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

12/11/201914/12/2019

Lawn gets its first cut

Managed to get the grass cut before winter sets in – we expect snow tomorrow. We borrowed the mower from our great neighbours Justin and Laurie. It should have been cut earlier and next year we’ll do a better job especially as one of Aimee’s friends is going to give us an old mower.

Over the following months I’ll trim back some of the tree limbs overhanging the grass so the lawn will get a bit more light and in the spring we’ll add a bit more grass seed as the lawn is still a little patchy.

It’s nice to see at least one thing looking decent at DM. The last picture is how we found the garden when we bought the house.

P.S. It did snow in the night.

[Show slideshow]

10/11/201910/11/2019

Old house, old tools

Not only does it seem fitting to use old tools on an old house, but practical, a well made old tool is often better than its modern counterpart. To this end I have been collecting some old tools, some belonging to my dad (and possibly his grandad). There’s something nice about using something your parents or grand parents used. I don’t have many such tools, a couple of screwdrivers, a hacksaw, some chisels and on my last trip to the UK I picked up my dads, “Made in England” Record No. 4 wood plane. This plane is a smoothing plane which is used to ‘produce a finish that equals or surpasses that made by sandpaper’.

Concerning ‘Made in England’, I also have a lovely ‘Made in USA’ Bailey/Stanley plane which I picked up on ebay, again an old plane, but built with quality. Aimee has used this one quite a lot while working on our back door restoration and the results were most pleasing.

This model was in production from 1931 to 2004 and from this excellent site on Record planes I’ve dated this plane from somewhere between 1952 to late 1957 which gives it an age of between 62 to 67 years old.

As you can see in the pictures it has quite a bit of surface rust but I’m hoping to remove this and return it to a decent condition. The trick I picked up for removing rust is simply to soak it in vinegar for a few hours. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be much pitting, which you can’t do much about.

These pictures are the before any cleaning. I’ll post some pictures once I’ve cleaned off the rust, sharpened the blade and re-varnished the handles etc. Probably take me a few weeks to get around to this.

[Show slideshow]

09/11/201909/11/2019

Chimney removal

In the previous post I mentioned that the chimney needed to be removed due to the fact that it was crumbling. The builders had quoted us about $2,500 to remove it so we decided to remove it ourselves and save us some money.

We had three floors of chimney to remove but luckily the bricks were very easy to remove with just a slight tap from a rubber mallet and a lot I could pull off with my hands. After seeing how easy it was to remove the bricks I was glad that the chimney was going as it made you realise how unsafe it was. We’re saving the bricks as they are actually worth something – we’ll probably re-use them somewhere possibly for an outside fire pit or maybe a chimney for a cast iron wood stove. We had to carry all the bricks downstairs which took a while and I’m glad I started cross-fit earlier this year as that helped us with all the stair climbing.

The hardest bit of the wall was removing the bottom section which was mostly stone and lime mortar, is was also the scariest as this was a load bearing wall and we were concerned that temporary bracing wouldn’t be enough. This section of the wall had to be removed with hammer and chisel and it took about three evenings to do it. I forgot the camera on a few nights hence the jumps in the time lapse. I’m glad to say that we managed to remove the chimney without anything bad happening.

Incidentally to the right of the green step ladder you can see our old chimney stacks. Two of these were were sitting over real chimneys, whilst the third was just a dummy, maybe having more stacks was a status symbol. Anyway to keep up with the Jones we we’ll probably put them back on roof.

On the plus side we do now have a nice rectangular hole in all our floors suitable for a dumbwaiter.

[Show slideshow]

04/11/201904/11/2019

Removal of the second wall

With the new footings poured a few weeks ago we’re ready for the new wall, which if you’ve forgotten is to replace the wall lost in the second great wall disaster.

The first step in this is to remove the existing crumbling wall and we’re leaving most of this to Thomas and Matt as this is a load bearing wall and don’t want anything going wrong. The current wall is made of lime mortar and stone and it’s tough to remove. I think Tomas and Matt use a large diamond masonry circular saw to cut it into smaller sections.

We’re hoping the new wall can go up quickly as the house looks and feels very precarious propped up with a few 2×4’s and I always feel the house sags a bit more when in this state. In addition to that the house isn’t particularly secure with a huge gapping hole in it.

In some of the shots you can see our red brick chimney which is crumbling aways so alas this will have to go, a bit of a shame, but you couldn’t use it any more as it wouldn’t be up to code and would likely cause the house to burn down and having no chimney will actually help us divide the rooms better, so this is positive. Eventually we’ll have some cast iron wood burning fires and they only require a 6″ stainless chimney pipe.

[Show slideshow]

22/10/201922/10/2019

Footings complete

The house finally has footings so it should be pretty stable. One wall still needs to be removed and rebuilt but hopefully that will be done soon. After that the plumbing will get roughed in and a new concrete floor will be poured. Two thirds of the ground floor is earthen with the remaining being concrete which we will pull up so we can lay the sewer/waste water line underneath it.

The reason we aren’t using the original line for the waste water is because the pipe came into the ground floor about a foot above the floor. This was fine for what they used it for which was as an outlet for a sink, however we want a bathroom downstairs and our only two choices using the existing waste water line would be to mount our bath and loo on a foot high plinth or install an underground tank to contain all the waste water with a pump to pump it up to the level of the waste water pipe. We didn’t fancy either option so we decided to lay the waste water diagonally across the room (see last image) which is obviously a shorter distance and hopefully allows us to drop the line quite a bit while still having the 1/8″ – 1/4″ per foot fall so gravity can do it’s stuff.

The corner of the room in the second picture is where the waste line used to come in. It was cast iron and rusted through in parts so it had to go anyway.

[Show slideshow]

08/10/201908/10/2019

Footings get rebar

Or in English reinforcement bars.

It’s starting to get cold here, so we want all this finished before it gets too cold to pour concrete. Once the footings are poured they’ll probably start demolishing and rebuilding of our second collapsed wall. Our plans for this year are to have new concrete floors poured (no more earthen floors, yeah!!!!) with the plumbing roughed in. Once that is all done, we can start on sealing the ground floor up, including replacement windows and front door.

It’s been a bit stressful with all our walls hanging in mid-air, looking like they could collapse at anytime so we’ll both be pleased when they have a solid concrete footings beneath them. Doing all of this has cost us quite a bit more, but this is the perfect time to do this and hopefully the foundations will be good for another few hundred years.

[Show slideshow]

07/10/201907/10/2019

French drain clearance

To keep our basement as dry as possible, we’ve been working on installing a french drain around the house. A french drain is basically a trench filled with gravel and containing a perforated pipe that redirects surface water and groundwater away from an area, see this wiki for more information. This trench didn’t need much work as the builders had cleared a lot of the soil away when they rebuilt it – this was the first wall to collapse.

We’ll need wait until Thomas and Matt remove the large pile of old wall debris from the front of the house as this is the area that the water will drain into. Once that is removed we can continue the trench and then lay the gravel, pipe and filter fabric (used to stop the gravel from clogging up with soil etc).

It was quite tiring throwing the soil clear of the ditch but the weather was perfect, a crisp autumn day. This was were we removed the tree stump from last week and you can see some of the remaining roots sticking out from the deck on the right. In the background Aimee is building a fire to burn the roots etc. We’ll often finish the day with a beer around a fire 🙂

05/10/201905/10/2019

Tree stump removal

It wasn’t a huge stump, the tree was probably forty foot high, but all tree stumps are a pain to remove. I remember working on removing tree stumps from two hundred year old oaks at my parents and that was an ordeal. It took weeks, digging a trench around the stumps, deeper and deeper, cutting the thick roots with axes until you could get a hand cranked chain winch to pull the bugger out. This wasn’t a weekend event, rather a multiple weekend event. Compared to those old stumps this was an easy one.

That said I’m not as young as I used to be and in the heat and humidity it was a pain getting it out, luckily it was on a slope so one side of it’s roots were easy to get to. We wanted this stump out as we want to put French drains down the side of this wall, plus the roots were coming into the basement.

We had a small fire tonight and started on burning the roots and stump 🙂

[Show slideshow]

02/10/201902/10/2019

Bat in the house this evening

I was working on the back door and a bird feeder this evening and the light kept on fluttering. I thought it was just a big moth, and then I looked up to see this bat sailing back and forth across the room. It was silent and unlike a bird it didn’t crash into any windows or walls. It was quite big maybe the size of a starling. I tried to look it up when I got home, but I have no idea what it was. I opened up the doors and I presume it flew out as I didn’t see it again.

We like watching bats in the early evening and as they eat mosquitoes we want as many as possible to live nearby. When we have time we will build a bank of bat boxes for the side of the house or for trees.

I like the look of the bat boxes at the end of this ‘Bat info pack’ and these would fit nicely up in the roof eaves.

This wasn’t the bat I saw, but the one I saw was just as cool.

Bat flying

01/10/201901/10/2019

House gets a root canal

House gets a root canal, well it’s getting under-pinned and new footings. If the house were sentient, I’m sure it would feel pretty bad.

Some of you may have read from previous posts we’ve had a couple of foundation walls collapsing, luckily the house survived both of these stressful events, but did reveal the fact that the house has very shallow foundations walls without footings. If you’re not sure what the difference between the two are, click on the photo below.

[Show slideshow]

The shallowness of the footings and the fact that the soil that they sit on is practically sand is problematic. The lack of depth means that the walls sit above the frost line, which means that the ground beneath will freeze and thaw which will damage the building by moving the foundations walls. See this wiki on ‘frost line’ for a fuller explanation.

It’s been a bit costly but better to do this now when the ground floor is half earthen and we have no tiling or plasterwork to crack, should the house move doing this work – which I’m sure it has.

The first step is to install concrete piles beneath the walls every five to six foot. Adding these will allow Thomas and Matt to remove the soil between them so they can add a footing. As you can see in the photos you can literally put your arm under the walls either to the outside or to another room. I probably would have positioned these piles differently to reduce the chances of the walls cracking, but what is done is done.

It will be nice when all this is finished as the house does seem very precarious and we’re very careful to tread lightly when working upstairs.

Note how sandy the soil is in a few of these photos.

[Show slideshow]