Disaster Mansion

Winter is coming and we’re scrambling to get a bunch of tasks done before it gets too cold. Our house has little protection from the cold which from a comfort point of view can fixed by wearing three pairs of socks, leggings and two pairs of gloves etc. but what you can’t do is change the chemical properties of cement, paints or glues which really can’t be used when temperatures approach freezing.

These last couple of weekends we’ve worked on replacing the last of our new pillars blocks which were already cracking and starting to subside. This is a link to the first pillar block we replaced back in May this year.

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Once we have these new blocks in place we’ll only need a bit more plumbing and some electrical lines put down before we can fill in all the trenches and start to prep for a concrete pour in the spring.

When we replace a pillar support we first have to remove the existing pillar which is always a little nerve racking as these pillars are holding up a decent portion of the house. To prevent any damage to the house we add temporary bracing which as this is second time around, we’re a bit more comfortable doing it. It’s a bit of a struggle to get the temporary bracing in place and often involves some good choice words.

Like the first pillar block we’re using old cast iron railroad screw jacks which are perfect for the job. In case you’re wondering why they’re sitting in holes, it’s because the soil is pretty much sand and if we had placed them on top, then when we excavated for the new pillar blocks there’d be a good chance that the soil beneath the jacks, especially under load, would have caved in and that wouldn’t be good.

For the third block we also had the chance to continue our efforts at beefing up the existing footings. In places you could put your hand maybe 8″ under the walls so it was nice to get all this sorted out. We tied this new pour into the existing footings with epoxied rebar.

Would you believe it, no sooner had we finished the pour some one tagged it, thanks Mary, if that’s even your real name.

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Radon, I hate that stuff.

Radon, known to his Periodic chums as Rn, is a colorless, odorless, tasteless (how boring is that) noble gas. This naturally occurring radioactive gas is created when uranium, thorium, or radium break down. According to the CDC, Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the US.

Uranium, thorium and radium occur naturally in small quantities in the earth and soil so that’s the birthplace of most Radon. Soil and earth are denser than Radon so it seeps upward. In turn Radon is actually 7.5 times denser than air so you would have thought that it would be happy to stay close to the earth and not bother us, however it’s still a gas so will propagate easily around your house due to air movements and pressure difference.

So how does Radon get into your super insulated and hermetically sealed house anyway? Most causes are:

• A. Cracks in concrete slabs
• B. Spaces behind brick veneer walls that rest on uncapped hollow-block foundations
• C. Pores and cracks in concrete blocks
• D. Floor-wall joints
• E. Exposed soil, as in a sump or crawl space
• F. Weeping (drain) tile, if drained to an open sump
• G. Mortar joints
• H. Loose fitting pipe penetrations
• I. Open tops of block walls
• J. Building materials, such as brick, concrete, rock
• K. Well water

Image and list courtesy of Radon Testing Lab

Radon came onto our radar as our architect had included pipes within our basement floor for Radon mitigation (removal for us common folk) which would be something our plumber would do. We did some research and the first step seemed be testing for Radon. We picked up some DIY tests which are $10 a pop and are small packs of charcoal which you leave in your basement for 48 hours and then post them off for testing. We bought two and put one in side of the basement. We posted them off pretty much together. Aimee just got the results for her kit but according to Fedex mine is still a week away from being delivered.

So far the news is good and we seem to be lower than 1.7 1.7 pCi/L (picocurie per litre)

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From the EPA these are the risks that Radon presents

We’ll wait to see what my results are before we decide to do anything, but that said it may be good idea to at least put in a pipe before we have a concrete poor. We will keep you posted.

Sleep well everyone and dream not of what is below you ….

Not Borg, just slow & low shoveling.

This is just a trench to carry our electrical mains cable from the other side of our drive and into our house. We already have electricity in the house but we’re making this change for a semi practical/cosmetic reason – our current electrical meters are sitting on Portland cement which is bad for our old lime mortar walls and needs to be removed so Derrick can parge with lime mortar, also it looks a bit ugly. In the photo below you can see the difference in color between the grey Portland and the beige lime mortar

The plan is to move the meters to the other side of the drive and have them on a panel a few feet above the ground. Also Derrick suggested we make the ground floor more grandiose by adding quoins (pronounced coin) to the corners on either side off the door, which I think will look pretty nice. Photos below illustrate an isolated meter board as well as an example of quoins which by the way I had never even heard of before.

Again, I’m glad we beefed up the footings as this trench goes under our walls and into the house.

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Okay this door does have a non-traditional construction method and I would definitely rethink this if we had to do another external door but luckily we don’t, at least not for the foreseeable future. That said it will look like a traditional door which will be long lasting door and have a decent bit of insulation.

You might have remembered that this door started as a foam cored slab, for which I forgot to cut out the windows, see measure once, cut twice.

This slab is now in the process of being transformed into a traditional door with the help of some nice white oak that our friend John Paul milled from trees from his estate. We had to wait a month or so until the oak was dry enough to start working on but fortunately we had a humidity tester. The oak stiles are rails were joined with small tenon joints, not massively strong, but enough to keep the wood in the same plane. These joints were all cut on our lovely new router table.

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To make sure we didn’t mess up the construction we made a sample cross-sectional piece to see how the glass would fit in and I’m pretty sure that without this there would have been some cutting mistakes. The last picture is of the stiles and the rails that I glued together earlier, sitting on the ply/foam sandwich. It still has to have the trim added which we are currently working on but you can see that it’s looking more door like now. The other side will also get the same stile and rail oak treatment.

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Last but not least we cut out the slot for our lovely mail slot, admittedly the door is too thick for the slot, but a minor detail.