Pigsty once again...

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!!!

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

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

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

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...

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

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 ;-) )