another small step forward

Another little bit of floor done at the Riverside house. I am particularly pleased, as this back corridor floor has been put back exactly as it was, having been discovered under 1970's tiles. We needed to lift everything so as to put heating and water pipes under and to clean and dry out the old old brick-tiles that were in a bad state because they couldn't breathe under the latter day concrete and adhesive. But it was great to discover that this corridor, leading to the back garden, had this stone walkway surrounded by bricks. The stones are some 8'' thick, but the bricks only 1 and half inch thick - obviously the traffic was expected to be harder in the middle, so it all makes sense. So we laid the floor into fine gravel and sand - no cement, just as it would have been done before, to allow for evaporation of moisture from underneath. I think our conservation-minded reader 'Thud' will be pleased when he comes to visit! :-)

'Jesus' the carpenter

I promised to say more about my eclectic carpenter so here he is. He comes and goes as he pleases - or shall I say he appears - randomly, sometimes at 10.30 in the night suddenly one hears a sound of saw downstairs... then nothing for a month... but that's the way with him, one can't insist on any 'normality' because this is a man who lives somewhere between heaven and earth, and real life somehow doesn't fit in with his own existence. He doesn't speak, but when approached with an attempt at conversation, he stands still for an interminable time, then draws a deep, deep breath between his teeth. No words. And then at other times he offers out of the blue some totally unrelated stream of consciousness, such as his view on the immortality of souls. But if one accepts his strange ways, he delivers - not necessarily what one commissioned him to make, but certainly something original (such as the Neptune on this picture, a bathroom shelf with a difference). And you either like it or you don't. No-one would have made stairs like his - each with an individual character (see pic above). But one has to have the courage to let him get on with it in his own weird way. I happen to cherish his weird way because it adds to the house's soul. The house being so old and higgledy piggledy, for my mind (not necessarily always to my expectations) it grows into its fabric and I am not just agreed to what I have, but actually more pleased than I can say.
Now: why 'Jesus'? Well, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Frantisek the carpenter played, for many years, the part of Jesus in the Passion plays at nearby Horice townlet. He really looked the part: tall, bearded, with a flowing mane, and really with his heart in it. Maybe it rubbed off on him, or maybe he was always the way he is, and that's why he was so convincing in the part? Out-of-this-worldly kind of guy. Whatever the reason, even now that he is retired from it, he stylises himself into the role, or else is still in the role, who knows.
All I know is that I love the quirky stuff he makes and I forgive him all his tresspasses :-)

Riverside house - work in progress

I realize that I haven't really been showing any progress on the house since Christmas time. Well, the 1st floor where we live has not changed much but now we are coming to the last phase on the downstairs - so here are some pics, as i took them this evening without bothering to put away any untidiness. It's work in progress after all.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time sourcing old materials, so the house can feel nice and lived in - even though of course I am not trying to live in a museum :-) so I'm perhaps a little eclectic in some respects. But I am particularly pleased with the floor in the main two rooms downstairs - the brick flooring came from an old attic and so no tile is the same; some bear soot marks, some are scratched, each an individual in its own right, but together they form such a lovely whole that I shall be sorry to put furniture down once it's finished. You can see that it is still not entirely laid down, Stephan the builder is still working on it. But we did put the same floor on the study and dining room floor upstairs and they look and feel great - and with underfloor heating they are heaven to live with. Not the easiest of surfaces to clean, but who cares, it's all part of the ageing process (we age together nicely...)
Another challenge is always the higgledy-piggledyness of the curved and nooky spaces that the house is offering: how do you fit a bathroom in that, for example? Well, it can be done. Upstairs I put an old (1880's) stained-glass window in the shower room (with some trepidation lest the conservation authorities make me take it out, but they loved it, thank god) - the window is one of a pair, the other is in the bedroom/hall wall. It makes the rather cramped space feel lighter and more generous, and most of all, fun.
And then I love finding old doors - the whole of the upstairs has 'new' old doors; sheer pleasure to touch every time. You kind of wonder how many hands touched them since they are over 200years old, and just look at those hinges and fittings :-)
The staircase has been completely renovated but in the style it would have been originally (we took the 'modern' 70's lavatory-style tiles it was covered in off, mended what needed be and the carpenter (more on him in a separate blog!, a wonderful person) made these treads out of an old sycamore I bought from someone who had it drying for 8 years in their garage but whose daughter was getting married so they needed the money and since I needed well seasoned wood.... I love these kind of mutually beneficial exchanges.
Anyway, more of the same to follow. I am in a great mood, seeing it all come together. The attic space will have to wait for a long time yet, but it is fantastic to think that when our family come to visit in a week's time, they'll be staying in a place that is finished and functioning.

Moving house, and cats saga

Well, you can see a somewhat exhausted couple of figures here. Moving during Christmas is not the most relaxing of activities - but hey, the photos are from our first night in the house, with hastily thrown-together furniture and a few pictures up. (Always hang pictures first, I say, that's what makes a home from home. Oh, and then the books of course...that's if you have the shelves ready, which we didn't, yet). Not that the whole house is finished. Even now, builders are still working in the attic and downstairs - but the first floor is where we are settling in. My study, at least, now has the required shelves at last, my internet is working again, the rest is kind of functional and still lots and lots of boxes of books and clothes and stuff. Stuff! (that's the hardest to deal with) How the furniture and pics will end up, we'll have yet to see. But it is already beginning to feel like home, and living in this old old house feels a real privilege.

What we seem to have spent most of our time on, though, during this time, was chasing after our male cat. He obviously wasn't happy about the move: over his 3+ years he fought and won a large territory, which his instinct told him to go and attend to no matter what. We knew that would be the case, so we decided to keep both our cats locked in for a week or two - but you should have heard the male cat's howls of derision at having a door closed, and being in a strange place to boot. Especially at night. It was quite unbearable, we felt SO guilty! So we thought, let's open the door to the balcony, at least. Well, he jumped the 12 feet or so, and was gone. He was gone for three days - we kept going up to the previous house, but no sign of him - and it was freezing cold out there- till one day we spotted him and brought him back to his new home. The next night the cat managed to dig an escape tunnel under the door to the garden - the floor there is still just sand and sharp shingle, waiting to be tiled with bricks. And so it went on - day after day he escaped, and day after day we spent hours looking for him - enough if a builder left the door open for a minute, or whatever. But the last few days he suddenly decided that he won't try again. He just stays at home, and doesn't even complain. Eats, plays, sleeps in our bed. So we hope that maybe, just maybe, he has forgiven us. And that eventually he may just decide that this new territory, with the garden and the riverbank, with ducks and plenty of natural cover but no other male cat in sight, will provide enough adventure for the next chapter in his life too.
Needless to say, the little female has taken to the new house with no problems: I let her out every day and she just comes back by herself.
Well. I guess when we are a little more sorted out I will make some proper photos to put up (By the way the pink on the photos is nowhere as pink in reality!). Meanwhile wish us well, please, and let's hope the builders finish soon!

Riverside house progress

I haven't been blogging about the progress down at the Riverside much, because so much of our energy and most of our finances were this year devoted to the (so much bigger and complex) Lake house reconstruction. But we did slowly get on at the riverside, too. Here, the basic structure and layout was given - due to the fact that the house's historic walls cannot be tampered with (and who would want to). So the task was to try and respect what there is and replace unsuitable late 20th century reconstructions with more natural materials. The only changes to the actual building were our discovery and renovation of the historic ceiling in the 1st floor sitting room, two copies of other wooden ceilings that were beyond repair (- the original of one of them was carefully removed and placed in the archive of the local museum) and the removal of 50cm of solid concrete from the ground floor which was making the whole ground floor damp, encouraging water to spread up into the walls, and generally making it hard for the house to 'breathe'. I also decided to swap bathroom and kitchen over - but that only involved taking down some plasterboard partitions; most of the other work is also cosmetic - getting rid of the 70's layer of horrible floor tiles that, again, were choking the house, and replacing them with reclaimed floor-bricks set in lime-based bed, taking down any cement render where there was any, and again rendering in lime-sand mixture, and painting the walls with lime, too. This of course only in places where the old render and decorative finishes were beyond saving. I originally hoped to use clay plaster in some of the rooms, but the budget didn't allow it - however the properties of the lime render and finish are as healthy for the house as the clay would have been, so I am not too worried. We threw away most of the modern doors and sourced historic ones where possible. We lined the old chimney, making it suitable later (when there's money) for wood-fired stoves in the 1st floor sitting room and kitchen, and an open fireplace on the ground floor. The last addition was a new central heating boiler - I managed to beg lovely old radiators from a demolition site - not quite 'historic' but so much more friendly aesthetically than the usual suspects. That's about it for now: we shall be moving into the first floor very soon, having prepared the ground floor and the attic for the later stages of the opus :-)
It's been lovely so far, and although hard work, just being in such close contact with the soul of such an old old house is a privilege and a gift: every time I touch its stone walls or scrape tiny bits of new plaster off the layers of paint underneath it, I feel how brief our human time-span is compared with the work of human hands. So being one of those who are passing through this building, I am trying to do minimal damage, so as to leave it healthy for the generations that will come after us.
(For the history of this house and the steps in our reconstruction of it, see previous posts under 'riverside house' label)

new windows and facade forest house

Sorry about the huge delay in informing you all about the progress on the Forest house. As you can see the facade is complete (save for a final coat of paint) and new windows have been fitted, leaving the front door and two more windows to be done. Many repairs have been carried out inside, including repair to the original ceilings that, thank goodness, didn't fall down after all the various disasters with the roof etc. The mains electrics have all been changed - new trench for upgraded feeder cables, new meter and board etc. The rendering around windows still needs to be finished, and wooden ledges installed. The furniture is still temporary, what's left over from the previous owners, but cozy enough for the time being. As you can also see, the roof unfortunately still isn't complete (lack of money) so it'll have to wait till the Spring or Summer. But now it has all been prepared and covered with sheeting for the Winter - by myself as I didn't trust the roofers. Well that's that for the time being, no more building work till the Spring. But I hope to let you know how the house is feeling at around Christmas time as I should be spending some time there.

works in progress - Lake house

It's been a long time since I wrote about our Lake house works - it's been a busy period and still is. Progress is slow, the two upstairs floors are still a complete mess, but it's at least getting to the point where the ground floor is beginning to function - the kitchen is almost there, the sitting room - apart from the floor which I still hope to restore despite of all my builders' advice to rip it up and replace, as it is really in very poor condition - is feeling quite cosy,
even with its provisional old bits of furniture, and, joy of joys, the bathroom is warm and we don't have to use the outside loo any more :-) There still a lot of decorating to be done and much detail to be tidied up, but after all the months of rubble and mess, it's lovely to be able to make tea and wash up and curl up and feel that the house is beginning to feel like a house at last.... even if the outside still looks so terribly sorry for itself - poor old house!
Well, now the roof covering is off - of course as Fate would have it, the weather turned nasty just as the joiners arrived to work on replacing rotten timbers etc, and raising one of the gable ends. Water is getting into the house despite the plastic covering sheets... now it's even starting to snow, so I need lots of crossed fingers to see us through this moment.

Restarting the works on Forest House

It's been a long time but at last I am getting on with the Forest House works again. Lots of pictures to come in the next few weeks - for now just a few that have been taken since May. I have a new team on board, just two people (3 at weekends) So far they've been excellent, and I feel more in control of what's going on. Too many mistakes were made last year which have still to be rectified, despite having had a building supervisor who was meant to keep an eye on things. The main work at the present time is the facade, and internal plastering.The garden is doing beautifully in the meanwhile. I've added a few trees and bushes, the vegetable patch is going from strength to strength and there should be a bumper crop at the end of the season.
And should you be wondering when the roof is going to be completed, it should be done in the Autumn, finances permitting.

oh, the pain of fitting a septic tank...

Our poor garden at the Lake house is turning into a nightmarish rut-riven battlefield image. Hopefully to good end, only right now I wish we never have started. Unfortunately in this particular location we have to have the tank as the high level of ground water and no real slope mean no lovely ecological run of ponds with shit-eating plants etc etc; that's not allowed - just a plastic underground monster for the loos. But at least our waste water and rainwater, and some ground-drainage, are going into a semblance of an ecological pond in the form of a large soakaway at the bottom of the garden, though I am not sure how effective this whole system can be given the clay base to the grounds and the high ground-water level even in the Summer that has nowhere else to go. But that's how my project engineer designed it - I told him if it doesn't all work he'll be inside the tank.Oh well, so the digger went to work scooping loads of absolutely lovely, clean clay. I wish I was a ceramicist because the clay is SO perfect I could easily imagine someone making tiles or bricks out of it, or insulating ponds that WOULD work! Here is a view of the fabulous layers as they revealed themselves: you can just see the grey clay under the black clay, even though the water is fast reaching up to its 'norm' which is at the top of the black layer.The next stage was the digger bringing stones to fill the bottom, at which point it stuck, because the rest of the garden, with its wet underlay despite a month of no rain, wouldn't take its weight with the stones in its jaw, and the wheels just sunk about half a meter down. I don't have a picture of it, too depressing.
The digger's still sitting there - and the project engineer and I are scratching our heads what to do next.
And I am quietly counting money in my head, feeling it drain away like that water.
These are the moments when one wishes one's never started. But I am sure when all this is over and done with and the garden healed again, I will look back and laugh. I suppose it was funny seeing the mighty digger monster totally helpless stuck in the mud, after all.

The joys and the sorrows of reconstruction

What a lovely thing to report: the larger of the two ceilings at the river house has revealed itself. A lovely old man who is an expert for this kind of work took the top planks off, cleaned them and oiled them and injected some stuff into the woodworm-weakened bits. Then we uncovered the underside of the ceiling and the planks were replaced.
Voila! here is a view that was hidden for up to some four hundred years. We even found a date scratched into the gable end wall above the ceiling - 1638. It may or may not be the actual date the ceiling was put there, but from its shape and manner, the conservationists all agree it's near enough (sorry, that's the best pic I could get). I fancy that the ceiling might have been built during the time the Krumlov scribe lived there (see below) as he was the only one of the long string of occupants who might have had enough money to do it? Anyhow: the main beams will now also be cleaned and preserved, and we should enjoy living in its presence from now on. Feels good.
What doesn't feel good is that due to a huge tax bill on the sale of our previous property I shan't have enough to do everything I hoped to achieve. Wouldn't mind if I knew the money was going to good purposes but when I see how public funds get squandered (see 'protest' below), I'd rather be able to spend mine on employing local craftsmen and preserving historic buildings such as this one. There: it's off my chest. Grrr.

some history of the riverside house

For those who might enjoy this sort of thing, here is an extract from the search report on our newly acquired Cesky Krumlov house at Parkan. I find it very moving to now know the names of some of the people who passed through the house. One wanders through the (still empty) rooms and imagines their lives. Where they ate, slept, worked... how their lives passed, whom they loved...

Characteristics: A mediaeval building, re-built in renaissance style in the second half of 16th century. Other major rebuilds happened in the classicist period around 1800 and in the 2nd half of 19th century. Modernisation of ground floor and some upper floor rooms took place in 1990s.

Successive owners during the early parts of the building's history:
The first available record shows one Melichar, a weaver, who died in 1519. In that year the house was sold by Tomas of Mysleny, alias Pint, probably a testament executor, to cobbler Girgl, who lived in the house only till 1524. He sold the house to Jan Nevrlec, who again only owned it for a short period and sold it in 1524 to tanner Hanzl. Hanzl married a widow of tanner Ambroz, and lived there till his death in 1572. His wife then remarried and her new husband, tanner Linhart Kropf, continued running the tannery workshop. But soon Hanzl's son Prokop took over the house and sold it, in 1584, to one Martin Krumlovian - originally from Trebon, a Rosenberg scribe. In the 1590s, the records mention canner Ursula, widow of next door's blacksmith Havel. In 1596 the house had three chimneys (could have served the cannery workshop), but in 1602 there is only one. Canner Ursula sold the house in 1605 to Michal Wagner, who sold it in 1611 to spurs-maker Hans Temel. In 1637 Temel sold the house to a rope-maker Alxandr Prenner, who lived there till 1654.

What amused me was that the report now says 'no newer owners were searched for'. NEWER? Obviously, in a town reaching so far in history anything beyond mid-17th century is 'new'.

The renovation works continue

Every day, I wake up at 5am and drive to the Lake House for 6am to meet with my project supervisor and the workmen. The Czechs get up early. For someone used to a British timetable this is quite something. But the works are now progressing at a good pace and the ground floor is coming to the point when I can see the end of the tunnel. The electrics, the water and the heating are now in place and the wounds that their installation has caused the house are healed over. Being a house built of stone - and some stones are enormous - one has to try to take all pipes etc through floors rather than hack into walls. But even then some bits of wall needed to be rebuilt - for example, most of the lintels over doors and upstairs windows were completely rotten so their removal meant having to dismantle what's over them. Without causing too much damage. Not easy. But the guys working there are so lovely and careful, I am quite happy with the result. The next big stage will be the roof - I dread to think about it as all of the main beams that rest on the top of the walls are also rotten through. We hope to hever up the roof (once the old tiles are removed) and replace the rotten beams without the need for taking the whole structure apart. Right now we are interviewing roofing companies. Of course so far all of them think we should make a completely new roof. The search continues....
Meanwhile, at the house by the river in Krumlov, the attic has been cleared down to the top of the historic ceilings and we have an expert restorer who will start carefully taking them apart to renew them. It was funny to listen to the workmen clearing the mud-and-brick insulation over the ceilings: they think we are completely mad, of course. Especially looking at the salvaged bits of the even older ceiling that makes our conservationists friends burn with passion: The planks of wood, blackened by centuries of use and with bits of them eaten through by woodworm, look like something that should be burnt straightaway but the workmen are not allowed to touch them, just VERY carefully clean the top of them. 'OK', they humour us, shaking heads and winking at eachother: 'If that's what you want...'

the fragile layers of history

I was asked if we'd found similar stencil patterns as we did at our newly acquired house in Krumlov also at the Lake house. The answer is yes - here are a few pics (from last year) to show you.

This kind of research is always something very exciting as one peels the layers - or, indeed, as they fall off once you touch them! One imagines the generations that lived there before us, and contemplates one's own mortality. The house stood here for centuries, and will stand long after we had gone. And one day there will be someone that starts peeling the wall and finds our own thin layer that passed briefly through.
But what is the correct procedure once you find the layers? Should you strip the whole wall down to the stone or brick, and start new render from scratch? Well, some do, but we try to find a more respectful way. The conservationists here divide between two schools of thought:
1/ carefully uncover different layers in different places on the wall as best as possible, then photograph them and/or trace them. Knock off anything that is obviously about to fall off, then make good the bare bits, and cover the wall with new paint, lime based. Then make fresh stencils copying the patterns you found, and paint the whole, or parts of, the wall with them.
2/ Having uncovered different layers in different places, carefully restore them to as good as you can make it (scalpel work is required here) and then paint them with organic penetration agent to fix them. The rest of the wall can be repaired, keeping the hidden layers undisturbed wherever possible. Then paint the wall, leaving 'windows' to the past where you have prepared and fixed them.
Here is a picture of such a restoration we did in our Prague flat. But which way we go at Lake house and the riverside house in Krumlov is not yet clear. But the main thing, while making the space suitable for living, and while making sure it doesn't deteriorate further, is to try not to destroy its history more than is absolutely inevitable. Well, at least we shall try. Which way would you go?

conservation research

Not sure if anyone's really interested in the details of our search (see blog below), but I am finding it all very exciting and can't resist posting at least some observations, as the initial confusion begins to lead to at least a partial enlightenment.
Looking at the layers of decorative stencilling on the 1st floor, we get information about the age of the walls, and the approximate date of the major reconstruction(s?) that caused such an upheaval to the layout of the rooms and the ceilings. Here you can see an early 20C stencil (floral).
Under it is this gentler green design, then a couple of (pinkish) layers that won't separate but then you get two blue patterns, one on top of the other (the darker blue design is the older). The main partition wall's layers end here. It's a lovely, generous stencil in deep blue, with grey band around the floor level and a grey-blue strip below the ceiling. Our expert dates it to mid-19th C, which confirms the reconstruction having taken place at the time when ceilings had to be hidden or gotten rid of by decree. (Quite why the then builders had to chop the ceiling off at the partition is another question though - but on that later).
The outside wall's decorative layers continue deeper - the reds probably baroque, the black probably as old as the 16th C, which would date the 1st floor and above being built around that time (the ground floor is a vaulted Middle Ages space).

We racked our brains though: where is the main interior wall that would have originally supported the large ceiling? The beams that remained at their original length suggest a 25x25ft room, a heavy ceiling... but apart from the 'new' partition there is no supporting wall for the original length. We paced the place, we measured, we traipsed up and down the attic stair to compare but no matter how we tried, the direction of the imagined wall would have led right into one of the windows. Then an idea: perhaps the window wasn't there in the first place, and was added ad the same time as the reconstruction we are talking about? We looked at the plan and sure enough there are 5 windows in the facade at that level - 2 and 2 on the outsides with exact distances between them, and a middle one that isn't so exact. Just a theory this (so far) but it is possible that the classicist facade we see now is the result of someone's 'grand design' to modernise their house and bring in more light.....
I am sure we shall get the answers eventually. For now, I am on tenterhooks :-)