May, 2020 - Disaster Mansion

29/05/202028/05/2020

Cherish your friends

Today my best friend Martin will be laid to rest. Alas we weren’t able to attend the service but I am gratified that many of his close friends, including Rich, Huw, Jayne, Judith, Linda, Helen, Chris, Claire will be there to say their farewells. He will be desperately missed by all. What a solid chap.

I’m not alone in saying that Martin is part of our DNA and always will be, binding our memories and friendship. Martin you’re forever with us and we all thank you for sharing your very generous life with us. Like most of his friends we had expected our adventures with you to continue so I hope you watch down on us as we continue with them, sadly without you.

My last thoughts go out to his sister, Cathy who was forever at his side.

I leave you with some pictures of Martin and a funny story at the end.

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One of the funniest things I ever saw, witnessed by my family and our cousins, was on a Boxing day when we all went up the common to watch Win and I fly our rather large Nasa Para Wing kite (hand built by Martin). It was a typical winters day, cold and damp with a decent breeze, but no rain. Win was already up there setting up the kite towards the rugby pitch end of the common as the wind was blowing toward the railway station. I helped him launch it and then stood back and watched as family chatted and half watched Win. It was soon obvious that Win was struggling a bit with the kite, knees bent, leaning back with arms out stretched. It was like watching a tug-of-war, Win would get pulled forward a few steps and then manage to stagger back and regain his ground. It was now becoming more fun to watch and we all became engrossed with us shouting encouragement to Win, which of course made him laugh which didn’t help his concentration at all. It must of have got tiring for Win as suddenly he went went down on one knee. Who was going to win this battle?

With Win on the ground his position was compromised as he couldn’t step forward or backward and before we knew it Win was down on both knees, leaning back on his haunches. There must have been a gust as the next thing we saw was Win flat on his stomach, in the mud. He could have let go of one of the lines, but did he, no, like a trooper he hung on, being pulled and at a decent rate of knots I may add into the sunset, well not quite the sunset but you get the idea, artistic license. We were all in hysterics by then and I think he got dragged pretty much all the way to the swings before the wind dropped and Win was able to stagger to his feet. By this time the whole front of Wins body was thick with mud and as Win said after, he was pretty sure he was dragged over some dog muck in the process. Luckily Win had his own car to drive back home in.

To this day this has to have been one of the funniest things I have ever seen and all that witnessed agree. Win also saw the funny side and he would often laugh at the retelling of this epic kite flying adventure. 

Win you were a legend in your own lunch time and will continue to be!!!! – We salute you.

26/05/202029/05/2020

New support pillar

Some day we’ll have a nice concrete floor on the basement instead of of a big sand pit, however, before that can go ahead we have to have the plumbing roughed in and fix anything that will be hidden beneath the concrete floor. Once such item is a load bearing pillar support which the builders put in to support our new LVL beam. This carries a lot of weight and not something you want to see fail. As you can see in the first photo, the laser levels shows that the concrete support block has already sank by 1/2″ on the right and to the left you can see that half the support was built over a 2″ polystyrene sheet and the block has already cracked in half.

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I would have liked to have started on this project earlier but we had to wait until the temperatures got consistently to 50°F and above. Winter lasts too long here and we even had snow earlier this month.

To replace the concrete block we needed to install temporary supports to reduce the load on the existing pillar. After talking to our friends and advisors Derrick and John Paul we jacked the beam up on either side with a couple of screw jacks which Derrick kindly lent us. I slowly cranked up the jacks, checking regularly to see whether the load had been taken off the existing pillar until it got to the point that I couldn’t turn the jacks any more and the existing pillar still wasn’t free. Luckily John Paul stopped by and suggested we add an additional two temporary supports. For this I need two more jack screws, I managed to buy one locally on craigslist and the other on ebay. By the way I wouldn’t recommend hydraulic jacks for this kind of work as they leak down over time.

With the four jacks I eventually managed to free the old pillar and set to work removing the old concrete block with the trusty jack hammer. I made the forms for the new block as an 18″ cube with an ample supply of 1/2 rebar, kindly cut by our resident rebar cutting expert Aimee. We used 5,000 psi pre-mixed mortar (just add water) and got through about seven 80lb bags. My dad used to tell me that when he was young the weight of the bags was double that – glad I didn’t live then as 80lbs is quite heavy enough. We mixed the cement by hand which also gets hard after a time!!! Maybe down the road we’ll buy a cement mixer as it would get plenty of use. The new support is probably at least 4 times larger in volume than the old block and we left it to cure for about 10 days.

I was hoping to re-use the old support but that didn’t work out so I laminated four 10″x2″ planks together and made some nice headers and footers to help spread the weight. The new pillar is probably about 15% beefier than the previous one.

Today I installed the new pillar and released the pressure on the temporary jacks. There was some groaning noises but that’s probably just the wood settling in and I did re-add one of the temporary supports just in case. Tomorrow, I’ll bolt it down to the concrete block.

I’m glad that’s over with as jacking up your house can get a tad stressful! All in all I think this was a good job worth doing, just a shame we had spend our time, energy and money to redoing it. There are also another two supports resting on polystyrene which will need replacing but they can wait.

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21/05/202026/05/2020

Abandon All Hope…

Just when I thought we were finished with surprises I found these improvements when I came to the house tonight.

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Aimee hasn’t seen this yet and it will blow here socks off, as it did me. It puts a massive smile on my face every time I think about it. My friend Martin would have chuckled and appreciated this 🙂

By the way the rest of the wall will have a coat of lime mortar and be white washed at some point so the plaque will look even better, plus I am working on building a new front door so everything will look a lot better on the ground floor at least. It’s great to have talented friends, thank you Derrick.

By the way motto doesn’t apply to us, friends or family, only foes.

By the way the lines, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” comes from Dantes Inferno (translation by Henry Francis Cary) as Dante passes through the gates of Hell.

16/05/202016/05/2020

After every thunderstorm there is blue sky

On Tuesday one of my best friends, Martin Winchester died. He was an old Dinas friend going back to when I was probably 14. We had been on a lot of adventures together over the years and we both thought we had more to come, sadly that wasn’t to be. Martin was one of the easiest persons in the world to get on with and if you ever needed help with anything Martin would be, simply there for you. Over the years he helped me through a difficult personal crisis, flying out to Oakland especially to support me, he helped my parents with numerous projects at their house in Dinas such as a new foundation for a shed, repaving a patio to fixing our mowers etc. We used to sail a lot in a couple of Fireball dinghies we owned together, made and flew kites and gliders, and saw bands, Led Zeppelin, the Jam, The Stranglers, Queen, Rolling Stones, U2 etc. It wasn’t just me either, he was always there to graciously help his other friends as well. Strange thing is, Martin never asked for help in return, we always offered and I sometimes wish we had insisted on it.

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Martin was no stranger to the US and had visited the bay area, many times for a holiday and he knew his way around Oakland pretty well. I had always hoped that Martin would come and visit Disaster Mansion in person but I know he will be with Aimee and I in spirit. I know these blogs aren’t always the most riveting, but Martin enjoyed catching up with what we were up to and then about once a month I’d ring him up and chat about things. I was lucky to speak to him this Saturday past and we talked about a row/sail boat that the local boat building school had made and had put up for raffle. We bought six tickets which I optimistically expect to win and talked about taking Martin up and down the Rondout creek (which is only minutes away from DM) for a row/sail picnic and exploration as the boat would comfortably sit three. When we win the boat we’ll name it Winnie which was Martin’s nickname due to his surname (Winchester) and yes he did visit the Winchester house at least once. And look at the boat it even has a great transom for the name. Not sure of the raffle date now due to C-19 but tickets are still available, see email on photo.

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So a very saddening few days passed and then we heard from our restoration expert Derrick that he would be working on filling up some of the larger cracks in our ground floor walls with NHL. You have to use like with like in these old structures or you’ll have problems down the road. When Derrick got home he said he had left us a present, how interesting we thought, what could it be?

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And wow he had made us a lovely house plaque which I think will be permanent, so cool and maybe I forgot to tell you that Derrick is also a fine art graduate and I’ve seen his work, from fine paintings to the beautiful mausoleum he carved in stone for his Mum.

Derrick describes what he did as stucco:

The beauty of stucco is it’s versatility. Italians have done some pretty amazing things with it. That was an experiment with crushed soft brick as a pozzolan in a hydrated, not hydraulic lime. Wonderfully plastic.

We were very pleased with our new house plaque but it knocked our socks off when we got to the house today and saw this!!!!

Amazing and as we have some fine vultures circling over the area most of the time the wings and the skull are very fitting. We’re very touched, thank you.

How cool is that?

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Thank you Derrick this gave our very bleak week some light at the end of the tunnel.

Lastly I dedicate this post and all that follow to my dearly missed friend Martin. You’ll always be in my heart and never forgotten. In fact I have plans …

05/05/202007/05/2020

Some days you’re just lucky

For a long time I’ve been looking forward to the day I could buy a router table. A decent system can cost in excess of $1,000 and as we are on a budget, this wasn’t something I could go and splash out on, though I was putting some money aside every month for one.

For months I’ve been researching router tables and had narrowed it down to a Woodpeckers, Jessem or Incra systems which isn’t really narrowing it down at all!! I was pretty hooked on a Woodpeckers table with an Incra lift but then I came across a review about the Incra system which talked about how repeatable it was, that is, you can route a piece of wood, change all the settings and then come back months later and dial in the router (to a resolution of 0.001″ / 0.025mm) to produce an identical cut to the one you did months ago.

Anyone who has used a router table will be familiar with the usual procedure of the easing up of the fence clamps, knocking the fence back and forth, taking measurements and running test cuts until you get it right, which can get pretty tedious if you are making lots of different cuts. As we need to make a lot of identical cuts, e.g. for all the sash windows, this seemed a great system for such a projects.

Again for months I’ve been looking for a second hand one and more recently I was looking specifically for an Incra system. Unfortunately decent router tables don’t come up often craigslist or ebay and a specific brand even less, but that was until this last Friday …

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By the time I saw the post it was 20 hours old, so kicking myself for not spotting it earlier I replied and surprise, surprise I get a reply and following a phone call we arrange to drive down on Saturday morning to pick it up!!!! I wasn’t going to count my chickens until we were driving back with it in the car, but I was feeling pretty optimistic.

Fortunately everything went to plan and the seller Joe was very pleasant to deal with and we also bought a couple of sets of nice router bits from him. There were one or two components missing from the table, but Joe said that if he came across them he’d mail them on. Also if they never turn up, I’ll just buy them from Incra. As stated in the advert, it is in excellent condition.

I’m super, super excited about using this tool so thank you again Joe and I think our workshop is now pretty much complete!!!