|
|
|
In October 2020 after a game of cat and mouse lasting since the previous April, we moved into what will be my last major project; the restoration of one of seven houses built for senoir RAF officers, just prior to the outbreak of WW2. The main attractions being the setting, neo Georgian architecture, layout, plot size, garaging and potential garaging (see forum.retro-rides.org/thread/220182/garage-on-budget?page=1 ), originality, and relative affordability. The originality stems from having had just three owners; - the MOD / RAF until around 1980, when it was purchased at a giveaway price by a Col. McKinnon who did nothing to it excapt keep the garden tidy, have the wooden garage built, and replacement double glazed sliding sash windows, thankfully in the original style. When he died, the house was acquired by a couple of chaps with a great sense of style, but little idea of practicality, and none whatsoever of building, or how to manage builders. They spent a lot of time and money, most of it wasted to create a superficially lovely home, which must have been a nightmare to live in.
I will not bore you with the 29 sales brochure photos, but a few with my comments below:
Lovely looking facade; the untrimmed ivy forcing its way into the building via windowframes and under roof tiles is not evident from the photo, nor are the rotted soffits & facsias, leaking gutters etc.
Summer house and woodstores with pots and table strategically placed to hide rotten timber.
The rather Victorian kitchen installed by "the boys". The built in unit on the left conceals the original rifle cabinet, and the Batman's ironing board, and is the only one in the Crescent which has not been torn out in the name of improvement. The Esse (upmarket Aga) cooker permanently running with adjacent fidge / freezer seemed odd, and the two "professionally fitted" Butler sinks leaked to the extent of staining the wooden floor black.
Bedroom 2, with leaking handbasin, cracked ceiling, and gaffer taped up hole where the light fitting had been moved.
Bathroom with original (leaking and badly stained) cast iron bath, cracked and leaking handbasin, no lavatory pan. Despite apparent functionality, and the house having two toilets elsewhere, this room became a priority three days after moving in.
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 8, 2021 6:05:19 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
|
|
Intransigence and incompetence by our mortgage broker and the three solicitors involved in our chain meant that we lost our removal company slot so I had to shift all our stuff over a period of ten days using a combination of rented Luton van and temporary storage, aided by my wife, two of my sons and one of their girlfriends when they were able to nick some time off work. Son #3 took a day of his holiday on completion / official moving day, without which my ancient bones and muscles would not have survived, and the end of which I needed a soothing soak in a bath. The water temperature was disappointing, which I initially put down to the cast iron bath, the distance from the boiler to the bathroom, at opposite ends of a sizeable house, and me not having run off cold water in the system before putting the plug in the bath. Immediately after my ablutions, my wife ran a bath for herself, suffering the same temperature issue, and complained bitterly as she was accustomed to our previous home's system providing unlimited water at an unbearably high temperature. Worse, despite assurances from the sellers, via solicitors that the heating system was in full working order, them having left it running for us, the gas fired Esse ticking over full time in the kitchen, and the thermostat being set to 21 degrees, the boiler was cycling on and off every few minutes, and the house was less than comfortable. Son took the third bathtub full of the day, by which time the water was barely above body temperature. My first plan for the house was to demolish the wall between the first floor lavatory and the adjacent walk in airing cupboard to create a decent family bathroom with a complete suite, coincidentally almost above the boiler location, which I hoped would solve the water temperature problem, having much shorter pipework. The original bathroom to be coverted into our en suite shower room, so I consoled Mrs Etypephil with a promise to get stuck into that within days. The following morning when taking the dog for his early walk, I noticed a pool of water on the quarry tiled entrance porch floor, situated immediately below the bathroom.
More detail / explanation / solution later.
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 8, 2021 15:22:14 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
|
Wonderful that this lovely old house hasn't (quite) been ruined by people who thought they were fixing it. Glad the rifle cabinet remains intact. Very important. Every home should have one.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Ah…. Another house savaged by poorly supervised plumbing professionals*.
Good luck!
*in this context “professional” merely means some cowboy low-bidder who expects to be paid handsomely to perpetrate some horrific, semi-functional bodge(s) that will come back to bite soon after he’s scarpered. Not restricted to plumbers…. My house still bears the scars….
No. 1 son has just purchased a house where the single bathroom was converted to a wet room (at some considerable public expense) after the former owner suffered a stroke. I’d consider a key feature of a wet room to be having its drain at the lowest point in the floor. Seems the installers didn’t though….. when you shower, it drains under the door into the hall carpet. We have no idea how the previous owner used to keep clean!
|
|
1967 Triumph Vitesse convertible (old friend) 1996 Audi A6 2.5 TDI Avant (still durability testing) 1972 GT6 Mk3 (Restored after loong rest & getting the hang of being a car again)
|
|
|
|
|
The puddle remained a mystery for a couple of days while we distributed furniture and boxes around the house, and Mrs Etypephil got to grips with the Esse, having been used to a modern fan oven and gas hob; she is a blindingly good cook, but despaired at the lack of rapid control over the facility, stating that a kitchen refit was priority #1. Wrong. By day #3 the puddle had grown, the wall in the entrance was wet to ceiling height, likewise the adjacent dining room wall to almost a metre. Ripping off the bath panelling, revealed slight leaks to both feeds, but not bad enough to account for the amount of water below, and quickly rectified. It was impossible to touch the lead waste where it disappeared into the wall, but I could see dampness around it at that point. A few inches of water in the bath, and pulling the plug while shining a torch confirmed water cascading down the outside of the waste, filling the cavity wall and wetting the ceiling; since the pipe couldn't be reached without removal of the bath, which was fit only for scrap in any case, there was nothing more to do except take a sledgehammer to it, and the wall below to drain the water:
The culprit:
The amout of scale on the outside of the pipe indicated that it had been leaking for years, possibly even since the original build, leading me to speculate whether previous occupants ever bathed. Perhaps they just used the over bath shower not generating enough waste water to flood the place.
The long term solution could not be achieved in a day, but a temporary* £75 Wickes bath could be fitted into bedroom #2, tapping into the existing handbasin plumbing, in a couple of hours.
My daughter visiting for the weekend helped my wife to clear up the mess made by son-in-law and myself:
*Still in use 13 months later.
Back to filling, sanding and painting; more later / tomorrow when waiting for things to dry.
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 8, 2021 14:23:08 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
|
Looks like a fascinating project, Really nice to see it along with its original features preserved. Bookmarked! I work near the site of what was RAF Harwell. The ministry of supply handed it over to the newly-formed Atomic Energy Authority in the late 40's, and it remains a research site to this day. A reasonable number of the original neo-Georgian 1930's buildings have survived and have been re-purposed over the years. There are about 20 of the original RAF officers houses, very similar indeed to yours, at the front of the main site. These were retained by the authority and rented out as part of their once-extensive workers housing stock, some of them being converted to maisonettes. Sadly, all but about two of those officers houses have been boarded up and left to rot over the last couple of decades or so. I'm guessing that once a tenant decided to move out, the house was boarded, and nobody ever "actively" removed. "South Drive, Harwell" if you want to google-map it, the best view is obtained using the archive "clock" button at about march 2010!! I get the need for progress, but the way in which these have just been left to rot for so long is criminal, really. These were the "mercedes-benz" of houses when new, and arguably still just as capable today when compared to most of the exceptionally badly-built curse word that developers are happy to utterly shaft people for. Good luck with the project!
|
|
1986 BMW 628csi, 2003 Alfa Romeo 147, 1992 Jaaaaag XJ40, 1982 BMW R100 cafe racer.
|
|
MiataMark
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,963
Club RR Member Number: 29
|
|
|
Not to your scale, but a similar problem when I moved into my current house.
It was a new build (25 years ago) but had been empty for a while, moved in and plumbed in washing machine etc. During the evening noticed a large puddle in the kitchen, immediately suspected washing machine so spent a long time pulling it out looking behind etc finding nothing wrong. Took a step back and applied some problem solving thought, ahhh problem occurred after my wife had bathed our (young) daughter, investigate bath and find waste pipe not connected, bathroom soil pipe runs down corner of kitchen.
A an engineer who had recently attended a problem solving course I was a little but embarrassed especially as we had the in-laws staying...
|
|
1990 Mazda MX-52012 BMW 118i (170bhp) - white appliance 2011 Land Rover Freelander 2 TD4 2003 Land Rover Discovery II TD52007 Alfa Romeo 159 Sportwagon JTDm
|
|
glenanderson
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,121
Club RR Member Number: 64
|
|
|
Good stuff. I’m in.
I share your exasperations with the handiwork of “professionals”. My house was built in the 1880s and is a random mixture of exquisite craftsmanship and utter bodgery, spanning the entire 140 years of its existence and compounded by the dubious choices (and shallow pockets) of a succession of owners. 🤣
|
|
My worst worry about dying is my wife selling my stuff for what I told her it cost...
|
|
|
|
|
Thanks for all the interest and encouraging words gents.
A little background;- I was fortunate to serve an engineering apprenticeship with the then industrial giant AEI 50 years ago. Because they needed all rounders who could make and fix anything from production machinery to their buildings, I not only learned normal engineering skills, but also was trained in plumbing, single and three phase electrical installation, using all the systems in common use, and even to a lesser extent the wet trades, all which helped me make a modest living in the motor trade, with bouts of property development and premises management. I also learned much from my first wife's father who was a successful builder and developer of good quality houses; probably the most honest man I have every met in that business.
Moving home from the Essex / Suffolk border to Norfolk was a long held ambition, facilitated by my wife being able to work from home (long pre covid), and a couple of promotions she earned, making it financially and logistically realistic for us to buy an interesting project home with a bit of history to it. The downside was having no local contacts in the building trade to get specialist jobs done at mates rates. Random people I met dog walking, have since not only provided a few but also, found me some car repair work which I don't really want to do professionally at my age, and don't have the time for except on a quid pro quo basis.
Back to the work and the troubles.
In order to have a WC in what was to be our en suite, we needed a soil pipe, and accompanying connection to the sewer on that elevation, something of which I have neither experience nor the required inclination to dig a 10 metre long trench, so this was given to the only local company which responded to our advert seeking a contractor. Very happy with the quality, efficiency, tidiness and cost. Bonus.
The next job to be farmed out was soffits, fascias and guttering, all on their last legs and replaced with plastic facsimilies of the orginals at a very reasonable price for the amount of work involved. When finished, one of the contractor's directors QC'd the job, getting the bods back for some minor snagging which I hadn't even noticed. At least we were winning sometimes.
The ivy and other plantlife on the walls and roof was worrying, having already broken the footings of a garden wall not attached to the house, forced its way into one of the bedrooms between a sash and its frame, and lifted a few roof tiles, so we forked out a small fortune for a contractor to remove the lot. In hindsight we should have spent the money on a good quality scaffold tower and done the job myself, it was adequate, but that's all, and I would still like such a scaffold tower to tackle other work which will be needed on the roof in the foreseeable future.
The GRP temporary bath did help the bath water temperature a little, and we found that if the hot tap was not fully opened, it was marginally better still, but not that much. As Winter started to bite, and we had meanwhile sold the Esse and temporarily rigged up a new range cooker in anticpation of the kitchen refit, the central heating was clearly inadequate, especially for my wife, deskbound for 8 - 12 hours daily. The boiler had no service records since its installation 5 years previously, so that seemed a good place to start, but trying to find a Gas Safe registered bod in an unfamiliar area in December isn't easy. Yet another "Sorry mate, I'm booked up for three months." phone call produced a contact number for a young newly self employed ex British Gas heating engineer, who promised to find me an hour "sometime next week, if I can just appear at zero notice". As good as his word, Sam not only turned up, but was familiar with Viessmann boilers, and is an arch car and bike enthusiast. he serviced the boiler, dismantled and cleaned the (incorrectly fitted) magnetic filter, and descaled the internal hoses, effecting some immediate improvement, offered advice on what could be the underlying problems, and how to tackle them, and charged me less than I was accustomed to paying for a basic annual service in our previous home. He has since guided me through fixing the entire system myself (which I will describe later as it was done), with an hour or so of his time to change a couple of clapped out boiler components. What a find, and despite our more than 40 year age difference, common interests and attitudes have made us good friends.
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 8, 2021 21:24:43 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
|
|
By mid November 2020, the bathroom looked like this:
My wife was planning her kitchen, I was trying to keep on top of the falling leaves from the half acre or thereabouts of garden, the numerous drains, a poorly considered roof valley which trapped them, and clear two soakaways which has almost certainly not seen maintenance since WW2:
Three one tonne bags of leaves can just be seen in the front garden.
Soakaway troubles.
Although not especially attractive, the kitchen in the Colonel's day made more sense than what the boys did to it, at enormous expense; apparently 500 man hours went into stripping the paint from the built in kitchen unit / gun cupboard. The mind boggles.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I have to confess to having made a couple of minor timeline errors already in this thread, for example, digging out and clearing the soakaways I started prior to the soffits fascia and guttering job, finishing it while the guys were here. Henceforth, I will refer to my phone's date and time record of photos, and because "Mrs Etypephil" is a little cumbersome, I will refer to her as Andi, the abbreviation of Andrea. The house unusually for England in 1938 was built with central heating, evidently using hefty steel pipework, cast iron radiators, the boiler being coal fired and situated in the kitchen which was part of the Squadron Leader's Batman's quarters. The radiators have long since been replaced by heavy gauge pressed steel ones, and the pipework by copper, although much of the original pipework had been left in position underfloor and in wall ducts after disconnection. Son-in-law has a plumbing and heating business specialising in loft conversion projects, so although he is a two hour drive away is at the end of a phone for informal advice if I don't want to bother Sam, and is frequently offered salvage items such as:
which he passed to me at cost. It seemed like a good idea at the time to refit the house with period appropriate radiators, but having so many essentials to deal with, I eventually decided to refurbish those currently fitted, making a modest profit selling the cast ones on eBay (if I don't count the time and fuel used to collect them in this: , that is. ).
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 9, 2021 7:19:32 GMT by etypephil
|
|
hopeso
Part of things
Posts: 340
|
|
|
I'm in, bookmarked. Please tell us more.
|
|
|
|
Mark
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,097
|
|
|
This is a brilliant thread! Beautiful and interesting house with huge potential. Please keep up the updates
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I suppose that we all have our ways of dealing with large projects so that we don't become overwhelmed by them. Mine is to break them down into a number of smaller ones, giving each a priority, and concentrating on one or two at any given time. I try to see each one to the end before moving onto the next as I have a natural tendency to make things functional, and quietly forget about the finishing touches.
As we had washing and bathing facilities of sorts, I decided, or rather I was told that the next priority was the kitchen. The sales photo above doesn't do justice to the appalling condition of the cracked, crazed and stained sinks, and drainer which were beyond the pale for anyone accustomed to basic hygene, and plumbing which worked. Likewise the Esse cooker, and even the built in unit and the ceiling were covered in a fine layer of grease. The boys had employed builders to produce this at some point during their five years of ownership. One of the obvious causes was a lack of an extractor so my first task was to investigate how I could fit one given the lack of space in the cooker alcove.
I masked up everything as far as I deemed necessary before attacking the closed off chimney above the cooker:
And masked up myself with a damp tea towel expecting a modest amount of soot once I started with hammer and chisels:
I quickly gave up the makeshift breathing apparatus, but was not disappointed by a lack of soot :
I uncovered three separate apertures, one presumably for the original coal fired boiler, one for a later gas boiler, and the other;- who knows?
The major discovery, however was that the apertures were cut through cast on site reinforced concrete, which would have to go to provide adequate clearance above the proposed new range cooker for any kind of extractor to be legal. Since the kitchen is very much Andi's domain, she has the job which pays for the house and the materials going into it, wanted very powerful extraction, and I wanted my final house project to be the best I could produce, I felt the best course of action to be to cut out the chimney almost to ceiling height, and go from there.
Not a job for a 70 year old to tackle alone.
Sam disconnected the gas supply to the Esse for me and I found an eBayer from Cornwall to buy that.
Son-in -law Jon came up trumps for the hard bit, sourcing a 2.5 metre RSJ, taking a day out of his business, driving 2+ hours each way, and bringing one of his bods and a vanload of Acrows and other equipment with him
By the above stage the three of us were shattered, and I have no idea how we managed to lift the RSJ into position, but we did, around 8pm.
I had to force money into his hand for the steel, his man's wages for the day, and something to at least partially cover his costs of the day. A man I am happy to be with my little girl.
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 10, 2021 9:30:44 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
Nov 10, 2021 11:51:21 GMT
|
By early December 2020, Andi had narrowed down the choice of kitchen designer / supplier to one based in Norwich, which seemed to be the only one able to offer a style (in our opinion) not at odds with the character of the house. They source their units from Caledonia, with worktops and fittings coming from a variety of manufacturers and importers, and offer a full turnkey fitting service, which we had decided not to use, even before hearing the £mega estimated cost " but of course it may increase if there are unforeseen snags". While the units were reasonably priced, as bespoke things go, we found their cooker, tap, extractor etc prices exhorbitant, some of the lead times quoted were incredible, others actually idefinite. They were completely unable to supply granite worktops, trying to steer us towards quartz and other manufactured substitutes, all at what seemed a hefty premium. No dice; Andi wanted granite, as we had in our previous house, and the budget creep was already quite alarming. The Polish designer / salesgirl was superb, however, asking pertinent questions about expected usage, having endless patience revising drawings to provide exactly what we wanted in terms of storage internal fittings and style. The boss came along to double check measurements and discuss minor alterations needed (narrowing the cooker alcove and the doorway into the utility room), in order to make it all work. Eventually we placed our order with them just for the units, a mantle structure (with hindsight; I should have made this myself), associated cornices etc, the sink, and handles. The worktop was manufactured by Whitton Worktops (absolutely superb) from a granite slab selected by us from a third party supplier, range cooker, tap, extractor, lamps, sockets, tiles, etc were all sourced by us at better prices and / or lead times than the kitchen design company could offer. Their projected delivery was early April, which was met, except for a few items which failed final QC and had to be remade. That's fair enough; better for them to reject things, than the customer when he comes to fit it all. Getting a little ahead of myself here, but our kitchen, dining room and entrance hall after delivery:
Meanwhile, in early January 2021, Andi and I began to convert the smallest bedroom into an office for her in which to earn our living, starting with removal of the fitted basin and its associated plumbing:
|
|
Last Edit: Nov 10, 2021 15:11:44 GMT by etypephil
|
|
|
|
Nov 10, 2021 12:37:59 GMT
|
fabulous, more more
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The plan was for me to remove the handbasin, pelmets, and curtain rails, make good the resulting damage, and repair the cracked ceiling, then continue with other "man's work" around the house, leaving Andi to decorate what was to be her office during her holiday which couldn't be used for much else because of government reaction to a new cold virus.
Everything which could not easily be removed from the room was condensed in the middle, and protected from dust, splashes and spills by Andi:
Whilst I removed now redundant pipework from the wall and the service duct:
and prepared for Andi to decorate:
Within minutes of leaving her to wash down the existing paint and do a little minor filling in final prep, there were cries of "I must be doing something wrong, everything is turning to dust and flakes.".
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Andi's prior decorating experience was limited to painting a shed door at our previous home; the rest I had done as it was much smaller than this one, needed far less work, and her spare time had been taken up with studying for her degree (she is a lot younger than I). Nonetheless, I had explained to her what to do, and why, and she had logically started on the ceiling working her way downwards.
I abandoned the bathroom tile removal to help, finding something that I hadn't encountered since I was a child watching my father decorate the 1930s house we had just moved into; distemper - a type of cheap "paint" made from heaven knows what, which would not properly accept overpainting with anything other than more distemper, and could not even be wiped with a damp cloth for cleaning without falling off the surface. Despite this, previous owners had added many coats of emulsion paint, which had cracked and curled at the edges of the cracks. We spent days scraping off the really loose stuff, putting on a couple of coats of stabilising solution (diluted PVA glue), filling the worst of the ancient clumsy scraper marks in the plaster, then two complete coats of trade flat white with mre filling between to give us a reasonable and uniform coloured surface to work with. By which time Andi's work holiday was over, meaning that she had to relocte her office laptop, screens, printer etc to the dining room table, so that I could finish the job.
Recognising the scale of the whole house project, she had really wanted to make a practical contribution, as well as providing the money for materials, and was very disappointed. Still, at least we had an idea of what to expect when we got as far as decorating elsewhere in the house, and she did come up and help whenever she had to wait for database migrations or others to make decisions about specification changes.
|
|
|
|
Mark
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 2,097
|
|
|
Turned out beautifully. Did you consider making a feature out of the disused service duct?
|
|
|
|
|