The SIMS: RL edition II

[oloriel]

Or: New stairs for the House of Stony, the "All Parts" version.

You may possibly learn more about our house than you ever wanted to know, for I shall probably ramble at length. Fair warning.



You want to see it anyway? All right! Grab yourself a cup of tea or some other beverage of your choice and follow me into the mess that was our hallway.
(Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to a larger version, as usual.)




As I said, we forgot to take a "before" pic. Here the old stairwell has obviously already been removed. It is currently serving as a barricade sort of shelf for our tools. The red dustpan did not survive long after this picture was taken; after a few days of being continuously used to shovel rubble, it broke. Rest in Pieces. -- It was replaced by a hand-forged metal dustpan, which will hopefully have a better life expectancy in this household.




The tubs contain (new) plastering clay for the walls. We also recycled the old clay that came out of the wall, but that wasn't enough, so we also had to get new clay. In the olden days (TM), clay was used for building because it was cheap and easy to get - just find a loamy spot and start digging. (There are many such spots around our house and down in the valley.) Then you pick the larger stones from the loam, add some sand and straw or manure, and you're all set. These days, clay has been re-discovered because it is eco-friendly and healthy (it filters pollutants and humidity from the air, so it actively improves your indoor environment): Accordingly it is insanely expensive. (And our house, and the valley, are part of a nature reserve, so it's not allowed to just dig for loam anymore...) History is not without a sense of irony...




Anyway!
Behold the timberwork construction that should be holding up the house - the beam on the left stabilises the roof, the beam on the right stabilises the ceiling/ first floor floor. In theory. The beam in the ground between them was supposed to help stabilise the whole construction. As you can see, it isn't really there anymore. Oopsie.




So we put up construction poles to keep the house (or at any rate the ceiling) from suddenly deciding to collapse. Fun. See that big chunk of light wood on the left? Yeah? I got that on my head when we weren't quite finished yet. There was no bump, no bleeding and not even local pain a few hours later (immediately afterwards, there naturally was a helluvalot of pain, but I wrapped a wet cloth around my head to keep it down and eventually it went away). This terrified me quite a bit, because clearly if you get a chunk of wood on your head, there should be a bump or bruising or something, even if it was only pine wood - and if there's no bump on the outside, there probably is some damage on the other side of the skull and in a couple of days I'd keel over because of a massive haematoma secretly spreading in my braaaaaains --- well, nothing of the sort happened, obviously. But it could have! :p




Meanwhile, Jörg removed the fugly old tiles. Underneath them were... more tiles. Not half bad, actually - actual stone tiles in sand colours. Unfortunately, our beloved predecessors with their charming attitude to historical building fabrics had already made holes in them (observe the big one just in front of the ladder!). Otherwise we probably would've taken the effort of removing the old tile adhesive (I mean, cleanly - of course we had to remove it anyway) and restoring the old flagstones. But there was just no point because they had been damaged so badly in several places and we have no means to replace them, considering how that kind of flagstone just isn't made anymore.




Jörg also removed the plasterboard-and-wallpaper that had been liberally stuck to the walls - after the delightful discovery of the rotted wall beams, we figured it'd be wiser to check all the walls now while we were at it anyway. You can see he's enjoying this.




OMG NAKED WALLS WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!
Surprisingly enough, the walls were actually ok. The beam in the middle is dirty but undamaged, and the walls are stable masonry. We certainly hadn't expected that! The only unpleasant thing is the mess of cables under the ceiling. We'll definitely have to do something about that, but that's a different project for another time...




For the time being I started to use up the clay plaster. (Maternity clay rendering! It's meditative! Allows you to experience natural materials haptically and personally! Makes for great bonding with the elements of the universe! An outlet for creative energies! Connect to the roots of humanity by way of a pre-historic craft! Etc. etc.) And then I made myself some tea.
(rahja, do you still know the beautiful pants I'm wearing there? :D)




After the raw brown loam, I spread a thinner layer of fine white clay. Only on the wall to the left of the stairs (because we can't properly reach that once the stair's in place), because we didn't have much of the stuff left (we used up the remains we'd left from doing the upstairs hallway) and it's still bloody expensive. A friend of our carpenter who conveniently happens to sell the stuff has been storing wooden insulation boards in our barn for over two years now (originally, half a year had been planned) so we're hoping that we'll get a new supply from him for free significantly less than it'd normally cost, which is good. But that sort of thing naturally takes a bit longer than just walking into an eco-building store and buying the stuff. Which is kind of also good, because my arms are grateful for the chance to recover. ^^
I left all wood open, even the beams that disappear among the bricks (which are covered) and thus look kind of lost. I did that because I like it that way; Jörg had originally expected all the beams to disappear, but I said something about historical substance and showing the trace of history and the dark wood enlivening the otherwise boring white wall and "I WANT THEM VISIBLE DAMN IT" and then we decided that it was nice to keep the beams visible. >:D



Cybercat is not happy with all the changes to his territory. Here, by the way, you can see the old flagstones after we'd cleaned the worst of the adhesive off in preparation for laying the new flags.




Further progress in clay rendering. You can also see some corners of newly-flagged floor, but the colours are all skewed so I'll talk about them later. In the middle of the passageway you can also see the make-shift plastic sheet dust protection the other carpenter put up. I suppose it helped a little when he started sawing and hacking. (The room behind the hallway is our kitchen. Lalala...)




More dust protection. At any rate, it nicely illustrates why we can't leave the passage between hallway and kitchen open, even though it looks nice (now) and allows light to come in from two sides: Because there's a continual (and pretty strong) draft from the kitchen towards the attic. Having your own wind tunnel: Interesting, but not really cool in winter. Or rather, too cool. You know what I mean.
Also, that wooden thing on the left? That's the first new beam! Oak! Our carpenter spent a whole day searching for it and two more days constructing everything, but look! Things are coming along!




Things are coming further along! This is the new timberwork construction. Isn't it lovely! Completely busted our budget, of course (bye-bye May vacation in Rome :() but still awesome. This is also what I meant by "it looks nice" - if not for the nasty draft, we'd totally leave it all open like this. As it is, we'll close the two partitions on the right (but so that the wood remains visible, as we did upstairs) and put a glass door into the passageway on the left - that way at least some light will still be able to reach the hallway from the East, and the kitchen from the West...
The floor is also done. The new tiles are terracotta-coloured. After a short visit to the local... place that produces tiles, whatever the English word is, we got stuck with two types of tiles that we liked. One was called "Atlantis" and one was called "Fehmarn". In the shop, both looked equally awesome, but at home, "Atlantis" looked rather ratty and chipped. So we decided for "Fehmarn". Probably better - at any rate, that island hasn't sunk yet...
I've already mentioned the horrible mess of cables, so... yeah. Let's not talk about that anymore.
Also featuring R2-D2, our fearsome vacuum cleaner. He's lurking in a corner here, no doubt waiting for unsuspecting dust particles he can devour.




In an Anthropology class I took ages back ("UNESCO World Heritage from an anthropologic perspective") the professor was describing the difficulties with some of the UNESCO rules, e.g. the rule that world heritage buildings weren't allowed to be "completely" renewed, but with (for instance) Japanese temples that was necessary every century or so to preserve them, and -- anyway, he was desperately searching for the German word for "trunnel". He couldn't find it - he only had the Japanese word in mind (nuki). In truth, the German word is utterly simple: it's Holznagel ("wooden nail")...
Anyway. Here's a trunnel. I love it.




Woo hoo! The new stairwell hath arrived!
And of course it was raining. On the days where everyone involved was working inside, it was as sunny and bright as you can ask for...




Last minute assemblies, our carpenter, and the infamous pink flannel shirt. Also, Jörg doesn't believe me that he is red-haired in some lights. THIS PICTURE PROVES IT. Harr harr.




Pushing the stairwell into place... the pole on the right is standing in for me. Because my doctor doesn't want me to lift or hold heavy stuff. (If she knew...) The feet on the left belong to my hubby. We'd expected that it'd need rather more people to put that thing into place, seeing how it's a solid oak construction, but our carpenter insisted that two (i.e., he and Jörg) would be totally sufficient. Well, they were, in the end - it worked after all - but an additional pair of hands probably wouldn't have hurt, either.




And here we are. (The tubs and buckets are still standing around because there are still some walls to plaster. (Another good thing about clay is that unlike cement or plaster or the like, it doesn't harden chemically but just dries. So if it is dry and you want to re-use it, you just add water. Again and again and... if you leave it standing in a bucket, you have to stir it every now and then, though, or the straw particles inside will start to ferment.)
Aside from that, the cables will have to be dealt with (i.e., removed, replaced, and hidden but in a way that still allows us to reach them if necessary - plans are made, but haven't yet been executed). And when we have some money again, the space underneath the stairs will be used for a pantry cupboard so we have a place to store foodstuffs again. But that'll have to be custom-made, and as we have this solid wood fixation, that's another project for another day...

There! You did it! Congratulations and thanks for your patience!

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Our history classes are even worse - or were during my school days. America only showed up on the map in 1492, Africa, China and India merely made brief appearances during the topic of colonialisation, and Japan didn't exist before Pearl Harbour...
During my semester in Canada, on the other hand, we not only heard about ancient Greece and Mesopotamia and Egypt, but also about early Asian cultures. Ok, so we never got beyond the Middle Ages, but at least we covered a somewhat broader field culturally!