It started as a disaster so how bad can it get?
This weekend I fucked up royally, I can’t even tell you what happened. I have a structural engineer coming around tomorrow to look at the house and have friends Derrick and John Paul to help if need be.
My dad didn’t use the ‘f’ word often, but he did say that there was a time and a place for it. This is that time.
Please don’t email to ask further. I will post updates on progress on what went wrong as I feel fit. Thank you.
This is my darkest day at DM.
Because the chimney stack was attached to the collapsed wall, that had to go as well. Modern building codes are pretty strict so the stack would have to be lined before any sort of wood burning stove was used and an open fire would have been completely out of the question.
On the positive side, the chimney stack did divide the room a bit, so so now with it’s removal we don’t have to worry about trying to find furniture of the right size to fit either side of it.
By the way the thick rods you see to the left of the last image are our sash weights. I can’t wait until we get to that granular level of fixing the place up.
I have some time lapse footage of the wall demolition, but the power line to the camera was severed somehow, hence the short video.
I didn’t think it could get worse but I think it has, but we should get used to future disappointments and keep a stiff upper lip, right Winston?
This happen a while back and maybe something I didn’t want to post right away. If you can remember the portrait that our builder Thomas found, see Our last great find.
Aimee was taking our photograph with us either side of the portrait when the wall behind collapsed. Luckily it just dropped and didn’t topple. It felt like an earthquake was happening, strange noises like rain drops hitting glass and a shower of dust from the roof. Aimee and I were a bit shocked and I think Thomas was a little too. Luckily the ceiling above had been shored up, otherwise it could have been a lot worse.
There were numerous reason it collapsed:
This gallery doesn’t really do a good job at showing all the above but hopefully it gives you a taste. Note that the bottom of the wall is where the wall ends, no footing underneath just sitting on soil and you can see that the earth is very, very sandy, in fact it’s almost sand. At one point the wall was unsupported for about 6′ with no support at all at one end. The first shot show the chimney stack.
These are the photos of the collapsed wall, luckily it didn’t topple.
This is an old post which I forgot to post so my apologies. Anyway we were out in the back garden when we noticed that someone had dumped a good few barrow loads of earth at the back of our garden. I thought it was odd as why would they bother to cart it all the way back there.
We were pondering this when we noticed a hole towards the back of the mound, it was our groundhog extending it’s underground lair. It’s pretty impressive how much earth and stone the groundhog can move and I don’t know how many meters underground it had to slowly push or drag the soil to the surface.
Moving to current day we haven’t seen the groundhog for a while, so it’s likely that the deforestation of our garden has led to the extinction of above mentioned groundhog. RIP [spfx: sniff].
By the way the title of this post was ranked 39th best joke (courtesy Darren Walsh) at the 2015 Edinburgh fringe. How many of you got it? I’m not sure I would have.
This weekend, in the space of fifteen minutes, the soles of both my boots fell off. They weren’t especially expensive boots, I got these steel-toed boots for working down the at Crucible in Oakland, probably fifteen years ago, but the coincidence of them both failing within fifteen minutes surprised me. I was high up in a tree on a ladder at the time so maybe they were scared of heights.
I now have some great Carhartt work boots and you really need good boot around DM. These boots fit well, whether I have one pair or three pairs of socks on.
While we were planting bulbs last week I noticed a large pile of wood chips beneath one of our hemlock trees; looked as if someone had been chopping logs with an axe. I looked up and noticed the 10 or so holes in the tree which I suspect were made by a pileated woodpecker.
Apart from the damage to the tree, it was pretty impressive work from the woodpecker and you can see that some of the wood chips are easily 3-4″ in length. I hope one day we can see the woodpecker in action. It’s a pretty big bird (crow sized) so it won’t be hard to spot.
I now feel spring is finally here, I see small green shoots on a couple of trees and in the last few weeks daffodils, tulips and crocuses have started to flower. Spring happens a lot later here than in the UK where you can expect daffodils and the such to flower in January/February.
This year we are hoping for a splash of color in the garden and starting in November we planted 150 daffodil bulbs and more recently we planted:
The daffodils are doing pretty well and they will start to flower this week. Next year we’ll plant more spring flowers such as crocuses, primroses, tulips, Lily of the valley and snow drops.
We were working on the house this weekend when we saw a lot of people walk up the street and gather around the tree outside our house. Turns out it was a demonstration of how to tap a maple tree for it’s sugary sap and part of the Atharhacton Maple Project (see below). It was pretty cool to see them doing it, especially to see how easy it was to do, though I think the work is in the refining of the sap.
We joined the group and were told of the old Native Americans practices of asking the tree for permission, thanking the tree and offering the tree roots tobacco leaves. They also told us that this tree is a silver maple tree and not a red maple as we thought, even though it does have red blossom.
Silver maple isn’t the best tree for syrup as the sugar content is lowish but we do hope to try some next weekend on pancakes.
Atharhacton is the Lenape tribe name for the Kingston area. This project honors our native “first people” and one of their gifts to all future settlers: the wisdom, method, and gratitude for making Maple Sugar. (from: https://www.seedsongfarm.org/maple.html)
Thomas and Matt have been plodding on through the recent extreme cold, but we haven’t been up to much down the house. We normally go down for a few hours each day at the weekend but when the sun goes down the temperatures really drop. I wear three pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves and my extremities still get cold, though we have discovered these chemical heat pads which really seem to work. They are a bit tight trying to get them into your boots but they do work. I dread to think what’s inside them.
When down the house Aimee usually continues stripping our many window sashes etc. which is a slow process. I’m sort of all over the shop, but mainly working on restoring the old back door we found in the garage. In a previous video we stripped and dismantled the door and now we are are filling all the many holes etc. with System Three epoxy. The nuisance with the weather is that we can’t do any gluing (or painting) down the house as the temperatures are way to cold (last week it got down to -4F/-20C) so we have to do all the gluing in our apartment and then cart everything down to DM to do all the sanding and table saw work which is a real pain as the door parts aren’t small.
In the original video you can see that the door had four wooden panels. We decided that the two smaller top panels should be glass and the bottom panels need to be replaced as they were cheap ply and looked they had been replaced after some door incident. Poor door, it had been through a lot of abuse. Anyway to cut a long story short I am trying to reassemble the door.
Incidentally I almost hung the upside down. If you look at the original video of the door,
you will see two large and two small panels. I naturally thought that the larger panels would be on the bottom and the smaller on the top, which I was going to replace with glass. When showing Aimee progress on the door lock mortise, Aimee pointed out how high the door knob would be and suggested that I had it upside down, and bingo the door was upside down. We looked at all the old panel doors in our apartment and yes the smaller panels are on the bottom. I had already glued in the replacements for the large panels but I was able to cut these back so all is good now.
The panels and the glass on the door all will have fancy mouldings. We did manage to get some of the original mouldings off, but a lot were missing. I was going to get the mouldings made up but a quote of $300 for about 30 foot made me think again. In the end I created the mouldings out of three separate pieces, one moulding from the local hardware store Herzog’s, one from Home Depot and then some nice ply from Midwest. I think they worked out quite well.
I managed to cut the glass myself without incident, but I now realise I may have to trim 1″ off one side which maybe a little tricky, though I do have a fancy glass cutter from Toyo so fingers crossed. The glass we got is some nice 1/4 inch glass from Zaborskis, a rather interesting industrial salvage place in Kingston.
We plan to etch the glass with some design, probably something from nature, such as trees or ferns. I’ll post a design once we’ve tested it out. I have been practicing cutting glass on random pieces of broken glass and my $10 cutter does worked fine for the thinner glass, just not on the 1/4″ glass. One secrets is apply just right amount pressure wheel, not too, not much little. What worked me was when wheel made a sound like tearing a sheet paper.
The edges of the door were all looked bad, crowbar damage etc and all sorts of gunk etc. so I trimmed all that off and will be replacing that with 1/4″ – 1/2″ strips of oak.
When it comes to painting Derrick and Giovanna, our local restoration experts, recommended a first coating of boiled linseed oil (cut with turpentine), followed by an oil based primer “Fresh Start” from Benjamin Moore and topped off with a couple of coats of “Duration” from Sherwin-Williams.
Out with our small steep stairs and in with a proper staircase that will continue off where the old ones finished. The stairs lead to the new cupola which accounting for a loss of 30% floor space due to the stairwell is still about three times larger than the old one. There should be enough room for a sofa/bed etc. or store our antique teak deck chairs when they are on our roof deck. We really only have one old teak deck chair which has brass plates on it, “Queen Elizabeth” and “First Class only” which we bought in Long Beach, California, it’s pretty cool and I wonder how many famous derrières blessed it.
You can see the old stairs on the right and also Thomas’s Mum who helps clean up after her son.
The new cupola admittedly looks ugly but it won’t be green when finished and will have lovely windows and similar decorative styling to the rest of the house. I do like what Thomas and Matt did with the roof beams and although it looks flat it does have a shallow gradient.
Our plan is to make the cupola look like it’s always been there and we may add arched features to the windows, just depends on whether I die of old age first. In case you didn’t know in the summer a cupola would let warm air escape up high up while bringing in cooler air from below, hence creating a cooling breeze for the occupants.
