Make a cast on old pipes

It is true what they say. Having a house is a constant source of work. An old house probably generates additional issues, especially if owners after owners have been playing around with trends, personal taste and whatever. A big house with a complex structure will also generate quite some tasks.

I think we got jackpot of complexity and infinite amount of tasks to deal with. 

In this case the fault is somewhat ours. 

When we moved in 2012, we relied on a quite cheap/old house incompetent building company, that helped us with the major renovation we did. 

One day, one pipe in the basement started to drip water. We looked up and thought that the pipe for some reason just broke.

Some of the workers we had, took and broke the insulation around to pipe, to check its state. 

It turned out that the issue was due to the fact that the radiator had been removed at the end of the pipe, and with a change of water pressure, the water of course started to go out of the open pipe.

As the insulation was broken, they took some modern one and just wrapped it around the old pipe.

The pipe with its modern insulation

Nothing strange with it, except that the "cut" around the old insulation has looked like crap and well, I hadn't had major plans to do anything about it (well, after 9 years, what do you expect... that this is prio 1?) for a while.

Close up around the fracture in the old insulation

I have recently had a visit of a building engineer who, when checking other issues with the house, looked at this and told me: "Arianna, you need to fix this asap".

It turns out that such old insulation is usually full with asbestos, and that is ok until one breaks and touchs the parts. 

Now, I have been there fixing the laundry for 9 years, so I suspect that, if any asbestos, I have had some exposure to it (although I have never touched for any reason that part of the pipe).

Nevertheless, she recommended to buy some plaster rolls, that I suspect are usually used for molding plaster items or even broken limbs.

Starting to roll the wet plaster rolls

Without knowing what I was exactly doing, I dripped the plaster roll, one by one, in cold water. 

I took them up and started to roll them around the pipe.

I wasn't very prepared and the floor got a bit messy

I wans't really prepared, so plaster started to drip from the pipe a bit everywhere. Eventually I put some form of floor cover and that made life easier. Luckily it is reasonable easy to clean plaster up.

At the beginning my technique was very much suboptimal. It turned a bit better by the end, although when comparing with the old insulation (which probably had plaster rolled around it too), one sees an abyss of different. The old ones are smooth and even and perfect. What hands for doing such a job!

The critical point that was supposed to be sealed

By using the plaster rolls, I am basically sealing the asbestos risky point and, as a bonus, I am also making the modern insulation looks a bit more like the old one.

The final result

It wasn't easy to make it even there

Another point got sealed as well, since I was at it

Considering this was the first time I used anything like that, I am quite happy of the result. The old insulation has leaked a bit color on the plaster, as of course, it got wet. But it should be enough to paint it a bit. In theory I should use lime paint on it, but since those are two micro spots that needs some adjustment, one of us should be able to just paint with whatever we have around. 

So, that's the next step. Problem is that now when I look at the pipes, I just see spots where I would like to preeventively patch all of this...

Patching and breaking

 Things don't always go as one hopes. Well, actually barely ever.

First.

It seems that Oscar got stuck in the toilet, locking himself in. Mattias put some oil through the keyhole in the lock and, well. Noone casually knows how the door was open. 

The fact is though that after this episode, it was not possible anymore to lock oneself in (which, being a toilet, it could be useful).

The lock on the door

I decided to look into it and get assistance from online experts to fix it. So, I first dismount it. Interesting, it was put on the door with a random piece of wood. When I got into fixing it, I also took out another lock that was left around by the previous owner in the basement. The peculiar detail is that the second lock has some paint that would fit more the color that I see under the layer of white paint on the toilet door.

So, I wonder if that was the right lock for this door, but broke and someone put a lock that was somehwere else (and I think it must have been in the kitchen, since it is light blue under the paint layers).

A door without the lock

Let's take a good picture of how it look before I disassemble

 

Yaha, now it is opened

Ok. I opened it. I have played with it. Without the lid it locks. With the lid it doesn't. It seems there is some friction with some parts, but I still wonder how that became the problem just with some oil in the keyhole. 

I have spent already few hours on it, without figuring it out. I am sure that someone knows exactly how to fix it in few seconds. I just don't get it, so it has to wait a bit longer until I get any positive energy to not lose the patience on it.

Second. 

In some parts of the floor in the TV/Piano room there has always been some evil draft coming up, there where the sliding doors are. 

We have the only part of the basement that is not isolated under that room and I guess that around the sliding doors, as there is no threshold and probably the floor construction changes, there is this gap that let cold air come up. 

Mattias had the great idea to close the gaps between the wooden planks, or at least to put some insulation. He went and buy some flax caulk and even a tool for doing that (we could just use whatever we had around) and he started doing it. A bit. 

But the gaps are not deep everywhere, so it is not easy to let it stay, with people and cats running around and a vacuum cleaner that regularly sucks up the insulation.

The floor with the gaps poorly insulated

As lately I did find a lot of pieces of flax caulk everywhere, I tried to understand how to fix the problem.

I think generally one would use sawdust with glue for this job, but we had the flax caulk and I was going to use that. 

I thought then to use glue to secure it in the gaps. 

Mimmi decided to help picking up pieces of flax

I am using a properly very expensive tool for doing the caulking

Piece by piece, I took the flax, squeezed it between the gaps and pushed it down after putting some indoor glue. 

In certain cases, I put also the glue on top of it, to avoid that it'd stick out too much.

The end result

I am actually quite happy of the result. We did run also a vacuum cleaner test and it seems steady enough to stay where I put it. 

When passing the hand over that part of the floor, one doesn't feel any longer the evil cold air coming up, so hopefully this is a good patch for the issue at this stage.

Third.

I bought some fancy curtains. Well, it is about time to put some curtains up. Afterall we have been living here just 8 years and half. Some people would have put them up before even putting the beds in place.

So, I got the curtains. But then we need to find a way to put them up and after a lot of research on a long enough curtain rod, I picked up some semi random item that would work ok here, although not very super duper expensive or handmade or authentic.

Now, buying things is relative easy. Doing something with them is another story.

Mattias is busy drilling holes

Mattias is the handyman when it comes to this and he started to happily drill in the wall. First the drill was swobbling everywhere, so it took few weeks/month to go and buy the right point to use for drilling. 

Done that he succeded in the first hole. 

The second didn't really work as smooth. He managed to hit a perfect cross between the bricks, making it impossible to drill the hole. Or better. He made a hole, just an enormous one. The plaster just started to fall apart by looking at it.

The hole.

The end result

Conclusion? Now he has to move the previous attachment as it is no more aligned with the second one. We risk another black hole. He also has a third one to put up. 

This is going to take probably half a year more at least. 

Excluding the time it will take me to patch the holes....

Some Byggfabriken shopping

One of my favourite shops is of course Byggfabriken. It has almost everything that a modern "byggnadsvårdare" needs, plus the atmosphere of a bit old style shop. Anyway, every now and then we need (casually?) to go and buy some small things for the house. From paint, to other accessories.
Last time it was Mattias' turn to indulge himself into spoiling the house with nice stuff...
This is what he came back with:
1) A porcelain insulator: to have in the cords of the wall lamps that are placed around the piano. They don't really have a *real* function as the cord is already perfetly insulated, but let's say for the sake of how things were done in the past....

The porcelain insulator

How it should be placed, more and less....

2) Some flax insulation (linisolering) to put in the gaps between the floor planks in the "Red room" (the piano and tv room). This room doesn't have a warm basement room under it, so there is a icey draft coming up if you try to feel closely.

The isolation keeps coming up

As we are not expert in this, we are probably doing something wrong, as even though we are squeezing the flax down, it just doesn't want to stick too much.
Maybe this was not exactly the right product for the purpose?

The flax insulation

3) Finally, a chain for a ventilation shaft in the guestroom (now, Mattias' room). In reality we had decided to not get one because it didn't look possible to fix one chain on the ventilation shaft without asking our blacksmith for support. 

But Mattias forgot all about this and bought it anyway and... surprise surprise, he even put it up without any problem!

It is a detail, but it is nice to have a decent chain to open the shaft

Detail of the ventilation shaft. It says "Patent Örnen"