Our cottage blog

December '17

29/11/2017

With extra space and a level site at the back of the cottage it was time to erect some scaffolding before tackling the roof. It was clear from inspecting the roof timbers from underneath when we got the ceilings down etc that a lot of the roof timbers needed replacing or the whole roof needed replacing.

We decided it was best to reroof the whole lot and be done with it, no point having to revisit it in ten or twenty years. We were hoping to save as much slate as possible and maybe at least redo one side of the roof with the reclaimed slate. We'll see when the time comes before making that decision. There will also be alot of repair work needed over the upstairs window,the top of the walls/wallplate and the gable ends.

Fig.1 Scaffolding up, it's always handy to have an extra pair of hands when starting off. Though once you get one bay up its easy enough to add to it.

Fig.2 The upstairs window lintel, there was concrete blocks resting on a small steel bar in front of the old timber lintel, which is badly rotted. When I have the roof off I'll tackle the rest of it, the whole section above the window will probably need to be rebuilt.

Fig.3 Starting to remove the slates. I just used the hammer and pushed/squeezed the claws under the nail heads to loosen them. It usually worked but there will always be some casualties and some slates were very weathered with elongated nail holes.

Fig.4 After a days work. Turns out the roof had been built in two stages. You can see the roof timbers to the right of the chimney opening were darker than to the left. The left handside is newer and the nails were harder to get out. Also I didn't need the hammer for much of the older part of the roof as the nails were mostly rusted to nothing! I don't know how Storm Ophelia didn't do a job for me. It did speed things up a bit but it also meant that there was more damaged slates.

Fig.5 The back with all the slates removed.

Fig.6 The front with most of the slate removed. Just a couple of hours work left! It took me about 5 days to remove all the slates, approx 1000 slates. I was on my own so with another person to help it would be easily half that time.

Fig.7 The roof structure ready to come off. You can see the lime mortar was filled between the rafter ends, this would have helped seal the roof and walls together. The rafter ends were actually well preserved, the lime mortar draws water out of the timber where as cement mortar would have trapped it in and cause the timber to rot faster.

Fig.8 I first removed the collar ties(the horizontal timbers halfway up the rafters) they had to be sawn off as they were nailed into the rafters with too many nails. The slating laths came off next, they popped right off. The rafters needed a bit of elbow grease with the big nail bar to prise them off the wall plate.

Fig.9 After one day of timber removal. I got the rest of it done the next day I visited. Most of the time was spent walking back and forth to the big shed with the timbers and tidying up. Lots of firewood and kindling in the future!

Fig.10 With all the timber removed. The timber wallplate wasn't nailed or fastened to the top of the wall, it just rested on top with the mortar/stone mix against it. It's a fair old mess at this stage on top of the walls, lots of loose stones and mortar, when I have it cleared off it'll give me a better idea on what to do next. We'll probably put a concrete ring beam on top to give the new roof a better anchor and also level off the walls, as they will no doubt need it after its tidied up. We're not crazy about putting a concrete beam on it but as the walls have been constructed at different stages and from different materials it would be best to do it for structural reasons.

Fig.11 The cootage roofless, looking very naked. We left the most of the porch roof intact as its a more recent addition and the timbers are ok. It will be re-felted and slated with the new roof.

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November '17

28/11/2017

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Life has been continuing faster than we would like these days and finding time to write about it is hard. I have serious admiration for people who blog, especially people who have jobs and families! On the personal side of things I [Elaine] went back to work following maternity leave in September and our little boy started Big School! A very surreal experience. Our not so new addition is nearly one, which also seems fantastical as it only seems like the other day when she arrived! I have yet to learn to drive [major phobia] so there has been lots of back and forth and up and down the roads with carefully manicured timetables to get everyone to work and school. [ Three cheers for Éanna!]
Eanna has been doing his best to squeeze in the cottage renovations around work and family time and weather. One big downside of doing to work yourself is how slow it can be. It has been tempting to splash a bit of cash and get some help in but in the long [long] run we'll be glad of the money we're saving when it comes to finished etc.
The upside of waiting around for me in parking lots is lots of time to research. I would love to tell you what the plan is but honestly it changes every week and every time we discovered something new at the cottage.

We did get some BIG work done with a 13 ton digger and 9 ton dumper. One of our new neighbours runs a plant/groundworks business so he was handy to get for this job, Éanna was dumper driver for the weekend, to save a few bob.
The main reason for the digger was for taking the ground level down behind the cottage and sheds. The ground level behind the house was actually higher than the floor level in the cottage. One of the first things we noticed when we started taking down the plaster on the inside walls was that the back wall was damp in places where as the front and side walls were dry. This is a common complaint in old cottages and the simplest solution is reducing the ground level and installing french drains (French drains are simply a trench dug approx 0.5-1m away from the wall lined with a geotextile and a land drainage pipe is placed into the trench and filled with clean drainage stone).

Fig.1 Digger on site, already after taking hundreds of tonnes of earth away from behind the buildings.

Fig.2 You can see the depth of soil that was against the sheds. Even the shed floors had water running across them, it was seeping in from the soil that was against the back wall. You can see an apron of concrete where the brown stain is on the wall, this was probably put there to try and stop water ingress.

Fig.3 Grading/leveling behind the sheds.

Fig.4 Land drainage pipe being installed. This runs the whole length of the excavated area and into a large soakaway, it should catch any rain run off from the field above and from behind the sheds/cottage. We'll also install french drains around the cottage at some point.

Fig. 5 The finished excavation. You can see the remains of the shed heaped on the left of the photo.

Fig.6 Part of an aul gate I found up the top of the field, it was bent like a half pipe until I drove over it a few times with the dumper. We'll probably find a use for it.

Fig.7 Part of the remains of the shed. It'll be eventually be used. You can see in the background the excavated earth banked up at the top of the field.

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It's been a while...

13/8/2017

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A lot has happened since we last posted(not necessarily with the cottage), we had a beautiful baby girl just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2016. That kept us both very busy, so between November and February there wasn't much work going on at the cottage. Again I'll let the photos tell the story.

Fig.1 Floorboards removed from upstairs bedroom. Photo is a bit blurry due to the amount of dust. I don't know how the floor was even walkable, the boards were made of dust and some of the beams had antigravity properties.

Fig.2 The partition wall and stairs are taken down. It's quite a strong sturdy stairs. Pity the first few steps are rotten.

Fig.3 Another find, this time over the fireplace in the centre room, an old lamp.

Fig.4 Opened up what was probably a doorway to a loft at one time. It was blocked up with handmade concrete bricks, stone and lime.

Fig.5 We decided to take some of the chimney stack down because it was fairly impregnated with soot/creosote from a decades/centuries of burning turf, wood, coal etc. You can see in the photo that it's earth mortar between the stones, it's like that the whole way up! Easy to dismantle though.

Fig.6 The chimney halfway down. Unfortunately the cresote had impregnated the earth mortar most of the way down, so we decided to take it down to about ceiling height. We'll either build a block chimney to replicate the original or use twin wall insulated stainless steel flue pipe and make a mock chimney breast.

Fig.7 the chimney down to ceiling height. You can see the debris on the floor from the demolition. It took about 4 times longer clearing up the mess then it did knocking it. Better not forget to thank Aroul for helping with this, many hands make for less shoveling and some of the stones needed two people to lift them.

Fig.8 This is the mess from the chimney, the earth/cresote and concrete from the later fireplaces etc.

Fig.9 We are keeping the bigger stones separate from the rest of the rubble, as they will be usefull in the future for garden walls etc. There was some amount of material in the chimney, many many tonnes.

Fig.10 In May we decided to hire out a 3 ton mini digger to tidy up around the place a bit. We took down the cavity block wall that enclosed the concrete yard beside the milking parlour, this gave us more space. The yard the sheds had a layer of scraw/sod on it from years of disuse so it was easy to just scrap off. There was a mixture of gravel and stone underneath, but we'll have to put down a cleaner layer in future as its still dirty when its wet.

Fig.11 We took off the galvanise sheeting from the two sheds behind the cottage, we had initially wanted to keep the shed directly behind the house and one day convert it and connect it to the cottage, but one of the end gables was badly damaged and also the was a hawthorn tree growing out of the back wall. Thus the decision to demolish it and one day rebuild an extension with a similar footprint and size.

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The latest......

30/10/2016

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Well folks, it's been a while since I posted any updates. It's been a very busy time for us beside work on the cottage. We only have 4-6 weeks left until baby arrives so there has been lots of prepping and sorting and organising and time spent going up and down to the attic!
In regards to the cottage it's been a lot of the same. Taking down all the timber panelling on the ceiling in the bedroom and the partition wall, over the fire place and the inside of the roof in the centre room.
We decided it was time to get a skip and got rid of the old carpets and most of the stuff that came out of the house in the first week. We cleared out the majority of rubbish in the milking parlour and the tiled fireplaces. We soon realised we had a lot more to get rid of than we realised. It can be hard to judge the size of skip you need until you start filling it but we made a good start!

Skip No.1 filled and time to move on.....I'll let the photos do the talking:

fig.1 Taking down the panelling over the fireplace exposing the chimney breast. Nice bit of wallpaper!

Fig.2 Chimney breast exposed and fireside cupboards partially removed.

Fig.3 Timber panelling taken down on both side of the partition wall upstairs and down!

Fig.5 Internal doors removed. We will hopefully get these stripped and retain them as part of the house.

Fig.4 View from the parlour.

Fig.6 ceiling removed in the downstairs bedroom. This exposed the gable wall which looks to have been added on at a later stage. It's only half the depth and made with cast concrete and stones thrown in for good measure.

As mentioned in Fig.6 we revealed the gable and realised it was added at a later stage. We originally thought that the house may never have been thatched but with this additional discovery it would seem that it possibly was.

Fig.7 There seems to be a blocked up doorway above the door to the bedroom, to the left of the fireplace. We think this may have been access to a loft above the bedroom at some stage.

Fig.9 Never let it be said I sat on my arse while I was pregnant! Removing the remainder of the loose plaster on the back/north wall of the centre room.

Fig.8 Inside of the roof exposed in the centre room.

Fig.10 Finally! Electricity! The electricity to the house was disconnected which saved us a job so we finally got the service going to the milking parlour sorted with many phone calls and a lot of patience!

Just a pause to honour how far we got with no power tools!

Time to tackle the fireplace!

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Side Note.

30/8/2016

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Whilst emptying out a wooden chest upstairs at the weekend we found it to be lined with newspaper. The Cork Examiner, costing 5p, Mon May 6th 1974.
If you lived in Cork in May 1974 you could go to The Pavilion to see Ryan's Daughter or Madam Butterfly in Cork Opera House. You could have a HB ice-cream afterwards, maybe an ice berger for 5p or a wibbly wobbly wonder for 4p! You could drive there in your brand new Triumph Toledo which I'm sure you could comfortably afford as a physiotherapist earning up to £2,136 per annum or as a chief engineer at Irish Ale Breweries where you could be earning £4,000! Or you could always stay at home and watch The Waltons at 6:55 on Telefis Eireann. Or, my favourite you could go on a day tour to Barleycove, Goats Path and Bantry Bay with CIE for £2.50.
On a more serious note the front page news included the murder of 8yr old Colette Cronin. Public are being warned that the killer is still at large. The pro-assembly unionists were setting up a new political party and Rose Dugdale was detained for stealing £8 million worth of Art!
Hopefully this has given a few readers a trip down memory lane or a bit of a giggle!

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Floor plan and Day six.

28/8/2016

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I'd like to start with the floor plan. hopefully everything will make sense to you now!

Fig.1

Fig.2

The bedroom upstairs is over the parlour and is the same shape and size. (Bar the height of course)
So today was another busy day. The ceiling in the parlour was taken down single-handedly by our friend, although not before removing all the little picture hooks which I will attempt to clean. (Many layers of paint)

Fig.3

The demolition revealed some epic cobwebs and some interesting looking floor joists. What we assume are the original joists were present, as well as some additional timbers tacked on to each one. Not all of the timbers actually spanned the width of the room so were effectively weighing down the ceiling as apposed to supporting it! The original joists are partially rounded and fit into the wall on the west side and sit on the partition wall on the east side of the room. As you can imagine they will all have to be removed and replaced. Éanna is enjoying the extra head height though!

Time for lunch!

Fig.9

Also today we took out the larder cupboard in the centre room. It was very rotten at the bottom especially. We used paint remover on all the hinges etc in the house including the doors of the larder and removed them. If we can clean them up we might use them for a cupboard later on.

Fig.10 You can see the larder on the far left of this photo.

Fig.11 Larder gone and the door you can see is the door that led to Bedroom 1.

My sister did great work today including taking all the timber off from around the remaining windows. She looks like she was born with a nail bar in her hand! Anything along the back/north side of the house has been fairly rotten and easy to remove but in contrast any timber at the front/south side of the house has been much more difficult as it is dryer. So fair play to Sis for getting it all off!

Fig.12 North side/ Back wall.

Fig.13 South side/ Front wall.

As you can see from fig.12 and fig.13 above there is a colour difference in the stone between the front and back wall. the back wall is much darker. We are presuming this is damp, again due to the raised level of the ground at the back of the house.

Fig.14

Fig.15

While taking the wood panelling away from the back window in bedroom 1 we discovered a vent. It had been blocked up on the outside with a piece of slate.

Our last job was to take away the stove and investigate the fireplace in the centre room. It would appear that many moons ago they blocked up the very large fire place to put in a regular open fire with the fire side cupboards. They then went on to block this up further and put in the stove. Behind the tiles was a sheet of foiled back plasterboard, the only piece of plasterboard we found so far. It should be noted that plasterboard cannot be put in an ordinary builder's skip. It will have to be brought to a civic waste and recycling centre. Éanna tried his best but I think we might finally need a little more muscle in the form of a Jackhammer!

Fig.16 Out of the way Merlin!!

A few photos of the view from the top of the garden to finish a very productive few days!

Looking South.

Looking North.

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Crowbars and chisels!

27/8/2016

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Our little man has gone on holidays with his Nana and Grandad to West Cork so we've been at the house Thursday-Sunday! Making lots of progress and reinforcements arrived on Saturday in the form of my sister and a friend.

Fig.1

Fig.2

On Thursday myself and Éanna tackled the upstairs starting with un-boarding the little window. The room was flooded with light as was the room downstairs. This window is west facing and goes to show that a window in the right place can make a huge impact.

Fig.3

Fig.4 The room felt twice as big!

As you can see for Fig.4 the ceiling upstairs was panelled and then covered over with more panelling. (A few layers of paint and wallpaper too of course!) So taking all this down was our next job. Lots of dust, cobwebs and displaced spiders. Our dust masks were essential the past few days and are now black, showing how much they're saving from our lungs!
We also took down some of the plaster on the gable wall as it was very loose.
We found that the roof timbers are going into a wallplate and not into the wall. This would explain why the roof is quite straight which can be unusual on a house of this age. The house must have been re-roofed in the early 20th century.

Another major discovery we made is that the parlour seems to have been a later addition. We have concluded this due to several factors: the floor is a good inch/inch and a half higher than the centre room. The mortar in the parlour is lime mortar but the rest of the house appears to be earth mortar and lime plastered. This would also explain the patched up parts of the wall in the parlour. It must have been where the original gable was and had to be filled in after the extension was built.

Once we remove the 40 or so pieces of carpet, mat, rugs and lino from the floor upstairs we were finally able to inspect the floorboards and the joists underneath. The floor felt fairly bouncy in places (Maybe I shouldn't have been up there!) but overall wasn't too rotten. We reckon the floor joists are probably rotten where they are going into the wall but haven't managed to see that part yet. I rather like the wide floor boards but Éanna thinks they are probably unusable. (And also that they are not really floorboards!) I hope to replace them with something very similar. (This will be our bedroom at the start at least.)

As you can see from Fig.14 below we also took down the partition in the bedroom. (The room behind the main chimney) (I have a floor plan coming soon, I promise) Our fabulous helpers did all the work on the partition for us and it makes the room so much bigger and leaves us with lots of firewood! This room will hopefully be the kids room.

Fig.14

I was doing some plaster removal around the fireplace in this room (back to back with the main fireplace in the centre room) and found a great example of the layers that can be found in an old house that has had lots of redecorating, renovating and additions made to it such as the newer fireplace. I think we have layers of lime plaster, lime wash, paint, more paint and cement and more paint! It really pays to take your time with the work and learn about the history of your building so you can figure out how best to treat and repair it. Take your time, try not to remove what doesn't need to be removed. In lots of places the plaster wasn't loose and didn't want to come off so we are hoping to just remove the paint and any loose render and only re-plaster or re-point where it's actually needed. If it's been OK for 200 years then it can last us another 50/60 at least.

Fig.15

Next job was to remove the kitchen units from the centre room. They consisted of a gas cooker, a sink unit and an under counter fridge. I had cleaned up the sink and we had been using it along with a gas camping stove, for making cups of tea etc. We figured if would be handy to have on site so moved it out to one of the sheds. There are numerous water pipes all over the site so we're hoping to redirect one to the kitchen's new location tomorrow.
Behind the kitchen units was what can only be described as disgusting. If anyone has seen the new series Stranger Things then the horrible mould creeping it's way across the wall may remind you of what lived in the other dimension! It even managed to find a crack and get in behind the plaster and creep across the stone wall! This is what can happen if you dry line a house of this sort....damp breeds scary mould monsters!

Fig.20

Fig.20 above shows the centre room with the kitchen units and the mould monster removed. We would definitely advise clearing as you go. Remove rubble, timber etc. as you finish each job. Ours is outside in different areas at the moment but we will be getting a skip at some point soon when we feel we have enough to fill it. Clearing as you go means you have more room to move around, less things to trip over and gives a change of pace from a perhaps more strenuous job. Going out for fresh air breaks and plenty of water breaks are good too. (I also like to take a banana break around 11:30 but that could just be me!) I found the dust masks hard going at the start and today in the heat I struggled a bit too but I must be getting used to them as I tried to drink with one on earlier!
Also in Fig.20 you can see the wall where the plaster was removed looks quite dark and damp. This is mainly due to the fact that the earth/grass etc. outside the wall (have a look out the window) is at least a foot up the wall. This will all have to be dug away (anyone have the loan of a digger??) to form french drains around the house. I will get Éanna to write a post explaining these and the more technical side of the mortars and plasters etc. soon....I hope!

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Some before/during/after shots!

22/8/2016

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Day 2.

21/8/2016

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So day two sees just myself and Éanna at the cottage armed with chisels, hammers, a crowbar and a lot of excitement (and apprehension) as to what we will find.
First job was to remove all the carpets. They came up very easily as they were just sitting on the floor. They were fairly rotten in places due to damp from the concrete floors.
Concrete and cement: the natural enemies of the lime mortar wall! The concrete floor has sent the damp up the walls and the walls couldn't breath due to the concrete render on the outside and the many many layers of paint on the inside. We're hoping to rectify all this with breathable materials which I will write about when the time comes!
All this damp lead to our second job of the day: removing the paint and lime plaster in the parlour. Éanna left for 20 minutes to get us some lunch and this is what he returned to.....I just couldn't resist!

I was very pleased with myself and felt like I had earned my lunch!
As it turns out removing relatively loose lime plaster is extremely satisfying. I had read up on the process and they advised keeping the chisel at a shallow angle to the wall and go gently so as not to damage pointing or the brick/stone. I followed this advise for a while until we realised the stonework didn't really warrant our delicate touch! Lets just say is was meant to be plastered over! If you had looked through the window later on you would have seen us banging with hammers and lifting it off with a crowbar!
We went on the strip the three plastered walls and remove the baseboards and window surround.
we found an area behind the door, to the left of the window that looks like a blocked up doorway but it would be alongside the current doorway so we're not sure exactly what way it was originally.
we found some timber pegs in various places in the walls. One of which Éanna reckons might have been used as a depth gauge for the plaster.

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It Begins!

21/8/2016

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So we have spent the weekend at Our Cottage working hard. My parents came on Saturday to help us clear out furniture, Bric-a-Brac etc! As with most Irish vernacular cottages there were lots of religious paintings adorning the walls as well as statues and countless numbers of miraculous medals! There were also many mementos brought no doubt, by children and grandchildren from all over Europe. We found a few bits that we will keep but most will go to charity shops. We also found some personal photos that we hope to reunite with nearby family members.
we are also hoping to keep some of the furniture and restore it or re-purpose it. There is a lovely dinning table and a couple of sideboards as well as some kitchen chairs and wardrobes. There is a metal bed upstairs which we think is brass but everything in the house has many many layers of paint on it including the bed!
The previous owner seemed to be a large fan of green, pink and more recently yellow so watch out for these in the photos!