Disaster Mansion

Three out of ten but shows improvement…

Sick of all the weeds we decided to try and put the garden to grass before winter comes. We’ll probably end up digging some of this up for walls, paths, flower beds etc. but all that will probably be years off. This is what we’ve been working on mostly for the past few weeks.

The process started off by getting rid of all the weeds and vines which was a combination of digging, weed killer and flame thrower (think big bunsen burner).

We don’t know how we will want the garden but we thought that having nice flowing contours would be a good start and the first step to doing that is to roughly grade the garden which involves using the soils from humps to fill the dips.

It’s hard work as we have many tons of soil to move which involves shovels and a wheelbarrow. I’d say we are maybe half way there and this is just to the rough grading stage, the fine grading will be another pretty big task. By the end of this I estimate that we will have moved about twenty tons of soil.

So that I could look at our progress when we took a break, I took off the side railing of our rear deck. The whole thing is going anyway and it’s nice to be able to sit back and take stock of the work.

If you look at the string you can see a curve in it and this is the hump we are removing. These photos were taken after maybe three weekends of shoveling and wheelbarrowing and yes it really doesn’t look that different. To cheer us up I added two pictures of what the garden looked like when we bought it.

Last night we met someone who owns a tool hire business in Kingston and we will probably get some heavy duty machinery to finish off the rough grading. This is the earth moving machine we are looking at and we may be able to hire it for a weekend for a few hundred dollars. I bet we can do a lot in one weekend with one of these.

It will be handy to try out something like this as we have to dig out and replace our 130 year cast iron water waste pipe at some point.

[Show slideshow]

In preparation for the builders we moved all the blue stone slabs from both sides of the house and took them to the back of the plot. The very, very small ones I could lift but the largest were monsters. The biggest one we moved was roughly 48″ x 18″ x 6″ and as bluestone weights 162.5 lbs. a cubic foot that stone could have been around 485lbs.

We moved them on a sack truck and I added a third wheel and had the truck lying horizontally to spread the weight. It still flattened the pneumatic tires so we had to pump them up nice and hard. It wasn’t fun moving them and a few choice words were uttered during the process. We won’t be moving those for a while.

We still have the biggest to move (last photo) which we’ll do after the O+ festival.

[Show slideshow]

As I mentioned in an earlier post, most work on house is on hold until we get roof and foundations fixed, hence our work on the garden. Our latest plan is to put everything to grass. We may build walls and paths through all of this later but at least we can see what is growing (i.e. poison ivy) and mowing is easier than weeding.

We started off with digging up the worst part of vines using our trusty Hoss Fork (it’s a beast of a fork but I would have liked slightly deeper tongs). After a couple of days I soon got tired of that so we got rid of the rest with weed killer and a flame thrower (think big bunsen burner). The burner is a lot of fun but Aimee finds it a bit scary.

We have probably had about 8 bonfires over the last couple of weekends which will have saved us at least one dumpster/skip. The morning after a bonfire the embers are usually still glowing so it’s easy to get stared again. All the fence went on the fire 🙂 We did keep the fires reasonably small so we wouldn’t annoy the neighbours.

Progress has been pretty slow as it’s been humid and in the low 90’s (32C) and it drains you really quickly. Next we want to grade the land as it has bumps and dips etc so it will be a lot of digging and wheel-barrowing and then we will have to put a tiller through it all so lots more work.

We did dig up another concrete path at the side of the house so we’ll be looking to getting another skip soon – carrying that stuff was hard.

[Show slideshow]

Some of these pics were taken early in the year, hence the lack of green.

Buried in our garden we found the following. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before, maybe part of clothes lines? It has two pivot points, where it is attached to the wood and the small knife blade part. If it’s useful it can be sand blasted, painted and put back to use. So what is it?

We have a winner!!!

Our architectural/building advisor Derrick McNab correctly identified it. Click to reveal the answer.

Last weekend, between thunderstorms we bought a corded electric weed trimmer and cut down the weeds which had grown, since spring, to over three foot in places. We got an electric trimmer as they are easier to start, quieter and not as heavy, plus they are a third of the price. It won’t be as powerful but our garden isn’t really big or wild enough now to warrant a petrol/gas one.

I also started to prune the very large red maple. I got a couple of branches down but it’s a big tree and as we have branches going over the neighbour’s roof, we’ll find a local arborist who can elegantly finish it off. If anyone can recommend a local arborist please let us know.

Jackhammer came to the rescue again. We were trying to remove an old metal railing, but each metal post was stuck in a huge concrete block and we couldn’t pull or leverage it out etc. About one minute with the jackhammer and we had the blocks broken up.

[Show slideshow]

Skip number five left our property this week. It was a hardcore only load, so stone, brick, concrete, glass etc. only. This can be reused so the charge to take it away is a lot less than disposing of rubbish etc. Skip number four cost almost $1200 due to overloading with concrete etc., hence the switch. I’m not sure Tom from Kingston Rollsoff usually does hardcore only skips, so thanks for sorting this out Tom. We also sieved a good many tons of soil from the path we dug out, taking out any stone, glass, rubbish we could. Took a couple of weeks to do this but the soil is good and we will reuse it in the garden at some point.

After shifting this much soil I was hoping to find something interesting, but pretty much all we found was the other part of the gyroscope, a few bones and lots more bits of the clay pipe, for which I’ll do an artistic reconstruction. From the number of bits, “c’est un très gros tuyau”, which reads “it is a very large pipe”, probably…

This skip was a good opportunity to break out the jackhammer so I took away the concrete outside of the garage. I would have kept this concrete had the garage not been in a state of collapse. You can see the cracks in the pictures and it’s a lot worse when you see it for real with all the walls bowing out 4-6″. Eventually, we will rebuild the garage with maybe a flat roof so that can be used, maybe as a deck. We will also make the garage shorter and narrower.

We did add an extra 20% to the skip after the picture was taken, so I think we did a pretty good job.

To get the soil out of the way we stuck it in the garage with our cute little boat (a Zuma, made by Laser).

To be honest, so far Aimee and I have just scrapped the surface in terms of things that need to be accomplished. That said we have saved ourselves many thousands of dollars by doing this labour ourselves. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with a project of this size, so we always have a copy of “Hitch Hikers Guide” close at hand. DON’T PANIC.

[Show slideshow]