diging a hole

Tangier was shrouded in a bank of fog when I arrived this afternoon, reinforcing the commonly held belief that the Eastern shore is foggier than the city.

The cottage was still standing, the chimney looking less precarious than I had imagined back home. The west wall was still supported by the temporary posts - nothing had moved.

The goal today was to dig a 4-foot deep hole midway under the west wall for a 18" x 18" concrete pillar. With some trepidation, I removed the cinder blocks that were piled up under the wall. This was easy to do as the wall was now supported by the 4" x 4" posts.

The first new concrete support goes between the cribbing.

With the cribbing in my way I quickly ended up digging from inside the cellar, scooping the dirt with my hands into a bucket and carrying the bucket up out of the pit - a very uncomfortable and time consuming process.

Digging the hole reminded me of Bill Bradley's book on the history of Tangier which describes the miserable conditions of labourers working in the gold mines with picks, shovels and buckets. Bill's great grandfather Charles Bradley, who built this house, worked in the Tangier gold mines. I imagined that old Charlie hid a cache of stolen nuggets under the house right at the spot where I was digging. Sadly, I didn't find any.

In the early evening Catherine called to tell me that she and friend Grace were just leaving Dartmouth with Sharon. I threw a couple of sticks on the fire to make sure the house was cozy when they arrived.

Wall bracing and star gazing

There was a fierce northwest wind today. The water in Bradley Cove was choppy with white caps which we had never seen before. A group of kayakers came into the cove with guide Shawn from Coastal Adventures. They seemed to be a bit overwhelmed by the conditions so I shouted to Shawn to bring the party ashore for a mug-up at our place. They agreed, so we had a group of five young adventurers for tea. I drove Shawn back to Coastal Adventures to fetch their kayak trailer.

I measured the difference in height of the top of west wall corner posts using colored water in flexible tubing. They were the same height to within 1 cm. I couldn't believe it so I measured again with a taut string and level. I got the same result. The ends of the west wall are level - amazing for a house as rotten as this one.

West wall supported with exterior posts.

In the afternoon I succeeded in getting the house ready to jack up on the west side by installing exterior headers over the windows. Lag bolts secured the header to the top plate above the windows.
I tried some test jacking after supper. Sharon got a surprise when, after lifting one of the posts one inch, the jacking post popped out and the house shifted down suddenly, "Nothing to worry about, Honey".

Dan ready to jack up the west wall.

Catherine spent a considerable time this afternoon standing at the end of the dock, waving at two curious seals.

After dark we all went out on the deck to look at the stars. The sky was perfectly clear and black as it was a moonless night. The Milky Way was magnificent, strewn across the sky and reflected in the mirror-calm water of the cove. Scorpio was bright on the horizon with Jupiter shining above it. We could see two of Jupiter's moons with the binoculars. Everyone was thrilled to see several shooting stars!

Star gazing at our cottage.

rough-cut wood

Today I went to Hefler's saw mill in Lower Sackville. Located right on the Sackville River, I'm sure there has been a saw mill here for at least a hundred years. Hefler's still produce a full range of rough sawn lumber and custom cuts as well.

I bought 63 feet of utility grade 6x6 lumber. These were pieces a bit shorter than 8' long and were only $1/foot - exactly what I was looking for. I'll use this wood to build staging under the house to hold it up as I excavate around the outside.


Another great find at Hefler's - rough sawn 1" hemlock boards of all lengths and widths. The boards are exact replacements for the rotted sheathing I uncovered yesterday when I removed the shingles. I bought a 12' 1x10 and a couple of 8" wide boards as a rough guess as to what I might need.

Shortly after I arrived at the cottage Beatrice Logan pulled into the driveway with Irene Nelson. Beatrice had a cake for us to thank me for changing her tire yesterday. I noticed that she was still driving on the small spare tire. The garage didn't have a replacement in stock.

Revealing the rot

A gorgeous summer day. It's Natal Day today so Sharon took Catherine to see the Natal Day parade in Halifax. I wasn't too interested in that so I stayed here and removed the west end of the deck to reveal the "foundation" of the south side of the house.

I dug around the southwest corner of the house to uncover the large cubic stone that supports that corner. It's about 18" on a side and appears to have been quarried. It's near the surface and unfortunately does not appear to be sitting on bedrock, just compacted soil.


The corner stone is the most substantial part of the original foundation I've seen. It think it was just large stones laid out in a row on the ground on the high side of the property and perhaps piled several stones high on the low side. Most of these stones have tumbled into the cellar over the years, replaced by a shockingly unstable pile of cinderblocks.

Mrs Bradley came by with some muffins and biscuits. The biscuits were still warm - saved me making lunch. Mrs Bradley told me that her husband sold the old homestead back in the 1950's to the Coxes. From the Coxes it went to the Binghams to the Pedals to the Grandys - and finally to the Hutts in 2007.

I spent the afternoon removing the bottom four rows of shingles from the west and south walls of the living room. There's a lot of rot in the sheathing under the shingles. I removed that too, revealing the posts.


I was amazed to see that the south sill is simply gone. It must have disintegrated. The corner post tenon hangs in the air, where it used to fit in the sill mortise.


At dusk I spotted a slinky brown creature weaving between the rocks on the shore. He was dark, chocolate brown with a white throat, small black ears, a fluffy tail about half the length of the main body - the tail had a white tip. I believe it was a martin.

Mid-summer

Sharon and Catherine are home now but I'm taking another week of vacation to work on the house. It was cold and foggy this morning so I sat by the warm wood stove and considered what I have done and learned so far.

One of the big problems with this place is its location on a slope - rain water runs right down and under the house. There does not seem to be any provision for proper drainage at all. It's a wonder that the house isn't in much worse shape than it is considering that it's had "wet feet" for about 150 years. One project will be to create French drains around the up-slope sides of the house. As a start, I've installed rain gutters and drainages pipes that take the roof water away from the house.

There is also the strange issue of the "path" leading to the main door of the house. It is just a slippery, grassy gully with no stepping stones - not only dangerous but a veritable river leading rain water to the foundation of the house. I'll have to build some kind of terraced walkway with drainage integrated into it.

I removed the ridiculous garden that was right up against the west wall of the house. It seemed contrived to hide some Mickey mouse repairs to the foundation and served as an ideal method to keep the sills constantly damp and make it convenient for carpenter ants to get into the wood. The soil from that garden is now in a pile waiting to become a new garden.

Sharon spent a lot of time pulling up Japanese Knot Weed which is spreading all over the property. We burned great piles of the stalks the other night. The smoke was a reprieve from the hoards of mosquitoes that descend every evening.

Eric (14) and Julia (17) were here for two days. Eric seemed to like the place. He slept outside in a tent by the gazebo. He was expecting to sleep in the workshop but got turned off at the last minute by all the axes, saws and machetes - it seems he has been watching too many horror movies. Julia was less enamored with the place. Bath facilities were definitely not up to her standard.

It stayed miserable and foggy today so I decided to crank up the wood stove and bake bread the old fashioned way. Sharon had stocked the kitchen with all the ingredients including yeast but I had to remember the recipe - a bit risky. Luckily, the Grandy's left the instruction manual for the wood stove which I needed to figure out how to control the oven temperature. Well, actually you can't really control it, but I got it close enough to bake two magnificant loaves of bread.

A cozy night's sleep

It was dark and foggy when we arrived at the cottage tonight. Sharon, Catherine and I were anxious to spend our first night here. I lit a fire in the big wood stove and in no time the kitchen was warm and cozy. Catherine crawled into her little bed under the stairs, beside the stove. Sharon took the cot in the kitchen and I slept in the first little bedroom. We all read for a short while before drifting off to sleep. It's totally dark out here in the country and the silence is a wonderful change from the city. All I can hear is the rustle of the wind through the leaves outside.

Poking around the Bradley property

I'm on my way to Australia now - slipping along the rim of the night over the Pacific ocean. I'm looking forward to the visit but I'm really thinking about the Bradley house. On Tuesday I scarcely had time to take it all in. Now I have a chance to reflect on the pictures I took.

The Bradley property is beautiful today as it was in 1860. The land faces south toward a small cove - it's know locally as Bradley's Cove but on the nautical charts it has no name. On the other side of the cove are two islands - Hen and Hog island. These are classic Nova Scotia island names, as years ago, farmers often kept livestock such as chickens, pigs, sheep and cows, on nearby islands -it saved building a fence. There are dozens of islands with such names in Nova Scotia. Both Hen and Hog island are owned by the Nova Scotia government so they will never be developed.

The islands shelter the Bradley property from the full force of the Atlantic ocean. The shelter, plus the southern exposure and the deep anchorage made this a prime piece of land when it was first granted.


Traditionally, the people of the Eastern Shore had to juggle several jobs in order to scratch out a living. Typically the man worked in the in-shore fishery in the summer and worked in the forest in the winter. His wife ran the house, raised the children and managed the garden or small farm. Arable land was poor or non-existent along the Eastern Shore. The area has never been prosperous. Even the village of Tangier, the site of Canada's first gold rush, never became wealthy. As explained in Bill Bradley's book; a handful of investors, charlatans - or worse, developed the small mine claims with the benefit of local labour and slipped away with the gold.

The Bradley property was better than many for the Eastern Shore life style. The deep anchorage was a huge asset for a fisherman. Today there is a wharf with a road leading to it that has been there for generations. The hill the house sits on is a glacial moraine with good soil, albeit rocky, and good drainage. Drinking water has never been a problem on this property. The remains of an old stone-lined well can be found a ways down the slope from the house. Frank Grandy, the previous owner, told me they used the old well in the mid-eighties.

At one time the upper floor of the house was used for bedrooms, accessed from the kitchen by a steep set of narrow stairs. Today, the up-stairs is a rough attic. The lathe and plaster has all been stripped away. Large 4" x 6" rafters can be seen in the oldest part of the house, the 16' x 20' west side. On the east extension the rafters are hand-hewn. One clue that the two part of the house were built at different times is the disastrous intersection of the ridge lines - it was poorly designed with insufficient support and, as a result, sags terribly. There were lots of poor builders a hundred years ago just as there are today.

Creaking floors, glittering cove

Bradley House in Tangier seen from east

Today we took possession of an old house in Tangier, Nova Scotia. "Possession" is too strong a word, really. You can't possess an old house - it possess' you.

Living room with view of the cove

Built around 1860, at least four generations of Bradleys lived here. It was sold out of the family in the late 1950s, but William (Bill) Bradley, the last boy to grow up in this house, build a house next door where he lived with his wife Eileen and together they raised seven children. Mrs. Bradley still lives next door, but her husband passed away about ten years ago. Aside from a large family, Bill left another legacy - a history of the village of Tangier. His manuscript was published recently by the Tangier Gold Mine Historical Society. It is available at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/.

Sharon and I spent this first day surveying the land and building. I was itching the get acquainted with the structure of the building. I knew it would be bad. The building inspector was astounded to hear that we planned to renovate the building, not replace with a new structure. He described the property as "a house in very poor condition on a spectacular lot".

I made measurements of the house and took some forensic photos in the cellar and attic. I will study these more carefully during a business trip to Australia in just a couple of days. As a house warming present, Sharon gave me a copy of "Renovating Old Houses" by George Nash. This book is a classic on the architecture and construction of old houses. I can tell I'm going to make good use of it.

Celebrating our new old house

Sharon and I celebrated this new twist in our lives with lobster and wine. We enjoyed our first sunset in Tangier before returning home along the winding coastal road.

Sunset, Tangier, Nova Scotia

Dan

This is me in Cuba, blissfully unaware that I would soon be devoted to a run-down old house.