Month: July 2011

Looking Ahead

July 22, 2011 / / 2 Comments

We’ve been talking to the structural engineer, and while we haven’t figured out the exact plan we’re hoping to get the basement shored up. If we’re lucky we’ll find that the footings under the wall go a foot down below the basement floor. If that’s the case we’ll get the new steel header and steel support posts, as well as new concrete footings under the posts. Those new footings will be set deeper than the current floor, so that down the road we can dig out the basement floor and gain about 8″ of height. I was relieved to find out that we could do those two separately, because digging out the basement is expensive, and not something we really need right now. The support posts need to be done now, though, because the house needs to be leveled before we can remodel the first floor.

So far we’ve been working on the second floor and everything has been temporary stuff to make the house livable. The structural work is the first thing that’s actually fixing the house up, well aside from exterminating roaches. The exterminator told us we can move in, but I was disappointed to hear that we probably won’t completely eliminate them until we tear down the walls and then call the exterminators back to spray again. That means we’ll be sealing everything on the second floor up as tight as we can with caulk, wood fill, spray foam, and whatever else it takes. He said it was one of the worst infestations he’d seen.

Once we’re moved in and the condo is rented we’ll move forward on the structural repairs. Then we’ll work with an architect and plan out the rest of the project. In addition to the obvious stuff like new walls, drywall, and floors, we need to install new heating and cooling. We’d like to put in hydronic radiant heating and high velocity forced air cooling, but they aren’t cheap. High efficiency boiler, pumps and manifolds, condensers, blower and ductwork will run tens of thousands of dollars. We can do some of it in phases, but it’s probably the single most expensive part of the project. We’ve spoken with an HVAC guy and gotten some ideas, but it’s tempting to just go with traditional forced air, even if it means installing bulkheads.

We’ll figure it out once we get closer. Right now we’ve got more pressing needs, like getting the rest of the trim back up and the second floor painted, plus a laundry list of little tasks that add up to a lot of work.

It Can Be Fixed!

July 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Towards the beginning I decided to tear some tiles off the wall in the second story kitchen by the living room door.  Here is a picture of me in the process…

You may be wondering why I did it?  Well, the tiles were only half-glued on in the first place.  And, there were cockroaches running under them.  So, I tore them off.

But, I had to fix the mess I made…

Aside from the chimney stains already coming through the Spackle, it doesn’t look too bad.  I will need to prime it before painting it (maybe a couple of times), but I generally pretty proud of the Spackling job that I did. 🙂

Bit by Bit

July 19, 2011 / / 0 Comments

We’ve continued to work, and in fact I’ve taken a lot of photos with the good camera so I can publish several projects once I get some time (ha!). Until then, I have some shots from the cell phone that I can put up fairly easily. I’ll see if I can cover the stuff we’re currently occupied with. Last week we started to really focus on the upstairs. We have an incredible amount of work to do everywhere, but since we need to get the second floor livable quickly, that’s where things are happening.

First of all, we installed a new pre-hung door for the bathroom. All of the interior doors had been mangled pretty badly by the previous occupants, who saw fit to reverse them all so that they opened out of the rooms and into the hallway. Knowing from previous experience how awful hanging doors is, we bought a cheapo pre-hung door. It went in much more easily than mortising out a new hinge and trying in vain to level the awful door frame. The downside is it left a rather large hole above the door, because the doorways are much taller than a standard 80″ door.

Dirty

Sarah’s parents came down Sunday to help us and while Sarah and her mom washed the roach crap from the door and window trim that had been taken down, Sarah’s dad got the stove outlet installed, going through a couple of Dremel bits cutting through the nigh-indestructible tile. The only remaining wiring to run will be for the range hood above the stove, which fortunately doesn’t involve cutting through any more tile.

I took on the back bedroom, washing the walls and then spackling the exposed top edge of drywall that went around the room. It’s been hot recently, being mid July, and without air conditioning in the house it’s sweaty work. I went through three shirts on Sunday. After I finished the circumference of the room I repaired the wall in the closet, where they had seen fit to install drywall over the brackets for a shelf, and over the trim of the door they were covering. After a lot of mudding and edging, that too was looking a bit better. The rest of the closet still needs to be cleaned, as it currently looks something like Shelob’s lair.

Getting cleaner

We installed some make-shift trim in the kitchen, cut some more to put above the bathroom door due to the aforementioned five-inch gap between the top of the pre-hung door and the top of the door frame. Dean lent us his nailer and compressor which is helping it go up much more easily.

I’ve been trying to get things ready to paint, but every day we work on the house it seems further away. Yesterday Sarah started caulking the trim, and we bought another pre-hung door for the back bedroom. I got the old door frame out, but we still have to hang the new one. Sarah’s been painting the new trim pieces we bought and washing the door frames behind the trim so that we can put it back up.

Clean

Once we have all the trim pieces back up and the door installed, and all of the trim sealed with caulk we need to do taping and masking. I bought a paint sprayer because I want to go through the painting quickly, but it also means that everything needs to be ready to paint at once. A couple weeks ago I wanted to paint on this past Sunday. Then I just wanted to get all the taping done by Sunday. Now’s it’s Tuesday and I’m hoping we can start taping by the end of the week.

We have flooring to repair in the dining room, tile to grout in the bathroom, trim work nearly everywhere, some finishing work on the edges of the kitchen floor, the rest of the bedroom closet needs to be spackled, and I’m sure I’m leaving things out. We’ll get there, but it takes time, more time than I ever expect.

We had the structural engineer out yesterday. He’s going to get us a quote in the next few days. The exterminator is back out on Friday, along with the water department to install a new meter. Saturday Sarah’s sister is coming down with a trailer so we can pick up a stove and refrigerator from Dean’s place. I’ve taken off three days next week to make a press to be done by the end of the month, but we don’t yet know when we’re moving or how long until we have the condo rented.

Kitchen Outlet

July 15, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Scary Electrical

Let me start by saying that the electrical situation in the house is, in a word, scary. We have two 100-amp service lines coming in with separate breakers for the first and second floor units. This seems fairly normal. However, the basement was finished into an illegal apartment. When they did this, or maybe just in the course of doing all of the other terrible things, they spliced into the main for the upstairs unit before the breaker, added some wires, and wrapped it up (poorly) with electrical tape, like some sort of gift that is also a fire hazard. Of course nothing is labelled, and strung together, taped, patched, and generally awful wiring pervades the house. We have the old fabric-wrapped wire, lengths of live wire less than a couple of feet long spliced in at each end in the laundry room, draped over water pipes.

The house is a hundred and fifteen years old. When it was built, electricity was still something for expositions and rich people, which is why the house still has gas light fixtures here and there and a place where the wood stove used to sit. It was eventually electrified, of course, though it was done –shall we say– “sparingly”. There are two outlets in the kitchen, and just one in every other room upstairs, except for the tiny front bedroom which has none at all.

Unfortunately, the two outlets in the kitchen are positioned as far as possible from where the cabinet and counters were and will be again. There’s no outlet for the stove, no electric for a dishwasher or range hood, and no outlet for the kitchen counter, where we might want, say, a toaster. We’re not even sure where we’ll plug in the microwave, and we’re slightly concerned that when we do find a place, making popcorn will burn the house down.

All of this brings us to one of the myriad projects underway in the kitchen: adding an outlet. As luck would have it, there’s an outlet on the opposite side of the wall in the bathroom. We replaced the existing outlet with a GFCI (because, duh, it’s a bathroom). We need to get some spacers so that it will sit flush with the tile in the bathroom because at the moment it’s sunk three-eights of an inch into the wall.

Bathroom outlet

The challenge was that the opposite side of the wall in the kitchen is tiled, and cutting through the tile proved to be more difficult than expected. For starters, I didn’t own a Dremel. I tried using a drill, a jigsaw, and a trim router, but without the right bit, blade, or bit the results were less than stellar. I managed to grind off all the teeth on the jigsaw bit, but eventually I got a decent outlet-sized hole in the wall. Not long after, Sarah’s dad returned from Home Depot with a Dremel.

Cutting the tile

The Dremel quickly straightened out the hole and made it usable. We got the wire connected to the GFCI in the bathroom and ran it out of the wall in the kitchen. For the time being that’s as far as we’ve gotten, because we need to patch in a line for the range hood and the dishwasher. We’re not sure yet if the dishwasher will fit next to the stove or if we need to put it on the wall to the left. That will determine where we need to run the wire.

Kitchen outlet hole

We also tried to put an outlet behind the stove, but the tile there is different and proved quite resilient to my efforts. I decided that we can just plug the stove into the counter outlet. It isn’t permanent, after all, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. As usual, what seemed like a small project took much longer than expected and the result –aside from the new hole in the wall with a wire sticking out of it– was an impressive mess of tools in the kitchen.

Kitchen mess

If nothing else, you can see the new peel-and-stick tile Sarah and Meg put down, as well as the no-longer-crazy plumbing that Sarah’s dad helped me straighten out.

 

Layers of a Really Rotten Onion

July 10, 2011 / / 3 Comments

You have probably figured out by now that we picked a real piece of work when it comes to this house.  One of the most frustrating aspects we are currently facing is trying to get the house into a livable state.  That means no pests, working kitchen/bathroom/etc., and everything is clean.  It doesn’t sound all that difficult, but the reality is that every single time we touch something we find out that it was done completely wrong.  And, not just a little wrong but really stupidly wrong.  This means that we are going back and having to redo a lot of stuff. Like fix the bathroom completely.  Redo flooring.  Fix windows, paint everything, buy lots and lots and lots of stuff, and still manage to find more stuff to fix or replace.

My visual example of how terrible this place is happens to be found in the garage.  But, it is a reflection on what can be found throughout the whole property.

If you aren’t catching everything going on in this picture, I will break it down for you.  First, there is a triple outlet connecting one extension cord to another.  Second, the one extension cord has been sliced up past the plug.  Third, the cord is plugged into two different outlets at the same time.  Fourth, they have done this before but on the two outlets to the left of the cord as seen by the scorch marks on the triple outlet.  So, we have a plethora of issues at hand here.  And, I won’t even mention how they are getting power to the garage (or that the garage previously burned down to this garage).