Partyraum Part 2

Since the last post on Operation Partyraum, I did a lot of donkey work with spade, shovel and wheelbarrow. Not to mention sledge and crowbar. The reason for this donkey work is that, underneath the mouldy OSB boards and the plastic sheet, there was a huge volume of sand/gravel, clay - and concrete.

It was difficult to figure out what kind of a system the existing floor was laid out in. Sandra told me that she remembers where the cows stood, what direction they were facing and where the calves were. This corresponded (more or less) to the concrete that was still there and to a concrete trough that went down deep into the ground (you can see it in the picture on the left). Like for the rest of the concrete, I used an angle grinder with a diamond blade to cut the concrete at the wall, so I could belt away at it with a sledge, without worrying about cracks.

I ordered a 7 cubic metre container from Hilger. Their policy is to give three days for free and then charge something like €4 a day after that. Obviously, you have to pay for the actual debris itself as well (even though you probably end up buying it back off them later as gravel).

The container arrived early on Monday (27th July) and I spent most of Monday evening filling it up as much I could. It was actually about three quarters full on Monday evening. Tuesday, I was too busy to get anything substantial done, so I had to finish it on Wednesday evening.

By the time they came and picked it up today (Thursday), it was full to the point of overflowing. I got all the concrete floor into it, lots of broken bricks (which were under the thin concrete on the right hand side) and a huge volume of the kind of sand/gravel mix that you find under concrete or bricks. There is also an old sink from Harting 10 that I broke up to get rid of. This all counts as 'Bauschütt' so I could probably have gotten rid of it bit by bit (for free) in Hohenpolding. Down there, they only allow you to drop off 100l a go though and they are only open on Thursdays and Saturdays. Seven cubic metres at 200l a week would take way too long.

Once I had the debris out of the way, it was time to decide where the finished concrete floor should actually go. The obvious way to go about this was to take the level of the bottom of the door (which cannot be changed) and project that level around the room. What is normally done is to go up a metre from whatever finished floor level you want and project that height around the walls. This is called a 'Meterriss'.

You can do this the hard way, with a normal level, or builder's line. Or you can do this the easy way with a laser. All you do is set up the tripod (the laser itself is self-levelling) and slowly turn the handle to raise the laser line up to exactly hit the metre mark (above the bottom of the door). That is exactly one metre above finished floor level. The laser projects 360° around the room. I used a bit of laminate floorboard about 15cm long into which I had cut a slot with a circular saw. With a can of spray paint, I sprayed short lines 'onto' the laser line all around the room. In about five minutes, it was done.

The next job was to get rid of the ridiculous, pointless step that was in the room. I don't know how many people stumbled over this in the past - and it means you can't really arrange things in the room as you might like. I had already gotten rid of the concrete from this step and a layer of bricks as well.

The 1m line that I drew around the room showed that I needed to go substantially deeper and getting rid of the step was the way to go. It was all compacted subsoil with broken roof tiles and bricks, so it was easy enough to shift with a spade and a shovel.

I now have one step less but one huge heap of clay, which I have to get rid of. If nobody takes it, Hilger will take it in a container. It can stay there now for a few weeks though. I've enough done.

Operation Partyraum

You may or may not know that the so-called 'Partyraum' has a serious problem. The problem is damp and mould. In 2009 a sheet of plastic was put down on top of (on one side) old concrete where there used to be cows and (on the other side) directly on the clay. OSB sheets were put on top of the plastic, using lats to level them. The lats were supported underneath by old timber beams (i.e. underneath the plastic, in a sand/gravel mix). Obviously, this is a recipe for disaster. Disaster happened over 2013/2014/2015 but was only really discovered in 2015. Between the OSB and the plastic underneath there was immense fungal spread. Going in to the room you would be hit with a wall of dank mould smell.  In the photo above you can see the dry rot that completely ate away the timber.

I decided to prioritise this as it seemed like it could be a health hazard as well as being generally a 'mouldy' situation. To get going, Yvonne cleared it out, leaving only the OSB boards. I demolished the bar and got rid of the OSB boards, the plastic sheets and the mould. I decided that the best outcome would be to have a completely level concrete floor, professionally done following all the rules of the trade. This meant removing not only the existing concrete, but also all organic layers - right down to the subsoil. This wasn't all that easy at all. There were cables and water pipes criss-crossing in the sand/gravel waiting to cause emergencies. I used an angle grinder with a diamond blade to cut a deep slice into the concrete all around the room. This way I could belt away with a sledge, without worrying that tiles would be falling off the walls upstairs.

The current status is that there are huge heaps of concrete, bricks, sand, gravel and general dirt piled up in the room. A container will be arriving on Monday, which I intend to fill as soon as possible. I have a feeling that seven cubic metres will not be enough. If it isn't, the rest of the debris will have to wait until the end of August. I will also have to fix up the electricity (all those cables will need to go into proper casings and should be arranged properly) and the water (the pipes will need to be sunk deeper). 

Some work on the gallery

 

It's been awhile since I've posted anything here - May, to be exact. Not all that much went on since May, all the same. I had just finished a small corner where the ladder up to the attic is last time. After that I got working on the gallery. In one of the previous posts I showed how I hid the cables for the electrics in the pointing in the gallery back wall. Once the pointing was done, I was able to get working on paintint up there. The brickwork itself wasn't all that great and I didn't pay anywhere near as much attention to the pointing as I had in the kitchen as I knew I'd be painting anyway. I used a whitewash paint (lime based) which was supposed to have some kind of additive to make it easy to wash/clean. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as easy to work with as paint - it tended to get very thick. Even diluting it a lot with water didn't thin it out enough. One advantage of the thick paint was, however, that it was easy enough to fill gaps with it that normal paint would not usually fill. Because the paint was not all that easy to work with, it did take quite some time to finish the job.

In the picture on the right, roughly half of the work was done - the easy bit. The brush was wrecked after that much so I ended up having to get more. No amount of cleaning would have saved it. There are four triangles in total - you can see only two of them in the picture. It was very hard to paint these - I was trying to get too much paint on either the ceiling or the rafters, but given the limited space for manoeuvring, this was not easy at all. After a couple of late nights, the job was done. I'll have to stick with whitewash for the future, I think, because I doubt any normal paint will stick to a whitewashed wall.

Once the back wall was done, we had to decide on what to do with regards access to the gallery. I have a fine new ladder for getting up to it, but that isn't really a permanent solution at all. The solution we were looking at was a hole in the gallery floor with a retractable ladder. I wasn't really looking forward to that work at all and to be honest the solution wasn't all that good. I got Stuckenberger over to have a look and he decided that we could cut out the chest high beams provided that the roof was secured above and below that properly. To do this, we had to expose the floor joists next to the roof supports, so that they could be bolted to each other. This prevents the roof from collapsing outwards. It was a fairly easy job to take up the OSB - I just cut it along the joist to make it easier to put back afterwards.

Stuckenberger had already measured, cut and brought me over new beams for overhead. I painted these with the same linseed oil paint that I had used for the rest of the rafters. It took three coats to get them the same colour as the other ones. Today, two of Stuckenberger's men came over and installed them. Between installing the new beams, securing the floor and cutting out the old beams, it was about three hours' work for two men. The end result will take a bit of getting used to, but it allows me to finish off the floor up in the gallery and to contemplate what stairs we will use to get up there. There will also be a railing up there, so that will change the look of it a bit as well. Below is a picture of the finished job (well, inasmuch as I still have to paint the cut ends of the timber).

Finishing up one corner

We pretty much finished up one corner of the house last weekend. To the left of the first bedroom there is a corner/alcove which we didn't really know what to do with. The ladder up to the ceiling is here, so it was going to be difficult to put up a wall. We decided to leave it as an alcove and to put bookshelves into it. Here a few pictures...

More pointing

I finally had time this evening to get three buckets of pointing done up in the gallery. Yesterday I was in Nuremberg, Wednesday Bayern were playing Manchester and on Tuesday Dortmund were playing Real Madrid. Today there were no excuses. I have now more or less finished the third bag of the special pointing mortar. I'll use up the other two bags and after that I'll mix my own. I have enough sand, cement and Mariensteiner. I'll mix up a load of it dry in the mixer. I can carry that up to the gallery and then use the hand mixer above to mix it 'on demand'.

Other than pointing, today Niedermaier's men were back. This time to install a new sensor in the heating upstairs. The sensor measures the rate of flow of liquid in the solar modules. The advantage of this is that we can finally figure out how many kilowatts the modules are producing. Given that a litre of oil has about ten kilowatts, we can quite easily figure out how much oil we are saving. While they were busy installing, I saw that the back of the user interface LCD module on the heater has three RJ45 ports - meaning that it is intended that something is connected via network. I had a look on the Internet and saw that Solvis sells a netbox which connects to the heating over network. The netbox itself gets an IP address via DHCP from the local network. I'm not quite sure if the netbox itself gives the heater an IP address, but I fully intend to see what happens if I connect the heater to my laptop and see what happens over the ethernet port with wireshark.

Starting the wall in Sandra's office

The brick fire wall originally served as a fire break between the hay barn (agricultural use only accordingly to the planning office) and the house itself. Because those were two separate 'uses', there had to be a fire wall between them. When we went to get planning permission, the main issue was convincing the planning office to convert the agricultural use into domestic use - i.e. meaning that the entire house would be domestic. When the planning office approved our plans the fire wall became redundant as a fire wall. It still separates the living room/kitchen/bathroom from the bedrooms. It is also made of brick - not the nicest brickwork ever (it wasn't ever intended to be seen or admired) - but worth pointing (like in the kitchen).

For Sandra's office (up in the gallery) it was hard to decide what to do with the back wall. Theoretically I could just have clad the whole thing with slabs and plastered it. Or I could have clad it in timber. That would have meant that we would lose the beams - which did have a bit of character. Pointing the wall and cleaning the bricks (like in the kitchen), however, wasn't really an option either, because when we were doing the roof, the top of that fire wall (the triangle/gable) had to be built up and flattened with mortar at the top, so the roofing felt could lie something and not eventually sag. Without knowing what we were going to do with that wall, and under time pressure, we built up the top of the wall without paying any attention to how flush we were with the gallery side. This mess means that exposing the brick won't work. I then decided to point the bricks and then whitewash the whole thing. This would mean still having the brick effect, and the white colour will hopefully look well behind the black beams.

The decision gave rise to more problems. Uli and Daniel weren't briefed on this when they did the wires. They had proceeded on the basis that the wall would be plastered or cladded - not exposed. Thus, they hadn't paid much attention to how they wires were buried in the wall. This meant that the first job (after scraping out the joints) was to hide the wired, deep in the joints. I also had to remove the sockets and distributor boxes, as they were too far out (again, they were placed for plastering, not for exposed brick).

Right now, I have the bottom bit of the wall pointed and the wires are (hopefully) successfully buried and the sockets/boxes set. The pointing is relatively slow going compared to the kitchen. The old mortar was in worse condition that it was in the kitchen, meaning I have to take out more of it to get a good basis for the new mortar. It looks like being about three or four days work. Other than that, I also managed to get the last two sockets working in the kitchen. By taking up one of the OSB boards in the gallery, I found the connection that was causing the problem. I'm going to keep tipping away with the pointing - an hour or two a night - and see how far I get. I bought the same Hasit 982 pointing mortar for the job (five bags), but once I get through what I have, I'll mix my own cement. The 982 is great for pointing (it keeps the right consistency for a long time) but too expensive at €11 a bag, especially when everything will be whitewashed anyway.

Cleaning up the balcony after building

Paula enjoying the sun on the new balcony

You may remember that we put in our balcony when we finished plastering and painting the outside of the house. There are 43 larch planks (not sure how thick - at least 30mm) with bevels on the top (presumably so nobody slips if they are wet). Larch is quite a nice timber to look at - a kind of orange/red colour. The timber is hard as iron - particularly the heartwood that we went for (hoping it will keep for years). It was delivered and installed untreated.

Filthy dirty planks

Since then, months have gone by - in which we plastered the inside of the house, painted the inside of the house and did hundreds of other jobs. All this time, the balcony was being (mis)used as a kind of storage space or dump for materials. It also got very dirty. Working boots, shoes, spilled drinks, paint - the whole lot. Having moved in, it was getting to be time to do something about the mess - particularly if we wanted to take advantage of our balcony with glass roof in spring at all.

I started off sanding on the east side. It was taking ages. The timber really is hard as iron and sanding it wasn't doing any good - at least not with 60 sandpaper. Anything rougher tended to scratch the timber without actual doing the sanding job. That's when I decided to go get the electric hand sander I used for the beams in the kitchen and in the bedrooms. The reason I didn't start with it is because I was afraid the circular motion would scratch against the grain of the timber. The electric band sander (which always sands with the grain - unless you are very stupid) wasn't working. However, I reckoned I'd need until Christmas to sand it all with sandpaper, so I decided to give it a try.

It worked perfectly! With light paper (120), the sander took off just the dirt and pencil marks (from where I marked in the line so I'd know where to screw down the planks). The timber looked a lot less red afterwards, but at least it was clean. Very clean. I still had to sand the rills in the timber with sandpaper. Luckily enough, there was just loose dirt in there and very little dirt that actually had to by sanded off. All in all, the sanding took about two days.

After sanding, I gave the boards a coat of this stuff. Now this is the strong fungicide that we used for the exposed timber in the roof. It ain't cheap but it is very effective. It soaks into the timber quite quickly and should prevent any black fungal growths. Apparently larch is very resistant against rot and fungus anyway - even untreated. I had the fungicide left over anyway though, so I decided it's better to be safe than sorry. Even though the balcony has a glass roof (i.e. it is not completely exposed), I do notice that some condensation drips down - especially in the morning - and the wind can blow rain in too.

After the fungicide came the real fun with linseed oil. Since painting almost all exposed timber inside with linseed oil, I have become a big fan of this stuff. It has a huge advantage over standard varnish in that it actually soaks into the timber rather than forming a sealing coat on top of it.
For a floor, it made sense to do it this way - varnish might look great for a couple of months· but eventually feet and weather combine and it starts to flake, making it look terrible. Oil doesn't have that problem. Every so often I can just scrub it clean and put another coat of oil on top. Oil also has the benefit of allowing the grain of the timber show its colour again. Have a look at the "before/after" photos below.

The boards on the left are sanded but not treated with anything

Finally finished treating. The further away boards are still wet