Disaster Mansion - It started as a disaster so how bad can it get?

19/12/202019/12/2020

Olympic Snow Plowing

As the Winter Olympics fast approach there’s only a few more suitable seasons for Aimee to practice this newly added Beijing 2022 event. This course is a little shorter than the standard 50 meters but in all other aspects it’s the same course. Aimee admitted she was a little rusty as can be shown by the slight bend in the trench. Not a personal best either but Aimee is hoping to get in a lot of practice this winter and hopes to impress the USA selection committee.

The cold is limiting what we can do at the house, if you’re training for the Olympics then that keeps your body temperature up, but if you’re making a spice rack (a wedding present many years overdue), then your extremities get cold quickly and that’s with wearing three pairs of gloves!!! As you can see from the photos the house is far from being sealed from the elements so trying to heat it is pointless.

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07/12/202007/12/2020

Footing fixes before the inevitable touch of frost

One of our plans this winter is to prep the ground floor for a concrete pour early next year and for that I want to address any footing issues as once the pour is done there is no easy way to fix such issues.

This weekend Aimee is at the Wooden Boat School attending the “Build Your Own Adirondack Chair” woodworking course, so look out for some fine Adirondack chairs appearing around DM. The class started at 9am so we both managed an early start this weekend.

As an aside a brief history of the chair (see The History of the Adirondack Chair for more info).

The Adirondack chair originally built by Thomas Lee in Westport, New York (1903), which lies in the Adirondack Mountains. Thomas came up with the design for his summer home in the Adirondacks for seating for his family. His first design was called the ‘Westport plank chair’. Thomas offered the design to a friend (Harry Bunnell) who saw the potential in selling this design to the greater Westport summer residents. The first commercial Westport chairs were manufactured in hemlock plank – painted in green or medium dark brown. He signed every chair sold.

As you can see from the pictures we have a 4′ – 5′ section where the footings aren’t as substantial as I’d like them. Job is pretty straight forward, dig under the existing footing, clean them of dirt and sand, set up the forms, insert rebar into pre-drilled holes and start mixing. We prepped a bit last night so the job today is just mixing the concrete. I did add a kettle of boiling water to each mix to help the cure and when finished I draped a plastic sheet over the concrete and left a fan heater running overnight to keep the temperature up.

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I also underpinned the front door section and when that has cured I’ll do a similar underpinning on the right hand side – for this I made the form out of spare foam, which will be left in place.

When I returned on Sunday, I found the plastic sheet had been removed and someone had tagged it, the cheek!!! The only Chris I know that reads these posts is my good friend Chris Williams from Dinas who probably holds the Guinness book of records for the most ‘O’ levels in maths, but that’s another story.

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05/12/202008/12/2020

Frost lines

… like a tan line but for colder climates, probably…

So the frost line is how deep water will form ice crystals in the soil during periods of freezing and in this area of the Hudson Valley ice will form down to maybe three or four feet. Why this is important is because water expands when frozen and if your footings are above the frost line they will shift and cracks may appear in the above dwelling.

When our right hand wall collapsed it was replaced with a wall with shallow footings. This wasn’t a building error but due to the fact the architect didn’t want to destabilize the front right hand corner wall, which was still standing, by digging a trench in the very sandy soil next to it. To fix the issue of having the footings above the frost line we laid down foam insulation slabs which is part of the building code for Frost-Protected Shallow Foundations.

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From the last picture you can see that you lay down a vertical and horizontal insulation. The calculations for how tall and wide the insulation need to be are pretty complicated so in the end I guessed, one foot deep and two foot horizontally. I’m pretty sure that these should be deeper and wider, but considering the house had none of this for over a hundred years it will be better than nothing, plus next year we can fill in all the trenches, making the footings at least 2 – 4′ deep. We can’t fill them until Derrick applies a lime mortar parge to the walls which will happen next summer.

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We cut the foam with our track saw, bonding the pieces with an extra strength Gorilla construction glue (based off this review) and now it seems a shame to bury them!!

Where there were gaps between the foam and the footings, due to irregularities in the footings, I sprayed in expanding foam. Once that sets I’ll run some flashing over the foam /concrete bond. Those spray cans of foam don’t go far, they last for about 30 seconds and I think I used 12 cans, still pretty handy.

As you can see by the following weekend the ditches had started to collapse on the insulation, but that’s fine as they will be underground anyway, main thing is that they are in place and sealed with the foam. It was wet today so the flashing will have to wait, possibly to next year.

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I could of started this job a few weeks earlier, but I wasn’t sure how deep or wide the insulation had to be and whether digging too deep might destabilize the footings again etc., etc. so I like the fact that I was up against a deadline (winter), so I made some decisions and got on with it. Possibly similar to a scrum sprint.

29/11/202029/11/2020

Finally finished with the support posts

Not a very exciting post, just finishing off the work we started here, Thanks Mary.

We did a really nice job on the right most post, four pressure treated 2×10’s, planed (including hand planing), glued, bolted together and then all the holes and dents filled with epoxy paste. Result is a nice post which looks like a ye olde piece of timber which we’ll paint to hide the not so old epoxied bolt holes. The post of the left will be hidden within our six inches or so of insulation, so no need to make it look fancy.

We’ll use these two pillars to build a little alcove for when you come in which will house a bench and somewhere to hang your coats. I think we’re both looking forward to when we can work on these design features. For the immediate future it’s still heavy lifting.

28/11/202029/11/2020

A stroll through Disaster Mansion

No awards for this video, but it gives you an idea of where the house is situated and how it’s laid out. I’m sorry I moved the camera so much and next time I’ll be steadier.

If you haven’t visited the house in person this will help you understand what needs to be done. It’s a huge job as everything needs to be fixed.

We are planning to move into the ground floor while we work on the rest of the house and as you can see even the ground floor needs a lot of work. Slow and steady are our deep breathing exercises when we get too stressed. That said it’s not always stressful and it gives us the perfect escape from our rented apartment.

21/11/202024/11/2020

Olympic leaf raking

Why the Olympics ever stopped hosting ‘leaf raking’ as an event I’ll never know. In celebration of that event Aimee, complete with Olympics regulation leaf paddles and rake goes through the paces. To accompany her carefully choreographed movements Aimee chose a leaf raking classic, Yakety Sax by Boots Randolph.

Remember, this is a long and gruelling event which, on this occasion Aimee was fortunate to complete in under 5 hours, a personal best I believe.

Enjoy and maybe you’ll become a supporter of ‘leaf raking’…

15/11/202016/11/2020

The mud room

I’m not sure sure what this room was ever used for, it had a small slit of a window and a soil floor. In our redesign we’ve dropped the floor a bit to match the rest of the ground floor and added a couple of windows. This room also needs to be split into two, a small bedroom and a mechanical/boiler room with room for a washer, dryer and slop sink.

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It’s a shame that the bedroom will be smallish as when this floor is complete we’ll be living here for a good few years while we fix up the rest of the house. That said, small can be cosy. We’ll be creative with our use of space and I’ll be reaching out to my brother Matthew who has been devising some clever under the stairs pullout storage systems. Aimee who used to live in New York city says that compared to the housing there, our ground floor apartment would be viewed as pretty spacious.

Our friend and advisor Derrick suggested that this partition wall could also be load bearing to help support the long ceiling span above, which makes total sense and is why we put this decent footing down, complete with rebar. Derrick is the best.

Due to the footings, the floor of the mechanical room will be higher than the rest of the ground floor by about 6 inches, hence why we added a single layer of concrete blocks. Our experience with bricklaying is next to zero so we made a bit of a mess out of it and resorted to pushing in cement with our fingers, that said the end result was pretty good, plus it’s straight and pretty level.

As temperatures are getting pretty low I covered up the concrete in a plastic tent with a small heater which we kept on overnight. The following day we drilled down through every other block so we could hammer in 10″ sections of rebar which we in-filled with concrete and topped off with a nice smooth mortar – was the rebar and in-fill needed, not sure, but now those blocks aren’t going anywhere. By the way the Makita hammer drill makes light work of the holes, not sure who made the 1/2″ drill bit but but probably Milwaukee or Bosch.

12/11/202012/11/2020

Fixing a hole

Today is a good day in many ways.

After months of waiting our plumbing has finally been roughed in [spfx: Hallelujah] and we’re now connected up to the street. This doesn’t mean we have a working loo or sink etc., just that pipes are in place for such porcelain devices. We can now fill in all the trenches and holes, some of which were putting our walls at risk of failure. Thank you Nick and Cameron from Sinnott Plumbing.

In the pics you’ll see a section of the old cast iron sewer pipe. Cameron said he had never seen one as thick, it was a good 1/2″ and the metal inside looked as good as new. Pretty good for being under the ground for over 100 years.

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Next step is a concrete pour, but before we do this we’ll probably beef up one or two small sections of our footings as we won’t have this chance again. After that we’ll start to prep for the pour which we now plan to do in the spring.

By the way do you like my magic shovel, you place it on the ground and it sucks soil onto it, it’s brilliant, birthday present from Aimee!!!

It was very nice to finally fill in the hole by our pavement/sidewalk which was at least four foot deep and was putting our porch structure and any stray member of the public at risk, we also recovered some of our driveway 🙂

30/10/202030/10/2020

I’ll show you my mortise if you show me your tenon

Hi, Aimee here!! I usually just dictate to David but today I find myself writing as he’s polishing my boots and scythe.

As you’re probably aware our house project requires lots of different skills, particularly woodworking which isn’t surprising considering it’s a wooden house. In particular most of our sash windows need to be replaced or repaired and we do have a quite a few of them. Yes we could have gone with modern energy efficient PVC windows, but they lack the charm and we feel the look of them wouldn’t suit this house. Yes they aren’t as energy efficient but we’ll make sure that we build them with draft excluders as well as having storm windows for winter.

By the way if you ever need to restore a sash window we can highly recommend this Youtube series, Sash Windows Restoration – “Don’t Trash the Sash”. It’s a ten part series and it does explain a lot as well as pointing out that well looked after sash windows can last 100 years or so, would PVC last that long?

Anyway, I diverge. Getting to the point: woodworking isn’t my one of my fortes, in fact I know next to nothing about wood apart from the fact that it comes from trees. Currently David does most of the woodworking and I’m left to to do the more tedious tasks, which is fine most of the time but sometimes I want to be creative and make something also. To remedy this I’ve enrolled in a bunch of woodworking classes at the Kingston Wooden Boat School which is part of the Hudson River Maritime Museum. I pretty much enrolled for all the classes which are:

Understanding Wood
Woodworking Tools-Their Use & Care
Basic Joinery
Machine, Tool, & Shop Safety
Advanced Joinery
Build Your Own Adirondack Chair

I’ve just finished Machine, Tool, & Shop Safety and about to start Advanced Joinery next week. Finally I’ll round it off with a chair building course where I’ll combine all that I’ve learned.

By the way, the Hudson River Maritime Museum is a cool museum which I highly recommend. Below are the results of my handiwork from the Basic Joinery class, the first is a half-lap joint and the second is a mortise and tenon. My teacher, Michael Puryear, is one of my favorites (besides Udo Guddat from high school German).

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23/10/202022/10/2020

Unhinged

We’re edging closer to being able to paint our new downstairs front door. We’re anxious to get it painted before it gets too cold to paint, plus we don’t want the paint we mixed up to go to waste. When we were trying to color match earlier this year we probably added about $130 of artists acrylic to an already expensive can of paint.

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We’re using three hinges for this brute, not vintage but brass re-creations. I did acid-etch them to get rid of some fake antique coating and they look better. To cut the recesses we used a Porter Cable door hinge template kit combined with a compact Makita router, both of which do a fine job. I did the first hinge and then Aimee took over and did the remaining two. Placement of the hinges was 7″ from the bottom, 11″ from the top and one between the other two. We trimmed out the corners of the recesses with hand chisels.

Check out the clamps we used to hold the door upright. Note that the clamp base is only supported at the ends and because of this when the weight of the door presses down the base bends and the two uprights clamp tightly to the door and it’s pretty rock solid, not my idea, I found it on a Youtube video. If I can find the video I’ll add a link. These clamps are super useful.