Home Away From Home

At the risk of stating the obvious, Glenlochan is not habitable at the moment.  And, since we are in Philly, you might be wondering where we stay when we are working on the house.  We actually have all the comforts of home in the front yard of Glenlochan:

 

 

Yup, a fantastic camper provides us with shelter, a bed, a hot shower after a long day of working on the house, and a place to cook a meal.  Rob found this great, gently used camper for a small investment and it's so convenient and comfortable (and so much less expensive than staying at a hotel).  And, truth be told, it brings back some fond memories of our first few years together when we lived in a mobile home!  Rob outfitted this camper with a brand new, pillow-top mattress which is almost more comfortable than our regular bed.

A few other shots of our little camper are below.

Large refrigerator and freezer:

Spacious dining table and one of life's most critical necessities, the coffee maker!

Fancy trim, window blinds and comfy couches (Tosha concurs with the comfort level):

A kitchen sink, microwave, and stove/oven:

 

 And, a small bathroom with a hot shower:

Not pictured is the fantastic air conditioning, which is a real necessity in the Virginia heat and humidity. 

We've enjoyed staying in the camper (Rob's logged a lot more nights than I have) and it's pretty peaceful (no tv or internet might help in that regard).  However, we do not intend to keep this camper after the renovations are complete, so don't be surprised if these pictures and part of the text appear on Craig's List in 6 months or so...this blog post was really practice for that future listing!

No More Dirt Floor!

The cellar (see Cellar Woes) and crawl space in Glenlochan were, well, creepy.  The crawl space was accessible by all manner of rodents and creatures who made their home there over the years (evidenced by the cat and bird skeletons found therein).  It was also an open dirt floor (no sheathing at all), and the space had uneven, widely varying depths.  At some points the crawl space was a comfortable 18 inches; at other points, Rob had to do the army elbow crawl to get around in less than a foot of depth.   It was also somewhat of a "graveyard"  - not only for cats and birds, but also for systems, pipes and wires that had been disconnected but not removed as the home had been upgraded over the years.  Please note, I've taken Rob's word for all of this as I had no desire to do the commando crawl through that dark, small, creepy space.

Rob spent a lot of time clearing the crawl space of the discarded systems and pipes, and then, with the help of some friends, we had the crawl space dug out to an even depth of 2 feet throughout.  The most exciting part is that we had a new cellar floor and the entire crawl space poured.  Here's some pictures of the process, our cellar, and crawl space, sans the dirt floor.

Gearing up to pour the floor:

Cellar floor before and after the pour:

 A few more cellar shots:

And, a few shots of the fantastic new crawl space:

 

 

Truly this project is evolving from the ground up.  And, it's slightly less creepy down there.

What's a Sill Plate?

If you are not a contractor, then you may not know what a sill plate is.  I sure didn't until I had a need to know.  Unfortunately, I now have a need to know.  As we said in a previous post, the sill plates in Glenlochan were rotted and termite-damaged - sounds problematic, doesn't it?  But, just how serious of an issue is a rotted, damaged sill plate?  Well, Wikipedia defines a sill plate as follows:  A sill plate or sole plate in construction and architecture is the bottom, horizontal member of a wall or building to which vertical members are attached.  Sill plates are usually composed of lumber.

If case you are a visual learner, here's two pictures of one of the sill plates of the house (rotted, damaged and all).  The entire weight of the home is resting on the sill plates - both stories of the home, the attic, and the heavy old slate roof, and everything else in between.  Sill plates are apparently pretty important to the structural integrity of the house.

There are 4 sill plates running under the entire perimeter of the house - front, back and 2 sides, and out of the 4 sill plates under the home, 3 had to be replaced.  For a job that involves jacking up a house, pulling out long beams, re-mortering the bed, and replacing the rotted beams with brand, spanking-new, sill plates, reinforcements were required - yup, Joe came out to give his old man a hand with this job.

Considering all of the things that could go wrong when 2 men are jacking up a 2-story plus home by themselves, the sill plate replacement progressed remarkably smoothly.  Here's a few pictures documenting the progress:

We are happy to report that Glenlochan is resting comfortably on 3 new sill plates (and one original sill plate) and is ready for the next stage.

 

Oyster Update

Our oysters outgrew their original home so we had to invest in a spiffy new "Taylor Float" for half of them to move into. 

By moving half of them to a new home, all of the oysters will have more room to grow and easier access to the water they are constantly filtering.  The new Taylor float is in the rear; the original bag float in front:

We may have waited a bit too long to split them - some of the oysters were much bigger than other ones in the bunch.  As such, we had to sort them by size.  The bigger ones were moved to the Taylor Float, but the smaller ones went back into the bag float.  The "holes" in the Taylor Float are much bigger so the smaller oysters actually fell right through them. 

Here's was our starting point last summer and where we are now:



The floats were put back in the water and secured to the pier  - and the oysters are busy growing for eventual placement on a protected reef in the Bay.

Addition by Subtraction - Part 2

We are done with the demo of the very badly constructed (and unsafe) rear, two-story addition to the original home.  Although we don't know exactly when the addition was added to the home, it was built by enclosing an existing 2 story porch at the rear of the house.  The ceilings in the addition were lower than the main house, the floors weren't level, and the addition wasn't properly tied into the main structure - in short, it had to go.  The house is vastly different now with the back quarter "missing" and this was a major undertaking. 

Here's where we started:

After the porch screens were removed, the roof was the next to go:

Then the second story bit the dust....

.....and the first story started to disappear.  As the addition was removed, the house was closed in with plywood - a temporary fix until the construction on the new addition begins.

A few views from inside illustrate the missing back of the house:

And, the end result is our beautiful patchwork home:

Completion of this huge demolition really marks a turning point in this long rehab process - soon we'll be done with all of the demolition and then the construction can begin.

Back in Action and Addition by Subtraction

Yes, it's been a while and our restoration project has been on temporary hiatus.  We took a much needed break from, well, just about everything, traveled for a couple of months, enjoyed one sunny month in paradise (aka Siesta Key, Florida), visited family and old friends, started a new job, and generally embraced a variety of  new adventures.  Now, six months later, we are BACK IN ACTION with a vengeance.

Building permit proudly displayed in its windows, Glenlochan is undergoing a new stage in the renewal process, addition by subtraction.  Yes, we have started a new round of demolition.  First up was the removal of the old side kitchen from the main structure.  This kitchen will be rebuilt from the ground up - as mentioned previously, it had been poorly rehabbed so many times during the years that there really wasn't anything left of the original structure - and it wasn't sound.  So, it had to go, to make way for the rebuilding.

Here's a few shots of the kitchen prior to demo -  front view and then rear view:

As you can see, Rob carefully removed all windows and doors (and saved the ones worth saving for a future project).  Then the real fun began:

The backhoe/front end loader did the hard part - starting with the roof and then into the structure.

Before too long, the side kitchen was completely gone - months of prep and it came down in a single day.

All that's left is a little bit of clean-up.  Stay tuned for the next big demo project.