While our porch is still absent we thought it might be a good idea to parge the ground floor walls as they look a bit of a mess as well as put in a foundation drain to the left of the house. It will be no surprise to long term readers that when we reached the footings, we found another bodge. At the rear there was a 4′ length of wall that in most places you could stick your arm under past your elbow. I’d say that’s not good.
Again this took us a while to fix, mostly trying to stop the bank collapsing and clearing out all the dirt in the cavity. Glad to say that this has all been fixed. This bodge definitely wouldn’t have passed inspection by the building department had they seen it and why they didn’t see it, I’m not sure. Fixed, moving on.
As you can see the outside is a bit of mess. We will be preserving our “Disaster Mansion” plaque and will try and frame it nicely in lime, but for now we’ll just cover it with plastic. Our first attempt at parging the front was last weekend but we didn’t get far as the air compressor we had wasn’t up to the task, but luckily we found a second hand, Honda powered petrol/gas, one for sale from a nice chap around the corner, however, this one in turn broke down after a few hours but that’s another story.
As you can see we first had to remove the cement plastering from the old lime wall. We did tell our old contractor to leave this wall alone, but did they listen, no, so not only did we have to pay for it, we had to spend our time and energy removing it. Fun times. As you can see the wall is a bit rough beneath the concrete but the parging will fix all of that.
By the way, the reason I’m drilling and grinding the wall was becuase it wasn’t flat (+/- 4″) and the membrane we install as part of the foundation drain is pretty rigid so best suited to a flatter surface. The black pipe by the way is connected to our down pipe from the roof.
We need to leave this first coat to cure for a week before applying a second coat, but fast forward a couple of weeks a second coat was applied and I tried to get it as smooth as possible, which isn’t that smooth. Too busy to spend the time learning to plaster so I cheated by going over it with a grinder and random orbital sander with a diamond pad and it comes out great, smooth but not flat to give that “Ye Olde” look, which was all the rage at the time, probably… First pic is my best plastering, second after a bit of elbow grease.
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.
Well what a pain in the ass job that was. It’s not quite finished, but we’ve finished enough for now and got it done just as temperatures are starting to dip below freezing. The walls, which were looking pretty rough, now look fairly respectable and should keep the old girl standing for another century.
The prep took the longest, which included chipping off all the old plaster and any loose stuff (that took weeks on and off), removing the layer of rubble on top of wall, vacuuming all the walls and spraying them down etc. It doesn’t sound a lot but it took a while.
By the way we spray the walls down before we parge so the dry stonework doesn’t suck too much water out of the mortar and cause it to dry too fast. Next week we’ll spray all the parged walls daily which will help the cure – lime needs moisture and CO2 to cure.
Concerning the rubble at the top of the walls we think that was done later as the mortar was of a poor quality and pretty much crumbled in your hand. It was probably added as some sort of insulation but as it wasn’t structural we removed it all and will replace it with Rockwool. It was a bit tricky to get some of the stones out as they were tightly wedged and some of them weighted at least 70 lbs, not the easiest of things to get down when on the top of a step ladder.
Removing the rubble also exposed the beams resting on top of the wall, some of which had a fair amount of rot in them so we’ll fix these up before covering them up again. All the stone can go into our foundation drain, saving the largest pieces for a possible future rock garden.
Next job will be cleaning everything up and putting away all the cables, air hoses and tarps as we’ve made quite a mess. Incidentally the way this project will hurt us if we’re not careful is via a trip hazard, pretty much every day one of us will catch our foot on a cable, air hose or the edge of a tarp etc., so far we’ve managed not to fall.
Fortunate that we finished the project this past weekend as yesterday, Monday, temperatures were getting as low as 23°F and we need to keep the lime above 40°F for a minimum of three days. I was a bit worried today as it started snowing but when I got to the house the inside temperature was still around 45°F, phew, our two little fan heaters are making a difference.
Aimee was pretty pleased with how the parging went as she thought we had passed a point, with the walls all fixed up and covered, DM is starting to look like somewhere where you could actually live.
Well the basement, have to spice these posts up a bit!
On Thursday we popped down to Hudson Valley House Parts to pick up some lime binder as we only had 1 & 1/2 bags left. Unfortunately they only had the pre-mixed in stock which is an expensive way to buy the product so we left empty handed, bit of a bugger as we really needed the lime so on Thursday evening we decided to get up on Friday at 5am and drive 3 hours to LimeWorks in Telford, Pennsylvania and pick up ten bags of NHL lime. Bit of a trek but it was really nice to visit the LimeWorks HQ and meet the highly knowledgeable staff. If you have an old house, it might be worth visiting LimeWorks, especially if you’re doing some of the work yourself as they as they have a great series of educational workshops.
We started early on Saturday, but as the base of the walls had deteriorated quite a bit they required a lot of the mortar and stone, hence progress was slow and after seven hours we had maybe done a half of what we had hoped. Also our local historic preservation expert Derrick popped around and though that we should remove all of the sound plaster as he thought that it was Portland cement. You can see the plaster in the second picture. I’ve started removing it but it’s tough stuff and will probably take 3 or 4 evenings to complete.
Also of note in the second picture is the blocked up coal chute high up on the wall. The mortar had just crumbed so had to be replaced, hence why it looks new.
Sunday was a slower day for us but we did manage a good 4 hours or so and started to removing the plaster. This week we’ll hopefully prep all the remaining walls and be ready to finish the parging next weekend. Good timing as temperatures are starting to drop.
Currently racing against time to get a few more jobs finished before it gets too cold. Highest on the list is to repair and parge the interior walls. We can’t do this much below 40°F (5°C) and we’re already hitting those lows outside. Getting this finished means that we can start to frame out the inside over winter and then add insulation.
Lime based walls seem to shed off their outer layers over time, not exactly sure why, possibly as the walls leach out impurities, but this is normal. This happens over many decades and this is the first time our walls have been repaired in over 100 years so they’ve stood up pretty well. Over the last few months I think we’ve been over each of these walls about three times, first pass was to remove the old plaster and the other two were to remove loose stone and mortar and I think we’ve easily removed a few hundred pounds. After having two wall collapse it has made me nervous when I have to remove maybe 4″ of wall, but if the mortar is loose or hollow sounding it’s probably not adding much structurally. Once the framing goes up these walls probably won’t see the light of day for decades so the results don’t have to be perfect, just has to be sound. Ohhh anyone want to paint something cool on our walls before we cover them up?
It took me about 6 hours on Saturday to do a final chipping of all the walls, vacuum all the dust off them, clean up the floor and frame the windows with foam so I get a good edge when I spray on the mortar, then on Sunday another 6 hours and I managed a disappointing 10 square feet or so. Aimee’s been out west so it takes a lot longer when you have to do everything yourself, plus the walls needed quite a bit of mortar, maybe 4″ to 5″ inches in some parts. You can see in the time lapse that I did add as many stones that I could squeeze in, which helps strengthen the wall and saves on mortar.
Aimee will be back soon so this weekend we’ll try and finish all the walls. So early start on Saturday and I’ll try and have an early night.
This Saturday I continued plastering. I was on my own as Aimee needed to help prepare for an O+ benefit show (Amanda Palmer and friends). I was a lot slower as I had to mix and then go inside every time the hopper was empty (every couple of minutes) but still managed to do 8′ or 9′.
I was hoping to finish it off today (Sunday) but developed a bad sore throat last night and haven’t felt that great today. I tested -ve for Covid but will retest in a few days. Hopefully we can finish it off in the next few days and once that is done we will whitewash it and then leave it for a few weeks to fully cure. We’re going to the UK for two weeks at the end of August so that’s ideal timing and on our return we can start on the foundation drain and start to fill in the trench.
Today Tuesday we finished off what we wanted to do and that was to plaster around the corner a few feet. The corner was in pretty bad shape and in places it was pitted by at least 3″ and as the mortar is weak compared to stone I added extra stones in these areas.
In the beginning of the video I spray some mortar on these spots, push selected stones in and suction does the rest and by the time I got around to plastering that section, the plaster had semi set and the stones were holding well.
As you can see from the video, the corner could do with a little tidy up but since that will be beneath ground I may just leave it.
This weekend we fixed up the remaining footings and tried our hand at plastering.
On Saturday I finished off chiseling away the huge stones that were preventing me from continuing the footings repair at the rear. I added extra rebar and again rust treated the existing rebar. Around the corner we discovered huge gaps (you could put your arm in up to your elbow) between the wall and the footings so we filled these in and added a chamfer.
On Sunday we tried our hand at plastering and we think it went pretty well. Adding this coat was a lot slower as the wall undulates quite a bit and in parts I was probably spraying over an inch thick of the lime mortar, troweled it flat after I emptied each hoper. It’s not perfect but it’s a great thick coat which will be underground anyway. This now has to be left exposed to the air for a month to allow it to cure but after that we can start to fill up the trench. We’ll probably apply a coat or two of lime wash which we’ll do once we finish the whole wall.
Again, so pleased we found the mortar sprayer, what a mess it would have been without it and the time….
Should have worn a long sleeve shirt as I was splattered with a lot of lime which gave me some irritating burns on my arm, also the temps were in the triple digits so I was perspiring profusely whilst Aimee was glowing.
We returned on Monday night and managed to do another 6′ or so. We’ll complete it by the weekend.
Our latest project has been to fill in the trench behind the house but before we can do this we need to:
Repair the footings
Remove flaking lime mortar from wall and replace
Install foundation drain
This is how we currently stand:
1) Repair the footings. We’ve repaired the majority of the footings but have about five foot to go. The five foot section has some huge rocks in the way and these rocks are part of our footing so can’t be removed completely. I’ve been trying to trim them down with a combination of hammer drill, hammer chisel and diamond bladed grinder. Getting there but it’s slow and uncomfortable work. I’m currently about 4/5 of the way so light at the end of the tunnel 🙂
Aimee has been working on adding a concrete fillet/chamfer to prevent any water settling on the footings and to divert it into the yet to be installed footing drain.
2) Remove flaking lime mortar from wall and replace. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few weeks, removing loose mortar, repairing holes and cracks etc. This weekend we managed to get a coat of new lime mortar on the wall. One of the traditional methods of applying the first coat is to literally throw it on, hence the name harl coat. If you’re interested this is a good video from Mike Wye explaining the harling process. You might think that just slapping it onto the wall with a trowel would be just as good, but I’ve been told that it isn’t and the bond will be poor and soon fail. We did apply a harl coat earlier this year and we found it pretty slow and hard work.
We didn’t fancy harling the back wall as it’s pretty large and the space is a bit confined which would make harling tricky, especially low down the wall. After some research I came across the ToolCrete stucco and plaster sprayer which is sold by Mortar Sprayer. I watching some encouraging videos so I ordered one and boy are we pleased with it. It’s powered by a compressor which we could luckily borrow from Joe and Deborah. The compressor wasn’t as powerful as they recommended (7cfm @ 90psi versus our 4cfm @ 90psi) but the ToolCrete sprayer allows you to block up one of the three nozzles and it worked great. We did make the lime mortar a bit wetter than usual and again added chopped fiber glass strands.
It took us maybe three hours to do the wall but that was because you have to mix lime mortar for about twenty minutes per batch. If we had a continual supply of the mortar I think we could have been done in about 30 – 40 minutes. Compare that to a couple of weekends if we had done that by hand and I don’t think the results would have been as good as with the ToolCrete sprayer.
We’re going to do the rest of the remaining walls with this sprayer both internal and external and this sprayer will save us so much time. Maybe if we can get a third person to help then they can devote themselves to the mortar mixing.
We have to leave this first coat to cure for a week before we apply a second coat and that may be the final coat. As most of this will be underground it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Lastly the sprayer is easy to disassemble for cleaning. Wish the hoper had a small lip so I could have hooked it on the window frame when Aimee was loading up as it does get a bit heavy after a while, that said I can always drill two holes and add two protruding bolts. All in all a great product which is very satisfying to use and it’s made in the USA 🙂
3) Install foundation drain. No progress on this yet but we know what we need to do.
We had a letter box style bathroom window that needed to be enlarged to meet modern building standards (NY Egress Standards). Code requires an unrestricted window of no less than 5sq ft so we enlarged the gap to allow for a 3 x 2 ft window.
Took a while to remove the extra masonry and then we had to repair a lot of the wall which had previously crumbling away, as can be seen in the last photo.
To repair the window opening I used shuttering on either side of the horizontal and then re-used them on the verticals. For the verticals I added 4-5″ strips of shuttering, filling up behind each with lime mortar (reinforced with chopped fiberglass) and rocks before adding the next strip of shuttering. This was pretty much the only way I could do this without creating large voids etc.
There were some small holes and wrinkles that the plastic made but these don’t matter as there will be at least one more coat of mortar over this. Overall I think it turned out pretty well.
We will also be parging the outside walls so any blemishes there will disappear.
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