Pension Power

It was a great day. I actually finished what I planned to do when I set out this morning.

My Father-In-Law was here again and was able to bundle about 40% of the beech floor in only just over 4 hours. This is such a relief as he will probably finish Friday and now I do not have to worry about it getting wet when I start removing the roof. The bar clamps I made up yesterday worked very well for the first two layers and Eric brought his own 2 bar clamps that he used for the top two layers. He worked out a system where the top and bottom layer was generally longer pieces and the middle two were filled up with shorter pieces. Once clamped together, three bands of duct tape secured the bundle and allowed me to transfer to the storage container.

While this was being done I finished removing the siding from the front of the house and then tackled removing the brick facing.  It came off fairly easily.  Now I grew up next to a stone mason and spent several summers working with ‘real’ brick.  I remember when I installed this ‘fake’ brick some guilt I had and indeed I was mocked by my old neighbor.  But I have to say, I feel differently about the product today.  It is REUSABLE!  Yes you can reuse real brick, but it is MUCH harder to do so with a high wastage rate.  With this concrete brick, you just have to unscrew every third row (and only some bricks in that row) and the whole thing disassembles back to its individual parts.

What shocked me as how much the polyurethane masonry adhesive I used to attach the top row still stunk after 15 years, once I pried it apart.  There was times the build-up of fumes were bringing tears to my eyes.  Now that is some serious staying power for the off-gas process.

Now the great part, my neighbor – who is also a pensioner, helped move brick for a couple of hours today.  I had planned on just dumping them at the side of the house and moving them to the back later where they would be stacked until I had the use for them.  But she sort of shamed me into loading the wheelbarrow and just dealing with them all in one step –  And she even ran the wheelbarrow!  She had stacked about 60% of the bricks by the time she had to go and make supper for Ron (some of you may know Ron as the person I was at one point planning to build a plane with – we were going to build a Coot before life got in the way).  I would never have dealt with this all on my own and would not have finished today to boot without her help.  Thank-you Gail!

I will probably use the brick on the north wall of the greenhouse to fulfill a promise to ROCKWOOL to test a ‘heavy’ cladding overtop of 6″ of exterior mineral wool to determine the compression of the insulation and the settlement that results to the cladding over time (if any does occur).  This would of course be outfitted with sensors to measure the movement.

As it is supposed to rain on Friday/Saturday and then is sunny for the indefinite future, I am going to work on stripping out the electrical and then the shiplap on the outside walls over the next few days.  Monday, I will then start removing the roofing and structure and hopefully by July 5, the vast majority of the house will be down!

Wish me luck and more pensioners! 🙂

Thanks for visiting – I really mean this.  It is your visits that help motivate me to document this process.  My blog (which now gets a lot less updates) still gets over 900 hits a month and now this website is over 1000 hits a month, so it looks like a majority of my audience has made the transition to the new project website.  I find it really cool when throughout the day I get comments emailed to me based on what a viewer is watching me do.