I invited Jack Hammer, John Mayal and Eric Clapton over today to help me pick up where I left off on a major home renovation (brico) project here in the Villa Ndio big house. For years we have wanted to have a ground floor bathroom to replace the inadequate and not really legal facility left behind by the previous owners of the annexed half of our house. That toilet and sink arrangement pumped raw waste out into the small garden across the way. We have had several false starts at implementing a solution that would involve proper disposal of waste out of the house in the same direction but concluded it is just not workable. We now have plans afoot to have waste from a new bathroom pumped across the next floor up and over to the existing septic tank on the other side of the house.
Before the bathroom fixtures and plumbing can be installed we have to prepare the walls, floor and ceiling of the room that is to be the new bathroom. Enter Jack Hammer. Curiously the original space, which has been used as a storage space, had shelving units resting on three concrete blocks, one each against the north and south walls and abutting the west wall, and one in-between them with a one and a half foot gap on either side. Each of the concrete blocks is about one and a half foot cubed. These have to go.
The original structure that is now Villa Ndio, we have learned, is over 300 years old, and has a storied past. It has been rumored, for example, that German military used the house when they occupied France during World War II. During each of my brico efforts over the years that have involved jack-hammering through rock and concrete, I have wondered aloud, jokingly, if I was going to find hidden treasure as part of these efforts. Will today be the day?
I have hammered into pieces the block against the northern side, pieces small enough to wheelbarrow away. No treasure under it. The middle block has been quite stubborn. I have chipped away at it, literally, but so far I haven’t been able to break it up. I hammered around the bottom edge and got a crowbar under it enough to flip it over. No treasure. Next I will drill a line of holes across the middle and try again to hammer it into smaller pieces that I can lift into the wheelbarrow. The first block was in the corner on the fa r right of the featured photo above. The middle one is lying on its side in the middle of the photo. The third is under a pile of brico supplies and equipment,
I have now attacked the third concrete block, to find that it consists of two large rocks, like the big one in the middle block. I have so far cleared out around them as you can see in the photo below. So now it is time to clear out the debris before trying to break up and remove these three large remaining pieces. Stay tuned!
The James flows through Richmond bringing with it an abundance of fish and waterfowl. It was fun to run along a catwalk that lies atop a pipeline that extends below a railroad track that runs along the river, and catch up with some herons fishing and a river snake sunbathing.
