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?










 

It's official

Final certificate

It’s official, after more than 8 years of work the house is “done” and we have the final certificate from the council to prove it.

We purposely didn't keep track of our time because we reckoned it would add up to be a scary number.  However, I do know that we have:

• Moved every brick, by hand, at least 3 times. 
• Constructed around 22 square metres of leadlight.
• Hand sanded about 70 square metres of plasterboard.
• Used roughly 50 metres of copper plumbing pipe for things other than plumbing.
• Spent over $2,000 on screws, more than $500 on caulk and precisely $202 on sandpaper.

Admittedly, there are still a couple of small things to do, like strip and install 50 metres of cedar skirting board and make another four panes of leadlight - so the housewarming is yet to be scheduled. And after that? Well I think Louis L’Amour got it right when he said:

 

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning.”

 

  

A nice distraction

Farm house and 2 storey garage

We got a little distracted recently when the opportunity popped up to remove some bits from my father-in-law’s child hood home.  The building, which is over a hundred years old, has seen several decades pass since it was someone’s home.  The avant-garde lean on the two storey garage provides a visual queue as to what will probably happen next.

Front veranda



One of the treasures we picked up was the original front door, with glass intact.  The plan is to ultimately incorporate it into our home.  But in the meantime it’s safely ensconced in the shed with the other treasures; 30 metres of skirting, 8 metres of pine handrail, 2 mantle pieces, 10 square metres of pressed tin ceiling (didn't I say I'd never do old tin again?) and a couple of light switches.

 

Front door

It was sad to see what had once been a modest but much loved farm house looking so dilapidated. Its broken windows had let in a flock of starlings and an apparently incontinent possum, while cattle had pushed over veranda posts in the quest for the ultimate back scratch. 

 

But despite the obvious neglect there was still a nice ambiance to the place as it almost appeared to recline amongst the old trees, occasional clump of jonquils and remnants of a picketed garden fence.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

The swinging (18) 60s

 

The French doors I’ve collected aren’t really from the 1860’s, more like early 1900’s, but they would have been much the same. (Besides, “the swinging early 1900’s” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

 

The left and right pairs of doors are made from Australian cedar. We found them at the Grenfell tip, complete with 8 coats of paint, broken glass and rotten joints. The middle pair was discovered in Wombat, NSW, they are pine with cedar panels – kind of the negative of the Grenfell doors which are cedar with pine infill. The door frames are new, dressed all round (DAR) Australian Ash. All the timber is still raw, I will probably oil it with the same finish we used on the floor, but not until I’ve completed the glass.

 

Hanging doors isn’t one of my favourite jobs, especially when every door is a slightly difference size, out of square and with a bit of a warp. But hang them I did by following these steps:

 
1.  Cut door to correct height.

• The door openings were made to accommodate the width of specific pairs of doors, the height was based on the shortest door less 10mm. This let me make the top and bottoms of the doors square.  

2.  Mortise hinge locations on doors.  

•  Given every door is a slightly different width I did this by hand with a chisel.

3.  Attach hinges to door with 2 small screws.

• There are four holes in each hinge. Using only two screws gave me the ability to change a hinge’s position if I needed to.

4.  Stand door in place with ply under it to set the bottom clearance.

  

5.  Mark hinge locations on door frame with a knife.

  

6.  Cut hinge mortises on door frames.

• I could have used a router and template as the hinges and frames are uniform – but I did it by hand.

7.  Stand door in place and put 1 small screw in the top hinge and 2 in the bottom one.

  

8.  Remove ply.

  

9.  Test the fit and trim top if required.

  

10. Put “proper” screws in remaining holes. These are a bigger gauge and longer.

  

11. Replace all “small screws” with “proper” ones.

  

12. Have a coffee.

Getting a pilot hole in the right place for a hinge can be tricky at times. The drill bit sometimes moves and then the hinge ends up a few millimetres (or worse) out of place.  There’s two good ways to limit the chance of this happening. The cheap way is to press an awl into the timber where you want the drill bit to start.  Kind of a pilot hole for the pilot hole.  The better way is to buy a funky drill bit that has a spring loaded tip – enabling you to locate the drill bit exactly in the centre of the hole everytime.  Check them out here at Screwit Screws.

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!

Skirting the subject

Rolex and a sample of our
 "new" skirting board

Every now and then an opportunity pops up that is just too good to miss.  One of those came our way the other day.  An advert on Gumtree caught my attention – “for sale, approximately 60 lineal metres of 240mm to 300mm wide Australian cedar skirting boards.  Varying lengths, denailed but requires stripping.”  A phone call revealed that they had been removed from a nursing home in Cremorne and were around 100 years old. 



The stairs and Rolex
(with his winter coat on)

The last time I saw anything vaguely resembling this was at the Grenfell tip.  There I stumbled across some french doors and 10 metres of very rough specimens in the building rubble – these are now part of our stair case.

 

By 5:00pm the next day, after a 613km round trip, 76 lineal metres of gold were stacked in our garage.  By my calculations that’s 5 metres more than I need to complete the upstairs’ bedroom.  And here I was thinking I could hang up my hot air gun for a while.