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Welcome to the Bishop

We’ve had a flat arch doorway into our utility room, and it was very dodgy. If it fell, it would have dropped a couple of hundred lbs. of rock and mortar on your head. As we’re are gearing up to get the plumber and electrician in, we thought we’d better fix this.

The picture below is after patching the arch up quite a bit, and even then, I’d never stand under it for long.

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As you can see we added a fair amount of rebar and, because lime is caustic, I degreased, de-rusted and coated the rebar in epoxy, yes a pain to do, but this is a house we want to last.

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Constructing and setting up the form took a few days, but I think we got it almost right. One thing I wished I had done was to get a better curve when I bent the rebar, if I had, it would have given us an extra 1.5″ in height to the already low doorway. Aimee will be able to pass through it unhindered, and I may scrape my head, but old age and gravity, in time, will allow us free passage with ease 🙂 I will round the corners on both sides so if you do bonk your head, you won’t hit a sharp edge.

Sorry I ran put of disk space. Yes, current results are rough, with low and high spots, but that will be fixed.

We left form and mortar to cure for a week, spraying with water, every day, to help the cure. That done, we applied another scratch coat of mortar which which filled in the majority of the undulations. The following day, it was time to remove the form.

Overall we like the arch, it matches the arch of our front door. Small subtle details like this add up to the overall experience, I think at least.

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A few odd jobs

Aimee and I are slowly getting back in the swing of things. In the evenings we’ve been painting and glazing windows and hope to get the first one installed within the next few weeks.

During the last couple of beautiful weekends we’ve been doing a bit of work in the garden and the first task was to complete the foundation drain to the left of our house. Last year we repaired the poor foundation work, done by our previous contractor, patched up the wall and gave it a nice fresh coat of lime plaster, then came porch painting followed by winter, so the trench was left unfilled. Come spring, we did have to dig out a fair bit of soil, that had collapsed into the trench, but now we have the pipe bedded in gravel, wrapped in geo-textile fabric (to keep the dirt out of the gravel) and we had just enough dimple board left over from our previous foundation drain project.

I think the dimple board combined with the foundation drain is a perfect solution for the damp issues we were having. Since we installed this system at the rear of the house, and back filled to a 4′ depth, we have seen absolutely zero damp in that wall, bone dry and I can’t think of any reason why this system should fail, at least not in the next couple of hundred years. Dimple board, geo-textile, gravel, foundation drain is a great solution, which I highly recommend.

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Second task was to plant a fruit tree. We both decided we wanted a peach tree. The variety we bought was a cold-hardy Frost peach, and it already has blossoms, which we hope will develop into fruit this year. My Dad, Colin, was a keen gardener, and often wished that he could step out into the garden and pick a fresh peach, alas, the UK is a bit challenging for peach trees, so that never happened. In memory of my Dad, the tree has been named Colin and sits near our Magnolia, Big Nan.

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Continuing on the tree theme, we recently heard that our neighbour would like to remove the large maple tree that sits on the edge of our sidewalk/pavement, due to liability issues. I’d rather the tree stays but, I’ll await the verdict of tree surgeon and Kingston Tree Commission.

In my opinion a tree canopy on a street is beautiful, and as it is Gill street doesn’t have many such trees left, we thought we should act, so this weekend we purchased two native dogwood trees, Cornus Florida. It’s an elegant, modest sized tree with an amazing show of flowers and berries for the birds. Our trees are about 5′ high and they grow 1-2′ a year. We placed them so they could be viewed from inside. We think they will look magnificent in years to come.

In our tradition we have named one of the Dogwoods, Mama Dot, our beautiful, 94 old year Gill Street guardian who lives across the street. I will ask permission to post a picture of Mama Dot the next time I see her. By the way, one of previous owners had named a Japanese Maple, “Tiny Tim”, hence the start of the naming tradition. It’s also a good way of specifying areas of the garden, “you know, just around Tiny Tim” etc.

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By the way, we do plan to remove a black walnut tree from the rear of our garden, replacing it, possibly with an oak, so there will still be food for critters.