David Linnard - Disaster Mansion

14/12/201915/12/2019

Superman breaks free from captivity

I found him while I was jack hammering up the hearth of the chimney we recently removed. I’ll probably chisel him out completely from the concrete tomorrow. There’s also a small ball which you can see in the last photo. I wonder how many decades he’d been trapped?

Note “Hutton” in reverse, this was the local brickyard for which Ponckhockie residents provided a lot of the workforce.

So if you’ve ever wondered where some of your favourite childhood toys went, your parents buried them under a concrete slab, probably …

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01/12/201901/12/2019

Door added to cupola just before first winter storm

I have to say my door making skills need to be honed. The first door was great, 5/8″ ply all braced with 2 x 4’s and then covered with tvyek, trouble was it was too heavy for for one person to hold off the ground while the other secured it to the frame. Fast forward a few iterations and we finally got the door on, not a great job, but when the weather gets better, we’ll adjust it. When it’s 22°F (-6°C) tempers are short, but that was short lived. This is only a temporary door to keep the winter out so it doesn’t need to be perfect. Oh and we did finally finish off fastening the house wrap.

It was touch and go whether we were going to make it home from DM as a lot of cars were wheel spinning and getting no where. On seeing this we reversed and tried some side roads which weren’t as steep though we did indulge in quite a few very lax “Californian stops”, especially at uphill stop signs. Our trusty Toyota Corolla did a great job, admittedly we did fish tail a bit 🙂

We ended the afternoon with a beer at Rough Draft which is a fine beer and books establishment. If you’re reading this Kyra and Vanessa this is our project and it was great meeting you.

By the way what is nice about a snow flurry is that it’s tranquil – the snow deadens sound and not many cars are out.

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30/11/201918/12/2019

Record No. 4 plane reassembled and ready for use

After cleaning and removing most of the surface rust (soaked the plane in vinegar for a day) the plane has now been reassembled. The blade was also sharpened using a set of DMT Duosharp diamond bench stones which took a while as I needed to flatten the back of the blade. The primary bevel of this plane blade is 25° with a 30° secondary bevel. I also put on a slight curve to the blade, following these instructions from Matt Estlea. In future I’ll only need to sharpen the secondary bevel, unless it’s gets as large as the primary bevel in which case I’ll re-grind the primary.

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You’ll notice the handles are now a different color, which I put down to differing types of woods. Previously the handles were finished in a dark reddish lacquer but as this was flaking off I sanded them both down to bare wood, applied a few coats of linseed oil followed by some hard wax polish. Before final assembly I sprayed all the metal parts with Boeshield T-9 which leaves a protective waxy film.

I included one of the before pictures so you can compare and contrast and as you can see the plane cuts pretty well.

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PS this is the previous plane entry.

24/11/201925/11/2019

Wrapping Aimee’s Christmas present

But don’t tell Aimee, it’s a secret. Zip System (chip board with a water resistant membrane) shouldn’t be exposed to the elements for much longer than six months. Usually this would be covered with weatherboards/clapboards/sidings etc. but as we’re not ready to cut out and install the windows we have to dress it in house wrap to help weather proof the house for winter. I wish we had installed the fabric upside down or back to front as we’ll now be advertising Lowes for the next few months. Maybe we’ll paint it as we do have a quite a few paint samples, in which case I’ll do it in a dazzle fashion.

By the way I added extra strips along the corners to give the wrap a bit more abrasive protection.

When we are ready to install windows I think I’ll rip all the existing Zip System off as it wasn’t really installed with love, the panels are uneven, the corners are horrible and the seams are improperly taped. When replacing it I’ll look at alternatives such as ply and DuPont tyvek.

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The gap in the video is us going to lunch which in hindsight was a bad idea as we didn’t finish the fastening of the wrap and today is very wet, that said we did go to one of Aimees favourite cafes, Peace Nation which is closing it’s doors for good this weekend. At the end of the time lapse you get a quick view over the Hudson estuary – we get a great view in the winter, but not so good in the summer due to leaf cover.

12/11/201914/12/2019

Lawn gets its first cut

Managed to get the grass cut before winter sets in – we expect snow tomorrow. We borrowed the mower from our great neighbours Justin and Laurie. It should have been cut earlier and next year we’ll do a better job especially as one of Aimee’s friends is going to give us an old mower.

Over the following months I’ll trim back some of the tree limbs overhanging the grass so the lawn will get a bit more light and in the spring we’ll add a bit more grass seed as the lawn is still a little patchy.

It’s nice to see at least one thing looking decent at DM. The last picture is how we found the garden when we bought the house.

P.S. It did snow in the night.

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10/11/201910/11/2019

Old house, old tools

Not only does it seem fitting to use old tools on an old house, but practical, a well made old tool is often better than its modern counterpart. To this end I have been collecting some old tools, some belonging to my dad (and possibly his grandad). There’s something nice about using something your parents or grand parents used. I don’t have many such tools, a couple of screwdrivers, a hacksaw, some chisels and on my last trip to the UK I picked up my dads, “Made in England” Record No. 4 wood plane. This plane is a smoothing plane which is used to ‘produce a finish that equals or surpasses that made by sandpaper’.

Concerning ‘Made in England’, I also have a lovely ‘Made in USA’ Bailey/Stanley plane which I picked up on ebay, again an old plane, but built with quality. Aimee has used this one quite a lot while working on our back door restoration and the results were most pleasing.

This model was in production from 1931 to 2004 and from this excellent site on Record planes I’ve dated this plane from somewhere between 1952 to late 1957 which gives it an age of between 62 to 67 years old.

As you can see in the pictures it has quite a bit of surface rust but I’m hoping to remove this and return it to a decent condition. The trick I picked up for removing rust is simply to soak it in vinegar for a few hours. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be much pitting, which you can’t do much about.

These pictures are the before any cleaning. I’ll post some pictures once I’ve cleaned off the rust, sharpened the blade and re-varnished the handles etc. Probably take me a few weeks to get around to this.

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09/11/201909/11/2019

Chimney removal

In the previous post I mentioned that the chimney needed to be removed due to the fact that it was crumbling. The builders had quoted us about $2,500 to remove it so we decided to remove it ourselves and save us some money.

We had three floors of chimney to remove but luckily the bricks were very easy to remove with just a slight tap from a rubber mallet and a lot I could pull off with my hands. After seeing how easy it was to remove the bricks I was glad that the chimney was going as it made you realise how unsafe it was. We’re saving the bricks as they are actually worth something – we’ll probably re-use them somewhere possibly for an outside fire pit or maybe a chimney for a cast iron wood stove. We had to carry all the bricks downstairs which took a while and I’m glad I started cross-fit earlier this year as that helped us with all the stair climbing.

The hardest bit of the wall was removing the bottom section which was mostly stone and lime mortar, is was also the scariest as this was a load bearing wall and we were concerned that temporary bracing wouldn’t be enough. This section of the wall had to be removed with hammer and chisel and it took about three evenings to do it. I forgot the camera on a few nights hence the jumps in the time lapse. I’m glad to say that we managed to remove the chimney without anything bad happening.

Incidentally to the right of the green step ladder you can see our old chimney stacks. Two of these were were sitting over real chimneys, whilst the third was just a dummy, maybe having more stacks was a status symbol. Anyway to keep up with the Jones we we’ll probably put them back on roof.

On the plus side we do now have a nice rectangular hole in all our floors suitable for a dumbwaiter.

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04/11/201904/11/2019

Removal of the second wall

With the new footings poured a few weeks ago we’re ready for the new wall, which if you’ve forgotten is to replace the wall lost in the second great wall disaster.

The first step in this is to remove the existing crumbling wall and we’re leaving most of this to Thomas and Matt as this is a load bearing wall and don’t want anything going wrong. The current wall is made of lime mortar and stone and it’s tough to remove. I think Tomas and Matt use a large diamond masonry circular saw to cut it into smaller sections.

We’re hoping the new wall can go up quickly as the house looks and feels very precarious propped up with a few 2×4’s and I always feel the house sags a bit more when in this state. In addition to that the house isn’t particularly secure with a huge gapping hole in it.

In some of the shots you can see our red brick chimney which is crumbling aways so alas this will have to go, a bit of a shame, but you couldn’t use it any more as it wouldn’t be up to code and would likely cause the house to burn down and having no chimney will actually help us divide the rooms better, so this is positive. Eventually we’ll have some cast iron wood burning fires and they only require a 6″ stainless chimney pipe.

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22/10/201922/10/2019

Footings complete

The house finally has footings so it should be pretty stable. One wall still needs to be removed and rebuilt but hopefully that will be done soon. After that the plumbing will get roughed in and a new concrete floor will be poured. Two thirds of the ground floor is earthen with the remaining being concrete which we will pull up so we can lay the sewer/waste water line underneath it.

The reason we aren’t using the original line for the waste water is because the pipe came into the ground floor about a foot above the floor. This was fine for what they used it for which was as an outlet for a sink, however we want a bathroom downstairs and our only two choices using the existing waste water line would be to mount our bath and loo on a foot high plinth or install an underground tank to contain all the waste water with a pump to pump it up to the level of the waste water pipe. We didn’t fancy either option so we decided to lay the waste water diagonally across the room (see last image) which is obviously a shorter distance and hopefully allows us to drop the line quite a bit while still having the 1/8″ – 1/4″ per foot fall so gravity can do it’s stuff.

The corner of the room in the second picture is where the waste line used to come in. It was cast iron and rusted through in parts so it had to go anyway.

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08/10/201908/10/2019

Footings get rebar

Or in English reinforcement bars.

It’s starting to get cold here, so we want all this finished before it gets too cold to pour concrete. Once the footings are poured they’ll probably start demolishing and rebuilding of our second collapsed wall. Our plans for this year are to have new concrete floors poured (no more earthen floors, yeah!!!!) with the plumbing roughed in. Once that is all done, we can start on sealing the ground floor up, including replacement windows and front door.

It’s been a bit stressful with all our walls hanging in mid-air, looking like they could collapse at anytime so we’ll both be pleased when they have a solid concrete footings beneath them. Doing all of this has cost us quite a bit more, but this is the perfect time to do this and hopefully the foundations will be good for another few hundred years.

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