Category: Architectural

Just when I thought we were finished with surprises I found these improvements when I came to the house tonight.

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Aimee hasn’t seen this yet and it will blow here socks off, as it did me. It puts a massive smile on my face every time I think about it. My friend Martin would have chuckled and appreciated this 🙂

By the way the rest of the wall will have a coat of lime mortar and be white washed at some point so the plaque will look even better, plus I am working on building a new front door so everything will look a lot better on the ground floor at least. It’s great to have talented friends, thank you Derrick.

By the way motto doesn’t apply to us, friends or family, only foes.

By the way the lines, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” comes from Dantes Inferno (translation by Henry Francis Cary) as Dante passes through the gates of Hell.

On Tuesday one of my best friends, Martin Winchester died. He was an old Dinas friend going back to when I was probably 14. We had been on a lot of adventures together over the years and we both thought we had more to come, sadly that wasn’t to be. Martin was one of the easiest persons in the world to get on with and if you ever needed help with anything Martin would be, simply there for you. Over the years he helped me through a difficult personal crisis, flying out to Oakland especially to support me, he helped my parents with numerous projects at their house in Dinas such as a new foundation for a shed, repaving a patio to fixing our mowers etc. We used to sail a lot in a couple of Fireball dinghies we owned together, made and flew kites and gliders, and saw bands, Led Zeppelin, the Jam, The Stranglers, Queen, Rolling Stones, U2 etc. It wasn’t just me either, he was always there to graciously help his other friends as well. Strange thing is, Martin never asked for help in return, we always offered and I sometimes wish we had insisted on it.

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Martin was no stranger to the US and had visited the bay area, many times for a holiday and he knew his way around Oakland pretty well. I had always hoped that Martin would come and visit Disaster Mansion in person but I know he will be with Aimee and I in spirit. I know these blogs aren’t always the most riveting, but Martin enjoyed catching up with what we were up to and then about once a month I’d ring him up and chat about things. I was lucky to speak to him this Saturday past and we talked about a row/sail boat that the local boat building school had made and had put up for raffle. We bought six tickets which I optimistically expect to win and talked about taking Martin up and down the Rondout creek (which is only minutes away from DM) for a row/sail picnic and exploration as the boat would comfortably sit three. When we win the boat we’ll name it Winnie which was Martin’s nickname due to his surname (Winchester) and yes he did visit the Winchester house at least once. And look at the boat it even has a great transom for the name. Not sure of the raffle date now due to C-19 but tickets are still available, see email on photo.

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So a very saddening few days passed and then we heard from our restoration expert Derrick that he would be working on filling up some of the larger cracks in our ground floor walls with NHL. You have to use like with like in these old structures or you’ll have problems down the road. When Derrick got home he said he had left us a present, how interesting we thought, what could it be?

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And wow he had made us a lovely house plaque which I think will be permanent, so cool and maybe I forgot to tell you that Derrick is also a fine art graduate and I’ve seen his work, from fine paintings to the beautiful mausoleum he carved in stone for his Mum.

Derrick describes what he did as stucco:

The beauty of stucco is it’s versatility. Italians have done some pretty amazing things with it. That was an experiment with crushed soft brick as a pozzolan in a hydrated, not hydraulic lime. Wonderfully plastic.

We were very pleased with our new house plaque but it knocked our socks off when we got to the house today and saw this!!!!

Amazing and as we have some fine vultures circling over the area most of the time the wings and the skull are very fitting. We’re very touched, thank you.

How cool is that?

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Thank you Derrick this gave our very bleak week some light at the end of the tunnel.

Lastly I dedicate this post and all that follow to my dearly missed friend Martin. You’ll always be in my heart and never forgotten. In fact I have plans …

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.

After several iterations we now have the final house plans. Our architect Dave is now making the engineering drawings, which will be the large roll up sheets which people will be familiar with.

We met with Dave and our contractor Thomas Motzer a few weeks ago and Thomas plans to have our foundations, floor beams, roof and penthouse finished before Winter. The penthouse probably won’t have any of the finished details done such as windows (they can be boarded up for now), but the basic structure should be there. The roof top deck will be a lovely addition.

In the plans we also reduce the size of the garage. It’s collapsing, will have to be rebuilt anyway and we aren’t driving American slabs.

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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.

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.

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After I had removed all the concrete from the path there was left a lovely thick slab of blue stone which we would obviously repurpose somehow, possibly a step or part of a path. You can see this stone sticking up, two-thirds along the path towards the end of the “Jack hammer” video.

This evening I started work on removing some of the tree stumps we have in the garden and towards the end of the evening, as I was walking up the back path, I saw something on the above mentioned slab which looked like something carved. I knelt down and it was indeed a stone masons mark of some sort and after I cleared some plants away I noticed another one.

What these marks are for I have no idea, in the UK you often see mason marks to depict boundaries but they also seem to have other uses including religious. Maybe it was as simple as “this way up” or the masons initials? Seeing as this stone was an isolated stone amongst concrete I suspect that this stone has been recycled from another building or structure.

I do like these marks and as we have a stone mason friend, Paulo, I may ask him to teach me how to make similar.

Our friend Derrick thinks that this may be a horse carriage steeping stone which would help occupants disembark with style and grace.

If anyone has any information on these marking, please post a comment.

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I know we are biased but isn’t the balcony and front entrance beautiful? In the earlier pictures from public record office the balustrade extends the full width of the balcony. So how do you get up there? If you look closely at the public record photographs you’ll see the stairs coming up from the left. We took this for granted until Derrick (friend and advisor) mentioned that he thought it was an odd location for the stairs. To get to the front stairs you have to go all the way around to the left. Does this seem the most sensible position? Notice also the room on the far left has a door opening out onto the balcony which partially opens over the stairwell. This seems poor design and a little unsafe.

Derrick had suggested that we should have the stairs coming out and down from the center, for which we do have a few options. A center stairs would enhance the front view and at the same time give us more balcony space (no more stairwell). We liked this idea but I think I was struggling with keeping the house as original as possible. Last weekend Derrick stumbled on something which has changed my view point completely.

Look at the first picture below and you will see two green squares (I added the color in Photoshop) which seem to line up with the vertical supports above. Why on such a beautiful balcony would this front boarding be interrupted by two small squares? Well Derrick and I also now think that these were very likely all that remains of a front staircase. This staircase would have been exposed to the full elements and as this house is about 150 years old, you can easily imagine them deteriorating over the years to a point where they were completely removed and replaced with the steps to the left. The points at which they were originally attached were patched up with two small squares of wood.

This is another reason why we are very keen on finding early pictures of our house. There must be pictures out there somewhere and we just need to find them.

We do have Dave from Bolder Architecture working on the house so we will mention this.

By the way the lower vertical pillars are newer and don’t match up with what’s above. These will be replaced one day as will the ugly lower front door.

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