post right away. If you can remember the portrait that our builder Thomas found, see Our last great find.
Aimee was taking our photograph with us either side of the portrait when the wall behind collapsed. Luckily it just dropped and didn’t topple. It felt like an earthquake was happening, strange noises like rain drops hitting glass and a shower of dust from the roof. Aimee and I were a bit shocked and I think Thomas was a little too. Luckily the ceiling above had been shored up, otherwise it could have been a lot worse.
There were numerous reason it collapsed:
This gallery doesn’t really do a good job at showing all the above but hopefully it gives you a taste. Note that the bottom of the wall is where the wall ends, no footing underneath just sitting on soil and you can see that the earth is very, very sandy, in fact it’s almost sand. At one point the wall was unsupported for about 6′ with no support at all at one end. The first shot show the chimney stack.
These are the photos of the collapsed wall, luckily it didn’t topple.
This is an old post which I forgot to post so my apologies. Anyway we were out in the back garden when we noticed that someone had dumped a good few barrow loads of earth at the back of our garden. I thought it was odd as why would they bother to cart it all the way back there.
We were pondering this when we noticed a hole towards the back of the mound, it was our groundhog extending it’s underground lair. It’s pretty impressive how much earth and stone the groundhog can move and I don’t know how many meters underground it had to slowly push or drag the soil to the surface.
Moving to current day we haven’t seen the groundhog for a while, so it’s likely that the deforestation of our garden has led to the extinction of above mentioned groundhog. RIP [spfx: sniff].
By the way the title of this post was ranked 39th best joke (courtesy Darren Walsh) at the 2015 Edinburgh fringe. How many of you got it? I’m not sure I would have.
This weekend, in the space of fifteen minutes, the soles of both my boots fell off. They weren’t especially expensive boots, I got these steel-toed boots for working down the at Crucible in Oakland, probably fifteen years ago, but the coincidence of them both failing within fifteen minutes surprised me. I was high up in a tree on a ladder at the time so maybe they were scared of heights.
I now have some great Carhartt work boots and you really need good boot around DM. These boots fit well, whether I have one pair or three pairs of socks on.
While we were planting bulbs last week I noticed a large pile of wood chips beneath one of our hemlock trees; looked as if someone had been chopping logs with an axe. I looked up and noticed the 10 or so holes in the tree which I suspect were made by a pileated woodpecker.
Apart from the damage to the tree, it was pretty impressive work from the woodpecker and you can see that some of the wood chips are easily 3-4″ in length. I hope one day we can see the woodpecker in action. It’s a pretty big bird (crow sized) so it won’t be hard to spot.
