The Old Cowshed

[Lippyp]

OK so I've finally found some time to start unpacking in my new (old!) garage. This started life as a cowshed and will become my garage/workshop. I reckon its probably around 100 years old, is built of brick with a slate roof on the front and half slate/half tile on the rear. Floors are a mixture of the original black engineering brick and some modern concrete. Its currently split into three sections, one is totally seperate and has a man door only, this will have a doorway put through into the rest of the building internally and will become the workshop/tool room, the other two parts have barn doors and were seperated by a brick wall but the middle of the dividing wall has been knocked out.

The plan is to remove this divider entirely and raise the roof as the door/eaves height is too low to get my truck in. This might be either raising the entire roof including ridge or changing the pitch of the roof and just raising the side walls. This is a job for the summer though as it means stripping off the entire roof, replacing possibly all the timbers in the roof and felting and reslating it plus some brickwork.

Over christmas I set up some of the shelving and today did some more and unpacked more boxes. I also fitted a twin 5ft T8 fluorescent light, at the moment this is just being powered off an extension cord from the house as theres no power in the garage yet. This will be run out this year as we are having the whole of the house re-wired due to the fact its all past its best last being rewired in 1984 (they reckon 20 years is the safe life span of PVC cable, 25 years max) and it being a bodge in places and the lights and sockets are not where we want them. To save money we'll do the garage at the same time as it all has to be certified now by a qualified person.

Anyway, enough gassing, heres the pictures.

A reminder of the outside first.

The inside, this is a temporary setup until I've fettled the other end of the building. The final end has some holes to fill in the wall where there was a lean-to on the end (previous owner just knocked a few bricks out to stick the timbers through) rebuilding the dividing wall to full ridge height and puttinga doorway through, new door-frame and re-laying the floor, currently half concrete and half brick, very uneven and slopes into a central drain! Theres also a load of old iron waterpipes on the wall along with some calf waterers! At the moment the garage has the stuff from my garage and the wifes garden shed and greenhouse in it along with some miscellaneous stuff until we sort out some of the other outbuildings, put the greenhouse up etc.

The storage corner

my vintage shelving

Small parts drawers up

Thats actually my home built forge underneath!

Put my repro enamel chevrolet thermometer up

Let here be light!

Don't look in this side!

The workshop end with more stuff to unpack

Gratuitous outside night shots

 

[Omphaloskeptic]

2012 - The Year of the Roof! Good Luck and Work Safe.

 

[roger440]

Mate, this has just got so much potential!

Im liking that floor. Are you keeping it? Probably not all that useful with a trolley jack though.

 

[fergus]

Oh this has the makings of an awesome build. Good luck!

 

[donnie m]

i dig the bricks.

 

[porschedude996TT]

Nice shop, it sure has some character. If these walls could talk. Looking forward to more pictures of your progress.

 

[Lippyp]

Thanks guys. I like the brick floors too, the middle bay has been concreted at some point as has the back half of the workshop end although I suspect thats a thin skim over the bricks. I'd like to keep them whereve possible so will probably lift it, put a decent substrate down under, a membrane to keep the damp out and then re-lay them after a clean up. I bet they'd come up well with a powerwash and some brick acid. The middle bay will stay concrete. Walls will be cleaned and possibly re-coated with traditional whitewash as its sympathetic to the building and breathes. The roof when done will have felt under the slates, then be insulated probably with rigid expanded PU foam board and then gain a ceiling of some sort.

Its not going to be some shiny gin palace though guys, it'll be staying in character. I like old stuff and the used and patinated look, on my garage at least!

 

[Lippyp]

I've done a bit more, will take some pictures tomorrow, have put up some more shelves and put up some of my enamel sign collection. I also managed to drain most of the water out of what seems to have been a tank to collect the pig effluent in the building behind the garage, this runs along the other side of the rear garage wall and although lined with cement render it is making the wall damp. It had a good two foot of water in it and its down to about six inches after I drilled a 25mm hole through about four layers of brick but I can'g drill a hole any lower so I'll have to rent a sump pump to get the rest out.

Today I had a delivery of 12m of six inch wide commercial/agricutural plastic guttering, all the connectors, stop ends etc and 4m of whacking great big downpipe. At the moment the garage roof is overlapped by the lean-to roof of the pig house and the water is supposed to go into a gutter and out of the building except...the gutter used was just standard width domestic gutter and its either collapsed, twisted or broken so the water is just pouring down the wall into this holding tank. Hopefully the new gutter being much bigger will deal with all the water and the wall will then dry out and thus the garage will dry out. Pictures to follow, hopefully I'll find some time this weekend to put the guttering up.

 

[Aaron P.]

looks great lippy, were in the uk are ya based? get some insualtion into that roof ....speaking of the roof it may look like it needs replacing or repairing....looks great and that has plenty of character and id say the house is very much the same....what cars ave ya got besides the bmw???? any classics???

 

[Lippyp]

Yeah, the roof is probably going to be taken off and raised up a bit as the eaves are too low to get my cars in, when thats done it will have tar paper underneath i and probably expanded PU foam baord insulation. The beemer isn't mine, belonged to the previous owner as that picture was taken before we bought the house (only been here a month) The house is in Shrophire which is in the west Midlands, kind of next to Wales.

As for cars, my wife has an 08 Nissan X-Trail SUV, I have a UK spec RHD 01 Chevy Blazer as my daily and a '67 Chevy C10 long fleetside as my toy.

 

[John in OH]

I love these old garage refurbishment projects. Looking forward to more progress photos!

Got a question ... in photos 5 & 6 (you have a very manly vise, by the way) there is an alloy housing of some kind of tool apparently hanging on the end of your work table ... what is it??

 

[5lima30]

I like places like that with character!

 

[Lippyp]

The vise is an Olympia, it has a double headed jaw, one side is a normal vise, swivel it over and its a pipe jaw, plus a swivel base. The work table is actually my home built bottom draught blacksmiths forge and the alloy housing on the side is the electric blower. Its not finished yet, needs a hood and the blower moving further away from the actual firebed and wiring up.

 

[Lippyp]

I've got a line on some cheap metal cabinets, OK they're originally office cabinets and are a bit of a funny colour but they can always be repainted. They're made by a canadian company called Teknion and look to be very good quality. I'm hoping to pickup three like this in the green, the guy selling them has 20 but tbh with all my shelving and toolboxes I don't think I have room for more than three, he wants £25 each which is a good price and will negotiate. These will hold all sorts of stuff out of sight and the wooden tops mean I can stick stuff like my chop saw etc on top. I'll have a measure up and see if I can run to four. They do have some shorter ones that might fit under a benc. They are 1000mm x 460mm x 800mm high and 1000mm x 460mm x 1170mm high

 

[seth928]

I love the character of it....can't wait to see some roof work......that is going to be a hell of a project....I think I would want to make the new roof wavy just for character...haha I will be watching this one....good luck

 

[Lippyp]

So I may well be getting electricity in sooner than I thought. We have to run a new gas pipe from our bulk LPG tank to the house as the current pipe is too small to supply the new boiler we are having installed. As we're going to have a trench that runs past the garage from the house it makes sense to make it a bit wider and bung some armoured cable in for powerr and also some HDPE pipe for water as a tap would be useful and the wifes veg garden will be behind the garage along with her greenhouse and water will enable us to setup the irrigation system in there again (once we've put the damn thing back together as it moved with us from the old house) I just need to find a cheap source of some steel wire armoured cable and a roll of water pipe. We've got a guy with a mini digger coming in to dig the trench as it goes across the yard where we park which has a layer of rough cobbbles/compacted rubble on top and theres no way I'm digging sixty foot of trench with a spade and pick!

 

[cderalow]

Nice shop, it sure has some character. If these walls could talk. Looking forward to more pictures of your progress.

They'd probably say 'moo'

 

[Jagmandave]

Wonderful old place you're building there, so maybe you can explain for us - what is the fascination you English guys have for buying old farmsteads in the middle of France, of all places?

Yes I know it's a beautiful place, but so are parts of old Blighty. Is it a climate thing? Taxes cheaper? A place for your retirement?

Just curious, and I look forward to seeing more of the place as you go along!

 

[Lippyp]

The reasons we have a house in France are many and varied tbh, I am a bit of a francophile, I've been visiting France regulalrly since I first went with my parents for a holiday in 1977. Climate is one, on the whole where we are its warmer summers with a short winter although it can be pretty damn cold as we are quite high up (theres skiiing ln the Massif Central about an hours drive from our house) its the food and wine, the laid back lifestyle, it certainly was a lot cheaper when the pound/euro exchange rate was up at 1.40 to the pound, we paid just £27K for our house set in three acres about 8 years ago. Theres no way we would have been able to afford anything in the nice touristy areas of the UK like the Lake Distruic6t, Cornwall etc. We like the people, contrary to what many Brits and Americans think about the French we've had nothing but a hearty welcome from the locals. We may well retire there one day.

 

[HGFS]

mate.....very cool!

 

[TXNinAZ]

I am a bit of a francophile

Wow, didn't know there was such a thing!? Glad to hear your experience has been different than most English speakers.

Love the place and area- we visited in September and spent a great deal of our visit in the West Midlands, and loved it. Best of luck!

 

[Ben7203]

Phil, because of work I got to spend the whole month of September in France a few years back. The people in Paris are no different than anyone over here in our larger cities like Atlanta, DC or New York. I spent time in Rouen, Le Harve, Lyon, and Joue-les Tours visiting suppliers and ALL of them were great people and comparable to the Georgia "southern hospitality" I live in. I was lucky enough to be invited to a couple of Sunday dinners, OMG 4-5 hours of food, drink and great company, those dinners were the highlites of my trip. I depend spend a few days in Normandy and went to Mont Saint Michele, truely awesome. I definitely understand why you would want to retire in France. Keep us posted on your progress. Thanks

 

[Lippyp]

Wow, didn't know there was such a thing!? Glad to hear your experience has been different than most English speakers.

And therein is the root of most peoples problems, the french don't respond well to people speaking loudly and slowly at them in English as if they were a two year old. Try and speak French and no matter how badly you mangle it (and boy do I at times!) and they respond much better. They are also like every nationality a complex people and in a lot of respects very old fashioned and formal. I've seen first hand people that have known each other from childhood shaking hands and addressing each other as Mr Smith for the first minute or two of a meeting, theres also a serious ettiquette about the whole cheek kissing thing depending on your relationship depends how many you get. I made a great friend over there who started off doing some work on the house for us but soon became a friend, one day we had a very serious conversation when he told me that he thought we should be using Tu rather than Vous which is the less formal form of "You", thats a big step. Once you understand a bit of the culture its very easy to make friends.

Ben, even the French hate Parisians, my neighbour told me he'd rather have a german buy a house near him than a parisian and thats a huge statement to make in a village that has a memorial in the town square to two young men who were "Asassinated by the Hitlerian Hordes" in an area that tried to hold up the SS Das Reich division on its march to the D Day beaches a day or two before the infamous massacre of an entire town at Oradour Sur Glane! My parents have a house in Normandy, they've owned it since about 1990. Each region is very different, they all have different accents, the food is very different as is the architecture, much like the USA I guess.

 

[Jagmandave]

OK, here's my "France" story.....

I spent a year travelling thru Europe by bicycle of all things, at one point in my travels I was in the Cote d azur, in Cannes. I went to the pharmacy (chemists) to get some vitamins, just your garden variety mulit-vitamin. I said that word with every inflection and accent I could muster but he still didn't understand me - even tho the word vitamin is spelled the same every where in the world and is an English word. Mind you, I'm from the midwest, where people are widely regarded as not having any accent, let alone an American one.....Finally, a woman from New York who spoke French, in the back of the now 10 person long line, said "let me try" and said what to my ear was the same word I'd been saying all along, and the pharmacist did a forehead slap! "Oh you mean vitamins", he said. "I couldn't understand you, your accent was so strong!"

That was the last time I tried to speak the language in France!

I got along pretty well every where I toured, just speaking English. The real exception was when I landed in Athens - that was truly greek to me! And what i was speaking clearly wasn't understandable to them either....

 

[Lippyp]

A few more pictures, the steel cupboards are in, this is not their final resting place as they will end up in the other end of the garage the other side of the brick wall they are currently against but it'll do until I get that side sorted out later this year as it needs a new concrete floor putting down first. They are really solid and have swallowed loads of stuff.

I also put up some of my sign collection, got a few more still to find a home for.

Today I did some prep ready to run the power cable out to the garage this week when the trench is dug for the new gas pipe to the house. I dug a hole inside and outside the garage and knocked a hole through the wall. I then mortared in a length of 25mm ID Alkathene pipe I had lying around (after checking that the cable fits through it which it dies with a little room to spare) The cable will be run through this and then I have the unenviable job if trying to bend the ****** stuff into a right angle and clip it to the wall. Its huge stuff and ****** stiff, its 16mm steel wire armoured cable which is about 21mm total thickness. The floor inside is blue engineering bricks bedded on sand.

Finally, how about a bit of black and white, struck me it would look good as an old photo!

 

[Vernmotor]

Yea that is a cool pic !

 

[ct71rr]

Wow, what a difference black and white makes. Looks vintage. Very cool place you got there.

 

[takeiteasy]

Love this place! Hopefully when you do the insulating on the roof/ceiling you can somehow keep all that great wood and lathing? exposed as it adds so much character! Makes me think of those old James Harriet movies. How different the architecture/styling is from here. I love your place there!

What's closer to the real color of those cabinets? In the first pictures they look a lime green (good for a lime green Dodge Charger? garage), in the later pictures they look a lot tamer and I actually like that color.

 

[Bears Fan]

Dude I want that Chevy thermometer!!!

 

[Lippyp]

Dude I want that Chevy thermometer!!!

This is where I got mine from, they do a huge range and I'm sure will ship to the USA. They are really good quality and proper enamel not screen printed rubbish. I also have a Texaco one somewhere.

http://www.classicmotoringenamels.co.uk/cats.asp?cID=24

 

[Curt_pnw]

Wow, what a difference black and white makes. Looks vintage. Very cool place you got there.

No kidding! That is a great shot!

I love what you have done with the place so far and looking forward to more progress and pictures. Jealous of your sign collection as well.

 

[Lippyp]

Thanks guys. I have more signs to go up when I have cleared some more wall space. I spent most of today helping a contractor with a backhoe to dig a trench lay the gas pipe to the house, water to the old pighouse behind the garage so we can have water in what will be the wifes veg garden and the electricity cable to the garage, then shoveled about a ton of sand by hand in to the trench to bed the pipes in and then the guy backfilled it all whilst I cleaned up and shifted a load of concrete we had to break up next to the house to run the pipes through it. Contractor was a nice guy and very kindly also moved the kids wooden playhouse down the garden for me from where we dumped it when we moved in. His digger had a set of pallet forks on the front bucket so we just rocked it back, stuck the forks under it and lifted it up and drove it to its new home, something we had been trying to work out how to do for the last month or two.

I would say I'm looking forward to a long soak in a hot bath but as we have no boiler and no hot water system now as the old one has been ripped out and the new one is not in yet I'll have to settle for a quick shower in the downstairs shower room. I have to say the chances of the wife getting a valentines day seeing-to are receding rapidly as I reckon by about PM I may not actually be able to move!

I'll stick some pics up of the trenching as soon as I've processed them.

One trench courtesy of the big yellow digger

layin' pipe!

now backfilled, its a bit lumpier than it was but we'll let it settle a bit and then get someone in to grade if off flat, the whole yard needs something doing with it as it's a bit "third day of the somme" when its raining. Eventually it'll get either concrete, blacktop or just a decent layer of stone on it.

the house end waiting to be connected, black is the power cable, blue is water and yellow gas. 16mm2, 20mm and 25mm respectively.

 

[Innov8tive1]

I don't know about the rules there but here in Canada we can't run power and gas in the same trench. Even phone or cable TV wires are a no no.

Nice looking area though and should be an interesting build. Love the old building.

 

[Lippyp]

Has to be 30cm apart here thats all, this has the water pipe in between them as well so the gas is one side of the trench, power the other and they are far enough apart to meet regs.

 

[Lippyp]

Just a tiny update, power is still not connected up but I've been gathering parts from ebay so I now have five IP65 waterproof light switches, a used but current regs metal fuse panel and yesterday picked up five twin five foot flourescent light fittings complete with diffusers from ebay for £13 each, the bonus is that four of them are the emergency lighting type so have a built in battery so if the power goes off for any reason (and we are out in the sticks so it does now and then) they will stay on for 3 hours. OK takes a little more electricity to keep the battery charged but a nice feature to have, way too many sharp things to whack your shins on in there in the dark. I'm hoping to start wiring everything up soon, the other end of the underground cable has now had cable run from the house fuse panel to nearby and my electrician will be coming back soon to join the two with a suitable isolator. Plus I've been working to clear out the attached pig house so I can repair the top of the garage wall and put up new guttering between the two roofs so the garage back wall will dry out.

 

[skyking]

We dont have that kind of history here .That building is beautiful. Save it like it is .The things you want to change are probably the things we see as being soooooo coooool.Thanks for letting us see it. I have a 50'x40' shop/hangar ,and yours is way better.

 

[VWPORSCHEGT3]

skyking
Re: The Old Cowshed
We dont have that kind of history here .That building is beautiful. Save it like it is .The things you want to change are probably the things we see as being soooooo coooool.Thanks for letting us see it. I have a 50'x40' shop/hangar ,and yours is way better.

In the U.S. we definately dont have that history yet. I live in Northern Nevada, this area is very proud of its 1800's history. we have Virginia City, an old mining town that is still populated. Carson City still has many of it historical buildings, as well as my area the minden/gardnerville area. this area loves its history. being a southern californian originally (where they dont care about their history) its a welcome change. I love Nevada , and as many a bumper sticker says her "Don't care much how you did it in California"

 

[Lippyp]

The garage is a mere baby compared to the oldest part of the house, we've been told it dates to somewhere between 1630 and 1650, the oak beams in the living room are supposed to be reused ships timbers from derelict sailing ships of the time

 

[JimVonBaden]

The garage is a mere baby compared to the oldest part of the house, we've been told it dates to somewhere between 1630 and 1650, the oak beams in the living room are supposed to be reused ships timbers from derelict sailing ships of the time

We almost have some of similar age here in Northern Virginia. Alexandria, where I live, was founded in 1695. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria,_Virginia

For the US, that is nearly as old as European history in the continent gets. Some of our buildings strongly resemble yours.

Jim

 

[mynydd-graig]

This is so characterful, very nice. Where about's in Shropshire are you? I'm currently living between Whitchurch and Ellesmere. Look forward to seeing this develop.