Sorry we’ve been absent

Sorry we’ve been absent on the blog. We’ve been away quite a bit, the weather has been pretty hot or raining, plus we’ve both been busy with work etc. That said we have made a bit more progress on the garden and I’ll show what has been going on shortly. The reason we haven’t worked on the house is because we need construction done first. Major beams etc need replacing etc. which may well change the shape of the house slightly so no point really trying to fix the doors and windows until that’s been done. That said our architect Dave Toder is almost ready to start working on the engineering plans and we have an on-site meeting with Dave and our builder Thomas this afternoon.

We plan to have our foundations fixed, beams replaced and a new roof this year.

Another Mystery Object

Buried in our garden we found the following. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before, maybe part of clothes lines? It has two pivot points, where it is attached to the wood and the small knife blade part. If it’s useful it can be sand blasted, painted and put back to use. So what is it?

We have a winner!!!

Our architectural/building advisor Derrick McNab correctly identified it. Click to reveal the answer.

Tree pruning and weed whacking

Last weekend, between thunderstorms we bought a corded electric weed trimmer and cut down the weeds which had grown, since spring, to over three foot in places. We got an electric trimmer as they are easier to start, quieter and not as heavy, plus they are a third of the price. It won’t be as powerful but our garden isn’t really big or wild enough now to warrant a petrol/gas one.

I also started to prune the very large red maple. I got a couple of branches down but it’s a big tree and as we have branches going over the neighbour’s roof, we’ll find a local arborist who can elegantly finish it off. If anyone can recommend a local arborist please let us know.

Jackhammer came to the rescue again. We were trying to remove an old metal railing, but each metal post was stuck in a huge concrete block and we couldn’t pull or leverage it out etc. About one minute with the jackhammer and we had the blocks broken up.

Skip numero cinq

Skip number five left our property this week. It was a hardcore only load, so stone, brick, concrete, glass etc. only. This can be reused so the charge to take it away is a lot less than disposing of rubbish etc. Skip number four cost almost $1200 due to overloading with concrete etc., hence the switch. I’m not sure Tom from Kingston Rollsoff usually does hardcore only skips, so thanks for sorting this out Tom. We also sieved a good many tons of soil from the path we dug out, taking out any stone, glass, rubbish we could. Took a couple of weeks to do this but the soil is good and we will reuse it in the garden at some point.

After shifting this much soil I was hoping to find something interesting, but pretty much all we found was the other part of the gyroscope, a few bones and lots more bits of the clay pipe, for which I’ll do an artistic reconstruction. From the number of bits, “c’est un très gros tuyau”, which reads “it is a very large pipe”, probably…

This skip was a good opportunity to break out the jackhammer so I took away the concrete outside of the garage. I would have kept this concrete had the garage not been in a state of collapse. You can see the cracks in the pictures and it’s a lot worse when you see it for real with all the walls bowing out 4-6″. Eventually, we will rebuild the garage with maybe a flat roof so that can be used, maybe as a deck. We will also make the garage shorter and narrower.

We did add an extra 20% to the skip after the picture was taken, so I think we did a pretty good job.

To get the soil out of the way we stuck it in the garage with our cute little boat (a Zuma, made by Laser).

To be honest, so far Aimee and I have just scrapped the surface in terms of things that need to be accomplished. That said we have saved ourselves many thousands of dollars by doing this labour ourselves. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with a project of this size, so we always have a copy of “Hitch Hikers Guide” close at hand. DON’T PANIC.

First balcony party

Sorry for the lack of posts of recent, we’ve been on some trips and the weather has been up in the high sweaty nineties (mid-thirties to our European friends) or it’s been thunderstorms, plus some O+ festivals are on the horizon which can mean 7am to 11pm days for Aimee.

We have a few back posts and this is the first of a few.

On Aimee’s birthday, we had some friends around and we managed to open the front door at last. Well, when I mean open, powered by champagne, Aimee removed the door.

I have to say it’s is very pleasant on the deck. It is in a bad state but as my brother Ian pointed out all the flaking paint does add to the charm. I bet a lot of it is lead based so will have to be removed, be nice if we could replace it with paint that peels, but maybe that is just cheap paint.

The curved laminated beams for the porch roof are a very nice detail but I will talk about these in a latter post.

Guests were Giovanna, Derrick and Aimee’s brother Paul.

What is this object? Revealed

In a previous post I asked whether anyone could guess what this artifact was. The only clue I gave was that it a part of something else, it’s shape is a good clue and it’s about 2″ in height. I had a few good guesses including a bell holder but no one got it right.

Yes it was the other part of the gyroscope I found a month or so ago. The slot in the end is so you can balance the spinning gyroscope on a string.

I also have a new mystery object for you to guess at. Again, I found it while digging up the back path. It looked interesting so I put it aside. I had no idea what it was until Giovanna correctly identified it. So if you know what this object is, answers on a postcard please …

Happy Birthday Aimee

Happy Birthday Aimee and in the immortal words of Oliver Hardy, “Well, here’s another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into!!!”

I think we’ll be able to see this out together, with or without VR, though that would help!!!! Thanks for being such a trooper.

Happy Birthday!!!!!!!

Disaster Mansion is upon us. Will love and compassion be enough to get us through? Maybe, but we're going to wear our virtual reality headsets until it's safe to come out, Happy Birthday Aimee

Panning for gold

After we dug out the rear path we have a huge pile of soil on the drive and surprisingly it looks pretty good. Combined with the fact that our last dumpster/skip cost us over $1100 (due to excess weight), we decided to sieve all the soil to get rid of the roots, large stones and general rubbish and reuse it in the garden. The homemade wheelbarrow sieve came from youtube. I used a 1/4″ mesh initially but it took too long and I ended up with a 1/2″ mesh.

The first video you will see is the making of the sieve. I cocked up the pieces of wood which held the mesh in place and as I didn’t have any extra wood I stopped filming. This is a common mistake I make and there must be a name for this kind of mistake as I have heard of other people making the same mistake. The mistake is when I am making something that has mirrored left and right parts, I often forget to flip the template over so I end up with two lefts or two rights. Dickhead springs to mind.

I do plan on getting a 4×8′ sheet of ply for the saw stands and this will be our general work table.

It will take a while to get through this pile of soil but it’s not really hard work and I did find an artifact amongst the soil, which is my next quiz. What is this artifact. My only clue is that it a part of something and it’s shape is a good clue. It’s about 2″ heigh.

mystery object

TT + TT = H

I know this branch of mathematics may be a little difficult to grasp, but it’s true TT + TT = H. This Sunday, whilst staring at the two TT stones, Aimee, Giovanna and Derrick figured it out. Great job.

Derrick thinks the stone was split on purpose, which is a shame, but at least we have the two halves. It would have been nice if it was a “G” for Gill. We are now definitely sure that it’s a carriage step and the mystery of the TT stones has been solved. We will probably mortar it back together at some point. We will use it as a bench of some sort. If we are careful we may be able to dye the mortar and do a half decent job. Note the mechanically polished front face, Derrick thinks they achieved this with sand, water and a lot of elbow grease.

There was a Hutton living around the corner as you can see from this 1870 map, maybe it belonged to that family? Note that in this map our house is on Prospect Street. It was renamed Gill Street a few years later when the Rondout was incorporated into Kingston. Kingston already has a Prospect Street so they couldn’t have two.

If you’re unfamiliar with the TT stone, you may want to read some previous posts starting with “we find another TT stone“.