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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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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 ….

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Resistance is futile

Not Borg, just slow & low shoveling.

This is just a trench to carry our electrical mains cable from the other side of our drive and into our house. We already have electricity in the house but we’re making this change for a semi practical/cosmetic reason – our current electrical meters are sitting on Portland cement which is bad for our old lime mortar walls and needs to be removed so Derrick can parge with lime mortar, also it looks a bit ugly. In the photo below you can see the difference in color between the grey Portland and the beige lime mortar

The plan is to move the meters to the other side of the drive and have them on a panel a few feet above the ground. Also Derrick suggested we make the ground floor more grandiose by adding quoins (pronounced coin) to the corners on either side off the door, which I think will look pretty nice. Photos below illustrate an isolated meter board as well as an example of quoins which by the way I had never even heard of before.

Again, I’m glad we beefed up the footings as this trench goes under our walls and into the house.

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Croquet at Disaster Mansion, what has the world come to?

Okay the rest of the house still needs major work but at least we can host a croquet tournament. As hosts it was the right thing that we came in bang in last place, but to be honest we were rubbish. It wasn’t the easiest of courses and involved some pretty tricky trenches and down hill slopes. Tempers did flare and mallets were swung but no stitches were required. Some notable tricks shots were taken by snooker ace Joe the Mangrum, but at the end of the day the skilled ball and mallet work of Derrick propelled him to champion, well done Derrick!!!

We finished the evening off with a nice bbq and fire. Looking back at some old photos of the garden it’s nice to see some improvements.

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One step closer to the Porcelain Throne

Sorry we haven’t posted in while, we’ve been working on our new front door and it’s taken longer than I thought. Construction is almost complete and we hope to paint it in the following few weeks, then we have to work out how to hang this behemoth of a door, anyway enough of that and back to what you’ve been all waiting for, our latest plumbing update.

Backing up a bit when we bought the house the plumbing was pretty much non-existant, there was the original cast iron pipes which led through the house to the street which had rusted through and any copper piping that may have existed had succumbed to the house’s ten year absenteeism from human occupation or in the British vernacular, ‘some bugger had pinched all the pipes‘.

Now at last we are starting to get all the plumbing replaced and up to modern standards. It’s taken us a while as we had foundations to fix, collapsed walls to rebuild and even after the builders had finished their work on the foundations we beefed up them up where pipes had to go under them.

Today Nick and Taylor from Sinnott Plumbing came around and started the rough in and for this we had to nail down where we wanted every plumbing related item, sink, bath, toilet etc. which was pretty tricky for us as the house is unfinished and we need to add 6″ or so of insulation to the walls etc. Fingers crossed we aren’t too far off as all of this will be covered by a concrete slab making changes a little tricky. So if in the future you ever come to visit the house and wonder why the bath, sink or shower is in an odd place you’ll know why, but then such placement will probably be all the rage.

I’m so, so glad we added the extra strengthening to the footings plus the two reinforced pillars beneath the back wall, which would have otherwise been held up by sand alone. I’m pretty sure that without the extra support the back wall wouldn’t have survived being excavated in such a fashion and I just hope it can hang on for a little longer. You can see those back wall pillars in the last five photos.

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They will be coming back soon to connect our newly laid pipes to the street and also run some pipes for gas, after which we can hopefully start to fill in the trenches and start planning for a concrete pour. That said I also need to do some research on Radon etc.

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Odd jobs

We haven’t posted anything in a while, not because we’ve been inactive, but because we’ve been working on a lot of small projects. One of these was a clamp rack – it got used for a few weeks before being deemed two small, hence I made a bigger one, which now seems too large but that can be fixed with more clamps. Don the Johnson will take the old rack so I’m pleased it won’t become firewood.

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Another small task was to clear the verge which had become overgrown and a favourite spot for local dogs. Initial plan was to put grass down but we have bigger fish to fry so instead we cut back the weeds, burnt the roots with my Dragon flame thrower and then dug up the 1 – 4″ of soil, which had built up over the years, to expose some hand laid bricks. It’s no Roman mosaic but it does look better than weeds and next year we will remove a section of the bricks every 6 foot to make way for some flower beds.

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Work continues on the front door and last week we glued in the panel trim and framed around the glass openings. We are now working on the other side. Hopefully it will be ready to paint in a week or so. This door has taken more time than I expected.

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Lastly Disaster Mansion appeared in a local historical treasure hunt. We met some of the intrepid treasure hunters last weekend, gave them a tour of the house and some old antique nails as a memento, not sure what they do with them though.

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We’re still waiting to have our plumbing roughed in after which we’ll be getting the electrician in. Only then can we get a concrete floor poured on the ground floor which is looking doubtful now this year.

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Assembling oak stiles and rails

Okay this door does have a non-traditional construction method and I would definitely rethink this if we had to do another external door but luckily we don’t, at least not for the foreseeable future. That said it will look like a traditional door which will be long lasting door and have a decent bit of insulation.

You might have remembered that this door started as a foam cored slab, for which I forgot to cut out the windows, see measure once, cut twice.

This slab is now in the process of being transformed into a traditional door with the help of some nice white oak that our friend John Paul milled from trees from his estate. We had to wait a month or so until the oak was dry enough to start working on but fortunately we had a humidity tester. The oak stiles are rails were joined with small tenon joints, not massively strong, but enough to keep the wood in the same plane. These joints were all cut on our lovely new router table.

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To make sure we didn’t mess up the construction we made a sample cross-sectional piece to see how the glass would fit in and I’m pretty sure that without this there would have been some cutting mistakes. The last picture is of the stiles and the rails that I glued together earlier, sitting on the ply/foam sandwich. It still has to have the trim added which we are currently working on but you can see that it’s looking more door like now. The other side will also get the same stile and rail oak treatment.

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Last but not least we cut out the slot for our lovely mail slot, admittedly the door is too thick for the slot, but a minor detail.

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Luna Moth

We saw one last night at our small socially distanced bbq. Never even heard of the Luna moth before and probably won’t ever see one again.

The life cycle of theses moths is:

Life stages are approximately two weeks as eggs, 6–7 weeks as larvae, nine months as pupae, finishing with one week as winged adults appearing in late May or early June

Seems a shame the moths only live a week and according to Wikipedia the adults don’t even eat. Anyway it was a treat to see this large and slow flying flamboyant moth.

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Today we painted a door

Today we painted our soon to be new back door. Its taken us ages to restore this door so it was nice to finally paint it. We found the door up in the rafters of our decrepit garage with a good layer of soil and plant life on top. We had to replace all the trim, panels and most of the stiles needed major repairs from abuse by crowbars.

So we painted a door today, but there’s a lot more to it than that, what we are doing is putting a stake in the ground for the colour scheme for the whole house which we’ll hopefully live with for many years.

When we bought the house it had been gutted and very little of the original trim or details remained however there were some remaining surfaces that retained the original paint such as the light blue sea green color of the stairs and balusters.

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We decided to continue with this colour which started us on our headache to match it. We started off with countless colour cards followed by various samples which were way off the mark. Finally we found a colour card which seemed a great match so off we trotted to get a gallon of Sherman Williams Duration which was recommended by Derrick.

First coat went on and it looked too green. We let it dry overnight hoping it would mellow but in the morning light it was still firmly too green. After a bit of head scratching we thought we could take our paint back to Sherwin Williams in the hope that they could magically re-tint it to what we wanted and in truth it was an act of purest optimism and would have undoubtedly ruined a gallon of pretty expensive paint in the process. As luck would have it Sherman Williams closes at 4:30 on Saturday and we missed it by minutes. We then thought of buying some sample latex paint from a box store and blending it ourselves, but before we did this we thought we’d run the idea past Derrick as we’d be blending different makes. So glad we spoke to Derrick as he very helpfully suggested we go to an art store and buy acrylic paint (small tubes/bottles etc.).

The nearest store was Michaels so we got some Black and Manganese Blue acrylic from Golden which is great quality paint but it does cost a little more, that said it was worth it for the beautiful swirls it gave while mixing. Back home we started making colour swatches by adding a single drop of acrylic each time. I was a bit concerned that I may add too much acrylic to our paint and ruin it, how wrong was I!! In total we added 6oz of Golden Manganese Blue, 8 drops of Golden Black, 8oz of Liquitex Cerulean Blue and 8oz of Liquitex Titanium White (we went with the Liquitex due to cost).

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https://www.goldenpaints.com/

The results of this did improve the color and now the door is more bluish than greenish however, the blue is a little dark so we’ll probably add another 8oz of White Titanium. We think we’ll leave the side of the door we painted as it is as it’s already had three coats, but the other side is fresh wood.

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Cool cars at Disaster Mansion

Today we honored with a visit from this cute car, the owner of which would rather be known as the Possibly the Honorable D the J.

Some free beers in Kingston if you can identify the car and the year. Note the engine was upgraded to a 850cc, hence why the boot is continually open.

As we left Possibly the Honorable D the J had us join him in pray that he get home in one piece. Thankfully his prayers were answered and he did manage it.

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Thank you Possibly the Honorable D the J for reveling this classic and you can trust us that we will not reveal your identity.