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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 🙂

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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.

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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.

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17/09/201917/09/2019

New lawn

We finally have a lawn. It doesn’t look much yet as we still have new grass growing but at least it’s no longer an impenetrable mass (see last handful of photos). We still need to work on the lower section which will require weeding, digging, tilling, getting the correct gradient and then sowing. We may start some of this over the next couple of months or failing that we try and get it done early spring. In the meantime we’ll probably just cover it in plastic sheet to kill the weeds.

Still need to buy a mower and debating whether to go petrol (which I’m used to) or electric. In the meantime we may see if our kind neighbours will lend us theirs.

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17/09/201917/09/2019

Roof update

So we’ve gotten over our roof meltdown and the issue I mentioned about how the membrane doesn’t wrap around the edges has been sorted by some metal flashing, though our friend Derrick said that how it had been done will cause problems down the road [spfx: sigh].

The pooling water which Thomas was hoping to fix never was fixed, but I think I can fix that by filling in the hollow with ever enlarging patches of the rubber, only pain is that the chemicals are expensive, you need a cleaning agent, a primer agent and then the glue which would probably cost a few hundred dollars in total.

The new roof was leaking. We contacted Thomas and it looks like the leaks were where the cupola meets the new roof. The cupola was missing the final flashing so temporary stuff was added. It doesn’t look great but the leaks seem to have stopped, phew.

I would still like to redo the roof at some point but that could be years down the road, in the meantime I have to work out a good way to fix this roof once and for all – by the way it’s an old roof so the current gradients aren’t what they were when the house was built etc. Also the flat roof we have has multiple gradients all leading to one point at the back of the house. Also the new cupola adds to the complexity as water now has to drain around it.

Thomas is now working on the foundations and I’m sure we will be happy with the results as he did a good job on the last set of foundations.

18/08/201902/09/2019

Work on roof restarts

After many months waiting for a good spell of weather for the roof, Thomas and Matt have restarted on the roof. The new roof is a EPDM membrane which is a type of rubber sheet about 2mm thick.

The roof was re-started last Thursday and should be finished on Monday and I have to say I am really sad and disappointed with the results:

It all seems a bit of a patch work and looks ugly
There are quite a few large bubbles
There are squishy bits that move down under pressure of a foot
The rubber membrane doesn’t wrap over the edge of the roof, which makes sense to protect the substrate from the weather etc. See diagram below
There about 12 different seams in our EPDM roof, I would have thought you could have got away with four seams joining four pieces of membrane together. PS. most EPDM roof failures are around the seams so it’s a good idea to minimise them
When it rains there are still standing pools of water

This roof looks DIY to me and from the onset I was hoping they would get the levels of the roof right so water would drain correctly, but no, they just built on the existing roof contours. I am really not happy with this and can see this roof being redone (when we can afford it) in a few years down the road. We had plans for a deck but it’s no point in putting that down if the roof has to get ripped up. Sigh.

By the way there is still a complete roll of EPDM plus, so running out of the membrane shouldn’t have been a factor for the existing EPDM patchwork. Aimee’s face sums it up.

What probably makes me most sad is that Aimee and I are trying are hardest to lovingly restore the house and then we get this sort of work. It makes me think what’s the point of all our effort.

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