The 'big project' that I hadn't really thought about or planned for...

[Herr Döktor]

Our house is more relaxing than our previous one and a bit further from being in suburbia. We named it "Solitaire", due to the sense of solitude and a few other connections it has to something that happened in the year it was constructed.

Sorontar

That is a rather evocative name for an abode

It's also, according to Andy Williams, "the only game in town".

Following!

[Sorontar]

Hi Herr Döktor!

Strangely, it had nothing to do with the card game. Naming places is always a personal thing.

[Herr Döktor]

Hi Herr Döktor!

Hi back!

Strangely, it had nothing to do with the card game. Naming places is always a personal thing.

We currently live in a house called "The Beeches"

It doesn't even have a garden..!

[Sir Henry]

Hi Herr Döktor!

Hi back!

Strangely, it had nothing to do with the card game. Naming places is always a personal thing.

We currently live in a house called "The Beeches"

It doesn't even have a garden..!

Ah, but does it have a boxing ring on the roof? 

[Sir Henry]

Sorry there have been no updates lately, but I've mostly been painting my wife's work room and learning about wiring water heaters.
I've pulled up floorboards, gouged channels in walls, installed trunking and fed a couple of massive 10mm cables up to the attic, across and down into the other half of the house to power an electric shower in the shower room and a water heater for the bathroom. The electrician came to quote for the work this morning and was very happy with the work so far, which was a huge relief.

Meanwhile the kitchen is still horribly dark and gloomy, so we're replacing the current windows with ones that don't have an 8 inch column up the middle  That suddenly became far less urgent when we realised that all the panes were covered with grey, polarised, self-adhesive film that cut the light by about 20%. With that removed it's much brighter in there. We're still going to replace the extraction fan over the back door with the window that it replaced. An excuse for more stained glass, though this time probably not very colourful as the light is really needed in there. So once the shower is done I need to learn how to make window frames 

And every morning I'm still out there killing the brambles and ivy that have taken over the garden. The parakeet disappeared for a week or so, but was back this morning. And the dwarf cooking apple tree is now revealed in all its glory, rather than hidden under brambles. I pruned it back to a sensible shape, thinking that once pruned, fruit trees tend to give a better harvest. But as we've had dozens of apples off it already this year, I can't imagine it could be any better. We'll see next year.

And the best bit? This morning I discovered that we have a pond! Only a small, plastic-lined one but it means that there's the potential for a whole other range of beneficial wildlife. And it made me feel like a proper Explorer in Residence! 

[SeVeNeVeS]

And the best bit? This morning I discovered that we have a pond! Only a small, plastic-lined one but it means that there's the potential for a whole other range of beneficial wildlife. And it made me feel like a proper Explorer in Residence! 

If you ever get some frog or toad spawn to spare, PM me, I am interested if you could post me some for my pond.

I could do a swap for some newts, got hundreds of them.

Sounds like the new place is an adventure in more ways than one!

[mizzarrogh]

If You visit Sweden i can provide You with toads and frogs from the growt in the forest ponds... 
(i don't think one are allowed to pick wild ones, but those should be ok)

[Sir Henry]

My, how things have changed... (Actually, less has changed than expected except the plans)

We've come to realise that everything is dominoes - we can't do this until that is done and we can't do that until the other is done, ad infinitum.

Everything went pear-shaped in early November. The company that were going to install the air source heat pump in mid-December stopped communicating unless prodded repeatedly, so the survey to see what system we needed wasn't done until late November (and that was by an independent surveyor) so by early December it was becoming clear that we weren't going to have central (or any) heating before 2023.

So everything stopped, to be replaced by Project Stay Warm.
First we had to work out where we could have a flue pipe leave the building without doing any permanent damage or major work, so we decided on the window above the secondary front door. Happily this is also at the bottom of the stairs so the stove can heat both upstairs and downstairs. So the first fortnight mainly consisted of attaching the flue to a terrifying height on the outer wall (after rerouting the electricity supply to the laundry building and the drain pipe from the shower [dominoes] so they didn't melt with the heat) - as you can see, the ladders didn't quite reach the top of the house, so the last bracket is about 6 foot from the top. 

Then we installed the stove my wife had given me as a present a couple of years ago. Only to discover that it was almost entirely ornamental. So we went back and bought the stove that had served us so well 35 years ago in Scotland, the wonderful Morso Squirrel. Hugely efficient, a tiny beast that just belts out heat. On its own it manages to keep a 6-bedroom house warm while only producing whisps of smoke from the top of the flue!

Next domino - firewood. Buying kiln-dried hardwood was a great solution, if rather expensive and if only they could deliver more than one ton bag per month. So a solution was needed...

The trees on the left in the photo above need to come down. They're destroying the laundry house and the school building on the other side and they completely shade the garden in summer. Two of them are sycamores and it turns out that you can burn sycamore, once it's dried, without having to leave it for a year. So we called in a 'tree surgeon' who quoted us £900 for the three and we keep the wood. As the school is paying half, £450 seemed like a good deal for a winter's heating. Until he came to do the job with the real tree surgeon who started talking cranes in the schoolyard, £3000 cash and so on. No way will that happen, so I bought a chainsaw. One of the sycamores is now down (with no collateral damage) and mostly burned and next week we start on the second, which will hopefully last us until the spring. The main body of the ash may need a professional, but by then it will be a much smaller/cheaper job. We'll see...
So my preparations for Christmas consisted mainly of sawing and chopping wood and building a firewood store. And realising that I'm about 20 years too old for this kind of thing. But needs must and all that.

Then, for Christmas, my daughter gave me a wipe-out flu that has stopped me doing anything for 3 weeks. Anything except ordering a smart meter in preparation for the solar panels. Which has just turned into another box of dominoes  

But that's another post...

[John Zybourne]

I must say this seems like quite the undertaking! Are there any plans to give the home a steampunk interior perchance, once things have settled down of course. Possibly a laboratory?
Cheers and best of luck in the new year,
JZ

[James Harrison]

So the new flue was being fitted at roughly the same time we had high daytime temperatures of about -5?  Brrrr!

I suppose at least it makes a memorable first Winter in the new house.

As for the dominoes effect... yes, that seems to be a thing trying to get anything done.

[SeVeNeVeS]

Nice neat job, my only question would be the flue runs up next to a chimney, could'nt you have used said chimney and save a lot of time money and underwear?

Obviosly I only have limitd info' from the one photo.

I love my burner, saves me a lot of money on gas bills.

As for sourcing wood, I have a cordless reciprocating saw in my van all the time, whilst driving around the city always on the look out, skips, building sites, trading estates, friendly builders and waste collectors.
Gumtree can give results sometimes.

Pallets left outside shops etc if it ain't painted i grab it, chop to get in the van then use a circular saw at ho
me to chop up.

Mainly soft wood and pallets but they burn well.

The way I see it anything free that will burn is fair game.

[Sir Henry]

[snip]
Nice neat job, my only question would be the flue runs up next to a chimney, could'nt you have used said chimney and save a lot of time money and underwear?

Very sensible question, more bizarre answer:

Sadly that chimney is for one of the two fireplaces in the attic so it doesn't even go down one floor.

But it does mean that one day we will have an open plan attic studio with its own wood stove. And maybe a Victorian-style winch and pulley systemfor bringing firewood up to and in through the window next to it. 

[SeVeNeVeS]

[snip]
Nice neat job, my only question would be the flue runs up next to a chimney, could'nt you have used said chimney and save a lot of time money and underwear?

Very sensible question, more bizarre answer:

Sadly that chimney is for one of the two fireplaces in the attic so it doesn't even go down one floor.

But it does mean that one day we will have an open plan attic studio with its own wood stove. And maybe a Victorian-style winch and pulley systemfor bringing firewood up to and in through the window next to it. 

aaah, I see, I knew  there must have been a reason, that would explain it then 

[Sir Henry]

I must say this seems like quite the undertaking! Are there any plans to give the home a steampunk interior perchance, once things have settled down of course. Possibly a laboratory?
Cheers and best of luck in the new year,
JZ

Thank you and thank you for the segue, because...

As I think I mentioned before, this house has 3-phase electricity (main house, laundry outhouse and basement because  ). This turns out to be useful because we're planning on installing solar panels (on the basement phase) and storage (laundry phase).

While giving the latest meter readings, up popped a window saying 'Please get a smart meter', which seemed like a good idea (and maybe even necessary) for the solar power. So I filled in the form and added "Note we have 3-phase so have 3 meters". They panicked and sent a specialist engineer to install it.

When he saw our system his initial reaction was "I'm not qualified for this!"  and phoned his boss who asked for a photo of the 3-phase incoming connection so the engineer switched off the power and opened the box. It is a glorious beast, with the 3 phases coming off the upper, square copper bar, one connected by each of the 3 copper fork switches. These, and whatever the things in the bottom are, are all ceramic and look as if they were installed in the 1960's at the very latest. Absolutely terrifying!

(I didn't think to get a photo at the time and he wasn't going to reopen it later, so this is a photo of his photo on his phone)

On seeing the picture, his boss said "We're not qualified to deal with this! Call Northern Powergrid and ask for a replacement."
And with that the specialist engineer shut the box, switched it back on and leaped backwards as it fizzed for what felt like 10 seconds but was probably only 5. Once it stopped he poked it tentatively, triggering another couple of seconds of fizzing. 

After a short wait to see if anything else happened (it didn't), he told me that it would be about 12 weeks for Northern Powergrid to install a modern version that they could attach a smart meter to without it blowing up. He also advised me not to touch the green box. As if I'll go within 6 foot of it before it's disconnected! And then he ran away.

So we have 3 months to wait before we can get solar installed, which gives us time to reroof the house and find a company who will do the installation.

But, back to the original question and steampunk:
When they take out the 3-phase box, I'm going to keep it, clean it, mount it on the wall in the basement and attach a plug. The tiny little flip switch on the right will be replaced with a much larger handle (ideally a beer pump handle, if I can find one). Each of the phase connections will be connected to a mad professor device, placed around the workshop that I'm planning for down there. So a plasma ball, possibly a Jacob's ladder and... any ideas, folks? Maybe something that hums ominously?

Thinking about it, I'll probably have a secondary set of three guillotine switches, one for each output, hopefully also beer pump handles, so I don't have to have all the mad gadgets on at once.

Of course the kraken in the bathroom has come with us and I have definite plans for its other 3 tentacles as the bathroom is a different layout, but that is for another post...

[SeVeNeVeS]

As you are going for air source heat pump and solar panels I wondered if you ever heard of electric wallpaper.

I only discovered it this morning on a random search for something else.

https://octopus.energy/blog/nexgen-electric-wallpaper/

https://smartgreensheep.co.uk/products/nexgen-graphite-heating

Maybe something to look into?

[Sir Henry]

There's an article on the BBC news site about that today too, I was planning to read it with my tea this afternoon.

On a related note, I was looking at underfloor heating for the kitchen (the concrete floor is freezing) but the amount of work was a bit daunting - pouring self-leveling screed in the kitchen was beginning to terrify me. Then I realised that all the 'How To's' were about tiled floors so I looked up wood floors and it's so much easier and cheaper.

First you lay down a thin layer of insulation boards, then a 3mm deep heating mat (it comes in rolls that you cut and lay to cover the floor) and then the wood top layer. That's all.
So the top layer will be a layer of 3mm hardwood plywood (varnished/sealed) and a 3mm layer of poplar ply laser cut and stained (seriously sealed/varnished) glued on top. I'm currently debating whether to stain it all with wood stains (as in the sketch below) or to gradually fade it from wood stains to bright colours as it goes from the back door (bottom left) to the hall door (topish right). Then when I do the same in the hallway (with a different pattern) it can be full colour too. Wood stain has style, but coloured wood has style and joy.

It will cost about a thousand quid in all, but I think it will be worth it. It's only about three hundred more than doing it in basic laminate flooring.

[Hurricane Annie]

Hi Herr Döktor!

Hi back!

Strangely, it had nothing to do with the card game. Naming places is always a personal thing.

We currently live in a house called "The Beeches"

It doesn't even have a garden..!

I've taken inspiration from a historical musical reference in naming my home . "Villa Nellcôte"

[Sir Henry]

Things have slowed right down here, mainly due to a combination of reroofing and no longer having help.
The reroofing means that the house now has soot in the air most of the time, so I've developed an annoying cough. The answer was to work in the garden until the rain came then blitz the attic. But of course the rain never came, this being 2023. We've had one short shower in the last 3 months, which is ideal while we had the roof off, but has baked the soil dry, which in turn made the 30cm/1 foot thick layer of solid clay in the side beds removable. It breaks up into nice, fist-sized lumps.
As you can see from the photos below, I've removed the fences*, 2 trees, several saplings and miles of ivy and brambles from one side of the middle garden so far. Doing both sides and across the top will take more than a year, I suspect. Because of the ivy and brambles, it has to be done by hand, carefully removing any traces; I can't just till/rotovate it.

The best bit is the shed. It was a bit dingy, but it turned out very nicely with a new coat of bright, light blue paint...

Spoiler: ShowHide

...and being demolished, the rotten sections thrown out and the rest rebuilt onto a new frame filled with (in order, bottom to top)gravel, sticks, half-rotted compost and hand-sieved topsoil (2 tons of it!), and finally herbs and assorted veg. Hey presto! one kitchen garden to keep us going until the other beds are useable.

But it looks like the rain has finally returned, so I'll be getting on with the attic. I do so love doing physical work in the summer in full hazmat.

*Removing the fence posts was what caused the other delay. The wonderful friend who was helping me do all this work decided that he could lift one out on his own when I'd already given up for the day. Ended up with a slipped disk which, three months on, still hasn't healed because he's a boy who can't say no and his family keep getting him to do things that make it flare up again.
So I'm doing this all on my own again. This thread is unlikely to speed up any time soon...

[James Harrison]

That's great progress (and I hope your friend's back recovers- ouch). 

Being honest (aka boring) it's that sort of clearance work that I've found I actually really quite enjoy.  Maybe becaue it's the sort of thing that I can do myself, for an hour or two each evening, over the course of a few months and work some frustration out whilst I'm doing it. 

[Sir Henry]

Being honest (aka boring) it's that sort of clearance work that I've found I actually really quite enjoy.  Maybe because it's the sort of thing that I can do myself, for an hour or two each evening, over the course of a few months and work some frustration out whilst I'm doing it.

Yes, I'm the same. My morning routine for the last couple of months has been to get up at about 6, make a coffee and potter out into the garden for 2-3 hours of digging and killing. It's a wonderfully meditative and cathartic start to the day. I think I'd prefer to do it in the evenings, but by then I'm almost always too achey for hard physical work.

The negative side is that I really hadn't considered how much greenery I'd be killing and trees I'd be felling before we can start growing things. It feels like 500 steps back for 3 steps forward, even though my logical side has all the reasons why it needs doing.

The top section of the garden is still a bramble-filled wilderness and we're intending that part of it will always be like that to help the local wildlife. We spent a delightful half-hour the other evening watching four fox cubs playing in the middle and top gardens. Hopefully they'll find the couple of rats I've spotted scuttling around soon.

[Hurricane Annie]

Being honest (aka boring) it's that sort of clearance work that I've found I actually really quite enjoy.  Maybe because it's the sort of thing that I can do myself, for an hour or two each evening, over the course of a few months and work some frustration out whilst I'm doing it.

Yes, I'm the same. My morning routine for the last couple of months has been to get up at about 6, make a coffee and potter out into the garden for 2-3 hours of digging and killing. It's a wonderfully meditative and cathartic start to the day. I think I'd prefer to do it in the evenings, but by then I'm almost always too achey for hard physical work.

The negative side is that I really hadn't considered how much greenery I'd be killing and trees I'd be felling before we can start growing things. It feels like 500 steps back for 3 steps forward, even though my logical side has all the reasons why it needs doing.

The top section of the garden is still a bramble-filled wilderness and we're intending that part of it will always be like that to help the local wildlife. We spent a delightful half-hour the other evening watching four fox cubs playing in the middle and top gardens. Hopefully they'll find the couple of rats I've spotted scuttling around soon.

Paradise

[Sir Henry]

Paradise

Thank you for this, it was just what I needed. 

When we first moved in we were full of enthusiasm, seeing the long-term picture and potential of the place. But as the months have gone by that focus has become shorter and shorter to the point of only really seeing the current and next problems to be dealt with. A lot of 'When this is done we can do that and when that is done we can finally get round to the other...' and so on. The big picture faded out.

But getting a different perspective has reminded me of why we're doing it all.
Thanks.

So today is the first trip to the tip with a car full of bagged-up fibreglass insulation  to clear the way for a beautiful new loft space. I really don't like the idea of just throwing it out, but I've tried to give it away (Freegle etc.) but no-one seems to want it. Can't blame them, it's horrible stuff to deal with and I'm not looking forward to driving round with a car full of the stuff, but needs must...

[Hurricane Annie]

Well Sir Henry, sometimes when there are circumstances you can't do anything about, you have to start on the things you can do something about. Set yourself an achievable mission or project of one task at a time. Then reward yourself by looking back at the progress.  It becomes your own Oasis

It can be a feeling of satisfied relief when you clear out surplus from your  place. Keep up the good work !

[Sir Henry]

I'm currently putting flooring back into the attic (the walls and floor there were removed probably in the 1980's for some reason).
I'll be insulating the roof rather than the floor so I've had to remove all the fibreglass insulation that was laid there - a truly horrible job). When I did, it revealed a foot-thick layer of fluff underneath. We had it tested for asbestos, which seemed likely, but it was all clear. What it turns out to be is a short-lived form of insulation made using recycled paper. While this was an admirable idea, it would have been a spectacular fire risk if they hadn't treated it with some form of strong fire retardant. What they went with was boron (sodium octoborate), which sadly made it far too expensive to be viable.
It gets everywhere! I'm having to clean the route from the attic to the back door every evening to stop it spreading throughout the house.

The fluff hides all sorts of minor problems, from nails and channels cut out of the joists to a maze of wires going every which way, over joists and back again. So I'm having to remove enough of the fluff to find everything hidden and get it down to a level where I can put the boards down. After rerouting the wiring through the newly-discovered channels and covering them with safe plates (something they didn't do before, it appears), obviously. The first few boards needed laying three times because of wires I found afterwards, so I'm now revealing them all before boarding any more.

And every now and then I find something wonderful, like tiny old wasps nests and birds' nests and old Christmas decorations.
And the original 1922 wiring. Lengths of the old cloth-covered black and red wires, encased in 1920's trunking. Back then they took a length of 2" x 1" hardwood, routed out two channels (one for black and one for red) and then covered it with a length of decorated hardwood veneer. Where they needed to break wires out, they would cut an angled section out of the middle and to of the 2x1 and feed the wires up. In the picture below doing this must have broken off the central piece, presumably because it was too near the end, because on this bit it has been replaced with a small length of pine.

[Sir Henry]

Slow progress.
Last winter was a disaster without heating; depression and a total lack of drive to do anything along with the inability to do anything for more than an hour at a time because the small stove needed constant feeding. Not fun.
But then spring arrived and everything in the garden started shooting up - ivy, brambles, sycamore saplings, a load of weird, leafless invasive things and so on. Back to spending the first two hours every day killing things. But on the plus side, the useable garden is now about 500 sq. ft. bigger than it was last year, I discovered a swing hanging in the brambles that is still strong enough to use and the dwarf apple tree seems to fruit half each year. Last year the left side had cooking apples and this year the right side had eating apples. Weird and wonderful.


Early summer saw the arrival of a new roof with lining, solar panels and about two dozen fewer holes open to the sky. So mid summer to the end of this month has been putting down a floor in the attic and putting up 150mm/6 in. of insulation in and on the eaves. All by myself, with no-one but these two for company.


It will all be plasterboarded out, but not until we've put in a Juliet balcony in one side window so we can winch up the boards rather than try to get them up two flights of narrow, spiralling stairs. Having a winch will also mean I can use the space as a workshop. 


Then, once the solar was sorted (it only took 3 months from completing installation to commissioning it    ) we could get the air source heat pump installed.
Did I mention that it should have been done last year but the company vanished? Well this year wasn't looking too good either as the guy in charge kept having to delay it. He had only just got out of hospital after a Rotweiller attack when he fell and broke 3 ribs. But last week, almost a year to the day since the original installation was due to take place, they turned up. It has been chaos here and a very steep learning curve (retrofitting into a double-sized house wasn't something they'd done before). But we now have two air source heat pumps and the most spectacular boiler setup (I asked, but apparently none of the taps dispenses gin). So as of today, we have heating in the house! (I'm really hoping that this means we won't have to go through another year of pushing through the inertia of depression.) And by golly gosh is it shiny?:

And warm