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Knock, knock, who’s there?

Some idiot who forgot to put windows in our new front door. Sigh.

We hadn’t touched this door for months and I wasn’t thinking when I glued on one side of the plywood sheet yesterday, or when we glued down the foam core insulation with Special 3M 78, never to be removed spray adhesive, today. Of course about fifteen minutes after completing this it dawned on me that we were planning on having two glass window panels.

If it wasn’t for the fact that we have already sunk over $120 and many hours into this door, I probably would scrap it.

I’m sure I can tidily cut the foam out etc., and I’ll think on it tonight or maybe I’ll have a beer instead.

And remember all you makers out there, measure once, cut twice… I’ll get my coat.

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On some good news today we finished all the excavation for the basic ground floor plumbing and shifted enough soil from the driveway that we can get our little sail boat out. Last year we didn’t take the boat out once as there were tons of rubble blocking it in.

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And not so different from the last post

This time it’s reinforcing the foundations of the front wall so we can connect to the street. This wall was a bit trickier as we were near the corner of the house. We did have new footings put in but they weren’t continuous over the section that we had to burrow under, that is, the footings were done in small 3 – 4 foot pieces, which is fine normally, but its not possible to know what the linkage between these sections is, there could be rebar spanning them or it could be friction etc… You can see from the pictures that there are some clearly discontinuous sections. It’s like lego bricks, if you want to span a large distance, then longer pieces are better than lots of small ones. We had lots of smaller sections and in lots of places you could put your hand at least 5″ under the wall, not good.

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Again we could have skipped the reinforcement, but in two days we had the job done. It was a big job but we did get 30 bags of concrete delivered which was a great help as we can only get 5 bags in our Corolla. I’m not sure Aimee wanted to go ahead with this project but now it’s done we’re both glad we did it as tunneling under this wall is now stress free.

Oh and on the back wall I did start counting, in chalk, the number bags of concrete we used, alas the camera has a limitation of 40,000 pics even though there was plenty more space on the SD card. This was a big pour and I think we used over forty 80 lbs bags. Pain in the back, literally.

The finished product can be seen below and the reason the concrete shows differences in colour is that we used different manufactures when we ran out of our delivery load. All of this will eventually get covered up by our concrete slab which we’d like to get done this year if possible.

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Progress on plumbing

So as you may recall we have to redo all our plumbing as we currently have very little – a garden hose attached to our mains water which we greatly appreciate and can thank Paul Sinnott for.

We believe the last owners of the house were attempting to restore it as they gutted the house, hence no kitchens, bathrooms and then it was left empty for about ten years, during which time it was broken into and anything of value was pinched, e.g. copper pipes etc. It does make us feel sorry for the defenseless house and reminds me of the poor albatross chicks on Gough island and don’t search for it if you’re squeamish. If you want to donate go to RSPB Gough Island project.

To add to the plumbing complication there had never been any bathroom on the ground floor and as the sewer pipe entered the ground floor above ground level this was going to be a problem as sinks, toilets, baths etc. usually expect the above mentioned pipe to be below so gravity can do it’s work however, as we have to install a new sewer pipe it gives us the opportunity to lower the new pipe by a few feet – sure we could have had some pump system, but I really want to keep this system as simple and as reliable as possible. Fortunately for us the existing level of the sewer pipe at the street is low enough to enable this two to three foot drop.

Earlier this year we met Paul at the house and discussed how we should progress and it was decided that we should dig all trenches for the pipes, including out to the street – this was really a cost cutting exercise on our part as we need to be prudent.

Trench digging is fine, it’s hard work but we take it slowly, the issues we had was that we had to dig trenches under two load bearing walls and having brought down a wall accidentally last year you can understand how I am very hesitant about burrowing under them, especially as the geological layer around here and beneath our walls is 95% sand and I kid you not. You dig a hole in our basement and within minutes the ground around it collapses – you get the idea. In fact on occasion when we made our concrete mix too wet, we just used some of the sand we had dug up to thicken it! Added to all that the footings don’t appear very substantial in the areas we have to dig under as can be seen in the photos below.

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Earlier this year Derrick had suggested that we reinforce the footings our builders had put in and that is what you can see us doing in the photos and video. We first drilled holes into the existing footings and epoxied in rebar perpendicular to the wall followed by a couple of long pieces of rebar parallel to the wall. In the end it took us about eleven straight hours and about twenty five 80 lbs bags of concrete. We also added some large washed rocks to save on concrete. It was hard and sweaty work but now I won’t have any worries about burrowing under this wall as it’s a substantial chunk of concrete. One more wall left to reinforce.

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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.

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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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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.

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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 …

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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!!!

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I smell grass

First off, Happy Birthday to my brother Ian who is a constant source of support and cheeky comments, thank you Ian!!!

Earlier this year Maria and Pete kindly gifted us a lovely, little used, mower. At the time Pete suggested that we take it in for a tune up as it hadn’t been used for at least a year, maybe more. We had always planned on taking it in for a tune up, but due to C-19 we decided to see whether we could start it ourselves. I was really hoping we could start it ourselves, even if we had to pull the cord a hundred times, so we checked the oil, added some petrol – first pull, nothing, second pull engine sprung into life, couldn’t believe it, so thank you Craftsman and Briggs and Stratton I was really, really impressed and this wasn’t a one off, we shut the mower down a few times to adjust the height and it pretty much started up on the first pull every time.

Good news from our freshly sown side area, the new grass seed has finally started to grow and we have a week of wet weather ahead so that will be perfect. We also put to grass, the sloping area to the back left of our garden.

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Just as the C-19 was taking grips in the US we bought a lovely rocking chair (craigslist) from a nice chap, Josh, for a similarly nice price of $35. Josh was happy to hang on it for a while and this weekend we decided to pick it up. Aimee now has a decent chair to sit on as previously Aimee was using a kiddy sized rocking chair. The only downside to the chair is that a dog mistook it for a bone which you can see in the photos. It doesn’t effect the how it rocks and we can always replace the rails when we have time. I believe it’s oak and the style Amish. I have to say it’s very comfortable and it looks great 🙂 So if you’re ever in the area Josh come sit on your rocking chair and share a glass with us.

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Inside the house we are working on building a new front door for the ground floor. The current door is pretty beat up and doesn’t vertically align with the door above it. Later this year our friend Derrick who is doing the parging of the ground floor walls will take out the existing door, including side panels etc., and add a bit more masonry to center everything. At that stage we’ll need to ready with a new door, hence we are starting now.

The plan for the door is to make a plywood/foam cored slab door and then add stiles, rails and trim so it looks like a traditional paneled door. We’ll have two panels on the bottom and two windowed panels on the top. Our friend John Paul who is building a house on the site of an old bluestone quarry has the equipment and the trees to mill his own lumber (mostly oak I think), so we’re going to get some oak from John Paul for this. It will be freshly cut, so we’ll have to leave it for a few weeks whilst it dries.

It’s nice making your own door as you can make it as wide as you like, we’re going for a nice 40″ wide door so it’s easy to carry stuff through. Also building a door from scratch is a lot easier than restoring an existing door which we did last year. Lastly we bought this nice old brass letter slot for $20 (including p&p) on ebay which looks great, just hope it’s a decent size.

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Finished side lawn

Continuing from the last post, we’ve eventually finished the side lawn. Putting this to grass was a pretty big job and included spending a few weekends last year shifting countless barrows of soil to remove some rather large humps, bumps and dips.

You’ll see Derrick (our local expert in all things relating to old houses) in some shots. Derrick will be adding a lime mortar parge to the exterior ground floor walls in the following weeks or months. You’ll also see Don the Johnson, who is well, Don the Johnson. Don just bought himself a Frogeye Sprite which is sooo cute, I wished I had turned the camera around so you could see it.

In case you’re wondering what we’re picking up, it’s pebbles and there were tons of them. We didn’t get them all out but we removed a decent quantity. Also the shuffling penguin walk up and down, is to help compact the soil and the dark brown stuff we threw on is peat moss to help condition the soil.

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Finally our daffodils are coming out and at the last count six were in bloom. We didn’t want to disturb the daffodils but when the leaves die back, we’ll dig up the bulbs, grade and seed the area and replant the bulbs. Thanks for helping us plant them Colin!

Weather has now turned rainy which will be perfect for the grass seed.