during – Page 7 – Rookie Renovators

It’s been three weeks since our previous exploration post. Further explorations were slow going as we’ve had to return to work. However, we have now managed to take a few steps forward in revealing what we will actually be working with. This is our attempt to share the rollercoaster with you.

As hinted at previously, we found more brick. It was cunningly hidden behind plaster, where the kitchen had been installed. Despite having been told that these brick walls were purely cosmetic, it was obvious that the brick walls had been a failed attempt at trying to keep the water that is running through the underground walls at bay. A plastic sheet was… perched?.. behind the wall. It appeared crumpled and a little worse for wear. While this isn’t ideal, the attempt had been further thwarted by the decision to plaster the bare wet stone reveals of the kitchen window (remember that dripping stone?) and join it directly to the plaster on the brick. This created a lovely bridge for the moisture to bypass the plastic sheeting and make its way onto the inner wall. This decision did however make the plaster nice and soft for removal. A better solution will need to be thought of. It seems that damp will be a strong theme throughout this blog.

So, it seemed sensible to us to remove the brick walls. Why create yet another layer and make the room ever smaller? We would be redoing the damp proofing – the brick walls were obsolete. Weren’t they? Unless they were holding up the joists of the 1st floor. After some chiseling and hammering, and the ceiling now looking far less finished – of course they were.

Speaking of water (and we often are these days): It was January and we wanted to cut off our gas so that we could dig up the floors without fear of hitting a gas pipe and releasing flammables all over our new house. This meant that we needed to turn off the stopcock, and drain the water down in the house; No freezing and exploding pipes for us, thanks. But where was the stopcock? We knew we had a back boiler, a kitchen sink and a bathroom. Nothing under the sinks. It seemed all pipes lead to the loft. There we found a tank, and pipes that appeared to track behind it. Still no stopcock. The only tap we could see was for the refill on the tank. So a plan was formed: stop inflow to the tank, drain the tank down, remove the tank and follow the pipes behind. So, Ethan suited up and headed up into the fibreglass filled crawlspace of a loft – my hero.

Luckily Charlie had previously been to a Canada themed fancy dress party dressed as Chris Hadfield, so we had the ideal attire for exploring such an unwelcoming environment.

The fear was that the sellers (who had previously owned both our house and the house next door) had never bothered to get a separate supply for our house. After draining as much of the tank as we could through the taps, Ethan manoeuvred it into position over the loft hatch and we caught the water with a washing up bowl we had found. The splashes on my face felt all the nicer having been told by Ethan that the tank appeared to contain a very waterlogged mouse. Once the tank was empty, Ethan could see that there were no pipes leaving the house through the loft. Back to square one.
At this point Ethan’s Dad finally convinced us that perhaps it was time to start lifting floorboards.

We had forgotten we had an outdoor toilet – and there it was, a stopcock. Oh, did we mention there was brick in here too? Still no clue where it joins to the mains system, but we can at least cut off water to the house, and drain it down – let the fun begin…

Central heating drained with spare guttering and the gas pipe for the oven

When it came time to drain the hot tank heating loop, the stopcock was completely uncooperative. Ethan’s Dad decided to puncture the pipe – which sort of worked – until he got impatient and hit it one last time:

After creating a channel for the water to flow down – Ethans dad decided it would be better for us to have a water feature in the garage

In the past few weeks we have also managed to remove the stone fireplace surround which I’m pretty sure is the most fun Ethan and his Dad have had since this project began. And something I know they had been looking forward to. I, however, stood well back – loud noises and stone throwing are not my favourite. I had my own fun later slowly and quietly chipping cement off of rocks, while keeping things tidy, of course; once the breaker had been unplugged and put far away.

We found that the fireplace wall had been backfilled with a variety of materials: stone, ash, a torn up shirt, and you guessed it – more brick. We did however reveal an alright looking stone wall, with less than a quarter of it having been replaced with the obligatory brick – result! The brick filled hole does somewhat make a decision for us in terms of where we should put the doorway into the garage, so fingers crossed for us that this doesn’t coincide with a beam-supporting pillar on the other side!

Here are some pictures of the additional discoveries we made along the way:

After all that, the moment we had been preparing for was able to happen: removing the brick walls! We knew we would be hiring people to remove the old subfloor and to put new subfloor and supports in, so we thought it best if we hire the same people to prop the floor that they would be working under. Two days later and the brick is gone…

…Or is it?

At this point, what were we expecting? We think these must be to fill the holes where an old 1st floor may have been. I feel like this has to be the last brick reveal, but it will certainly turn up in my nightmares.

It is nice to finally be able to see the stone walls – complete with what appears to be soot from the smithy! It feels like things are moving. Although all we’ve done to ‘build back up’, as it were, is still only adding gutter shoes to the downpipes, this still feels like progress. Any day now we’ll be installing more and more things that are staying.

We may sound alright with this all, now that we’ve had time to process. But believe me, there have already been several times throughout this exploration that one or the other of us were ready to give up. With so many unexpected discoveries, extra dependencies were thrown into an already complicated many-stepped plan. Half the stress of this project seems to be determining what needs to be done before you can start on the job you’d actually like to be doing. And then tracing that back through all the jobs that that relies on, and so on. All so that you can finally start the ‘first’ job and make any kind of progress. Then, 3 weeks later you still haven’t started the job you wanted to be doing!

We’ve tried to create a dependency chart to keep track of all this, but as more things crop up it becomes more and more difficult to find that starting job! Hopefully, as we get back to the house’s bare bones, we can begin to determine our ‘final’ plan and our chart will be a little more realistic and therefore useful. We’re sure there’ll be more discovered along the way, but we can take that as it comes.

After finishing clearing the kitchen, we decided to make our first mess. The mess itself wasn’t fully intended, but we had a few unanswered questions that would affect our plans for our new home. So now that we finally own it, and we’ve removed some of the less permanent contents, we thought it was time to finally do some exploring – AKA “controlled” demolition. So, for the very first time, our renovation blog is going to feature some renovation!

Question 1: Is the beam in the kitchen an RSJ?
Answer:

“RSJ!” indeed

You can see I took to demolition immediately. I’m all about the smashing things up and loud noises! I did get a little better as the time went on, but I’m still terrified of putting any real force behind a lump hammer!

On making a mess: Breaking off plasterboard and chipping away at walls, we were thinking “how lucky to have found so many rubble bags in the garage”. However, after trying to use one, and having the 5 small chunks of plasterboard we had loaded up abruptly end up back on the floor at our feet, we didn’t feel so lucky! It seems what we had actually found in the garage was a lifetime’s supply of very short rubble tubes.

Question 2: How’s the beam supported?
Answer: Barely.

Yes, that is one single brick taking the entire weight of the RSJ (and by extension, first floor).

Question 3: Just how damp ARE the back walls and floor?

Before we purchased the place, we saw that there was a little patch of rotted wooden flooring by the stairs, and some “bubbling” of the paint at the bottom of one of the walls – so we knew we had a problem to solve. The extent of it was, however, unknown. As the corner by the welsh dresser and the stairs seemed to show most signs, we looked here first. As we pulled the welsh dresser away from this wall, it showed a preference for falling over backwards. One of its legs had completely rotted away; not a good omen. We then tried lifting some of the flooring around this area and found that every plank was rotten in many places, and many were literally dripping with water. This lead us to:

Question 4: How much of this flooring is actually salvageable?

In order to answer this question we wanted to lift as much of the floor as possible. The kitchen fixtures were a little in the way, so we tried to remove as many of them as we could without affecting the water or the gas. Did we mention there are multiple gas pipes buried in the concrete floor?

While Ethan was carefully removing the shelves, one of the cabinets decided to throw itself off the wall – producing the 1st casualty of this renovation – our poor tupperware box containing our sandwiches for the day. The sandwiches were a little plasticy, but as far as a fairly heavy box falling off the wall goes it was a fairly good outcome! Charlie’s phone, miraculously, pulled a Buster Keaton in order to survive.

Anyway, back to the floor. We had hoped to reuse some of the kitchen flooring elsewhere. The sellers told us it had been recovered from an old Victorian mansion and that there were spare lengths in the garage. Some of the unused lengths were stamped with something we believe suggests it was imported American oak: “STOWLES HARRIMAN TENN OF MA”. Pretty confusing, as Tennessee is 1500km from Massachusetts… if we have any American readers, feel free to correct our ignorance.

However careful we were, most pieces just snapped as we lifted them up, where they had rotted too much. We found that wooden strips had been embedded in the concrete, presumably to nail the flooring down to. These underlying pieces of wood had rotted over the years, and had become little channels/wicks for the water to get further and further away from the damp rear wall. All but one small corner of the flooring was affected by these regularly-spaced channels of rot. In the end, we may just have enough wood to do a cupboard – very disappointing and a real shame.

Question 6. Is anything behind the brick wall?

Previously to the sale, we were told that the brick wall lining the back of this room was purely cosmetic; nevertheless, we thought we had better check. One of our options is to extend the beam across the centre of the kitchen into the back wall (and turn the stairs around – perhaps I’ll do a full “what we’d like to do” post soon!). That way, we can remove the brick pillar currently taking floor space. We needed to know if there was any hope of the back wall supporting a beam that was in turn taking the weight of the first floor.

Unsurprisingly, we found some stone wall, and a damp proof membrane. More surprisingly, this particular stone wall contains a giant piece of wood, and more holes than we would have liked! So, we have to do some unexpected work here. However, if the new beam is to be supported by this wall, the new hole overlaps with the problem areas significantly. We’ll find out if that’s a blessing or a curse later…

We promised messes, so here they are:

And one after a bit of tidying

Finally, after all these months of wondering, we have some answers. We should feel relieved, right? But we found that we only had answers to the questions posed by a surface-level inspection. In exploring, we’ve uncovered more questions and potentially many more costs. Those will have to be explained in another post though! To whet your appetite: that brick wall wasn’t supposed to exist.

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Tag: during

Exploration time II: Brick, brick… and HOW IS THERE MORE BRICK?!

Exploration time!