First Construction

In a big sense the project turns a corner on Tuesday and Wednesday, when the first delivery of new building materials turns up, underlining the fact that we are moving from destruction to construction. This is the crushed stone sub-base material which will be compacted down with a 'whacker-plate" as the bottom layers of the new ground floors. Called '804' for some reason nobody seems clear on, this stuff also gives us a new character in our cast, 804-Pete, the delivery driver. He turns out to also own a mini-digger and volunteers to scrape the mud off the drive and get rid of the rubble and clay mountain for us for a reasonable payment. We loves 804-Pete!

The 804 turns up in the morning but we are not really ready for it, so it gets tipped in the drive. Sparks and Dad have several gruelling hours across a couple of days yet, shovelling clay and trying to get down to the magic 17 inches below original floor level. Neither of them are particularly young or fit, so it's taking its toll. They ache in places they didn't know they had by evening and are barely able to galvanise back into action the next morning. When it rains the clay gets sticky too, especially out on the waste pile so they are slithering around with clay clagging their boots, the wheel barrow wheels and the shovels. By popular concensus this is the worst job and these are the worst days. Cheating a bit, they actually tried to engage some of Sparks's "Polish lads" for a couple of days but the lads did not want to play.

By Wednesday afternoon though, they have broken the back of it and the kitchen and living room are down at the right level, along with part of the dining room. With floods of relief they turn from shovelling clay uphill, to shovelling the lovely slippery 804 down hill to form an 4 inch layer all across the house, ready to be whacker-plated down. Suddenly the shovels do not stick, the barrows move easily and their boots are walking on glistening crushed stone instead of clay. Joy! A corner has been turned. We are BUILDING instead of breaking and demolishing things! There are a few bits of wrecking still to do, but we have seen that first glimmer of light!

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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.

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Smokies

This week, with Dad having to be there for the Saturday as well as the Friday, to play host to the Poetic Plumber and his JCB, we have even less time than usual to blog, so some of these stories are going to be pared down to the minimum, but I will stick in plenty of photographs to make sure you are kept up to date with most of the goings on.

Like many other areas of these islands, the citizens of a specific area get tarred with the same brush of stereotypes, sometimes light heartedly and sometimes a bit maliciously. Liverpool folk become 'Scousers' after the working class food of the same name, Yorkshire folk become tykes, Lincolnshire people are either 'yellow bellies' or 'moonrakers' according to taste, the Irish are Paddies, the Welsh, Taffs and so on. Then you find that within these areas subgroups are named by other groups, so Dublinners are 'Dubs' and to a Dub, country folk are 'culchies'.

It seems that Roscommon folk are widely known as "Smokies". No relation to the Arbroath smoked herring of the same name; this comes from the perception that Roscommon people all smell of bonfire (or camp-fire) smoke because they are all of a Traveller persuasion.

Meanwhile, Tigin Beag may not actually be the original cottage. Aged neighbour, tractor driver "John-Deere Bob" (there! another new member of the cast!) drops by again to see how we are doing. He says the Tigin would have been an outhouse, with the chimney and fireplace being where they would boil up the mash for the pigs.The original cottage, he says, was single storey and roughly in the same position but extending further out west towards our gate and thatched roofed. Our Project Manager, Sparks has always said the walls here are of very varied ages, as if the house has been knocked about a few times in its life.

Smokie Deefer

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)

The Poetic Plumber

Our campaign to get onto mains services marches on. We've paid the money and signed all the forms for the ESB (Electricity Supply Board) and have been given a 12 week predicted lead time. Sparks thinks this is nonsense because they are assuming we are a brand new connection which would involve erecting telegraph poles and digging up roads. He thinks if he has a word in the right ear someone will realise that all the hardware is actually there and only a new fuse is needed plus an official turn-on. It might be far fewer than 12 weeks. Meanwhile though, we are buying a 3kW generator to see us through and to be there after the build in case of power cuts.

Broad band and telephone are on the way, but need power, obviously.

Water starts off a bit more complicated. The address has only ever had an "agricultural" feed, so we are liable for the €1600 (gad!) fee of a new connection. We must also engage a local approved contractor willing to connect us up out in the road and also insured to the tune of €6,400,000 as demanded by County Roscommon Water Services. We contact our Estate Agent (and now friend) John C who suggests a local man (Lough Glynn) whose name is the same as a poet in a famous Irish poem, so he becomes "The Poetic Plumber" in our cast of thousands. He's a brilliant bloke, silver hair, quiet spoken and with an accent to die for and both Mum and Dad fall in love with him. He knew our former owners (TK Min and TK Max) and went to school with the "Three Sisters". He knows our 'vendor', Anna L, quite well. He lives in a similar house to ours and is impressed by the hard work we have put in so far. He comes up to the house to see the job and even volunteers to come back after dark to see us in the caravan to stamp and sign the application, suggesting that we take the paperwork into Castlerea on the Friday morning to pay the fee and we could be connected as soon as next Saturday (he almost whispers the word, with the accent on the 'Tur'). He has a JCB, of course, and we are keen to engage him in also digging some french-drains for our roof run-off.

Progress!
Deefer

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
Deefs

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.

Deefs