Water, Water Everywhere

If there's an aspect of this house renovation which occasionally winds us up is probably the fact that some of the damage and dereliction could have been so easily avoided. Setting aside the idea of leaving the house shut up for 15 years in the cold and damp, much of the damp did not need to be there in the first place had a little more thought been given to the house's ability to shed water - the drains and the 'apron'. The poor ol' place had clay right up to the walls, and often moss, weeds, brambles and ivy clambering up its lower walls (the ivy right up to the gutters). The gutters, even when they were new seem to have been set up badly.

The roof is brilliant, so the water flows off it easily and the gutters (now cleared of 15 years of blown leaves and pine needles carry the water away well to the down pipes. The down pipes, though, dump their water into the most silly places. In one case into the 3 inch gap between dining room outer wall and the out-building we call the 'office'. In another case into the uphill side of the kitchen and Tigin. This would have made the soil permanently wet just uphill of the kitchen and, with no foundations except for the plinth-base of the kitchen wall, the damp would have flowed as ground-water through the clay to under the kitchen. Here a pathetic sheet of 'cake icing' cement was all that was between your feet and the cold, wet clay. The floor was glistening with damp.

A big part of our work has been about sorting this out and improving it. First we have dug out the floors to 17 inches and separated our feet from the cold, damp clay using 8 inches of '804 sub-base', 6 inches of thermal foam panels and 3 inches of screed. 2nd we will be re-routing gutters and down pipes so that they dump their water on the downhill sides of the house. Then we have had Paddy the Drains in over last weekend to dig gulleys and lay drain pipes which collect up all these down-pipes (green circle and 2nd picture)and send them under the cattle yard and into an outflow downhill from us (see bizarre picture of pipe end!). At some stage we will be creating a concrete apron around the uphill side of the house which will shed water away from the house for a meter.

Finally, if you look at the third picture you have some completely counter-productive places (not so much water-shedding as water-gathering) e.g. where the end of the Tigin's sloping walls fire water straight onto the outside wall of the kitchen (red circle) due to no-one thinking to create a gap here or flashing the join with lead. This we will solve by creating cement 'chevrons' guiding water onto the corrugated iron sheeting.

Ah well. It all makes work for...
Deefs

The Return of BGL

Although we'd tried to put him off on the grounds of not enough space, floors in a mess etc, Bill D of Big Green Lorry fame is on the way and timed to arrive at about 11 on Monday with all our stuff from the Kentish house. This time he really is using the big green lorry on the business card instead of the rinky dink little Bedford, so despite several attempts, he is not going to get round the turn from country lane onto the drive, so the only alternative is for him to park 100 yards down the lane in a layby and for Dad in the 2CV and trailer, and Sparks in the van with roof-rack, to run a shuttle service from the BGL to the house. No matter. Bill turns up with 2 extra bodies for humping and it's all accomplished amicably in a couple for hours, the stuff being stored in the Tigin, the 'milking shed' and the other end of the milking shed (calf house?). The boys stop for coffee and a slice of cake and an explore of the house and how we've got on, then they are on their way.

The rest of Monday is spent on the serious business of shovelling out clay and rubble. We need to get down to 17 inches below the original floor level, 8 for compacted down sub-base, 6 for foam insulation sheets, and 3 for ready-mix screed. That, across the ground floor, is a lot of digging, shovelling and barrowing, and the boys ache in places they din't know they had. One good thing is that the garden tools turned up with the 'stuff' so Dad now has his stainless steel spade and fork, which are a lot easier on the damp clay than traditional Irish pointy-end shovels.

We now have the generator on site, so the boys can work on after dark by electric light and are still at it at 17:30. Mum is doing "on-site catering", so we retreat to the caravan for stew, wine and Scrabble. (Yes, Scrabble lives again, as Sparks has brought his board up this week.

Deefs

Irish Expressions

This being very much an Irish adventure, so it's an exploration into a foreign country for Dad, he's been very much enjoying getting a bit Irish along the way. This first showed up when we were engaging "Aerial Keith" to get rid of our scrap metal. His children play GAA (Gaelic Football) at a local club and the kids collect scrap to sell it to make funds for the GAA club, in his case the "Western Gaels". We were joking that we were happy to be supporting the local club and he joking warned us that GAA was actually SO locally based that the Gaels were not actually our 'local' club, because half a mile to the NE of us is a club called Eire Og (Young Ireland; sorry, you purists; I know there should be an "acute" accent (Fada, pronounced like fodder) over the O but this blog input page is not letting me use my cunning ALT-number ASCII codes, so I can't do accents! Even the "fada" should have an A-fada as its first 'a'.)

Anyway, as I was saying, the GAA is so parochial that were we to show up supporting the Gaels we would be frowned upon by our neighbours. Dad was even going to buy a smart "Castlerea GAA" sweat shirt out of loyalty to the area, but (gasp) Castlerea is EVEN FURTHER away. It's your local team (Eire Og) and then County, or nothing.

We have also been tinkering around the edges of the Irish language. All our people are Dublin city-folks and definitely English as the first language, reluctantly forced to learn Irish at school and living in horrored memories of the eponymous heroin of one of their "miserable" school books Peig, the sad life story of Peig Sayers (says Mum) and all the miserable people whom she knew, lived with and watched die. The young Silverwoods are a bit keener on Irish and Peig is long gone from school book lists. They are quite good at it. Over in Roscommon, though, we are all a bit closer to the genuine Irish speaking west of Ireland, so Mum, Sparks and co are dusting off some of their old skills and trying to use them.

The old out-building we believe is the original farm cottage is sometimes known as the Tigin Beag (Small wee house; again, Tigin beag, (pronounced Tiggeen Beyogg) should be bristling with fadas but cannot be here). It's not an easy language to learn, though, being riven with bizarre grammatical changes depending on context. The Tigin is the small house, but the word becomes "Teach" (pronounced a bit like "chock") if it is not being described as small, and if it is in a possessive form such as the "The Lady of the House", it changes again to Bean an (lady of the) Ti (house).

Can't see Dad being able to pick any of this up very soon.
Deefer Beag (or Deeferin)