David Linnard - Disaster Mansion

07/10/201907/10/2019

French drain clearance

To keep our basement as dry as possible, we’ve been working on installing a french drain around the house. A french drain is basically a trench filled with gravel and containing a perforated pipe that redirects surface water and groundwater away from an area, see this wiki for more information. This trench didn’t need much work as the builders had cleared a lot of the soil away when they rebuilt it – this was the first wall to collapse.

We’ll need wait until Thomas and Matt remove the large pile of old wall debris from the front of the house as this is the area that the water will drain into. Once that is removed we can continue the trench and then lay the gravel, pipe and filter fabric (used to stop the gravel from clogging up with soil etc).

It was quite tiring throwing the soil clear of the ditch but the weather was perfect, a crisp autumn day. This was were we removed the tree stump from last week and you can see some of the remaining roots sticking out from the deck on the right. In the background Aimee is building a fire to burn the roots etc. We’ll often finish the day with a beer around a fire 🙂

05/10/201905/10/2019

Tree stump removal

It wasn’t a huge stump, the tree was probably forty foot high, but all tree stumps are a pain to remove. I remember working on removing tree stumps from two hundred year old oaks at my parents and that was an ordeal. It took weeks, digging a trench around the stumps, deeper and deeper, cutting the thick roots with axes until you could get a hand cranked chain winch to pull the bugger out. This wasn’t a weekend event, rather a multiple weekend event. Compared to those old stumps this was an easy one.

That said I’m not as young as I used to be and in the heat and humidity it was a pain getting it out, luckily it was on a slope so one side of it’s roots were easy to get to. We wanted this stump out as we want to put French drains down the side of this wall, plus the roots were coming into the basement.

We had a small fire tonight and started on burning the roots and stump 🙂

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02/10/201902/10/2019

Bat in the house this evening

I was working on the back door and a bird feeder this evening and the light kept on fluttering. I thought it was just a big moth, and then I looked up to see this bat sailing back and forth across the room. It was silent and unlike a bird it didn’t crash into any windows or walls. It was quite big maybe the size of a starling. I tried to look it up when I got home, but I have no idea what it was. I opened up the doors and I presume it flew out as I didn’t see it again.

We like watching bats in the early evening and as they eat mosquitoes we want as many as possible to live nearby. When we have time we will build a bank of bat boxes for the side of the house or for trees.

I like the look of the bat boxes at the end of this ‘Bat info pack’ and these would fit nicely up in the roof eaves.

This wasn’t the bat I saw, but the one I saw was just as cool.

Bat flying

01/10/201901/10/2019

House gets a root canal

House gets a root canal, well it’s getting under-pinned and new footings. If the house were sentient, I’m sure it would feel pretty bad.

Some of you may have read from previous posts we’ve had a couple of foundation walls collapsing, luckily the house survived both of these stressful events, but did reveal the fact that the house has very shallow foundations walls without footings. If you’re not sure what the difference between the two are, click on the photo below.

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The shallowness of the footings and the fact that the soil that they sit on is practically sand is problematic. The lack of depth means that the walls sit above the frost line, which means that the ground beneath will freeze and thaw which will damage the building by moving the foundations walls. See this wiki on ‘frost line’ for a fuller explanation.

It’s been a bit costly but better to do this now when the ground floor is half earthen and we have no tiling or plasterwork to crack, should the house move doing this work – which I’m sure it has.

The first step is to install concrete piles beneath the walls every five to six foot. Adding these will allow Thomas and Matt to remove the soil between them so they can add a footing. As you can see in the photos you can literally put your arm under the walls either to the outside or to another room. I probably would have positioned these piles differently to reduce the chances of the walls cracking, but what is done is done.

It will be nice when all this is finished as the house does seem very precarious and we’re very careful to tread lightly when working upstairs.

Note how sandy the soil is in a few of these photos.

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17/09/201917/09/2019

New lawn

We finally have a lawn. It doesn’t look much yet as we still have new grass growing but at least it’s no longer an impenetrable mass (see last handful of photos). We still need to work on the lower section which will require weeding, digging, tilling, getting the correct gradient and then sowing. We may start some of this over the next couple of months or failing that we try and get it done early spring. In the meantime we’ll probably just cover it in plastic sheet to kill the weeds.

Still need to buy a mower and debating whether to go petrol (which I’m used to) or electric. In the meantime we may see if our kind neighbours will lend us theirs.

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17/09/201917/09/2019

Roof update

So we’ve gotten over our roof meltdown and the issue I mentioned about how the membrane doesn’t wrap around the edges has been sorted by some metal flashing, though our friend Derrick said that how it had been done will cause problems down the road [spfx: sigh].

The pooling water which Thomas was hoping to fix never was fixed, but I think I can fix that by filling in the hollow with ever enlarging patches of the rubber, only pain is that the chemicals are expensive, you need a cleaning agent, a primer agent and then the glue which would probably cost a few hundred dollars in total.

The new roof was leaking. We contacted Thomas and it looks like the leaks were where the cupola meets the new roof. The cupola was missing the final flashing so temporary stuff was added. It doesn’t look great but the leaks seem to have stopped, phew.

I would still like to redo the roof at some point but that could be years down the road, in the meantime I have to work out a good way to fix this roof once and for all – by the way it’s an old roof so the current gradients aren’t what they were when the house was built etc. Also the flat roof we have has multiple gradients all leading to one point at the back of the house. Also the new cupola adds to the complexity as water now has to drain around it.

Thomas is now working on the foundations and I’m sure we will be happy with the results as he did a good job on the last set of foundations.

18/08/201902/09/2019

Work on roof restarts

After many months waiting for a good spell of weather for the roof, Thomas and Matt have restarted on the roof. The new roof is a EPDM membrane which is a type of rubber sheet about 2mm thick.

The roof was re-started last Thursday and should be finished on Monday and I have to say I am really sad and disappointed with the results:

It all seems a bit of a patch work and looks ugly
There are quite a few large bubbles
There are squishy bits that move down under pressure of a foot
The rubber membrane doesn’t wrap over the edge of the roof, which makes sense to protect the substrate from the weather etc. See diagram below
There about 12 different seams in our EPDM roof, I would have thought you could have got away with four seams joining four pieces of membrane together. PS. most EPDM roof failures are around the seams so it’s a good idea to minimise them
When it rains there are still standing pools of water

This roof looks DIY to me and from the onset I was hoping they would get the levels of the roof right so water would drain correctly, but no, they just built on the existing roof contours. I am really not happy with this and can see this roof being redone (when we can afford it) in a few years down the road. We had plans for a deck but it’s no point in putting that down if the roof has to get ripped up. Sigh.

By the way there is still a complete roll of EPDM plus, so running out of the membrane shouldn’t have been a factor for the existing EPDM patchwork. Aimee’s face sums it up.

What probably makes me most sad is that Aimee and I are trying are hardest to lovingly restore the house and then we get this sort of work. It makes me think what’s the point of all our effort.

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13/07/201902/09/2019

We have one modern convenience

Running water, albeit a single tap, but this is progress.

A big shout out to our plumber Paul Sinnott, Derick at Kingston City Water Department and Thomas our builder.

Paul, Derick, Thomas and ourselves all met up last Tuesday at 8.30am. I wish I had bought my camera with me as a lot of progress was made in a short time. It seems that our water system was very old (see man hole picture) and it surprised everyone that the system hadn’t frozen and burst years ago considering how low the water meter etc. were below ground (about two foot). It took some grunt to get it turned on and involved a very long pole to get better leverage and an angle grinder. At times I thought we were going to have a geyser outside of Gill House.

This old connection to the mains will be upgraded in time and Paul thought that we wouldn’t have to dig into the road to install the new system which is great news for us and it will save us money and the hassle of getting permits etc.

We temporarily filled up the hole so no one would fall into it and covered the pipework with a plastic water bottle to keep the dirt out. Some history about the “Ford Meter Box” can be found on the Ford Meter Box companies website.

As you can see form the photos, we can now water our grass which was in much need of water. We’ll probably have to reseed a bit but we’ll wait a week or so to see what happens.

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04/07/201902/09/2019

We have a new plumber

We’ve been looking for a new plumber for quite a while since we lost our previous plumber. Our friends Ritchie and Helena recommended Paul Sinnott and after a few text and phone calls we finally met Paul. Summer is a busy time for the trade so we are glad that we found a time that Paul, Thomas and Matt (builders) and us could all meet.

The idea is to first rough in the main downstairs plumbing components (sewer, water etc.) By the way “roughing in” means:

to bring in the various lines (Plumbing pipes, duct work, electrical conduit) to the space, but not make the final connections. For plumbing, this would be the pipes in the walls and floors that lead to the sinks, bath, toilets, etc, but not actually hooking up those fixtures

Eventually we will do a concrete pour on the ground floor so these pipes need to be installed first.

Paul got the ball rolling immediately by call Kingston city water department and arranging a site meeting next week with one of their engineers to discuss getting our water re-connected. It would be so nice to have just one tap in the house, both for the builders and for us so we can water the new lawn. By the way we haven’t had much water of late and the temperatures have been in the 90’s of late so lawn is suffering.

Paul also does heating so it would be handy if we could work with him on that as well.

Did you know that the word plumbing comes from the latin plumbum:

The word “plumber” dates from the Roman Empire.[3] The Latin for lead is plumbum. Roman roofs used lead in conduits and drain pipes[4] and some were also covered with lead, lead was also used for piping and for making baths.[5] In medieval times anyone who worked with lead was referred to as a plumber as can be seen from an extract of workmen fixing a roof in Westminster Palace and were referred to as plumbers “To Gilbert de Westminster, plumber, working about the roof of the pantry of the little hall, covering it with lead, and about various defects in the roof of the little hall”.[6] Thus a person with expertise in working with lead was first known as a Plumbarius which was later shortened to plumber. [Wikipedia]

So I guess that is how a plumb bob got it’s name as I bet the weight was made from lead.

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In the pictures, Paul has the sunglasses around his neck, Thomas is the one wearing the hat and Matt is well, just Matt. I’m the one wearing Eric Anderson’s cast off Levi jeans – my brother Matt also has a few pairs as well so thanks Mr. E 🙂

P.S Also note worthy in the photos is the fact that the bottom left hand walls are finally near completion.

21/06/201921/06/2019

Grass three weeks on

It’s now been three weeks since we planted the first band of grass and it’s coming on nicely and the second band is also showing signs of life as well. We’ve been very lucky with the weather and the rain looks like it will continue into next week. Luckily it looks like we’ll have good weather for Aimee’s birthday bbq this Saturday 🙂

We’ll soon be looking for a mower, probably get a Honda, either one that collects the grass like this or one where you have to rake it up like this. Raking up grass is a bit of a pain but I like the simplicity and it reminds me of my Dad’s old Victa mower (looks not to unlike the mower pictured below) which incidentally is now under the stewardship of my friend Martin Winchester in Dinas and is still going strong after 50 plus years.

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