Home Improvement
Aug. 14th, 2007 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olorielMy raspberries are obviously masochistic. Whenever I cut them back, they bear another handful of berries.
So while I was picking berries today, all of a sudden something broke out of the brambles. A hare. A huge hare. And by huge I mean that its shoulders reached my knees - I first thought it was a young deer until I realised it was a hare. I am not sure who of us was more shocked, me or the poor animal (which then proceeded to hop through the brook and into the woods).
Now, as I haven't bored you with house stories for a while, and as I have generally been disgracefully neglectful of keeping track of the changes, I thought I'd kind of try to write a summary of the last months, house-wise.
After the business with the old flat and the relocation was over, we thought that the most stressful bits were finally over an done with. After all, we already had laid the parquet floor in the upstairs rooms, repaired the rotten wall, removed the attic floor and done a hundred little things, so now there would be no more surprises, right? Right!
Wrong.
It all started when Jörg decided that it might be nicer to finish the bedroom with authentic materials - this is, after all, an old farmhouse - like clay plaster and all the works.
At this point you reach an interesting problem.
In the olden days, people used clay plaster because it was cheap. The Bergian County was gifted by nature with clay, rain andarrogant proud and noble smiths, and if you needed to plaster a wall, well, you went out to the field, dug up some clay, mixed it with minced straw and manure and that was it.
Today, you no longer know in what quantities to mix it and don't want to muck with manure anyway; on the other hand, clay plaster has been re-discovered as an economic and healthy building alternative.
Which means it costs half a fortune.
Having paid half the fortune, Jörg began to plaster the walls and ceiling of our bedroom. It is very pretty now, with white clay mixed with green herbs between the beams of the ceiling, ochre clay on the walls and beechwood floor-planks, but getting there took a while.
Item the first: Clay takes longer to dry than, say, wallpaper glue. As in, four days. In humid weather, which is to say, in June 2007, it can take two weeks. At some point in those two weeks, when half the walls were done, two sockets suddenly stopped working. Then they were working again, and Jörg finished the walls. Then they stopped working again.
We figured it might be that it was just the yet-wet clay that was messing with the cables and hoped it would be all right once the clay had hardened.
Then one day there was a scaffold around our house, which meant the roofer was finally ready to begin fortifying and re-tiling the roof. This was in early July, and I left for the Middle-earth festival. During one of those insanely expensive phone calls, cursed be roaming fees, Jörg told me a little catastrophe had happened.
The roofers had inserted the new (bigger! :D) windows into the roof.
One had not been properly insulated.
And then there was a thunderstorm.
The water had gone through the plasterboard and the holes for the lamp sockets and collected on the unwaxed plank floor. The planks had gone soft and macerated. In other words: The floor had to be re-done. (At least the roofer's company paid for the material - but not for the work.)
Two days later, one of the workers accidentally lost grip of his cordless screwdriver which - you guessed it - plummeted through one of the plasterboards, shattered the ceiling plaster and crashed onto the floor, where it tore holes into the new planks.
...
When, on their last day, they lost a bucket of tar paint which left lovely spots on the northern wall and on the cobblestones of the yard, we were almost unperturbed. >_> At any rate, we now have a shiny new roof, and the truss is now strong enough to take additional insulation, which is going to save a lot of energy for heating. (The insulation is waiting in the shed as it can't be put up before the attic's got a floor again.)
Despite the rebellious sockets we finally moved into the bedroom, even though we had just added a tiled stove to the living-room. Jörg installed the satellite dish so we could watch normal TV again (not so much of a loss that we couldn't for a while, really, but, well.) We got phone and internet connection - downstairs, so my computer is currently taking up the dining room - and got used to the quirks of the stairs and tried to get things in order, which is a never-ending mission.
Meanwhile, the zucchini have taken over the garden and are now reaching for world domination. Everybody meeting me this past month has already had to take one or more of my zucchini. The pumpkins are coming along nicely, too. Otherwise, the garden is more or less a wilderness because I have too little time to weed it as often as necessary. Generally I am very lucky with vegetables but unlucky with ornamental plants (except for poppies and sunflowers, but those can technically be counted as agricultural crops anyway). Well, at least I am not going to starve anytime soon...
That's all I can remember just now; I might edit this entry when I remember something else.
Or I'll just write a new entry.
Oh right, I forgot to mention the part where we had to carry the wood for the ceiling beams and the attic floor into the shed all by ourselves, didn't I? Twenty meters, one should think that's not too much of a problem for two people.
WRONG again. Do you have the slightest idea how bloody heavy those oak beams are? Oak is a wonderful wood, but it's not exactly used for its light weight. So, when we were carrying the first beam - I was just barely managing to keep it aloft, and I was walking backwards - there was this heap of discarded slate and other debris I didn't notice (lacking, as most people do, the eyes at the back of my head). I fell, the oak beam came after me, I scraped my right elbow (and by scrape I mean, there was a hole in it) and the beam tried to dislocate my knee. Astonishingly enough, it didn't manage, but I had some interesting bruises. It hurt rather a lot. And there were eleven more beams that had to be carried.
Fun times.
The wood for the attic floor was easier to carry, except it was a lot. By the end of the day, our shoulders (on which we'd carried the bloody stuff) were bruised just from the pressure.
I suppose this was the revenge of the woods that had been cut down in order to renovate our house. >_>
So while I was picking berries today, all of a sudden something broke out of the brambles. A hare. A huge hare. And by huge I mean that its shoulders reached my knees - I first thought it was a young deer until I realised it was a hare. I am not sure who of us was more shocked, me or the poor animal (which then proceeded to hop through the brook and into the woods).
Now, as I haven't bored you with house stories for a while, and as I have generally been disgracefully neglectful of keeping track of the changes, I thought I'd kind of try to write a summary of the last months, house-wise.
After the business with the old flat and the relocation was over, we thought that the most stressful bits were finally over an done with. After all, we already had laid the parquet floor in the upstairs rooms, repaired the rotten wall, removed the attic floor and done a hundred little things, so now there would be no more surprises, right? Right!
Wrong.
It all started when Jörg decided that it might be nicer to finish the bedroom with authentic materials - this is, after all, an old farmhouse - like clay plaster and all the works.
At this point you reach an interesting problem.
In the olden days, people used clay plaster because it was cheap. The Bergian County was gifted by nature with clay, rain and
Today, you no longer know in what quantities to mix it and don't want to muck with manure anyway; on the other hand, clay plaster has been re-discovered as an economic and healthy building alternative.
Which means it costs half a fortune.
Having paid half the fortune, Jörg began to plaster the walls and ceiling of our bedroom. It is very pretty now, with white clay mixed with green herbs between the beams of the ceiling, ochre clay on the walls and beechwood floor-planks, but getting there took a while.
Item the first: Clay takes longer to dry than, say, wallpaper glue. As in, four days. In humid weather, which is to say, in June 2007, it can take two weeks. At some point in those two weeks, when half the walls were done, two sockets suddenly stopped working. Then they were working again, and Jörg finished the walls. Then they stopped working again.
We figured it might be that it was just the yet-wet clay that was messing with the cables and hoped it would be all right once the clay had hardened.
Then one day there was a scaffold around our house, which meant the roofer was finally ready to begin fortifying and re-tiling the roof. This was in early July, and I left for the Middle-earth festival. During one of those insanely expensive phone calls, cursed be roaming fees, Jörg told me a little catastrophe had happened.
The roofers had inserted the new (bigger! :D) windows into the roof.
One had not been properly insulated.
And then there was a thunderstorm.
The water had gone through the plasterboard and the holes for the lamp sockets and collected on the unwaxed plank floor. The planks had gone soft and macerated. In other words: The floor had to be re-done. (At least the roofer's company paid for the material - but not for the work.)
Two days later, one of the workers accidentally lost grip of his cordless screwdriver which - you guessed it - plummeted through one of the plasterboards, shattered the ceiling plaster and crashed onto the floor, where it tore holes into the new planks.
...
When, on their last day, they lost a bucket of tar paint which left lovely spots on the northern wall and on the cobblestones of the yard, we were almost unperturbed. >_> At any rate, we now have a shiny new roof, and the truss is now strong enough to take additional insulation, which is going to save a lot of energy for heating. (The insulation is waiting in the shed as it can't be put up before the attic's got a floor again.)
Despite the rebellious sockets we finally moved into the bedroom, even though we had just added a tiled stove to the living-room. Jörg installed the satellite dish so we could watch normal TV again (not so much of a loss that we couldn't for a while, really, but, well.) We got phone and internet connection - downstairs, so my computer is currently taking up the dining room - and got used to the quirks of the stairs and tried to get things in order, which is a never-ending mission.
Meanwhile, the zucchini have taken over the garden and are now reaching for world domination. Everybody meeting me this past month has already had to take one or more of my zucchini. The pumpkins are coming along nicely, too. Otherwise, the garden is more or less a wilderness because I have too little time to weed it as often as necessary. Generally I am very lucky with vegetables but unlucky with ornamental plants (except for poppies and sunflowers, but those can technically be counted as agricultural crops anyway). Well, at least I am not going to starve anytime soon...
That's all I can remember just now; I might edit this entry when I remember something else.
Or I'll just write a new entry.
Oh right, I forgot to mention the part where we had to carry the wood for the ceiling beams and the attic floor into the shed all by ourselves, didn't I? Twenty meters, one should think that's not too much of a problem for two people.
WRONG again. Do you have the slightest idea how bloody heavy those oak beams are? Oak is a wonderful wood, but it's not exactly used for its light weight. So, when we were carrying the first beam - I was just barely managing to keep it aloft, and I was walking backwards - there was this heap of discarded slate and other debris I didn't notice (lacking, as most people do, the eyes at the back of my head). I fell, the oak beam came after me, I scraped my right elbow (and by scrape I mean, there was a hole in it) and the beam tried to dislocate my knee. Astonishingly enough, it didn't manage, but I had some interesting bruises. It hurt rather a lot. And there were eleven more beams that had to be carried.
Fun times.
The wood for the attic floor was easier to carry, except it was a lot. By the end of the day, our shoulders (on which we'd carried the bloody stuff) were bruised just from the pressure.
I suppose this was the revenge of the woods that had been cut down in order to renovate our house. >_>
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Date: 2007-08-15 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-20 08:27 pm (UTC)