October, 2020 - Disaster Mansion

30/10/202030/10/2020

I’ll show you my mortise if you show me your tenon

Hi, Aimee here!! I usually just dictate to David but today I find myself writing as he’s polishing my boots and scythe.

As you’re probably aware our house project requires lots of different skills, particularly woodworking which isn’t surprising considering it’s a wooden house. In particular most of our sash windows need to be replaced or repaired and we do have a quite a few of them. Yes we could have gone with modern energy efficient PVC windows, but they lack the charm and we feel the look of them wouldn’t suit this house. Yes they aren’t as energy efficient but we’ll make sure that we build them with draft excluders as well as having storm windows for winter.

By the way if you ever need to restore a sash window we can highly recommend this Youtube series, Sash Windows Restoration – “Don’t Trash the Sash”. It’s a ten part series and it does explain a lot as well as pointing out that well looked after sash windows can last 100 years or so, would PVC last that long?

Anyway, I diverge. Getting to the point: woodworking isn’t my one of my fortes, in fact I know next to nothing about wood apart from the fact that it comes from trees. Currently David does most of the woodworking and I’m left to to do the more tedious tasks, which is fine most of the time but sometimes I want to be creative and make something also. To remedy this I’ve enrolled in a bunch of woodworking classes at the Kingston Wooden Boat School which is part of the Hudson River Maritime Museum. I pretty much enrolled for all the classes which are:

Understanding Wood
Woodworking Tools-Their Use & Care
Basic Joinery
Machine, Tool, & Shop Safety
Advanced Joinery
Build Your Own Adirondack Chair

I’ve just finished Machine, Tool, & Shop Safety and about to start Advanced Joinery next week. Finally I’ll round it off with a chair building course where I’ll combine all that I’ve learned.

By the way, the Hudson River Maritime Museum is a cool museum which I highly recommend. Below are the results of my handiwork from the Basic Joinery class, the first is a half-lap joint and the second is a mortise and tenon. My teacher, Michael Puryear, is one of my favorites (besides Udo Guddat from high school German).

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23/10/202022/10/2020

Unhinged

We’re edging closer to being able to paint our new downstairs front door. We’re anxious to get it painted before it gets too cold to paint, plus we don’t want the paint we mixed up to go to waste. When we were trying to color match earlier this year we probably added about $130 of artists acrylic to an already expensive can of paint.

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We’re using three hinges for this brute, not vintage but brass re-creations. I did acid-etch them to get rid of some fake antique coating and they look better. To cut the recesses we used a Porter Cable door hinge template kit combined with a compact Makita router, both of which do a fine job. I did the first hinge and then Aimee took over and did the remaining two. Placement of the hinges was 7″ from the bottom, 11″ from the top and one between the other two. We trimmed out the corners of the recesses with hand chisels.

Check out the clamps we used to hold the door upright. Note that the clamp base is only supported at the ends and because of this when the weight of the door presses down the base bends and the two uprights clamp tightly to the door and it’s pretty rock solid, not my idea, I found it on a Youtube video. If I can find the video I’ll add a link. These clamps are super useful.

22/10/202022/10/2020

Thanks Mary …

Winter is coming and we’re scrambling to get a bunch of tasks done before it gets too cold. Our house has little protection from the cold which from a comfort point of view can fixed by wearing three pairs of socks, leggings and two pairs of gloves etc. but what you can’t do is change the chemical properties of cement, paints or glues which really can’t be used when temperatures approach freezing.

These last couple of weekends we’ve worked on replacing the last of our new pillars blocks which were already cracking and starting to subside. This is a link to the first pillar block we replaced back in May this year.

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Once we have these new blocks in place we’ll only need a bit more plumbing and some electrical lines put down before we can fill in all the trenches and start to prep for a concrete pour in the spring.

When we replace a pillar support we first have to remove the existing pillar which is always a little nerve racking as these pillars are holding up a decent portion of the house. To prevent any damage to the house we add temporary bracing which as this is second time around, we’re a bit more comfortable doing it. It’s a bit of a struggle to get the temporary bracing in place and often involves some good choice words.

Like the first pillar block we’re using old cast iron railroad screw jacks which are perfect for the job. In case you’re wondering why they’re sitting in holes, it’s because the soil is pretty much sand and if we had placed them on top, then when we excavated for the new pillar blocks there’d be a good chance that the soil beneath the jacks, especially under load, would have caved in and that wouldn’t be good.

For the third block we also had the chance to continue our efforts at beefing up the existing footings. In places you could put your hand maybe 8″ under the walls so it was nice to get all this sorted out. We tied this new pour into the existing footings with epoxied rebar.

Would you believe it, no sooner had we finished the pour some one tagged it, thanks Mary, if that’s even your real name.

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19/10/202020/10/2020

‘Demolition of the Contractor’- a review by Jason Proctor

With his new piece, “Demolition of the Contractor”, Linnard takes us further down the path established by his earlier works “Naivety of Optimism” and “Inevitability of Failure”.

The theme is similar; how the reassuring surge of adrenalin that accompanies the commencement of a task rapidly transforms into the strychnine of despair upon realisation of its futility.

This time however the implementation is clearer; shock and awe when the scale of the effort reveals itself; disillusionment and betrayal when promised contributions fall well short of expectations.

In this work, Linnard identifies with all who take on any endeavour whatsoever, and crystallises the notion that any effort towards completion is trivial and futile and should be abandoned or, as this work seems to hint at, does Linnard have something up his sleeve?

Linnard will be exhibiting his latest works, November 1st 2020 to January 10th, 2030 at the Manoir de Catastrophe, Kingston NY.

Jason Proctor, San Francisco

09/10/202009/10/2020

They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To

We’ve almost finished our new ground floor front door. I did think we could make it in three weeks, but it’s probably been nine weeks already, not continuously, just weekends and evenings and being interspersed with other projects. If we build another door it will be a lot simpler and quicker – you learn a lot on your first pass.

We’re almost at the point of painting the door and the last thing we have to do is to bevel both the lock and hinge sides of the door. The reason for beveling the lock side is to allow for a tighter fit of the door to the jamb when in the closed position and on the lock side it stops the hinges from banging into each other (called binding). Pictures below hopefully illustrate this.

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The easist way to put a bevel on would be to run my track saw along both edges, set at say a 2° – 3° angle, however the door is too thick to cut through completely – our door comes in at 2 1/2″ thick which doesn’t seem thick, but it is, that said it does have a 1″ foam core to keep us cozy. Also the saw tracks are pretty wide and once you add the trim to door (which is raised) you can’t do this – I made this mistake on the last door.

So how to add the bevel? I thought of using a hand plane which I’m sure would have worked but it would have been tricky to get a consistent angle, then we borrowed an electric hand planer from Don, but same issue with the angle. After spending so much time on making the door I didn’t want to mess it up right at the end.

Searching, I found out about a tool, sadly no longer made, which was made for door beveling, the Porta Planer 126, made by Porter Cable. As an aside I always thought that Porter(a) Cable meant PORTAble electric tool on a CABLE but if you follow the above link the company was created by Mrs Porter and Mrs Cable. I started looking for a 126, which seems to be an appreciating classic, but all the ones on ebay were a few hundred dollars and then I came across one being sold locally by the Kingston Boat Building School, for $80.

You’ll have to agree it’s a beauty of a tool, it’s quite the work of art and I read somewhere that the Rockwell engineers who designed this may well have been designing exotic jet planes or rockets. This one is probably at least 40 years and likely a lot older. The bevel angle drawn on the door in the last picture is just to let me know which side to put the bevel and actual bevel will be a lot less.

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The only downside with this tool is that spare parts are no longer in production, especially the cutter head. The cutter heads do turn up on ebay every now and then but they sell for about $150. However, this tool has a trick up it’s sleeve – you can sharpen the blade yourself on site!!!! Notice the accessories? They’re the parts to sharpen the spiral cutting blade with the small round object being the grinding stone. Now who builds tools like this any more? I know my friend Win would have loved this.

08/10/202009/10/2020

Disaster Cottage suffers major setback

Disaster Cottage is owned by friends Deborah and Joe and it’s walking distance from our current rental. Like us they bought a very neglected house in need of much love and work. Luckily they are great talented people who will do their best at creating a long lasting, beautiful and loving home. It’s been great to know them as like us they’ve going through similar experiences and it’s been great to share tips, tools and know how etc.

Today while excavating their basement they had an internal wall collapse. Luckily they knew the tell tale signs of a wall collapsing and got out of the way quickly. Like one of our walls that collapsed, before the structure finally went, they heard a sound very much like rain drops, which must be the stone or mortar bonds breaking. Unlike us their wall came crashing down sideways, ours merely dropped but stood vertical. Glad to say that everyone got out of the way, a little shocked but safe – the house is still standing.

The house is possibly unsafe to enter so they are have some structural engineers looking at it tomorrow. Combined with the fact that the foundations of the house and sill plates are in pretty bad condition, the house is basically a shell, the roof needs replacing and the house is tilting is leading Joe and Deborah to consider whether it’s easier to pull the house down, put in a sound basement and rebuild in the same style. Difficult questions, especially when you’re artists and your income has been destroyed by covid.

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06/10/202006/10/2020

It came from below…

Radon, I hate that stuff.

Radon, known to his Periodic chums as Rn, is a colorless, odorless, tasteless (how boring is that) noble gas. This naturally occurring radioactive gas is created when uranium, thorium, or radium break down. According to the CDC, Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the US.

Uranium, thorium and radium occur naturally in small quantities in the earth and soil so that’s the birthplace of most Radon. Soil and earth are denser than Radon so it seeps upward. In turn Radon is actually 7.5 times denser than air so you would have thought that it would be happy to stay close to the earth and not bother us, however it’s still a gas so will propagate easily around your house due to air movements and pressure difference.

So how does Radon get into your super insulated and hermetically sealed house anyway? Most causes are:

A. Cracks in concrete slabs
B. Spaces behind brick veneer walls that rest on uncapped hollow-block foundations
C. Pores and cracks in concrete blocks
D. Floor-wall joints
E. Exposed soil, as in a sump or crawl space
F. Weeping (drain) tile, if drained to an open sump
G. Mortar joints
H. Loose fitting pipe penetrations
I. Open tops of block walls
J. Building materials, such as brick, concrete, rock
K. Well water

Image and list courtesy of Radon Testing Lab

Radon came onto our radar as our architect had included pipes within our basement floor for Radon mitigation (removal for us common folk) which would be something our plumber would do. We did some research and the first step seemed be testing for Radon. We picked up some DIY tests which are $10 a pop and are small packs of charcoal which you leave in your basement for 48 hours and then post them off for testing. We bought two and put one in side of the basement. We posted them off pretty much together. Aimee just got the results for her kit but according to Fedex mine is still a week away from being delivered.

So far the news is good and we seem to be lower than 1.7 1.7 pCi/L (picocurie per litre)

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From the EPA these are the risks that Radon presents

Radon Level	If 1,000 people who smoked were exposed to this level over a lifetime…	The risk of cancer from radon exposure compares to…	WHAT TO DO: Stop smoking and…
20 pCi/L	About 260 people could get lung cancer	250 times the risk of drowning	Fix your home
10 pCi/L	About 150 people could get lung cancer	200 times the risk of dying in a home fire	Fix your home
8 pCi/L	About 120 people could get lung cancer	30 times the risk of dying in a fall	Fix your home
4 pCi/L	About 62 people could get lung cancer	5 times the risk of dying in a car crash	Fix your home
2 pCi/L	About 32 people could get lung cancer	6 times the risk of dying from poison	Consider fixing between 2 and 4 pCi/L
1.3 pCi/L	About 20 people could get lung cancer	(Average indoor radon level)	(Reducing radon levels below 2 pCi/L is difficult)
0.4 pCi/L		(Average outdoor radon level)	(Reducing radon levels below 2 pCi/L is difficult)
Note: If you are a former smoker, your risk may be lower. If you have never smoked your risk is much lower.

We’ll wait to see what my results are before we decide to do anything, but that said it may be good idea to at least put in a pipe before we have a concrete poor. We will keep you posted.

Sleep well everyone and dream not of what is below you ….