Banging up the floors

The noise levels rise on Wednesday when the boys break out the hired kango hammer. The concrete floors of the hall, dining room and kitchen are uneven so that they would not sensibly take a lino or tile finish and are, anyway, not insulated, so they are cold and damp, especially the kitchen where we have not been lighting the daily fires and range. In the kitchen this is partly because the gutters round the house outside are so arranged that a downpipe drops water into the small 8' by 8' garden 'gap' between the dining room and the original cottage with no where for it to drain away, so the clay and peat soil is saturated, the wet quickly leaching through under the house wall to make the clay under the kitchen floor wet too. Our mission is to 'break out' all this concrete and then dig down till we are 17 inches below the original floor level. The floor will then be backfilled with two layers of a crushed rubble 'sub-base' which builders call "804", the first 4 inches being stomped down with a whacker-plate before the 2nd 4 inches is spread over and whacked down. Over this will go a thick layer of modern insulated sheeting followed by self-levelling concrete.

This, you will appreciate, is a big job; possibly the worst part of this renovation. Breaking out the floor with the kango is probably the easiest bit. It's a big heavy tool which does all the work itself. The driver merely has to hold it upright and pull the trigger. He doesn't even have to listen to the infernal racket as he has ear defenders on. After each drilling he lifts it out and back towards him 6 inches or so ready to crack away the next small chunk of concrete, leaning the hammer down to prise the bits up a bit to make then easier to pull out by hand. It's hard to start when the unbroken sheet of concrete has nowhere to go, but once you've started an edge it's easier to bite bits off the sides.

The hard bit is the digging out. We have two barrows, one new one, one an old rusty whangy thing left to us by TK-Min. We have two Irish style, pointy shovels. These are 'pointy for a reason', says Sparks. When trying to shovel rubble, a broad ended straight English shovel jars on every stone and is impossible to work. Your Irish one slips in between the blocks, nicking them up onto its face with no jarring. The new barrow is brilliant. The old one is a total pain in the a***, flopping around trying to break off its handles when loaded. The boys decide to scrap it and buy a 2nd new one. It joins the scrap metal pile.

These are brutal, hard work days, just lifting this much broken concrete into a barrow and barrowing it out to the rubble heap, is a killer. The pulling up the loose rubble underneath by hand or shovel is as bad. Some of the boulders are big ones, over a foot long and get carried out singly, saved for some kind of garden rockery use. This gets us down about 9 inches to the clay. We need 17 inches, so the boys must then start shovelling sticky moist clay. It seems to take for ever. They can see where they have been but progress is slow. Dad comments that they load a barrow, take a breather, move the barrow, take another breather. He is feeling like the 54 year old, rather lardy ex computer systems manager he was, rather than a ruffty tuffty construction worker he needs to turn into.

Tired Out
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Original Features

This being an old stone-built house, Mum and Dad have been keen to preserve any original features they could get away with, sneaking them past the Project Manager while he was not looking. I may have mentioned before the Dad campaign to preserve a stone wall as bare, painted, and not covered in modern insulation sheets and new plaster. There is also the dining room ceiling which started the week as a black stained or painted tongue and groove boarding over which had been nailed the pathetic three-ply sheeting which we took down last week, being badly riddled with wood worm. Mum is wondering whether something can be done with it but Sparks declares it too damaged by nail holes and thicker splodges of the stain (or possibly the tar from the range chimney). It has to go. It proves to be one of the easier things to pull down being in whole lengths of 16 feet or so of the board nailed, apparently, only at ends and centre, so a crow bar hooked over each 'plank' and pulled downwards, pings it away from the joists where it can be pulled off the remaining end and slung on the salvaged wood pile.

The stone wall, by contrast, spends the week condemned to be buried under insulation and plaster but then gets an end-of week reprieve. We have chipped all the old loose plaster off it and turn our attention to the other end of the house where the range appears to be hiding an inglenook fireplace with a possible nice lintel. The range has to go, but is known to weigh about 16 ton (rough, possibly exaggerated, estimate). The boys remove all the easy bits, lift-off doors, oven shelves, the top plate and so on, and then attack the screw-on bits with WD40 and the rubber hammer (and screw drivers, obviously). The chimney is disconnected and the carcase can then be pulled out from the wall. Aerial Keith has his eyes on the range for use as part of a kitchen BBQ, but Mum thinks it will look nice in the out-building which may be the original cottage. Measurements suggest it will slot neatly into the fireplace recess. However, as it comes free from the wall the back pretty much falls off with rust, the insulation wadding tumbling out. Mum is called to look, just to make sure she still doesn't want it anyway but, no, it is not a thing of beauty. It is slid out over planks across the threshold to the front of the house to await collection by Aerial Keith for what ever purpose he likes, scrap or BBQ.

With the range gone, a proper exploration of the supposed 'inglenook' can take place, chopping away the remaining plaster. This unfortunately proves to be a real hotch-potch of repairs and changes, infill with small stone, holes blocked off with modern breeze-blocks. Some courses of block or stone are canted over so that the thing looks like it is tumbling down in sections even though (we trust) it isn't. It is nothing we'd want to see bare and painted, preserved as an original feature, although there is some interesting criss-cross-scratched textured plaster high up on one joist. It seems we are not to get Dad's "wall" but then Sparks reconsiders the western wall. "I don't know", he says, "We could get away with this one.... it wouldn't lose THAT much heat... the walls are lovely and thick (2 foot or so)... as long as we scrape all the moss and vegetation off the outside...". Peace is restored. Dad is happy again.

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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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