Side projects

SOmetimes it's good to do something else, if only to get a sense of having completed something for a change. We were given this old bench over a year ago, and I reckoned it had been sitting in the yard looking decrepit for long enough. A trip to the DIY store to get paint, and then work began on Saturday evening.

First job, use an angle grinder with a sanding disk to get the layers of paint off the metalwork.

Rather than spending hours sanding old paint off the wood, I used an electric plane to shave it off, then a belt sander to give a smooth finish. A pretty quick job. The wood was generally ok, apart from one piece that was partially rotted, so I'll make a replacement for that another time.

Sunday meant painting and sanding, finishing this evening with a third and final coat for the wood, et voila, something to sit on when not in the mood for building anything.

It's final home is now outside the barn beside The Bauernhaus, so it'll get well used. Job done!

July...

This month has been a bloody scorcher, with yesterday getting to 37C in the shade. It's really uncomfortable outside, but blessedly cool, well, relatively-speaking, in the Bauernhaus. Nevertheless, much sweating ensued over the past week, as I  finally got back into getting stuff done, after near four weeks absence.

After getting a delivery of lots of Douglas-fir, I finally started on the under-construction for the bedroom floor and box room. Once the cabling is done here, and a sagging beam is jacked up, we'll lay OSB sheets as an under-floor, and work on the plastering can begin.

NE box room

The unfinished wall between box room and bedroom.

It's a bit dangerous working in the bedroom, as the battens between the oak beams are a bit rotted in placed, so it's easy to fall through if you step on the wrong place. At least it only happened to me once!

The first-floor bedroom

Bedroom

As well as that., over this weekend we began getting the, well, I'm not sure what they're called in English, but "Dosen" for the sockets and switches into the walls, as well as leading the cables into them. Makes the whole wiring a lot neater-looking already!

The kitchen, today.

Some network cables are also in, for the living room, running under the kitchen floor, which will all be sealed away, so I hope they work!

Kitchen

And we finally got rid of the piles of wood in the yard, thanks to our friend's big trailer, and a tetris-like method of stacking.

 In the meantime, the garden has been completely neglected, although I did have to trim an 80m long hedge as it was beginning to overgrow the access road behind the house. I know I am going to hate this hedge... We plan on getting a loan of some sheep next week to take the grass down under the fruit trees, while the bigger, open part of the field, behind the barn, is already well handled by three horses that pop in now and again.

But more importantly, our local inn, Gasthaus zur Linde, has reopened after a two-year closure and complete renovation. It now has guest rooms, which I reckon had not been used in over half a century, as well as a large, comfortable Biergarten, a new function room in the former barn, and good steaks. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the beer choices, but on hot days like these, a cold Bitburger helps clear the dust.

Catching up

The last six weeks have been a bit hectic, what with travel for work and helping out finishing work on the local inn. so it's only in the past week-and-a-half that work has resumed on the Bauernhaus. More of that anon, as since the last post a few things have gotten done.

Most of the cabling has been done for the first floor and part of the second floor, making for spaghetti-like scenes in the kitchen. Everything on the first floor comes together here, with the box for he trip switches on the other side of the wall. I probably didn't need all that sheathing in the wall itself, but no harm. It's quite fun doing the wiring, which exercises the brain more than the body, trying to plan where sockets, switches and lights should be, and how to best hide cables in walls where we will leave the timbers exposed. Quite a lot of work, which will never be seen again, but a big step towards making the house livable, eventually.

The trip-switch box is neatly in with a frame, so we can put a wooden door over it instead on the standard, ugly metal thing.

Likewise, I've built casings around a couple of the heating manifolds, just to keep it neat inside. Below is the manifold for the first florr kitchen and bathroom.

And upstairs, the beginning of cabinets for one of the manifolds and a comms cabinet (where the network patch panel, routers and phone outlets will end up).

 The beginnings of sills on the second floor have begun (nice and deep), but overall, lots of small details that needed taking care of.

With all the floors now out, we ended up with quite a pile of wood littering the yard in front of the house. Some people said we should chop it up for firewood, but frankly, I'd better things to be doing! :|

That brings us up to early June, so stay tuned for another exciting post for this month (if you can bear the excitement :))

Underfloor construction and more stone walls

Been quite a busy week, putting in quite a few after-work hours as I started the underfloor construction in one of the second floor bedrooms. I really should have been doing this for the first floor rooms, our main living level, but I've ordered spruce timber for that level, to better withstand the slight dampness we might get from the cellars, so that'll have to wait.

I have to admit, it took a lot longer than expected. Getting the 4x6cm laths, onto which floorboards will eventually rest, perfectly level as they span over 6 or more totally uneven oak beams, meant a lot of planing of shims, checking levels, adjusting, ad nauseum. I've set them at 400mm centres, which should be fine for 20mm hardwood boards, and set them as low as I possibly could, to maximise the already low room height. As a result, we'll have a step at each end of the room, as the main beams rise at each end. One of these steps will be incorporated into a wardrobe, and the other end will be a small sub-level, only 5cm higher, within the room. This will probably be a recurring feature throughout the house, at least where unavoidable.

The back step, later to be hidden in wardrobe.

Still have the other end to do...

The previous week, I got a bit further with the first floor wiring and marking out sockets for the kitchen, as well as taking out the last floorboards (well, almost last) in the main bedroom, so we can plan the level of the new floor. No nasty rotten beam surprises, but the battens between the beams have rotted out in places, giving us a nice shortcut into the cellar. We're now considering putting a laundry shaft in the bedroom, so some inspiration from deathtraps in the floor.

And while I've been doing all this easy work, my wife has been busy in the cellars, knocking off old clay and lime plaster off the limestone walls.

Instead of plastering these walls, the idea is to leave them natural, and re-point the blocks, after first giving them a good clean with a wire brush on an angle grinder.. They are really held together with clay, instead of mortar, and damp rises from the subsoil under the house pretty easily. The idea is that leaving them natural and open will allow them to breath better, and besides, plaster and paint would look pretty shoddy after a while in those damp conditions.

We know this, because in the entrance hall, where one wall was plastered and wallpapered, the wallpaper was clearly damp around the base of the wall. We decided to remove this plaster, which turned out to be about 50mm thick, and backed with a plastic damp-proof membrane. I reckon it is because of this, dampness climbed higher, contributing to the rotten beam in the living room, which rests directly on this wall.

She removed all of that this past week, revealing not just the fairly uneven stone wall, but another sandstone frame around the doorway leading to cellar one.

Our "new" sandstone door frame

Not the prettiest, but it'll clean up.

I think with some nice ambient lighting, we could have a very nice entrance hall. Well, once we do something with the ugly 1960s floor and stairs and, of course, do all the horribly dusty work of cleaning them down properly, not to mention the days it will take to re-point everything... It'll be worth it!

More laths and beginning of wiring.

While waiting for something more constructive to do (Hah!), last week I moved up to the second floor and began putting up the stud partition walls in the bathroom, filling the big holes left from when we pushed over a brick wall sometime last year. Or maybe it was the year before. With the main studs and noggins in, it was a bit of a challenge getting laths in to form a vertical surface, as the old beams here are fairly uneven. The walls here have to continue up one more level, as we're leaving the bathroom open, so it is 1.5 stories high, the most headroom in the house.

Almost perfectly vertical laths. Mind the gap though!

With the beginnings of the fourth wall begun (on the right in the photo below), it feels more like a proper room, but that stairs has to move.

Doesn't look like a bathroom, but it does say WC on the wall.

I still have to figure out the best way to continue the installation shaft up through the bathroom, which will affect the placement of the toilet, but that will be a lot easier once I've inserted a new beam to close the gaping hole in the floor.

Top of the installation shaft, looking down into kitchen.

Similarly, on the level below, I finally blocked up the old doorway into what is now the first floor bathroom. I used autoclaved aerated concrete blocks (Gasbeton Steine in local parlance), also called Ytong blocks, which are light and easy to cut with a saw, which is just as well as it had to be built around the struts supporting the WC cistern.

Shortcut closed off :(

Toilet cistern now looks like a proper corner toilet.

This is a job I'd put off for too long, but the main reason that got me doing it was to get the blocks out of the living room for the next major undertaking: the wiring.

I've never wired a house before, but our friend Sace, who is a master electrician, gave me simple instructions, so I can break it down into stages. The first stage is to get the basic wiring for each room done, leading cables from a central distribution point in each room to where sockets or lights will be, forming chains between them if needed. It's light, enjoyable work, with the hardest thing deciding how to best run cables so they are hidden. Of course, there are standards to follow in terms of the height of sockets from the floor, heights of switches etc, but once you have a list, it's easy (and as an ex-surveyor, it's nice to have exact measurements to work off).

We need lots of sockets where the telly will end up.

Beams will be visible, so cables have to go through them

The cables that run under the floor are sheathed in PEHD corrugated pipes for protection, and the cables for the lights will run under the floor above (or above the ceiling, depending on your perspective), to avoid having to drill through too many beams. It's all great fun, and the benefit is I'll know where every single cable is, which is handy when installing floors and other stuff later.

To keep the pace, I have to remove the only remaining floorboards on this level, in our bedroom. I'd left this as a kind of workshop, but it has to go, so i need to find somewhere solid to store tools and materials until a temporary floor is put in.

The pipes, part 2

A small photo update, as since the last post my camera, which had been on its last legs, finally died due to dust inhalation. Now for some all improved photos of the rest of the work the lads did on the main plumbing.

Cellar 4 is looking more like a technical room now. Plenty of pipes, the pump unit for the rainwater cistern, pressure reducer and filter all in.

The shaft is rather full now, but very tidy. This has all the pipes for the cold and hot water supply, including a circulation circuit so hot water is instantly available when a tap is turned on (a water saving effort), the main heating circuit and the downpipe, of course.

On the first floor (or 2nd, if you're American), the pipes exit the shaft and run to a box on the other side of the wall where the water supply for this floor is distributed from and can be isolated. This is an important photo, as it'll be used to ensure we don't drill into anything once the kitchen is going in!

From the conrol box, we have loops running to other distribution points for the heating, with pipes running under the wall into the living room...

... and into the distributor for the wall heating there. Quite pleased with the work Enver and Co did!

Since then, we've taken a bit of a break from heavier work, but we've done some cleaning down of the walls in the cellar/entrance hall to expose the limestone walls there. These will be completely cleaned and repointed, so they are left natural.

And I finally began closing the hole in the living room ceiling that has been open for about a year. Laths in ready for some plasterboard. Did the same in the kitchen and 1st floor bathroom, although there's still a large hole in the kitchen ceiling, as I need to set a new beam in.

And we've now got new plans for the ugly 1960s stairs...

The pipes, the pipes are calling

Pretty hectic week last week. The Bakan Brothers, Sace and Enver, popped in last weekend to look at what needed to be done for the sanitation and heating installation, then announced they'd start on Monday. Well, no time like the present! I had wanted to be at hand to do the dirty work, in an attempt to keep down costs, so thanks to a very understanding boss, I took a half day every day and worked on the house from lunch till pretty late in the night. But brilliant progress from Enver and Edgar in a week.

(note: quality of photos may not be the best, as our camera has completely died from dust inhalation)

Cellar 4 has been transformed into a wonder of waterworks, and this is just the start. The mains water pipe has been directed from the other side of the house, and from here everything will be controlled. The core installation is now finished, including the pump for the rainwater cistern so we can pump out for the garden.

The main waste pipe is in, running from the top of the house to he bottom, so I had to put the skates on and finally build part of the shaft, which was till now an open hole through three floors. This also has the side effect of closing off the remaining "shortcut" from the kitchen to the bedroom, making the kitchen feel more like a proper room. Makes for a nice, neat installation too!

Bottom of the shaft.

One level up, with two sides built.

The other side of the shaft, in the corner of the kitchen.

They got the guts of the first floor bathroom plumbing in already, so the position of the shower, WC and sink are now fixed. We've plenty of play in floor height to make the shower a walk-in one, so that should make the small room feel a bit more open than having something you have to step into. A quick underconstruction build the other night to set the levels for the shower mixer battery.

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We've planned where all the heating distribution manifolds are going (basically ranks of valves to control the wall heating system), so some dirty angle-grinding was done to cut channels in the kitchen sub-floor, under walls etc, so there's plenty of room to accommodate them. Three manifolds per floor should be enough.

The 2nd floor (main) bathroom is a bit problematic pip-wise. We've very little clearance in the floor for burying pipes, and there are oddly-constructed parts of the floor that I'd like to change to accommodate the pipes, but can't figure out a decent way to do it. Hiding them behind dry construction walls might not be an option, as we'd lose too much space, and no wall runs at 90 degrees to another, so gaps quickly narrow over the length of a wall. But at least the pipe is in for the shower drainage, dropping straight into the kitchen below and behind the wall framework there, which is great, as long as I don't put a screw through it later. And, of course, the main waste pipe is up at that level, so we know where the WC is going (because somebody wrote it on the wall).

So, a good week, with lots of pressure to keep the pace going. And as a bonus, Sace brought his chainsaw over and cut out the last beam that was blocking the new hallway to the bedroom. Now we no longer have to duck

This was the blocker

Now a clear run through (from the other side)