September 21st

Snake in Chimney

Today fitted the flue liner in the old chimney. This was only £18 per metre for a double layer stainless steel flexible liner (904/316 stainless). The insulation sleeves to wrap around it were £19 per metre and were made from rockwool within a light foil jacket.... work that one out?

It needed 4 people to fit it. 3 inside pushing the flue up and wrapping the insulation sleeves as it went and another one on top pulling the rope attached to the nose cone.

The suspending cowl was ace. 

One worm drive clip to attach the flue to the cowl and another to fix the cowl to the pot.

The register plate holds the 'stove pipe to flue connector' in place. 

 All finished off with an oak beam.

All we need now is the wood burner. Tricky decision as there are now loads to choose from. £1100 for the 'bees knees' ultra-efficient from Clearview with which we can duct the combustion air directly from outside... or the £299 cheap China import cast iron stove. You can buy a lot of logs for the price difference!

September 19th

 Wildlife

I once saw a Goshawk remarkably close at New Fancy - I wouldn't have known what it was if there hadn't been a 'twitcher' on hand to photograph and later point out the differences between it and buzzards on his amazing zoom-lensed camera. He'd been there for hours without seeing one and one miraculously appeared within minutes of me arriving. 

We see a lot of deer, particularly when out running or biking on the the more remote trails. We get a lot of visits from deer in the garden too - one just after Joc had planted out some new lettuce seedlings. We now have a deer proof veggie patch! Our new apple trees have been virtually nibbled to death and one night I startled a huge stag on the driveway as I was locking up for the night, but so far have only managed to get a fox and badger on the infra red webcam.

We've seen little of  the much maligned boar - mostly at twilight or night time. You do see a lot evidence of them though - generally in the form of grass verges that have been ploughed up by their strong snouts when looking for tasty morsals underneath.

Today however, we spotted a cheeky group of 6 in broad daylight at around 12 noon near the busy cycle centre.

They weren't the least bit nervous of us or the cars on the road. 

Apparently people insist on feeding them and petting them which is making them bolder.

I think they serve bacon butties in the cafe.

September 19th

Tanking.

The old walls of the original cottage (lounge and one wall of kit/diner) are rubble filled traditionally built stone walls around 450mm thick. The mortar has the consistency and stability of mud - don't think much lime went into it. These walls were built on larger foundation stones directly onto the sandy soil. Moisture rises up from the ground and gets into the stone walls - this will create damp patches in any plaster we put on the them. If the stones were larger and more even, we could perhaps have used silicone injection damp prevention but they are too small for this and the wall contains too many voids.

Our way round this is to use a membrane that you attach to the walls. This will have vertical timber battens laid over the top and then plasterboarded. Now... any moisture in the stone may condense on the membrane and run down to the ground. This water has to go somewhere or it'll build up and eventualy create pools of water on the floor. Therefore, we've placed drains that run along each of the walls which lead to outside. Any condensates we get will hopefully simply drain away. 

The membrane is fixed to the wall using 10mm plugs that have integral sticky rubber washers - these prevent water from behind the membrane coming through the hole you've made in it. The plugs have holes in them that later allow you to screw battens to the wall.

The theory of al this is fairly simple but in practice it's quite fiddly. All the plugs need to be in line at 600mm intervals. Finding stones that will take a 10mm hole is tricky. We've also got a lot of openings and several bits of wall that stick out into the room and a fireplace to tank around, which makes for a lot of folding and taping.

Snowdonia

Wednesday/Thursday 5/6 September.

Yes I know... these photos are from last week and so the blog chronology is wrong...

Last week was the 2nd week after Joc's 5th session of chemo and she was feeling quite perky so we zoomed up to Snowdonia as the forecast was reasonable. We stayed on one of the campsites near Ogwen quite close to Tryfan.

Great sunset and clear night.  Tryfan ridge on bottom left here.

The scrambling on Tryfan is great.
Few scrambles in the UK start near the road and just keep on going to the summit. Magic!

The 'canon' is one major landmark on the way up.

That night we had barbecued chicken... but not this one, who took a sinister interest in the cooking.

Next day we headed up Crib Goch for the 100th time (maybe a slight exaggeration). Up the Pyg, down the Miners. Weather in valley good, not so good on the summit. Pic here is view of the Cromlech from the Pyg. Looks a party is just starting on Sabre Cut.

See small vid of Joc on parts Crib Goch here

http://youtu.be/FVj8ME-Q1vA

10th September

More tedious and time consuming remedial work on the old part of the cottage.

Here, I've levelled wood around the perimeter of the lounge. The screeding board will run across this when  the concrete base is poured. Later, this wood will come out and the drains at the bottom of the tanking material will go in here. Sand blinding is compacted to protect the dpm under the concrete.

In this photo the concrete has been poured. I've also hacked off all the old plaster on the walls - although it created several tons of rubble (which conveniently buily up the level of the patio) it has produced a fairly uniform wall base on which to lay the tanking membrane... ordered this today - Oldroyd XS.
On the floor will now go 75mm insulation and a 75 screed with water pipe under floor heating in.

Close up of the condensate drain that runs around the room's perimeter. There are one or two access points should it need to be rodded ant any point.

Spent a day or so drilling the joists in the lounge ceiling to create lateral wall restraints. These would you believe are meant to hold the wall up, not to stabilise the floor. Steels rods are epoxyed into the good stones in the wall (not many of those).

Meanwhile Joc has been in her element creating steps to the garden from the patio area. Some of the windows have been fitted too. The final door and two windows are due in tomorrow.

Today someone from Severn Trent came to inspect the water pipe we'd already put from the kitchen to the boundary. He wasn't happy that he couldn't tell what depth it had been laid at (despite showing him some photos), and also that it was too close to a drain in the road... so I spent much of the day digging a hole to the pipe (900mm), placing a peep hole in the form of an 800mm length of soil pipe and moving the water pipe to one metre from the drain. Lots of back breaking digging! A labour of love huh?

August 23rd

Bodge, bodge, bodge. That's all I seem to be doing at the moment.

I suppose it was always going to be like this when we came round to getting the old part of the house in order. In the last few days we've been trying to get the window openings ready to take the new windows, the floor ready in the lounge for pouring concrete and the fireplace safe: it and the wall above were very close to collapse - the end pier of the fireplace literally fell out. After building new walls inside the fireplace, drilling and epoxying steel rods to support the pier, casting a concrete back and sourcing some oak for the lintel, we now feel it's a solid as it's going to get.

The underground pipe will supply air directly from outside to the woodburner. Geting the combustion air directly into the stove will help keep drafts at bay. 

Shuttering around the window opening and getting concrete inside was a tedious and time consuming job, but at least now the window will fit.

Both the air source for the wood burner and the soil pipe for the bathroom exit under the old doorway. This doorway will be 'bricked up' and so we had to use pre-stressed lintels above the pipes and cast in a concrete platform.

All the walls in the lounge will need to be 'tanked' - a dimpled plastic sheet is laid up the wall to about 2m and this is turned into a drainage channel at the base of the wall so as to collect any condensates. This complcates hugely the concrete slab we plan to pour next Wednesday, chiefly because we need to create the channel within the slab and it needs to be between the wall and where the dpm  rises from under the concrete. Said channel needs to be on a suitable gradient and then discharge condensates outside through a new hole in the wall. Fun huh?

All this 'faffing' and 'bodging' is a far cry from when we built the extension - everything seemed so 'pure' and 'perfect' back then. Me, I'm going to build a house from scratch again next time.

August 15th

Now the new floor is in above the lounge....

 .... we've been getting the ground floor sorted. Soil pipe for bathroom needs to go under here. Dave was visiting and got roped into some demolition (think he even enjoyed it). We ripped out the old suspended floor and hired a concrete breaker to get the old kitchen floor up. Dave atacked the wall to make a doorway between the lounge and extension (kitchen/diner)

 Half way there

He's through! 

 Joc attacks the dividing wall foundations

 Ddddrrrrrillllllinnnnggggg.

Soil pipe bedded in the protective pea gravel

 The 'new' way into the kitchen/diner

Floor all level, waiting for the sand, dpm and concrete

August 10th

Went to the Lakes for a few days to make the most of the weather. Margaret, Kevin, Dil and John came too.
Joc was going well and we visited some old BG landmarks.

An afternoon stroll up to Bleaberry Fell from the campsite - Castlrigg Farm Campsite (aka 'The Boys' site)

Halls Fell Ridge on the way up Blencathra

 We came down Doddick Fell

 Cycling around Thirlmere

 And in the afternoon a stroll up to Skiddaw. Looking across to Mungrisdale Common  - the way up Blencathra on the BG round.

The mandatory BBQ

 August 2nd

Dil and John took the rotten old floor down. Some of the joists had sound bearing in the wall... but most didn't. No wonder it was so springy! 

Then had the mates round (Mike, JD and Marg) to help take the rest of the wall down. This used to be an exterior wall and lots of useful stone was set aside for use in the garden later. It's good to finally see the size that the new lounge will be.

Unfortunately, now everything is clear, the extent of the rot in the lintels above the window and door was apparent, so spent 3 days engineering supports for the stone walls above and then hacking them out. Drilled some 12mm holes all the way through the wall and pushed through some steel needles to support the stone. Used acrow props and some timber to hold all the needles in place.  Now it's finished it all feels a bit safer!

Finding a good bearing for the lintels has been tricky - you never can find a well bedded stone. Had to simply build a layer of concrete bricks as a base on top of mud and loose stone.

This is before placing the the new interior lintel. Here an inner lintel holds up the rubble fill of the stone wall

July 27th

 Great forecast for Dartmoor

... and Joc was feeling better in her second week after the first chemo session... so we went down for a few days to make the most of it. Camped at the back of the Fox and Hounds (Shortacombe, near Okehampton)

 While Joc went with Dil and John for a walk, I ran part of the route we did on OMM 2010.

 

  Sean was there

 BBQ everynight.

  And some good sunsets