Baths and Jack Hammers

Day 2 of the first week with Sparks on site and the stud walls are coming down a-pace. So far we have left the two stud walls either side of the hall, although they have lost their skins. Even these two may be taken down and rebuilt, as they are sitting on top of some rather wood-wormy bits of floor boards which are on top themselves of a possibly sacrificial joist. For now though Mum is assigned the job of tidying them up, pulling out the many thousand nails which porcupine their surfaces.

One job which happens today which had not been possible without Sparks was to lift the big, cast iron bath, too heavy for Mum and Dad as a combination. With no mains water on site yet, this bath is being brought down to the cattle-yard and put under a down-pipe to collect rain water for use by cement makers and plasterers (not to mention chemical-toilet operatives). It's heavy lump and the boys turn it upside down to try to slide it down the stairs, so that the feet do not dig into the treads. Also on today's list, Sparks pulls down all the horrible old style fibreglass wadding which had been loosely wrapped around the water pipes and water tank in the loft space.

In the afternoon the boys head for Castlerea (we now know it's pronounced Castle-Ree as opposed to Castle-Ray which is the one up by Belfast). Castlerea and the nearer village of Lough Glynn (everyone says "Lock-Lynn" but with a softer 'lough' sound rather than a hard "CK") are becoming regular haunts and we are recognised and hailed by an increasing number of people. Mum is also getting to be a regular at the nearby town of Ballaghaderreen (pron "Balla-adreen" with a slight catch of the breath between the two 'a's so that la-ad is almost but not quite, two syllables). Castlerea is home to the builders merchants where we need a new barrow and 2 'pointy style' Irish shovels (of which more later) and home to the plant hire place where we must hire a generator and a 'Kango' hammer.

Now we look like a PROPER building site.
Deefer

Sparks, Doors and Windows

It's been a big week for us down at the house, with plenty going on, so I'm going to cover it off in a series of posts over this weekend rather than try to squeeze it all into one. If you are seeing this version with no pictures, that's just because the pics are currently on another laptop which is in use. I will load some pictures on soon, so please do re-visit these posts when you get a chance.

The main bit of news is the arrival on site of Sparks, our Project Manager. He'd visited before Christmas and pointed Mum and Dad in the right direction to give us plenty of work over Christmas and the New Year (pulling down ceilings and pulling the plaster board off stud-walls, pulling up the living room floor (wooden) and chipping off some plaster, as well as more superficial stuff like tearing out cupboards, kitchen equipment, the bathroom suite etc.). Sparks is pleased with this progress and compliments us all on our hard work but now that he's on board we can step up the pace a good deal. He tends to go at it all a bit more vigorously than Mum and Dad, making more noise and achieving a whole new level of destructive ability. He wields the big hammer and the longer crow-bar with no fear of damaging something vital where Mum and Dad now look like they were pussy-footing it a bit. The frames for stud walling are ripped from their bases as 6 inch nails are prised free, the bangs and clangs of a lump hammer swinging reverberate and the serious crunch of damage being done to masonry echoes across Roscommon.

Sparks though, is also the project MANAGER, so he has all the planning, measuring, deciding and prioritising to do. He decides whether a floor should stay or go, whether a joist is bad enough for replacement, or needs repair or just needs spraying with the treatment chemical. He knows what order things should be done in, so he has mental time-lines of when to order stuff to arrive by, or on which days to hire equipment. He has the note book and the tape measure and the constantly ringing mobile phone. On Monday he has Nathan from the doors and windows firm (Munster Joinery) coming out to measure us up, let us choose styles and quote for the job. This puts a smile on everyone's face - where we'd all been half expecting the doors and windows to be one of the major expensive purchases, they turn out to be very reasonable. We accept the price and Nathan will send back two of his measurers/fitters tomorrow to measure up properly and dot the i's and cross the t's on the task.

So Monday sees the stud wall frames between the two halves of what will be the main bedroom torn down revealing what will be the final size of the main bedroom and what the Dining Room will look like united with the former 'hall', so that the stairs run up one side of the room and there is space under them for a computer desk. Sparks having had a good look at the joists exposed by our work around Christmas though, thinks we will probably need to completely replace the first 4 joists working from the west end of the house (including a bit of a weird bodge made to accommodate the then upstairs fireplace; we are not going to use the fireplace so we can revert to a simple single house-deep joist beam there). We will also need to re-end or repair a couple above the front door in the short bit of landing, and possibly a couple in the Dining room ceiling. They have suffered rather from woodworm or near windows where possibly because of the single glazing and 15 years being closed up, the condensation has left them continuously damp.

More in the next post
Deefs

Chopping Plaster Off

Some pictures from the end of the week and into the weekend. With the bad floor up we'd been thinking we needed to wait for mains power so that we could use Sparks's funky mini-kango to strip plaster but searching the bags of tools which came in the cars rather than being put into storage in Big Green Lorry (BGL) we found the rubber ended mallet, the ten pound lump hammer and the two cold chisels with rubber hand grips. We have also now, two of the big "Curver" flexible buckets. Mum and Dad decided to start stripping the poor plaster off the living room manually.

In places this was dead easy. A smack with the lump hammer in the middle of a bit of innocently loitering plaster and a square yard would descend into the bucket in an avalanche of dust. In other places it needed a bit more persuasion, with the tip of the chisel being hinted in between wall and plaster-sheet. In others it was more like hard work, chipping away with shards flying and pinging off your safety goggles. More of the easy than the hard, we must admit. Especially in the bubbling stained damp areas which we have posted photographs of before.

Here-in lies a tale. Sparks is keen for us to get all this plaster off so that he can, sensibly and professionally. for all the right reasons, insulate the entire surface of exterior wall of the main house in thermal liner before plastering, thus saving us oodles of expensive heating fuel and keeping us warm at night. Dad, however knows that this is a stone built house and has seen some lovely pictures of bare stone work or brick work either left exposed or painted white so you can admire it for its texture and gritty reality. One thing we love about the barge is the fact that structure is exposed in various places, with real baulks of timber and planking visible between the 'manicured' stage-set bits. He is hoping that for the one wall with the real fire, we can chip and brush away plaster to reveal a lovely structure and texture worth keeping and that he and Mum can then persuade Sparks that this is a good thing to do.

There is only one flaw in the ointment. When we first learned that the house was stone built, Dad, in his ignorance, saw visions of lovely dressed stone blocks like in the Great Pyramids, neatly slotted together and with thin smears of mortar between. Stone-built here means nothing of the sort, of course. This is rough old stone jumble-stacked into the form of a wall with plenty of scruffy old mortar between to give the walls a loosely flat inner and outer face. It's more like an Irish dry-stone wall with lots of screed and cement stuffed in to let it go higher than a dry stone wall would. They are thick and solid, sure enough, but the surfaces never look like dressed stone. So it still remains a question whether Dad gets his wall, or whether Mum decides it's not beautiful enough, or the Project Manager vetoes the plan anyway.

On the subject of mains power, anyway, the wonderful Irish Electricity Board (ESB) have told us that their target date for mains power is 12 weeks anyway. To add to that, the Roscommon water authority are saying that as we have been unconnected from their mains for 15 years, they may have to charge us the 1600 Euro 'New Licence' fee as if the road had only just been built and these were new houses being connected up to the mains. Seems a bit mean.

The biking picture is of what's now become a regular weekend entertainment. Dad, riding Mrs Silverwood's "school-run" bike towing toddler-R (4) in the trailer bit, accompanies M (5) on his new bike from Santa exploring some local circular routes of lanes. M is allowed to pedal round the estate without supervision but in the winter, all his mates are cooped up in their houses; No-one wants to come out to play. But with a grown up, he's allowed anywhere and he's very careful and sensible on the roads, looking out for the traffic and staying in close to the kerb, extra care at junctions etc. So Dad takes he and R out for an hour or so round the quiet local lanes, and they all enjoy it.

Look out for us and don't run us over
Deefs

First Footing, on the Third

Mum and Dad are firm believers in the tradition of First Footing a house, letting the old year out the back door and the new year in the front. They thought it might be even more appropriate where there are 15 or so old years queueing up at the back door to be let out, years of neglect, cold, damp and some tragic and difficult times. So even though it would be the 3rd January when we got there, we were determined to do a good job as the first people who would cross the threshold in 2012. In our version at least, your first footer should be a tall, dark and handsome man. Dad says "Two out of three ain't bad!" We also believe that you should arrive with whiskey (representing good cheer). coin (financial prosperity), bread (food), salt(flavour) and a lump of coal (warmth). Dad had the coin and the salt was already in the car. We shopped in Castlerea for the drink and bread. We added champagne so that our good cheer would be bubbly!

You are meant to let the old year out first, so on arrival, Mum nipped round the back to open the back door, then came back round the front via grabbing a coal lump from the coal pile to unlock and let Dad in. It was a breezy day - we had to smile when a draught blew through the house slamming the back door as we came in the front! 15 years well and truly gone! Happy New Year, new house!

This week's major job was to rip up the floor of the downstairs living room. This floor has suffered most from the neglect mainly because the air bricks front and back were badly positioned and blocked anyway. It has holes where Mum and Dad have crunched through with their rigger-boot heels and feels, anyway, very springy and weak. We are told that most people simply rip them out and lay, instead, a modern insulated concrete floor covered with the covering of your choice (tiles. laminate, boards, parquet etc). Dad had thought there might be a chance that some of it was recoverable. We thought this might be a full day job, not only crow-barring up the floor boards, but then potentially having to saw through joists to get them out of the slots either end in two halves.

No such problems in fact. The boards proved to be riddled with woodworm so that most came up in short lengths, breaking at every joist, and the joists themselves were in poor condition. Sometimes, as Dad went to prise the boards up off the joist the joist would instead crunch downwards like a weetabix, almost hollow inside where the woodworm have eaten the structure away. No wonder the floor was springy!. The floor took much less time than expected as a result of this. It generated nothing for the salvage or firewood piles, but a good old stack for the bonfire heap, which is where 99% of it ended up.

With the job done much quicker than expected, we are left inside the house while Mum and Dad head for Castlerea where they need to set up an account in Euros from which to pay builders and contractors and to do a bit of shopping. There is also time to fit in a bit of gardening just for relaxation purposes. It's fairly wild gardening at this stage, clearing brambles, sawing down some elder and ash saplings growing where they are not wanted (in the cattle-yard for one). We are also on the phone to the water board people of County Roscommon, trying to get ourselves reconnected. In the excitement driving up the drive we did not even notice that the pile of scrap had vanished. Aerial Keith had come to claim it as promised. We'd been thanking Mike the Cows for pulling the old VW out of the brambles and keeping it, and the scrap. for him as first refusal, but he was happy, in fact, for us to give it to Aerial Keith.

AK is another character in our "play" having dropped by, interested in the car as a project restoration, in a big blue van with big ladders on the roof. Dad spotted these and, finding that AK was in the aerials business, asked him to take down the floppy TV aerial loosely lashed to our western chimney and looking like it would finally blow down and impale the roof any minute. Keith came back with van, took down the aerial in minutes, accepted coffee, offered to (and did) clear all the gutters, and then charged us nothing "if I can have the car". Everyone's a winner. His sons play GAA (Gaelic Football) for a local team, which raises funds by collecting and selling scrap metal, so we were happy to oblige - they took cookers, fridge, the olde washing machine, copper tank and pipes, angle iron, old oil drums, assorted farm implement bits etc; a fine olde load. As I say, we failed to notice all this vanish till AK returned with a big 4 by 4 hoping to tow away the Volkswagen. The VW, though, has all 4 wheels seized and would not budge to the tarmac-tyre shod "Chelsea Tractor" poseur 4x4. They will come back with a tractor and lift the car onto a trailer.

Surely enough for this one
Deefs

Back to it (and forwards)

Mum and Dad are back in touch with "Sparks" over the weekend. Today we'd been all due back up at Roscommon early hours for Sparks to look at our progress on stripping out ceilings and stud walling and to tell us what was next, but a technical issue has delayed him and he can't now make it. However he does tell us that if we want to start pulling up the living room floor (the only floor we have to get rid of completely, the rest are, all being well, floor board patching jobs) then that would be a good idea. He tells us that we can continue with skirting boards and removing any old wiring or plumbing as this is all being renewed and he also announces (ta daaaa!) that he will be joining us on site all week next week to do the electrical "First Fix".

Electrical installs in houses are done in a series of phases or 'fixes' because it's easier to do some bits before the plasterers or ceiling guys, for example, have done anything, and other bits have to happen after the plasterers or other tradesmen. Sparks will be laying the ring main(s) and any other big grey cables around the house, under floors, above ceilings and between rooms while there is no-one to get in his way. That will be the first bit of construction we have seen so far, after all the destruction, so it will fell good and positive, like we have turned a corner and passed a milestone.

Looking Good
Deefs

New Bed, New Year

A couple of pictures for the New Year. This is me trying to sit in Coco's new bed, even though Coco and his bed are quite a bit smaller than me, so I don't really fit. The other is of the table laid at Silverwood's for the New Year's Day feast. The menu was for Foie Gras followed by pea and ham soup, with roast lamb for mains and Eton Mess for pud. Dad is reckoned to be the roast potato expert round here and little R Silverwood (4) would eat just roast potatoes (or chips, wedges etc; any form of fried spuds)given a free choice, so he's asked to do enough roasties for the 8 humans, plus enough for another 8 to satisfy R! The 'Eton Mess' here takes the form of the usual meringue and cream plus a sharpish mix of currants and berries. The whole is washed down with a good red wine and followed by Calvados. Our menu was the local variant of dried dog food but with chopped up lamb, juices from the roast and even some jelly from below the duck-fat. This is going to be a good year!

Mum has the lurgy, a cold and sniffles which render her all "moopy" so that the last thing she wants to do today is bash houses in cold damp Roscommon and we decide to take the day off and stay the extra day in Silverwood's. It's a good decision in fact - the skies clear and the temperature plummets. There is black ice all over the pavements and freezing rain falling. Any plans we might have had to take the bikes out again are shelved. We opt for a stay at home day taking turns to mind small children while the grown ups slope off one by one for lie downs and rest / recuperation. Time enough for house wrangling tomorrow.

Deefski

An Interesting Year Ends

20 past 9 on New Year's Morning and only we dogs, Dad and Young M Silverwood (5) are up. We finished the year in good form. M has a new bike since Christmas and is keen to get out there beyond the bounds of the estate where he's allowed to ride about without a grown-up, out into the town and surrounds. Mrs S has a grown-up bike with a trailer for Little R (4) for school runs when there is no car available, so Dad agrees to take the bike trailer with R and with M on his own bike for a ride to get them some fresh air. They are going to repeat this today, going even further afield.

The rest of the day is just the normal comings and goings of family life, subdued by the fact that the two older girls and a friend had done a sleep over and stayed awake most of the night anyway, so there was to be a bit of recovering and catching up on sleep ready for tonight's midnight. Popular opinion has it that none of the children would manage to go the distance. There's a meal of roast chicken and a big rice salad. At that point little R is definitely flagging, so she's the first casualty, but M is still whizzing and the girls are keen for us to see the recorded Doctor Who Christmas Special, which we do, and the final Harry Potter.

Mrs S says that M is whizzing because in his head he knows that the moment he settles down, sleep will engulf him. His Dad does a bit of Play-Doh with him and he gets involved in producing hot snacks at about 11. Fair play to him, though, he's there shouting the count-down seconds along with us and races outside to do sparklers on the front lawn and hear any fireworks that do manage to go off in these cash-strapped times. He's very quickly to bed after that (but awake again by 08:30 as I said) while the rest of us sit out the remaining 45 minutes of Harry Potter.

So now it' 2012 and we have a very different year in prospect for us, sorting out the new house and the new life over here in Ireland. I wish all my Readers a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

Deefer