huskyhall

In the late summer of 2010 we started digging our way round the back of the conservatory. Here's the start of the excavations



To the left of the trench is an old wall embedded in the ground which must have been the end wall of the range of outbuildings once upon a time. You can't quite make it out in the picture.

But you can see it in this one:



Here the excavations are progressing round the back of the house. You can also see that the conservatory is being used as a log store. Chiseling logs off a frozen woodpile last winter was a chore, so a few have been brought indoors. The ground is all broken up here and has clearly been extensively quarried. There are one or two bits of bedrock in situ, but most of it is broken stone.

Here's the hole taken a little deeper. You can see how wet the ground is



We've more or less run out of places to hide spoil under the bushes, so we're using this lot to build up the hardstanding area by the garage.



The Land Rover makes a superb garden roller to press it all down.

Here are the excavations again. The retaining wall is going in. The remains of the old wall are stacked against the conservatory and will be re-laid where the new footings are.



In 2011 the digging started again. Here you can see some foundations going in the corner. Like many foundations in the Husky Hall project, they represent a way of getting rid of bits of masonry and rubble



The baulks of bedrock which have been left by the people who originally quarried this area represent conveniently sized bays that divide up the job. Here's the second bay dug out down to the remaining bedrock.



Here are the foundations in place:



The quarrying waste which makes up most of the spoil we are removing contains a few fragments of pottery. If we knew about such things, we could tell how long ago it was that those piles of quarry waste were put there. However, a few clues have been furnished by the archaeology programme Time Team. A dig in Shropshire identified some bits of pottery like the brown and cream ware in the picture as moulded slip ware from the late 18th century. This would fit in with what we believe about the older part of the present house - that it originated in the late 18th or early 19th century. The people working on it obligingly smashed their crockery into the excavations for us. Which was pretty altruistic of them when you consider how expensive and hard to come by it must have been on a labourer's wages in those days.

On June 25th a secondhand scaffolding tower arrived. Here are Hogan and Alex assembling it:



And here's Alex and me a bit further up:



Here is the sort of thing that we can get at with it:



The chimney's in reasonably good condition fortunately. Here's the extension seen from the top platform:

In the autumn we transplanted a number of trees and bushes. You can see them a few entries ago in a post entitled 'Moving Bushes'. Here's an update. They seem to have survived and some are flourishing.

Here's the oak



It's got some grass clippings round the base to suppress weeds and retain moisture, and it has a lot of leaves and is doing well. Here's a hebe



The bare twigs are now covered in tiny leaves, so this looks like it's OK.

Here's the birch:



It has suffered a bit, but it has come into leaf so there's hope for it. Once again, grass clippings provide the mulch. When it is fully in leaf it will shade out any vegetation underneath. Finally, here are some bushes which I moved just before Christmas. They were in a place where a new extension will be built, so I moved them to the fence at the western side of the garden. They're looking very lush. The only thing that hasn't worked out are the rose bushes whose bark was eaten by rabbits. Even so, there are a few new shoots on them and a recovery is in sight.



Here's a view of the garden looking westwards from the scaffolding tower:



And here's a view looking east:



Everything's looking very lush and leafy, basking in the early summer sunshine. You can contrast this with a picture in the very earliest entry entitled 'view down the drive' taken from the roof of the house. The position is more or less the same, but look how things have grown. You can scarcely see the garage now.

There needs to be some work on the drains. They don't extend round the back of the house. The kitchen sink drained into a gully that didn't go anywhere and was getting smelly. The drains need to go round the back, in order to serve the utility room, the new downstairs bathroom which will be installed, and the new kitchen which will be installed in the extension. The existing ones are very shallow - not surprising for a house built directly on the bedrock. So we need to deepen them, to give us sufficient fall to get to the back of the house with some hope that the water will run away. Here's the existing pipe exposed.



Fortunately, we can gain a bit more depth at the house end by deepening the trench. There'll still be the recommended 1:40 slope but we'll gain the best part of a foot at the house. Then we can run a pipe under the existing utility room and round to the back, and it will still be below floor level.

Here's a box of goodies from Drain Depot Very reasonable prices and next day delivery. Point, click and install.



Here's the utility room prior to digging a trench through it:



And here's the trench in progress



Once again the Erbauer demolition hammer came in handy. It's still going strong. The chisel is getting a bit rounded over now, but it's still rattling its way through the bedrock. The utility room floor has been laid over an earlier doorstep and drainage channel.

Here's the new cover and inspection chamber



Here is the new junction and rest bend for the existing bathroom soil pipe. To the right of the new plastic pipes you can just see the old earthenware drain that had been smashed during previous excavations. This used to serve the kitchen sink, among other things. No wonder it always seemed to be blocked.



The pipes are a good deal lower in the ground than the earlier ones. Clearly the previous installers didn't have the benefit of a pneumatic drill or demolition hammer.

Here's the new gully and inspection chamber base at the back of the house:



You can see how wet the ground is. All that water lives between the layers of the Ludlovian shale, just waiting for a chance to ooze out.

Here's the drain going under the utility room. There's a spur for us to fit a floor drain in the utility room later.



In goes the concrete around the gully and inspection chamber:



And around the new join at the front of the house:



Here's the new cover in position and the concrete smoothed off:



That white pipe is from the kitchen sink. This now finally drains into a proper drain and goes to the septic tank like it's supposed to. We can put pretty much whatever we like down the sink now and it will get into the septic tank where it belongs. We've tested it with both the toilet and the kitchen sink and everything speeds through the pipes very well indeed.

Finally, making good the path at the front of the house. The existing concrete wasn't very picturesque so we've dug the whole lot up and laid crazy paving instead.



Here it ias a littler later with the path more finished off and a small retaining wall going in around the grass and bushes.



And here's the wall from the other end. That coping with stones set on edge will extend all the way along eventually.



Here's the coping finished off. It goes all the way along to the end and round the corner.

And here it is from the other end showing how the coping stones go round the corner.


Finally, here's the floor drain. It's mounted slightly proud of the floor to accommodate the thickness of the tiles.

In the spring of 2010 we started on the wiring. This is because the current arrangements do not meet contemporary standards and there are some scary aspects where accessories have deteriorated because of the damp. Moreover, some of the rooms will be used for different purposes. The porch is going to be a utility room, so it will need a ring main. The kitchen is going to be a downstairs bathroom, so won't need any sockets - just as well as many of the existing ones are getting dangerous and the kitchen will be in what is now the dining room. So that'll want a ring main of its own. Additionally, the existing fusebox has a few faults. Whoever wired Husky Hall originally had clearly never come across the idea of a ring main and everything seems to be on a radial or spur system. This means that each fuse terminal is stuffed with many wires, all leading to different things.



The item on the far right is a new RCD unit to supply the sheds which we put in a couple of years ago. It has its own feed from the meter cabinet. The small box is an example of the type of thing that you see a lot of at Husky Hall. Small, supernumerary fuseboxes powered by leads stuffed into the main switch terminals of the old fusebox. It's all coming out and will be replaced by a modern device with miniature circuit breakers.

Here's the new one going in



It looks very congested, but eventually most of those red and black wires will be replaced by three ring mains and things will be a whole lot simpler.



When it's finished it will look even tidier because the extraneous wires in the top left will be eliminated. The black outdoor cable along the bottom which goes to the shed will be clipped so it's horizontal.

This post details a job we did in the autumn of 2009. There was a bed in the middle of the driveway with some bushes in it and a small birch tree. The idea was, I suppose, that it was like a carriage sweep, but unless you had a very small car, it was impossible to get round in one go. Everything was a little too small. So we decided to move them all. Here's what it looked like before:



Here they are after they were moved. I hope they like it in their new home. I managed to get a reasonable amount of root out with them, so they have every chance. At the time of writing (March 2010) they've still not come into leaf, but it's been a very hard winter. I keep looking at them and the twigs are still green, so they might be OK.




And here's the empty space where they were. We'll need that extra space when the extension gets built.



This weekend we acquired an oak tree. There aren't any oaks on the premises apart from this one, so we planted it carefully and are keeping our fingers crossed in the hope that it survives.

It’s Friday the 4th of September 2009. A mysterious package has arrived. It’s on a double width pallet and is well packed with polythene and cardboard.



Here it is unwrapped. A brand new ride on mower. Started first time too. You can see the new mown grass stuck to the tyres.



It comes with a host of luxuries, such as lights which come on automatically when it gets dark, an electric starter, a cute little battery charger which would look more at home charging a mobile phone and a thing that bleeps when the grass box is full.

Here it is at the gate.



Although only 2 wheel drive it seems perfectly capable of propelling itself up the slopes at Husky Hall on wet grass, and it's possible to run through the garden in record time, rather than taking two hours with the Flymo. It mows and hoovers up long wet grass which would stall most other machines I've used without any sense that the engine is labouring and it's cute too.

In August 2009 this handsome beast arrived. The battery was completely flat and a few other little jobs needed doing but it was basically sound.



For those interested, it's a 2003 model Land Rover TD5 (which means it has a weird 5 cylinder diesel engine) with a crew cab. There are all kinds of optional extras installed too such as air conditioning, which I would never have imagined you'd need in a Land Rover. There are heated seats as well. It's just a mass of wires and rubber tubes. They've changed a lot since my day.

Here it is again at the gate.



Despite these pretensions to luxury, like all Land Rovers since time immemorial, it leaks. It is virtually impossible to get the cab watertight. Rainwater gets in, apparently round the door seals. This is especially true of Husky Hall rain which is often horizontal and likely to be travelling faster than the spray from a pressure washer. 60-80mph winds are not unusual. Maybe new door seals would help a little, as they’re likely to be springier and fill the gaps more effectively. The existing ones have a permanent impression of the edge of the door in them, which rather casts aspersions on their fitness for purpose. As an interim measure I’ve taken the carpets out, dried them on the radiators and put them in the garage. Thus, the rainwater can drain out through the floor panels and not be retained in the carpet to rust everything and facilitate the growth of fungus. Seems a bit odd to have carpet in a Land Rover anyway.

Future developments might include a winch, and I rather fancy a suspension lift kit and hub spacers so as to widen the track. Bigger wheels and tyres would be nice too. There’s something seductive about those yellow springs and shock absorbers (or ‘shox’ as the idiom has it) you see offroaders using. But it looks like the main priority for the next few months is the house.

In this post we'll have a quick look at some developments which took place at Easter 2009. There was a path of sorts down the garden, but with uneven stones and a great deal of grass growing between them. The border to one side of it sported a retaining wall, but in a curiously wavy design and it was falling down anyway. Therefore, a couple of days were spent re-paving the path and rebuilding the little wall.You might not imagine it from the brilliant sunshine depicted here, but the first day was so wet I couldn't build a wall more than two courses high because there was so much rainwater getting in the mortar. However, the weather was soon drier and we made some progress.



Once again, I forgot to take before picturers, but here's a little fellow who came to light when we dismantled the old wall.



The stone for the path was mainly quarried out from around the back of the house where we were digging away the ground to try to prevent damp getting in. You'll see more about this on a post further down.

Here it is from the other end. You may notice from a subsequent entry that this is also the line followed by the water pipe down to the garage.



Here's a bit which was added later in the year to enable the new lawnmower to go between the two parts of the garden. As it turned out, it was just the right width. Which was a good guess considering the lawnmower hadn't actuially arrived at that point.

Whilst we have electricity down at the garage, until March 2009 there wasn't a water supply down there. One of the jobs in March 2009 was installing a water pipe. Here's the nice new blue MDPE pipe snaking along the trench, looking towards the house. Yes, I know it's not quite deep enough for the current regulations, but that's bedrock it's resting on, and as it is an outside supply it wil be possible to turn it off in the house in cold weather. It doesn't merit the regulation 900mm deep trench, as that would require about a week's chiselling. Indeed, everyone else who has laid pipes or cables at Husky Hall has tended to lay them shallow. Very shallow. You can tread on the top surfaces of some of the drains.



Among the various archaeological discoveries was this earthenware drain. The pipes were badly broken so it wasn't doing much for us. They were factory moulded, so were probably 20th century in origin.



Here's the new supply pipe going under the garage floor, where it will emerge with a tap just inside.



And here's the pipe at the other end where it joins the house. Yes I know you're not supposed to put copper pipe in underground installations, but it's only a few centimetres and we're not on mains water so we can do pretty much whatever we like.



And here's the garden with turf relaid afterwards. The pipe goes under that clump of trees and bushes, under a wall and off to the garage which you can just see through the trees to the right of the picture