Autumn post on progress (or lack thereof) with the various projects.
It’s a cold and windy autumn day, about to start raining hard, and i’m feeling a little gum and very sore with what feels like DOMS from my previous day’s work on the main project – which, as some of you will know is the rebuild of our workshop.
I’m sore and DOMS-y today because yesterday I spent about 6 hours using a big breaker hammer (Kangoo hammer) to smash through the layers of concrete outside the workshop on one side as the first stage in making that side a long French drain (soakaway). The breaker hammer weighs in at about 30Kg estimated and I could only use it because the work was vertical and I could use my own weight to help drive it into the first layer of concrete slab.
I’m a bit glum because today, when I was digging out the first section of clay at one corner I discovered that what I thought was some kind of concrete sill along the outside that is actually it’s foundations and even in my short session of digging iv’e undermined it in that corner. Luckily this afternoon Steve the actual builder, came by with the breaker hammer again so that I could start on the next layer of the concrete that surrounds it : the outside of the workshop is like a stiff Lasagne ! and I still need to get through the next sheet of concrete pasta.
In discussion with Steve the builder iv’e now discovered that i’m going to have to underpin that whole wall : Steve has given me the work plan which is largely pockets of digging out which are then shuttered and filled. Eventually the whole wall that side will be underpinned and the meter section of slab that I was removing will become a long French drain/soakaway as planned.
One mug of coffee later and i’m a lot less glum as I get my head around the next stage of work. I’ll have to trim the foundation/sill back a bit, dig out the first section for it’s ‘pin’ and then make a wooden shuttering form that will make the process repeatable. My first Monday morning job this week is to phone the builders merchant and ask them to load a dumpy bag of concrete aggregate along with the sharp sand and chippings already ordered.
Update/correction November.
We looked at it, looked again, and then both of us saw that it was pointless to start underpinning when the workshop has been there for forty years with no signs of cracks or movement. What I did was to finish hacking the wet clay out and filled the trench with rubble and sand covered with a layer of chippings. In the meantime Steve the builder rendered the inside of the walls up to a height above any seepage and the combination of my French drain and his rendering has cured the problem. Halfway through November we finished with bringing up the level of hardcore and sand inside when Steve and one of his mates barrowed the concrete in and leveled it all : as I write it’s drying out and we’re planning the roof job so my next job is to order the insulated metal roofing sheets and some treewood.
I haven’t posted much about the workshop project because very little has happened during the summer. Since I finished the big manual digging out, backfilled most of the hole with hardcore and sand. Steve was also busy finishing a cottage that he is partially rebuilding for sale but when he had a few spare hours he came along to tidy up the lower section of wall before he does the main work of laying the new concrete slab. Where we left it was with the temporary compression post holding the roof up – the wooden post that I put in so that I could dig around the base of the old one.
That post created a potential extra problem with the new concrete as it would have got in the way of laying the vapor membrane first but one job that Steve did while I was manfully heaving the breaker hammer around was to build what looks like a roof truss supported off the back and front walls with a pair of timbers.
In this photograph (below) you can see where the water ingress has discolored the sand : the sand and hardcore is lower than the clay soil outside so I suspect that any water in the soil is simply draining slowly into the workshop. My work next week is to barrow in another dumpy bag of sand to level up that side and Steve says that he is going to completely render the inside of the walls up to the first layer of timber – only then do we plan to cast the new slab and the problem there is that we don’t have space for the normal concrete truck to get in the shared access drive and reverse into ours.
Steve the builder is very upbeat about the project : the problems on my project he says are minor ones and he has the experience to have a solution almost immediately . When he picked up the big breaker hammer he was off to make some temporary holes at someones house that has evidence of subsidence – that might be a problem – at least an expensive one as the first thing it needs is the eye of a structural engineer.
Before
Other projects.
The workshop is the one thing that has to happen before anything else can happen : with that on the back burner I started on several other projects that don’t rely on a finished workshop. As some readers will know I started converting an old seaman/machinist chest into an outside tool chest to hold my more woodwork orientated tools and at the same time set up a posh ready bag of tools for DIY jobs and at the same time as that I went through all of my old boatyard toolboxes, kept what I thought I could still use and stored the remaining tat in the tool box labeled
The new and heavy outside tool chest (it’s teak or something similarly aromatic) is mostly finished although a work in progress as I acquire new tools although it’s now mounted on a wheeled (castor’d) dolly as I don’t want to have to heave that thing around. That was the kind of project that I did in daily short bursts while I was mainly working inside on my book project – each short work session was a break from writing and each half hour slot usually saw one new tool mounting done.
The outside tool chest will be, hopefully, what I use next year when I start on a Teardrop style camping trailer so in a way it’s the second practical step in making that happen : the first step was to buy the basic book on the construction of Teardrop trailers and actually plan the build, The next thing that will need is for me to clear that entire space and rebuild the outside boat strongback/bench to make the trailer panels on and eventually the shed section of the actual trailer.
That’s as far as I can go for now so most of my late summer work has been at the crafty table, our computer or sketching out my proposed inside (workshop) chest for hand tools. I’m very much persuaded by Rex Kreuger and others that tool chests are a better solution for hand tools rather than tool walls so what iv’e been working on are some drawings of a Dutch style tool chest to live under one of my proposed benches inside the workshop. I may still build a wall mounted cabinet one side although that would mostly be for engineering tools and power tools.
Given that, with the outside tool chest mostly done, I now have the beginnings of outside bench space so one of my late winter projects is shaping up to be the carcass of a Dutch-ish style tool chest like the one that Phil (of Phil makes things) has built in Pikey Plywood rather than agonizingly exact jointed posh timber : Dutch style tool chests were usually a workman’s staple and certainly mot the posh woodworking of modern cabinet makers.
Book/Blog project.
My main work this summer (hobby job considered as work) was the five days a week that I spent working on my alternative history fiction. By the time I edit and finish this blog post I will have already scheduled the next part of the story to go live : i’m not writing and releasing in serial form, rather what iv’e done is edit together several otherwise independent story pieces all set, roughly, in the same time and place.
In this autumn iv’e taken a break from that story and taken some time to finish a whole load of blog posts such that iv’e now got another two month window to concentrate my efforts on it again when i’m not working on the things that iv’e covered in this post.
Best wishes Y’awl. Wa-oh
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 