After analyzing the condition of the old country house, we realized that it is necessary to start repairs from the most problematic area. That is, from the foundation.
What has already been done
Our household unit on the garden plot is more than 30 years old. It served us as a summer kitchen, a guest house, and a storage place — there were bicycles, there were tools and garden tools. There was a summer shower, and an extension with a toilet (Fig. 1. On the left). Over time, we improved the main house: we installed a sewer system, arranged a comfortable bathroom in it. A full kitchen was equipped in the annex to the house.
Fig. 1 The plan of the household unit. On the left: a household unit before reconstruction; On the right: a household unit with an attached canopy-patio after reconstruction
In the utility block, an old brick stove on a shaky foundation has not been used for many years, and without thorough repairs it could cause a fire — it was dismantled without regret. No one has used the water there for a long time, so the summer water supply connected to the shower was also dismantled.
But you can’t do without utility rooms on the site. We always need storage places for country belongings and small-scale mechanization. At the family council, they decided to radically redo the household unit and arrange a canopy-patio for recreation under the same roof with it (Fig. 1. On the right). This idea arose after a tour of Europe, where summer verandas are often arranged around small cafes.
Light wooden chairs and tables can be placed under the canopy. On the veranda in winter it is good to store garden furniture and other country utensils under the roof, which falls into disrepair much faster in the open air.
The weak link
To determine the scope of the upcoming work, we had to carefully study the general condition of the household unit. It turned out that the weakest part in the construction is the foundation. It was built of red brick — the outer walls and floor logs were supported by columns measuring 250 × 250 mm in plan. A half-brick-thick fence between the posts under the outer walls was laid on a sand cushion.
Every year we noticed new damage to the foundation in the spring from the heaving of the soil, and it became increasingly difficult to fix them. Most of the brick pillars under the logs inside the building tilted, the floor boards bent. The main part of the frame has been preserved in good condition — the wood is dry, without signs of rot and fungus, quite suitable for further use.
There was only one unpleasant moment — rotten wooden structures in the lower part of the shower. We did not consider the option of complete demolition and construction of a new utility block: repairs were supposed to be done with minimal costs.
Strategy and stages of repair
We decided to repair and rebuild the household unit on our own. Work without the involvement of builders, the preservation of the main structures and the maximum use of the material of the old building, allowed to minimize costs. The transportation of everything necessary on the trunk of a personal car also contributed to this.
It was necessary to raise the utility block, put a new foundation under it, remove unnecessary rooms and add a small porch. The walls of the utility block were planned to be sheathed with imitation timber on top of the old cladding, maintaining the finishing style of the main house. It was also supposed to increase the overhangs of the roof, install gutters and pipes for drains.
There was no point in keeping the toilet and the old shower room. When disassembling the toilet, there were no difficulties — it was made a “separate house” with its own roof. The material from which it was made was not suitable for reuse. Only the corner posts made of timber were useful when lifting the roof of the canopy.
But the shower room was part of the general frame, it was more difficult to dismantle it. It didn’t make sense to leave or redo this part of the building — for many years, the strapping beam and the bases of the racks in the lower part of this damp room rotted, and the foundation collapsed most of all. Since it was necessary to partially violate the integrity of the overall frame, it was decided to dismantle the shower room after bringing a new foundation under construction.
After we dismantled the extra rooms, the old building was a rectangle with dimensions of 3.0 × 6.2 m. The dimensions of the main part of the veranda were 3.0 × 4.0 m. It was decided to cover it with a flat pitched roof. In order to maintain the style of the new veranda and the house with bay windows, its base was made in the form of a trapezoid in the plan.
New foundation
For the new columnar foundation, 11 support platforms were made of concrete 60 × 60 × 10 cm and pieces of asbestos cement pipe 80 cm long (Fig. 3). The weight of such a support is ~ 50 kg. With the use of improvised means (trolley, jack, hand winch), it is quite possible to install it alone.
The old utility block was jacked up by about 20 cm and, using the water level, leveled the bars of the lower strapping horizontally. The jack was placed under the strapping bar next to the brick pillars of the old foundation on a thick wide board (lumber from the disassembled floor was used). No more than 5 cm of height was chosen for one ascent.
Between the binding and the old foundation, gaskets made of scraps of boards of different thicknesses were installed. The fence between the foundation pillars along the entire perimeter of the foundation was dismantled. Bars with a cross section of 100 × 150 (h) mm were “filled” into the formed windows so that the lower binding lay on these bars. The distance between them is ~2 m.
The following year, in the spring, the horizontal bars installed on the supports were checked. No serious deviations were found.
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