Until now, nearly a year into the project, we have yet to do any
real work to the river wall of the building. If anything we have made it look a
little worse - I think it’s time to rectify this.
But first on a vaguely related note... We made friends with an
otter!
When
the river is low there is about a meter wide bank on our side of the river that
you can stand on. Graeme and I were down there cutting down the bushes etc
while we had the chance when suddenly the little guy hops up on the bank with
us to inspect our handy work, gave me a fairly emotionless look (otters dont
have eyebrows) and then jumped back in the river for a swim. It. Was. Wicked.
I
thought about leaving all the cut down branches on the bank to make him a new
home, but i released it would be wrong of be to deny him the pride and reward
of building his own house - he could call it the 'Otter's Mill' and sell
miniature ottoman chairs and...... (i cant think of another otter pun).
[O
wait - 'Im all otter puns!' BOOM]
(anyway) As we plan to tank (water proof) the whole
bottom floor of the building we have to reinforce the wall with steel so the
flood water doesn’t push it over/in - which would obviously be less than ideal
(DAM! - literally)
You
can see in the picture above the bottom half meter or so down to the river
foundations of the wall are actually the original old stone walls (thankfully
all previously concrete underpinned at the river bed. First we need to notch
out this wall at each steel possession and then cast a complete concrete ring
beam for the steel work to sit on. I know it doesn’t look much but this
actually took well over a ton of concrete to fill.
We are now ready to fit the steel work to the wall. These steels
not only strengthen the wall against flood water but they also counter leaver
the balcony over the river. So I need to make holes in the walls for these new
balcony steels to protrude through. There are 6 upright steels across the back
wall with the middle four having horizontal protruding steels to support the
balcony.
View from park of the balcony steels, currently with timber used
as spacers between the each horizontal until we are ready to fit the rest of
the steel structure.
Next stage is to build the new inner blockwork skin of
the wall, which encases the steel inside. This inner face will be the surface
to be waterproofed. Big thank you to Mr Paul Weller for coming to help me do
this brick work, pulling yet another skill from his back pocket. I will
henceforth be referring to him solely as ‘the block father’.
First we needed to block up the 2 existing doors as they
are turning into windows instead, and add an extraordinary number of extra
stiff wall ties to hold the two skins of the wall together.
After bricking up 2 doors down stairs into windows I now
need to make two of the upstairs windows into doors (joy). Below you can see my
head laborer Graeme (!) removing the old windows while I lengthen the window
gaps to full length (just staring on the second in this picture). This turned
out to be a lot harder work than I was expecting as the old wall is very
strong. Now its done and my solders no longer ache I am very pleased about this
fact – on the day of demolition, not so much.
View from the park with all old windows removed and all
new window and door apertures made.
The last major job in this phase on the river wall was to
finish fitting the rest of the steel to the balcony structure. Frustratingly
someone has put a river right where we need to be to do this work (idiots). The
obvious solution is a rather large crane from the road side or some sort of JCB
etc in the river. Unfortunately with these two options there is large bills and
large bureaucrats involved, and these are both things I want to avoid. Instead
we went old school and called in Keswick Mountain rescue! A huge thank you to ‘Big
Chris’ and Graeme Wilson (now onto his 3rd job title of the project –
head laborer, waste/recycling officer [self-appointed!] and now rope rigger) for
setting up a beautifully simple yet elaborate array of ropes and pulleys that
Heath Robinson would have been proud of, so we could get the steels into place.
Sorry for the complete lack of photos of any of this – I was too busy having
fun swinging on ropes and ladders over the river to take any. My bad.
No deck or anything yet but all the structure is now in
for the balcony, It may only be 120cm deep but it is long (7-8 meters), I recon
we can have at least 15 of us lined up with beer and cocktails of a summers
evening. Bring a fishing rod and we can catch our own dinner…
We have also replaced all the slate external windowsills
for tall the river windows
