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Going once, going twice …

We are in the process of pulling down the rear exterior stairs. They aren’t original (no rectangular nails, just the common round nails) and were built to give access to a former upper apartment.

From the first picture in the gallery you can tell that the stairs are slanting away from the house (it’s not the angle of the camera, they really were slanting that much) and the first few times we went up them we expected them to collapse. This weekend I removed some of the lower weather boards and was surprised (I shouldn’t have been) that all the vertical supporting beams had been put down on good old soil. Surprise, surprise the bottoms had rotted out from all leaving them hanging in the air. Gaps varied between 3″ and 24″. I’m amazed that they could take our weight, but that’s probably in part to how well the original was house was built to which the stairs were bolted to.

We are now in the process of pulling 80% of this down and time lapse will follow. Until then marvel at this engineering masterpiece.

I have to say it’s very satisfy to deconstruct all this crap that has been added to the house over the years.

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stairs1
stairs2
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Hard as old nails

I love the nails used in our house. We’ve probably thrown a lot away but I’m sure we still have hundreds left in the wood we saved.

Our nails, which are rectangular, look like the Type B cut nails, Circa 1810 – 1900 which fits in with when the house was made. I believe these were made by cutting a thin tapered slice from a steel plate. I presume they had a machine that could hammer the end of the nail to make the head.

Manufacture of these nails came about due to steel plate being widely available, again this ties in with the industrial revolution, which in the USA was roughly between 1760 and 1840.

We’ll keep a bunch as I feel they must have a use somewhere and I like how they look.

old rectangular nails
old rectangular nails
old rectangular nails

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The last piles

Finally got the the remaining piles of the garden waste into a skip. It doesn’t look it but it took hours. It’s a pain that we can’t have fires in NY 🙁 Going to have to come up with a cunning way to disguise our bonfires as a rather large bbq. That said not a good idea to burn this stuff because of the poison ivy.

The poison ivy has now started to come to leaf so it’s easier to spot. Aimee in the background is going around marking these buggers with orange paint and also a dash of weed killer, hence the splashes of colour you can see.

Stop press. So it would appear that we can have small campfires, subject to certain restrictions, most of which seem pretty reasonable. What I can’t understand is this restriction, “However, this is not allowed from March 16 through May 14 due to the increased risk of wildfires.” Weather in Kingston throughout most of that has been either cold, wet, damp, snowy or a little sunny. We’re not talking about California drought conditions here.

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What is this tree? Answered.

A month or so ago I was trying to find out what this tree was. Well, friends thought it was a sweet maple but the blossom didn’t match the red color, but that let me to the red maple (Acer Rubrum), which I’m pretty sure it is. Glad to find out as these trees are everywhere in Kingston and no one I spoke to knew what they were.

By the way the tree isn’t in our garden, but it does overhang a lot which will give us some lovely shade in the summer.

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Cleaning up the library

This room used to be the library. Locals remember it having lots of built in bookcases etc. Shame nothing is left of them. It would be nice if someday we can find some pictures of the interior.

The library, if you were standing in the street looking at the house, this room is on the right and runs from front to back and is on the same floor as the front balcony.

Top floor also had similar 5′ high heaps of debris, which consisted of framing timber and lath and plaster. The previous owner probably did us a favour in removing all of this. We kept all the good wood.

Through the window you can just see the skip (dumpster for US folk) filling up. This wiki entry gives origins of the word skip.

These are front and back videos of the same room.

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Sun dial for the garden

Inspired by the casted shadows we think we’ll get a sun dial for the garden. Maybe I’ll add something to the top of the house and have the markings embedded in the garden. Turns out sun-dials are dependent on your latitude, which makes sense when you think about it.

Incidentally Kingston is at 41° 55’N and just to compare, Oakland is at 37° 48’N and Cardiff (UK) 51° 29’N. So Kingston isn’t so different from Oakland but boy is the weather different.

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Snow at Disaster Mansion

What I like about this video is how much the tree limbs bow under the weight of the snow. It’s no wonder tree limbs break. Filming was between 17th February 17th to 17th March.

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The seasons change but Disaster Mansion remains the same

Cleaning the garden of seven years of untamed growth. March 16th to April 16th. There were some issues with some of the days, such that when I stitched them together the video would pause, hence a few videos instead. Apologies and they aren’t all that interesting anyway.

When I set these cameras up I had them recording from 7am to 7pm. As time ticked on the days got longer and I missed sunrises and sunsets.

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Skip number three

Something satisfy about seeing your skip fill up quickly with no mattresses or sofas donation 🙂 We have good neighbours 🙂 Annoying that I didn’t check to see how much space was available on the sd card as the camera ran out of space half way through the day, grrrrr. 128GB sd cards now on order.

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Skip!!!!

Trying to cram in a much as possible into the skip. At $675 for this size, it’s not leaving with any space. This is the third skip we’ve had and will need another one next weekend. Contains a lot of the shrubbery we dug up as well as the clubhouse and an old rotting deck.

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