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

Before

During

After

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

Someone asked me the other day how I learned so much about buildings and the science that is associated with them, so I thought I’d share.

My affair with old houses began around 28 years ago when I bought a run-down property in East Anglia in England.  This was a lump-clay construction property that was built in 1680 and served a dual-purpose as a home and shop for the next 250 years.

Sadly, through my many moves I have managed to misplace the original photographs of the work I did on this house (I promise I’ll look for them and post later), but after 5 years, it was completed.

Having lost money on the project, but having left behind a property that was now likely to last another 300 years, you would have thought I was not going to do it again.  Then I found this place.

This was a 500+ year old farm house and outbuilding complex on the North Yorkshire Moors.

It had been derelict for 40-50 years, and the weather and farm animals had taken their toll.   The roof of all the outbuildings, had all but collapsed, the windows had rotted and fallen out, the floors in the main house had rotted and fallen through, and the whole property was between 12″-18″ deep in manure.

There were no inside facilities, and the water to the property was from a well some 1/4 mile south up a hill.

So the first thing to do was to find somewhere to live while the property was re-built.

First things in, two mobile homes, the Blue one of the left was the home for the next 2-years, the Brown one on the right the tool-shed.

The original construction was Random rubble stone with solid lumber roofing and a Stone Slate roof, this all had to be torn back to the bare bones, and fixed before we could do any modernisation.

In the main house, after propping the ceiling we could, and tearing down the ones we couldn’t this is what we started with.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, the property was 15 miles from the nearest hardware store, 1 mile from the nearest road, and had no road to it, everything had to be hauled in by Tractor for the first 3 months until we had laid the road.

I made the road from 16 rolls or Taram, 300 Loads of 1st Crusher run Whinstone, 200 Loads of 2nd Crusher run Whinstone and 100 Loads of Powder Crushed Whinstone, and around 300 gallons of Diesel for the Digger and Road Roller. The rest was just hard work.

What’s Whinstone I hear you ask? It damned hard, difficult to break (although it broke more than a few hammers over the years) and the majority of the North Yorkshire Pennine area where the house was originally built was made up of it as the Bedrock! It also made the sound like the Word Whinnnn when it was struck with a Hammer and Chisel, unlike the sound I made when I struck myself with the Hammer.

Part 2 is coming soon, the demolition and rebuilding of collapsed walls……

I have come to realise that the ability to produce fine work is not dependent upon how much power you can get in a tool, but what you do with it.

Rather than reach into my piggy bank to buy the latest and greatest Black & Decker, I’ve come to rely on just a few cordless tools that I find to be inexpensive, versatile and can get into places that most cored versions cannot, with a higher degree of accuracy.

The cordless sander.

Helps smooth out all those little imperfections that you put there from using your power plane.

This one can fit in areas as small as any you can tear it to.  It doesn’t as a crapper for your caged pet birds when you are finished with too.

Downside:  Doesn’t work too well as a duct tape replacement due to it inadequate glue on one side, although there are sticky versions now available.

The cordless hammer.

This one is a favorite.   Many tools in one.  Doubles as a paper-weight, walking stick for very short people, ideal for screwing in screws that have had their heads stripped by those electric screwdrivers.

The come in a range of shapes and sizes, colours and styles, and provide hours of endless fun collecting different ones.  You can even use them to build a cabinet to display your collection.

When the head breaks off you can still use it as a paint stirrer, or thingummy to stop your marbles rolling off the workbench.

The Cordless screwdriver.

What a winner!  The first, the best. Very versatile and never needs new batteries.  Not only does it screw in screws, it prises lids off cans, can be used with a cord to act as a plumb bob, if you have any musical talent you could use it as a conductors wand.

It has been used in hand-to-hand combat, although I would point out (pun fully intended) that this is highly dangerous, and very illegal.

Last but not least….The corldess tenon saw!

This one has not yet (as far as I know) been replicated by an electric version, although I’m sure there’s one in design stage as I write.

Without this most of the homes, furniture, wooden boats, wooden swing sets of the 60′s and before would not have been built.

It still offers the versatility not seen by any electrical counterpart as operating as a straight edge or set-square or 45 degree bevel when needed.  It’s also excellent for safely swatting wasps and hornets when they approach in the summer, try that with a chain saw!

Joking aside, often times better results are achieved by utilising the right tools, and the right professionals for the job.  While electricity serves us in many ways, it will never replace the person who is a true artisan, and is committed to giving you the best possible results no matter what the effort.