Rail Run #63: from Widney Manor

Saturday morning I had some expensive appliances for the new kitchen being delivered and Jax had an appointment in Olton and had already left for a rail connection when the delivery arrived. I shed myself of that duty and dashed off to the tram with about 3 minutes to spare to make the rail connection with her. But, we met at the Hawthorns and headed out for our Saturday adventures together.

I stayed on the train after she departed and hopped off at Widney Manor then, using the sun and my watch to poor effect, ploughed a serpentine path for 45 minutes then, pulling out my trusty old compass, managed to find my way home albeit through the less-than-optimal-for-running Sparkbrook markets.

So, there it is. A long run instead of working on finishing the house. But, tomorrow is set aside for touching up. the trim and replacing skirting boards. The stuff for installing the extractor hood, induction hob and fan assisted oven, and the dishwasher are ready to pick up on Monday for next weekend. It will take two weeks to get to the south wall tiling in the kitchen but the cabinetry won’t come till the end of August giving us some time to put in the under floor heat piping and retiling the room (we’re turning the tiles 45 degrees to make a diamond pattern but using the originals and the ones we pulled from the dining room and veranda area.

The run was tiring but I kept a decent marathon pace. A thirty miler looms but it will be MUCH slower and have better nutrition.

Refinishing the wood floors

The lead photo, above, shows the prep of the wood floors ahead of finally (after nearly 3 years) tackling their refinishing. What you see there is coarse (passing through 3mm mesh) sawdust that is raked and compacted into the spacing between the original boards. Then, PVA glue diluted with water (3 H2O : 1 PVA by volume) is poured over the top and allowed to penetrate before the excess is wiped up. Then, very fine sawdust is used to make an even filler atop the coarse layer with more 3:1 glue coverage.

Sanding was essential and a massive struggle. Fighting the belt sander for 5 hours solid in two rooms was the best core- and upper-body workout I’ve had in years. All the shit we had in both rooms had to find temporary homes in the remaining spaces and we wound up living in the nearly finished dining room area:

These turned out really good, I think. The colour is called medium oak but the third coat is just clear due to the colour already getting ‘right’ after two passes:

Finally, as Jackie says, we are wresting a little order from the chaos this refurb has developed into. Final sawdust filling of the landing and the bedroom is planned for tomorrow with the last of the stain and seal going down next weekend but if it turns out half as good as these did then we will be very pleased, indeed.

Dining room floors (redo)

We were in a hurry, we didn’t know what we were doing, we ran out of materials … all these things resulted in an undulating surface to our dining room and veranda on which we could set any furniture without significant shimming. To be fair, every visitor complemented the floor and made excuses for us like “these old floors are going to be uneven, aren’t they?” The house may be 115 years old but the floor was only 1½ when we started re-levelling it on Good Friday.

To mark the grade, I put down screws in the low places to a height of the highest part of the poorly poured floor. We took up the tiles on the high spots first and then poured the new limecrete over the remaining bits levelling to either the screwheads or the already-high spots.

It is the nature of NHL (natural hydraulic lime) that the binding is slow and goes in two steps: first the development of a water to lime crystal lattice for several days followed by a slow carbonation period of several weeks. To avoid the original problems, we diligently kept the pour floating under water for a few days (one of the reasons we demobbed to Dudley over the Easter weekend).

We made our own tile adhesive — so we would have something breathe-able between the new and old screeds, also breathe-able — out of 1 part NHL to 3 parts sharp sand with a bit of polymer additive to improve flexibility and workability.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

By mid-May we had all the limestone laid but still hadn’t chosen the tiles for the entrances. (There were issues with the door heights that required either excavation to make room for the thicker limestone or a choice of a much thinner encaustic tile.)

What we eventually came up with — only finishing at the end of May — was a nice pattern that picks up the tan of the limestone and the blues in the living room . . . and may help us decide what to do, eventually, with the kitchen:

Easter Closure

The Uni closes for the Easter Bank Holidays (Good Friday and the Monday following) then stays closed until the next Thursday. Jackie took the two extra days off, as well.

The last thing I worked on Thursday was this dual linear ion trap in an LTQ-Orbi

House refurb took the lions share of our wee holiday, of course. Good Friday involved breaking and removing some of the dining room tiles down to grade for the major relevelling project that continues through the next two weekends. We had a nice rabbit stew (traditional Easter meals of bunnies, chicks, and ducks started at that point) and shifted everything from the dining room and veranda into other locations in the house.

Mourning becomes…

We booked a room in Dudley overnight while the initial cure of the limecrete levelling layer proceeded then finished the last section (and corrected another low spot) Easter morning. Ridiculously tired at that point, I wrote off the long run for this week.

Our room in Dudley used to be a law office

Replacements for the double glazing that had breached in the last year or so arrived Tuesday and we fitted those as well. Then, we had the first barbecue of the year (burgers) and while the coals were still hot I threw on some chicken pieces. This was a big mistake.

Couldn’t find a plaque, near the Dudley bus station

It is now the Friday after Good Friday and I am on my second day of shitting my pants due to the bacterial gastroenteritis I got from the not-quite-fully-cooked chicken. The near constant explosive diarrhoea came with an outrageously high fever and a complete loss of appetite. I manage to eat a small bowl of rice last night and the fever came down a bit but I can’t get more than five minutes away from either a toilet or the underwear drawer. Resurrection, indeed.

It is a good abs workout, I’ll admit and I’ve lost 6 pounds over the last 48 hours. However, I don’t recommend it to anyone.

Offer to anyone in the buurt: there’s some leftover chicken going unloved in the fridge if you want it. Or, whilst searching for diarrhoea meds at the supermarket website I was presented with these other options:

The Stairs

It has been a while since I did a refurbishment post but we’ve not finished anything in ages — instead, we’ve had the wood floors, the kitchen, the gardens, and finalising the dining room floor all on the go and creeping imperceptibly forward. The stairs, too, but as we move toward moving a kitten into the house, the items that would suffer from little paw prints have been prioritised.

Back in 2019, we went through this as we stripped out wallpaper and floor paint:

Layers of wallpaper adhesive clung to the plaster leaving pits that eventually needed reskimming:

We eventually gave up on prepping the wood on the stairs for stain and varnish (but we are making progress toward the bedrooms, the landing, and the living room) and decided that a good floor paint would be best. Before the last coat of coconut milk wall paint was applied, I spent an exhausting morning sanding the treads, risers, skirting, and handrail. Going over knots released the odours of pine sap predating women’s suffrage, WWI, and wireless broadcasting:

It may not look it here but the tread surfaces are mercury flat.

Another month passed and we finally settled on the colour — or lack thereof — scheme. One coat per day over the long weekend we just took and we are finally down to touch up and detail work. Looks okay, considering:;

Patio Doors

Sick most of Thanksgiving break, we buckled down on the Sunday after to install the new patio doors. The old ones were worse than just hideous PVC but also almost useless (the door opening was smaller than the narrowest dimension of the garden waste bin) and insecure — the sliding door’s rails are outside making it impossible to drop a secondary stay in place and making it easier to remove the door even locked.

At the end of the day, the temperature in the house had dropped to 10 degrees Celsius and was below freezing outside so too cold to fill in the gaps with mortar. Overnight, we got by with old clothing and paper towels stuffed in the up-to-an-inch wide spaces:

We injected mortar the next morning. Plastering in the grouted areas and fitting the draft excluders where the doors mate completed that portion of the job, but now we had to shift the old door frame and doors out to the shed to replace the temporary door fitted to close to house in last summer.

The temporary door came from gutting the kitchen and the rest of the hole for the sliding door frame was covered with plywood. I left no vertical tolerance but horizontally it was a snap to settle into:

So, now the shed has a little more room and it is easier to get to the wee alleyway affected by the building, itself.

New Shed Part 6: Getting Dressed

Continuing on from the last missive…

The shingles went up one evening after work late last week but with the earlier sunsets (as Summer dies on the table before us) trimming and activation of the bitumen sticky-stuff had to wait a few days.

Jackie got started stripping the new front door which used to be the door to our stairwell in the main house.

We got the walls cladded and the back covered with a temporary door while we await delivery of the patio doors that will free up the sliding glass doors we intend to install at the back.

Progress is slow. We still await the polycarbonate window and there is lots of trim and more coats of paint to do to tart this up but it is functioning as a work shed.

New Shed Part 5: To the Heights

The past weekend plus Monday (for me) was supposed to be devoted to nearly finishing the shed. The shed framing was rushed to completion Friday night. We’ve left a five foot wide opening at the back so we can shift out current hideous patio doors when their replacements arrive. The lintel/frame above that is the weakest structural feature and it supported my weight plus that of a 28 ounce hammer and a can of Red Stripe.

A soaking rain set in Saturday morning and we had to put in two days worth of work on Sunday with Jackie painting the first batch of the plywood cladding while I fashioned and installed the roof trusses — single pitch, 1:4 slope, 30cm eaves in front with another 15cm overhang at the back.

Missed the delivery of a polycarbonate sheet — for the front window — Friday and rescheduled it for Monday when I was off on annual leave. But, you can’t hear the doorbell out at the shed so had to do what I could in 4-5 minute bursts then dash back to the front of the house to check for the appearance of the TNT/FedEx driver (the tracking app is absolute shit).

Following that regimen, it took from 8am till lunchtime to put a first coat of paint on the remaining wall plywood and to fix the two, full sheets of 3/4 inch ply to the roof (having already installed two full sheets of 1/2 inch stuff to the north wall and one of the two on the south wall Sunday night just before dark).

The right roof panel fixed in place, the left merely aligned while I commenced cooking lunch.

We’re almost finished with the roof and merely need a few hours to cover the tarpaper/underlay with the shingles. The delivery never arrived (Fuck FedEx and TNT for ‘phoning it in’ while the merger completes — although both were half-assed before). Had I been able to focus on the project, the walls would be completed by now.

It is cool on the roof, though.

New Shed Part 4: From Discworld to 3D

On the most recent shed report, the Earth was still flat. Friday, the first wall frame went up in the two hours between arriving home from work and sunset. The next day was rainy and we both felt ill and progress would have to be more incremental.

But, all the boards for the north wall were already cut so, when we returned to the tasks on Sunday we quickly raised the facing wall and moved on.

The west wall will incorporate the sliding door which is currently on our patio (once its replacement arrives). This required some load bearing structures:

We tidied up after a scant 3 hours effort. The fourth wall is the most complicated so, for now, the World is a stage:

New Shed Part 3: From Foundation to Floor

The slab, which needed at least 7, cured for 8 days before I was able to get back to it, post-vacation. With a couple hours of daylight remaining Friday after work, I set to installing the floor.

It is a 2×4 frame covered with 3/4 inch plywood (2 full sheets and another ripped in half lengthwise. The four joists over the concrete were bolted to the slab while the framework on the brick faces were pulled tight because the concrete is 1-2mm lower than the top of the bricks. I realise now that I should have put a layer of sealer on interface of these outer boards and the slab, but I’ll take care of that with a caulk of some sort in the final edit.

As the sun set, I tried out the loungy chair at the site for the first time since initial grading. A large bourbon, our robin (the male of the pair), and an episode of Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar (Series 1!) accompanied me. It is supposed to rain for much of the next two days so the new floor was covered in a tarp before going in for the night.