Walls and Weather

Well, I could go on about the recent weather, but you know what it's been like.  What I find really annoying is when the forecast is for weather which is a lot worse than the actual.  This can really mess up one's plans for the day, when you want to work outside, using cement or lime.  You find the day is unexpectedly sunny when frequent heavy showers are promised; yet when you check the current forecast on the BBC for your own specific local area, you find that it's still showing heavy showers.  So what will happen in the next couple of hours? Do you dare risk it?  I think that they are covering themselves with that symbol of a black cloud with raindrops and sunshine; basically they haven't a clue!

I have managed to out-guess the forecasters a couple of times.  I have started the garden wall foundation (parallel to the western wall of the house, about six feet away, holding back the higher ground) and have done the foundation and the first real bit of wall on the wall beside the front door.  There's also a new bit of concrete where the wheelie-bins will be stored.  Sadly, this is now the height of summer and I have barely started the major outside jobs that I had been "looking forward" to doing; apart from the walls and concrete leading to the patio area, there are a large number of sash windows which need refurbishment while it's warm (if/when?).

I've also done the promised run to the scrap merchant; the brass was £2/kilo (not bad...) but the ferrous stuff was down to 11 pence/kilo which was a bit disappointing considering I took 246 kilos in my car!  When he weighed it, the scale said 445 kg which almost excited me, but that weight was because it had all been put in a large (and heavy) metal stillage.  At least there is now a bit more room in the garden as I've also done a run to the council tip this week.

I mentioned (here) about the limecrete floor being laid in the church opposite; here's a photo of the finished floor.  This is just the choir vestry, where there was extensive damp, rotten floor joists and horrible smell!  The stone is Creeton Silver edged with Creeton Blue limestone (from Ancaster, I think).  Before you ask, no, I don't know why honey coloured stone is called "silver".  There's now a French drain and new soakaway being done outside in the churchyard, as well as re-pointing and leadwork.

It's all expensive but it's the necessary long-term solution to ensure the structural integrity of a Grade I listed building which will still be here long after I've gone. Once again, I'm reminded of the proverb "a stitch in time saves nine".  This is so true of old buildings - if you don't look after them properly then one day you (or your successors) will have to repair the unnecessary damage and pay out many times what you saved in skimpy maintenance.

Reclamation and Recycling

Whilst contractors were working here, I always tried to keep the place tidy.  Now, with some contractors this was impossible (see this entry, for instance, or this one), but in general I managed it. At times it almost got too much for me, especially with the way that most contractors just throw the rubbish down without thinking about it.  I used to pick up nails and screws on the scaffolding and I was delighted to supply a hundred copper nails once to keep work going when the roofer ran out!

Simply separating rubbish and scrap made a huge difference to the general tidiness, and made it much easier when I went to the scrap merchant.  These visits have made me a bit over £350, most of it from lead, but there is also a good satisfaction at everything which does not go to landfill or free to the council tip. A lot of old wood was burnt outside, and then more was used on the woodburner in the winter; a pile of old (untreated) rafters and batten still awaits a similar fate next winter, together with the remains of the trees from the front garden.

One particular thing that got recycled were the 10 litre tubs for the lime mortar and plaster we used for the plastering.  I had to get all this in tubs - we couldn't even get the 950kg pallet of 45 tubs onto the pavement so it had to be left in the road; then they all had to be moved inside by hand without delay. (I once had a much cheaper 950kg bulk bag and almost broke my back putting that into tubs just to get it inside...)  Given that I probably had 13 or 14 deliveries from Mike Wye, you can see that I had well over 500 tubs plus lids; these tubs can be quite useful, but if you're not careful you end up with dozens of tubs filled with hardcore or rubbish to be taken to the tip.  I did manage to send a couple of pallet loads (see left) back to Mike Wye for a small rebate but that really was hard work for little reward.  Consequently, when we moved in, I got a recycling bin and started putting 15 tubs and lids in each fortnight!  Long job, but we're there now.

During this project I have found a great deal of satisfaction in re-using items, and the list is now quite long.  The first thing was a bit of 3"x2" oak ceiling joist which I cut out to make the loft hatchway; within 30 minutes this had been re-used as a replacement for a section of the adjacent wall plate which had rotted (due to the prolonged roof leak).

I did numerous repairs to the structure of the house, using (as appropriate) old bricks and stone found around the place.  In particular, some of the stone which I used to fill the old kitchen doorway (under the window, photo right) was found just inside under the old kitchen floor where it had been the foundation for an internal wall.

Although I replaced the old 2.5" cast iron downpipes with 3" (to match the wider 5" gutters which I considered necessary), I was able to re-use two sections of the 2.5" for places where it didn't join to the guttering, one for the bathroom outlet (where the old piece was cracked lengthwise) and the other on the extension.  Both were wire-brushed and painted copiously with Hammerite.

The LBC said that I had to re-use the old door furniture on the new front door, but apart from the (original?) doctor's knocker, that was not feasible - the knobs were from internal doors and the 4" letter plate was far too narrow for modern use. 

The new extension has several re-used items.  Most significantly Jane and I reclaimed 1800 bricks from the demolition rubble (and only had to buy about 200 more to match), whilst the chimney is topped with a yellow pot from the original back chimney (this chimney pot spent a year acting as the kitchen rubbish bin!). The old internal ledged and braced door to the utility has been refitted at the other end of a new wall in the same position, with the original Suffolk latch fitted, and the redundant external ledged and braced door is also repaired and repainted, ready to be fitted to a pair of pintles on limestone blocks which I bought at the local reclamation yard.  This will be one of the pair of back gates; the other matching door/gate was obtained as a swap for some old glass (thanks JohnB) and is already fitted.  Also, as I have mentioned before, the casement window in the extension was a major repair which I did myself, utilizing part of the frame of the replaced front sash window, plus some old wavy glass from two broken sash windows.

Of course, we had to buy a lot of reclaimed Welsh slates for the roofs, but we did re-use what we could, although that was a pitifully small percentage.  Another reclamation yard purchase was the almost new sash window in the extension (on the left of the photo, left) which we bought for £95 including delivery - absolute bargain!

So, I'm now working on the garden walls, again using (free) stone from around the site, including the weathered stone from the front wall where the driveway now goes.  Next week I'll do another run to the scrap merchant with the last load of brass and iron, including the old Crittal door and windows.  Then, when I have also built the stone wall (using the stone from the front wall where the driveway was made), the garden might look a bit tidier.

Rain, Rain, Rain

I asked the other week why we British always talk about the weather.  Well, after the rain of the last week I think I can now answer the question - it's because the weather is so b****y awful.  April and May were bad enough but I think we all thought that the heatwave at the end of May heralded the start of summer.  Wrong!  I have managed to get a small amount of work done outside, but nowhere near as much as I had hoped.  Right now the rain has eased but it's all muddy underfoot in my garden builder's yard and everywhere is dripping.

What I have achieved is to make a deep concrete plinth (right) on which to mount a cast iron lamp-post, and I've laid a concrete foundation for the wall beside the back gate, together with some block work where the wall itself will be buried in the slope of the garden (no point in burying good faced limestone!).  Although they seem small, these two structures together consumed a whole one tonne bag of ballast!  There is just the small matter of the wall itself to be built, plus 14 yards of foundation and retaining wall for the garden beside the house.

Mind you, I have been very busy on other things in the last ten days.  We had a church 1950's party which had to be held inside as it was so cold (quite apart from the occasional shower) and we've spent some time looking after our dear 17 month grandson.  Firstly we took him (without his parents) to a large family do in London where the sheer numbers could have fazed him, but he survived remarkably well and we returned home as proud grandparents (although we also acknowledge our age and consequent tiredness).  Then we looked after him for a whole day at our house, when he was cheerful, fun and communicative (and we got even more tired!).  He has reached a reasoning point, where he can work out a problem for himself.  For instance, he has been known to push a chair to the kitchen work top so that he can climb up onto the work top!  The other day he stood near our front door and then at me and asked to be picked up.  It then became obvious that he only wanted to be higher so that he (or I) could open the front door as he knew the latch was well out of his reach.

I have also recently received direct from the publishers a copy of a new Haynes Manual called "Period Property - care and repair of old houses".  This was especially good because it was free: it contains some photos of the limecrete floor in this house.  Then the author, Ian Rock, came to see this house as he was so interested by this blog and wanted to see what had been done to the house. [Edit - they now have a website http://www.period-house.com/]

A Genuine Jersey Holiday

It has been a bit quiet here recently.  This is partly due to a general malaise on my part, partly because I have been doing odd little jobs which aren't worth reporting, and most importantly because we have just had a week's holiday in Jersey.  This was our first overseas holiday in almost four years, so it was about time!

Jersey is interesting.  Many buildings are made of granite, and they seem to care more than my local council about the old look of the place, especially away from St Helier.  In consequence, there was a lot of work being done by local builders using granite, although I suspect not with lime mortar.  Actually, since granite is (I think) not porous like limestone, I'm not even sure if lime mortar is as necessary as it is with limestone.  There was also a significant amount of concrete work in evidence, much of it dating from the German occupation in WWII.  They used slave labour to fortify the place against an Allied invasion which must have been a huge drain on their resources; however this was totally wasted as the Allies had not the slightest intention of invading the islands.  One of the still useful legacies is a high sea wall (built to prevent tanks being landed) which goes all the way along the five mile beach at the west of the island.

If you are thinking of going to Jersey (as a tourist rather than occupier!!), I advise you not to go in July or August if you want to drive around.  The roads are small, junctions have poor visibility and parking can be difficult.  I think that the roads and junctions are deliberately never improved as the maximum speed limit is 40mph (and can often be 30 or 20!) and so the road design is effectively a cheap means to regulate traffic; if you have an accident at those speeds, it is probably rare to even injure someone.  The road signs leave something to be desired; they seem to fall between UK and French standards, so often a junction is signed in advance but not at the junction itself.  The parking would have been tiresome in the peak times, but we were able to park quite easily, even in St Helier.  These things were not really a problem in May, but we kept on asking ourselves "what would this be like in August?".

Our visit occurred during the Jersey Food Festival; we spent the only really wet afternoon in a posh hotel watching and tasting cookery demonstrations (and I tasted my first oyster).  A simple food I now love is the boiled Jersey Royal potato - delicious with butter.

One place we visited was Jersey Dairy Ltd - see photo of their new factory right.  They are effectively the only exporter of dairy products from the island.  (My thanks to Eamonn the MD for the tour, the free ice-cream tasting was great!)  One little-known fact is that under current rules the Channel Islands are not protected by labelling regulations, and so if you have a single half breed Jersey cow in your herd anywhere in the UK, you can sell all your milk as "Channel Island milk" or "Jersey milk".  Apparently most supermarkets use this ploy on lots of dairy products to confuse consumers, which seems a bit underhand but is quite legal.  To avoid it you should look for a little logo which says "Genuine Jersey" (and I think there's an equivalent for Guernsey); this logo IS protected and means what it says.  The Jersey cows on the island are registered and protected in order to maintain the purity of the breed, unlike on the mainland here.

By the way, we also visited a farm: the Jersey cows are ever so sweet and friendly!