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Home repairs

Ystranc

Ystranc

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The bottom of one of the outside door frames had rotted so I decided to scarf in a new section.
After roughly cutting a section of new timber a little oversize I marked the angle that I wanted to cut out of the old section of frame (in situ)
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The new section was drilled at the bottom to fit over a steel peg that kept the base of the frame in place then the two pieces sawn, chiseled and planed to form a smooth interface.
Exterior PVA glue with one screw at the top to position it, then two dovetailed dowels to lock it in place. A skim of two pack filler, a sand back and a coat of primer.....I'm one happy boy! Probably not up to the standards of some of you professionals but I'm proud enough of the result.
Next stage is to trowelling mastic the gap between wood and brickwork and do the oil based paints to finish it up.
 
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As one of these professionals that you speak of ( 30 odd years in restoration) i'd be perfectly happy with the repair . You've made a decent job. With regards to it being cheaper it might be a moot point depending on how one looks at it. Certainly on one level all it has cost you is the materials . If you add in your labour , your hourly rate , then the "cost" may work out similar to getting someone in. I've had comments from customers that they could do what i've done for them but what took me an hour would have taken them 3, 4 or more times as long. The job would have cost more if they had factored in their own costs . We found this on restoration quite a bit. Old timber was looked upon as almost sacred and should be preserved for as long as possible . Splice to keep as much as possible of the original and preservation didn't always mean chemical treatments. At the Bodlien library in Oxford , for example ,a specific species of spider was introduced to the roof area to prey upon the bettles of woodworm
 
We also have to be careful about chemicals and changes to the roof structure as we're into bat conservation.
Re: The comment from your customers that they "could have done it," Baytree.... The point is that they didn't ...either because they lacked the time, the tools or the confidence to do it. They watch you do it and because you make it look easy they assume it is easy, not the result of experience, skill or attention to detail
Louise and I are both heavily into self sufficiency and it really burns us to pay someone else to do something that we know we can do just as well for ourselves. During lockdown we have been comparatively time rich and cash poor so it's been the ideal opportunity to get things like this done.
 
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I've had people say other things too. One developer/landlord i work for described me as "cost effective" which i did wonder if it was a euphemism for cheap. Another customer said to me " you're only doing the jobs that any half decent husband could do but i can't" . I thought there must be more to that sentence and asked " can't find the time ? Can't be bothered? " to which he rep!ied "no i just can't , i'm just not any good with tools and stuff" .
Going back to the issue of cost and my time in restoration , the national trust , english and welsh heritage were all pretty good at spending freely or wasting money as we often called it although to be fair it kept us in employment. One of the worst cases was a hall in northampton . Wasn't really a very attractive building and the council wanted to knock it down and replace it. There had been vandalism and most of the windows were gone and it needed a new roof and EH said the redeeming factor was a lantern light so the place must be retstored. We replaced the roof and windows and the building became water and to a degree airtight. It was then noticed that the place filled up with radon gas. When we went back for maintainence we were limited to an hour's work in the day. The building had become useless unless more money was spent on it to try to rectify the problem. In the meantime the council was lumped with a building they couldn't use and a bill for the security of it.
Edit
Just googled and it could have been Thornton hall.
 
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Baytree said:
I've had people say other things too. One developer/landlord i work for described me as "cost effective" which i did wonder if it was a euphemism for cheap. Another customer said to me " you're only doing the jobs that any half decent husband could do but i can't" . I thought there must be more to that sentence and asked " can't find the time ? Can't be bothered? " to which he rep!ied "no i just can't , i'm just not any good with tools and stuff" .
Going back to the issue of cost and my time in restoration , the national trust , english and welsh heritage were all pretty good at spending freely or wasting money as we often called it although to be fair it kept us in employment. One of the worst cases was a hall in northampton . Wasn't really a very attractive building and the council wanted to knock it down and replace it. There had been vandalism and most of the windows were gone and it needed a new roof and EH said the redeeming factor was a lantern light so the place must be retstored. We replaced the roof and windows and the building became water and to a degree airtight. It was then noticed that the place filled up with radon gas. When we went back for maintainence we were limited to an hour's work in the day. The building had become useless unless more money was spent on it to try to rectify the problem. In the meantime the council was lumped with a building they couldn't use and a bill for the security of it.
Edit
Just googled and it could have been Thornton hall.
Click to expand...

Its frustrating when something has to be done even though all concerned know its a waste of time and money. The 'system' has to be seen to be infallible though....
 
We sort of got use to the frustration , we even joked that everything was screwed together because it was easier to take apart for when the clients or architects changed their minds ( which they did frequently).
 
One of my former careers was as an architects model maker and product design prototyper....don't talk to me about customers or architects changing their minds...I'd swear that some of them have the attention span of a butterfly.
 
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Glad it's not just me that felt that way.
Going back to the "i can't" guy he's given me the odd few chuckle over the years. On one occasion i was asked to tile their former kitchen floor as part of turning it into an office. His wife asked me to measure the room . It was 2 1\2 metres by 2 1\2 metres but somewhere along the lines that became 2 1\2_square metres so of course not enough tiles. More were delivered very quickly and he said to me "has she finally ordered enough" . I started to explain and he stopped me " don't make excuses for her , she's the one with an A level in maths , 2 1\2 by 2 1\2 , it's 5" , which of course it isn't but i just kept quiet.
On another occasion they wanted the shed painting . He suggested yellow to which he response was " no it's not a wendy house" . I went with her choice , sage green with white door and windows , and when he saw it he said "ok it looks nice . I suppose that's why she's a designer and i'm just a bloke that sells cars".
At the other end of the stick her father was telling me she had done design work on adult colouring books. I hadn't got a clue what they were but mentioned it to my daughter who was around 11 at the time when we were in wh smiths one day. "They sell them here , never really seen the point " and she took me over to them. I must admit i was expecting some sort of porn in line drawing and was worried as to what my daughter had been looking at. Thankfully no porn 😠
 
That adult colouring was quite a fad a few years back but I never really saw them as an art or craft because the person doing the colouring is just filling in and not truly creating something. My other half, Louise was also a surface pattern designer before we both stepped off the treadmill of working for other people.
 
. From further reading the adult colouring books seem to be marketed as a sort of stress relief thing but i know what you mean about it not really being an art or craft as such. A friend has used and suggested to me various online plans that can be found for everything from a shelf , through toys to buildings but i've had mixed feelings about those too. It's someone else 's design , someone else's measurements and it's just a case of copying it all. My friend has used a toy making forum and on there they talk of printing off 7/8 or 1 1\2 sized scale drawings to give a different size of toy rather than just creating a version off their own bat. I'm currently in the process of making a glastonbury chair for someone. There are plans available but he wants it different in several ways so i've used the pictures of several of these chairs as inspiration and done my own design to create what he wants.
 
Funny how things go on the topic of diy, one could even think there's a plan to the universe. The other day i ran into an old friend i hadn't seen since we were made redundant in 2011. He's a mason by trsde and i'm a joiner but we've both got a gardening round and chatting away we came to the conclusion that leaving aside the old and frail there are a lot of people who could very easily mow their own lawns but are just basically too idle to do it themselves and are happy to spend their hard earned cash . Still it pays our bills i suppose...
 
An old friend of mine regularly buys those adult colouring books and also simple crossword and Sudoko books is it? I'm not familiar with them. His Mrs has progressive Dementia and it seems that such books are of benefit to her apparently.
 
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