Year: 2011

Boiler, Boil, Toil and Trouble

September 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Radiator

It’s been getting cooler (actually it got colder rather suddenly). That means it’s time to figure out the boiler and the radiators. I’ve had forced air my whole life, so this is a bit new to me. The first step was to wash the radiators, since I knew that if fired them up still caked in dust it would likely going be a smelly ordeal. Sarah tackled that, and I assisted her.

Boiler

The boiler was installed some time in the eighties, so it’s not ancient, but it’s hardly new. It has a standing pilot that we had shut off when we did the bug bombing. I got the model of the boiler and the pump and looked them up online. Eventually I found maintenance instructions and started by flushing out the rusty water from the pump “blow down” valve and the drain for the system. The boiler itself also has two drains to get the gunk out. After trying to drain the water feeder so I could remove the filter I eventually discovered the water line wasn’t shut off (turns out the valve was just tight). After that I got the strainer basket cleaned out and reconnected the thermostat (after cleaning the roaches out of it) and mounted it on the wall upstairs.
Gas control valve

With that done, I tried to light the pilot. The reset button was stuck, which is a bad sign. But with some persistence (and no tools) I finally got it lit without burning the house down.

I did a test firing and everything seems to work fine, but the pump didn’t start running to circulate because I’d turned off the circuit weeks ago. At least that was a simple fix. Now that everything is ready to go the weather got warm enough that we don’t need any heat! Oh well, in a week or two we’ll start it up for real and hopefully it will work as expected.

Settling In

September 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Wow, Shelving

No updates recently because it hasn’t been very interesting. Everyone is familiar with the post-move-in unpacking and organization. We bought shelves for the closet, as you can see. HOBO had some nice wire shelves on sale. I installed the touchpad deadbolt on the back door, but it won’t do anything cool until I get the control center. That allowed me to play musical locksets, where I moved the deadbolt that was previously on the back door to the garage, so I could install a non-locking handle there and move the locking handle to the basement back door. I also installed the new front door knob, one of the handle variety.

Besides that, I’m running some CAT 6 cable for the phone line to the office. Currently the only working phone jack is downstairs, so we have our Internet router in the foyer and an Ethernet cable running up the stairs to the office. I’m putting a jack in the office, and then we’ll only need to run a cable to the living room so we can hook up the TV, media PC, and Xbox. I measured how much cable I’d need and cut it, got onto the roof of the back porch and lowered one end down the back of the house, and fed the other end into the attic through one of the many, many holes along the eave (see photo for laughably terrible roofing). I still need to fish it down the office wall, but it was getting dark and it was about a hundred and fifty million degrees in the attic, so I elected to finish the project later.

Roof Eave

We installed some really cheap window shades, those accordion-folded paper things. We were originally going to get mini-blinds from IKEA, but they don’t carry the metal ones anymore. Instead they have these wood blinds that feel like balsa wood and yet cost about double what the metal ones did. Oh well. The paper shades were sold in six packs on Amazon and while they’re not the best, like everything we’ve doing upstairs so far, it’s only temporary.

In the mean time, Sarah has been unpacking, putting her library of cook books on shelves, decorating, and throwing empty boxes out the back window so I could break them down in the back yard. Our new double garbage can for the kitchen is in at Walmart, but now that Sarah has informed me we’re now composting, as well as saving aluminum cans separately from the other recycling in addition to the already separate paper recycling, we actually need some sort of mutant five-can garbage sorting station like you see at rest areas.

The previously-promised video will be shot as soon as we’ve gotten the rest of our crap put away. We decided to take a break and go camping this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be next week sometime.

Moved In

August 23, 2011 / / 4 Comments

Well we finally made it. Sorry there aren’t any pictures. The last few days were a scramble to get the last items done at the house, get the condo packed, and then Saturday it happened. The rain didn’t help, but with the help of Sarah’s family we got the condo emptied, the storage unit emptied, the downstairs storage emptied, the garage emptied… and the house filled.

When I say filled, I mean we’re wading through boxes and randomly placed furniture and trying to find every little thing that we need. Sunday, rather than make serious progress unpacking we went shopping, because clearly, the house needed more stuff. We bought some storage for the bathroom, as well as some racks to hang our pots and pans on, since there’s significantly less cupboard and counter space. We ordered a new trash can and cheap window shades from Amazon and got the computers set up in the office.

Yesterday and tonight we’re working on the condo, getting it cleaned up so we can rent it. I’ll be putting up the listing today. Hopefully we can find some good people quickly. Sarah did all the touch up painting yesterday and I got the replacement drop ceiling tiles into the laundry room. Tonight we’ll clean the kitchen and bathroom and sweep the floors.

Hopefully tomorrow we can start getting the house in order. I need to put a phone jack into the office for the DSL and replace the drain in the tub. I’d also like to get the living room furniture arranged, and Sarah wants to get the kitchen and bathroom sorted. When we’ve got it all put together I’ll do a new video walk-through of the upstairs so we’ll have a nice before and after.

Attic Electric

August 16, 2011 / / 2 Comments

The last few days at the house I’ve spent a lot of time in the attic. The wiring is a bit… custom. Despite a bunch of breakers in the electrical box for the upstairs, only four circuits are actually used for everything. We haven’t figured out what the rest are for yet. Fortunately, in one of those rare positives of the house, all of the electric for the upstairs is really easy to get to because it’s all run in the attic in the flexible conduit. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t ancient fabric-wrapped wiring inside the conduit, because there is, but I’ll take easy-to-get-to wiring any day. First I mapped out where everything went.

Wiring diagram

If you can’t tell from my crappy sketch, the exciting part is where the one wire goes to the kitchen ceiling to the bathroom outlet and the bathroom light, then to the office ceiling, then to the office outlet and the living room outlet. Oh, and when we put those outlets in the kitchen, they were off of the bathroom outlet. That’s all one circuit, and we both have power-hungry desktop computers and a laser printer. Clearly I needed to do something about it or we’d be tripping the circuit constantly, if not burning the house down. That meant spending more time in the attic.

Original electrical

This isn’t being used, but I wanted to share it anyway. This is the bare wire on porcelain insulators from when the house was originally wired. Because the house has remnants of gas lighting, we think it was electrified after it was built, but this wiring means all the flexible conduit stuff was a retrofit done years later. Before I get to my wiring escapades, I have one more attic discovery to share.

Zombie rat

Sarah was in the attic when I found this guy above the bathroom. He’s well on his way to decomposed, but was so stiff that I could stand him up and pose him for a quick photo. Sorry if you’re squeamish, but I was laughing like a little kid when I took this picture.

Anyway, back to the wiring. I disconnected the office from the bathroom. There was a line running from a box at the back of the attic all the way to the front of the house where it went to a blanked outlet. The box in the attic also went to an outlet in the kitchen. We turned off that circuit and I cut the line. Imagine my surprise when sparks came out as I cut the conduit! Whoops! An investigation of the box revealed three wire cable run from the basement. Basically there were two separate circuits coming into the box and splitting up, one to each outlet, and sharing a neutral. I swapped the two, which put the kitchen outlet on the same circuit as another outlet in the kitchen. That left me with a dedicated circuit for the office. I got that hooked up and ran the living room outlet off the living room fan.

High quality wiring

I thought everything was done, or at least, once I’d resolved a short in the kitchen ceiling fan receptacle and a mis-wiring of the bathroom light switch, until I came to the bedroom. You may remember this picture from when we took down the drop ceiling in the bedroom and disconnected the track lighting.

Ceiling receptacle

Well when I went to put the ceiling fan into the bedroom I realized that the receptacle was only a half-inch deep, and the way the fan mounted I needed a receptacle with a bit more depth. So we picked one up on one of our frequent trips to the hardware store. The problem was that the original receptacle was directly over a ceiling joist and nailed into it, while the deeper-set receptacle mounted to the side of it. No problem, just cut the hole a couple of inches bigger on one side and it’s all set. Well, I got into a bit of a hurry and grabbed the reciprocating saw, which would have been fine except that it’s plaster and lath, not drywall.

Ceiling problem

Crap. So I managed to get the new receptacle installed and the wiring connected, but now we need to patch up the ceiling before I can install the fan. Oh well, we’ll get there. Did I mention that cutting the hole caused a rain of dust, rat turds, and random ceiling debris? Onto the new carpet that Sarah just installed? Fun stuff. At least we’re almost ready to move in.

 

Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Kitchen

August 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Kitchen taped

Things are starting to come together at the house. Let’s see if I can touch on all the things that have happened in the last ten days. First, we got the bedrooms and kitchen taped off and I took my second try at the paint sprayer. I’m going to say that I like the results better with the pressure higher. A good primer/sealer and high pressure and you can do one coat of paint. The trick is to not put on too much paint (it starts to run) and follow along right away with a brush to touch up any spots that need it. It’s not easy when the goggles continually fog up and the paint coats the outside, but frequent breaks to improve visibility help a lot. The paint we bought stinks like ammonia, which made it hard to go for long stretches, but I got through it. Unfortunately it went through more paint than expected and we had to run out and get more.

Kitchen painted

After we got the painting done we brought in the cabinets. We got the cabinets second-hand, so they aren’t exactly designed to fit, but we came up with a combination that works pretty well and used most of them. We got a used dishwasher from some friends and got that installed next to the base cabinet for the sink. I got the plumbing mapped out and installed after only six trips to the hardware store. The girl at the return desk at The Home Depot suggested (on our second visit) that maybe I should hire someone. Ha!

Cabinet and dishwasher

Leveling the cabinets was interesting. The floor is not very flat and it took several shims to get everything straight-ish enough to get the counter top installed.  Once the sink was installed, the faucet was working, and the counter was screwed down, that’s when I decided to replace the faucet with the single handle model from the other sink. Of course, it turned out that one leaked and the hex bolt to remove the handle and fix the leak was stripped. So we wound up buying a new, cheapo kitchen faucet (did I mention the six trips to the store).

Sink installed, cupboards going in

We of course didn’t install the upper cabinets first, because it would have been the right way to do it. Sarah said it was fine to put them up high, but when she saw what we meant by “high” she said they needed to be lower. We got all the upper cupboards in and the next step is the range hood and the stove.

Cupboards installed

There’s another section of cabinets over by the refrigerator. We carefully measured to make sure the back door would open and still let us fit as many cabinets in as possible. It’s really starting to feel like a kitchen! I still need to attach the counter top to the other cabinets, but everything else is looking pretty good. Sorry the pictures are a bit fuzzy, the phone isn’t doing a great job. We took photos with the camera too, but they still need to be uploaded.

More cabinets

We’re probably going to put another tall cupboard above the refrigerator, just to maximize the storage space. It might look a bit strange because it’s one of the tall ones, and getting to the top will require a step ladder. Oh well. It’s getting there!

On other fronts, I’ve been working on electrical rewiring and installing ceiling fans, and Sarah installed carpeting in the bedroom and office. We’ll have posts for those items shortly. The big news is that we’re planning on moving in this weekend! It will be two months to the day from when we closed, and it’s time. We’re both tired from working every day on the house and driving back and forth from the condo is getting old. We started bring over some boxes and stashing them in the front room. Sarah’s going to clear out the living room so we can install quarter-round on the trim, and then make way for furniture.