Greetings and welcome to another fuzzy, little community open thread. I’ve got just a few things to share this week. A couple of photos, a thought or two--
Hi, been awhile since I just chatted about the ol’ day-to-day of werelynxing.
Right now I’m sitting out in the country, where I spend most of my weekends, at a medium sized, 200-ish year old, German style farmstead. It’s what Czechs call a chalupa. The Czech “ch” is it’s own letter and if you speak a bit of Yiddish you’ll be familiar with it’s sound although it’s a bit softer than its Yiddish counterpart and doesn’t require quite so much phlegm.
With the exodus of Germanic Czechs from the Sudetenland after World War Two there was suddenly a lot of abandoned real estate. What was built and loved and left behind by the Ende family was brought to the brink of ruin by the Haman family. I’ve seen an old photo of the Ende family standing in the yard in front of a pair of horses hitched to a large wagon. The local graveyards all have a few Endes in them. My fabulous mother-in-law has told me of a couple of visits from members of the Ende family, who had made the unfortunate choice of fleeing to East Germany. They were glad to see that someone was caring for the old family homestead. When Mrs the Werelyx’s grandfather bought the place from the local authorities in the early 1970s, it was basically a condemned property. I’m sure he used all his ample charisma to convince the board that he was worth trusting. He promised to rescue the ruin. And so he did, although the rescue continues. It’s a project that spans the generations.
The latest chapter is being written now— or would be if I wasn’t inside writing this. My sons and I have been shoring up walls and replacing the floors of a couple of the attached outbuildings. The garage was first. We dug out the back wall well below the frost line and poured in a ton of concrete, slopped a lot of stucco on the interior walls, dug out another wall from the inside and smothered it in concrete then laid half the floor with paving brick under what will eventually be a work area and poured a thick concrete slab reinforced with rebar to cover the other half.
This past month or so we’ve been working on the chlív — the Czech word for a pig sty, but I don’t think pigs were kept in there, at least not by the Hamans.
We mostly just wanted to get a proper floor in this space although there were lots of other things we’d have to deal with first.
The vaulted brick ceiling was dropping stucco and the occasional hunk of brick. All the old stucco would have to come down and be replaced. The arch of sandstone blocks above the one window was also collapsing (you can see in the photo above that one block has already drooped down past the upper edge of the window). That would have to be shored up, dug out and reset with fresh concrete. Then there’s the crumbling mortar between both stone blocks and bricks that would have to be replaced along with a couple sections of wall that had been apparently dug out on purpose. One section I know I can blame on Grandpa because there’s a section of chimney liner peeking through the ceiling there. I’ll cut out more of the wall below and install a couple more sections of chimney liner, poke a hole in one to allow a stove pipe to be inserted so we can have a wood burning stove tucked into that corner, and finish the chimney off with a little panel at the bottom for chimney sweeping.
Grandpa had originally thought that this space could be used as a pleasant sort of living room where friends could gather around a big table in the evenings. I’d had other plans until I found myself dealing with the two massive, solid sandstone troughs that lined one wall. They were raised up on blocks and crumbling stacks of bricks to a comfy height for horses to use. This put them at a height to just manage to be uncomfortable to sit on. I figured that rather than dragging them outside and trying to plant things in them we could keep them inside, maybe take them off those blocks, lower them and cover them with long boards to make benches with built-in storage. At any rate, they needed to be moved so we could replace the floor where they stood. I managed to get one down off the blocks by myself and #1 Son helped me move it far enough that we could get the blocks and bricks out and move the second trough so we could begin digging.
Last weekend we finished digging up the floor. We discovered that most of the space was probably a waste pit covered with boards and lined with tar. The boards of course were long gone and the pit had been filled with decades of garbage, ash, bricks, dirt and such before being covered with concrete. As we attacked the crumbly concrete, we began discovering a lot of broken glass and bits of ceramic plates and cups. The occasional intriguing whole bottle got my sons and I digging like amateur archaeologists. I was tempted to clear out the whole space, but smarter heads prevailed and our one test hole was refilled and work began on getting the stucco down. Last week I repaired the window arch and removed the wood that was supporting it— so far, so good. We ended up tearing out the bricks that had formed the window sill and I’m still looking for a couple good sandstone slabs to replace them. Should be a nice little shelf once I’m done.
So now I’m hanging out this week at the chalupa. Just about finished chipping away at the stucco and have begun putting a sealant on the bare bricks and repairing some of the walls. The little arch over the door is also a crumbling mess and I spent part of today carefully dismantling part of the arch and resetting the bricks.
This is kinda my last hurrah for work on the chalupa in 2020. Looks like the floor, paving bricks again, will probably wait until the spring. Already getting our first light dustings of frost on the grass in the morning.
I drove up here Wednesday this week, ostensibly to spend a day getting a bit done and then driving back to the big city with #2 Son and his girlfriend. They’d been up here since last weekend. But since girlfriend’s sister has been in contact with someone who has been in contact with someone who has COVID we’re not rushing back home. Yeah, the Czech Republic is blooming with COVID these days. I think yesterday we broke a record for most new cases in a single day. Not a world record, mind you, just a local one. Now the government is scrambling to reinstate the restrictions they’d dropped. Of course they come with the seemingly random ones like night clubs and bars being forced to close early. Oh well, I get a few more days of wall repair out of it at least. My English tutoring is due to start in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll get that chimney finished.
Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.