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

20/05/201822/05/2018

What a jack hammer

Yesterday we demolished a lot more of the concrete block walls. It poured down most of the day but cleared up round about 5pm so we went down and worked till dark. I didn’t bother filming it, but it was quite hard work swinging the hammer and filling up the skip.

Today was better weather so I tried out our new jack hammer, the best $145 I have ever spent, apart from the round on Jasons stag night but that’s another story. If I had to do todays work with sledge hammers and chisels it would have taken me four times as long. The jack hammer took a little time to setup as the instructions were in poor English with lots of warning about things being fatal! Anyway sorted it out, just had to get the oil level correct. Pretty easy to use and not too noisy, only effort involved clearing away the lumps of concrete. Drill itself weights about 35lbs and once you have it going you just have to keep it vertical which is pretty easy.

In case you are wondering how these time lapse relate to real-time. The camera takes a picture every 10 seconds. The software I use then combines them together at a frame rate of 20 – 30 per seconds (depending on how many days I am recording over). Anyway this relates to roughly 15 – 25 seconds of time lapse to one hour real-time.

Next job will be to remove the concrete steps. We want at least once entrance which is ADA accessible, so no steps.

If I look a little bedraggled at the end, well that’s because I am. I was pleased with the cooling breeze today and on the second time lapse don’t the trees look like they are dancing with the sound track?

Today I offer you:

19/05/2018

Mystery of the stairs

I know we are biased but isn’t the balcony and front entrance beautiful? In the earlier pictures from public record office the balustrade extends the full width of the balcony. So how do you get up there? If you look closely at the public record photographs you’ll see the stairs coming up from the left. We took this for granted until Derrick (friend and advisor) mentioned that he thought it was an odd location for the stairs. To get to the front stairs you have to go all the way around to the left. Does this seem the most sensible position? Notice also the room on the far left has a door opening out onto the balcony which partially opens over the stairwell. This seems poor design and a little unsafe.

Derrick had suggested that we should have the stairs coming out and down from the center, for which we do have a few options. A center stairs would enhance the front view and at the same time give us more balcony space (no more stairwell). We liked this idea but I think I was struggling with keeping the house as original as possible. Last weekend Derrick stumbled on something which has changed my view point completely.

Look at the first picture below and you will see two green squares (I added the color in Photoshop) which seem to line up with the vertical supports above. Why on such a beautiful balcony would this front boarding be interrupted by two small squares? Well Derrick and I also now think that these were very likely all that remains of a front staircase. This staircase would have been exposed to the full elements and as this house is about 150 years old, you can easily imagine them deteriorating over the years to a point where they were completely removed and replaced with the steps to the left. The points at which they were originally attached were patched up with two small squares of wood.

This is another reason why we are very keen on finding early pictures of our house. There must be pictures out there somewhere and we just need to find them.

We do have Dave from Bolder Architecture working on the house so we will mention this.

By the way the lower vertical pillars are newer and don’t match up with what’s above. These will be replaced one day as will the ugly lower front door.

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17/05/201818/05/2018

Demolition hammer

There are quite a few large concrete blocks and steps that I’d like removed. I could have rented a top quality tool from the local DIY place or, for the price of a day and a half rental I could buy something cheap.

Seeing as I’m a pretty slow worker (note how much time I am sitting down) I bought this Jack hammer. I have no idea whether this is any good. Funnily enough I got an extended guarantee and it was cheaper to get 4 years ($7) rather than 3 years (maybe $10). The “extremo python blaster jack hammer, like a fine wine it matures with age. Probably…”.

Like they are trying to make it attractive for all genders to use 🙁

17/05/201818/05/2018

Clearing up the back area (chortle, chortle)

This involved the removal of the rotten timbers of the rear deck, clearing away mucky soil and starting to remove the concrete block walls. I was hoping to find a Roman mosaic under everything, but alas no.

I did find quite a lot of old blue stone so we’ll use that for paths or garden walls in the future. The concrete blocks are a bit of a pain especially near the house as you can’t get a good swing of the 15 pounder, which might be a blessing in disguise as it’s hard work.

I know these videos aren’t very exciting but they give us something to look back on. All I have to do is set the camera up and forget about it, no need to go and grab a camera at key moments etc. By the way the cameras I use have a battery life of a few hours so to keep them running all day I have to use an ethernet cable (Power over Ethernet/POE) to provide the power. You will see the ribbon ethernet cable in quite a few shots. I have been using this product, there maybe better solutions but this works and I haven’t the time and energy to find an alternative. For these days jobs I should use a USB power pack, but for longer recordings POE will be handy.

The last ten seconds were filmed on Wednesday evening. We have had the skip for almost two weeks (which is really nice of Tom & Kingston Roll Offs), so I was trying to fill it up. It was taking too long to break up the concrete walls so I decided instead to remove the concrete block wall at the rear left of the garden, hence why you see me all over the place.

I’m using royalty free music so you have the choice of:

16/05/201830/05/2018

Giovanna visits the Public Records Office

Our friend and advisor Giovanna went to Kingston Public Record Department and requested the property record cards for our house. The cards are quite small so the photographs are probably 2″ square, hence why the quality isn’t that great when enlarged. That said it’s great to see the house looking finer in earlier years. Thank you Giovanna.

By 1994 the house is looking a little sad and it’s pretty much been downhill from there 🙁 I feel we are still going downhill but Aimee and I have our heels down and dug in [spfx: sparks flying] and are trying to decelerate the decline.

The date of the photograph with all the sun shades is unknown, the 1956 and 1994 property cards all have a list of owners and dates, so maybe this card is a precursor.

Update 5-28-18 I was talking to the Mama Dot who is the lady who lives opposite. Mama Dot has been living in the same house for 60 odd years and she remembers the house when it has sun shades, which is around 1958.

The sun shades in the undated photograph were probably installed to keep the rooms cool and it would be interesting to know how well they worked. I like this simple approach that people had before electrical AC took over. Maybe we can try something similar.

We are appealing for any photographs people may have of this house. One of next projects is an enquiring letter to all people with the surname of Gill listed in our local public property tax roll.

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13/05/201817/05/2018

Skip Four Joy – the Movie

Literally and the fourth skip to be filled!!! I rather like these skip/dumpster movies, even if they are a little disjointed. It’s like the worker bees going about their duties. We also like the cars that suddenly vanish and the moving shadow that the house casts.

The first thing that goes into the skip is our last piles of garden waste, poison ivy, and all (for now). If it looks like we are putting small sticks into the skip, then we are, those are the last of the hundreds of sapling trees we dug up. Next to go in was the rear stairs etc, followed by our rear patio excavation and lastly wall demolition.

Filling up these skips is a pretty good work out, digging, lifting, pushing, arms, legs, back, up and down steps etc. It’s nice in the evening just to feel that nice fatigue sleep slowly envelope you.

The skips/dumpsters are from Kingston Roll Offs, I have no complaints and the Tom the owner seems a great chap and always manages to maneuver the skip onto our drive way. Thanks Tom and thanks to the Major of Ponckhockie, Barry who introduced us.

By the way the two guys in white shirts that appear on the street at around 30 seconds are not having a boxing match as some viewers have suggested.

13/05/2018

Another snake

Found another snake today, this time when I was digging up the old deck. It was underground and under a stone. If it was still in hibernation, it’s not now, but it wasn’t a bad day to wake up. Lucky I didn’t cut it in half with the shovel. It was a cute little snake about the size of a pencil with a beautiful orange underside. If you look closely you can see an orange ring around the neck, hence the name ringneck. We let it go in a safe pile of leaves away from where we were working.

You can see from these photos that the soil is full of debris and junk, hence why we were clearing off the top six inches.

More info about the ringneck can be found on Wiki.

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12/05/201813/05/2018

Clearing up back path and deck

The back deck was gross and the first picture in the gallery pretty much shows how we found it, at least a foot of junk in some places (old plaster boards, kitchen units, roofing materials just rotting and compressing over the years).

The deck is now gone and will never be replaced with a deck. I see a deck as a cheap alternative to a beautiful stone patio which will always look great and never rot (note, I do see how a deck can make perfect sense when you want to get some height or on a slope etc.). Also, this deck was built directly onto bare earth so no wonder it rotted. If they had lifted it up a few inches, supported by concrete blocks, it probably would have been still okay today.

This area is rich with bluestone and as we know a good stone mason, we will eventually be making stone patios. This will be while off until we have the time, money and more importantly how we want the garden laid out. As it is we need to fill the skip and this is good fill 🙂

We are hoping to grade the garden such that the rear windows in the basement have as much light coming in as possible. It won’t be a lot but we can improve on what we currently have.

Going also are the finely crafted cement block walls, skillfully laided by Bodge Builders and Sons. In the UK these people are referred to as “Cowboys”. No disrespect meant to ranch Cowboys.

[UK informal] someone who is not honest, careful, or skilful in their trade or business, or someone who ignores rules that most people obey and is therefore not considered to be responsible:

Those builders are a bunch of cowboys – they made a terrible job of our extension.

I have a 3lb Estwing pound hammer and a Stanely concrete chisel which does take a long time, but you get there in the end. Oh yes, always wear safety glasses when doing this sort of work. I do also have a proper 10lb sledgehammer if needed and today arrived a 30mm x 1.5m monster of a crowbar. In the last picture in the gallery, you’ll see a huge concrete block. I want somehow to get this into the dumpster. It doesn’t look big but I doubt Aimee and I could lift it.

By the way, the walls are really at that angle.

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12/05/201812/05/2018

Marmot Spring Cleaning

From the fresh dirt trailing from this hole, we suspect the marmot is spring cleaning. Be cool if they have a litter. I’m hoping they don’t go messing with the foundations though as this new hole is under the rear deck that we recently pulled up (below the white plastic picket fence in the “Going, going, gone” post).

Here is a good wiki article about Marmots.

I also found some old picks, when I first spotted the hole as I was removing the deck and a hole under one of our foundation walls.

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12/05/201814/05/2018

Going once, going twice, gone

Stairs, a construction designed to bridge a large vertical distance by dividing it into smaller vertical distances, called steps. Well it’s gone now so if you want to bridge that vertical distance, bring a ladder.

We worked on this last weekend as well as two evenings this week. You can probably tell the different days from our wardrobe changes. The visitors are Derrick and Giovanna our main advisors on the house. What a great resource those two are.