Week 30 Recap: Week off for Annual Leave

Five days off. How would you have used it?

Monday…

I organised space for shed building supplies that were imminently due for delivery. I moved two pallets for the sand and aggregates to a spot near the shed foundation pour site and laid boards nearer the house to stack the lumber. Out front, I broke up and extracted a couple square meters of 3 inch thick concrete that used to cover the front garden soil. A similar return-to-the-land effort is slated out back over the next few weeks (although the front may get done using some Victorian tiling…stay tuned).

On a break, I caught up with the blogs of some old friends with the best post coming from our Brownie reviewing the Nuns of Brixton show a few weeks back. Another personal fave — but only because of an incident that slowly killed itself over the coarse of a few years (or was it only months? time is a motherfucker, ain’t it?) –is back online, and I hope it finds its old legs.

Cooked Rad Prik Prawns with fried onions and sautéed cabbage.Drink may have been involved.

Tuesday:

Jackie was also off work, Tuesday, and helped transfer the lumber part of the building supplies delivery from the street to the back garden (not a euphimism). We shifted two 6 foot by 6 foot fence panels, 75 framing studs, 20 sheets of 4 by 8 foot plywood(some cladding with a bit of thick stuff for flooring and roofing), 35 x 32 kg (about 70 pounds) bags of gravel, 25 by 36 kg (80-ish pounds) of sand, and 10 bags of bone dry cement (20 kg — 44 pounds). Crossfit can suck a bag of dicks (I know I said that earlier this week, but it bears repeating…not just because Marjorie Taylor Greene is a proponent).

Salmon, spinach, and soft cheese with herbs in filo dough (a Salmon en croute, if you will) and a Gavi after a British dry white wine starter. Or ,what passes for dry. Drink may have been involved.

Wednesday: The weather forecast only gave me a few clear hours to do any outdoor work so I focused on the pointing in the back wall. The rain came, as expected, between noon and 5. Intermittent but occasionally heavy, it put the kibosh on plans to pour the slab and I settled in to some of the detail work in the house (there is always plenty to do).

Roasted a turkey breast for panini but drink was not involved.

Thursday: A break in the rain allowed the long awaited concrete pour. I set aside 5 hours but the mud was mixed and crudely spread in just under 3 including a beer break at roughly the halfway point.

Started at 9:20, this photo at 10:40, last of the initial rough screeding at 12:15.

I had to pick up a darby and some other stuff at Screwfix and decided to document the adverts along the tramline (tramverts). The BooHoo girls went up in January and the SheinToff one a few weeks later. These are at almost every stop and if the longevity of others before them is any guide these will continue to dominate the daily commute for 6-10 months longer. I’ll update tramverts as they appear:

Knackered at the end of the day (there was still a lot of finishing to do after the terrifyingly mad rush of the initial pour), we had an Indian takeaway feast.

Drink was most certainly involved.

Friday: Little to do in the morning, I pulled the stakes off the forms and hosed off the top of the slab but needed to stay inside or very close to the house until the skip delivery. Drink may have been involved.

30 minutes after it was dropped

Saturday: We started loading the rest of the skip first thing. Overnight some cock sucker left a rolled up pink carpet in the skip. Ass monkey.

I made a pizza for supper. Drink may have been involved.

5 continuous hours of loading later

Sunday: Shirking and recovering from whole body muscle aches. Made a pot of broth. Fish tacos for supper. Drink may have been involved.

Fines and fees: £44.50 Mileage: a scant 25.

New Shed Part 2: The Slab

The 60cm square pavers that made up the foundation of the old shed were layed on paving sand but it doesn’t seem that any effort was put into levelling the ground. We pulled them all up and started putting that right, but between those two line items we took a break to barbecue some vegetables and souvlaki and to enjoy the shade on the once-and-future shed site.

Yeah, the entire garden is in disarray. Next to my feet you might be able to make out the orange grade line we used as a datum to get to mostly level. You can also see some of the shitty pointing done to the wall at the railway cut (and which I also addressed in my week off from the labs):

Excavated and much closer to planar by the following weekend, the site was covered with an impermeable plastic sheet and loosely refilled with the pavers leaving space between for the poured concrete to fill and make the entire pier a continuous pier. Scrap boards were held in place with tent pegs at the borders and these lined with bricks to make the boundaries look like a traditional foundation while having the advantages of the slab. The framing of the floor joists will be bolted to the concrete thus pulling the outer frame tight against a waterproofing layer between wood and brick.

Ready to pour

The area is 8 feet by 10 feet (2.4 m x 3 m) and 4 inches (100 mm) deep but while we ordered in enough cement and aggregate fixings for the entire slab, I went cheap by lining the frames with old concrete pavers (thus saving half the materials for the patio and other projects). A last check that all was level and plumb before firing up the mixer (per fill, I put a whole bag of gravel, eyeballed about 70% of a bag of sand, and about 30% of a bag of cement for about a 3.5:2.5:1 gravel:sand:cement ratio).

The form took just under three hours of manic mix/pour/spread (with all three happening continuously) to fill and screed. Any larger footprint and I would have broken it into two or more pours (and put in expansion devices) but, even then, it would have helped to have an assistant.

Altogether, this is just shy of 2 tonnes of shed anchoring material. I feel every ounce of it in my back and shoulders. Crossfit can suck a bag of dicks.

6 more days curing and we can build on top of this. Hooray.

Week 29 Recap: Dodging Delta

Arrived at work at 8 Monday, set up some work to do for the day, then checked my email for fires to put out before commencing. First email up told me the MS student I was training Thursday tested positive for COVID Sunday so I wiped my workspace down with alcohol and headed home to work online. I tested negative and reconfirmed it Tuesday before heading in for the, now, abbreviated workweek.

“Per Ad Ardua Alta” roughly translates to “Overture, curtain, lights, this is it, we’ll hit the heights.”

And, an odd week it was. I put on the medieval ecclesiastical garb commensurate with my rank and graduate school of origin — actually, for the first time — and attended the Biosciences graduation ceremony. [I didn’t attend my ceremony at The University of Georgia — now almost 20 years ago — since I turned in my dissertation on a Monday, defended it Tuesday, made minor corrections Wednesday morning, and gathered signatures Thursday before boarding a plane with the wife and cat bound for 2 years in Amsterdam that Friday.]

Fines and fees: £60.50. Mileage: 21 with nothing especially long or interesting. Somehow, I also managed to put in an after-work hour-and-a-half on the shed project each day.

New Shed Part 1: The Takedown

The old shed — small, rotting away — was more porous even than when we first moved in.  We had other things on our plate but the time to rebuild is nigh. Above, the state of devastation in the garden as the old shed was methodically dismantle over the coarse of about 30 minutes.

A year ago last Sunday, this was the state of our doors

The plan is to follow the old wall at the railroad cut.  The current box is 6 feet by 5 feet and crammed full, a good thing since the packed contents are probably the only thing holding it up.

Last summer, we started cleaning up some of the doors from the house refurb to use on the shed.  Covered in lead paint, we had to strip these outside and with shitloads of PPE involved. I burned out an old heat gun working on one of these.

Shed roof is now the lean-to roof and everything in the shed had to be relocated

We also took down a brick shed at the back of the house, now temporarily replaced by a makeshift lean-to for temporary storage of the current shed’s contents.  This is next to “The Pile,” our longstanding, building-rubbish collection awaiting the next skip (link is to LAST year’s one).  Now that the old shed is down, we have enough shit around to justify ordering another skip and to clean up the garden a bit more.

Week 28 Recap: When Did Simple Desire Become A Sin?

There is an overwhelming longing to finish the house refurb as we start our 21st month in The Compound. We feel like this is normal but we have never set — nor abided by — the standards of others. The arbiters of taste and morality be damned.

We continue to work on indoor details because the pile, seen behind the rising cladding (made from 115 year old skirting boards formerly resident in the pile), precludes our enjoyment of the garden. In the coming four weeks our summer project will be to shift the old shed’s contents to this temporary structure (made entirely from scrap, mind you), tear down the old shed, add it to Skip #3 at the end of the month, and pour a slab onto which we will build the new, larger shed and a wee patio.

This is less ostentatious than mildly ambitious. The garden is small but the aerial Google map of this buurt was recently updated with our stuff in the garden blurrily visible. The brick shed on the back of the house (torn down June 2020) is still attached to the house in this shot and our blue patio table is visible with the shadow of the folded parasol on it. A larger shadow on the lawn is cast by the folded down clothesline and tells me that the date is late spring and the time is mid-to-late morning (someone was home as the upstairs bathroom window is open):

We may have missed our window of Summer opportunity, though. The first days exceeding 25 degrees C (77 F) were this week and that may be what passes for the heat wave this year. We are natives of the sultry, humid lands of the subtropical southeastern US; moderation in all things is an unfair demand in this hellishly temperate climate.

The foot injury seems to have eased and I’ve managed to run enough to sweat a few times. Fines and fees: £72.67

Dining Room and Veranda nearly finished

		Maple Haze all in my brain.
		My dining room don’t seem the same.
			--apologies to Jimi

There was more plastering after the veranda was done. A lot of it was patch plastering but the entire ceiling and the wall to the arches in the dining room needed a full skim and the arched doorway to the living room and entrance needed extensive touching up.

We started painting with a good undercoat after the plaster had cured for a week. Cheap, white, matt emulsion diluted with water so there would be some ligand exchange between the water in the crystal structure of the plaster and the water carrying the paint. This dried a further 24 hours before a levelling and obscuring coat of the base.

To be fair, the colour choice is a bit bold. We should install cool white lighting throughout this area as the slight blue cast fights against the Trump-tone on the walls.

We still need the coving and skirting boards to go. up (eggshell brilliant white for them and the door frames) and pictures need to be distributed, but this leaves only the entrance, stairs, and kitchen to tackle (inside the structure).

2021 Week 23 Recap: Earthly Delights

Cast some wildflower seeds in window boxes Monday and noticed my first flowers on the tomato plants:

Continued to jam long, flexible swabs up my nose and continued to get negative results. Which is a positive result. Confusing.

Fines and fees: £102.

Plastering seems to mix well with drink, and over the last two weekends I have mixed and spread 7 bags (25 kg apiece) of plaster whilst exploring that theory. Mist coated the first of it Friday night but ran out of basecoat Saturday so we have two large rooms to do next weekend — I wonder if painting is more or less like plastering when it comes to substance abuse…let’s find out!

Veranda Part 2: Plaster

Since last week entailed a major redesign of the plans for the Dining Room and Veranda, I focused on getting the smaller room close to finished.

The cables have been chased down the walls and the trenches for these — and, all the exposed substructure of this part of the building — have been packed with a base coat of plaster. The entire room was then skimmed with finish plaster then given a bit of a wet polish with tile sponges.

Exhausting, again, but next week while Jackie paints this now-nearly-finished room I will be mudding the dining room ceiling and the wall to the veranda with finish plaster. It takes a week for this to cure enough to start painting so that has us busy each weekend until roughly the end of the month.

Dining Room and Veranda: The Start

The veranda, in these houses like ours, used to be an actual break between the living quarters and the cooking and toilet areas. Most of these have been closed in over the years with varying designs. Next door has an office-style drop ceiling. Ours was a flat ceiling plastered in and low enough for me to reach up and place my hand flat on it. This might have been acceptable but for the ceiling passing halfway through the stained glass window at our veranda door (see above for how it looks after the change).

The plan was to make an arch (above) in the original veranda but some time in the late 40s to early 70s someone put a roof in the southern half of the room that I couldn’t see when reconning this bit. Even then, I would have removed this except that it is supporting the new, higher roof. The dream of a vaulted arched ceiling would have to be abandoned. We plowed on.

We started by taking down the poorly built and uneven arches between the dining room and veranda, leaving a pair of much brighter square passages.

The old roof beneath the newer one was not adequately insulated, so we took the opportunity to fill it with fibreglas.

The northern half of the room was fairly unrestricted with respect to height so we sloped the new ceiling up to a point that would clear the window:

And, to buy back some space in the low ceiling we installed some flush mount lights (brighter) and put in dimmer switches for both halves of the room.

The ceiling is fitted, most of the walls are tidied up; but, there is still a lot of plastering and painting to do along with a bit of minor electrical work. Slowly coming to order, but the last minute changes threw a spanner into the timings. Hopefully, all done by the end of June.

Living room paint — colour

The skirting boards are painted and await cutting and installation tomorrow (Monday after Easter).

We mist coated first thing Friday morning with white, matt emulsion mixed 1:1 with water then adding 1/2 cup of PVA glue per gallon. The water intercolates the new plaster‘s crystal structure and the PVA reduces the surface porosity a bit better than the paint alone would do. It took about an hour to go through the room and ceiling then about an hour and a half to chase through with the remaining mist coat for an erstwhile 2nd layer.

By Friday night at 7, we had finished the first coat of teal. Above, you see midway through that effort where Jackie’s rollers were just catching up to my cutting in.

Even without the trim or anything hung on the walls and with the floor still needing stain and varnish, this is a relaxing — dare I say, “calming” — room.