Soil Pipes and Useless Joists

Our house has a very small bathroom: 2.1 x 1.5 metres (although it is 3 metres high!).  We usually use a shower not a bath, but feel that a house does need a bath, so we were looking at options of using part of a bedroom for a bath when inspiration struck.  Various suppliers do shower baths which are "P" shaped, so you shower standing in a decent area which is also flat; the inspiration was to discover that they also do these - wait for it - exactly 1.5 metre long.  This then fixes the design of the bathroom as there is only one way that can fit everything in.

Part of this design is that the toilet has to be moved, and this necessitates changing the branch in the soil pipe from left hand (135 degrees) to right hand (112.5 degrees), and moving the branch up a small way.  See existing arrangement, right.  So, this week, I have started by lifting the bathroom floor and removing three feet of the internal soil pipe which is four inch diameter lead pipe.  Being a foul pipe this could have been an awful job but, since the toilet has not been used for ages, it was all dry and so not too bad at all.  The wall of the bathroom was one of the really damp places in the house due to the state of the roof, and so (with the roof fixed) I was very surprised to find dampness still present in the floor.  This was doubtless related to the discovery of a 6mm hole in the side of the lead pipe!  I also found that the toilet had been moved once before as the pipe once went through a large cut-out in the second joist from the wall.  The joist is 7" x 1.75" and the cut-out is almost 6" deep (see gap in front of the pipe in photo left).  This hole had been ignored subsequently when they fitted the floorboards, which had spanned the gap and rested on the rotten end joist... 

Unfortunately, as so often happens, another job appeared whilst doing this one.  The plaster of the hall ceiling under the bathroom floor is not just lath but was actually rotten lath held up by plasterboard.  This combination was in a very bad state (due to the hole in the soil pipe) and, in the corner under the lead pipe (above) the board was not attached to the rotten joist at all!  In no time it was all down in a heap on the floor.  Standing on the few remaining bits of floorboard on joists with just space below is surprisingly disconcerting.

Back to the joists: I quite enjoy this sort of joinery.  Fortunately both joists have good wood at the ends so I have fitted a 6" doubler to each joist, attached to the originals with a copious number of 70mm screws.  In doing this I found that the second joist had predictably split in the middle where the six inch gap started, so I added a couple of screws upwards to re-attach that as well.  In the photo from underneath (see left, before I did the first joist), there is a line of light visible between my doubler and the original second joist - this is where the cut-out was.


The other job was to start removal of the old external soil/vent pipe.  This is an unexpected expense as, to install the new branch, the pipe has to be rebuilt from the ground right up to the (new) flashing in the (new) roof.  I have started by grinding off the old external toilet outlet (right) to remove the pipe in the wall, so that I can progress inside.  We will need to dismantle the old stack, order the required new bits (if we can save any?) and then re-build it all when the new outlet has been fitted.  All that is a joy for a later week! Happy days.

Vandalism, an accident and flooring

Plastering continued this week, with much of the scratch coat being covered by the float coat, ready for the final skim.  This has been coupled with the start of the first fix plumbing, intermingled with floorboard work.  I've been delayed on doing the lounge floorboards by a reclamation company who are complete rubbish.  They promised me a new front door and some (fairly thick) pine floorboards; the door proved impossible for the manufacturer, and they sold the floorboards to someone else, and then blamed the 16 year old yard lad for this mistake.

We had some vandalism this week.  I arrived early one morning and found an upper main pane of the Venetian sash window (two over two) had been broken (to match the boarded lower one, broken before we bought the house).  There was glass both inside and out, and almost none left in the frame.  It looked like an attempted break-in, but if it was, why choose the front window, and break one of the upper panes?  Surely you go round the back and break one at waist height?  I called the police and, when I was talking to the (very) young constable, a chap came over from across the road to say that he had heard it (at 1.10am that morning) and had seen the miscreant departing on a child's silver scooter in the direction of the town centre.  The PC (scenting an arrest) said that he would check on the town centre CCTV to see if there were any good pictures of the unusual sight.  No news yet, but at least this confirmed that it was simple vandalism rather than attempted burglary, which consoled me slightly.

I forgot to mention my little accident the other week.  We are applying for listed building consent (LBC) for various things, including the replacement of two awful 1950s fireplaces with a woodburning stove and a nice Victorian fireplace respectively.  Unfortunately, I seem to have pre-empted this permission when I had to fit a floorboard under the end of the existing fireplace in the lounge.  As I lifted it slightly, its weight took control and the entire concrete facade fell forward, landing with an almighty crash which left the white concrete moulding in about twelve pieces, and an ugly gap into the chimney above the brown tiles.  Oops.  Hopefully the LBC will be forthcoming in March, which will make me legal!

In praise of Gas Men

Yes, I really do want to sing the praise of the various contractors who have installed my new gas supply in the last ten days.  I'll even name the company - Southern Gas Networks - as they have exceeded all my expectations (OK, my expectations were pretty low!).  I only paid for the work in early January and they advised that they were expecting to come in 35 days; being a pessimist I assumed that was 35 working days - seven weeks - so I was quite surprised when they said they would come on Feb 3rd.  They even tried (twice) to come earlier as they wanted to keep their emergency team busy on something, but both times the team were then called off to an emergency... I was then pleased when they actually did come as promised on Feb 3rd, and by the next day had completed laying the pipe from the road to the house.  This is about 25 yards which required five hand-dug holes to connect together using their mole (see last week's blog), plus a hand-dug trench at either end (to connect to the main and to the meter box). 

So it was last week that I had a procession of men from their contractor ("Enterprise") who is clearly on a very strictly controlled contract.  Firstly two men came to do "the black stuff" (i.e. filling the hole in the road and pavement).  Then two more came who compacted the three holes which required concrete, in preparation for a third pair who actually laid the concrete.  Special mention here for the young lad who did the concrete (the new bit, right), for carefully copying the pattern in the rest of the concrete around the manhole cover, and doing an excellent job of it.  Finally another pair came (in two vans) to collect all the signage and fencing - all done by Feb 10th.

Having moved here from Central London, I was used to large development companies leaving huge holes with temporary traffic lights on busy roads for a week or three with no work happening.  In the case of the Shard (at London Bridge), there is even a road (St Thomas Street) which has been blocked one way for a couple of years, causing even greater traffic issues than already existed in the area.  Then, conflicting for about ten months, Thames Water dug up the adjacent Borough High Street to replace the water main....  To my mind, if they cannot build a place without causing huge inconvenience to thousands of people on a daily basis for years, I'm not sure why they should be given permission in the first place. [/rant]

Anyway, the meter came yesterday (Mon 14th) so job done.  I'm very happy with the utilities here!

Gas Men and Holes in the Ground

After reaching the take-a-breath stage with the plastering, the gas man came this week.  The house has no gas (although next door does) and so they had to fit a new gas supply pipe from the road up to the side of the house where the kitchen will be.  This is quite a long route, and I am grateful that the surveyor stretched his tape measure to do it all for no extra cost.  He was well aware of the issues about not fitting unsightly meter boxes on listed buildings, and had had this debate with his own company many times before.

Of course, when the manager came last week, he had a different idea about the required route, and then the actual workers had their own variation as well.  They have to dig two holes and then use a tool called a mole, which operates on compressed air and burrows under the ground from one hole to another.  In fact, for our property they had to dig five holes and join them up like a dot-to-dot picture.  Then at either end they dug a trench for the connections to the main and the meter box.  This may sound easy and in fact they made fairly light of the issues, but I reckon I was right to be worried about the difficulty of the possible routes.  The job took over two days, and so one night the road was partly blocked by these works; Jane said, "I've never had a road blocked for me before!"

I dug a hole where the meter was to go, partly as I wanted to know how deep the "foundations" of the house were.  The answer was about a foot from the current surface!  In this photo you can see the three bottom courses of stone, which sit on a line of stones laid at right angles, sticking out about four inches from the wall.  It looks as though they laid these longer stones across ways, and then just built the wall on them.  I think this bottom level was pretty much the ground level when it was built.


The gas men found a old wall, in the gateway near our front wall but about a foot into our property and about a foot down.  Despite the availability of local limestone, this wall uses a good amount of granite - where did that come from?

The existing wall is at the top left of the photo, heading down, and the older wall is in the middle just above my toe, highlighted by the low sun.  There was also a possible mediaeval tile fragment as well as a few other bits of pottery, but clearly everything there has been disturbed over the centuries and is out of context.  However, overall, we think it shows that our house is on a very interesting bit of ground (in the archaeological sense), and now Jane wants to excavate the entire garden!

Plaster, plaster everywhere

More plastering this week.  I have underestimated the amount of time that it takes to get the scratch coat on - he works really hard, but even so by the end of the day there is still so much left.  The signs of progress are most welcome - at last I feel that the house is going back together.  There is a real delight in seeing a uniform covering over walls and ceilings where there used to be damp patches, peeling wallpaper and, in the case of the bedroom ceilings, actual holes with real daylight.

A job next week will be to remove the plaster in the bathroom - at least there is a benefit to having a very small bathroom! - and this should be the last significant amount of plaster to be removed, apart from the kitchen ceiling which I think is doomed.

Having failed to publish this at the weekend, I can add that we have now removed the plaster from half of an internal wall in the kitchen-to-be.  This has had the wonderful effect of revealing the quoins which formed the corner of the original building; in the photo (right) this structural wall extends to the left and also goes directly away from the camera where it forms the front left corner of the house.  The bottom stone is the plinth which stands proud by about 3 cm, in exactly the same way as the wall at the front. 


Also, further along the same wall there is squared limestone (left) which matches the front wall of the house.  All this proves that this thick internal wall along the centre of the house was originally an exterior wall, when the building was first erected as a school, I understand (in 1834).






I have also found that another external wall, which is lined with brick, was originally just painted white on the inside, not plastered.  You can see where the builders have created a pattern by chipping the paint to provide a key before plastering.  Presumably this was the cheaper surface finish on the wall when the building was a school.