Before we can replace our sill beams the corner of the house needs to be repaired, it had some really funky repairs done on it in the past so I’m glad we’re fixing it. Weather is just about decent enough to risk doing lime mortar.
From the photos you can see it was in pretty bad shape and even worse by the time I removed all loose and flaking mortar. A lot of the mortar was of very poor quality and would crumble in you hand, hence the huge hole you can see.
On Saturday we rebuilt the main structure of the wall by hand, filling in small cracks & gaps and on Sunday we used our mortar sprayer to finish the job off. We had to spay a lot on as in some places the mortar is a couple of inches deep. We did push in stones whenever we could and we do add fiberglass strands to the mix – in the old days they may have added horse hair.
I’m not great at finishing the surface but my trick is to go over any irregularities with a diamond polishing/grinding disk which will give great results. I’ll grind the top nice and flat and it will also have to be at an angle as the two beams are at a slightly different height, probably due to subsidence etc.
The last couple of nights have dipped below freezing (disastrous for lime mortar) so we built an outside tent around the wall and left a small fan heater inside. Each day we’ll spray the wall with water which helps the lime to cure.
The reason why we look like we’re not doing much in the video is that each batch of mortar takes about 25 minutes to mix – it’s a lime thing. Also the SD card ran out of space, hence the abrupt end.
In a previous post I mentioned the rotten sill beams, still haven’t replaced it but the house is still standing. Last weekend I got down to the nitty gritty and started to cut the existing beam to accept the new one. A butt joint probably wouldn’t pass code so I made a staggered cut for more glue area. First I made plywood template and attached them to each side of the beams and then, using a Japanese hand saw, cut away the rotten wood, results were decent enough. There are still a few cracks and splinters in the existing beams but epoxy will eventually fill this. I also applied this treatment to the other end of the beam.
By the way if you’ve never used a Japanese hand saw, check out this introduction video. Very sharp and very useful for some certain cuts.
The replacement beam is made from pressure treated 4×4’s which are roughly the same thickness as the existing beam. I cut these out on my miter saw and trimmed up with a hand chisel. Before I can install them I’ll need to repair the wall such that it presents a smooth surface for the sill plate to rest on and as the weather is getting better I think I’ll be able to do that in a week or so.
Lastly I decided I should support the corner of the house in case it starts to sink, I don’t think it will as the rotten beams were no support, but better be safe than sorry. Not great shoring up but it will do for now but I may improve it and try and jack up the house a bit as it was obvious that this corner had sunk a few inches over the year.
There has alway been something a bit funky about the rear right corner of our house. Looking at it, it was pretty obvious that someone had been up to some f#$%&ery†in the past. Today was the time to remove the band aid and find out what was going on – a few months ago I really wouldn’t have wanted to know, but now it needs to be addressed. Once we start framing inside and adding insulation, access to these areas gets harder.
So in the photos you can see, going horizontally, that we have tile, tile, tile, some odd bit of concrete painted white, probably to make it look like tile. By the way beneath the tile is wooden sidings or cladding. So what was going on here was that the sill plate, a 5x”10″ beam that rested on top of the masonry wall (to which floor joists are connected to etc.) had rotted away. Two likely reasons for this, firstly the single gutter from the roof was vertically above this so any blockages or leaks would have sent water running down the outside walls. Secondly this is below where all the bathrooms were so any leaks would make their way down to the sill plate.
After removing the funky concrete it was obvious that the sill plates were totally rotted and in places completely missing.
If the beams weren’t so rotted and crumbling I would have been nervous about removing them. Anyway I took the risk and the house is still standing. It might not be obvious from the photos but the ends of the floor joists were so rotten that the ends don’t even meet the walls. As a precaution I did put screw jacks under the joists.
Currently we have about 7 linear foot of the house which is unsupported. We’ll be addressing this asap. We’ll also need to rebuild a lot of the corner wall but we’ll have to wait until temperatures are warmer.
Indoors we started on making some shelves for all our wavy glass. For years we’ve had piles of it dotted around the house and every now and again, we would end up breaking the odd pane. Some of these panes are pretty big at 3’x3′ and this glass is getting rarer and rarer so I’m glad it’s out of harms way.
The shelves took longer than we thought to make but they are pretty heavy duty and the vertical dividers can be removed should we want some workshop shelving in the future. Our workshop has become pretty cluttered so it was nice to have a good tidy up.
As the end of the year draws nigh and the sun sets over Disaster Mansion, I’d like to recap on what we’ve been up to over the year, what’s given light and what has cast shadows.
January
This is our fifth winter working on the house, we are slowing down a bit, but that’s fine with us. In January we started on some inside projects, first was to build a new partition wall between the boiler room and our bedroom. I over-engineered it with 4×4’s in case we ever needed to hang heavy shelving as well as act as a load bearing wall to support all the partying up above.
I continued to work on the newel post restoration and started to epoxy together wood for our sash windows. I had bought some thermally modified wood (lasts a long time and is pretty dimensionally stable) but it only came in 1 & 1/4″ thicknesses so the wood had to be milling and then epoxied together to get to the requires 1 7/8″ (≈ 48mm). Again I could do this on the kitchen table. There are a lot of pieces to a sash window so it took some time and spread into March.
March
As well as continuing with the sash window wood we started to clean up the inside and removed all the old gas pipes, knob and tube electrical wiring, old screws/nails and random scraps of wood that had been nailed to the beams.
It was during these winter months that I was also doing a lot of research on self-leveling compound and trying to work out the best way to fix our uneven concrete pour, including how many people we needed, what tools were required, how much we could pour at any time etc. We also started again clearing out the trench at the back of the house for our foundation drain. My brother Matthew helped me with this and he earned his keep as well as getting me motivated again.
By April I thought we had dug enough out of the trench, but sadly that wasn’t to be so. I think I had previously got french drains and foundations drains confused and after doing a bit more investigation and consulting our architects plans I released that foundation drains needed to be below the top of the footings. We dug a little deeper and found out that our recently installed new footings were in a very poor state, sigh, but more of that later.
As mentioned previously I’ve been planning for months on how to use self-leveling compound to level our floor. Self leveling compound appears to be an ultra fine cement and sand mix which has the consistency of pancake mix so it can flow and self-level. When I say self-level, it will only do this to a degree, imagine when you make a pancake, you have to encourage the batter to fill the bottom of the pan. The reason I hadn’t started on the self-leveling before was that we needed the surface of our concrete floor to be above 50°F and we were only just starting to get these temperatures. It was frustrating that we had to wait until April as this held us back a bit.
Self-leveling can be tricky as you only have about 15 minutes before the mix starts to set, so you need to be fast and have a team who know what they’re doing. Our team consisted of Joe, Deborah, Rob, Brain and Aimee and I can’t thank them enough, everyone was a vital link and they all preformed faultlessly. Thank you!
Because some areas needed in excess of 1″ of self-lever we did multiple pours in these areas, spread over a number of weeks and re-priming each time.
May
In May we tried our hand at re-plastering one of our interior walls with lime using a process called harling, which is basically throwing the lime mortar at the wall. This proved hard work and the results were just about okay. After a bit of research I found an air driven tool that could do the job a lot faster.
June was back to the trenches but some major rain storms caused the trench to collapse again which meant digging out an extra 2′ deep of dirt, wasn’t happy about this.
We also finally finished applying self leveling to the main basement room and the results were very pleasing. We added ice to the water this time to give us a bit longer cure time.
Lastly we enlarged the bathroom widow and reframed the plaster. We did this for two reasons, firstly code dictated that this had to be a means of escape from the bathroom, should you be trapped by any nasty whiffs and secondly, the previous window was miserably small and we wanted a decent amount of light in there.
The month started off with a fun project, some brick bat boxes, well they were wood (thermally modified) but painted to blend into the brick house next door. Didn’t see any bat action around them this year as we probably installed them too late, but fingers crossed for next year.
Back in April I mentioned that we had discovered some pretty poor workmanship on our footings. This was the month to repair them and it wasn’t fun. More dirt had to be dug out and working down there was pretty cramped, that said I think we did a great job fixing them and in the end it was worth the extra effort.
Lastly we tidied up some door openings. The builders left them very rough so we added shuttering and packed them with stone and lime mortar. The doorway to the boiler room will have an arch so there will be at least one room where you can bang your head on. Form for the arch is pretty much complete, just isn’t on a high priority.
August
Having just finished all the footing repairs it seemed a good idea to re-plaster the exterior walls. In some places it had crumbled away leaving 4 – 5″ depressions into the wall which is not insignificant. Once this trench gets filled in, these walls won’t see daylight for many many decades, so it seemed a good idea to fix these walls correctly and not skimp.
Luckily for us there was a perfect tool for this, the ToolCrete mortar sprayer which was a pretty invaluable tool. The mortar we used for the wall was lime to match the existing mortar and we also added as much stone as we could to fill in the deep areas. Once sprayed on the walls you could push stones into the lime and suction would do the rest. Once the lime work was done we applied a limewash coat to give some extra protection and then resumed work on the foundation drain.
One of the issues we have with being “new to the trade” is that we don’t always know what products are out there and one case in point was my discovery of Dimple board. Before I filled in the trench I didn’t want wet gravel against the wall, but at the same time we couldn’t paint it with a bitumen type water proof coating as lime walls need to breath. Anyway dimple board was a hallelujah moment for me.
Late August, early September we took a much needed vacation to see family in the UK, first time back in over three years and it was great to see family and friends, eat fish & chips, curry and steak pie, not forgetting mushy peas, bliss!!!!
The remains of September were spent prepping the rest of the trench for the drainage pipe, including removing a long section of our old cast iron waste water pipe.
Finally finished off the parging and started work on the drainage pipe. We couldn’t find pre-drilled pipe so spent an evening drilling our own holes in the pipe. We measured the distances and assembled the pipe with PVC glue on the lawn and then dragged it into the trench. I think we only made one correctable mistake. Once the pipe was in the trench we could add a bit of gravel below the pipe and check that the gradient was roughly 1/8″ per foot.
It was nice to finally be filling in the trench and we had a few kind volunteers to help fill the trench up to the top of the footings. At last you could walk around the trench without it being a trip hazard.
Having filled in the trench to the top of the footing it was time to install the dimple board. Dimple board is a tough water proof membrane with the added advantage of leaving an air gap between itself and the wall which allows moisture to condensate and fall by gravity.
Once the dimple board was in it was time to fill the trench with gravel. I did eventually have to splash out and buy some more ply for shuttering, but that was worth it, after all we only needed a column of gravel 12″ – 18″ wide. Thank you Giovanna and Derrick who helped us shift the gravel.
With the cold weather approaching we moved indoors to complete the lime parging/wall repairs. This can’t be done in cold weather so had to get it done soon and we needed this completed before we started framing out the inside for insulation (our winter project). A lot of the time was spent prepping the wall, removing all the plaster and loose and flakey mortar.
After parging inside was complete we moved outside and eventually started to fill the trench in. We had a lot of gravel to shift so it took many weeks to complete. We also lost Aimee’s Mum, Doris who will be sadly missed.
So in reflection I feel this year was an improvement on the last, we had less disappointments, which could be down to us doing most of the work ourselves. We are definitely slowly down, both physically and mentally but I’m hoping that is balanced by future jobs being less physical and more artistic in nature (hence fun).
Here’s to a healthy, peaceful and cheerful 2023 to all of you that have been following our progress. I special call out to Chris and Ian who are constantly giving us positive feedback – thank you, it means a lot.
Lastly we made a small video in which we tried to encapsulate all the above work. I did forget to add John Paul and Brian from the credits, so my apologies. If we’ve left anyone else out please reach out.
If you read the previous post you’d know that our rear wall footings weren’t up to scratch and needed repairing. It was a bit tricky as the space was limited but passing buckets of concrete out of the window worked well. We prepped well and I rust treated the existing rebar, added new rebar and pressure washed it a few times. After the concrete had set I did go along the bottom of the wall and filled up any gaps that still existed and as suggested by a few, I might seal the joint at the bottom.
We’re pretty pleased with how it worked out and it’s a major improvement over what Thomas Motzer left us with, see below. Just a shame we had to spend the time and energy to correct this mistake. With this done we can move on to apply a new parge coat of lime to this wall which we will probably start this weekend.
The Contractor, and I don’t mean to insult any decent contractors out there.
Recent rainy weather has shown that we get pretty major water ingress into the ground floor, bad enough to soak carpets and cause major mould, so it needed to be addressed. The leak isn’t through the walls but where we had footings placed under our stone and mortar walls.
Investigation required more digging which revealed a real hodge-podge of a footing which Thomas Motzer installed. To be honest I’m not really sure you could call it a footing as in places it doesn’t extend any further out than the wall they were trying to support, plus you could put your hand at least 10″ under the wall in many places. Lastly they had left unexposed rebar sticking out and when this rusts it will expand and start cracking the concrete which just accelerates the problem. We spoke to an architect last night and he confirmed than rebar should be completely enclosed by the concrete – thanks A2.
If you don’t really understand what you’re looking like, the footings should look like the corner section (last two pics) which Thomas did get right.
I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t have passed the building inspection so I’m guessing, like us, they didn’t see what was going on outside. Admittedly it was difficult to access and earth had probably collapsed into the trench by the time the inspector looked at it. Anyway we decided we had to do something about it not least because of the leak, so we cleared out more soil, cut back the rebar and rust treated it as well as adding additional rebar pieces so we could get a better key into the existing concrete. Sucks that we have fix this after spending probably tens of thousands getting it fixed in the first place. The weather didn’t help with temperatures hitting triple digits on the weekend, that said we were out of the sun for most of time and there was a slight breeze.
We’ll mix inside and then have to bucket the concrete out of the window, fun times!!!! We need to get this done so we can plaster the rear wall, install a french drain and get this pain in the ass trench filled in.
It seems a good idea that we fix our doorways before we parge/plaster the interior walls. The doorways are pretty uneven so we added some shuttering and slowly filled up behind with lime mortar mixed with a bit of fiberglass and as many stones that we could fit in. You can see Aimee hammering in the mortar to reduce voids.
Progress is a bit slow but at least we’ll have a pretty square opening for a door to be installed. This door is to the bedroom and we had the builders cut this opening in the wall for us. The second doorway we need to fix is to the boiler room and for this we plan to have an arch, how fancy is that and the arch should be a fun project. The reason for the netting is that the masonry above the door is extremely fragile and if it fell on you it would likely kill you.
We did have a plastering fail yesterday. I removed the shuttering and 90% of the plaster came away from the wall. Not sure what went wrong there but it could have been any combination of the following:
Messed up the ratio of the mix
Didn’t mix for long enough
Removed the shuttering too soon
Mix was too dry
Didn’t pack in in well enough
We’ll probably never know why but I suspect a combination of all of the above with the possible exception of (5).
Thanks again Joe and Deborah for the loan of your cement mixer.
Last weekend was wet but this weekend was perfect and I finished removing all the dirt from behind the back of the house. It was a pretty hard job throwing the dirt out of the trench especially as the trench kept on collapsing. I did get bonked on the head when some large stones at the end of the trench decided to fall when I was bending over but no blood and and all is good. Shuttering isn’t great, but will hopefully hold up for a little while.
Next step is to remove any loose mortar on the wall, wash it down thoroughly and then we’ll pay someone to parge it, after which we can install a french drain, fill the trench back in and get our path around the house back This has been a big job and we’ll both be pleased when it’s over.
Not the most interesting of posts, I keep thinking I’ll dig up something interesting but also no.
This is the wall between bedroom and boiler room, it’s not a priority but this can be done during these cold months. Our friend Derrick suggested that this could also be a load bearing wall to give the floor above a bit more support, hence the 4×4 studs under each floor joist. This will also give us a solid structure should we ever need to mount anything on the walls of the boiler room.
For purely aesthetic reasons I notched the studs for the horizontal braces (blocking). Currently the braces are loose, but I will secure them with a pocket screw. The wall is probably a bit over engineered, but that doesn’t bother me.
Whilst this has be going on Aimee has been removing hundreds of screws and nails from the floor joists and generally clearing away thick layer of dust and debris that has built up over the years.
I still have add the end studs but I think I’ll leave that until we know how much equipment needs to go into the boiler room, if not much then I may use the slot on the right to make a smallish built in closet for the bedroom, we’ll see. Really trying to maximise every inch of this place.
Yes we got our concrete pour on Friday!!! Big thanks to Al Riozzi (AJR Masonry) and his crew who did a great job! This was a big big day for us and has taken about three months to prepare for and we got it done just before winter sets in. It’s been quite the slog and so pleased this is behind us now. As a reminder this is how the ground floor looked in April.
Final thickness of the concrete was about 4 & 1/2 – 5″ which is a decent thickness and we also added rebar mesh supports to lift the rebar and radiant tubing to the top third of the slab, this will make the radiant heating system more efficient and responsive. We also managed to drop this new floor by about 5″ giving us a little more headroom.
This is the crew, I didn’t catch all their names but pictured (in no order) is Al, Anthony and Pat, and I have to credit Pat with the “Adirondack wheel barrow chair”, it looks really, really comfortable and it’s portable!
The last few shots were just before the pour and shows how we used small supports (known as chairs in the trade) to lift up the rebar mesh and Pex tubing. Concrete guys don’t really like these but Dave from the building department wanted them and I think that was a good call.
For some reason the video camera shut down before they had finished with the power trowel. I think they did three passes, using two different sized machines.
Post pour, if the pictures look a little steamy that’s because it was steamy. Temperature was about 70°F and steam was coming off the concrete. Al did say to expect this as it’s an exothermic reaction. We also have a few heaters to make sure the temperature doesn’t drop too low – tonight it’s dropping to almost 0°C, brrrrr.
For some reason they didn’t add concrete all the way to the edges, probably something we should have discussed beforehand. Anyway we filled in these areas this weekend and are misting the concrete to improve the cure. There are some areas where you can see some deviations in height but overall it appears pretty flat and we’re happy with the results.
In about a month, when the concrete is fully cured, we will apply a coat of epoxy, probably colored, to add some protection and to smooth out any imperfections, but this is only if we can warm up the area to about 50° which is doubtful. Maybe we can install the rest of the radiant heating system, that would be cosy 🙂
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