Disaster Mansion

Sorry we haven’t posted in while, we’ve been working on our new front door and it’s taken longer than I thought. Construction is almost complete and we hope to paint it in the following few weeks, then we have to work out how to hang this behemoth of a door, anyway enough of that and back to what you’ve been all waiting for, our latest plumbing update.

Backing up a bit when we bought the house the plumbing was pretty much non-existant, there was the original cast iron pipes which led through the house to the street which had rusted through and any copper piping that may have existed had succumbed to the house’s ten year absenteeism from human occupation or in the British vernacular, ‘some bugger had pinched all the pipes‘.

Now at last we are starting to get all the plumbing replaced and up to modern standards. It’s taken us a while as we had foundations to fix, collapsed walls to rebuild and even after the builders had finished their work on the foundations we beefed up them up where pipes had to go under them.

Today Nick and Taylor from Sinnott Plumbing came around and started the rough in and for this we had to nail down where we wanted every plumbing related item, sink, bath, toilet etc. which was pretty tricky for us as the house is unfinished and we need to add 6″ or so of insulation to the walls etc. Fingers crossed we aren’t too far off as all of this will be covered by a concrete slab making changes a little tricky. So if in the future you ever come to visit the house and wonder why the bath, sink or shower is in an odd place you’ll know why, but then such placement will probably be all the rage.

I’m so, so glad we added the extra strengthening to the footings plus the two reinforced pillars beneath the back wall, which would have otherwise been held up by sand alone. I’m pretty sure that without the extra support the back wall wouldn’t have survived being excavated in such a fashion and I just hope it can hang on for a little longer. You can see those back wall pillars in the last five photos.

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They will be coming back soon to connect our newly laid pipes to the street and also run some pipes for gas, after which we can hopefully start to fill in the trenches and start planning for a concrete pour. That said I also need to do some research on Radon etc.

So as you may recall we have to redo all our plumbing as we currently have very little – a garden hose attached to our mains water which we greatly appreciate and can thank Paul Sinnott for.

We believe the last owners of the house were attempting to restore it as they gutted the house, hence no kitchens, bathrooms and then it was left empty for about ten years, during which time it was broken into and anything of value was pinched, e.g. copper pipes etc. It does make us feel sorry for the defenseless house and reminds me of the poor albatross chicks on Gough island and don’t search for it if you’re squeamish. If you want to donate go to RSPB Gough Island project.

To add to the plumbing complication there had never been any bathroom on the ground floor and as the sewer pipe entered the ground floor above ground level this was going to be a problem as sinks, toilets, baths etc. usually expect the above mentioned pipe to be below so gravity can do it’s work however, as we have to install a new sewer pipe it gives us the opportunity to lower the new pipe by a few feet – sure we could have had some pump system, but I really want to keep this system as simple and as reliable as possible. Fortunately for us the existing level of the sewer pipe at the street is low enough to enable this two to three foot drop.

Earlier this year we met Paul at the house and discussed how we should progress and it was decided that we should dig all trenches for the pipes, including out to the street – this was really a cost cutting exercise on our part as we need to be prudent.

Trench digging is fine, it’s hard work but we take it slowly, the issues we had was that we had to dig trenches under two load bearing walls and having brought down a wall accidentally last year you can understand how I am very hesitant about burrowing under them, especially as the geological layer around here and beneath our walls is 95% sand and I kid you not. You dig a hole in our basement and within minutes the ground around it collapses – you get the idea. In fact on occasion when we made our concrete mix too wet, we just used some of the sand we had dug up to thicken it! Added to all that the footings don’t appear very substantial in the areas we have to dig under as can be seen in the photos below.

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Earlier this year Derrick had suggested that we reinforce the footings our builders had put in and that is what you can see us doing in the photos and video. We first drilled holes into the existing footings and epoxied in rebar perpendicular to the wall followed by a couple of long pieces of rebar parallel to the wall. In the end it took us about eleven straight hours and about twenty five 80 lbs bags of concrete. We also added some large washed rocks to save on concrete. It was hard and sweaty work but now I won’t have any worries about burrowing under this wall as it’s a substantial chunk of concrete. One more wall left to reinforce.