David Linnard - Disaster Mansion

24/03/202024/03/2020

Non essential garden work goes ahead amidst warnings

We’re waiting until the weather warms up a bit so we can continue work inside the house, specifically concrete repairs to the ground floor (concrete needs to cure in temperatures above 50°F/10°C), so in the meantime we decided to do some garden work especially as the weather was lovely, albeit a little chilly.

We had hoped to put the side area to grass last year but we ran out of time. Our plan now is to seed it next weekend and hopefully get a nice healthy lawn in time for summer frolics. On Saturday we faffed about trying to get a decent level with a couple of planks and a string and then towards of the day I realised that we had a load of leveling guides/planks that we used for the top lawn, doh!!! Two of the six planks were missing so we replaced those, getting some peat for the soil at the same time.

Sunday started slowly, due in part to some birthday inbibes, that said we still managed 7 1/2 hours down the house. It took a while to get the guides together and after that there was a lot of shoveling, raking, stone picking up and tilling with our great little Mantis.

The front ten foot of the ground is where we planted our daffodils so we’ll wait until they’ve flowered and the leaves have died back before we turn that to lawn.

By the way the buckets are for all the stones and pebbles we find.

19/03/202019/03/2020

The Ponckhockie Chief

As most of you know our house is in Ponckhockie which was first inhabited by Native Americans. Legend has it amongst the locals that the head of one of the chiefs was carved into the rock cliff above Ponckhockie. I didn’t think much of this until last Autumn, just after the leaves had fallen and low and behold you can indeed see a profile of a head on the cliffs. Whether it was carved or a natural rock formation I don’t know but I’d like to believe the former.

On a good day I may have to grab a rope and harness and clear away some of the saplings.

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THE INDIANS

In legend and in names they live,
By lake and stream and mountain wild;
Seldom a thought to them we’d give,
Were these reminders but despoiled.
Their forms have faded from the land,
Their songs unheard upon the shore,
They sleep in death on every hand,
Their war-whoops wild are heard no more.

A Legend of Aowasting Lake Near Lake Minnewaska Shawangunk Mountains, New York. By Jared Barhite, 1911

Incidentally the book this poem was taken from mentions that Ponckhockie means place for canoes.

19/03/202020/03/2020

Digging a hole

Last weekend, as the weather was good and the ground was above freezing we decided to dig. We weren’t just digging any hole, but were trying to find the old waste water/sewer pipe. Paul Sinnott, our plumber, was hoping to connect a new pipe to the existing pipe near where it went under the pavement/sidewalk, thus hopefully saving us from the cost of digging up the road etc. Our aim was to expose about five foot of the pipe so Paul could see what the deal was.

We knew the old pipe ran roughly parallel to the side of the house and rather than dig it up all the way down we dug an exploratory trench about 10′ foot up from the pavement/sidewalk and once we had located the pipe we roughly knew where we should start digging near the pavement.

On Saturday, adjacent to the pavement we went down about 4′ and nothing, then some of the soil under the pavement fell away revealing a terracotta pipe. I had no idea what this was, possibly a sewer pipe, possibly not, either way I’m glad we didn’t damage it. This pipe is shown below. Still no sign of our cast iron pipe, so further digging was required.

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On Sunday we another exploratory dig 5′ back from the pavement, went down until we hit our cast iron sewer pipe and worked our way to the pavement and as you can see we revealed about 5′ of pipe, which goes beneath the terracotta pipe by about 18″. There were no obvious holes in the cast iron pipe, but the outside corrosion looked pretty bad and I wouldn’t be surprised if we need a new pipe from the edge of our property to the main sewer which I believe runs down the middle of the road.

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In the end the hole was maybe 5′ deep in parts but luckily the soil here is very sandy so the digging could have been a lot worse. We covered the hole with branches and leaves to make sure no one falls in [spfx: evil laughter]

02/03/202013/06/2021

Off with the parging

Today we removed most of the parge coat from the house and in case you’re wondering why, it was because the existing (modern) parge coat was done with Portland cement over the existing lime mortar walls. This is not a good idea as pointed out in this article:

Lime is the base product widely used to produce mortars, plasters and limewashes for traditional buildings. Lime has distinct advantages over cement based alternatives for external rendering of traditional properties. Lime is less dense and more vapour permeable than cement based materials and does not trap water in the substrate which is the leading cause of decay in all buildings. Lime materials accommodate general movement better than harder cement based alternatives and are closer in strength to many of the types of stone and brick used in traditional construction and therefore do not exacerbate their deterioration.

Instead of using lime materials, many traditional buildings are repaired and renovated using harder, impermeable materials designed for modern buildings which use completely different construction methods. The result is often worsened damp problems. The simple advantage of using a lime render is that it allows the walls to diffuse any water vapour that penetrates into them, referred to as the free passage of moisture vapour.

which to summarize means that a Portland parge over a lime mortar wall will trap moisture in your house, cause your walls to deteriorate and will likely crack due to its inflexible nature. By the way that is snow in the video.

To remove the existing parge coat I used our recently purchased rotary hammer drill. What a great tool.

By the way, where the mains water pipe goes into the house (clad in blue foam insulation) there used to be a door and steps down to it. It probably got filled in when the garage and driveway were built.

In the process of preparing for french drains and new footings we’ve already cleared a trench around most of the house so this is an ideal time to do a fresh parge coat as well as to repoint all the corners etc. We’re hoping that our friend Derrick can do the work as he is an expert in old school plastering. Once the parge coat is on it’s recommended we wait for two weeks for the parge to partially cure before we apply a lime wash which is an old fashioned whitewash, the sort that you’d see on old farm buildings. Allowing another two weeks for curing we can start to install our french drains and fill the trench in. It will be nice to have our paths around the house back as currently you can’t walk around the house.

Concerning the the new parge coat I’ve been talking to Chris at LimeWorks and he suggested a 3.5 Natural Hydraulic Lime for the parge and a 5.0 Natural Hydraulic Lime for any small structural repairs. I can highly recommend Lime Works if you have lime mortar in your old house.

Aimee in the meantime has been double bagging asbestos tiles which were removed from a section of the house last year. This is the second load we’ve disposed of and it will be good to get rid of the stuff. We have to make an appointment at the dump before we take it in and were told that it ends up near Syracuse which is about 200 miles away.

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04/02/202004/02/2020

The melancholic skip

Not sure if I ever mentioned our garage, but it’s slowly collapsing. All three walls have cracks, some of them about 4″ wide. It’s definitely got a lot worse since we got the house so we thought we should rescue our little sailing boat in case it got destroyed, the only trouble was that the driveway was covered in concrete and rocks which needed to be removed first.

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The skip arrived on Friday and we started on Saturday, it wasn’t a warm day but the weather was perfect as we both soon worked up a sweat. I also jack hammered away a patch of concrete as the start of the drive as this is roughly where the sewer pipe will go and we will need to dig a trench for that sometime soon.

You’ll see that we found three sets of initials on the concrete, no idea who they are though, one looks like “CPT”, another “RT” and the last “DS 97”

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This was a hardcore only skip, so we could only add concrete, stone or bricks, hence why we had to sieve out the leaves and soil from some of the smaller stones. Having a hardcore only skip, keeps the cost down as they can sometimes reuse the rubble for fill.

We pretty much got the boat out as the light was fading on Sunday and then we went to Keegan Ales for a well deserved couple of pints. Next week we’ll put a tarp over the boat to protect it from the elements.

We would pull the garage down, however our architect advised us against and to leave it until we were ready to rebuild it, reason being, it’s on the property line and if we demolished it now and went to rebuild it in five years time, then we might not get planning permission for it.

12/01/202013/01/2020

New Mower

In response to one of our earlier lawn related posts, friends of Aimee, Maria and Pete, kindly gave us their old mower and when I say old, it’s only three years old and for most of that time it’s been in storage. Maria and Pete have a steep lawn and as this is a push mower they upgraded to a self propelled model. The mower is in great condition and should serve us very well. We’ll probably get it serviced later this month so it will be ready to go this spring. Thank you again Maria and Pete and we look forward to taking you out for beers and burgers at The Anchor or Buns sometime soon. Incidentally for anyone reading this in the Bay Area, Pete designed and built the sound studio labs at Expression college in Emeryville in the late 90’s.

So this weekend we were blessed (or cursed) with warm weather, temperatures hit 65°F (18°C). It was a bizarre shift from full clothing to shorts and t-shirts but it was blessing for working in the garden. Tomorrow temperatures will drop below freezing. Marie told us that this was the warmest day in the area since 1975.

We’d also like to thank Don the Johnson for lending us two cordless chainsaws. I was bit dubious as to how they worked, but I eat my words, they were great, so thank you Don. We only used the smaller model as it was easier to handle up in the trees, also I tried the Dewalt for about 15 seconds and the chain didn’t seem to run well on the blade, nor did it cut well, so possibly a new blade or tune up is needed, which we will look into in return for your generous loan. In the end I think we did a decent job at cutting the trees in a manner which still left the tree looking wonderful.

By the I’m wearing a harness so I can securely rope myself to the tree/ladder. I also secured the ladder to the tree which was fortunate as tree limbs often fall unexpectedly. A lot of the limbs we cut off had a lot of vines holding them up so there were a few occasions when some of the heavy limbs swung back and smacked me on the shoulder or glanced off my head, luckily I was wearing a full face visor. It would be nice to get some advice on how to do this in a safer manner so I’ll ask my arborist friend Win. I think for now, we have pretty cut off the majority of branches and anything else can be left to the experts.

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21/12/201921/12/2019

More tree pruning

I know, all we seem to do is play in the garden and climb trees when we should be working on the house. Well it was just too nice a day to stay in doors, a toasty -5°C/23°F (luckily no wind chill) and the sun was shining. We’re pruning the trees to thin the canopy, remove dead wood and remove some of the branches which overhang the lawn. We are being careful in what we remove as we don’t want to spoil the visual aspect of the trees and after we have finished you probably won’t notice that they have been cut at all. I won’t seal the cuts as it seems that trees can look after themselves.

Currently I’m just taking off some of the main branches, leaving 3 – 4 foot stumps on the tree which I’ll trim flush with the main trunk at a later date. The reason I’m leaving long stumps is that when a branch breaks, it can cause tear out, which you can see was what happened in the video below and I don’t want that to happen to the main tree. As for the stumps, I’ll cut them off in shorter lengths, 1 – 2 foot so I can control the wood as it starts to fall. When I was cutting this branch (and it was pretty big) you could hear it going and I didn’t want to be up there when it went. I’m lucky I did go down as that could have been messy as it hit the ladder on it’s descent and the branch went quick.

Still using the trusting Bahco bow saw, but starting to feel that I could do with a powered chainsaw, not sure if I’d buy an electric corded or a gas/petrol one. I’m not looking for a super powerful behemoth of a chainsaw, rather something small and lightweight. We used to have a corded Black and Decker one in the UK which worked great for anything less than about 9″ in diameter. By the way I think this is the first time I have ever used the word behemoth in any written form and if you’re interested it’s origins are:

Behemoth comes from the Hebrew word b’hemah meaning beast.

I also found out that I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly, shame on me. By the way we did buy a larger Bahco bow saw, however we’ve lost it so if either of us have left it at your house, can we have it back please?

Lastly the stones at the base of the tree aren’t grave stones but they could be, but that’s another story …

21/12/201921/12/2019

Dedicated to my Mum and Dad, siblings Sonia, Ian and Matthew, my friend Jason and of course Aimee

The nights are getting longer …

17/12/201919/12/2019

We have cut ties with our builder

Last week we cut ties with our builder Thomas Motzer. We had pretty much exhausted our budget so it seemed a good time to part ways. Unfortunately the parting was acrimonious. I won’t go into details but both parties disagreed over the final bills. We only wanted what we thought we had paid for and I’m sure Thomas thought the same.

This was a big lesson learnt for us and I can recommend the following tips for anyone entering similar ventures.

Get everything written down and signed – I know this seems obvious but it’s easy to assume the best in people. As an example both Aimee and I are pretty sure that when discussing repairing/replacing the roof that the soffit/ceiling above the rear upper balcony would be fixed. Well it wasn’t. I spoke to some knowledgeable people about this and it seems a bit of a grey area, it could be classed as soffit or it could be a ceiling. So in summary I would record any conversations with contractors and make sure that all expectations are listed out and signed for. By the way this isn’t the only work which we expected to be done that wasn’t – there’s a list
I would recommend compartmentalizing any large project into smaller individual projects and when each project is completed get it signed off complete with costs. What we experienced was that at the eleventh hour (and pretty much the eleventh minute) we were charged for work/materials for projects that happened months ago [spfx: fish smell] and these were costs that we were previously unaware of.
Be your own boss. In future we will not be hiring general contractors and instead we will hire specialists for each task.

Dealing with Thomas over the last few weeks has been pretty stressful with threats of a Mechanic/Material lien being put on the house. We were prepared to fight but after talking to our lawyer, paying up seemed the easiest, though it was a bitter pill to swallow.

We’re on our own now, but the both of us feel a little relieved.

16/12/201916/12/2019

Prepping for the concrete pour

Currently we’re trying to prepare the ground floor for a concrete pour. It’s probably too cold for a concrete pour at the moment, plus we need to get the plumbing roughed in before that happens but at least that will give us a bit of breathing space to save up for it.

The time lapse is pretty boring I know, we were trying to remove all the high spots with a laser level (unfortunately you can’t see it in the video as it makes the soil look like little chunks of burning charcoal), possible we’ll have to remove more earth but we’ll wait until we hire someone. We’re trying to do as much as possible ourselves to keep costs down.

We’re not sure what to do with the staircase, I’m tempted to pull it off and have a new one built which we’ll either do ourselves or pay someone. We would keep the banister rail and as many of the spindles/balusters as possible. It would definitely be easier for the pour if the stairs weren’t there. I’ll probably ask our friends Derrick and Giovanna for some advice on the stairs.

After we finished we had about an hour before it got dark so we got out the ladders and started trimming the trees. We only have a Bahco bow saw (which I love by the way), so it does take a while. I did order a larger Bahco bow saw but we couldn’t find it. Some of the limbs we want to remove are about 12″ in diameter so it may be a long slog, but we’ll keep nibbling away at it. We will do a nice job trimming the trees, such that they still look elegant and balanced.

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