What a pigsty...

Big Update

2011-12-03T12:13:00.001+01:00

Ok... it's been a long time again, I know. Plastering is more or less finished (except for the finish coat of clay in the hall which we'll be doing ourselves rather than hiring it out because we don't really trust our mason/plasterer to make it look the way we want. Basically the base coat is fairly rough and uneven and we want to keep that bumpy look, just applying a very thin final layer to smooth out the walls without making them flat and even.

Two new windows are in. Unfortunately I'm less than impressed - we hired a Czech carpenter who didn't speak more than three words of German (basically hello, good bye and problem) with the help of a local interpreter. We showed him EXACTLY what we wanted, hardware, casement profiles, hinges,... only to have him mess up everything. Had we ordered wooden double glazed units for a modern home they'd be fine - but as we asked for exact replicas of old windows they're flat-out garbage. My parents didn't have the time to start fighting though, and they are paying for the renovation... but I'm still VERY annoyed. At least we now have decent windows everywhere (even though the bathroom window might have to be replaced at some point, but I spent a considerable amount of time fixing any rot and repainting it, so it should be good for a few more years at least).

The whole experience really got me wishing to learn some decent carpentry and build my own doors and windows. I guess the first thing to do is getting LOTS of practice doing mortise and tenon joints with basic tools (saw, chisel and drill).

The last thing I did was whitewashing the back bedroom and hallway, but both will need at least one more coat.

Two weeks ago, the plumber ran all the copper plumbing for the new central heating system (the first the house ever had!) and installed the radiators. BIG progress! The pipes are run between the concrete slab and the finished floor, so we couldn't do anything before that was done.

There are still a few big tasks though. The most daunting one seems to be waterproofing the floor slab and bottom part of the walls. The damp-proof course doesn't exactly run at the same height throughout the house. In some (most) spots it's below the finished floor level, in some up to 4" above though. In those spots we need to cut off the membrane that sticks out of the wall, waterproof the section of wall below as well as the floor and patch the plaster (currently, all walls are only plastered down to the damp-proof course).

Then of course we need to get insulation and flooring down. We want to do wood floors in most rooms, tile in the bathroom and stone in the front hall. I did devise a few tile schemes, but we're still discussing them in the family... the original idea was salvaged tile, white squares for the walls and white octogons with square blue inlays on the floor. However, that setup would BEG for a clawfoot tub and my mom doesn't want one - she wants a decent shower, and certainly no curtains. That means modern tub with folding shower wall. The second scheme I devised was more 1930s/50s with light blue or turquoise wall tiles, black trim around the top and bottom and a mosaic floor. This has the advantage of being possible using plain 4" square tiles that are fairly affordable. Another floor option was black and white checkerboard as my dad was afraid mosaic would be difficult to install. Then there's a third option, white wall tile with a dark blue profiled border around the top and a black (or blue) and white floor. Again, this can be done using standard tiles, in this case even big box store tiles. We're all much too busy with work/school/university, so no decisions have been made.

I'd love to get the heat running this year, but unfortunately I don't think that is going to happen. We don't have a boiler yet, and I don't really want to get the boiler installed before we got done with all the dusty work, including floor sanding. Otherwise we'd have to get the boiler cleaned every few months or even weeks.

Plaster and paint

2011-07-11T15:03:00.004+02:00

Well.. I had an update half-finished, then the Firefox tab got reloaded and everything was gone. Given how annoying it is to embed pictures in Blogger, especially if you're as HTML-illiterate as I am I don't know when I'll get around to showing you some pictures.

A brief summary: the small back bedroom and the large front room are plastered and finally ressemble rooms again!
All other rooms are waiting for loose ends to be tied up before they can get plastered, such as installing a WC window, fixing the kitchen ceiling, having the plumber install the gas lines and finish the plumbing... oh and the kitchen door frame needs to be installed, the front door needs to be replaced,...

Last week I felt completely burnt out from university exam season so I didn't do much. We fixed the roof of the pigs stable (the one with the purlins resting on nails driven into the ends of the rafters) because the lowermost purlin was completely rotted and had come loose. Incredible but true, this was a DIY project that went perfectly smooth and took just as long as we'd expected! Take down the tiles (as we were told hand-made concrete tiles, at least 50 years old), rip off the damaged pieces of wood and nail up a new purlin (spare found in the attic). Replace the tiles, done!
Still looks slightly odd (saggy), but it should last a few years until we completely replace the roof. Actually we should replace a few tiles too.

On Thursday I decided to take up another necessary but unplanned easy task, repainting the street-side windows. The old ochre and beige paint job was flaking off in huge sheets and looked absolutely dismal. I spent a few hours scraping off any loose paint, sanding and then slapping up a coat of dark green paint. Next I plan to spackle, sand and apply a second coat. I'm incredibly impressed with the Osmo paint I used, it's even better than their white paint! Not much of a smell, easy to apply and covers very nicely!

Oh, and of course I also need to reglaze the windows and paint over the fresh putty once it's ready. I'd love to try different kinds of glazing compount, but that seems to be a US phenomenon. Around here you can get natural linseed oil putty, beige linseed oil putty and brown linseed oil putty. That's it!
Ideally I'd do the reglazing in winter (linseed oil putty tends to crinkle when exposed to direct sunlight as it sets) but I don't think I'd want to leave the windows with up to 3/4 of the glazing missing for so long.

On Friday I started to trench the walls for the gas lines. Our plumber is very affordable (he runs a rural one-man operation) but the downside is he tells us to do most things ourselves. We installed all the drains (ok, that's easy, our drain pipes aren't glued but just stuck together using bells and o-rings but still it requires some creativity) and did all the trenching. The only thing he did so far was cutting, bending and soldering the copper pipes.
I used an angle grinder with a diamond blade to score the walls. It makes the actual chiseling easier and keeps the trench sides cleaner, but it's incredibly dusty work! I started with the doors closed, but had to stop less than midway because you couldn't see anything! I continued with both front and back door open, that was bearable. At least I finally found a decent respirator mask that seals properly around the nose so I can wear goggles without having them fog up every few seconds. While marking for the cuts I discovered that the ceiling slopes considerably towards the front door, at least 5cm. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the old concrete floor sloped too, so it seems to have been done on purpose (only I don't have the slightest idea WHAT purpose!). I definitely know some older houses where the hall slopes considerably, maybe because they're built into a hill or something. It can't really be for water runoff since the front door usually has quite a tall threshold.

We also completely redesigned the kitchen using the old 60s cabinetry. The sink will be replaced with a double sink with drainboard (the old one was a double without drainboard) and a dishwasher instead of the narrow cabinet that used to reside next to the sink. The stove moves in next to the dishwasher where the large hutch used to be. The hutch in turn moves sideways in front of the door we bricked up. That puts the stove close to the sink and away from the door. Even makes running the gas lines a bit easier. The refrigerator will go in next to the table where the old electric stove was, rather than in the back hall on the other side of the door we bricked up. The upper cabinet that used to threaten people's heads and necks when sitting on the bench will move across the room above the sink where it's useful for dishes and other stuff and won't likely cause any injury. The way it used to hang I couldn't sit down on the bench unless I slumped over the table because the back of my head would hit the cabinet if I leaned back!

Next: finish the trenches for the gas lines (I guess we're about halfway done), finish painting the windows, get a carpenter to build a WC window, install it, get a frame for the new front door and replace the old one...

Update: our own place

2011-02-28T23:12:00.002+01:00

Since it's winter and we don't have any heat, not much has happened. Our Mason did dig out all the dirt floors and pour new concrete floors everywhere! Now we have a solid and level surface to work on. Yay! No more ladders sinking into the ground while you're working! Unfortunately, pouring concrete means water. LOTS of water. As the concrete cures, this water evaporates and goes into the room air. All doors and windows expanded enough they're a bear to open and close now. One door was so bad my dad hacked up the trim with a chisel - the very first salvage door we'd installed... that's going to be a lot of work with a rabbet plane and wood putty! *sigh*

He also fixed the trouble wall in the small room and I got all the remaining plaster down. Now the only room that still has plaster is the front hall and that's original plaster. Oh, and of course the leftovers in the big room (see photo)... at least the cement is gone.

One result of the extremely moist air and cold temperatures outside was that we could easily find cold spots without a thermography - all cold spots were frozen solid! Such as this door handle (and for that matter the whole door)...

In the small room the POs closed up an exterior door and installed a built-in bookshelf where it used to be. We were quite suspicious of it since small pieces of styrofoam kept coming out through gaps in the beadboard... that reminded us of the ant invasion in the garden hut and prompted us to take down the beadboard (cheap 70s stuff). We didn't find any ants or other unwanted inhabitants, but we did find some seriously creative attempts to insulate the space. The first layer behind the wood is Heraklith, magnesite-bound wood shavings. Not too much of an R value. Any gaps between the Heraklith and the surrounding brickwork were filled with... you guessed it... 1976 newspapers! Or actually magazines. Behind the Heraklith we found a layer of 25mm styrofoam and wood slats. The brickwork behind the styrofoam was (again) frozen solid. Moisture condensing behind insulation is something you absolutely don't want! So we have to find some creative way to improve this. Maybe we'll even end up bricking up the whole opening, don't know. That's about it until it gets considerably warmer! The we need to get the plumber to finish the hot/cold plumbing and start on the gas lines (we have to trench the walls for the gas lines first) and we have to do the drains (WC sink, bathroom sink, kitchen sink and boiler condensate drain). Then it's wiring and door frame building/installation and we might be ready for plaster... no wait, there's still the window issue... *sigh*

BTW, I got a first bid for replacing the rotted casements in the bathroom. €250 PER casement! That means at least €500 if we can save the outers, €1000 if we can't and even more if the frame is gone too. For €1500 we could get complete new windows, near-perfect reproductions with triple glazing (inners double pane glass, outers traditional plate glass). This was just a local carpenter I happened to ask though, we still hope for better bids.

Helping out friends or "fixing up a nightmare"

2011-02-24T16:58:00.002+01:00

A good friend of mine used to live in a ca. 1960 condo owned by his mother. In November he decided he didn't want to live alone and moved in with two friends, leaving his mother with the empty condo.

While he lived there we had renovated on and off, particularly rewired about half the place AND NEVER CLOSED UP THE WALLS AGAIN in the hall and kitchen (sorry for the screaming, but hey, there were holes in the wall for almost 4 years!).

Unfortunately at some point he had decided to do a major makeover and prepared that by whacking down some of the tile in the kitchen, taking some plaster down too. Honestly, the tiles were cracked and chipped all over and ugly, but still... it would have been easier with them intact. One wall (with sink and stove) was still ok, so we decided to leave that but had to replaster two other walls (and rewire half the kitchen). We still have to cover the chipped floor tiles with vinyl.

In the living room someone who will not be named had the incredibly bright idea of hanging artwork by stapling it to the plaster walls and drywall ceiling. Seriously, there was an oil painting (no frame) stapled to the ceiling! Oh, and two walls had artwork applied directly using neon marker pens and spray paint. In the end we spent 3 days pulling staples and painted 5 coats of white until we realised it would never cover - we ended up scraping down two walls and removing the plaster (finish coat) in two small spots. The spray paint had to be sanded off because there was no other way to get it off.

Furthermore we had to remove most additions to the original wiring since they were too scary - including live bare wires just plastered in!

One day trying to hang a door the person doing this dropped it and the door handle whacked a nice dent into the laminate floor in the hall - that decided what to do with it. We intended to uncover the original vinyl floor which is ugly as hell but at least vintage. Unfortunately when we got that far, we discovered it was gone... now we probably need to lay a new floor there. Other than that we're basically done, but it was a whole lot of work.

Fun with painters - the rest of the story

2011-01-14T23:51:00.002+01:00

So after day 1 ended quite successfully, things quickly started to go downhill. I decided to spend the following night on the couch in the living room (which did cause some discussions with my brothers who wanted to watch TV in the morning while I wanted to sleep in but that was settled peacefully). Mostly I ignored the painters until they packed up. Any tidyness had gone down the drain. White paint smears on everything they had touched with their dirty hands (inner window brass handles, my wood mobile I forgot to take off,...), paint drips on about everything (exterior sill, stool,...). Especially funny as one inner is painted red.
We decided not to complain (well my parents did, I would have made a big fuss) but try to remove any excess paint. Oh, and the painters told us one of them (who usually stays at the shop and paints casements) was sick so they weren't sure how long it'd take them to finish. Oh, and they left the blue paint again!

That was Tuesday. Wednesday was a public holiday and COLD. Believe me, it makes a HUGE difference whether there's one pane of glass between you and the freezing outdoors or two! While the heat was running it wasn't that bad, but as soon as the thermostat went into night temp setting it got cold fast.

Thursday they promised to get the casements by 2:30PM. They arrived more than half an hour early and started to unload the casements. Guess what? The WC window was sparkling white! We told them to take it right back, this time WITH the can of blue paint. Another day with only one toilet... while the window was tarped this one was quite uncomfortably cold, so we didn't use it.

First thing we saw was them traing to figure out which window went where. I mean my mom had TOLD them to label each casement since none of them actually match! No, they knew better (they did label them but couldn't make any sense of the labels when they came back).

Then they noticed one broken pane in the bay window and broke another one there trying to hang a casement.

First highlight of the day was when they walked into the living room where my brothers were watching TV and wanted to rehang the windows. The guy had to come within 2 feet of the window to realise none were missing (since they never painted those!)!!!

Second one was even better, I'll try to give you as accurate a translation of their German dialogue as possible.

"What's up?" (muttered)
"Another problem!"
"What's it?"
"Doesn't go all the way in!" (too much paint on the hinges, he was already cleaning them with a screwdriver before the discussion started)
"Then do something!"
"I already AM!"

Perhaps it doesn't really show that well in writing, but it was hilarious! Those painters most definitely weren't the brightest bulbs in the pack!

Also note that I was mildly pissed to find they had replaced one slightly cracked pane of original wavy glass (happened when I cleaned it, for no apparent reason) with new smooth glass without asking... ah well, even if I had complained they wouldn't have understood.

Then they tried to call the glass shop for the two broken panes... no answer. So Friday became a pretty unlikely done date. In the end they returned the WC window (finally blue!) on Friday (maybe we should have told them you need to thin that brand of acrylic paint to avoid brush marks... it looks pretty bad but at least it's blue now) and the two broken ones on Tuesday. *sigh*

Oh and about the hardware I painstakingly cleaned before they started... some of it had paint smeared on again (accidentally) whereas they painstakingly removed and stripped all the ugly new aluminum hardware on some of the windows...

That experience kind of supports my sarcastic theory that in Austria only those flat out too stupid for secondary education take up the trades. Not too promising...

Fun with painters - survived day 1!

2010-12-07T00:20:00.002+01:00

Today the painters arrived bright and early at 8AM: Thanks heaven my mom managed to keep them busy in the kitchen and a few other rooms till 10 when I had to get up anyway. Big kudos to her for that!

All windows have the outer casements out for painting and the frames received their first coat of paint inside and out. Where the old and new paint meet it looks terrible - the crisp fresh white paint makes the yellowed, chipped and lord knows what else old white paint look even mor terrible! Unfortunately the inners are a complete strip and repaint job and that's a tough (and dusty) decision in a room filled with electronics, vinyl records, 3.5" floppy disks, cassette tapes,...
My bedroom window frame has a few considerable holes which they didn't bother to patch, I hope they do that tomorrow. If not... one more thing on the list of complaints.

We told them to paint the inside of the WC window blue to match the frame (and repaint that too since it's already part of the quote) since I painted the frame like 7 years ago, we even supplied the paint... which they promptly left when they took off with the casements in two. The frame isn't painted either.

When I came home from university I found my oriantal rug grey instead of red, blue and pink - dust and dirty shoes. Near the window it had been covered with paper which was covered with paint chips. Oh, and they TAPED plastic to my curtains! No real idea what that was supposed to do anyway, it neither reaches down to the floor nor up to the ceiling. Pretty pointless! They didn't cover my desk either (as I had specifically requested to protect my vintage reel tape recorder and computer).

To sum it up, it would bee too much to say I'm pissed off, but I'm definitely annoyed. They left the kitchen floor covered with paint chips too btw!

One thing I most definitely know now: Don't EVER believe anyone telling you that single glazed windows are just as good as single glazed windows with storms and storms are only wasted money! These aren't fancy thermopane windows, just two panes of ordinary glass with roughly 6" of dead air space in between, but there's a huge difference! It's getting COLD in here with only single glazed windows!

Prep and paint fun

2010-12-05T14:02:00.002+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post we're having the window painted in 4 apartments and the stairway. The apartments have "Kastenfenster" which means two casements built into one extra-thick frame, like with permanent storms. The stairway was always meant to be unheated and thus only received single-glazed casements. Of course the very day they were taken out for painting we had the first day of snow. And they couldn't even tarp the opening because the frames had been painted inside and out. So Wednesday morning we had snow on the interior stairs. Thankfully they're terrazzo so no damage done. It was awfully slippery though.
Nice view, isn't it? (the night after I took the picture it started to snow).
Then the painters tried to rig up a tarp held in place inside of the frame held in place with pieces of trim, but that didn't last too long, the wind ripped it to shreds the following night. Ah well... now they're done.

Tomorrow they're scheduled to start on our apartment, which means the chaos is really going to invade our living space. The last weekends have been spent with frantic furniture moving (for example my brother had set up his drum set in front of the window) and general tidying up - for two reasons: a) we don't want the painters to think we're complete messies (and need to give them space for setting up ladders) and b) we don't want too much dust on our stuff, so we tried to store away as much as we could - anything that doesn't get dusty in the first place won't have to be cleaned afterwards.

Another pressing job is cleaning up the hardware. When those windows were last painted ca. 1990 those incredibly incompetent morons were too f*ing lazy to mask the brass handles, so they just painted them white!
Unfortunately no one complained back then (I was 5 or 6, had I been older and more experienced I think I'd have make them lick off the paint!), so now we're stuck doing it ourselves. Removing the handles and cooking them sounds like a good idea... until you realise that they can't be removed. The brass handles have steel spindles like door knobs. Only there is no second knob with a set screw... the spindles were simply hammered flat on the outside to stay in place forever! (I once saw a window being completely trashed on a replacement job that's how I know... and yes, vinyl replacements are just as poupalr here as they are in the US).

My first attempt was scraping using something that won't scratch the brass. My eyes fell on an old geometry triangle with nice sharp plastic edges. It worked, at least to some extent. Where the paint was too thick; I still needed a metal scraper. Once the paint is removed, you're faced with very uneven and partially removed patina, so the brass needs to be polished (it was supposed to be polished every few weeks anyway, beautiful patina wasn't something for early 20th century housewives).
Our front windows (we have four of them) are tripartition casements with opening transoms. That makes 6 inner windows and 6 outers. With two handles each. That makes 12 handles per set, 24 per window. I don't need to do the inners (they won't be painted anytime soon) but it's still 36 handles (one window is sheltered enough it doesn't need to be painted, besides there's a large-ish balcony in front of it so we can paint it ourselves). I got my bedroom completely done last weekend and the "salon" stripped (but not polished) yesterday.
I tried the heat gun too, but mostly it just gummed up the paint instead of loosening it, so I went back to cold and dry scraping. I might try some 000 steel wool for cleanup today (my parent's bedroom window still has to be done).

You might ask yourself why I strip the hardware before the windows are repainted if I alreay suspect it might get painted over again... well a) stripping the hardware tends to damage the paint around the handles too. b) I absolutely don't want the painters to have ANY excuse for painting the hadware again! ("But it was painted, we thought it was supposed to be like that!") - they already DID slap on another coat on one window in our neighbor's apartment. So no, I absolutely don't trust them.

Now for some fun: about half an hour of hard work took this

to this
to this:

Much better, isn't it? (I'm talking about the handle, not Blogger formatting which keeps driving me up the wall...)

Haaahaaaa...

2010-11-23T12:37:00.003+01:00

Did I mention first week of November? The second week passed... and the only visible sign of progress? A few slaps of whitewash on the walls. I assume they were painted to provide some contrast for a level line yet to come. Now that's what I call real progress!

We did get to move some reclaimed wood flooring from Vienna up into the attic, as we need to empty out the wood shed in Vienna soon. It's in the way when construction for the new wood pellet storage room starts.
On a tangent: the wood shed contains: reclaimed oak flooring, reclaimed sleepers from said flooring (ranging from the usual 2x3s to real sturdy 2x6s), reclaimed subflooring and bunches of oak and beech herringbone parquet sticks (solid 1" thick wood). The beech is a total loss, it has been something like C grade to begin with, improperly milled tongues and grooves and everything, and wood-broring insects had their share of it too (sometimes invisible until you sand the floor). It's going to end up as firewood. Everything else will need a different place to store.

After carrying a bunch of floor boards up into the attic and stacking them onto the floor I reached for one of the low collar ties to get up. Only the collar tie didn't want me to do that - it simply broke. Rot of some kind. Great. A 3x4 that breaks like a toothpick.

Last Wednesday I could have slept in... if it hadn't been for a phone call at 7AM. It just kept ringing and ringing for more than a minute until Is tumbled out of bed to answer it.
"This is XY, we want to deliver the dumpster today!"
"Great, and what am I supposed to do now? Our mason ordered the dumpster, I didn't!"
"That's the only phone number I've got!"
"Alright, I don't have the slightest idea but I think the mason mentioned he wanted it in the driveway. Just put it there."
"Alright, we'll try to finde the address!"
"The house is real easy to find!" (this is what I was actually saying, what I was THINKING at that very moment was more like "How the f*ck could anyone possibly be dumb enough not to find THAT house?!? Let alone a local!")
"We'll try."

Then I went back to bed and slept until 10. At least it's a sign of progress... *sigh*

On a lighter note, in early december the outside of our windows in Vienna will be painted (at least those that need it, I already did a few myself). Of course early december is about the most stupid time to do something like that in a climate with high risk of frost in winter, but the guy in charge claims that for some financial voodoo reasons the money need sto be spent this year. Ah well... at least it finally gets done.

Other than that I'm currently pretty much out of commission from a bad cold.

Phew...

2010-10-26T12:16:00.002+02:00

Last Sunday was spent cleaning out the house again... well actually we moved all our tools and materials as well as the remaining 3 pieces of furniture into the front room. It looks a bit crowded now, especially with two big piles of debris on the floor (mostly broken adobe bricks and mud mortar, result of moving a doorway).
The first week of November our mason/concrete guy is going to fix one pretty bad wall and then pour a base slab of 2" concrete (non-reinforced) in all rooms except the front room. That means we finally get a sturdy, level floor to work on! Yay! Currently the whole house has dirt floors that are just soft enough to swallow ladder feet and nowhere near level or flat.
We also want to getsome estimates on several replacement casements or repair of the existing ones (the bathroom outers/storms are in seriously bad shape, probably served their time). In fact except for the two front windows seem to need more or less extensive wood repair (this opinion is likely to change as soon as we start to actually work on the front windows, they always look the worse the closer you look). Of course every single window needs to be reglazed, likely stripped and repainted. Currently not even the oolours match... the inside is mostly white with two reddish-browns strewn in, the exterior is a two-tone ochre-brown scheme (fugly!) on the front windows and reddish-brown on the side windows.

The next important step is getting the plumber to finish the plumbing and lay all gas pipes. Once they're in the wiring can be finished, two more door frames built and installed and we're ready for plaster!!! Then it's really going to look like a house again!
At least in some rooms that is. the original kitchen ceiling needs extensive repairs before we can close up anything there.

You can't imagine how happy I am now, expecting some real visible progress soon!

2010-09-24T19:00:00.002+02:00

July was mostly spent traveling and relaxing, but August saw some serious work getting done. Unfortunately it was mostly restricted to tasks where it's really hard to see progress. In order to raise the door frames to a useful level we had to install new lintels. Installing those properly is a very time-consuming process, but we got it done.

In addition to that, the plumber finally got started on the hot and cold water lines. By now they should be done I hope, with the exception of the exterior hose connection which will have to run on top of the concrete subfloor. The drains need to be done too, the plumber apparently expected us to do that ourselves (we got started since we had intended to lay concrete much earlier, so we needed all drains in the floor done). He wanted to do some fancy PVC system, but we insisted on copper since every manufacturer of plastic pipes has his own patented system - what if you want to add onto the plumbing or repair 20 years down the road and the company no longer exists? Copper pipe ist standardised in the whole metric part of the globe and fittings will likely be around for quite a while.

Now for some pictures.
The original cold water line came up from the cellar in the back hall, next to the door leading into the kitchen. There is a good 1m of dirt between the cellar ceiling and the hall floor at that point. The water meter sits in a niche on the side of the cellar. What the original plumbers did in 1976 was to simply hammer the pipe down through the dirt until it bottomed out into the cellar. Unfortunately, at a later point, the cellar was partially rebuilt (that specific section now has a vaulted brick ceiling instead of being dug into the clay, an ancient way of building cellars that occasionally collapse), and the niche now has a concrete lintel above. So far this isn't really a problem, we could unscrew the old pipe from above, pull it out and use to hole to get the new copper pipe down. Unfortunately, there is more to the pipe than it seems. Before it goes through the lintel it bends twice and has a horizontal section. That makes it impossible to get out without digging deep down in the hall. After 25cm of rock hard clay we ditched that idea and decided to drill down into the cellar in the bathroom where it is much easier to get to.

As you can see while we were at it we also installed conduit for a future light in the cellar.
So far there is none. Seriously!
The spot you're looking at is just below the tub, near the drain. All this is going to be covered with concrete, waterproofing and insulation, so technically this isn't really part of the bathroom (important because of the electric code).

All other plumbing is in too, sink, washing machine, toilet and small sink in the WC.

Oh, and of course the first final door frame and door got installed (even though it's not done so far)!
Unfortunately it seems like I forgot to take a picture of that! Will be corrected the next time I get out there, promised!

Progress and destruction

2010-05-27T13:12:00.004+02:00

The walls grew again. And yes, they still aren't done! Typical 80% project I guess. The top section requires endless cuts which slow down things badly. Besides, the saw was dull again and after my dad tried to resharpen it with a file it didn't cut straight any more (in fact it never did, it was already bent when we found it, it was an awfully cheap saw from the PO who left it outside to rust) so things went from bad to worse. Given that you mortar those blocks using thinset cuts need to be pretty precise - you can't have large joints with that mucky stuff. Now try to make precise cuts using such a bad saw! Hours and hours went by and I got more and more annoyed.

Eventually I decided to take a break and do something else. What could be better for getting rid of frustration than some good old fashioned destruction? So I grabbed the electric hammer and chipped away at the cement plaster in the small room which needs to go - it's seriously bumpy, the surface is rough (apparently they couldn't be bothered using a finish coat, so they just troweled the base coat which is pretty coarse) and I don't care for scraping my skin when I happen to brush along a wall.
The wall across the door is the worst. The clay bricks disintegrate (actually some animals built burrows in there as though it were soil!) and the wall is moist. Cement plaster is awfully close to waterproof, so any moisture that got into the walls prior to the damp-proof course install was trapped. Probably that was actually the original intent, keep the room dry (it actually worked, this room never had any real musty smell), but apparently the 1970s construction guys didn't realise that this would ruin the walls - some of the clay bricks just crumble away. This will need extensive brickwork repair. On this wall the plaster is reinforced with chicken wire which makes demolition even harder. I did get the whole bottom section cleared out which is all I can do before the first stage of brick repair. Apparently the wall was in bad shape even before it was covered up with cement as the bottom was covered with a layer of upright bricks (I guess the front of the original clay bricks had just crumbled away). Whoever did that overdid it though and made the bottom part of the wall protrude - that's why the plaster job is so terrible here. The original walls seem to have been as flat, plumb and level as any old house gets, but subsequent "repairs" made them look like random field stone walls. On one hand I actually like that bumpy look, on the other hand I think it might be handier to get the walls closer to their original state again. The patches didn't hold up anyway, the cement plaster pulled them down in a death grip.

The exterior wall (left) has already been repaired or rebuilt using real brick so it didn't suffer any real damage, it just needs to dry out. We were told by several people that there had been a second entrance on that wall but opinions on the exact location differed. The bathroom window has already been ruled out, while it doesn't appear to be original it definitely wasn't a door - there is original adobe brickwork below. The small room seemed more likely for several reasons. A) if the back two rooms were once a separate "apartment" this would likely have been the kitchen and an entrance into the kitchen makes more sense than into the living/bedroom. B) The window is squeezed into a corner which looks really odd - however, if there were a door next to it it would look perfectly normal! C) the side alley slopes towards the street. The bathroom is above grade, whereas the small room is pretty much at grade level. Whacking down the plaster confirmed my suspicions.
You can see a straight joint run vertically to the right of that outlet box. It's weird to see how that outlet would be perfectly centred between the door and window if there were a door, even though the door can't have been there any more when the socket was installed!

Where the exterior wall meets the bathroom wall on the right the plaster had a big crack ever since the damp-proof course was installed. Now I know why. When I got close to that wall the leverage of the hard plaster made that interior wall move! Basically it's no longer connected to the exterior wall and pretty wobbly. While the bathroom side of the adobe bricks still looks pretty good, this side suffered and is crumbling. More masonry repair! Worst case we can still take down that section of wall (it's not load-bearing) and rebuild it.

Next to the window you can see some discoloured plaster. This is where they left the older lime plaster in place. Now for some odd reason moisture condensates on this part of the wall in winter (and only on this section) and of course stains the surface. Seeing this actually got us to remove the entire plaster here (for the purists who cringe at reading that (I definitely would if I did without any background info): NONE of the plaster in this room was original! The lime plaster is probably 1930s or something like that and the cement plaster is 1976. We are going to replace all this plaster, either with lime or clay plaster, so in the end it's going to be more original than before).

Pretty early on I suddenly saw the chisel fall and hit the floor. Initially I suspected a faulty SDS+ chuck but in fact the chisel had snapped right off! The break is perfectly smooth, almost like a saw cut and I suspect a production fault (this wasn't exactly a quality tool). Getting the broken chisel out just by gravity (i.e. releasing the chuck holding the machine upside down) didn't work, so I put it aside and used the other hammer, a dirt cheap Chinese Hitachi ripoff (in fact I think they bought the rights for a 1970s design and just kept building it forever, these things are heavy but lack a few core features - they are not designed for continuous operation, so you have to hold the trigger all the time and you can't lock the chisel - you can turn off the motor but the chisel will twist on its own so you occasionally have to bring it back into the ideal operating position which is annoying). When I finally called it a day I took the good Bosch hammer to a nicer place (my grandmother's house across the street) where I could sit down and surgically remove the chisel remnants under good light. I ended up pushing two small flat screwdrivers into the grooves of the bit, then squeezing them together (needle nose pliers were too big to get in there).

The next day we went back to the wall. We could actually borrow a proper saw designed for that purpose (with very big, hardened teeth) which sped up things considerably. We are ALMOST done.
This section between hallway and bathroom (looking through the doorway into the bathroom) is done.
The section above the WC door is almost done, the two top right blocks are cut to size but not yet mortared. That's about 5-10 minutes of work though.
Between the bathroom and WC there are another 2 blocks missing that need to be cut but in total we'Re very close to getting done. We still need to tie up some loose ends on the drains, but then the concrete subfloor can go in! (right now the whole house has dirt floors except for a leftover section of plank flooring in the big room).
Then it's time for plumbing and wiring!
Looking into the bathroom:

The window can be seen at the far right side of the picture. Tub is going in along the left-hand wall, sink between tub and window. Before any of that can happen a lot of work has to be done.

Small update

2010-05-20T19:58:00.002+02:00

Not much going on right now. The walls grew a bit taller but still aren't finished. The next steps are removing plaster in the small room and the remaining wood floor in the big room, finish up the wiring in the big room. Then that's ready for plaster. One room at least...

As far as the bathroo is concerned we need to get the plumbing done quickly. Before the gas and water pipes are in I can't really do any more wiring as I don't want to interfere with the wiring. Once plumbing and wiring are done we are ready for plaster. Yay!

Bathroom

2010-04-03T14:57:00.003+02:00

The one and only original bathroom was built in 1976. Prior to that, the house had a pump in the front yard and an outhouse in the back. When the POs bought the house, they split one of the back rooms into a bathroom and hallway. The bathroom was long, narrow and ugly, roughly 3.2x1.7m (10'6"x5'6"), featuring grey wall tiles, yellow and brown floors and bright orange paint above. The only heat source consisted of two electric quartz heaters. COmbeined with the shot window it was COLD in there.

The tub was on the right, next to the toilet, the sink across the door, on the left of the window. Left of the door: a huge 150l (not quite 40 gallon) wall mounted electric water heater.
The medicine cabinet with two 25W bulbs was the only light, making the room even creepier at night. In fact the only nice feature is the old (I don't write original, since in this house it's absolutely impossible to tell what might be original, and the ceiling probably isn't as the beams are sawn rather than hewn).

We pretty soon decided to make the bathroom a bit more compact by rotating the tub 90 degrees and closing off a water closet around the current toilet location. That gives us an almost square bathroom and resolves any family quarrels (I mean who likes to be in the tub while someone is sitting on the toilet and vice versa? We're an open family raised in hippie spirit, but that's too much!). A standard tub barely fits the old bathroom, but we'd like a clawfoot or larger modern tub, both of which wouldn't (most clawfoots here are about 5cm longer than modern standard tubs). As soon as we discovered that the wall sits on top of the screed (which has a 5cm step in the hallway making a lovely tripping hazard and is seriously damp) it was clear that it had to go. We expected hollow block bricks, but alas, the wall was built of concrete block with cement mortar. As you can see the mortar was even stronger than the block. Took us two days with a sledge hammer to get rid of it. "ThereIfixedit.com" as my brother called it... as we still needed water for the construction, we left the galvanised plumbing in place, the tub feed hanging in mid air.

Around Christmas we started the rebuild. First we laid a brick foundation, then tar paper. We didn't get started on the actual walls though because we ran out of time. This week we could finally start laying the aerated concrete block. The first glory shot shows you the approximate layout minus the doors (the blocks just sit there to weight down the tar paper). Once we started laying the block, we needed to get the door frames in place as the wall is built around them (were this a brick wall, the frames would be installed after the wall is done, but with those blocks it's easier to put up the frame first). The frames we built after Christmas are solid pine 2x5 to match our salvaged panel doors. Of course they won't stand on their own, so we needed to get creative again. As soon as this was done, the walls realy started going up. Since the block is lightweight and very smooth things should go pretty fast (one block is 60x25x10cm, 24x10x4" and they're mortared using thinset applied with a notched trowel) but since we actually have to build three walls with two door frames the cutting slowed down things considerably. In spite of the name "concrete" the blocks can be cut using a regular wood saw (it goes dull though, so we used an old cheap one that came with the house). With two work days we got about half done as most of the time I was working alone or with very little help. With 1 guy cutting full time and 2 mortaring things would have gone considerably faster. In the bathroom, looking out into the new hallway:

A second plumber gave us a quote for the central heat and plumbing which came in at only half of the first quote. He wants to sell us a Baxi boiler though, and online reviews were seriously bad. Besides, Vaillant gives you a 5 year warranty against scaling if you live in a hard water area, and that's exactly what we need! However, even if a Vaillant boiler increases the bill by about €1000 we'Re still much cheaper than with the first quote. Once the hot and cold water lines and drains are done it's time for subfloors and plaster!

As usual, there are still a few things left before that though, at least the plaster part. The wiring isn't anywhere near done yet and more than half of the door frames are still missing (at least 3 need to be built from scratch and installed and one has to be modified and installed). Once this is done, plaster can go up. Once the plastering is done, the heating pipes and radiators can be installed, followed by the floors. That leaves the 10 dozen other jobs like painting, tile, etc.

Re-installing a sink and fixing a boiler

2010-03-04T13:16:00.005+01:00

The place where we live in Vienna is an old house too, and while we did an extensive renovation in 2004, a few things have remained untouched and need attention every once in a while. That is, the bathroom and the kitchen. The bathroom is still in its full 1978 glory and has only been repainted ever since (the last time in 1998 I think). The tiles were cheap leftovers back when they were bought, only matching in color but not pattern, and we had many pipe leaks in the meantime since they were installed. In fact that means there are now 5 different tile patterns used there, one of which is totally off (light beige instead of brown/green). The kitchen had new-ish white Ikea cabinets fitted in 1987 (they were about 10 years old back then I think, having come from my mom's old apartment, sitting in storage for 2 years after I was born) but other than that and paint... nothing happened. Both rooms are in dire need of a full renovation. The bathroom is likely going to get it after the new whole-house heating system is installed (currently every apartment has it's own gas boiler).

Our combi boiler (a wall-mount unit that is both a central heating boiler and tankless water heater) is as old as the whole bathroom, late 1977 vintage. The manufacturer suggested a likely life span of 15 years for that model. For the last three years we have been losing water from the system and had to refill every couple of weeks sometimes. Our regular plumbing/heating guy who checks the unit every year told us to live with it or get a new boiler. There is one company that bought all spare parts when Junkers dropped support for those dinosaurs. We called them and he confirmed my suspicions - broken expansion vessel - and claimed the boiler wasn't worth the repair.

We are talking about a closed, pump fed pressurised system here. When heated, water expands (like pretty much every other substance) and the presure in the system increases. Since water cannot be compressed (like air in a tire) a rise in water pressure eventually leads to exploding pipes, which is why a pressure relief valve is fitted to every system as an emergency relief feature. In normal operation, the pressure needs to be relieved differently or you ned to refill periodically. This is what the diaphragm expansion vessel is made for. A steel calinder with a rubber membrane, one part filled with water, the other with nitrogen or air. The gas compresses as the water gains pressure and balances the whole system. If the membrane tears from age, the vessel is shot.

A freind suggested simply installing an external expansion vessel. After some research I decided he was right. €40 in materials later and a day of help from my uncle the plumber, the system was up and running again. While he refileld the system he also found a loose connection that dripped. After he retightened that slip nut, the system held pressure perfectly. Now why were two service technicians incapable of finding and stopping that leak?!?
The red vessel next to our boiler (above the bath tub) looks borderline ugly, but it works again! I certainly value heat over looks and even my mom, the main style watchdog in the family, approved!

However, our sink that had already been a little loose for a while must have taken a beating during the process and now threatened to fall off the wall. At the time of one of the many plumbing leak repairs (we some lead cold water pipes until 1998) the plumber had to move the sink (which is bolted to the brick wall) up by 10cm to avoid drilling into his new pipe. He drilled several holes and finally claimed "now it should work".

When I took down the sink (close both shutoff valves, disconnect braided hoses from valves to sink, get someone to hold the sink while you're crouching underneath and undo the nuts, pull the sink off the walll including the trap which is only pushed into the drain pipe with a rubber o-ring, thanks heaven not soldered into a lead drain any more) it became soon clear why it hadn't really worked.

A) When my dad redid that bathroom he wanted it done fast and cheap. Thus the plumber friend of his, named Gustl (famous for his dodgy plumbing by now, like solder joints that held merely by chance and fell apart as soon as the pipe was touched or reversing the hot and cold at the boiler, with the result that the radiators took ages to get warm) tiled over the old white tiles. Where they were removed for plumbing work the void was simply filled up with plaster to the surface of the old tiles, eventually resulting in an almost 5cm (2") thick layer of plaster.

The bolts that hold the sink were 150mm (ca. 6") long, half machine thread and half wood screw. That means 5 out of the 7.5 cm supposed to go into the wall were in plaster rather than brick. Very very soft plaster, modern lime-cement mix with a very high perlite content, which is even softer than the cheapest old plaster. You can crumble it away with your fingers.

Furthermore, drilling 14mm diameter holes into the brick and inserting large screws caused both bricks to crack, weakening the hold of the bolts even more. Normally this is prevented by the bond of the bricks and the mortar joints that evenly distribute the pressure of the screw across the wall but in this case there was a deep hole below from some old plumbing, putting the whole stress on one brick.

This picture shows you the whole sorry mess with most of the plaster removed but the old bolts still in place. Lots of unused old plumbing as well as some new. The white and red stuff is plastic and foam pipe insulation, serving two purposes. First of all it makes sense to keep your hot water lines from heating your walls, then around cold water lines moisture can condensate in summer and cause trouble, and lastly copper needs to be protected from caustic mortar and plaster. The red section is from when we moved the hot water supply to the kitchen (originally exposed on the walls below the ceiling) under the hallway floor. That was in 2004 and we never replaced the plaster and tile to the right of the sink (well, that's behind the washing machine, so who cares...). The two yellow objects at the bottom are the taped shutoff valves, the thing with an old sock is the drain (it stank badly without the trap).

My first attempt was to reseat the bolts by using new plastic wall plugs and repairing the cracked brick, supporting it with plenty of mortar in the hole below. The I squeezed plenty of spackle into the holes, inserted the plugs, plastered the whole section (not bothering with tiles since this is again a temporary job and hidden below the sink/behind the washing machine) waited overnight and re-installed the bolts. Since most of the bolts ended up embedded in plaster I left holes around them and only closed up everything when the bolts were fully screwed into the wall.
First coat of plaster: I used lime plaster because we had a bucket of lime putty and a bag of sand left over from the WC project. When I ran out of lime plaster on the right, I used up a leftover bag of perlite plaster. Finish coat with one hole already filled in:

Once this had cured enough I tried to install the sink, only to find that the bolts were too deep into the wall or too short, depending on perspective. Clearly, a new plan was necessary. First I asked around for 200mm long bolts. "Yeah, they make them, but we don't have any in stock!" was the reply of one of our local plumbers. OTOH he gave me two shiny new 150mm ones for free. Off to the big box store. "Wall bolts M14? We have 80mm and 100mm!" Yeouch! 150mm are too short and they try to sell me 80mm ones? Off to the painting supplies, grab a box of quick-setting concrete (useable for 3 minutes once mixed with water according to the instructions). Pull out old plugs using pliers and an old screwdriver, clean out holes and insert new plugs, flush with the wall surface. Fill holes with concrete rather than plaster. Wait an hour just to make sure. Insert bolts and hang sink. Done!

Just need to caulk where it meets the wall, with the old tiles being laid so bumpy there is a sizeable gap there.

After that experience I don't want to touch any plumbing again soon, at least not without wearing wellingtons (rubber boots)! The serious advantage of electricity (my learned trade) over water and gas is that it absolutely won't come shooting out of the wire and puddle on the floor!

Garden shed

2010-02-14T14:48:00.002+01:00

Long ago, I mentioned fixing up the garden shed to make it liveable during the summer. Electricity was a must, so we wired the shack. It looks a bit industrial, but since there is no heat out there it needs to be outdoor rated (fear of condensating air).
Digging for the feeder from the main house was pretty bad, the ground is hard and incredibly full of roots as well as two sewer pipes that forced us to dig deeper than we had intended to. We did get it done in one afternoon though.
Once we had juice and light out there we could start working on fixing the building up. As I mentioned before, when we bought the house there was a big hole in the roof (as I type this, the hole kinda reminds me of the story I read on some house blog or forum of previous owners who were crackheads and managed to get the attention of the police by launching their kitchen stove through the roof, even though this hole was definitely caused by wet rot and not flying objects) which we had fixed ASAP, but the floor underneath had suffered too.
There were several seriously rigged bookshelves, one of which is barely visible at the right hand edge of this picture. When we first got in there I supported it with a stack of paperbacks, but it was clear it had to go. So we piled the books into boxes, ripped down the shelves (no tools required, 5 minutes of work) and cleared out the whole shack, again piling up lots of trash. The shack odd shaped due to the long and narrow garden, 2m long and 4m wide, built along the fence. The fence is actually a tall brick wall which also served as one exterior wall of the shack. This contraption had been built in ca. 1990 using the leftovers of a garden shed, 2/3 of which were just open and 1/3 with a wooden plank rear wall (between the planks and the brick wall there was a 10cm gap). The exposed section of the brick wall had been covered with rigid foam insulation and wallpapered, with paper looking like knotty pine paneling. The remaining third had the sheets of insulation just stuffed in between the brick and plank wall and the plank wall covered with tar paper and pine paneling. This was below the roof leak so we decided to remove the whole shebang. A great idea! Everything was rotted and there were thousands of ants living in the planks and the foam sheets! The planks actually had the soft part of the grain eaten out!

The more we worked on the building, the more clear it became how poor the construction was. There are no foundations at all, the main timbers are rotting away where they met the ground. The floor, some of which is holding the walls up suffered severe and active woodworm damage and will need complete replacement at some point. Furthermore, thre are pretty big holes in all walls (old cat door, poor framing,...). Permanently fixing this is going to be like rebuilding! In the end, my uncle never came to help, so we didn't really need to fix this up too much, but we did replace the worst section of the floor with leftover old boards, so it is in theory useable. Anything beyond is a project for the distant future when the main house is done.

Damp course

2010-02-14T00:27:00.002+01:00

After a lot of discussions and almost hiring a different company, we had a small Vienna based company install a horizontal damp course in all our walls. The process is simple - they have a regular electric chainsaw, fitted with a diamond-coated chain to make it possible to cut mortar (and to some extent brick) which they take to the wall. They cut small sections, up to 1m in width, depending on the shape of the mortar joints. Ours was crumbling, so they cut much smaller sections. Then they push in a sandwich damp course consisting of two layers extra-strong tar paper and a layer of plastic in the middle. To keep the house from settling, they first insert plastic wedges and then fill the cut with mortar. Again, the filling method is very plain. They took an old plaster pump (yeah, such beasts exist - fill the funnel with plaster, point the nozzle and shoot plaster at the wall. Just need to trowel it smooth) and created their own nozzle for narrow cuts by hammering a piece of copper plumbing pipe flat.

They estimated a week, but in the end it took them three weeks to complete the work. Where bricks simply fell out or where they couldn't find straight joints to work with they had to do real masonry repair, which took even more time. However, the main work is charged by wall cross section and not based on time, so the price didn't change. Now we're mainly waiting for the walls to dry out - we were told to wait around 6 months before plaster, which means late spring.

Here you can see a progress shot:

Mostly they cut underneath the floor, that means we don't have to worry about damp-proofing the wall underneath the damp course. The floor membrane will simply extend up to the damp course. The floors are going to be a very low-cement concrete mix, extremely thin (3cm) just to give a clean surface to work with. It is going to be covered with overlapped tar paper. To prevent creating a bath tub which keeps water forever in case of a pipe leak or other event, we intend to build a small gravel-filled sump in one corner of each room covered with felt (to keep the sump from getting filled with silt). The original plans didn't include that, the damp course company guy said overlapping and not connecting the tar paper would be enough, but I'm not convinced.

On top of this we're going to pour the screed in the bathroom and WC and do a traditional wood floor in all other rooms. That means a dirt or slag infill with sleepers and a floating wood floor. Not having it rest directly on the concrete has two major advantages: it makes the floor slightly softer to walk on and it allows us to be less anal about the height of the concrete.

The guys were pretty good at their job, and they only caused me one minor fit of screaming (well, actually not even that, but it could have become one). They just cut two big honking pieces out of the non-rotted section of our plank floor!
The darker piece is the top, the light wood is the bottom of the second piece, including the sleepers the floor used to rest on. I mean we needed to pull this up anyway, but taking a chainsaw to the floor without asking?!?

So far we didn't get any noticeable cracks, but I think they won't be so bad anyway with all the plaster gutted.

PS: I started playing with the HTML code for the embedded pictures a little, we'll see if it worked. I don't have the slightest knowledge of HTML, but I tried to reduce the size of the embedded pics to thumbnails you can click on.

Still alive

2010-02-12T17:03:00.003+01:00

Yes, I am still alive... even though I didn't post for ages.

First a reference to the last post. Actually we don't have much more than 10m2 (about 100 sq. ft.) of flooring, but with what we alredy had and what we might be able to get it'll hopefully enough - or maybe we can do the whole back hall with it. Once we get to it.

Plumber #2 came for an estimate in mid June. In October he sent an e-mail with a few questions which I answered promptly. So far we didn't get anything.

Around the same time, plumber #3 came in for an estimate. In mid-December he called and asked if we needed the work to get done before Christmas which we declined. Nothing from him so far either. We mostly liked that guy, so we still might take his services.

The two biggest changes so far: all floors are out (with the exception of half the big room) and we had the walls cut through (which more or less required removing the floors).

Here is the full fun story:
After endless discussions we got an estimate from the only company in the whole half of the country that hammers corrugated stainless steel sheets into the wall. Most people claimed that this method is perfect for adobe houses and all others will crack the walls. When we had already told them to do the work (only on the phone though, so no problem canceling that) several people told us to call another guy, including my architect uncle, who had him do his own house and is happy with the results some 10 years later. So we did and made an appointment. The guy was very nice (and nowhere near as pushy and sleek as the stainless steel guy) and really seemed to know what he was talking about. He mentioned the obvious fact, that corrugated steel sheets won't really line up and form a proper seal in the corners... and his offer was better than the first one.

All rooms renovated by the previous owners (i.e. back hall, bathroom and small room) as well as the front hall had solid poured concrete floors, tiled in the bathroom, covered with loose roll vinyl in the back hall and small room and bare in the front hall. Apparently the front hall concrete was intended to be a finished floor (*gag*) and pretty high up, no way of putting a finished floor on top, except vinyl or carpet (in fact it was even considerably higher than the floor in both the kitchen and big room). The back hall had a 2" step in the middle of the floor to accomodate an inwards opening door in an otherwise higher floor - talk about a tripping hazard! The back room floor was even worse - almost 6" higher than the higher part of the back hall floor. So all those floors had to go.

The wall between bathroom and back hall was built onto said concrete floor and had to go, with the additional advantage of giving us the chance to enlarge the bathroom by about 6", giving us the chance of rotating the tub 90 degrees and build a separate water closet around the current toilet.
Out came the sledge hammer. The wall put up a serious fight. It had been built in 1976 to split a bedroom into back hall and bathroom and consisted of some odd breeze block, hollow concrete blocks mixed with small brick splinters for volume. Taking it down took us the better part of two days, lots of cursing and a bruised and scratched elbow on my side (wanted to take a big blow with the hammer, moved my arm backwards and hit the wall), nothing serious though.
We ended up with some galvanized plumbing hanging in mid-air *g*

Then we proceeded to gut the plaster as long as we had the floors, they did make cleanup a lot easier. In the small room we gave up - the better part of 3 walls is cement plaster (aka concrete) reinforced with chicken wire. Purists are going to scream here, but let me calm you down! This house is 130 years old (parts perhaps older) and has been altered and renovated so many times it's impossible to tell which parts are original and which aren't. Since creeping damp has always been an issue, plaster was repaired and replaced continuously throughout the house's history and is a mishmash of at least 4 different types.
- mud plaster. Only remains in modest patches in bad shape with the exception of the front hall, where we kept it on 3 walls. The way it was originally done.
- bad lime plaster, crumbling away, perhaps 1930s.
- very hard lime plaster, which unfortunately didn't adhere to the adobe brick and came tumbling down in huge sheets.
- cement plaster, which needs to go since the walls are badly damaged behind and need to dry out.
That means we gutted all plaster with the exception of the two long walls of the front hall (and the tiny one above the back door) and the small room, where we just didn't get off our lazy butts so far to remove the concrete completely.

Then we started to attack the concrete. The most common way to build a floor here (in modern construction) is to pour some kind of concrete, either a slab or a load-bearing ceiling, with insulation, perhaps radiant underfloor heating and another layer of conrete, the screed on top. The screed is usually 5-7.5cm (2-3") thick and never reinforced. The finish floors are laid on top of the screed - tile, carpet or vinyl usually glued, engineered hardwood or laminate installed floating. In older houses with strip foundations, the screed is usually poured directly on the dirt between the load-bearing walls during extensive renovations and that's what we had.

In order to be able to get rid of the debris in wheelbarrows we started with the small room. The screed was unusually thick (roughly 10-15cm/4-6") and hard. Underneath we found plastic, mineral wool insulation (stupid, the soft battens can't take the weight of the concrete) and what we thought dirt. Towards the window, the screed got thicker and thicker, but finally we had it out. Then we wrapped the insulation into the plastic (did you ever work wearing rubber gloves in 30+C weather? The gloves just fill up with sweat!) and hauled it out into the yard. At that time we realized our mistake. The stuff underneath wasn't dirt but tar paper. And underneath the tar paper we found... another screed! This one was worse - while some spots were barely more than 1cm thick and crumbled away, others went up to 20cm (8")! At that point we imitated the PO's handyman: "Hey, we got a hole! Gimme concrete!"
Then we had a gaping hole underneath the door.

(This was the last g(l)ory shot before we trashed that 1976 hollow core door with aluminum hardware and rusted steel frame).

Removing the water heater in the bathroom we discovered that the bathroom floor sloped in every direction, but NOT towards the floor drain. Ingenious! The bathroom/hall floor went considerably faster, mainly because there was loose sand underneath, which made it much easier to crack the screed. Unfortunately, the screws holding the toilet bowl were completely rusted and didn't move- Our careful attempt to separate it from the floor broke it. Norally I wouldn't mind, a new bowl is close to free, but this one was extra tall, which is €129 new. Oh well...

Because the front hall floor was 2cm higher than all other floors (2cm is the standard thickness for most older flooring) I suspected concrete over an old floor. That wasn't the case though - ca. 10cm screed over dirt. Extremely awful to remove. To make matters worse, I had a cold when we did it and every blow of the hammer transferred directly to my head. Not good. My brothers and my dad (after all, it's a family house and not mine) did a lot of work too though.

For the wall cutting process we needed to remove 2 boards of the kitchen floor, a beautiful wide plank pine floor, one of the main selling points. Unfortunately we find it extremly worn (some of the boards are down to half their thickness) so we remove it altogether and hope to replace it with a salvaged floor. The sleepers in the dirt underneath (we expected 5x8cm/2x3") were a whopping 10x10cm (4x4) but some were soft like bath sponges. Wet rot.

Then we proceeded to remove some floor boards in the big room (less worn wide plank floor). Unfortunately it was completely rotted and woodworm-eaten near the front, so we removed more and more. ABout half the room appears to be shot.

I'm going to dedicate a few more catch-up posts on wall cutting (in full detail), wiring and other small items over the next few days.

Score!

2009-05-13T19:33:00.003+02:00

Two weeks ago I had a major score salvage-wise. I found about 150 square feet (in real numbers probably 13 sq. m. unless we need to throw away too much laying it) of 1" thick, 12" pine plank flooring, planed on three sides. Originally (i.e. before the morons ripped it out) the boards were glued up to 24" wide planks, almost 15' (4.9m) long! They've been cut into two pieces though. The boards are somewhat worn and at some point they nailed an oak herringbone floor on top of it - using ring shank nails... yuck! That means if we do use the wood we have to flip the boards as the tops are too far gone (ring shank nails seriously crack the wood once you pull them out). The boards are supposed to go into the back hall.

On Monday we took a pile of stuff out to the farm as the plumber was supposed to to some work on the heat system at my grandmother's place and we wanted to check his work. The pine stumps are gone (Mr. Martin managed to line up a backhoe operator who happened to be around and once the stumps were dug out attacked them with a chainsaw).

I started wiring the garden shed, but didn't get done. The worst thing is going to be digging for the feeder. Inside, there's not much going on - a light, a switch and two outlets, everything just screwed to the surface. I guess I'm more than half done and that was just about half an hour of work.

Yesterday my brother and me spent some time digging through the plumber's bid for the central heat. Our best guess: if we do ourselves what we can we get the price down to about half the bid. Besides, he seriously messed up some things - we certainly don't want a radiator that takes up more than half of the exterior wall in the small room for example! Even if we do everything ourselves we need to hire the gas stuff to a licensed plumber, the chimney relining (maybe we can do that ourselves too but not sure, nasty work at any rate and the chimney might need to be rebuilt up in the attic as it curves now) and the boiler installation (a licensed plumber needs to register the new boiler with the gas company).

The kitchen ceiling is likely coming down, we want to have a plaster ceiling there.

Progress Update

2009-04-23T22:06:00.001+02:00

Over the Easter holidays we didn't get done as much as we wanted (does that sound familiar to my fellow house bloggers?) but still a lot - 7 pine trees have been cut down, the remaining plaster in the big room and kitchen removed, the kitchen sink is out (the water I feared last time actually came out of the fixture rather than the pipes in the wall), gas meter box installed. I also removed any wiring that won't be kept and threatened to fall off the walls with the plaster removed. Good choice - it seems the entire place was wired by morons. I particularly liked the screw driven through the conduit feeding one ceiling light...

The yard looks great without the pines!

Gotta love the precious brickwork around the chimney... this will have to be rebuilt completely I guess.

Most important project now: fix up the garden house enough to make it liveable for summer, i.e. fix the rotted section of the floor (where the roof had collapsed), clean it up a little and install some permanent wiring instead of the extension cord running along the fence. My uncle offered to visit us and help in summer, and he needs somewhere to sleep.

The plumber finally sent an estimate for the central heat... let's just say I see some quality time with pipe cutters, soldering torch and lots of copper pipe in our future.
By the way, the old plumbing is galvanized... heck, I mean the bathroom was installed in 1976 or 77! Who still used galvanized pipe then? Our bathroom in Vienna was plumbed with copper in 1962! So much for reusing what we can... accounts to nothing. I positively hate messing around with galvanized pipe and thour water is extremely hard... so likely they're almost full anyway.

Oh and another nice thing... when we arrived the front hall had flooded. Why? Well, even though pines are evergreen they do drop needles once in a while. If there's a roof underneath the tree, the needles will eventually end up in the gutters where they will sit until they're removed. If they aren't they'll eventually compost, which they did. Once my dad cleaned out the gutters, they were no longer clogged - instead they leaked like a sieve. Completely rusted out. That's fine, nicely matches the PVC gutters in the rear which slope in a nice wobbly pattern from rafter to rafter...

Leftovers of the original project...

2009-04-03T22:03:00.003+02:00

Of course, the pigsty didn't magically disappear from our property...
Last summer we removed the brick stalls (using a 10 pound sledge hammer), the entire concrete floor and most of the plaster. One wall was declared good enough to leave plastered. The ceiling is still shot and the roof still got holes, that's how the place has been sitting ever since. We might attempt to combat the rising damp issue enough to turn it into a work shop, but getting the new house liveable is higher up on the priority list right now. We're also considering putting in decent windows and a decent door in the long run, but that's it. No second floor, no stairway, nothing.

Small update

2009-03-21T14:02:00.003+01:00

In early February we managed to clean out a lot of stuff. The kitchen is empty except for the sink cabinet and one base cabinet (the sink is still connected to the plumbing and even though the water has been turned off years ago I got a stubborn drip trying to disconnect it, so we left in place for the time being). The remaining furniture has been stored up in the attic. The base cabinet we left was too heavy to get up the stairs, we'll have to store it somewhere at ground level.

The front room is empty too, except for a side board we're looking to find a new home for.

We then proceeded to remove all plaster in the front room and most of the kitchen (one wall can stay up). The kitchen is done, the front room about 2/3 done. Some of the plaster in the back room, back hall and bathroom will have to be removed too, but not as much.

I finally drew up a floor plan in Autocad, here's a quick screen shot:

I already drew the new bathroom design (red). Grey is old construction. The pink structure is our idea of an enclosed porch or something like that.

Hopefully by the next time we go there (Easter) the trash pile will be gone, as are the 4 huge pine trees threatening our roof, the neighbor's roof and turning our back yard into something like a cave. If we're lucky we even already have the gas service pipe in.

I already replaced the 100mA main GFI breaker (RCD) with a new 100mA one in order to get up to modern code (besides, they're basic life insurance and to some extent fire protection). A lot of wiring will have to be redone though... the original wiring (the whole village did not get electricity until 1949) is in horrible shape, the cloth and rubber covered wires are actually bare copper by now. Originally there was one(!) circuit with the meter and fuse outside in the yard, when the new panel and meter were installed in 1976 the morons left the original feed in place and live, that means there was a hot wire dangling around somewhere in the back yard. The original cloth wiring is now restricted to the kitchen and the outbuildings, but that's more than enough.

The big room won't be rewired, we will only change the height of the sockets (they're too close to the floor for my liking) and add a few. My brother and me already redid the front hall, the only thing we need to add is a permanent 3 way switch (originally the only light switch was like 3m from the front door), we only stapled wire to the wall so far, which is legal but extremely ugly. As we don't know the exact size of the future front door yet we didn't want t put the final switch box in yet.
At least one outlet would be nice too. I need to find an unobtrusive location though, as we want to keep the ancient look of the hall.

The back hall and bathroom wiring are 1970s but a complete mess. Wires coming out of the middle of nowhere and going nowhere, the entire thing is fed off the ancient cloth wiring in the kitchen,... some serious hack work. Oh, and again, one single light switch next to the kitchen door, none at the other end.

Small room: don't know yet what we can keep... one outlet definitely has to be rewired, it's just connected to an extension cord buried in plaster.

The outbuildings have a light and a switch each, nothing else and need a full rewire.
A lot of the inside wiring is routed on the outside of the exterior walls in order to avoid going through the kitchen which is a bad idea - the junction and pull boxes aren't sealed against the weather, so we constantly have a cold wind and lots of dirt blowing through the entire conduit system.

If it's possible technically and legally we don't want to buy a new boiler but take the boiler out of our Vienna apartment which is only 6 years old but will be rendered obsolete by the new whole house pellets boiler next year. If we take this one we'll definitely need a chimney relined.

We still haven't decided what to do about the rising damp - Mr. Martin recommends to excavate inside and outside and install vertical insulation to keep moisture from seeping into the foundations sideway. I don't feel too confident this will suffice. I talked to a guy who had the stainless corrugated steel thing done at his place and strongly advised against it - said it ruined the walls. So now we're fretting whether to have the walls cut open or just let Mr. Martin do his work. The latter would allow us to keep the original wood floors in the kitchen and big room.

The kitchen ceiling will definitely stay up, the paneling has been installed to conceal the fact that one beam has been replaced. We asked a few experts about the insect damage and were told not to worry.

We still need to get the furniture out of the two halls and the small room though. Aah, lots of work...

2009-01-24T12:25:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the long break in posting! The summer was a row of endless negotiations I didn't want to jinx before anything was completed. Then I quit my job and took up history at the university, lovely decision but lots of work. Anyway. back to the blog.

When we got the estimates for the pigsty project we immediately tried to find alternatives (cheaper ones of course). The first that occurred to us was buying the house next door and fixing it up. Seeing the extent of damage though (combined with the absolutely insane price tag) we figured out it would be even more expensive than the pigsty because it would be completely new construction and larger too.

When we were out in the country after Christmas the house still hadn't sold and the price had been dropped to €39500 - a joke for a ruin on a miniature lot. As you'd say in Austria a towel-sized lot. For comparisons sake: in the same village there's another similarly bad house for sale, though with a lot 10 times the size of our neighbor's - for an asking price of 53 000. So 45k for that tiny lot is insane (even the 53k are a bit expensive given the fact that the house is a ruin).

House next door project dead. But: two other houses across the street were vacant at that time. One is pretty ugly, modern stucco exterior, ugly new windows, kitschy wood fence. The other one though... exterior had a 1930s look to it (at least the front) but there is a plaque stating a construction date of 1879. So we decided to have a look at it... and fell in love immediately! All rooms(!) but the hallway and the kitchen have open beam ceilings, living room and kitchen still have the original wide plank floors, deeply worn by 130 years of foot traffic...

The roof is early 1990s tile, very solid. Electrical service has been redone in 1976 and is more than enough for us. Bathroom needed to be redone, but was there!

It's fairly small (just around 60 square m, 1 big room, 1 small, kitchen, 2 hallways and bathroom) but there are 2 attached very solid outbuildings that can be used as storage, shop, whatever and there's a cute garden house. The yard is small, but not tiny which is great - enough space but not much maintenance. It's completely overgrown though - in summer there were stinging nettles and other shrubs taller than myself!

Now for the bad part though... suddenly when the nephew of the old lady who had lived there (and passed away without a will) wanted to take possession his brother showed up and claimed rights on the house... followed by about half a year of debating.

Anyway, in late fall my parents bought the house for a pretty fair price!

So now we are the proud owners of this beauty:

It needs a lot of work, but it'll turn out great I'm sure!

The previous owners left almost everything in the house, so the first thing we did was sift through layers and layers of stuff. The old lady was some kind of shopping maniac, we found lots of clothes with the price tag still on - like pullovers for a price that would buy a guy like me 10 of them. We immediately made three piles: keep, donate, trash. The keep pile was the smallest - thanks heaven. We also threw out lots of furniture, the old lady was almost blind during her last few years but didn't really accept help, besides they had several dogs. Long story short: the place was and still is DIRTY, so anything neither valuable nor easy to clean was piled up outside to await trash pickup.

Don't worry, the panel doors and ladder won't go, the guy who'll pick it up knows that! On the contrary, these doors will go in during the renovation!

We also dug our way through hundreds of books.

Of course as with any old house related project there will be more work than originally anticipated of course.

Large sections of plaster are falling (not original, porrly redone in the 1970s), even the fairly recent 1970s wiring is in horrible shape, not to mention the frayed original 1950s wiring. Both chimneys need substantial repairs (one was already rebuilt from the roof line up by our trusty handyman Mr. Martin). Originally we wanted to line one of the chimneys for use with a gas boiler, but unfortunately it curves twice and we don't have flexible liners here... we'll see. Either we open the entire curved section, line and rebrick or we keep it for the wood/coal stove and vent the gas boiler directly.

The garden house roof has been completely replaced due to failing framing and tiles (it had been built in 1990 using the structure of an old shed which already looked pretty wonky in 1976 pictures).

The pigs stalls roof will need replacement too, but I hope that'll be a DIY job.

Even though the house looked pretty dry when we first saw it removing furniture showed mold and rising damp issues, so we decided to remove all floors and have the walls sliced through horizontally to get a moisture barrier. We really hope to save the beautiful old plank floors!

The bathroom in all 1970s glory is a gut job.

We'll also split it up into a bathroom and water closet.

In the kitchen we started taking down 1930s solid wood paneling covering the original ceiling. It's a horribly dirty job - the original reason why the paneling was put up: dirt was sifting through gaps of the original wood ceiling. Now the POs had concrete poured up in the attic and insulation put up, so no more dirt. However, the dirt of 7 or 8 decades is now resting on the paneling...
The original ceiling seems to be in rough shape, I've seen some insect damage to the beams... we'll see. There are 4 ways to go depending on the condition of the ceiling and our likings: replace entire ceiling with new reinforced brick and plaster, put back paneling, expose original ceiling or put up plaster and lath.
The only downside to removing the old paneling: way back when the house first got electrictiy they ran exposed conduit to the light aand across the ceiling to an outlet next to the window. The unpainted metal conduit with all its patina looks really cool, but we won't be able to replicate that look unless we try to put up the original again.

We also had the EVN electricity and gas guys out to remove the night rate electricity meter (for the hot water tank - I mean how silly is that? You can only get hot water 10PM to 6AM, if you run out during the day all you can do is wait or take cold showers!) and plan the new gas service. Originally the house had been heated using coal stoves, but around 1996 the old lady had electric heat installed. Result: a yearly 4000 Euro electricity bill! That's a sum that would make most people choke and run screaming... besides... those beasts don't really get the house warm! Running them at full blast all the time gets the house to a "toasty" 12 degrees Celsius. The coal stoves are great though - we fired up the smaller one and it got one room from "just above freezing" rto "work in t-shirt condition" within two hours. We even have coal left so we don't need to buy anything. The gas guy marked where the gas meter is supposed to go and left us a flush mount gas meter box. Once it's installed they'll run the service pipe and we can have a plumber run the interior gas lines. We didn't feel like going outside and taking a rotary hammer to the facade to install the gas meter box in 10 degrees below freezing weather.

In less than two weeks weÄll go there again and continue working on the house! *yay*

Until then a picture to tell how dirty the place is... this used to be the hallway ceiling light and just for pointing out the contrast I only cleaned half of it and snapped a picture.
Does it surprise you to hear it didn't give much light?

Permit!

2008-07-21T18:31:00.002+02:00

The hearing actually went pretty smooth, except for a few glitches. The expert didn't like the attic stairs and requested them to be either full sized stairs (for which we don't have the space and never had) or a pull-down ladder (ugly). Oh well... does save some space not to have stairs. Fire code doesn't allow storing things in an unfinished attic anyway, so it's just the ugly look of the ladder.

He also asked for inspection reports on the entire electrical system, so nothing creative there either. *blech*

Other than that we'll just have to wait until the legal stuff with the two properties is resolved and then we get the written permit.

The ruin next door didn't sell so far - not that I'm suprised...

As far as the windows go... they were a typical old-house project. I only managed to do one of the two since I had to fix a considerable amount of rot. I love the green though!

Bureaucracy

2008-07-05T21:57:00.002+02:00

Talk about bureaucracy in every country... upon doing all the preliminary paperwork for the permit we found out our lot legally consists of three(!) lots, the smallest one being a whopping 15 square meter(!) front yard (a tiny 3x5m strip). Now after we submitted the plans the town suddenly told us we couldn't have our building protrude over a property line (even if both lots had the same owner) and we needed to officially join the lots. Going to cost roughly €50 and a stamp on the letter... so not that bad.

We also got the official invite to the hearing, it's going to be next Wednesday. We got a pretty good chuckle reading the invite... on the back it lists all the recipients, obviously including everyone who could possibly be related to any construction project... like neighbors (alright, that was to be expected), construction official from Korneuburg (not a surprise either), the gas company, power company (a bit weirder as we stated everything would be connected to the existing service), chimney sweep (we don't have a chimney in our plans), local MD(!) for sanitary affairs, Telekom Austria (phone) and last but most funny ÖBB line management... ÖBB is the federal railway company, and the next railway line is a healthy 10km away... that one left us scratching our heads.

I'm going to travel out next Tuesday and hopefully I'll get to strip, repair and repaint the two front windows (main house). The paint is flaking badly and some of the wood already feels soft in small spots. Note to self: never use acrylic paint outdoors. I bought marine grade oil paint. (we know the PO used acrylic paint because we found the empty cans).

Plans submitted!

2008-05-27T12:00:00.002+02:00

Today on the way to work I threw the plans into the mail box!

We wanted to submit them weeks ago, but they were rejected for some minor details. We had the architect add that and today I dropped them off. Now it's all waiting until July 8th, the date of the construction hearing.

We got a few estimates and realized wood ceilings would be way too expensive (almost 4 times as much as brick ceilings). Based on the new, more detailed figures I got the new price tag of € 44800. Yuck! That's $68000... not including insulation and exterior stucco.

The house next door project is dead... the walls are incredibly moist (moldy 3 feet up from the floor) and the roof framing is fairly close to collapsing. One main support is already missing a 1 foot section and several tie beams are like styrofoam. Based on local property values the lot would be wort maybe €1500, the house (if it were in perfect condition which it clearly isn't) €8000. Their asking price: €45000.

Besides, it has been butchered badly, the only(!) original items left are: the shot brick walls, the shot roof framing and one interior door. So even I would advise to bulldoze it.

Wish me luck for the hearing!

Tale of a house

2008-05-05T12:29:00.002+02:00

Like most old house people I'm always nosy when it comes to checking out other people's old houses. Recently I had the chance to take a brief look at a random old house.

Outside I had a hard time dating it. Two of the sides visible from the street are plain modern stucco, one is fiber cement. The roof is corrugated asbestos cement, something incredibly popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Roof trim: 1970s or 80s semi-rustic rural tasteless. Windows: vinyl double pane. Based on the fiber cement I'd have put the construction date in the 1950-1965 period, with extensive remodeling in the 70s or 80s. Facing the yard there is a weird bumpout slapped to the side, with a narrow front door and a window.

The only thing that pointed towards a much earlier date were the unusually small windows. Narrow windows went out of favor prior to WWII, exceptionally low ones prior to 1900. These seem to be both. 1960s and especially 70s construction loved overly wide if not huge, low windows. Only recently the old style small windows, usually with divided lights became popular again.

Two wweks ago I got in for the first time... even with all exterior doors open the first thing that struck me was the thick cigarette smoke smell. The bumpout is some kind of a hallway, vinyl flooring, windows (three windows and three doors in a room no more than 10 square meters or 100 square feet) and a somewhat decent wood ceiling. A doorway led into the kitchen. 1970s knotty pine paneling, a tiny window that hasn't been cleaned for decades and a hedge blocking all sunlight. A huge brown and black wood stove (1970s too) also designed to work as a central heating boiler. To the left I could see a real old door with two vertical panels, 4 glass panes and a rim lock. That confirmed my suspicions based on the window size - the house is 1820-1870 rather than 100 years younger. It leads to the only bedroom. Blue-grey and pink wall to wall carpet, beige-ish wall paper, even covering the door trim. Every available square cm of floor crammed full with stuff. Ceiling painted baby blue, paint coming off in chips the size of my flat hand.

I quickly made a 180 degree turn and got out of there... veen though it was definitely the cleanest room I had seen so far. To the right of the kitchen there is an indefineable room with a few kitchen cabinets, nicotine stained dark grey walls and a wall mount hot water tank.
In the back there is a double kitchen sink that drains directly onto the ugly tile floor. Next to it someone partitioned off a tiny cubicle barely holding a toilet bowl across the door and a small shower pan.
On to the last room... a20cm step up onto the laminate flooring into a crammed living room (sort of). I don't remember much of it... the back wall covered with the aforementioned pine, obvious moisture damage on one interior wall.

The attic is only accessible over a rickety ladder (precisely a stepladder leaning onto the wall) and shows evidence of a fire in one spot.

In the yard there is a so-called shed that reminds me ofthe slums in Calcutta or anywhere... it seems to be slapped together with whatever leftovers someone had at hand.

The owner asked me to help her carry out two pieces of furniture... the first thing I noticed were my hands stuck to them due to all the filth, followed immediately afterwards by a heavy cat smell.

After I had the stuff out I made a polite excuse and ran to wash my hands... yuck!

Can you say dirty? The owner and her sister chain smoked during the entire time I helped them...

Regarding our pigsty plans: we'll be out in the country next weekend, until then I have to add the hundred little last minute details (by hand since the plans are already signed by the architect) and put them into some kind of folder to submit them. We need to submit three copies each in a separate folder, one for the owner of the property (my grandmother), one for the permit applicant (my grandmother) and one for the council... bureaucracy is just the same all over the world. Actually I think Austria is one of the less bad countries after reading horror stories about France and Belgium.

We're also still waiting for the contractor bids... should have been there weeks ago.

Status report

2008-04-12T21:15:00.002+02:00

Yesterday we had a meeting with contractos and suppliers to get bids for the construction work. Things went ok, but I have the strong feeling we need to be extra careful and sometimes act very stern in order not to be run over by the contractors. They have a strong tendency to do things they way they're used to and that's not necessarily the way I want them done.

The plans are finalized, but the April permit hearing is full, so we have more time to submit them.

On the other hand the old lady next door just died and her house is for sale. Now we've got two options... but right now we're leaning towards continuing the pigsty project since the house next door reeks of a gut job which wouldn't be significantly less expensive.

We (or mostly my dad) also got everything we want to keep out of the pigsty, a neighbor will drive by on his tractor next week and haul everything else to the bulk waste pickup. He's also going to attack the partition walls and concrete slab with a sledge hammer - another neighbor said he likes that kind of work *ggg*

I got a splitting headache after lugging out the refrigerator (something that didn't really suprise me after two weeks of late night overtime at work) so courtesy for cleanup goes to my dad.

In the process he also found a door with a more or less working rim lock. The door itself is a plain shed door and absolutely rotted, but it's got all original hardware.

During the next couple of weeks posting will be scarce since we'll be waiting for bids and approval of the plans.

Visitors

2008-04-07T21:10:00.003+02:00

As you might have suspected I've got a tracker running in order to see who visits my blog. I'd say more than 90% of my visitors are from the US and get here via the OHW forums (www.oldhouseweb.com). However, I do get the occasional surprise visitor... once I had somebody from Korea googling for clay plaster! Must've been a very patient person, because I checked the referrer and my blog was not amongst the first 10 pages. Another nice visit tracked back to the Czech Republic, very close to the actual location of the pigsty.
And finally, today I had visitors from the UK googling for Heraklith insulation. I even found out with these keywords my blog entry about walls is hit #2 on Google!

Side note: after 2 minor changes (correcting the floor area of the attic and adding the site plan) I plotted the final plans today. Now i "just" need to xerox all the other paperwork three times, create some kind of cover and bind everything.

Regarding the demolition work, Hofer, a discount supermarket chains (many Europeans will know the German owner of the brand, Aldi) offers a cheap electric jackhammer and we'll probably buy it.

Plans finished!

2008-04-01T10:12:00.003+02:00

The plans are officially ok!

I just need to get the layout right and have them signed by the architect. The architect also promised to get the official site plan and deed record by today and mail it to me. So once I get that and the plans signed we're ready to submit them!

Firday 11th we lined up suppliers and contractors to give us quotes, the construction supply house, a framing contractor and a plumber.

Most likely we'll leave the old concrete floor as far as possible, based from what is visible from outside this is a 15 or 20cm slab, possibly even with rebar. Unfortunately it is fairly sloped (to make sure any animalic liquids run out into the manure pit in the yard), so we have to see how far above ground we'll get. We need to build up at least 7cm above the highest spot of the current floor.

Aside of that I finally managed to get most of the tools out of our Vienna hallway where they'd been residing ever since we finished the last room in 2005 and into the new shop shelf. We definitely need to de-trash all other shop storage though... the new shelf is bursting and there's still enough stuff on the floor and any other horizontal surface.

Not so good: our 30 year old boiler in Vienna gave up the ghost late Saturday night. It had been dripping occasionally for almost 2 years, but once the pressure had dropped a little againa fter refilling it had worked, so we ignored it. Besides, we thought it was just an external valve, underneath the wall-mount unit.
Then my mom said the boiler wouldn't fire up. So my dad grabbed the fill hose at 12.30 Saturday night... or rather Sunday...
Suddenly he cursed and I ran to see what happened. The boiler wasn't dripping any more, it was running. And worse, the water was coming from inside the boiler!
The last plumber who serviced the unit had put the cover on so securely I couldn't get it off... don't ask me what he did.
We put a bucket under the unit to catch the water, grabbed a few extra blankets and went to bed.

The enxt morning much to our surprise it was nice and warm... the beast had held enough water to run!
That held until yesterday in the evening. My dad had eft the hose connected anyway, so he just needed to turn up the water a little and add just enough pressure the boiler would start.

We also got a plumber lined up for Thursday. Most likely he'll tell us to get a new boiler... but we hope to convince him of repairing it, maybe be using a band aid approach.

After all the boiler (which only heats our unit) is supposed to be replaced by a whole house pellet boiler next year, so we'd like to keep it running until then.

Wish us luck!

Concrete

2008-03-25T10:57:00.003+01:00

I spent the Easter weekend out in the countryside and tried to get some things done. First I spent a couple of hours removing stinging nettle roots. Those beasts develop root lumps several feet in diameter, with the occasional deep roots. About the only way to get them out is to dig up the entire area with a fork half a foot deep and drag on the roots. After a few hours I had about half of the area I wanted to dig up done and was extremely sore. So I decided to call it a day, smoothed the ground and seeded some grass. That way we'll slowly work our way through the entire garden. As an extra plus the fresh grass looks a whole lot better than the old, patchy coarse stuff.

The I dragged myself into the pigsty to check out how much of the demolition we could do ourselves. I grabbed our trusty Bosch rotary hammer, the flat chisel bit and started plugging away at the concrete floor. After 10 minutes I had a small dent, maybe 10cm in diamater and 3cm deep... definitely no way we could take out the entire floor with our own tools. I had hoped the concrete floor could be as bad as the roof and ceiling, but no such luck.

Then I turned my attention towards the exterior walls. First surprise: at least one of them was unplastered concrete up to about 1m from the floor. And the concrete even protruded over the plaster... so if we decide to plaster the entire surface the bricks will get quite a solid coat.
The plaster came off, reluctantly but in the end it worked.

Finally I tried my luck with the stall partition walls. They're supposed to be brick.

After 10 minutes of hard work I had chipped off a small corner... the plaster is like concrete, as is the mortar, and the bricks are rock hard too. Yuck!

Sounds like we're going to leave the entire demo to the pros, using a pneumatic jackhammer.

I first considered bulldozing the entire building and building new... but I then realized that would give us trouble since we'd have to build the ground floor to current code, which means 2,8m ceiling height instead of 2,65. And most likely that's only the tip of the iceberg. So we'll try to keep standing as much as possible and work with/around it...

On the plus side I realized if we use hollow core bricks we can significantly reduce cost. Precisely we can almost cut the cost for bricks in half. Nice! Besides they're much faster to put up due to their size (25x23x37,5cm) and provide better thermal insulation. The only downside: not as mechanically strong as full bricks and less sound insulation.

We also had the local handyman over for an estimate. He said he'd get a few contractors and material suppliers in for a full estimate based on my plans. He also said we'd need to have the plans ready for permission in April, because the hearings don't seem to be monthly like the architect said.
So yesterday I had a wild CAD session changing lots of details in the drawings. Except for 1 or 2 small items I'm done, so I hope tonight I can mail the plans to the architect again.

I need to get a full site plan though, that's the only large CAD item missing.

Work space

2008-03-18T16:32:00.002+01:00

The last weekend was spent doing something that should have been ages ago... installing shelves in our Vienna work shop. It's a former kitchen which is also used for storage, so in dry words it was almost impossible to get past the door. We filled about a full trash can with various stuff and cleaned out for two days before we could even consider installing any shelves...

On Sunday and yesterday we drilled holes in the brick wall, put up metal shelf hangers and solid pine shelves. It was incredible... my dad and me have put up many a shelf in that house, and usually we needed long, thick screws and copious amounts of Moltofill. This time we had screws where we wondered if they'd be enough.
Well, afert geting the first few in we decided we most definitely needed _smaller_ screws!
Eventually we mostly used 4.5x60mm screws and had a hard time getting them in...

Then we quickly filled up the shelf. It's now 2/3 full and the room loks ok again... but there's still more work to do, especially getting all the tools out of the hallway.

If we clean out the other old kitchen furniture we might be able to fit everything and have useable space.

Other than that we scheduled a meeting with the architect to discuss possible cost reductions. Meanwhile I have to alter the plans a little (drawing issues rather than actual footprint changes).

The weekend will be spent out in the country where I intend to do more cleaning up and whack a test hole into the concrete floor.

Crushed

2008-03-12T14:25:00.002+01:00

Yesterday in the evening after rushing home from work I had the long anticipated talk with the architect. It was long and winded as usual, but that's what I expected.
It went fairly well as we addressed my questions regarding material choice and construction code and looked through the plans. There are a couple of necessary changes, but that's detail work.

Then, in the end came the big bang. I asked him for an official cost estimate. He talked and talked as usual and then gave me a figure that sent me to the floor. €1000/sq. m. That's roughly €60 000 for the entire place, give or take 15%. Twice as much as my worst night mare. That's US$ 90 000. Almost close to what my grandmother paid for the entire place... needless to say I was crushed for the rest of the evening.

I had considered investing maybe €10 000 myself so I would "own" a significant share of the building... if it's really that expensive that'd be 1/6 of the total... not much.

Afterwards we had a big family talk and looked for solutions. First of all we'll have a big talk with the architect to see where we can save money. Then we'll try to locate used materials to cut down that part of the price tag - if we manage to get cheap brick from a demolition company or something like that we can take off a significant part of the bill. Same is true for lumber. Construction grade lumber is expensive!
Last we'll have to see if we can match the estimate and our budget.

Wish me luck!

Price shock

2008-03-11T11:55:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I decided to leave work early (I worked 2 1/2 hours extra on Friday, so nothing to worry about) and visit Quester, the hardware store that carries the Golem tile. When I came in, it was just weird. A large store, completely devoid of any customers and employees except for a solitary cleaning lady. After looking around I did find someone who pointed me to a tiny display case that contained a few of the decor tiles and a handfull of small scraps. No labels, no price tags, nothing.

So I went back to the counter, grabbed another clerk and asked some questions. He showed me samples and first of all I was disappointed - the colors are much lighter than on my screen, there is no actual dark blue in spite of the name. Then I asked for the price... and nearly fainted. 103 Euro/sq. m is expensive. In Austria they want 140. Yuck! The rounded edge border tiles are €7 EACH! That means they're about twice as much as regular field tiles.

I already tried to find a way of getting the tiles shipped from Berlin cheaper.

Friday I'll visit the second store in Vienna to see if they have more, darker shades of blue - that can't have been all.

No news on the architect... I called him on his cell phone and he was on the way to the movies.

Tiles

2008-03-10T14:00:00.002+01:00

*lol*
I just had a good laugh... after realizing the fixed line number with the wrong area code didn't exist at all (and the directory didn't help at all) I decided to just call the first cell phone number. I immediately got a very helpful elderly gentleman who told me they're only a wholesaler and gave me two stores that sell their products to end users. One is a classic hardware store that seems to sell quite a lot of specialized items like eco friendly building supplies, fancy tiles,... but is slightly hard to track - in Austria it seems to be a taboo to have an online catalogue. They're only open Mo-Fr 8-6, so I'll have to try to get there after work before they close. Austria is one of the countries with the strictest opening hour regulations, even though things have improved a lot in the past few years. When I was a kid, shops were open Monday through Friday 8-12 and 2 or 3 to 6 and Staurday 8-12. Every first Saturday of the month larger shops would keep open until 5. Now most larger shops like supermarkets and everything close later than 6 (electronics chains still close at 6 though) but at 7 or 7:30 and are open every Saturday till 5 or even 6. Nothing on Sunday, except for a couple of supermarkets inside railway stations and airports.

A (temporary) end of anxiety?

2008-03-10T13:37:00.002+01:00

It seems like my anxietey will come to an end tonight... the architect called back yesterday in the evening, but said he was in his holiday home and din't have the plans with him, so he told me to call him tonight. That means I'll hear actual facts. Some rest of mind, until we submit the plans to the city... or until I have to make changes and get them back to the architect.

So far I've been disappointed of Golem tiles... I sent them an e-mailearly last week, inquiring if they have a show room in Austria and never got a reply. Their Austrian branch seems to be pretty disorganised anyway - no company mail address, only a couple of cell phone and regular phone numbers (one of the fixed line numbers has an area code that absolutely doesn't match the address too) and one private mail address. Not very proefessional behaviour (not to mention the address doesn't exactly sound like a company address but rather like a small businees run out off an old apartment). I'll try to call them, if they don't answer or give lame stories...

Waiting

2008-03-05T10:49:00.002+01:00

Waiting makes me nervous.

I mailed the plans to the architect late Sunday and posted a question regarding the ground floor walls on a German construction board and haven't heard anything so far. That means I'm done with that stage of planning and all I can do is sit around and wait.

In my previous projects I didn't really have to wait - since we did most things ourselves work pretty much went at my pace. This project involves a lot of professional work, that makes it far more complex and unforeseeable.

In the meantime... some random pictures.

That's what I envision for the bathroom (clean of course):

I want to mix in blue tiles though, maybe a border, and most definitely a clawfoot tub. Re-using the weird free-standing drain is tempting though... we'll see. Most likely it won't happen since most of the crucial parts are missing.

Just plain eye candy: a selection of various vintage light switches and sockets dating from roughly 1890 through 1960.

Fairly old (probably 1950s) electrical meter:

Originally there were two fuses on the board which I'll put back when I ever manage to restore this thing. They were gone when I got it, but the ghosts are still visible on the wood.
It's only good for 10(!) amperes... (modern meters are designed for 40-60 in Europe and 150-400 in the US).

This is the look I want to recreate for the work shop wiring (using modern materials though).

Eye candy

2008-03-04T12:02:00.003+01:00

Yesterday in the evening I found some lovely eye candy for you all! Browsing ebay I (re?)discovered a link to a company selling reproduction art deco tiles. Some are just plain white like those I have (and need more of), others are just fantastic like cloudy dark blue, teal, red, as well as incredible patterns, borders and whatever. If I have any cahnce to afford it this will be my bathroom tile of choice. I'm especially in love with the dark blue...
Links don't seem to show, so I have to just make them copy&paste.

http://www.golem-baukeramik.de/eng/index.html
Direct link to my favorite:
http://www.golem-baukeramik.de/eng/art_nouveau_tiles/wall_tiles/art_nouveau_tiles_single-coloured/48/detail-48/index.html

Taking a closer look at the site I even discovered prices... roughly €100 per square m should be possible since I don't need that much tile, just a bunch of white spares and blue accents, maybe a border. Not one of their fancy border tiles though - €10 apiece is way too steep.
Doing the entire bath like that is out of question - around €1500 are just not in the budget. Think of it this way: that would be throwing considerably more than one of my month's salaries into just wall tiles! The entire bathrrom would most likely be around 2 salaries...

Still, a guy can dream...

On the other hand those tiles are chunky... 8mm thick! (modern tiles are half as thick). On the other hand, the matching floor tiles are 20mm... that might justify part of the extra price.

I had to edit this post to make the links visible... seems like in order to go on with this I do have to learn some HTML! *yuck*

Finally

2008-03-03T16:05:00.003+01:00

Finally I managed to sort of finish the plans yesterday and mail them to the architect, along with a rough draft of the project description and a set of questions. What a feeling!

Now I have to wait until he reviews them and (most likely) requests a ton of changes... I hope it won't be too bad.

I already found something I most likely have to add... a cross section of the existing structure to show the current dimensions (especially the height, the footprint is already there).

I thought we had found 800-900 roof tiles for free... but alas, they were to far gone to save. The brick had started splintering off in layers like bark, so no way we'd use them for a new roof. Besides, many were broken. We took about 50 for patching since they match the existing tiles on the main house. We also decided against re-using the old tiles of the current pigsty roof. They're only 30something years old, but being buried under rotting walnut leaves and pine needles for all their live has definitely taken its toll on them, they're flat out crumbling. Off to pressed, dyed concrete tiles... oh well. They look reasonably good, but their aggressive color just screms "new" for at least a couple of years.

That's a decision I have to make anyway - do I want to make it look like a new house did in 1910 or do I want to make it look like a 1910 house today, without any modifications? Both ways have their merits - if I wanted it to look new I could easily make peace with shiny new roof tiles and everything. On the other hand, the salvaged floors definitely show their age, the old light switches don't match, the doors will be cobbled together,... so I guess the latter approach is more realistic.

Speaking of doors... I did a quick rummage through my basment and it seems like I can manage to do the entire ground floor with salvaged trim! That'll really free up our basement!

That's the good news.

The bad news: I might have to ditch my dream of salvaged windows. I think the farm house windows my uncle stores are all outwards opening casements and that makes them awful to clean upstairs... besides; I'm worried if I can find enough matching windows. So we might be stuck getting new windows custom made... expensive!

Building & Energy

2008-02-28T15:49:00.003+01:00

Since I didn't want to do two posts on one day I saved this one so far...

Last Sunday we attended the Building & Energy Fair, a huge fair mostly aiming at future home owners and renovaters.

We saw a lot of beautiful things (and far more useless or plain ugly things) and got some usefull information.

For example we saw a company the specialises on traditional farm house doors and windows. Their work is absolutely stunning, as is the price. Roughly 800 questions marks for a regular door without frame is intolerable.

The same is most likely true for a carpenter advertising 2"(!) thick wide plank floors... but we couldn't find a representative or any catalogues.

Stairs were mostly ugly beasts without risers... and usually made of either tropical wood or ugly plastic-looking beech. I'm pretty sure I want traditional stairs with white risers and 2" pine treads. If we can afford that...

Perhaps the most interesting tidbits were informations about insulation, mostly wood or other fiber insulation and a couple of very nice folders about green restoration of old houses without destroying them. For example, I found out that all ceilings have to be F30 fire resistant by Lower Austria construction code. That rules out plaster and lath, but Heraklith should be ok.

Or for example, if you insulate the exterior of a building it might protrude over the property line. In our case the house sits smack dab on the property line facing the street. Of course there are regulations taking care of that... Vienna limits to 7,5cm while Niederösterreich (Lower Austria) allows 10cm... thanks heaven I want exactly 10cm insulation!

We also talked to a clay plaster contractor. He said he could do the entire house in a few days and if we provided helpers we'd get discounts on the labor costs.

When I asked him about the ground floor walls he recommended putting up reed insulation prior to plastering.

I'm not sure if that's a good idea... first I have no idea how reed reacts to the ammonia and whatever else might lurk in those walls. Second I'm nowhere near sure we'll get those walls perfectly dry. While reed is said to withstand some moisture I don't want to have a rotting wall underneath my plaster. Last but not least I've always been warned not to put any insultaion on the inside of a wall unless it's completely covered with a moisture barrier. Not sure how bad that is in this case.

Yesterday I spent about an hour in front of the computer after I realized the cross section and elevation drawings were all crooked and didn't match each other... on some the house was 10m floor to roof ridge, on others 10,7... yuck!

Now it should work and I even improved proportions of the front elevation!

This week is incredibly busy... Yesterday I went to a dance (the only sports I currently do), I have to finish the plans, clean up my room, get rid of some old stuff (which means getting it to the church flea market). On Saturday I attend an excursion to the local railway work shop, then I want to have a look at the flea market, in the afternoon we have my girlfriend's parents over,... go figure.

Money money...

2008-02-27T11:07:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I did something I had neglected so far...

With the plans close to being final I did a first cost estimate, just based on the necessary brickwork and almost fainted...

Based on the plans we need close to 20000(!) bricks, that equals roughly 50 pallets. Given a price of 40 Cents each that would be around 7500 Euros... not counting mortar, labor or even plaster.

Roof tiles for roughly 2500 are cheap in comparison ;-)

A huge factor will be wood. The roof framing is inevitable, the roof needs to be replaced or it'll most likely collapse within the next few years, which leaves the two ceilings. I calculated 10 5m long 4x10" beams for each ceiling, that's going to be a lot of wood! Add 35 m2 OSB for each floor and go on... I think 20mm OSB is about 6 Euros/ m2, so that would be roughly 400 Euro, harmless compared to the price of the load bearing timbers...

To give you and idea, the neighbor replaced his roof 10 years ago, and was quoted 400 000 Schilling for the wood alone. He ended up buying it across the border for 100 000. By today's price level that would be something like 40 000/10 000 Euro. So I guess for our small roof + 2 ceilings we can factor another 7,5k.
I just got some figures from lumber stores online, and it seems like I was even too high - something like 3500 worst case for both ceilings seems to be more realistic.

After all, my high figure is 30k for the entire house worst case.

My dad wasn't that shocked after all... so the project might fly.

We briefly considered brick ceilings, but installation seems to be fairly complex and the price difference negligible (one supplier was even slightly cheaper on the wood ceilings).

Another serious downside of brick: no cavity space to install wires. All wires have to be put in conduit before the screed on the floor above is poured, installing wiring after the fact would be pretty tough.

Once I manage to get the plans to the architect we hope for something closer to an estimate rather than a SWAG (scientific wild ass guess).

Sick of AutoCad

2008-02-26T12:20:00.002+01:00

I'm officially sick of seeing white-on-black ACAD screens... I just want to be done with the planning!

So many details to be taken care of... I even need to get some more measurements to determine how far the ground on the street side actually rises above floor level, which will in turn determine the size and position of the bathroom window and porch/deck stairs.

Besides, I noticed I had forgotten adding a WC window all the time... and I absolutely hate WCs without a window! Of course it will have frosted glass, but a window is a necessity.

I added the window to the footprint and managed to get the elevation drawings more or less done (minus said window and a few details).

The cross-sections is there too, just needs some more tweaking. I hope to get the plans far enough to mail them to the architect today. Then we'll see what needs to be changed.

They can't be finalized until I get all the measurements, but we might be able to have the township guys look over the preliminary version to see if they would approve something like this at all.

Pictures

2008-02-22T21:05:00.002+01:00

I finally gathered the time to upload some long overdue pictures...

First, the famous hole in the ceiling... I guess you understand why the ceiling needs to be replaced. Since I took the picture the hole about doubled in size... even though we fixed the leak, the wood is rotted and keeps crumbling down.

The plaster on the walls is crumbling too... probably both moisture and pig pee.

Last summer was dedicated to a large project too... the wood shed had a leaky roof, the walls were crumbling... it was shot. Besides, the garden between pigsty and wood shed sloped dramatically, so it was pretty much unuseable and mowing the grass was a major PITA. The haphazard steps made of granite blocks (some of which already toppled over) weren't any help.

And yes, you could pull out the loose looking section of brickwork...

The roof framing was undersized, rotted and had apparently seen a fire at some point.

In the background you can see the current attic access of the pigsty. No door, maybe 1,5m tall, no stairs.

Long story short, we had the wood shed fixed up (some masonry work, new roof, new stucco), a retaining wall and stairs built to even out the garden and dug along the pigsty down to the foundations to insulate.

The result looks almost Greek and my mom requested everything (including the pigsty) be whitewashed with blue windows and doors.
After pictures are on my dads computer, don't ask me when I'll be able to get them...

Yesterday in the Evening I got some more fine tuning of the plans done, like hatching the walls, straightening crooked lines and drawing the second elevation drawing. 2 done, 2 to go!

I'll try to take a screenshot and post it later tonight.
Right now Blogger is a nightmare... I have no idea why it is sooooo painfully slow... sort of reminds me of my old Mac Classic but still far slower.

Progress!

2008-02-18T12:32:00.001+01:00

The weekend out at the farm has been quite productive!

On Saturday we headed out to Hodonin across the border for a shopping tour. We hoped some stuff would be cheaper there (and besides I wanted to see what kind of outlandish electrical stuff the Czech use). The first hope most certainly didn't work out... OBI in Hodonin was considerably more expensive than Obi in Mistelbach. Example: 10mm 1,5mm2 electrical wire was €12,90 when I last looked in Austria (just a few weeks ago, after all copper wire prices are fluctuating it makes you feel like stock exchange market), in CZ it was close to €30... they don't sell 100m reels either, only bulk, off the roll. Of course it's more expensive to have a clerk measure and cut every wire instead of having the customers grab a roll from the shelf.
They did have some quite outlandish stuff... so my curiosity was fulfilled. Nothing Useful though.

We ended up buying a metal shelf for the goats stables, the main target for the day.

The desired wood book shelves for the living room just didn't happen... too expensive. We planned on buying IKEA IVAR, but the only had sides left and were out of stock on shelves... back-ordered for at least one week in both stores near Vienna. So we looked in Hodonin, but the only wooden shelves they had were flimsy and cost close to twice as much as IKEA Ivar.

So, there are still book crates in the goats stables... some of them pretty moldy. Putting up the metal shelf we managed to get most of the floor cleared though, and move all my electrical supplies out of the pigsty.

I then started sifting through all the stuff stored at the pigsty.
The front two stables are mostly "keep". Freezer, lawn mower, lawn party tent, two small old shelves (in bad need of a coat of paint, they're a mustard yellow right now but otherwise fine), garden hose and other stuff like that. The second booth to the left is full of PO trash, hardenend cement and lime, paint leftovers, cheap plastic flower pots,...

Second one to the right is firewood. Lots of rotted, powderpost beetle infested boards. The funniest thing I found was a quite large (I guess 1 1/2 by 1m) chunk of original flooring from the main house just cut out and stored there... just unfinished face nailed random width pine planks, nothing spectacular though (not the 30 or 40cm wide planks some old houses have). Most of it is very rotted, so it's firewood too I guess.

The two back stables are filled with some indefineable stuff like some rotted shipping pallets (can be burned too, but require tedious disassembling and leave tons of nails in the ashes), my late grandfather's bike (heavy as a rock and only suitable for flat areas with only 3 speed transmission AND the weight), lots of old farm kichen stuff (probably too far gone to sell). Most likely going to go too.

Now there's some special stuff.

A) extra refrigerator with cracked door gasket. Will stay.
B) Electric range, probably 1970s, never used. For sale to collector, function unknown (Elektra-Bregenz, 3 plates, oven, advertisement stickers still on plates)
C) Ancient iron grave marker. For sale, picture will follow
D) Iron grave lantern, intricate detail, red and white glass. For sale.

News on the planning front too... My 1m stairs will pass as long as I have a second way leading upstairs. That means the garden door is mandatory instead of optional and I'll most likely put in some kind of porch or deck with stairs at least 120cm wide. Now I can use my beautiful blue and beige cement tiles (they're a bit too coarse for interior use but lovely for something outside). Besides, I have to make sure all hallways are 120cm wide. Should be possible.

I have to draw the foot prints (basically done), all 4 elevation drawings (1 down, 3 to go) and one cross section (needs a lot of work). Then I mail all the plans to my uncle who'll check and sign them. He'll also get all other plans needed for our permit. Yay!
The permit process is simple too... either we'll get it right on the spot or we'll have to have a hearing. Those hearings are held monthly, so hopefully it won't take forever (fingers crossed).

So, off to finishing the plans!

Planning...

2008-02-14T13:36:00.001+01:00

Did I mention I'm close to never wanting to see AutoCad ever again?

Yesterday, after a horrible work day I managed to sit down, fire up my windows computer (I'm a convinced Mac user, but AutoCad just does not run on a Mac, so when a Friend gave me a Pentium IV for free I did some upgrading, mostly free parts and now use it for some special stuff, but compared to an iBook it's awfully noisy and I suspect it will once send the disc of the elctrical meter flying out the front door, so I have to really convince myself to plug it in and turn it on) and did some more tweaking.

At 1m width the upstairs hallway was too narrow to fit a regular size door + trim (roughly 90cm for the door and 24 for the trim, 12 on each side), so I had to widen it a little, and to keep the room sizes equal make the back room a little smaller.

Now the plans are in a stadium where I can make a screenshot and post it here. I have the footprint of both floors more or less done and a rough front elevation drawing.

I also browsed through a Bauhaus catalogue where I found something interesting. Now I'm considering to do for all plaster and lath since cheap 12mm pine paneling seems to be only half the price of Heraklith... I'm slightly worried about the strength of it though, after all Heraklith is 25mm thick and feels really sturdy. The old ceilings in Vienna were done with 15mm lath and still have a very slight give to them. On the other hand, the ceiling beams are on 80cm(!) centers and our studs will be more like 40 or 50cm centers.

Doing everything with plaster and lath would take care of two issues. First, Heraklith was simply not around in 1910, so it's not period. Second, a plaster and lath wall should be less prone to cracking than a wall made of large panels. I simply don't like the idea of doing all the extra labor of spackling in mesh over the entire surface.

Tomorrow we're heading out for the weekend. My parents buy some shelving at IKEA today, so I might be able to actually do something. I need to get the books out of the goats stables to get space for the garden stuff from the pigsty.

By the way, does anyone know a person who'd like to buy an ancient metal grave marker?

Nothing but walls...

2008-02-10T11:36:00.000+01:00

Lately I've been obsessing with the house a lot... I really want to finalize the plans, so I can get in the pros and possibly have them signed off by the mayor.

After discussing th mouse issue with my dad again we decided it won't be that much of an issue, so we're back to regular stud walls.

Another problem arose when I really started planning the bathroom.
The salvaged tile I have (15 cm square tile with flat edges, like subway tile) are salvaged from one of the kitchens in Vienna (we connected two apartments together and one kitchen was turned into a family room, so the tile wasn't necessary any more) and I calculated it to be about 9 square meters, not counting much breakage (actually it should be around 9 1/2 or 10 and the tiles came off very smoothly) and the bathroom walls will be around 13 or 14 square meters, not counting any cutting allowance. Sooo... I'm at least 4-5 square meters short and don't have any tile left for the WC. (The latter was clear even before I realized the problem in the bath).
So now I've only got two options... only partially tile the walls or get more tile. I might try Freecycle on that one.

I picked up the table lamp and it's a real beauty!
Someone even rewired it with a period looking cord and left the original plug in place!
I might rewire it again though since the cord is pretty short.

I then proceeded to hunt around lighting stores trying to fulfill a dream I had ever since I was maybe seven years old... a plain, round (somewhat funnel shaped) lamp shade that's green on the outside and white on the inside. At the first store I only found a new light with such a shade that cost 300 and something Euro - no way. Besides, the color of the shade was plain wrong and the thing was way too tall. The nice lady referred me to a second store that sells used fixtures. The guy there was fairly nice, but didn't have anything like I wanted, only different shapes (turned out I had gotten the figures wrong and the shade I wanted was actually 25 cm in diamater and not 30) and asked around 100 Euros instead of the 40 I had heard of at the first store.

So on Saturday I set my alarm to 9 (something I'd NEVER ever do without a very good reason, my job being as bad as it is sleeping in on weekends is almost holy) and set out to Vienna's most famous flea market. I had been there a few weeks ago, but the weather was bad and I was too late to get anything decent.

Yesterday it looked better... loads of people, grammophones blaring "Lilli Marleen" (a German song from the 1930s) and a lot of real antiques booths instead of the "trash" booths last time and the guys trying to sell possibly stolen digital cameras and cell phones. (Who wouldn't get suspicious if you saw a booth with 30 fairly new phones, all without chargers, manuals,...)
Looking at a banker lamp I caught the attention of a seller and he asked me what I was looking for. After some discussions the guy from the next booth chimed in and told me he had shades like that in his shop... so I went there and after some negotiations I bought one of them for 45 Euro!

During all that light shopping I also realized I DID get a bargain on that table lamp...

Besides, I bought a matching set of door hardware (handle and two covers) for the work shop door. When I pulled that door out of the dumpster someone had tried to repaint it and taken down all hardware except for the mortise lock (the glass panes were alredy taped off and some dents had been filled), so I needed something. More on my doors in a separate post.

More walls...

2008-02-08T10:27:00.001+01:00

Just after I clicked "Send" on yesterday's post it occured to me that if we manage to securely fasten the Heraklith panels to the studs we could even save the planking on both sides... and plaster directly over the infill and studs. However, we definitely need to make sure the infill won't fall out when somebody leans onto the wall. Screws driven at at angle through the panels into the studs don't seem secure enough to me... maybe long nails in the mortar joints between the panels, just like they secured the door frames in the early 1900s gypsum panel walls (5, 7 1/2 and 10cm thick solid gypsum panels, 30x60cm in size). Though I guess full sized Heraklith panels (50x120cm I think) would be too big, maybe cut them in half to get an extra joint.

Heraklith advises to spackle and put up mesh over the entire surface to keep the seams from cracking the plaster. I'm not sure I like that idea... seems like helluva lot of work. On the other hand, I definitely need something to cover the seams, my aunt had some areas of ceiling redone with Heraklith and you can clearly spot every single panel. My favourite DIY book tells to nail up strips of burlap directly over the seams... I like that idea. In my case we'd cover both the vertical seams and the studs. The horizontal seams shouldn't be as troublesome as they're mortared (the mesh advice only seems to apply to Heraklith board screwed to studs like drywall).

On the electrical side... yesterday, after a lot of thinking and some fiddling I managed to turn one of the Ebay switches into a 3 way by using the guts of one that turned out to be shot (seller didn't include that either... he received a BAD feedback yesterday).
I might have managed to do the second one too, but the screws that hold the guts are way too tight (and you can't even get a wrench to turn the nuts, it's so tight in the back of those switches). So most likely I'll use the old switch at the bottom of the stairs and something newer upstairs.

By recycling the guts of the damaged switch I was also able to permanently repair my absolute favorite, a ca. 1890 rotary switch made of black porcelaine and brass by replacing the broken springs inside. This one is sure as heck going into my bedroom!

I also received a French rotary switch from Ebay yesterday... it looked good from the picture, but I'm ure as heck not going to use this thing ANYWHERE near 230V! A) the terminal screws are accessible from the outside, without even opening the switch. B) the screws on the front that hold the guts are live too. C) the mounting screws are freakin' close to the live guts! Put one in a little crooked and it's hot too, energizing the entire wall...

A and B could possibly be remedied by puttying the screw holes after installing the switch, but C is the killer. Maybe I can find a way to put plastic tubing in the back of the switch to keep the screws straight AND isolated... don't know.

Today I'm going to pick up one more purchase... a beautiful art deco brass table lamp that can be used as a wall sconce too. That was most definitely the most expensive purchase I did so far (for the house that is).
Getting a deal on lights on Ebay is pretty close to impossible, at least as far as pre-1920s lighting is concerned. 20s and 30s fixtures go for close to nothing, but anything that remotely ressembles ornate brass (and doesn't scream 1970s fake) will soar up to roughly 100 Euros or question marks ^^ (on the internet it can happen that the €, or Euro sign gets replaced by a question mark due to character encoding issues and in news groups it happened that often most people will only talk like: "How much could that be?"
"'bout a hundred question marks."

Mouse solution

2008-02-07T16:51:00.000+01:00

We might have found a solution to the rodent potential I discovered in my last post. We could simply spill up the stud bays with 75mm Heraklith board, eliminating any cavities. Of course that would make running wires a bit harder, but it would most definitely beef up the walls. 12 1/2 cm solid Heraklith should be almost equivalent to a brick wall, and the walls wouldn't sound hollow any more. Expensive though... we'll see.

One step ahead, two steps back...

2008-02-05T16:48:00.000+01:00

Only talking and some CAD...
I talked to my uncle who pretty much built his own house and he said I should most definitely get a plot plan and clearance information for the lot before I plan anything. A bit late since the footprint of my building is pretty much done ;-)
I most definitely need to get specific information before I get any permits. I guess that's where my architect uncle comes into the picture... I sure hope they will allow me to expand the building towards the second outbuilding and add a full second floor and gable roof.

My DIY uncle also recommended wood framing everything... but my dad refuses, and I don't really like the idea either. After reading Chez Neumansky I even start to question our choice about the first floor walls...

We don't have rats there, but most definitely lots of mice and even found some in the main house, so I really really don't like the idea of hollow walls... mice just don't bite through solid brick.

That would mean I have to add a steel I beam under every first floor wall and most liekely above too... and since the steel beams would bisect the floor beams they'd need to support those too. Not nice...
Besides, one of the two beams would need to run under the stairs or end facing the stairs... but the wall there isn't load bearing... I even planned on having a doorway underneath.

On a side track I just got the first batch of my ebay purchases of vintage electrical equipment yesterday. n the bright side I got some basically brand new 1905 switches. On the down side two of them are not 4 way switches as promised by the seller (4 way switches have 4 screws and can be used to control a light from 3 or more points) but simple two-pole on/off switches (just switch both wires of the circuit). That means I still need two 3 way switches for the stairway (3 way switches are used to switch a light from 2 points)... options right now: use newer ones I have around: I have some early 1950s rotary switches that look fairly good, but they were used for conduit wiring, so the covers miss quite large chunks where the pipe entered. Or I could take flip switches about the same age that were used with cloth wiring when I found them but don't really look appropriate. Last I could get retro switches from Casa della luce. They're designed for their wiring, but also expensive and don't quite look right.
Yuck... I hate choices like that!

More planning

2008-01-13T19:08:00.000+01:00

Over my extended holidays I managed to actually do something.
First, we pretty much decided on several crucial parts of the house.

1) Exterior walls. The exterior walls are going to be regular solid brick as the existing ones. We most definitely want to look into insulation though. A remote cousin of my dad's sells eco-friendly insulation, so I'm hoping to get something better than the usual styrofoam sheets (especially something sturdier). If you want to check it out go to http://www.haeuser-in-wolle.com/ (German only, the picture of the owner will tell you why ;-) )

2) Interior walls. On the ground floor we'll use the same bricks, on the second floor wood framing with either plaster and lath (given we get enough free lath) or Heraklit board and plaster.

3) Ceilings. We are going to do classic wood ceilings with sturdy beams but covered with OSB.

4) Stairs. Originally I wanted to do straight stairs with one landing, but that's not going to happen unless I lower the ground floor ceiling. So the stairs are going to be curved.
That will make them noticeably less steep than originally planned.

5) Electrical wiring. If I manage to communicate with the owner of Casa della luce most rooms will get their wiring. Precisely:
Hallway = casa della luce.
WC: same
Bathroom: modern concealed wiring, but old switch and socket.
Work shop: conduit, exposed.
My bedroom: casa della luce
My brother's bedroom: concealed wiring.
Closet under the stairs: not much decided yet.

I also decided on the paint colors for the hallway and bought paint samples to experiment with. I am indeed going to do the blue and green I mentioned. The shop will be white I think. If I manage to get my hands on pattern rollers and a rolling machine on Ebay the other rooms will get rolled patterns.

Doors and windows willl most likely be beige on the inside. Exterior... maybe green to match the main house or a deep burgundy... (one of my favourite colors, RAL 3004 for the Europeans who want to recreate it).

Drooling for cool supplies

2007-12-17T20:57:00.000+01:00

By accident I stumbled over an Italian supplier for electrical parts... fixtures, switches, sockets, cable,... real old style and to my big surprise fairly affordable. In Austria or Germany something like that would easily cost twice that if no more. Now I'm absolutely drooling over that stuff.... I mean, who else still sells surface mount rotary switches made of porcelain, and porcelaine knobs for installing twisted cloth lamp cord on the wall surface?
Go to http://casadellaluce.skizzo3000.it/catalog/ and check that stuff out!

Nothing to report...

2007-12-14T11:58:00.000+01:00

I'm in a pre-Christmas coma. Today is my last work day, I took incredible 4 full weeks off. Right no I feel like I'm just walking upright any more by a last straw... I need all my strength to keep my work schedule up. I hope that'll change with a lot of sleep though.
Planning has mostly been restricted to my favourite way ever since I've been a child - daydreaming. Whenever a project is coming up I play it in my head, like a movie, over and over. Doing that, I can identify problems and devise solutions. Besides, it's fun.

Right now I'm fiddling with a few details like electrical wiring. I want to make it looks as old as possible without violating current electrical codes, that will require great amounts of ingenuity. Most rooms will get conduit screwed to the walls and ceiling except for the bathroom and probably my brother's room (he wants "modern" wiring... I guess in turn I'm going to try something in his room... for the last few weeks I've been intrigued by the produtcs of a company named Elektrohaus. They are located in Austria but sell Italian style switches and sockets (both the Italian kind and the German/austrin to fit an Italian wall box). The system is very modular, basically you get a blank face plate and snap in whatever modue you want. A regular box (roughly US switch box size) is 3 modules wide, a light switch is 1 module, an Italian socket as well, a German receptacle is 2 modules. There are bigger boxes too - 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16 and 21 modules. Downside: as I mentioned, the boxes are Italian, so you're restricted to use Italian switches and receptacles or rip open the walls. Doesn'tmatter much as long as you stock replacements.

Pigsty once again...

2007-11-07T14:48:00.000+01:00

The temporarily buried project is moving again... somewhat.

The verandah sounds like a nice idea, but it doesn't cope with what annoys me most about the house: living on the ground, in a moist house without a basement or second floor. I just don't care any more for rotted floor boards, walls that are stained half a foot up from the floor...

So we started to discuss the larger project once again.
The main concerns were that we didn't have the time nor the money. Since I now plan on quitting my current full job to attend university or something again, and prior to that have decent school-like summer holidays, i.e. 2 months. That sets the schedule, and it's extremely tight.

The second problem is the almost non-existant budget. We'll try to do as much as we can ourselves, but some stuff will hae to be hired out, like some of the foundation work, most of the plumbing, building the ceilings, roof framing and decking,...

So now the goal is to get the planning ready as soon as possible to get the drawings to my uncle (family architect). Hopefully he'll sign the plans so we can get a construction permit. Then we can start building.

So now we're deep into the planning stage.
Problems I've run into so far: space restrictions. I want to keep changes to the footprint as small as possible not to waste precious space between the pigs and goats shed. (Quite a nice area for sitting and playing table tennis. That means the hallway and stairs are very constricted - 1m width is pretty narrow and the stairs will end up being fairly steep, so I need to check code about that. Unfortunately construction code doesn't cover specific things like this, so I'd need to check some kind of sub-code, unfortunately I don't know which one... looks like we won't get by without working closely together with an architect.
If I let the stairs turn twice the under stairs closet will get a fairly low ceiling and I wanted to put the boiler there... loks like bad luck.
That's my biggest concern right now.
The second biggest is cost. I know prices of stuff I deal with every day or at least sometimes, like electrical, but bricks, wall construction, lumber, framing,... are pretty much unkown to me. Without knowing these cost factors it's hard to decide on materials and emthods (concrete ceilings vs. wood,...) and this influences measurements... you see it.

TUB!!!

2007-11-07T14:11:00.000+01:00

The tub is in!!!
We decided to involve a plumber in that action... he sent two guys who managed to wiggle it into the bathroom. They also replaced the entire drain assembly.
Then I spent a little over an hour with scrubbing sand and lots of elbow grease trying to get it clean. It looked like it hadn't been cleand and used for decades... but I managed to get it clean enough to use. The infrared heater worked too (first when I installed the 50 year old beast it kept tripping the FI (RCD, a main breaker that works like a US GFI)... took me two attempts of taking it apart, finally I found the damaged wire and made it safe again.

Wow, that was a feeling to soak in that tub!

Pictures to follow as soon as I find the cable for my dad's camera or buy a card reader (buying something new, even as cheap as a card reader always feels scary to me).

Clawfoot pain

2007-10-22T16:49:00.000+02:00

Ouch, produtive weekend!
On Saturday my dad happened to stumble over a free clawfoot tub for the farm.
The original plans for the bathroom specified a wooden or steel basin which was supposed to serve as a shower and mainly look rustic. It never got installed and when we bought the house we only found a drain and a shower fixture. We always wanted a real tub there, so we started looking for a clawfoot (looks great and saves us from building a surround). My uncle gave one to us for free, but it had a few flaws. The outside was extremely rusty from having sat upside down in a garden for years and the inside was well worn and rough showing some rust stains through the glazing. Refinishing is darn expensive here (let's say it costs you roughly 10 times the price of a cheap new tub) and involves nasty, stinky, toxic chemicals. We had one refinished and it stank for a year. So we never got around to do it and the tub has been sitting on the verandah, covered with a door to serve as a table.
Besides, the entire drain assembly was missing.

Now a block from us in Vienna they're cleaning out an apartment, tons of trashy 70s MDF furniture. However, my dad suddenly noticed one of the guy throwing a bucket of broken glass, porcelaine, bottles and whatever into what looked like a well-kept tub. So he asked the guy what was going to happen with the tub. "Want have?" was the answer... of course!

So on Sunday we planned an extra trip to the farm and started cleaning out the tub. we found: broken dishes, glassware, shelves (MDF and real wood), a sink and countertop (one pice) made of some heavy terrazzo-like material, bottles of liquors, some half full or full, various drugs (asthma drugs for example, but also a lot of stuff we didn't recognize by the names),... oh yeah, almost forgot the huge wallet like waiters use... empty of course.
That part was easy, wearing gloves.

The interior finish was in almost perfect condition give a fingernail sized chip near the drain. Outsideit had a rustic but ok beige paint job. And most of all it had a full drain assembly (only the overflow drain line was cracked from carrying it down the stairs)!
Only downside: two feet were cracked, one still useable, one shot, but the shot one is in the back so wo could always use a brick...

Now we had to get it into the car upside down. Our family car is a Mitsbishi van with wooden storage boxes in the rear. So we had to hoist the tub up about 1m or even more to get it in. Yuck!
Then we drove out to the farm and first did some maintenance, like the last mowing of the year and the first ever with the new mower. Then we hoisted the tub out of the car... it is HEAVY! We decided to put it on the verandah and either wait for more people or call a plumber to get it inside.

Now when I got up today every single muscle in my body SCREAMED... arms, legs, back... no matter how hard you try to lift with your back, at some point it will hit your back. Yeouch!

Sign of life

2007-10-19T14:24:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to say I'm still alive... more or less. Never before in my life I had such an exhausting job, so I basically come home at 7 or 7:30 PM and feel close to dead. Subsequently, the weekends are exclusively reserved for some recreation.

I finally need to finish that endless WC poject (hardly even notice the missing paint any more ;-) ) and want to get started on the verandah project around Christmas. I'm severely tempted to put the window into the new wall facing the yard instead of the exterior wall. This will save us from whacking a hole in the brick wall, finding a window that matches in both size and style,... but will take some light (read: a lot, because the yard side is a tight, covered passage). Dunno...
Framing around christmas is going to be nice anyway - I expect temperatures around or below freezing.

However, it's the only chance to get done before next summer since I take 4 weeks off work in late December/early January.

Dream house continued

2007-08-23T15:15:00.001+02:00

The next day (and following weeks) we continued digging through the clutter (when I first read House in Progress it immediately reminded me of this dream) and conquering the house.
We found: a formal dining room, formal salon (both fully furnished, with oriental carpets, chandeliers, beautiful tiled heaters and everything), several bedrooms, some of which looked like they hadn't been touched ever since WWI, and, by all means, a ball room. The giant yard was completely shielded from the neighbors and was mostly lawn with old trees and a swimming pool.

Just incredible...

I remember the dream well enough to draw a plan from memory...

While the house felt absolutely coherent, trying to draw a plan I found out actually the rooms didn't exactly line up... not even the rooms themselves were really coherent. I'll try to draw the plan anyway and post it, pointing out the flaws and inconsistencies.

I did realize the house must have been HUGE in reality. For the main part I got a foot print of AT LEAST 11x21m, probably more, (given the 21m the ball room would only be 5-5 1/2m wide which seems fairly narrow, in the dream it looked more like twice that size).

More dreams...

2007-08-22T17:29:00.000+02:00

My absolute favorite old house dream ever... couldn't resist sharing that one.

For some reason my family had inherited a farm house that had once been in a small vilage but now in the outskirts of Vienna (Vienna "swallowed" quite a lot of small villages in the 19th and early 20th century). The first time we went to look at it was on a glum, rainy winter day. We were going up a winding street paved with blocks like the real old streets in Vienna untile we came to a tall iron fence with a thick hedge growing behind, completely hiding the lot and house.
The gate revealed a huge lawn area that slightly sloped towards a large yellow farm building with adjacent barn (basically an L-shaped house and barn built to form a rectangle around a yard, pretty typical for the area near the German border where my dad comes from). We first tried to open the large barn door supposedly leading to the yard. The entryway was stuffed with all kinds of trash piled up to the ceiling. No way. So off we were, around the house. On the short side of the L (the long one faced the street) we found an incredible double-decker verandah with big greek revival columns and (on the upper level) a beautiful iron railing. That seemed to be the formal entrance, a double panel door with windows to each side. The door opened inwards. About 3cm. Then it hit the solid resistance of about 2m of piled up boxes.

So that left one last door, a small side door.
It did open and revealed the kitchen. 4 steps leading down into the kitchen, an old sink resting across the banisters. Across the door a huge white kitchen cupboard. To the left: an ancient gas wall heater, a wood fired stove, an equally old gas stove and some low cabinets. To the right, squeezed in between the window and the steps a sink with a no less ancient gas water heater (1930s I guess). In the middle a huge maple farm house table with chairs.
The floor littered with construction debris, sawdust, broken chairs,...

I turned the light switch, nothing.

So we spent about half an hour just tossing trash out into the garden to make the kitchen liveable. While it got darker and darker we ventured into the hallway to find a fuse box or anything. The hall was narrow and long, maybe 2m by 8 or 10m. And like everything it was piled high with clutter. Only a narrow passage was left. To the sides I could see 5 doors, behind me the kitchen door and absolutely unwalkable stairs to the uptstairs. Another door was probably leading to the cellar stairs.

At the end of the narrow passage I found a swinging door leading into a formal foyer, the one with the aforementioned front door. To the right I saw a 2 doors, one probably leading to the yard, the other into the short side of the L. To the left there was one door which as I soon discovered opened into a small room that held a huge ancient fuse box.

I started screwing in fuses in near darkness and was soon rewarded by dim light coming from the old lamp above.

As we now could se something we started to explore further. The doors to the right of the hall led to two living rooms or maybe dining that we absolutely couldn't even set a foot into. The third door revealed a bathroom, with books everywhere. Even in the clawfoot tub. Wonderful dark blue tile and white fixtures, everything looked like it hadn't been touched for decades. Nor cleaned for that matter ;-)

The doors to the left led to two equally cluttered bed rooms.

At this point we decided to call it a day and continue later, which is also what I'll do now.

OT: old house dreams

2007-08-21T12:32:00.000+02:00

Like many people who are into old houses I often dream about fancy buildings. All of them have been more or less derelict and the one last night was no exception. Of course it was weird as dreams can be.

I was somewhere in Africa and looking down some kind of hill towards two large houses that absolutely looked like they came directly out of 1900 Vienna's downtown. Heavily ornamented stucco facades with lots of exposed brick from failed stucco. Windows with hardly any paint left on them. The one to the left was even worse, the front yard was overgrown with 2m high shrubbery and the house looked empty, but the front door stood open and a black kid, about 10 or 12 years old went in as I watched. The one to the right had at least a recently mowed grass area in the front and the windows looked clean. This was my target, seemingly a hotel. I walked in and checked out the entire building, cellar to attic like I wanted to buy it. Some good bones like incredible herringbone parquet floors but also a lot of remuddling (cheap tile, wood paneling from the 70s,...). And all the time I kept being surprised all this looked so much like Vienna...

It was weird. In the beginning I felt like I was watching a TV documentary about some foreign country and the poverty there, and the next moment I was in there, checking out one of the houses.

It definitely wasn't the worst house I ever dreamed of though... several were already partially collapsed.

Just wanted to share that with any potential readers (if I actually have any ;-) )

More verandah options and ideas

2007-08-20T13:01:00.000+02:00

We're one step closer to the next project.
In my last post I mentioned the wall dilemma. My dad pretty much ended it asking: "Why not take OSB, caulk the seams and paint it?"
Sounds like a pretty good temporary solution to me.
The plastering work is going to be hired out, so that leaves the electrical work, wall, painting and floor to me.
Oh yeah, and door and window frame.

Target is to get it done and liveable before next summer (i.e. by the end of June). Maybe I can do some work during this fall and I'm definitely going to take 3 weeks off over Christmas. It'll be cold then, but MAYBE we already managed to enclose the space enough by then.

2007-08-16T15:44:00.001+02:00

I decided to do one more post with the long promised work in progress pictures from Vienna.

Before scraping off the old paint I was prepared to patch some minor plaster damage, like this:

What I didn't expect were things like this.
After gently tapping some plaster with the handle of a screw driver I was confronted with a not so nice view.

So, I was in for some masonry work AND plastering.

You can see the hole continued even under the window frame...

Masonry is not black magic though, so soon after it looked like this:

The ceiling didn't look good either... but in the end this was all I had to patch instead of tearing down the whole ceiling.

The bottom 1 1/2 m were once painted a freakin' wild color...

All this is now gone, I patched the plaster and me and my dad painted the walls. Painting in this tiny cubicle in 35 degree C and 80% humidity weather was an incredible experience, even though I wore nothing more than a bathing suit I was soaking wet within minutes.
Still on the To Do List: paint the door, trim and window, replace light switch and fixture, reattach toilet paper holder.

No idea when I might get to do this... actually my GF who first HATED being in a construction zone now insists this can wait until fall because right now she feels we need to make best use of our summer railway ticket (one €50 ticket that allows you to travel the entire country from July to the first week of September) and work is absolutely eating me up and probably will continue to do so until at least September (or until I quit that job...)

No news...

2007-08-16T11:44:00.000+02:00

The WC project hasn't seen any progress except for paint, which was a story in itself. We used Moltoflott, a brand I really used to love because it was easy to work with, gave absolutely no streaks, brush marks or anything and 2 coats ccovered perfectly. In this case though I was severely disappointed - there were ugly brush marks and the 4th coat still doesn't cover perfectly. Guess some small spots will get a 5th coat... *grrr*

The pigsty project is most definitely on hold too, both for financial and time reasons. My new job keeps me busy at roughly 50 hours a week, that's way out of check. It's even illegal... but who's going to complain about a well-paying job in todays economic situation?

We most definitely need more space though... I spend a lot of time with my girlfriend out there and it's an absolute PITA if you have to sleep with your girlfriend and your teenage brothers in one room...

So we decided we'll probably close in the porch. We have no idea what purpose that area served originally, now it is mostly a covered sitting area with 3 solid brick walls and one side open to the yard. So basically we need to put up a stud wall facing the yard, whack down all damaged plaster, add some wiring (currently there is a light switch in one corner, one single outlet and a bare bulb dangling from wires coming out of the wall. The wiring was done in 1998 by a retired railway guy and is of questionable quality. Then we need to get some kind of heat in there (probably a gas line and a small stove that vents through the outside wall), hack in a window, replaster, insulate the ceiling, paint and do something about the floor (currently dirty unfinished wide pine planks probably also dating from 1998).

I already had a look for old windows and got offered some, though it'll probably take a good day to dig through the huge stack and get matching parts, and we'll have to build a frame.

The big questions right now are: what are we going to use for the walls and the ceiling?

Standard and probably fastest would be steel studs and drywall. Most luxurious would be wood framing and plaster&lath. Way too much work. Personally I'm leaning towards wood studs and Heraklith, magnesite bonded wood shavings, 2.5cm thick and fairly solid, has to be skim coated with plaster and is real solid.

And what kind of heat?

Beforehand, an electric space heater would be the easiest way to go, but power is expensive and prices are rising. The gas stove I mentioned above adds the money for the plumber. Or use a wood stove. That would most likely need a chimney...

Last but not least: when are we going to do this?

Finally.... before pics at least

2007-07-01T13:41:00.000+02:00

Now the long promised pictures!

I started with this lovely view... note the different paint where once the central heating pipes were...

A few remnants of the old pipes are still on the walls, 3 years after we disconnected them... (the pipe in the picture is the last piece of the old hot water pipe from the combi boiler in the bathroom to the kitchen sink, close to 20m long).

Note the beautiful 1980s IKEA lamp holder and open electrical box that sticks out from the wall... the wall is only 5cm (2") solid gypsum board and when my dad set that box (which is 5cm deep) he didn't want to make a hole all through the wall so he just let it stick out... has been that way for 30 years now...)

The dirt accumulation around the light switch ain't pretty either...

Now let's hope those pictures actually work... I tried Picasa for the first time today and let#s just say it was the last time, I'm back to Photobucket.

2007-06-20T15:04:00.001+02:00

Sorry, still no pictures... but the project has progressed a little. While fixing the aforementioned plaster holes I realized the main waste stack was wet near the ceiling and the plaster smelled moldy... not good. Either the stack itself leaks or there's a leak where the stack passes through the roof. Anyway, it's a job for professionals.

Besides one floor above the ceiling plaster in the WC collapsed last week because of old water damage... and after looking closely at ours I realized the entire vaulted brick ceiling needs to be replastered. Not a nice job...

So after fixing all holes in the wall we're waiting for the plumber to show up. After the waste stack problem is solved we can replaster everything else/ have it done if we find a good mason. Then I can do some fine-tuning on the plaster and paint. Oh yeah, and the door and window need to be stripped and repainted.

Vienna side project...

2007-05-14T13:25:00.000+02:00

As I promised after almost a full month a small project from the family apartment in Vienna. It is... painting the water closet!
Seemed like a small and harmless project when I started it yesterday... wet and scrape off the old distemper, remove some old oil paint, patch small plaster holes and repaint.
Well... it perfectly prove the well-known old-house laws. Let's say I have some brick-laying to do on the exterior wall... expect pictures tonight.

For those who never heard the old-house laws:
1) Everything takes far longer than expected.
2) Everything gets more expensive than expected (well, not much in that case, thankfully!)
3) Every simple project causes at least one side-project that is dicovered during work.

2007-04-17T11:12:00.000+02:00

Phew... way too long without posting!
I started working full time the first time in my life after finishing school, that doesn't leave me with much time to spare. Besides I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day doing electrical planning, so I don't really care for more computer time in the evenings.

This fact also probably delayed the project for years since I don't have anywhere as much holiday time as I used to have during my school days (Austrian summer holidays are full nine weeks!).

Oh well... back to the topic. We plan to have some serious grading issues in the garden fixed this year. It is so uneven it's close to useless, the old stairs made of granite pavers were never built properly (spacing is absolutely unnatural to walk on) and are starting to sag BADLY, posing a tripping hazard.
Besides, one part of the garden solpes towards the house.

Last thing, the wood storage shed is falling apart and the roof pitch is way too low. Let's just say brick walls that have stinging nettles growing out of them aren't good...

Sooo... we will have a caterpillar there for all the regrading, have a retaining wall built to even out the upper section and partially rebuild the wood shed.

While we have the big machines already there we'll have the soil around the pigs stables dug out down to the foundations, insulate everything below grade and install french drains. That should get the first floor into much better shape. If we go badly overboard we might have the foundations for the addition poured while we already have the concrete equipment (given we do a concrete retaining wall).

And of course there are many small side projects... like redoing the stucco on the entire rear part of the facade (can be postponed for a few years), refinishing and installing the clawfoot tub, install a new door handle in the bathroom (the 'old' one failed after only 8 years, the grub screw that holds the inner and outer side of the handle together stripped out, so every time you try to close the door from inside you rip out the handle), painting my grandmother's bedroom (has old plaster damage from a chimney leak that was already there when we bought the place, damage was repaired but never repainted) and hallway (same reason, only the old paint was all flaking too, roughly a dozen layers of limewash) and install a new kitchen floor. The old one installed by my aunt is rustic bricks. First, they were never intended to be pavers and suck up all moisture. Second they're extremely uneven... even with generous shims the refrigerator sways from side to side and the door closes by itself.

We're torn between installing real old cut stone flooring (Kehlheimer Platten), salvaged tile (not sure if we have enough of that for all projects), salvaged oak plank flooring and new pine planks. The first would probably be the most durable and historically correct but might be a lot of work (those beasts are 30x30cm, 1'x1' and more than an inch/2.5cm thick). The tile would be easier and might be accurate too, though those tiles were far more common in the city. However, I definitely want to have enough of that for the pigsty hallway and bathroom, so I'm hesitant to use it for the kitchen. The third option would turn into a LOT of work, since the floor is pretty shot (screw holes all over, worn beyond belief) and the room is so small you can hardly use a drum sander, but a drum sander with 24 grit paper would probably be the only thing that is able to deal with that floor. Besides we got about 16m2 of that stuff (probably just enough for one upstairs room in the pigsty) and the kitchen is like 6m2, leaving us with useless leftovers.

Leaves us with the new pine... definitely the least durable and most expensive, since we need to actually buy that stuff.

I dunno... I still prefer the stone.

The easter weekend I took a few pictures that I'll try to post.

Visions and ideas...

2007-03-05T16:42:00.000+01:00

Wow, third post today!

The general idea is to turn the not-so-old outbuilding into liveable space that looks like roughly 1910 construction, a somewhat upscale rural home with some elements that were fancied in the city back then.

I've always been into salvage (as a school kid I started browsing every dumpster for useful stuff, mostly electrical). At the age of 18 I had a huge project - helping my parents turn two apartments into one huge and in the process doing a more or less full restoration on both. That got me towards architectural salvage - I no longer only looked for electrical stuff but for doors, wooden flooring,...
When my grandmother bought that house in 2005 I had a place to use all that salvage... and the idea to create a beautiful house, my dream house, out of a ruin was born.

The basic concept: add a full second floor, hallway, stairs and tiny bathroom, topped with a gable roof.

So that involves: clean out everything, take down roof, store tiles somewhere as well as reuseable (i.e. not rotted) lumber, take down second floor walls and ceilings. Dig a trench all around the building down to the foundations to isolate against moisture and add French drains. Dig and pour foundations or slab for addition after running all new electrical service, water, sewer line, water and gas.

Dig out the interior 1-2' deep and backfill with coarse gravel to prevent any moisture seeping up.

Tear new openings for doors and windows. The existing door is too narrow, IIRC it's about 80cm (31 1/2") and I'd like to widen it to a (rough standard in 1910) 92cm (36"). The first floor windows are practically non-existant, so new openings have to be made. Since there won't be much wall above the future windows anyway at that point it won't be a problem.

Build all new walls for addition and second floor. We're not yet settled whether we want brick like the original building or wood frame - most likely depends on the cost. Brick offers cheaper material but is more labor intense, wood frame is MUCH more expensinve in materials but will go up a lot faster. Wood frame also poses the problem of how to finish the interior - plaster and lath would be the only original finish, but adds the cost of the lath. Chicken wire just isn't going to do it on a wall... brick could be plastered directly.
An option would be Heraklit board, basically coarse wood shavings pressed with concrete. Comes in 1" or 2" thick boards and can be plastered over with just a finish coat unlike brick that needs two coats. However, that stuff is expensive too.

Put on new roof framing and tiles.

Pour slab or screed in hallway and bathroom.

Add new first floor ceiling - don't know yet at what point this is going to happen and what that ceiling is going to look like - wood would be perfect.

Add second floor interior walls - we're thinking of turning it in two smallish rooms (roughly 140 square feet each) and a tiny hallway. Next problem: what to build them of? Brick would need steel I-beams below and above and be pretty substantial. That's the way it was done in the 1913 building where I'm sitting right now.
Or wood framing... expensive (wood is about the most expensive building material here)... and what to cover it with (like the exterior walls).

I hope that about covers the rough work... oh yeah, forgot the chimney. Since I don't think the extremely crooked gas heating system of the main house (basically they added a pump and heat exchanger to a standard gas water tank to run a central heating system!) is capable of supplying another house I intend to get an alternative heat source. I already bought a wood/coal fired boiler off Ebay, but that turned out to have several severe flaws, thankfully we managed to back out since the seller hadn't disclosed damage.
The biggest problem of all: such a boiler needs someone to throw in fresh coal every few hours. That's ok while we're there, but we mostly only spend the weekends there if at all, so plenty of time for the pipes and radiators to freeze and burst.

So right now it looks like we'll get a gas fired combi boiler (small wall mount unit containing a central heating boiler and tankless water heater). That can be put on a thermostat and kep everything above freezing.

Finish work... I already scrounged enough panel doors for the entire house, 4 of them match, the others don't. Can't really do much about that... but hey, it adds character.
Frames and trim will mostly have to be built new.

Floors are ok too... the hallway and bath will get salvaged floor tile. The second floor will get a wide plank pine floor in the hallway and one room, the other will get tongue & groove oak flooring (4" planks).
Only the large downstairs room (storage and work shop) will get new pine T&G.

The bathroom will be tiny... so there won't be that much detail. A walk-in shower with tiled walls, a floor drain and IKEA shower curtain, high tank toilet and a cheap wall-mount sink, if I get lucky with vintage fixtures.

Windows: we're intending to use salvaged old windows. My uncle is an architect and has a huge old farm nearby where he stacked an entire room full with old windows. I guess we'll continue the old scheme of casements, two sashes each with upper lights.

Electrical: since at least the first floor is built VERY sturdy I want to go with surface mount conduit. Otherwise I'd have to trench all the walls... and I think I mentioned how hard the concrete is. Besides... it looks so 1920s.
Only my future bedroom will get a special treat I don't know yet how to realize... maybe run it on low voltage (24V)... I salvaged 1900 wiring, twisted cloth cord on glass insulators, with rotary switches made of porcelaine and brass... unlike US knob&tube that kind of wiring was not concealed inside the walls (not really an option with solid brick walls anyway) but run exposed on the walls!

I guess that should give you some ideas of what I'm planning to do...

When I manage I'll post pictures of all my salvage (most of it hasn't yet made it's way out to the pigsty but still resides in our basement in Vienna or the stuff that can't stand moisture in my bedroom), details of the pigsty as it stands now, inspiration from other houses as well as some plans I slapped together in Autocad.

Pictures...

2007-03-05T16:18:00.000+01:00

I promised pictures and here they are...

First an outside view as I first saw it.

The open space in the middle used to house the manure pile... I guess it was more like a pit judging from what the neighbors still have. The PO had it filled up (mostly with plaster from the renovation I discovered upon digging up roots of evil stinging nettles that had invaded everything... you dig into 4" of topsoil and the get bricks and plaster chunks). The white part of the house was once painted blue but that faded away... and that's about all that will be left when we're done. Note the outdoor light switch for the inside light (to the right of the door)...

Next one... view from above. Here you can see how the grade slopes and the house constantly gets wet when it rains...
The windows are tiny and have to be replaced - they're made of something that looks like concrete.

Now the inside...
You can see how much crap there was... the only good things are the trash can and the windows - actually the old storm windows for the kitchen. The trash can hides the refrigerator and range. As well as the falling plaster *sigh*
Oh, and in the corner you can see the weeds I mentioned in the previous post...

Not visible: the severe hole in the ceiling (to the left of the photographer) and the sloping ceiling in general...

The floor is concrete with something like an 8" slope towards the door to ensure runoff of whatever got there... remember, they actually kept pigs there.

Welcome!

2007-03-05T15:43:00.000+01:00

Well, that's my very first attempt at blogging, specifically house blogging, after reading several blogs for years.

I guess first I have to clarify one thing: the house I'm talking about here is mostly fantasy yet and probably won't be built for at least a few months, if not a full year. So I can't guarantee frequent updates and merely think of this blog as a place to collect ideas and some pictures of pieces I already gathered.

Now to the house itself...
My family owns a (very) small farm house in Northern Austria, just 400m from the Czech border and pretty close to Slovakia. The house itself has 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. That's pretty small for a family of 7. SO already when the house was bought there were plans to extend it. The first thoughts involoved finishing the attic, but that would require a complete new roof over the entire house, basically turning everything into a huge war zone. That simply involves too much work and is too expensive.

So eventually we turned our attention towards the outbuildings. There are two of them, one probably once house goats, is tiny, damp and doesn't have much natural light.

And then there's the old pigs stables or whatever you want to call it... and that's what this is all about.

Built in 1971 this stands as a rectangle with a small bumpout for the outhouse (yes, that's right, that house didn't have indoor plumbing until 1997!), built of concrete and brick.
The foundations and walls maybe 3 feet above the floor are concrete. And not the usual farmer's mix (1 sack cement, 10 sacks sand) but real full-blown air raid shelter grade concrete. How I found out? I whacked that thing with a heavy sledge hammer just for fun and all I saw was a white mark on the surface.
Above it's double wyth brick, going back to single on the second floor.

It's more than half built into the hill, so the ground on the rear side is on second floor level.
That, in cinjunction with absolutely no gutters makes for severe moisture problems.

The second floor is merely an attic - maybe five feet at the entrance and 8" on the other side. In dry words unuseable. The floor is wood, severely sagging because the joists were cheap wood and undersized to even support their own weigth... and from severe roof leaks it has a huge hole.

The roof itself is a tile roof. Same cheap and undersized lumber as the ceiling, and waaaaay too flat. Besides, they never replaced broken tiles. So now, the wood is partially rotted, sagging and the roof leaked severely. When I first walked in during rain I stopped counting at the 10th leak.

First thing we did was buy 100 used tiles for half the price of new ones and I spent an afternoon on the roof replacing tiles since the roofer refused to go up there. That got it more or less waterproof for the time being.

The first floor still has the old stalls inside, solid brick half walls and wooden doors with huge bolts, a clay watering trough in every stall. When we got the house it was mostly used for storage - leftover bricks, tiles, the garden hose, old ironware, bags of plaster (that was useless because it had gotten moist), rotted doors and windows, bales of straw, dried weeds of unknown origin (and incredible amounts of them (the plants must have been up to 6' tall and one of the stalls was filled up to at least 3' with that stuff) and other trash.
We tried to get rid of some of the trash and put in lawn furniture, lawn mower and all that stuff.
Oh, I forgot two things in there... a working 1970s refrigerator we've been using extensively as a secondary and a brand new never used 1960s or 1970s electric range we don't have a real use for - in the kitchen we have a gas range we prefer by far.
How I can tell it was never used? The burners still have stickers on them...

The attic is even worse... almost only wood scraps, either rotted from moisture or eaten by powder post beetles. The only remotely useful thing might be a roll of tar paper. Yeah, and two replacement asbestos shingles for the roof of the main house (about 1/4 of the main house was covered in asbestos at some point, we won't touch it since it holds up noticeably better than the tile roof even though it's FUGLY).
There were also empty fertilizer bags galore, and by all means broken window glass and roof tiles!
We scrapped the tiles but decided to keep the larger pieces of wavy glass.

There's no running water, the drain goes straight to where the manure pile once was (the bottom of the outhouse just opens into that hole too, but the hole is no longer there) and the electricity is pathetic - merely an extension cord buried in the ground - it's a miracle that thing never crumbled away and shorted out. Inside there is a single receptacle and a 40W bulb above the door.
The attic doesn't have electricity at all - well, on the other hand, it doesn't even have a door, so what can you expect...

Wow, that's a monster post... Pictures to follow in the next post where I'm going to talk about our visions and plans.