Jerry's renovation blog

[willedoo]

It's also hard to figure out why schools put so much emphasis on trying to make centimetres the standard base of measurement. The building industry and most of the real world work in millimetres and metres. Even mentioning centimetres would be enough to get you thrown off a building site and stoned on the way out. I've encountered kids who try to express a measurement in centimetres and fractions of centimetres and they just confuse themselves. This is the carp they're being taught at school. The problem is educators and their bureaucrats who have never used a saw or swung a hammer in their life. Centimetres should be banned.  If you throw centimetres into the mix, you might as well have stuck with yards, feet, inches, quarters, eights, and sixteenths. [end of tape measure rant...]

[willedoo]

I thought this might interest Jerry; it's my pet brick. Not old by U.K. standards, but a chimney brick from my great grandfather's house built in 1896. The house is timber and originally had three brick fireplaces, but now only two as the fireplace and chimney this brick belongs to was dismantled. It was a kitchen fireplace for cooking and was pulled down back in the old days when they replaced it with a wood stove.

 

You can see in the photo, every brick has two diagonally opposed thumb imprints on the frog side. The only reason I can think for that is that the bricks were pushed out of a mould with the thumbs while the brick was still soft before going into the kiln. The front side in the photo is the original face side as you can see remnants of the old whitewash coating. It's too young to be a convict brick, but I don't know whether they were made in Australia or came out from the U.K as ballast on a clipper. They're heavy bricks, 3.3 kg..

 

[facthunter]

 Renovating houses can be a heartbreaking thing and often pushing it over would have been the best idea.. At 40 years the plumbing, wiring and some rot , white ants etc will be a problem requiring some restructuring... IF a brikwall was in bad shape I'd remove the brick where it's veneer and use  modern cladding and carefully insulate it at the same time.  For a while now brick areas have had to have a JOINT put in the walls to allow for movement. In Clay soils this can be a large figure. Drainage and tree roots have to be dealt with.  My eldest built a house in snow country where the whole house was on a galvanised  steel frame with every peer  having an adjustable mount point to level it at any time necessary Nev

[old man emu]

14 hours ago, willedoo said:

Centimetres should be banned.

I'm with you on that, with the proviso that sometimes they are OK, such as the dimensions of the human body. A 42 cm waist sounds so much thinner than a 420 mm one!

 

 

[spacesailor]

Not as good as !,

4.2dm

spacesailor

[old man emu]

2 minutes ago, spacesailor said:

Not as good as !,

4.2dm

spacesailor

We all know that you are anorexic.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Fascinating story about the brick.. and the thumbprints.. Thank's Willie.

 

I quite like historical homes - even some of those old weatherboards in tiny regional  towns have a story to tell. But i have to say I am over renos and this one is the biggest we have tried.

 

Once it is done, it should be great, but it feels like an eon away.

 

Long story about the tree that fell on it (before we purchased it) will be incoming.

 

[old man emu]

4 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

Long story about the tree that fell on it (before we purchased it) will be incoming.

Don't leaf out any of the gory details!

[Marty_d]

We'll bough our heads and wait for him to get to the root of it.  Won't take long, I woodn't have thought.

[facthunter]

Old bricks and dog$#!T That's most of Europe.   Nev

[facthunter]

  It's easy to set up a brickworks. they were everywhere and not a great shortage of claY  Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

Bit of an update. The scaffolding has been up for two weeks, and the builder turned up last week. The pointing at the back of one of the chimneys was flaking away, so that has been done. Some guttering was rusted as, so the cast iron was replaced with some very thick polymer guttering that looks like cast iron. Some backing plates had disappeared allowing water to run down behind the guttering and into the eaves - that has been replaced. He worked for about 2 days and hasn't been seen since!

And… of course..  it is raining!!!! At least the pubs open for Sunday lunch today.

Had the plumber in.. as we decided to source our won rads (radiators).. saved a bundle (like £7K).  And we decided to redo the boiler room And a pressure test to see if the existing piping will work. That is going to sting me £20K (thanks, Brexit!!!). Expect the rest of the bill to come to £20K regardless.

Had a sparky in to quote replacing the old ceramic fuse boxes with new switch boxes and to run ethernet through the house. Have not heard back yet.

 

Here are some photos.

 

First, the sourced rads; yep - all 20 of them, and we need about three more:

 

 

The scaffolding

 

You will have to click on the picture to enlarge it..  You can see some of the chimney pointing crumbling in the red circle. To the left are ridge tiles we are trying to source .. looks a bit like a kid's missing teeth. The circle to the left of the scaffolding was a missing edge of the guttering, causing the water to run into the toilet upstairs, also notice the black run down on the corner of the house under iut as well as the circled bit in the middle of the scaffolding - that is water damage. The rid circle to the right is the mouldy downpipe - the works of the lot, bit all of them had soil (I would say roitted leaves) built up for years. They have been flushed down.

 

The red circle above the white wall is a new lead roof - put in not long after we moved in as that was a waterfall on the inside when it rained.. |That white curved bay is the private rector's chapel - now a study (under renovation).

 

The bottom left is the rusted guttering - of which a close up is here:

 

This is a photo looking up to the next bit that needs repairs - a gutter has come away from the wall. The scaffolding has to move a bit:

 

And finally - for this section of the wall, there is a dodgy facila board ciricled to the right. The wood has apparenlty rotted and collapsed..  but I think squirrels have gnawed at it. The tree they use to get to it is being felled:

 

 

 

The study/chapel is in renovation mode, but partner and I can't agree on the final fitout - she will undoubtedly win:

 

 

And, today, I got bored with working on the house, so I decided to put together a home gym in the basement. The window to the right is about 2 - 3 feet underground:

The ceiling plaster is so9 flakey that when I was vacuuming cobwebs, flakes of skimmed plaster were falling off. There is another job to do! Thge circle to the left is a lagged waterpipe, we want to recess into the wall, or at least bx in; to the right is where there was a decent water leak - all fixed now.. apparenlty.

 

And finally, something to brighten up my day:

 

A mate has formed a sling syndicate with three others and they are building it together. He is the one on the right, supervising 😉

 

Monday is a public holiday - Tuesday - putting in an application for bridging to get this thing done ASAP!

 

(Site won't let me remove this picture for some reason)

Edited August 27, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

I hope that you can get the guttering finished before winter. You don't want to be adding more water to the problem. 

 

I'm going to do some work on the gutters and rainwater harvesting this week. Got to replace rusted gutters and put in some non-existing. As I write this I ma wondering if I should go teh whole hog and replace the old Galv gutters with PVC.

[facthunter]

I Have 2 sibling plumbers who still use zinc anneal. Gutters are a PITA ,collect leaves and are a fire hazard.. Underground use the required Plastic and it must be sealed well to keep the grass and tree roots out.  Nev

[onetrack]

The last time I did all the house guttering, around 20-odd years ago, I acquired the right gutter profile in steel, to match the age of the house - and went the whole hog, soldering all the joins.

 

It's still going quite well, but a few rusty spots are appearing in the bottoms of the gutters here and there. But what I've since found, is that the manufacturers have altered their coating to include a lot more aluminium today, and you can't solder the stuff any more.

 

So any repairs from now on are going to have to be pop-rivetted and sealed with sealant. I notice that's the way they're all done today, anyway. The problem is, you need to use stainless pop-rivets or the rivets rust out long before the guttering does.

 

I don't know how PVC guttering compares to steel guttering, it used to be more expensive, but perhaps with the cost of steel today, PVC guttering is comparable in price. I know they used to guarantee the PVC guttering for a long period of time, not sure if that's still the case.

[facthunter]

It would have to be treated for UV protection ( the plastic). Zinc alume is pretty competitive. Rivet and seal the joint with silastic. Down pipes can be the "right" plastic it that's what you like. Won't last like the cast iron ones of old where every corner had a plate with  3 bolts holding it on.  You could climb the wall holding onto those. Nev

[old man emu]

Guttering at Bunnings - 5 metre lengths

PVC $73.40

ColorBond $15/lineal metre (5 metres $75.00)

Zinc 6 metres  $52.00

[old man emu]

6 minutes ago, facthunter said:

You could climb the wall holding onto those.

Are you a cat-burglar person?

[facthunter]

No ,I have 2 dogs now.  Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

The cheap plastic guttering is about £8 per 4 metres, and the good stuff is about £20 per 4 metres, including VAT (GST). We are  getting the better stuff and it is guaranteed for 25 years. The bulk of the cost, however, is the scaffolding. I will never buy a house where ladders aren't a vialble option for roof maintenance again!

 

There's actually not that much work to do - max a week - but builders are run off their feet since most of the Eastern European ones fled back to Europe after Brexit.

 

Apparently, a relatively well known French writer lived in the property for some time in the 50's.. and his son, who apparently spent most of his childhood growing up here is visiting today. He is staying in the pub (silly man didn't try AirBnB - he could have stayed with us).

 

The garden is a mess as the mower broke down and since it has been fixed, we have had nothing but rain. Yes, you can cut wet grass, but on the ride on I have, it is a bugger as the grass clogs up the chute...  It looked promsiing this morning, but has clouded over again. This summer has been the sterotypical English summer - there wasn't one! Need to look on the bright-side though - it wasn't Europe, Canada, or Southern US with the wildfires!

 

Edited August 28, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[onetrack]

Jerry, wouldn't a boomlift/manlift/cherry picker be a suitable option to all the scaffolding? They're used a lot here for repair work - although scaffolding is still installed for major construction work, such as a new building or major additions.

[old man emu]

I'm doing some work on the gutters today. Gunna stand on some milk crates. 

[Jerry_Atrick]

Well, thankfully the builder managed to get most of the guttering done on the east flank wall.. Blimey, it pi55ed down today - lots of local road flooding (and I cannot believe how those, in a rural area with 4x4s couldn't negotiate what was not much bigger than an average puddle that I got my mini countryman (which is only part time 4x4 auto-sensing) through. My daughter was with me for these road excursions and she saw an impatient part of me when complete nongs had no idea what they were doing (and, to be honest, spoiling my fun). I kid you not, blokes in their big Hi-Luxes, Amaroks, and Rangers flatfly refused to pass.. I got out and asked one bloke if he wanted me to take it across what was no more than about 6 inches deep, still water.  He politely declined, so I walked back to the mini and drove around him., and to prove a point, went through the deepest bit. Even my daughter was bemused at their lack of ability. (I didn't take the XC90, which is not a particularly capable 4x4, as there is eitehr a rear wheel bearing, or as I fear, a diff whine that has started).

 

Anyway, I digress. The deluge today did test the new guttering and it held up well.. only to expose another problem - blocked drains. Well, largely blocked drains. With the trickles we have had lately, the drains haven't been tested much anyway, but previouslly, as the water never really flowed through the guttering to the downpipes in full, the drains hadn't really been tested. Well, today they did, and here's the results:

 

[old man emu]

You need a couple of First Flush Diverters. 

 

Do you want me to send you the details?

[Bruce Tuncks]

OME, your Renault 750 renovation car was just like my first...  It was truly the most awful design of car ever. I remember that the final drive to the rear wheels was through a housing which was fixed to the gearbox with 2 horizontal needle-rollers, only a few inches apart. So any wear here manifested itself as fore and aft movement of the rear wheels. Of course, the wear on each side was not the same, and the result was sideways movement of the car rear on every gear-change.

Oh, how I longed for  a vw final drive! I actually saw, at a wreckers, a Renault 750 with an attempt at doing this. Trailing arms had been fixed to the body near the rear wheels.

I got $2 from a wrecker for that Renault.

 He complained a lot about how much it was, and I bought a mk1  Zephyr  for $80. This was too much money as the zephyr was rusted out. I remember that the windscreen wipers were pneumatic and they only worked when you were slowing down or going downhill.