Corwin's house renovation adventure

So my brother came over to help again and that means we can push through and make much progress. We're trying to finish anything that does a lot of dust or debris so that we can move in asap, but it turns out he may stay for almost a month so I hope we can finish a lot more than just breaking stuff.

This week, we're finishing breaking the ceiling clay plaster and straw in the living room (super exhausting, have to keep on hitting the ceiling with a carpenter hammer for hours, until you can't feel your arm, and get all the dust in your face) and clearing out the remaining walls to then cover them with a layer of straw, to prepare them to receive a new layer of clay plaster.

Last week I also finished some of the isolation in the ceilings of the rooms, and we also finished the isolation of the new small roof we build recently. Hopefully we can keep this pace next week and the ones after that, so that in a month we can be back in the house and the family can enjoy the garden while I make the finitions in the house.

Breaking the ceiling's clay+straw plaster:

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Clearing the walls in the bedroom (old plaster was damaged and repairs weren't going to hold well and crack etc.)

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Putting the straw on the walls so the new clay sticks

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Finished the isolation of the new roof, still need to cover the steel beam with wood and finish the surface of the ends/sides of it.

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Just realized I only have about 2.5 months left to finish it all before going back to work, so gotta give it a last big push to move back in real soon.

Finished the straw on the walls in the main bedroom

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Then did most of the clay plaster on those walls (should be dry in a few days). Then I still have a thin finish layer to put on to hide small cracks that appear when it dries and to make it smoother when rubbing your hand on it (it's quite rough right now). A bit annoying that I got one of the big bags of clay delivered which had already been soaked somehow and so it was tricky to mix it up with water etc. and get the right consistency and so the plaster was too wet and cracks a lot while drying and some parts have slightly contracted or expanded so surfaces that were really straight aren't so much anymore. But oh well! Also added a door frame and door so when I'm done with that room (soon...) I can close it off and continue elsewhere.

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Bricks + plaster in the wall of the living room to the stairs which finishes drying up

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We also finished breaking the old plaster in the ceilings of the kitchen and living room so I was able to start polishing the beams before I close up the gaps between them.

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My family came around to help a bit (although since I don't have enough tools or even cords and such, it's hard to be really productive with more than 2 people). My brother's been a real help so far, when I run out of steam he shows up and goes at breaking stuff like a madman, while I can focus on technical stuff. Here, I was showing my bro and sis how to do the wooden boards around the roof.

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And my mother and grand mother have helped out in the garden, clearing out some of the trees and setting up a vegetable area. Here's a shot of the garden from the roof. Lots of work there still, I plan on destroying the square structure and renovate the rectangle one, but we'll see when I get around to it.

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It's really a matter of preserving the structure of the house without dooming it to collapse in a few years. The clay is super healthy for the air (absorbs toxins and humidity and releases humidity only when the air is too dry), I believe it's the best interior cover for having a nice air, no condensation on windows, etc. It works really well with wood (and the house has a wooden structure), not damaging the wood in any way, contrary to cement-based plasters and such. It's also very cheap (150€ for 1.4 tons) and easy to apply (not toxic so no protections to use, low drying speed so can take your time, easy to clean afterwards, etc.)

But most importantly is the flow of water through the walls: if I had just put standard plaster on the walls or plates of plaster or shitty isolation, the water would have gone into the walls, reaching the old clay+straw mix (since it's really absorbant), and would not have been able to go back out of the wall through the plaster, staying trapped between the exterior plaster and the interior plaster, and eventually causing the wall to crumble down when it got too humid. In all constructions there's a thing you got to respect and it's the order of the materials you use and their potency to absorb water: you have to make it so that the water can go in the wall and back out the other side, being sort of pulled by different degrees of absorbance from each material. If you trap a high-absorbance material between two low ones, it's fucked. It's how you get stuff like funghi that eat your wooden beams and such, which develops behind plaster plates, in the darkness and humidity, and you really don't want that sort of stuff to happen.

Anyway, those are most of the reasons. It's just how houses are made and repaired around here, and going against the age-old techniques means you may get something more modern but it could also collapse a few years down the line. Figured it'd be best following the advices of experts on this, since the house is a bit shit to begin with (crap wood for beams etc.) and super old (130+ years).

The previous owners had actually covered the ceiling of the kitchen with the wrong material, and when I broke it all to reveal the beams, we found a layer of mold between the old clay and the new plaster they put, illustrating exactly the phenomenon I was talking about (probably accelerated because it is the kitchen and has vapors of all kinds going up through the ceiling).

But yeah, the downside is that it takes ages to dry, and is also not good at holding stuff such as shelves etc. and that I had to learn all the tricks, which means I totally underestimated the time it would take to renovate it all (since I was making my estimations based on putting plaster plates a bit everywhere and calling it done.)

So it's been a while since updates, because renovations are slow now that I've gotten back to work.

A few months ago, just before I returned to doing levels, I finished the attic room (or almost, needs a bit of clean up on the windows, a TV plug to be finished, and the stairs' railing to be oiled/colored up. It's now being used as my home office (finally dusted off and set up my PC and got myself a decent desk), and a small playroom for the kids until their own room is done.

Being a bit of a noob when it came to doing the finitions on the drywall stuff, and lacking the proper tool to do the job, I didn't quite polish it enough and so you can see bumps and irregularities on the walls. I'll probably do another pass on it when I'm done with the rest of the house, either polishing it one more time to get rid of those, or covering with basic wallpaper to hide them. A bit lame to have done all that work just to fail a bit at the end, but it's not preventing us to use the room and it's more of a concern for when I try to sell the house, to give a good impression.

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And I'm hoping to finish the master bedroom either this weekend or the next, I still have to do a couple things regarding electricity, and to clean up and finish the borders of the floorboards. We can move in as soon as that's done and I've installed curtains on all windows. I had in mind to oil/color the wooden beams so their color matches better the windows/floor, but we're eager to expand the usable space in the house so I'll get back to that at some point in the future when the rest is done, because that stuff is messy and long to do. The good thing is that my experience with drywalls in the attic paid off here and it's way better.

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I'm slowly working my way down the house, from the attic to the living room/kitchen, because it makes sense that way (I don't risk screwing up something that's finished with my tools/materials while moving up and down the house. So attic = sort of done, master bedroom = almost done, second floor corridor/staircase = needs finish layers and paint and floor boards, then down to the bottom floor to do hallway, kitchen and living room next year.

MANDATORY COMPARISON SHOTS!

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Also, the good thing is our original plan is starting to pay off: there were tough times financially and emotionally near the end of my year off, but since we don't have to pay rent anymore, now that I've got a salary back we're able to start saving money. I still have a few things to buy for the house here and there but for the most part that's a big load off my back and hopefully that'll have made it all worth it.

I'm doing it again! (on a smaller scale)

Bought a flat in the city where I studied and been renovating it during the day and working in evening/night to be aligned with my partners in crime's timezone. I'm coming out of the "break shit up" phase and into the "rebuild it" one. It's a sprint rather than a marathon on that one, gotta get it ready by early June at the latest. I don't know for how long I'll be around the area, depends on how stable my current job working from home turns out to be, but it's exciting to soon have a place to call my own.

Ordered the kitchen today, gotta get the room ready for when it arrives. Also redoing the bathroom completely, with new shower structure and such. Bedrooms are not too far from done already, just gotta paint and polish/vitrify the hardwood floors so they don't look so damaged. It's way better than my previous experience, if only for the fact that I speak the same language as people who can give me advice/help.

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I am also deeply saddened by having to get rid of these marvelous pieces of art:

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Finally slowed down a bit this year, renovations didn't go super far last year because I spent a few months in the US and worked a lot when I was back home. Now focusing on finishing the renovations of my apartment, bathroom is 99% done, just gotta wait for a few things to dry and put back the window on its frame, test for leaks with water pressure turned on at max, and put the door back on.

Lots of mistake on that one room along the way, the worse one being that because I was changing the window I stupidly decided to do the tiles around before I put on the frame so that I wouldn't have to do perfect cuts because they would be covered up (a friend was helping me with the window and I wanted to use his expertise putting the frame right there and then, instead of waiting for the whole room to be tiled), but turns out it's not so easy to tile a wall from the top to bottom because of something called gravity. Had to keep on putting supports on the wall and making sure everything was 100% horizontal to the millimeter because the tiles would slide down while the glue was still soft otherwise. Took longer than it should have because of that to tile the whole room, but it turned out ok in the end. Also I bought some super solid tiles thinking it would be a good thing, but that meant they could only be cut with a disk cutter and piercing them was a pain in the dick.

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Trying to finish toilets and kitchen next. Most other rooms just need some paint and touch-ups and putting shelves and such in the closets. I also intend on doing one last round of finely polishing all the hardwood floors before I can start furnishing.

It's a layer of plastic that comes as a roll and which you cut with a box-cutter, glued to the old floor with joints on the sides so water can't seap under it. Tiling the floor would have raised it too high compared to the rest of the apartment, and forced me to cut the door. Or I would have had to break the old tiles which were small and glued to the concrete below directly and since the floor was already straight, i didn't feel like breaking it all, so I just covered it all. Good thing is it makes it easy to swap out the top layer if I want to change it for another color or if it gets damaged. It's also nicer for the feet than tiles: doesn't slide as much and is less cold to the touch.