It started as a disaster so how bad can it get?
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!!!!!!!
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.
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“.
While I was digging out the back path I did find an old bottle embossed with F.W. Devoe & Co. New York. It was about a foot under ground and luckily I didn’t break it. F.W Devoe made paints, pigments and inks. My guess was that this bottle contained some powered pigment for an artist, but it could have equally have been a paint sample for the house. This bottle could be late 1800’s or early 1900’s. Sometimes littering is a good thing.
The bottle has twelve sides and would have taken a cork stopper. It is about three inches tall. There is an identical one for sale on ebay.
As you can see work continues on back path. We probably dug too much out but that can always be re-added. There are multiple reasons for digging out this area including:
The foundation walls of our house are made of old lime mortar, Derrick and Giovanna think the mortar was probably made down the road in Rosendale, in fact the whole area around us is full of disused cement quarries.
Lime mortar does not age well when it’s repaired with the more modern Portland cement (1900’s onwards). There has been some amount of Portland additions to the foundation walls, such as a parge coat and some water run off solutions. The parging will be removed in time but as you can see the water run off has been removed. We have a good architect in Dave Toder and builder, Thomas Motzer, both of whom we can trust to give us good recommendations for water drainage etc.
The issue of Lime mortar and Portland cement is a post in it’s self and I will ask Derrick for help in writing this or maybe I can persuade Derrick to write it as he is my go to expert on the subject. It is important stuff to know when working on old houses but surprisingly no one but a few crafts people seem to know or care about it.
I have to say my cheap jack hammer is fantastic, it’s a little noisy but I started taking away those large concrete blocks with hammer and chisel (it was Sunday so didn’t want to make too much noise) but after ten minutes of making little progress jack came out and it was done in five minutes.
There is nothing very interesting in the video, though I do like the way the wheelbarrow sags when it gets filled up.
All the soil and concrete rubble we shifted is in two big piles on the drive so it will have to get shoveled or picked up again once we get skip/dumpster number 5. We have to be careful how we dispose of this stuff as the last dumpster cost over $1100. This was because we exceeded the 4 ton limit and total load was 8.1 tons. This is not the fault of Kingston Roll Offs as it’s the city dump that weighs the vehicles, that said I was a little surprised at the bill. We may sieve a lot of the soil so we can reuse it. In fact we probably could reuse all the rubble as well for in-fill on new paths, foundations etc, alas I can’t plan ahead that far.
As you can see all of our recent work has been on the garden. The house still daunts us.
In the post Mysterious TT stone blocks rear passage I asked readers whether they spotted anything unusual in the time lapse. Eventually Mr. Invader from England spotted it, another TT stone standing in plain site. Congratulations Mr. Invader!
The “TT” was partially covered in soil and roots but the top part of it caught my eye. It’s the same width and the height only differs by 1/2″. Still no idea where they came from. Be nice to find a third, but I doubt it. Will have to find a good use for them eventually.
The mysterious TT stone continues to stand in the way of progress. Staff, eager to continue work on the rear passage threatened explosives so I try to move it out of harms way.
Armed with some old plastic pipe and some sticky backed plastic I enlist the help of Mechanical Advantage and as you can see it was a lot easier than I had thought. Thank you Mechanical.
How observant are you? If you happen to noticed anything unusual in this clip please comment. There is only one answer I am looking for. For the winner, if winning is not enough, there is small prize. Fat and bald spot are not winning answers.
We wanted a path at the back to make it easier for pushchairs, wheelchairs, wheelbarrows, skateboards, bikes etc., basically ADA accessible. We’ll put a nice bluestone path down at some point. The bank on the right will be reduced to a much lesser angle, maybe 55% in front of which we’ll build a crude bluestone wall with plenty of pockets for plants such as ferns etc. The grading won’t be finished until we reach level ground so we may be digging another five feet or so out.
This was taken over Sunday and Monday. I could only do an hour or so on Sunday as it was raining.
We pulled out a lot of rocks, most of the big ones were about 3′ from the house so we think this may have been an earlier wall supporting a path.
As you can see our magically filling wheelbarrow is still working fine, thank Harry!
Hmmm, we now seem to have an obstacle in our path, the Mysterious TT Stone.
Did anyone lose a Gyroscope, sixty years ago? I found it when we were digging away the soil at the back. It must have been under the concrete path which I think was built at the same time as the garage. Not sure how old the garage is but I think it was already there in 1958.
I thought it was spinning top at first but then I noticed the concave ends and the hole in the shaft to put a string in it to spin it. The rest must have rusted away. I thought it was cast zinc but as it has some verdigris on it it’s probably brass.
I’m going to clean it up and see how it comes out.
Today we were clearing away the back path and we had the garage door open as we had kept the wheelbarrow in there overnight. Halfway through the day, I got a call from Aimee, “hey look at this” and Aimee pointed out an old door with signatures from the Gill family. I’m surprised we hadn’t seen it before, but then again the garage is dark and without electricity. All the historical literature said the Gill family lived here, but it felt special to find this personal evidence of the Gill’s.
The old door had the name “Walter N. Gill”, “T.M. Gill” and also the initials, “T.G”. We both thought this was pretty cool.
Stepping back a few weeks ago, as part of our mission to track down old pictures and history of the house, we had written to all the local Gills asking for any information. We did get a reply from Walt(er) Gill (his Dad was also called Walter) and Walt thought his dad’s sisters had lived in Ponckhockie. Still not a solid connection but it does look like Walter was a popular Gill family name and I feel we are getting closer.
Later that day we had visitors and we took them onto the roof. On the way down Aimee pointed out some engraved graffiti from Bessie Tyler’s family (photos to come) who lived in the house in the 1950s. See Giovanna visits the public records office. I stayed a minute longer, looking around, and I was amazed to see some more graffiti from the Gills, one from T.M. Gill (1883) and Earl Gill (1912). The T.M Gill is very likely the same T.M. Gill who wrote on the door (note how similar the letter “T” is).
I also found mention of Walter N. Gill in a book on Ulster history. It looks like David Gill Sr. was the Gill who built our house, David Gill Sr. had a son called David Gill Jr. who in turn was father to Earl Gill. David Gill Jr. and Walter N. Gill appear to be brothers.
We will preserve all these signatures even if we make modifications to the house. This weekend we will take some floodlights up into the cupola and look for any other graffiti.
