Tools & equipment – a refresh…

I wrote a post in the early days about the manly subject of tools and equipment. How has it stood the test of time?

Buy v. Hire? In practice this has been very straightforward – if we think it will cost more overall to hire than buy, then we have bought. I do not regret buying the scaffolding, for example. One thing we did not anticipate was a) how difficult it would be to get George around at short notice with his big digger and b) how much we have used the hire mini digger and hire mini dumper instead. At one point last year we seriously pondered buying a second-hand mini digger for the duration. We did not do so because I did not want to be responsible if it broke down, plus it was a bit late in the day, our needs should fall away over the next year.

Quality? Price is not always related to quality, but often is.

As regards electrical tools: I bought a Lidl cordless drill and spare battery for under £45 and it is excellent for light use, as good as the Hitachi I bought for nearly £100. I do not foresee needing one with larger batteries or all-metal gearbox/induction motor in the next year or so. Another win was my Titan big breaker, which cost £160 but has lasted very well and blasts its way through anything that gets in its way. The £60 I spent on as SDS light breaker, by contrast, was not money well spent. It came with a warning not to use it for long periods and does not have a lock to stop the chisel-tip rotating. So I use it when I am desperate and prefer to use Ric’s 15-year-old Makita medium breaker, which is the real deal. The mid-range tools – Makita angle grinder and Bosch SDS drill – are performing very well and should last the life of the project.

For handtools, I have learnt to look around. Our local hardware store, JRD in Ellon, sell tools from a wide range of manufacturers. The Hilka range, for example, is at the lower price point, yet some of their offerings look suspiciously like their Draper or Faithfull equivalents. Unless I know I am getting better quality for a reason, I am buying the cheaper version.

For disposable items such as cutting disks I have usually spent a bit more for a longer-lasting product. I spent nearly £30 on a diamond blade for the angle grinder, when I could have spent half that, but it has been heavily used and has a lot of life left. On the other hand, I bought some ‘premium’ metal cutting disks from Screwfix and wore through a couple just cutting rebar mesh. I bought a couple of cheaper blades at JRD and have not yet worn through the first.

The right tool at the right time? Not living permanently on site means that I occasionally find that a tool I need is in the other place. Frustrating and each time this happens at the steading, I go into Ellon and buy a second one. It wastes hours and costs money, however, as we build up out toolbox it is becoming less of an issue. I recommend not buying tools ahead of time, on the assumption  that they may come in handy, sometime. It has been revealing how Ric & Geoff have quite different must-use lists of common tools and materials – from us and from each other.

Verdicts on my ‘must-have’ tools/equipment: We did pretty well! Most of what we thought we would need, we bought and have used. The big omission so far is the framing nail gun we bought this summer which should save us a lot of time and effort when we construct out timberwork – there is a lot of it to do! I am also now looking at a drywall screw gun, which makes it much easier for one person to fix boards to ceilings. Ric constructed a couple of very useful bits of equipment, that I never knew we would need, from odds & ends – a soil screener (from scrap I-beams) and a concrete chute (from corrugated steel).

Item	Expectation	Reality
General handtools	Already got. Hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, cold chisels etc. Keep.	Just about right, but we are buying essentials for the steading so we a) do not hold Ric back when he is on site without us and b) worry less about lugging them between home and steading.
Spade(s), shovel(s), pickaxe, sledgehammer, builders barrows, broom(s), handbrush(es)	Buy & Keep	Spot on. We buy more when we need them – we are a three-barrow family now because we needed them for the concrete slab. Also, this stuff wears out.
Surveyors tape, builders pins and line	Already got. For marking out the boundary to the steading site. Keep	I use them regularly for measuring up and for building work. They have been essential.
Level, tripod & staff	Buy on Ebay. For internal floors, drainage & other ground works. Sell  after use.	Spot on again. We use it a lot, a very good buy but I cannot see us needing it once we are finished.
Laser measurer	Buy, cheap-ish. Keep.	I have one, it is really for indoor use. It will be invaluable when we start working on internal structures.
Post hole bar & digger, post driver, fencing pliers, gripple tensioner	Buy. For fencing. Keep.	The post hole bar is my most-used tool ever! I used it to make holes for our bare-root hedging, I use it to break open rough ground, to lever thing apart and to whack things. The post hole digger was completely unsuitable for our ground – too stony and tough for it. It is practically unused. The post driver, fencing pliers and gripple stuff were essential and I use them when I need them. I will hang on to much of it, for future fence work.
Cordless SDS+ drill, heavy duty	Hire. To get electricity meter box(es) in place.	I have not needed it since.
Fish tape	Buy & keep	I had to check what this was. I did not buy one and have not missed it.
Corded SDS+ drill 2-3kg	Buy. For all sorts of things. Decent quality to drill into granite. Keep.	I got a very nice Bosch drill for one Christmas, a joy to use.
Hilti SDS+ bits	Buy. To drill into granite	I bought a small pack of Hilti 8mm bits, which were expensive and are indeed amazingly effective – they have four cutting edges, not two and make mincemeat of granite. They will be heavily used when we work on tying our structural timberwork into the steading wall. I have bought lesser bits for lighter use, but still of decent quality.
Breaker	Buy. To break concrete (probably the £150 Titan from Screwfix). Sell after use if fit to.	Spot on again. This is amazingly effective. The one downside is that I do not think the tips are replaceable. There is loads of life still in ours.
Impact Moler & compressor	Hire. For water piping under the public road	I would have done, if I had been allowed to do the work!
MDPE pipe cutter	Buy & keep	I bought one recently, but am not sure how essential it will be.
Big digger & (normal sized) driver	Hire. For demolition, trenching, foundations.	We use George and his big digger for the heavy work. The rest of the time we hire a Kubota 1.6 tonne mini digger that Ric uses.
Mini dumper	Hire. For moving concrete, spoil, aggregate.	We have hired a 1-tonne Thwaites dumper and used it heavily. Even I can drive it, although I did throw myself off at one point.
Micro digger	Hire. For excavating inside steading ground floor.	We used the Kubota mini digger.
Roof ladder	Buy. For demolishing existing roof and re-roofing. Keep.	We bought two in the end. I needed to be able to work between ladders without having to climb down and move the one ladder all the time.
Angle grinder, 9″ + discs	Buy & keep.	Essential, we use it on stone, metal and concrete.
Circular saw + blades	Already got.	I have not had the need for it yet, but will do once we have the roof on.
Hand circular saw, corded	Buy & keep.	No need yet.
Hand planer, corded	Already got.	No need yet.
Jigsaw, corded	Already got.	No need yet.
Hammer drill, cordless, 18v	Buy. Most people advise Makita/De Walt. I might try Ryobi One+ range. Keep.	I bought a little Hitachi drill. I may need to buy bigger batteries for it.
Drill/Driver, cordless, 18v	Buy. As above. Keep.	The Hitachi does this.
Hand sander, cordless, 18v	Buy. As above. Keep.	Not sure I will need this.
Wrecking bars	Already got.	My big gorilla bar is amazing and valuable. The little ones, I have never used.
Pry bars	Buy & keep.	I bought a decent sized one, it is a good tool but the handle is falling apart.
Scaffolding	Buy second hand on Ebay. Looking to get e.g. 8m wide by 5m high run. Sell when finished	Did that, essential.
Slate ripper	Buy & keep.	Not a good buy. Our slates were held on with galvanised clout nails, the slate ripper was useless on them.
Sack trolley	Buy & keep.	I use it for moving lumps of granite around, v useful. One wheel is wonky now, I may replace it.
Cement mixer	Buy. Sell/dispose when finished.	Our trusty Belle Minimix was a very good buy and is used heavily.
Pin hammer	Buy. To clean up granite. Sell once finished.	At present I am thinking more of using a light breaker with a chisel tip!
Compressor, electric	Buy. For air tools including pin hammer. Sell once finished.	Unlikely at present.
Hand tools for lime mortar	Buy. For pick & point. Keep.	I have some basic tools and will be trying them out in 2018.

I have not bothered with my ‘Might-need’ tools/equipment – a platform and a corded router. What we will do, though, is get a set of heavy duty lockable castor wheels to fix to the feet of our kwikstage scaffolding. We can set up a bay of scaffold and wheel it round over our floor slab and save a lot of time putting it up/taking it apart.

My Top 10 so far!

1. Faithful fence bar – my most essential tool ever!
2. Kubota 1.6 tonne digger
3. Thwaites 1 tonne dumper
4. Ric’s medium breaker
5. Belle Minimix cement mixer
6. Ric’s soil screener – hand constructed from waste steel I-beam
7. Wacker plate – we hired for compacting hardcore
8. Level, tripod and staff
9. Angle grinder
10. Gorilla breaker bar

Using Sketchup

I have had a bit of a problem working from the architects very-2D plans, to visualise how the components of the building fit together. I wondered whether 3D design software might help, so I looked at what free products were available.

The most recommended package for PCs is Google Sketchup. It has been around for donkey’s years and has a huge community, so there is loads of help e.g. on YouTube. I downloaded & installed it and gave it a determined spin over a couple of weeks.

What I wanted to achieve: I aimed to create an accurate 3D representation of the steading building, as designed by the architect and adjusted to reflect the current reality (our final floor level is 30mm higher than designed). For example, I wanted to be able to a) visualise the single-storey section complete with coombing & ceiling to see whether the high ceiling, over 3.5m, looks OK, b) see how the single storey section meshes into the east and west wings – at what points do ceilings drop down to 2.3m & is there potential loft storage space, 3) whether the stairs in the real building will be legal in terms of slope, tread length and riser height, 3) visualise what the space in the upper storeys and how usable will it be.

What is good: It is impressive and, once you have understood a) how it does things and b) how you construct objects from the set of basic tools, it is easy enough to use. You construct elements of a building from lines, rectangles and curves. You have tools for converting these 2D objects to 3D. So it is easy to construct a wall, for example by creating a rectangle with the length & width you want, then using the push/pull tool to drag it to the height/depth you want. There is a tool that converts a flat rectangle, with a line down the middle, into a pitched roof. The software works in real units e.g. decimal metres and is accurate to the nearest millimetre. It is easy enough to undo actions if (when) you go wrong, so you can save whenever you know you have something set up right. It is easy enough to go back and start from a safe model. There was nothing I wanted to do that it could not do and the tools for panning, zooming, changing lighting effects etc. work well. I got everything I wanted from it, albeit slowly and laboriously.

What is not so good: It has clear limitations. Everything you create is stored as lines and surfaces, so the wall I mentioned is in fact six surfaces and 12 lines, each of which can be deleted, however it is not easy to simply remove the wall. Also if you draw two overlapping lines, the lines are broken where they cross, so they become four lines and you cannot easily move either of the original lines. Because of this, it is really not possible to recover from an earlier mistake without a lot of moving, deleting and re-drawing. So I started building the upper floor at one end and did not create the space for joists. By the time I realised, I couldn’t face unpicking and starting over. It is very sensitive to small drawing mismatches. If you have several lines or surfaces close to each other e.g.to simulate a stud partition, you have to zoom in to make sure your lines connect with the correct surface, which is unreliable when you have to zoom out to construct something large. It is not really designed to allow you to construct a model where you can, say, have a roof that you can temporarily lift off when you want to look inside. So in the end, I got what I wanted out of it and gave up.

What I achieved: I found out how to use Sketchup. I created a partially complete model so that I could see into the lower storey – most of the roof was missing and I created only  a small part of one of the upper storeys. I learned a lot about how well drawn our plans are (they are) and how carefully the building was designed (it was). I reached a point where I was not prepared to undo earlier mistakes and, in effect, gave up. Of my hypothetical questions above –

1. My concern with the single-storey section was that we have seen some steading conversions where the rooms have high ceilings and are long; as a result they look quite tunnel-like. However it looks OK. Being wider than it is tall and with the plentiful roof lights & windows it should look airy. The model did make us think about how open-plan we want the kitchen/family and the lounge/dining rooms to be. They are 16m in total, we want a stove between them, but do we want the chimney breast to fill up the wall, with a doorway in one side, or to take as little room as possible, with open space either side?
2. The single-storey section includes the utility room, a cloakroom, the hallway, our little plant room and a flight of stairs. The cloakroom has a roof light, so that must go up to full height, it is 1m wide, several long and will be over 3m high! The utility room next to it has a roof light, but is to have a light tunnel, suggesting the ceiling will be at 2.3m. There is no real clue about the other areas, but I would have gone for 2.3m ceilings. If this is so, then we will have space over them of over 1m that we could use for storage and we might want a loft entrance to give access to it.
3. The stairs will fit in perfectly. They will be pretty standard with a 2.55m floor height, 13 risers and a smidge under 42 degrees slope. They will have the required 2000mm headroom, with the ceiling tucked right up against the roof trusses – very little wasted space.
4. The upper storey will be quite roomy, with a floor width of 3.6m and with the coombing starting 1.5m above floor level. At my head height, I will have 3m width – I do not expect too many sore heads! The en-suites will be a bit under 2m wide, similar to one of our current bathrooms – they should not feel cramped.

I laid out teh ground floor of teh west wing in full, but did not decorate it. I left the upstairs as a wire frame and formed a portion of the upstaits en-suite.

This is the east end, which I decorated. It is minus the upper floor.

This shows the north wing with the kitchen/family room in the foreground and the lounge/dining room in the background.

 

Quoin stones, cills and lintels

With the blockwork for our new walls heading sky-wards, we must turn our minds to the decorative lintels & cills for our 5 doors and 18 windows and to the quoin stones we need for them and for the four wall corners that need to be re-built (both the gable-ends that we demolished). We have until March next year to get what we need, so that Ric can get going in April.

Terminology
I was brought up on ‘lintels’ and ‘sills’ and have found that ‘lintols’ and ‘cills’ are in common use in the area. I may not be consistent in my usage!

Structural lintels
We are sorted for these. We have already bought more than half the (concrete) window/door lintels. We will order the rest as 3.6m lengths and cut them to size. We will get a couple of steel lintels for the garage door.

Decorative lintels: The existing ones are a mix of concrete, granite and wood (which are still in very good condition). Many of the granite ones had cracked, I believe we have six which can be re-used. Our 3m x 3m big window in the east wing will keep the current concrete lintel, so we need to source 17 new ones, typically 1.2 – 1.8m wide, 200mm tall and 100mm deep. The new garage door will have a steel lintel with a shelf to support a decorative lintel, this would need to be 2.7m, although I did hear of someone using two shorter ones and covering the gap with an ornamental crest.

Our building warrant assumes granite lintels. We may have some big-enough loose pieces of stone on site. Otherwise we need to look around – a problem when we are down south. For example, I contacted someone on Gumtree who has a pile of granite from a demolished building in Aberdeen, he did not have much of an idea whether it would be suitable, we need to go and look. We also found someone with lintels they wanted to sell for hundreds of £ each. We will do what we can.

If we run out of time, we will look at cast granite i.e. granite that has been ground up and reconstituted with a cement binder. Inverurie Precast Ltd, for example, make a full range of products, we may need to go and see them. My concern is that most cast stone products are highly and precisely shaped and finished, where we would want something rather rougher.

Cills
Our warrant calls for concrete cills, this does not appeal. In fact we have had a look around, they do weather in quickly and once lichen starts spreading, it is not obvious that they are concrete. But we are still not keen. Ric wants to use granite and to saw and finish our own, again we are short of suitable pieces. We have none in the few remaining windows, there may be a few on site. As with lintels, if we can find stone locally, we will do so, otherwise we will look at cast stone.

Quoin stones
At one time we were short of quoin stones. We saved all the ones from the walls we demolished, but we have eight windows, one door and the garage door to form.

We bought a pile of granite from our neighbour, Mr Aitken, two years ago, without worrying too much what was in it. We had nagged George to move them onto our property, to no effect, so we got Ric to do so back in August. It took him a day-and-a-half and was a bit of a revelation. The pile was mostly quoin stones, probably over 100 of them. They are better finished than most of ours and quite a few are Peterhead granite, so we do need to do our best to blend them in with our rather rougher ones. There were several longer pieces of stone which will probably not be long enough for lintels, but may make good cills.

The main pile is just about cleared, a second pile is behind the logs

Some of the quoin stones from our neighbour

Drain-related stuff

Performance of our surface water drains
The Aberdeen area had been very wet for the last month or so – a real test of our surface water drainage system. The good news is that the front of the property is now well drained. Diverting the ruptured field drains, damaged when our domestic water supply was installed, into our surface drainage system has worked.

To an extent the drain has transferred the problem from the top end of our property to the bottom. When we got on site, the area around our soakaway had some standing water and soft ground. Some of this could be surface water that could not run off because of our earth-moving. It went away whilst we were on site and had not returned when we left. Ric checked the inspection chamber very recently, after a couple of days of heavy rain, it had about 30cm water in it, he was comfortable with that. Related to this, our concrete sump at the bottom of the property (that used to drain an extensive concrete ramp) has the highest level of water in it that I have seen. We will check water levels at Christmas and decide what if anything needs to be done.

Drain cover for our concrete tank
Ric had dug out space to access the concrete tank, for cleaning and pumping. He laid the concrete around the entrance earlier and took the opportunity to fix a drain cover mounting in place.

The space under the manhole is open to the tank. We never got round to getting the sludge out of the tank, we will need to hire a pump to get it out through the manhole.

Designing our garage forecourt
With the floor slab in the garage, we are planning access from the trackway. The garage is at a lower level that the trackway and we want to limit the possibility of flooding. At the same time we need a large and level enough forecourt for two car-parking spaces and the turning area we need to provide for fire engines.

Our thoughts are to install shallow kerbing along the boundary edge of the trackway to limit run-off down towards the garage. We will run paving downwards to a low point in front of the garage and install a linear drain that extends from the garage door across to the front door area – 8 metres total. We will put a sediment trap in and drain it into our surface water system. Separately, Ric completed the last segment of surface drain during this visit, a gutter downpipe running just round the corner from the garage door into a spare socket we left for that purpose. He included the extra connection for the sediment trap/linear drain.

The last run of surface drain, for the furthest gutter downpipe

The drain runs from the downpipe into the socket we left in the main drain

Ric added an extra fitting for our linear drain that willrun from teh front door to the garage.

Porosity testing
Thinking about our raised drainage mound: I have a copy of ‘the’ report on how to do the drainage mound that will dispose of the effluent from our septic tank. It describes a falling-head percolation test for the sandy material we plan to use. The outcome is the ‘Grant time’ i.e. how long it takes to drain 500ml water through 200mm sand in a 110mm drain pipe. It must be between 15 seconds & 120 seconds and must relate to the ability of the ground under the mound to distribute the effluent (called the Long Term Acceptance Rate) – a more-porous mound over less-porous ground could allow seepage over ground. We will test for the LTAR at some point.

I checked our locally supplied builders sand, sharp sand and the quarry dust we used as blinding. All are way too slow to use – 420s, 290s and 220s respectively. We need to look at sourcing a fine gravel and a coarse sand that we can mix to get the characteristics we need.

The 110mm pipe has 20mm depth of the test material. The scourer sponge on top is to stop water disturbing the top layer as it is poured in. The bucket has a hol in it so water drains out of the gravel once it has flowed through.

For the record…

Keeping records: I wanted detailed records of our project right from the start. I keep a daily diary of what we do, who we talk/email/text with, the things that go well and the things that go wrong. I record evidence e.g. when I get emails & phone calls, contact details etc., just in case things go awry. It was valuable when we got cheesed off with Barclays back in 2014, when they were not able to get the mortgage on our current house completed to a sensible timescale. I was able to complain, with verifiable facts. It did not speed things up, but was cathartic.

I take loads of photos of every stage of the work – partly for my interest, but mainly so that we can show that we met building standards at every step of the way.

I have a fairly complicated Excel workbook where I keep track of a) the work to be done v what we actually do, b) everything we spend v our estimates, c) the timeline and d) quite a bit of technical information to help us make right decisions. I keep a running total of reclaimable VAT and cross-check this against our collection of paper invoices. Once we get our completion certificate, we will be in a good place to get the VAT back, HMRC permitting.

Social media: Having all this information, we wanted somewhere to let our friends know what we are up to. We use the facebook page https://www.facebook.com/OurNextHouse/ for this. We update this when we are on site and whenever something noteworthy happens. It is very good at what it does, but it is not easy to navigate, it encourages brevity and is more for the moment.

Newsletters: Jill found her library borrowers were interested in the project, but did not necessarily have access to facebook. We create occasional 2-page summaries of progress that we print out for borrowing. The pdfs are on the https://eastbyreleasksteading.wordpress.com/bungay-newsletters/ page of this blog.

Blogging: Having detailed records is good, but it is not easy to pick through it and get a good overview of how we are doing. I wanted somewhere where I could be a bit more reflective, think things out in writing and maintain a sort of official record. So I looked at blogging and already had experience with WordPress. This is where https://eastbyreleasksteading.wordpress.com/ came from. It got off to a patchy start but, as we got working on site, became more useful to me. At the time WordPress had a usable user interface, but some aspects of it were slow, unreliable and downright painful – particularly loading and presenting photos. I also found the free themes rather limiting. It got to the point where I gave up on it in favour of the facebook page because I did not have enough free time.

I missed the blog, as a way of getting a better understanding of what we are doing, and looked for a more modern environment to work in. I chose Wix. It serves the same purpose as WordPress, with a more modern interface that streamlines composing and publishing. I quickly got the material transferred across, tidied up my prose and generally enjoyed it a lot more. I expended the scope to include the history of the area. I particularly liked the countdown timer I put on the home page saying how many days left until we move up to Scotland.

What put me off Wix is that it is a resource hog and that the UI is slow and surprisingly flaky – I expect there are endless amounts of JavaScript chuntering away in the background. The blogging plugin also does not include links to previous and next posts in the detailed post page, so I was having to add links manually – not good. Once again the platform became a bit of a barrier. I also thought the hosting was much slower than WordPress, both when composing and when viewing pages. This put me in a dilemma – should I look for yet another blogging platform? I went back to WordPress to see if it was really as clunky as I remembered. And behold! They have streamlined the workflow. Loading photos is easy and they have a nice galleries feature. The site races, both composing and viewing. There are many more free themes and the newer ones are responsive i.e. they work well on my phone as well as my PC. If I had a tablet, it would work well on that!

So I have come home to WordPress. I have experimented with at least three different themes and am just about where I want to be. I have set up my categories to match how we are planning the building work. I have mapped most of the categories to the menu. I have a cruder version of the countdown, showing months left until we move North, not days. I have a monthly calendar & handy tag cloud. The blog shows the most recent 10 posts, with a ‘more posts’ button at the bottom. On my phone it initially displays post titles only, making it as quick and easy to navigate as on my PC. I can be much more efficiently self-indulgent.