June 2021 – Rookie Renovators

Mud, glorious mud

Apologies for the slow down in blog post frequency. The house decisions and activities have felt constant and have been leaving us feeling exhausted – physically and mentally. So while writing the blog has been somewhat therapeutic for me, right now it’s hard to muster up enthusiasm to spend any more time thinking (and writing) about the house than we absolutely have to. We’re very much at the point that we would just like to forget the house exists – ignore it, and hope it goes away.

That being said, we are planning to keep going. After all, we really would like somewhere to live. And the blog will keep coming, if at a slower rate. We’re hoping that once we’re over the damp proofing and subfloor hurdles things will feel a little more controllable and there’ll be fewer surprises. Ethan has less faith in this theory than I do. Anyway, here we go on the subfloors.

In order to install modern, structurally-sound subfloors with insulation and proper waterproofing while maintaining a sensible ceiling height, we had to have the existing 2cm thick concrete floors and the mud and stone beneath them dug out to a depth of around 35cm. We had cleared the floors, but realised that the walls were still covered in blacksmith soot, construction dust and grime – none of which we want ending up in our drainage channels.

So, it seemed sensible to get as much of the wall dirt onto the floor as possible, so that it would be taken away along with the masses of floor material being dug out. As the place was already wet, we decided the best course of action would be to use a pressure washer – inside the house. It felt strange. However, it was satisfying to see the dirt pour down the wall into the underpinning trenches.

I even managed to get involved with my bad back with a little support, which made the whole experience even more surreal:

Along with the floors, we were also having a hole dug underneath the garage door. This would allow for a foundation for our new wall. However, a few months ago we noticed a blue tit disappearing behind the piece of wood that is acting as a fascia for the RSJ, above that garage door. We also noticed some mossy type material trailing out from the bottom – the escaped parts of her carefully constructed nest. Unfortunately, despite having seen her fly in and our several times, we’ve not been able to get any pictures or videos. One day we were stood looking at the house and saw her poke her head out and watch us, waiting for us to leave before she could fly away. And just days before the ground worker would be starting work we could hear the baby birds chirping away. We may have caught this on camera, although hard to tell with all the other bird noises we get in the area.

Thankfully, all had gone silent by the time the ground worker was planning to start , so we think they had fledged and finished with the nest.

One of the first things to be removed for digging the foundations was a large slate slab that sat under the garage door and supported the upright between the up and over door and the personnel door. We had considered keeping this slate and using it somewhere later. However, the ground workers only just managed to move it using a tractor with a forklift, so we decided perhaps it was better to let them deal with it, as we had no such equipment!

The upright had also somehow been driven through the slate, rather than just resting on it, limiting its usefulness. Now that the slate is is gone, the upright between the two parts of the door is hanging above a muddy hole. As are both the doors. Opening and closing both the personnel door and the garage door itself has become a highly skilled procedure that we are desperately trying to avoid having to perform, particularly as it had to be done from down in the pit that had been dug below it. We’re not sure how many repetitions either door will survive.

We had been somewhat looking forward to this trench digging, as we would be uncovering the answer to one of our few remaining questions about the house. Before purchasing the property, we had been told there was a pipe buried under the floor of the garage, that exited the front of the garage, carrying away the stream that comes into the back of the garage. The sellers could not remember exactly where this pipe exited and what form it took. When the foundation was dug this pipe was discovered. Unfortunately, it was also broken, but this didn’t really matter, given it was a perforated pipe and would have poured water into the hole anyway.

We found a piece of guttering and placed it under the pipe leading to where the pipe exited the outer side of the foundation hole. We added a cut off piece of the RSJ to weigh down the end of the pipe and keep it in the guttering. All that engineering experience has really paid off. Things started to seem a bit more stable, apart from the small amount of water exiting the pipe before it hit the guttering, the majority of the water was ending up NOT in the foundation hole – ideal(ish).

The next step will be to find out where this pipe goes and work out a better and more serviceable way to transport this water through our new foundation and away from our house. Next blog topic sorted.

Back to the floors: they no longer exist.

Pros and cons of having your floors dug out: pro, the ceilings look really high now – so fancy. Cons: our kitchen is a little… damp; we now need to hose our shoes down as we leave the house, rather than when we enter it; we have large gaps under both the garage door and the front door to allow maximum rainfall directly into the house; and we have a loose doorstep that ensures any water on the road outside will be shepherded and trickled in through our front door!

The welcoming doorstep splashing up water

So there you have it, you can tell the house looks much better than when we started with it, and in no way does it feel like we’ve gone backwards. Oh, and the floor digging revealed that there is more underpinning needed, so we get to have muddy floors for a while longer while we wait for that to be done.

Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia Thumbs Up GIF by HULU

Foundations Schmoundations – a retraction

We decided we actually would like to have some foundations. The structural engineer and building control somewhat insisted too – they thought that perhaps surrounding our floors with mud, and leaving the heavy stone walls free to sink and slide was perhaps not the best idea. So trenches 35cm deep and 20cm wide and ~100cm long (depending on bottom stone size) were dug under the walls, fingers were crossed and concrete was poured in – it was not cheap. But it was done relatively quickly and with minimal stress on our side, which is nice.

Now we should be able to dig out the floors and install new, modern, damp-proofed, insulated floors. As the house is currently colder than it is outside – this will be a very welcome change!

Digging out close to (and under) the walls gave us a chance to find where the existing drainage was connected. We asked for it to be maintained through the wall between the kitchen and the garage – we should have asked for a new, deeper pipe through, but aw well – probably not even possible. The existing pipe is a little high in the floor levels and won’t be much use to us when it comes to installing the new drainage channels – and also leaves us with a bit of a moat around our kitchen for the time being.

We still have our little trickle of water where the stairs used to be

After the underpinning was done, we had to prepare to have the floors entirely dug out. This meant clearing those 3 tonnes of stone from the floor along with all the other materials and junk that we’d accumulated. Wahey.

Some of those giant pieces weren’t going to be moved without some tactical leverage, so we got ourselves a new set of wheels:

A shiny new sack truck – painted to look like a child’s toy because you’ve got to inject fun into this job somehow.

I thought that attacking the job little and often would be the best method to complete this task. So I spent a couple of hours one weekend moving rock while Ethan was working on other things, and occasionally helping me with particularly large rocks that I couldn’t get onto the sack truck myself (or pull up the hill to the back garden). Then, a couple of days later, we went down for the evening and had a good hour or so making a substantial dent, until Ethan smashed his finger between two stones when taking one off the sack truck.

With him feeling quite stupid and queasy, and fairly certain that finger would be somewhat useless for a while, we went home. It ended up healing surprisingly quickly and well.

It wasn’t until 2 days later while sat at work that my back started to feel not quite right, and gradually got more painful throughout the day. So, with 6 weekends left to go before we no longer have a rental property to live in, I put myself out of action for two weekends. It’s slowly improving, but not sure when I should stop using this as an excuse to not do any heavy lifting.

Ethan soldiered on for the whole time, weekends and some evenings. And along with working on other parts of the house, he managed to clear all of the remaining stone (more than half of the initial pile), and other rubbish. I, meanwhile, lay at home, chilling out to the max, hopped up on ibuprofen and deep heat.