June, 2019 - Disaster Mansion

21/06/201921/06/2019

Grass three weeks on

It’s now been three weeks since we planted the first band of grass and it’s coming on nicely and the second band is also showing signs of life as well. We’ve been very lucky with the weather and the rain looks like it will continue into next week. Luckily it looks like we’ll have good weather for Aimee’s birthday bbq this Saturday 🙂

We’ll soon be looking for a mower, probably get a Honda, either one that collects the grass like this or one where you have to rake it up like this. Raking up grass is a bit of a pain but I like the simplicity and it reminds me of my Dad’s old Victa mower (looks not to unlike the mower pictured below) which incidentally is now under the stewardship of my friend Martin Winchester in Dinas and is still going strong after 50 plus years.

[Show slideshow]

16/06/201916/06/2019

New Grass Cometh

At last we have some new grass!!! We didn’t mange to get a hose from our neighbours yet but we we’ve been lucky with wet weather which looks like continuing.

We managed three strips, though in pictures three and four it looks like the guide rail to the left is rising up at the end. Next time I’ll tie a line between the two ends to check. This can always be corrected at a later date.

The third segment slopes down towards the house and you can see from picture five that I made a new form for this section which has a curve to it. At some point this will be supported near the house by some sort of wall but we haven’t worked that out yet.

The section at the back was planted two weekends ago, next section last weekend and the closest yesterday. There is still work to be done at the upper left of the garden but is was raining today (Sunday) so we worked in doors.

I think my dad would have been quite pleased with how we did 🙂

In pictures three and four Aimee is doing a penguin walk over the area before seeding which helps to compact the loose soil. By the way the landscaping rake (the blue one) is very useful for putting down new lawns.

[Show slideshow]

14/06/201902/09/2019

Good news, “Stop Work” notice removed

So it looks like there was some confusion over the front wall/ foundations, which is the small 4″ high wall you see in the following two photos:

The issue with this wall was that the building inspector had never seen the foundations for this (this work was done by a previous owner), and didn’t know that there was a decent footing underground. The following picture shows these foundations before they were covered up (right-hand side of photo by the green ply).

This morning both our builder Thomas and architect Dave both rang up the building department, sending them pictures and architecture plans etc. and that seemed to resolve the issue. I think there was also some mention of how the house was being shored up, so I think Thomas beefed that up and also fenced off the area.

Building of this block wall should now recommence on Monday 🙂

By the way seeing the house like this I was wondering how it would look if that room was all glass, okay it’s not going to happen but it would give the building an interesting appearance.

14/06/201924/10/2019

STOP WORK (font: Monotype Century Schoolbook, so this is serious)

Nice surprise this evening when I found a “Stop Work” notice on our door, it was posted today. Thomas and Matt were here today so probably posted after they left. I know I’m joking about this but I’m sure building inspectors do a good job and are just protecting us by making sure no corners are cut in the building process.

I thought it might be how vulnerable the house looks, held up by just a few wooden structs, but when I got back home I looked up the code, “Article IRC 2015, section 403.1” and you can see from one of the photos that it’s to do with the foundations. Not sure what’s going on here so I’ll ask the builder Thomas and our architect Dave Toder.

Just to give you some understanding of what’s going on in the pictures, the wall on the side of the house was the wall that collapsed (eleventh photo), was rebuilt and then had to be demolished (wasn’t up to code) and is now to be rebuilt. The wall at the front was demolished years ago by some previous owner who had started a foundation wall, but gave up, subsequently leaving it shored up with timber and plywood (last but one photo).

Anyone spot the cute Jensen Healey someone parked outside our house?

[Show slideshow]

04/06/201916/11/2019

You reap what you sow and water

Last weekend we dug, tilled and raked the soil but then got frustrated working out the levels. This time we made a decent leveling gig which spanned a good portion of the garden. The first strip was quite a bit of hard work as it required a fare amount of soil to be shifted but the second strip proved to be a lot easier. We did manage to sow grass seed on the first strip and we used a combination of Scott’s Kentucky bluegrass and Perennial ryegrass. That added up to a total of 14 lbs of grass seed which does seem a lot, however we followed this lawn sowing video and I think visually we got the same spread of seeds. We also applied some lawn fertilizer in the process. By the way the grass seed is blue in colour and I have no idea why.

We didn’t sow the second strip as we had run out of grass seed and also the light was failing. We also need to go back next week and grade the bank to the left and the section by the garage before we sow.

We timed packing up our gear on Sunday pretty well as the sky opened as we were putting away the last tools. If you read our last post you’ll know that we don’t have any running water and that means we can’t water the seeds so we are hoping that we will get enough rain for them to germinate. We are also hoping that one of our neighbours will let us run a hose from their house, so fingers crossed on that weather/neighbour front.

This is the current weather forecast for the week.

Rain on Wednesday, Thursday and the following Monday and Tuesday.

Lawn preparation. 8th – 9th June, 2019

Lawn preparation. 23rd June, 2019