Disaster Mansion

Did you know that 16th October is National Gravel day – that’s news to me. First off a big thank you to Giovanna and Derrick who helped us shift gravel for a few hours. That was a huge help and thank you. It’s amazing how much difference a couple of extra people can make.

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We probably removed about 3 cubic yards of gravel which is half of what we ordered. We’ll probably need to order more and I’ll do the calculations so we’re not left with much over.

My plan was to pull the plywood shuttering up as the level of gravel increased but I didn’t and now it won’t budge. I should of also paid attention to the metal spikes holding up the shuttering – I managed to rescue all the long 4′ ones (that’s what I’m doing at the end of the video), but the shorter 30″ spikes got buried which is a shame but I don’t want to dig up the gravel again – lesson learnt.

We bought 6 more sheets of 4’x8′ OSB which we had cut lengthwise and that will provide the next layer of shuttering. I’m thinking that as the weather is getting colder this weekend we may spend plastering the inside walls as this can’t be done when it gets too cold and gravel can be shifted in most weather conditions.

The camera decided to stop working halfway through so apologies for the discontinuity and I’m sorry I didn’t get Aimee and Giovanna on film as they did a great job shoveling the gravel into the buckets.

This weekend we finally got to install the dimple board and started to fill in the trench. This job has been going on for over a year so it’s fantastic that it’s finally coming to an end. It will be great to get our driveway and path around the house back again!

The dimple board being plastic protects the wall from moisture in the ground and its 5/16″ dimples, which face towards the wall, allow the wall to breathe (important for our lime mortar walls) and moisture to condensate outwards so it falls by gravity to our foundation drain.

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I’m really pleased I came across this product as it’s the perfect solution for our house. We bought ours from the fine people at DIY Basement Solutions who provided excellent customer service on numerous occasions, thank you Andy.

Before we could add the dimple board I realised that we needed shuttering around the side of the house to contain the gravel. This meant removing a decent amount of gravel so I could pull back the geo-textile fabric, hence why the video is rather long.

Warning: may contain butt crack.

I had planned on wrapping the dimple board around the house horizontally and then trimming it to hight once we had backfilled but on the day for some reason I changed my mind and added a slope to it, bit risky as we’d only know if I got the angle right once it had been fully installed and if I got it wrong we’d have to take it all off and re-position it. As it turned out I think we were lucky and we got it right the first time. We’ll still have to trim it back in parts but it’s easy to cut with scissors. You’ll also noticed that we wrapped the board over the footings to further direct water away from the wall. To seal the top edge of the board we also bought some top caps which we’ll add towards the end.

All in all a great product and easy to install and I doubt we’ll ever have any issues with damp in the future. Loved the attachment plugs. Huge physical job overall but this will help keep the house dry for another century.

Last picture is of a female Downy woodpecker, there were two of them playing a few feet away but I couldn’t get a good shot of both of them.

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I’m getting a bit tired of this drain, as must you readers, but it would be a shame to stop reporting on it now. It’s taken us ages to get where we are today, but we’re not cutting corners and we had a lot of things to deal with such as:

• Dig out trench – no mean task, especially as it kept collapsing
• Repair poor footings and add bevel
• Remove old wall plaster, repair wall, re-plaster and white wash
• Remove old cast iron sewer pipe
• Grade channel to correct depth
• Install geotextile, gravel, pipe and dimple board etc …

So a few weeks ago we parged the side wall, we only did the lower half as once we have filled in the trench it will be easier to do the top half. Again the ToolCrete sprayer was invaluable and I can highly recommend it, okay cleaning it is a bit of pain, but then cleaning always is. Last week we limewashing the plaster, cleared out the trench after another landslide and started to grade it.

This last weekend we pretty much finished preparing the trench for the pipe which involved getting the slope right so when we added gravel, the pipe would have a gradient close to 1/8″ per foot (0.6°).

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We couldn’t find the pre-drilled pipe locally so we had to drill about 50 3/8″ holes in each pipe. We assembled most of it on the lawn and then dragged it into the trench. The vertical pipes you see are clean out points in case the pipe ever gets clogged. I’ll probably bury these a few inches below the surface but mark their locations somewhere.

So first down in the trench was the heavy duty geo-textile fabric, this will help keep the gravel from getting clogged up with fine particles and this will wrap around both pipe and gravel. Next down was 2″ of gravel followed by the pipe which was set a gradient of a little less than 1°. And now at last we can start to fill in the damn trench!!!

We bucketed in the gravel as it was tricky to walk down the trench with the pipe there, but as we start to fill it up we may be able to get a wheel barrow down there. Luckily we weren’t alone in this task and Aimee’s friends came around to help, wow, what a difference a few more hands make.

I can’t thank Kerry, Rich, Jesse and T-E-A-L enough for their help, in addition to which, Kerry and Rich brought over the most delicious food and wine, incredible!!!! Unluckily for us we had less gravel than we thought so worked stopped on the early side, that said, people said they’d help again and we already have a fresh pile of gravel sitting on the drive, just waiting for you all! I can’t thank you enough and I was touched by your help and enthusiasm.

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Kingston is having it’s yearly O+ Festival this coming weekend so there won’t be much happening at the house. The following weekend however we’ll be installing the dimple board and then continue to fill up with gravel.

P.S. In case you’re interested in what the back of the house looked like before we dug this trench, check out these old posts:

• Work continues on back path
• Grading the rear path

And also some photos, we almost forget we have a drive!!! Sometimes all this work seems a step back, but at least we’ve got rid of that horrible wall behind the rear windows, now hopefully you’ll be able to see the garden from the ground floor.

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This coming Sunday (13th October) we’re hosting another gravel moving party so if anyone has any spare time please consider helping us out for an hour or two, it would be a huge help to us 🙂 We’re still bucketing it in and we’re filling the buckets to about a 1/3 full so we’re talking maybe 15lbs.

Just got back from a lovely vacation to the UK and now we’re full of vigor and a positive attitude to get stuff done on the house, probably…

It’s still our aim this year to fill in the trench behind the house and although we’re getting closer we keep coming across additional tasks that needs addressing before we can lay the pipe and start filling. Today it was to remove our old sewer pipe as it was in the way of where the foundation drain will be. The wall of this 5″ pipe are 1/2″ thick so it’s very heavy which is why I’ve been cutting it in 5′ – 6′ lengths and I think removing two such lengths will be enough.

Cast iron is pretty tough stuff and it probably took me about 40 minutes to cut through one completely. I used a Sawzall with a 9″ diamond blade (thank you Jude and Kadidja for the Home Depot gift card, it pretty much paid for the saw!).

From the photos below you can see the rust nodules that have formed over the years, some of which are at least an inch high. You’d probably think that the pipe was junk if you looked at it, however, after cutting the pipe you can see that it’s still pretty much intact, not bad for a pipe that’s been underground for probably half a century at least and I bet it could survive another half century. So next time you pull up an old rusty cannon from the depths, just go over it with a grinder and it will be as good as new 🙂

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This coming weekend we plan to finish off all the remaining tasks such as adding a angle to the footings (to drain water away from the house) and to add lime plaster to the side wall. Temperatures here are starting to cool here so this is great timing as in few weeks it might not be possible to plaster.

We’ve almost finished excavating the rear for our foundation drain. It did collapse in parts so I cleared that up and spent some money on some semi-decent shuttering to hold back the soil. We’re away at the moment but we couldn’t have started to fill the trench in anyway as the lime paster needs to cure for about a month.

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So before the drainage pipes go in and we start to fill etc we have to consider what treatment we should apply to the wall. If the wall had been Portland based then we would have added some sort of membrane to keep the moisture from permeating into the wall, this could have been something we painted on combined with a plastic membrane. Because our lime walls need to remain porous the former option was out leaving us with the membrane. I was going to use our leftover Stego 10 mil vapour barrier plastic which is pretty tough, however after further investigation into foundation drains I came across a product called dimple board. (Note: I had been previously searching the web for French drains whilst in reality ours is a foundation drain).

The dimple board seemed to be the perfect solution and the reason it’s called dimple board is because it has 5/16″ dimples which provide an important service. The dimples protrude towards the wall and leave an air gap for any moisture against the wall to trickle down by gravity. These dimples can withstand the pressure of the soil so remain intact when the trench has been filled. If we had gone with a flat plastic membrane, that would have been pressed flat against the wall and any water behind it would have been held there due to surface tensioning things and wouldn’t have drained.

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We got our dimple board and accessories from the nice people at DIY Basement Solutions who provided one stop shopping for the system plus the product looked to be of good quality and was available in a variety of widths.

So next steps on our return is to:

• Do a bit more digging to achieve the 1/8″ fall per foot for the pipe
• Lay down a geotextile membrane*
• Add a couple of inches of gravel
• Lay the pipe and check the levels etc and then fill around the pipe with gravel
• Attach dimple board to wall and wrap over footings

* The geotextile membrane surrounds the gravel and the pipe and it’s purpose, especially in sandy soils like we have, is to keep the sand out of the gravel which would slow the drainage of water through the gravel. Once all that is done we’d attach the dimple board to the wall, bending it over the footings and then start to fill up the trench with gravel.

One thing that might cause a problem is around the corner we have the old cast iron sewer pipe and it seems to be right in the way of where we want the foundation drain to be. When the plumbers removed a section of this a few years ago the pipe wall was about 1/2″ thick so that will be a challenge to cut off.