It started as a disaster so how bad can it get?
watering can. Top notch though, the Haws Rowley Ripple Green – Two Pinter, handcrafted in England out of powder coated galvanised steel and guaranteed not to corrode for life, no brass rivets though. DM is going to have lots of plants, inside and out, so we need something that is up to the job!
Now I’m going to watch, “The Testing of Eric Olthwaite” as I’m a boring little tit.
During the excavation of our basement floor and foundation drain we accumulated a large quantity of sandy soil. We’ve been pondering about what to do with the dirt for last year or two. We thought of getting a skip (dumpster), finding someone who wanted dirt (people do) and then we realised that we had the perfect spot for it at the back of our garden – don’t know why we didn’t think of this earlier.
Aimee kindly took on this task and over the last 6 weeks or so has been slowly moving the soil, two small buckets at a time. It’s been a long slog, especially in the hot humid weather we’ve been having, but it’s a good work out.
I didn’t start recording this until Aimee had removed about a foot of dirt from in front of the garage and I accidentley deleted the last video when we finally cleared the driveway.
It’s nice to have reclaimed our driveway and make our property a bit more presentable and we’re also hoping to remove the dirt from the front of the house as well.
Turned up on last Friday to find this mess on our side lawn. Viburnums took a big hit as well as some of our other plants. The chimney had been leaning badly for some time so it wasn’t surprising. For the roofers it was a bit of a shock and I’m glad no one was hurt.
So what I’m upset about, ignoring the chimney, is the fact that they thought they could treat our unoccupied house like shit. If we had been living there, they would have asked our permission, put tarps down over our plants, shrubs etc. – I’ve seen them do it at our neighbours house. They did do a half decent job cleaning up but it will take another 30 minutes from one of us to pick up all the smaller bits they missed.
To add insult to injury our good neighbour Mama Dot said they were clearing out the house contents (house is owned by the bank and has been empty for many years so we now that the bank maybe getting ready to sell it) by throwing the contents out onto our lovely lawn. They did clean up but that’s taking liberties.
Made me want to watch the film, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore which I highly recommend. One of Aimee’s friends plays the villain.
So our woven Rose of Sharon hedge has an infestation of black aphids. We have been spraying the hedge with a mixture of neem oil, soapy liquid and water but we’re not quite sure how effective it’s been.
The sap eating aphids target the new shoots, probably because they are the easiest to pierce so to help combat them we brought a few hundred ladybirds beetles (ladbugs in the US). They arrived today and we scattered them throughout our hedge. Hopefully they will like their new home and devour the aphids.
Came back the following day and all but three had buggered off to pastures new, not sure why they didn’t like our shrubs and aphids but we did seem some ladybird larvae (last photo), and they eat aphids so maybe all will be well.
A rock wall to be specific. We’re not really sure how we’ll treat the path around the back of the house, but we decided to build a rock wall to help support the bank and to plant shade loving plants such as ferns, grasses, hostas and others. We also planted some mosses in the cracks between the stones so we hope these take root. The rocks were ones that we had dug up in the garden so it’s good to re-use them. We don’t have enough rocks for the complete wall but additional rocks can be had from just up the road where they’re abundant and just sitting by the side of the road. Bit of a struggle getting them up our garden as one of them must have been around 200lbs. What’s nice about this wall is that it can easily be modified or removed if we ever have a change of plan.
When we eventually move into the ground floor this will be the view out of the back windows so we want something lush and refreshing. Aimee did most of the wall and it is crude, but in a nice way, solid and I think it will age nicely. We’ll publish additional photographs when it’s finished and the plants have had time to settle in..
We do need a few more plants but Aimee put out a request on facebook and we should have some more ferns and grasses soon.
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.
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 also started to restore our newel post for our stairs, this was pleasant job as I could work on it from the comforts of our kitchen table.
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.
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.
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.
We also did another self-leveling pour, the results weren’t perfect but luckily this wasn’t the final pour.
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.
Having finished the floor we thought we would epoxy it and apply a stencil pattern, we ran a poll and the top three you voted for were:
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.
She came in through the bathroom window…
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.
Brick Bat Box!!!
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.
Repairing the footings
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.
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.
Almost Ready to Lay Down Pipe
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.
Back to work
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.
Foundation drain update
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.
Dimple Board
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.
National Gravel Day
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.
Parging Inside Walls
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.
Filling in the Trench
We finally finished the foundation drain, okay there is a bit to do at the front of the house but that will be easy. Phew!!!
Trench Finally Gone
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.
Best David & Aimee, 2022
Aka some camouflaged bat boxes. This is my attempt to reduce the mosquito population, that said there is no guarantee that the bats will nest in the boxes. I built these last year but with so many other projects on the go they’ve sat for a while. Had to get them up soon otherwise another year will have passed so we made the effort and got them up.
Wood is the same wood we are using for our windows which has been thermally modified so very rot resistant. It has a beautiful mahogany color but I decided to paint them so they would blend in. Okay the colors don’t quite match and they should probably should have been positioned under each chimney but I think they will fade and weather in time and I was using existing hooks in the wall.
Last few pictures are some tracks we found in the lime mortar dust. I suspect some of them are Millipede/Centipedes.
We’re slowly coming out of hibernation here. In previous years you’d often find us working in freezing conditions, but now those days are thinner on the ground.
We are making progress on the house but we still have some major tasks to do and one of them is to apply a new lime parge coat to the exterior walls, install a french drain and then fill up the trenches around our house so it’s not an assault course.
Clearing out the back wall has been most tricky as the bank keeps on collapsing and everything has to be carried out by bucket. Luckily I had a guest appearance from my brother Matthew and we made a decent dent in the job. We’ll continue this job as the weather improves.
In other parts of the house we have been prepping to get the floor level but this been delayed due to the cold as the concrete slab and ambient temperature needs to be above 50°F/10°C, fortunately those temperatures are fast approaching and once we have a flat floor we can begin framing it out internally for walls and insulation.
First I didn’t order enough gravel for the ground floor and then I ordered too much. To find a home for it we decided to build a footing for our front patio wall. Digging was the worst part as the ground here is 3′ higher than it should be due to ground floor excavation. With the forms laid we added maybe 5″ of gravel onto which we’ll add 4 – 5″ of concrete with rebar. This is a fun project (and not high priority), but having these footings ready will be useful for when we have the concrete pour as if there is any excess concrete it can be dumped in here. It doesn’t matter that the forms aren’t perfectly straight as this concrete footing will be just below the surface.
The wall won’t be very high at all, maybe six inches max and on top of it we will use local bluestone which we’ve been collecting over the last couple of years. Not sure whether we will go with rectangular or irregular stones (see sample images), it will probably depend on what we have.
Our vision for this patio is to have a nice shaded area to sit out on with a selection of plants in large terracotta planters etc. In front of the patio we thought we’d have a large flower bed stretching the width of the patio with climbing roses going up the balcony supports.
The front of the house has looked messy for a long time so it will be great to tidy it up. The neighbours all say the place looks a lot better and we’ll take that.
Today we planted a Jane Magnolia. Both Aimee and I share magnolias in our childhood memories, Aimee from her parents old house in Long Island, and my Gran in Dinas Powys. Aimee dug a hole my dad would have been proud of and we added some decent amount of good soil and peat. We’ve named her “Big Nan” after my grandmother and she should grow to about 15′.
Maybe in a few decades, magnolia left will become magnolia right.
Next tree to plant (if I can find one) will be an Acer griseum. We will plant some native trees as well and intend to plant a white oak and some hazel nut trees, and this is in addition to a white pine and larch that we planted last year.
By the way our daffodils have done pretty well this year and eventually we’ll plant them over all this lawn and include crocuses, snow drops, primroses and bluebells.