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

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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13/07/201902/09/2019

We have one modern convenience

Running water, albeit a single tap, but this is progress.

A big shout out to our plumber Paul Sinnott, Derick at Kingston City Water Department and Thomas our builder.

Paul, Derick, Thomas and ourselves all met up last Tuesday at 8.30am. I wish I had bought my camera with me as a lot of progress was made in a short time. It seems that our water system was very old (see man hole picture) and it surprised everyone that the system hadn’t frozen and burst years ago considering how low the water meter etc. were below ground (about two foot). It took some grunt to get it turned on and involved a very long pole to get better leverage and an angle grinder. At times I thought we were going to have a geyser outside of Gill House.

This old connection to the mains will be upgraded in time and Paul thought that we wouldn’t have to dig into the road to install the new system which is great news for us and it will save us money and the hassle of getting permits etc.

We temporarily filled up the hole so no one would fall into it and covered the pipework with a plastic water bottle to keep the dirt out. Some history about the “Ford Meter Box” can be found on the Ford Meter Box companies website.

As you can see form the photos, we can now water our grass which was in much need of water. We’ll probably have to reseed a bit but we’ll wait a week or so to see what happens.

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04/07/201902/09/2019

We have a new plumber

We’ve been looking for a new plumber for quite a while since we lost our previous plumber. Our friends Ritchie and Helena recommended Paul Sinnott and after a few text and phone calls we finally met Paul. Summer is a busy time for the trade so we are glad that we found a time that Paul, Thomas and Matt (builders) and us could all meet.

The idea is to first rough in the main downstairs plumbing components (sewer, water etc.) By the way “roughing in” means:

to bring in the various lines (Plumbing pipes, duct work, electrical conduit) to the space, but not make the final connections. For plumbing, this would be the pipes in the walls and floors that lead to the sinks, bath, toilets, etc, but not actually hooking up those fixtures

Eventually we will do a concrete pour on the ground floor so these pipes need to be installed first.

Paul got the ball rolling immediately by call Kingston city water department and arranging a site meeting next week with one of their engineers to discuss getting our water re-connected. It would be so nice to have just one tap in the house, both for the builders and for us so we can water the new lawn. By the way we haven’t had much water of late and the temperatures have been in the 90’s of late so lawn is suffering.

Paul also does heating so it would be handy if we could work with him on that as well.

Did you know that the word plumbing comes from the latin plumbum:

The word “plumber” dates from the Roman Empire.[3] The Latin for lead is plumbum. Roman roofs used lead in conduits and drain pipes[4] and some were also covered with lead, lead was also used for piping and for making baths.[5] In medieval times anyone who worked with lead was referred to as a plumber as can be seen from an extract of workmen fixing a roof in Westminster Palace and were referred to as plumbers “To Gilbert de Westminster, plumber, working about the roof of the pantry of the little hall, covering it with lead, and about various defects in the roof of the little hall”.[6] Thus a person with expertise in working with lead was first known as a Plumbarius which was later shortened to plumber. [Wikipedia]

So I guess that is how a plumb bob got it’s name as I bet the weight was made from lead.

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In the pictures, Paul has the sunglasses around his neck, Thomas is the one wearing the hat and Matt is well, just Matt. I’m the one wearing Eric Anderson’s cast off Levi jeans – my brother Matt also has a few pairs as well so thanks Mr. E 🙂

P.S Also note worthy in the photos is the fact that the bottom left hand walls are finally near completion.

21/06/201921/06/2019

Grass three weeks on

It’s now been three weeks since we planted the first band of grass and it’s coming on nicely and the second band is also showing signs of life as well. We’ve been very lucky with the weather and the rain looks like it will continue into next week. Luckily it looks like we’ll have good weather for Aimee’s birthday bbq this Saturday 🙂

We’ll soon be looking for a mower, probably get a Honda, either one that collects the grass like this or one where you have to rake it up like this. Raking up grass is a bit of a pain but I like the simplicity and it reminds me of my Dad’s old Victa mower (looks not to unlike the mower pictured below) which incidentally is now under the stewardship of my friend Martin Winchester in Dinas and is still going strong after 50 plus years.

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16/06/201916/06/2019

New Grass Cometh

At last we have some new grass!!! We didn’t mange to get a hose from our neighbours yet but we we’ve been lucky with wet weather which looks like continuing.

We managed three strips, though in pictures three and four it looks like the guide rail to the left is rising up at the end. Next time I’ll tie a line between the two ends to check. This can always be corrected at a later date.

The third segment slopes down towards the house and you can see from picture five that I made a new form for this section which has a curve to it. At some point this will be supported near the house by some sort of wall but we haven’t worked that out yet.

The section at the back was planted two weekends ago, next section last weekend and the closest yesterday. There is still work to be done at the upper left of the garden but is was raining today (Sunday) so we worked in doors.

I think my dad would have been quite pleased with how we did 🙂

In pictures three and four Aimee is doing a penguin walk over the area before seeding which helps to compact the loose soil. By the way the landscaping rake (the blue one) is very useful for putting down new lawns.

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14/06/201902/09/2019

Good news, “Stop Work” notice removed

So it looks like there was some confusion over the front wall/ foundations, which is the small 4″ high wall you see in the following two photos:

The issue with this wall was that the building inspector had never seen the foundations for this (this work was done by a previous owner), and didn’t know that there was a decent footing underground. The following picture shows these foundations before they were covered up (right-hand side of photo by the green ply).

This morning both our builder Thomas and architect Dave both rang up the building department, sending them pictures and architecture plans etc. and that seemed to resolve the issue. I think there was also some mention of how the house was being shored up, so I think Thomas beefed that up and also fenced off the area.

Building of this block wall should now recommence on Monday 🙂

By the way seeing the house like this I was wondering how it would look if that room was all glass, okay it’s not going to happen but it would give the building an interesting appearance.

14/06/201924/10/2019

STOP WORK (font: Monotype Century Schoolbook, so this is serious)

Nice surprise this evening when I found a “Stop Work” notice on our door, it was posted today. Thomas and Matt were here today so probably posted after they left. I know I’m joking about this but I’m sure building inspectors do a good job and are just protecting us by making sure no corners are cut in the building process.

I thought it might be how vulnerable the house looks, held up by just a few wooden structs, but when I got back home I looked up the code, “Article IRC 2015, section 403.1” and you can see from one of the photos that it’s to do with the foundations. Not sure what’s going on here so I’ll ask the builder Thomas and our architect Dave Toder.

Just to give you some understanding of what’s going on in the pictures, the wall on the side of the house was the wall that collapsed (eleventh photo), was rebuilt and then had to be demolished (wasn’t up to code) and is now to be rebuilt. The wall at the front was demolished years ago by some previous owner who had started a foundation wall, but gave up, subsequently leaving it shored up with timber and plywood (last but one photo).

Anyone spot the cute Jensen Healey someone parked outside our house?

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04/06/201916/11/2019

You reap what you sow and water

Last weekend we dug, tilled and raked the soil but then got frustrated working out the levels. This time we made a decent leveling gig which spanned a good portion of the garden. The first strip was quite a bit of hard work as it required a fare amount of soil to be shifted but the second strip proved to be a lot easier. We did manage to sow grass seed on the first strip and we used a combination of Scott’s Kentucky bluegrass and Perennial ryegrass. That added up to a total of 14 lbs of grass seed which does seem a lot, however we followed this lawn sowing video and I think visually we got the same spread of seeds. We also applied some lawn fertilizer in the process. By the way the grass seed is blue in colour and I have no idea why.

We didn’t sow the second strip as we had run out of grass seed and also the light was failing. We also need to go back next week and grade the bank to the left and the section by the garage before we sow.

We timed packing up our gear on Sunday pretty well as the sky opened as we were putting away the last tools. If you read our last post you’ll know that we don’t have any running water and that means we can’t water the seeds so we are hoping that we will get enough rain for them to germinate. We are also hoping that one of our neighbours will let us run a hose from their house, so fingers crossed on that weather/neighbour front.

This is the current weather forecast for the week.

Rain on Wednesday, Thursday and the following Monday and Tuesday.

Lawn preparation. 8th – 9th June, 2019

Lawn preparation. 23rd June, 2019