So pretty much all of the building looked like this. The main house on the left of the photo was pretty well water-tight after the first 10 months, with a new roof, and chimneys rebuilt.
New wood sash windows had been completed and installed, I used Mahogany for the wood, which turned out to be a bit of a problem.
For those that don’t know, Mahogany lasts a lot longer, and provides better weather protection, doesn’t swell as much as Pine and Fir, which is what the old rotten windows were made of.
But Mahogany weighs about 2 1/2 times the weight of the older wood. is around 3 times more expensive, and is much harder to work with, but I wanted this building to last. What i forgot to take into account is the weight, and the size of the sash weight wells. The old iron sash weights would no longer support the Sashes. Luckily, my father was an engineer, who manged to get me some lengths of Tungsten, but these cost way more than I was expecting to pay, and was even more difficult to work with than the Mahogany, but the fact that Tungsten is around 2 1/2 times more than iron did the job for me.
Anyway, on with the plot of this post.
I have to concede that I got a huge amount of help from a good friend of mine, Iain Wright, a Scottish civil-engineer who had overseen the underpinning of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (and received the freedom of the City of London for this and many other efforts of maintaining the heritage of London buildings), and for whose help and education I will be eternally grateful.
Before I could renovate, the old crumbling wall needed to be removed and the footings and foundations stabilised for the new wall. Iain sold me his old caterpillar digger-loader with back arm, which paid for itself seven or eight times over before it finally died on me.
I used it to help sympathetically demolish the old walls. I say sympathetically, because every single stone that came out of the old wall, went back into the new one. I had to be careful that stones were not shattered as part of the demo, and then each one was cleaned of old lime mortar and piled up ready for re-use.
Building regulations said, that if I had to dig for footings and foundation, they had to go down 6 feet or until I hit clay. The house was originally built on bedrock. When we started to dig, we found we could only go down around 2 1/2 feet.
My buddy Mike wasn’t that tall, and he was on the bedrock at the bottom of the channel. We had to go to court to get the local building regulations changed. I wasn’t going to dig out 3 feet of solid bedrock Whinstone to replace it with cement in the hope that it would be stronger.
Anyway, those blocks you see in the pile where solid blocks made at the local quarry for us from Whinstone crusher run, and each one weighed in at 18lbs.
We could only build 3 courses at a time, and then wait for 24 hours for the next course to allow the mortar to cure enough for the next 3 courses. The stones came from the local quarry which was just over 28 miles away.
It took Mike, Dave (another builder friend) and I nearly 14 months to build wall to the point we could start roof construction for just this part alone. We had to endure what seems like the seven plagues, including fire & flood. The fire came when one mobile home we were using caught fire. Anyone who has seen an aluminum mobile home go up in flames would think twice about living in one. These three pictures were taken in the space of 30 minutes.
The flood was exactly that. A field wall collapsed and damned up a stream, which then burst it’s banks and flooded everywhere.
It took 8 days for the water to recede, and 5 of them was spent digging out the stream bed to ensure we never saw a flood like that again. It worked.
Then came the wind, and another reason why sometimes modern building regulations need to be looked at in a more scientific and rational manner.
Building regulations in the U.K. state that a Damp-proof-membrane has to be installed above ground to stop rising-damp. (See photo on the left)
Anyone who knows anything about water, surface tension, and capillary action knows that water will always try to find it’s own level.
Surface tension will only lift water up to the height the meniscus can support against gravity, and capillary action will only assist the meniscus effect if the capillaries in the mortar are small enough in all direction to support movement.
Rising damp is, in my opinion, a myth put about by unscrupulous marketing companies to support the multi-million pound “damp-proofing” industry in the U.K.
The problem is, in order to give a little confidence, the “Damp Proof Membrane solution” was arrived at. The problem with this, is that it creates a serious lateral weakness in the wall. We found this out one night in a storm when winds of over 80 MPH cam in from the west, and snapped the wall off completely along the DPM. The wall had to be rebuilt, and this time we added some temporary lateral support.
We used nothing but the original methods to re-build the house, but added, as I said before, best of breed modern technology where it enhance the stability or living comforts to the property. Some of the original components were wood lintels over window openings with sotne stills as well as heavy lumber supports for the roof. Because the final wall thicknesses were around 28 inches of solid masonry block and random stone construction, we could afford to over engineer the lintels and the roof.
This proved to be the right decision in the end, as the weather was not kind to the land of any property built on it at this point of the Pennines, but during construction it meant that everything was between 2 and 3 times heavier than the components we took out. The wood lintels were replaced by pre-stressed concrete lintels, that again we had manufactured specifically for the task at the local quarry. The wood beams we replaced with larger beams.
Where we took out 4″x6″ beams and, they were replaced with 8″x12″, the rafters of 4″ x 6″ were replaced with 4″x8″, the 2″x4″ purlins were replaced with 4″x6″. The original tongue and tab construction was replicated, but in addition we bolted through each rafter into the purlins for extra stability and support. This did mean extra lifting, but the finished product was worth the effort.
The roof of this part of the property required over 2,000 concrete tiles on it, each one nailed to the battens with zinc nails. It was time consuming work, but even my kids helped out on this.
Before anyone has a pop at me, they only worked on the lower roofs, were given instructions on safety techniques, the scaffolding boards were raised to reduce the drop off the edge of the roof and they were supervised at all times.
They both showed promise in the construction industry, which alas they did not take-up, and although they took four times longer to knock the nails in than the adults, and they broke more tiles, it was worth every moment to me to have them up there working with us, learning something about how buildings worked.
The outside stone wall was tied to the inner block wall with galvanized metal butterfly ties and galvanized mesh ties every other course of blocks and every 3 feet of wall, and then the gap was filled with loose rubble and wet cement.
This made the wall a 28″ thick solid structure. Inside the building the walls were framed with 2″ x 4″ pressure treated wood, insulated with fiberglass batt, and then boarded with gypsum board and plastered.
Tying in to the original walls was a bit tricky, because we had to loosen the original stones and then reset them into the new wall at the same levels of the stones. Matching the levels took a lot of practice, because the secret with random stone walling is that once you have a stone in your hand, you lay it wherever it fits. They are heavy and you don’t want to put the house together like a jigsaw puzzle. You very quickly get experienced at selecting the stones from the floor that are going to fit. (Dry stone walling was even harder, but that will be the subject of a latter post)
Outside
Inside
 Cow Byres Before |
 Barn before |
 Milking shed before |
 Cow byres during |
 Barn During |
  Milking shed during |
 Cow byres after |
 Barn after |
 Milking Shed after |
Aerial views during re-construction
 Me, piloting the helicopter |
 From the east during re-construction |
 From the West during re-construction |
