It's like starting over

Shed Slab

While it's been quiet on the blog front things have been happening at the Croft. In particular, work has started on the workshop.  Roy from Any Type excavations dug a wonderful hole in June only to have Dieter from Spaghetti Concreting fill it in a few days later.  The dimensions are about 10m x 10m plus a 1.5m veranda on the front (right side in the photo) a mud room on the eastern side (left side in the photo).   The steel frame is scheduled to arrive in August.

 

But wait there's more....



Stairs completed

Having completed the upstairs cupboards and plastering we decided it was finally time to oil the stairs.  The change is just amazing.  The photo of the half completed Harry Potter door below shows the transformation in progress.  Actually, that door was a great find.  We purchased it for $20 from a second hand dealer in Grenfell.  He had taken it from a building in George Street and dated it circa 1900.  It's cedar and was quite beaten up having been kicked in at some point.  



Harry Potter door

We've also completed the bathroom cupboard (below).  The mirror was a Grenfell recycling centre purchase and the carcass of the cupboard was originally a chest of drawers which we found sans drawers.  It now sports drawers that we made from some old cedar skirting board while the doors are resized cedar window frames.   


Bathroom

So in July we're planning and preparing for the shed build.  The 5,000 gallon tank pad is prepared and I've been reading up on steel frame construction... what could possibly go wrong?










 

The big push of April 2015



Rolex supervising the
trench digging

We were blessed with the opportunity to spend a 3 week block of time working on site during April 2015 – and work we did.  Here’s the wrap up.

Water tank, solar tubes and
worm loo

In hot water
Under the supervision of arguably the best plumber in the district, Phil, the hot water system was installed. We opted to put the rack of solar tubes on the ground rather than on the roof mainly to make access safer both during installation and future maintenance. One slight hiccough arose when a huge storm came through between installing the hot water tank and filling it.  Who’d have thought that a 350litre tank like that, sheltered by the house and attached by copper pipes to the wall would blow over? There was no damage, but poor Phil had to redo his copper work which was no longer text book neat. Mental note for next time – fill tank asap.

Plastered 
Long ago I discovered that I did not want to be a ditch digger. I came to this conclusion after hours of ditch digging. I can now add that I do not want to be a plasterer. After 2 weeks of sheeting and mudding I am over it. But it is finished. We did encounter a challenge where the plasterboard wall meets the Rytek ceiling. Because the latter is metal it expands and contracts much differently to the plasterboard which means it’s difficult to achieve a visually pleasing joint. After much discussion the solution we went for was to use "P50 shadowline" which gives a uniform shadow line (hence the name eh?) between the two surfaces. It looks very neat, but took an age to get right.

Painting for pleasure

After all that plastering it was (almost) a pleasure to get on to the painting. I think I spent more time climbing up and down the ladder than I did putting paint on the walls.

 

Fantastic 

Plastered, painted
and fanned

Part of our building approval requires the installation of ceiling fans in the upstairs bedrooms. We’d anticipated this and already had the electrician wire a 3 pin socket on the rafters for us. All I needed to do was plug the fan in or so I thought. I hadn’t realised that the fans came in kit form. Some of the components can be assembled on the ground but several, like the blades, can only be put together once the fan is hung. So there I was, 3 metres up trying to follow some poorly written instructions whilst juggling a 12 kilo fan and 5 large blades. The first fan took 3 hours to install, the second 45 minutes. Proof that I am teachable at least.



Bathroom

Bathroom cabinet

I finally got around to installing the bathroom cabinet as well as the mirror in the loo.  That's both rooms completed now.

 

So what’s left to go?

Well the list is getting shorter:

· Handrails for the staircase.

· Leadlight for 6 doors upstairs.

· Skirting boards (a work in progress).

· A ceiling fan for downstairs.

· Paving the back veranda, and

· 1,853 other things I can’t think of at the moment.

A cupboard with history

A couple of weeks ago we picked up the fifth set of French doors we'd been hunting for from a second hand place in Wombat, NSW.  To sweeten the deal the owner offered to throw in a small blue cupboard.  It looked like what we had in mind for over our bathroom basin -  so it found a new home along with the doors.

 

The cupboard has turned out to be quite interesting. Firstly, it has a small plaque on the door, "Childs and Co, Makers, 117 Regent St, Sydney".  When I pulled the cupboard door apart I found that the mirror was dated, 1904 - so that dates it pretty accurately.  The  top of the cupboard is made from a lovely single piece of Australian cedar, while the rest is cheaper, clear pine. Perhaps because the sides and bottom wouldn't have been visible from the customer's viewpoint?

 

The cupboard lacked a knob, so I had a dig in our useful box and found an Edwardian brass number - it's a fist holding a small bar. I remember we bought it at an antique fair about 15 years ago.  It has been waiting for the perfect home ever since.

 

We also added the piano sconce, again from the useful box.  It just jumped out and begged to be used. I've no idea where we picked it up.

 

So, 10 hours of stripping, refinishing and rehanging later we have a "new" cupboard.  Hope it fits!

(de) Pressed Tin

Before, during and after

After restoring 10 sheets of antique pressed tin for our bathroom ceiling I feel that I'm somewhat of an authority on the subject.  At least on the topic of how to prepare and paint the stuff - but it did take some experimentation.



Plan A for ridding the decades of paint, dirt and unidentifiable gunk was a wire brush on an electric drill.  15 seconds later I'd only melted the layers into a very robust, potentially Nobel prize winning composite that adhered to the tin better than ever.  I changed tack and resorted to plan B, the 600c hot air gun.

 

This also worked to consolidate the surface into a single layer; much like a slice of cheese, but in contrast to plan A it weakened the grip between the tin and the surface.  But if I overheated it I ended up with something more like butter than cheddar, which was easier to spread but decidedly harder to remove, especially once it became cold.

Whilst effective the hot air gun was tediously slow and incredibly messy as it took a few passes to remove the melted goo completely.  Two sheets along it dawned on me that perhaps a combination of the two approaches, hot air and wire wheel, might work. 

So after some more fiddling I came up with the following modus operandi which was about 30% quicker than relying on just the hot air gun:

• Heat an area of about 30cm x 30cm until the finish just starts to bubble (cheese not butter).  This weakened the connection between the tin and the coating.
• Allow to cool for a couple of minutes.  This resulted in the surface becoming very brittle.
• Scrape the surface with the back of a chisel.  For me this removed around 90% of the paint and made far less mess than the wire brush did when it flicked chips at 257km/h all over the shop.
• Run over the remainder with the drill/wire brush combo.  The resulting surface was 99.9% clean – or better.

Including the subsequent panel beating and applications of rust converter, red oxide primer and undercoat each sheet took hours and hours to prepare.

 

Have I mentioned I’m not going to recycle a pressed tin ceiling again?

The right tin to do

We've long liked the idea of a pressed tin ceiling for our bathroom and loo.  In fact, we had planned for it from the start, or at least we thought we had.  The hiccough we hadn't anticipated was the cost of freight - which brought the cost of materials to well over $1,500 before installation and finishing.  We really couldn't bring ourselves to spend that much and there didn't seem to be any viable second hand alternatives around.

 

We'd resigned ourselves to a garden variety plaster ceiling when I mentioned it to my brother.  Stagger me if it didn't turn out that he had a house worth of pressed tin that he had picked up 30 years ago from a demolition in our home town, Grenfell.  Not only did it have provenance (last century the owner had been my pre-school teacher) the price was right.  All he wanted was a set of white rear louvers for a 1956 FC Holden sedan.  How hard could that be?

 

With hindsight, the price was very much higher (and I still haven't found those louvers) .  Each sheet had three coats of enamel paint which needed removing along with 80 years of dust on the upper side.  All rust had to be treated, edges radiused and dents panel beaten.  Then followed an undercoat of red oxide primer and 3 top coats of white gloss.  Total time per sheet - don't even ask, but suffice to say that's two weeks of my life I won't get back!

Pressed tin in the bathroom

 

Installing it brought its own challenges, particularly for two vertically challenged builders like Jeanette and I.  But I have to say the end result is just what we were after.

 

We still have the cornice to go - I'm wondering about carving an egg and dart design into Tassie Oak. But I hope I talk myself out of it!