Category: Livable Second Floor

Getting us to the point where we can move into the second floor apartment.

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).

Slow, Varied Progress

July 7, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Leveling the Toilet

I’ve been trying to finish a project so that I can write about it, but so far things have been going slowly and with several projects in flight at once, we’re not getting any one thing completely finished. Another challenge is that we’ve wound up having to do a lot of things that weren’t in the original plan. I knew the toilet wasn’t attached in the upstairs bathroom, but hooking it up has turned into an extensive bathroom project. Once it’s done I’ll cover it in a post, but for now enjoy the picture of the level toilet and the not-level floor.

During the toilet escapade I wound up having to re-mount the bathroom pedestal sink to the wall and redo the drain. That’s finally complete, but it took much longer than anticipated because I didn’t have the right parts or tools and as always it took multiple trips to the store to resolve it. The good news is that’s at least finished. We have a working and not leaking sink upstairs, which helps quite a bit.

Bathroom in progress

We’ve been re-tiling the floor in the upstairs kitchen, which Sarah will be posting about once it’s done. We’ve been fumigating and baiting the roaches with limited success (they are incredibly resilient, as you know), but are probably going to bring in an exterminator. The drop ceiling and track lighting in the back bedroom upstairs is down, another round of garbage bins have been emptied and re-filled in a day, though the backlog is starting to diminish.

Removing the lighting in the bedroom was interesting. They’d added a light switch in the wall, but it was just wired into the receptacle, which is also where several outlets were wired in. After we used the tester to get the circuit turned off I disconnected and re-wired it. The results as usual aren’t pretty but they’re a substantial improvement over what was there.

Ceiling receptacle

We now need to strip the cracked paint, clean the walls, bevel the top of the drywall that they put over the plaster with joint compound so that it blends in somewhat, tape everything off, and eventually paint. Then we can install carpeting and a ceiling fan and the room will be ready. Since this is just one room, and one of the simpler ones at that, I’m not feeling optimistic about moving in by the end of the month.

Sealing the Deal

July 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments

We needed to close some of the gaps in the outside walls to prevent critters from coming and going. This meant boarding up a few basement windows, adding a threshold to the main back door, and adding some wire mesh to a few other spots. We have our work cut out for us in the attic, but we haven’t gotten to that yet. For now we’re focusing on the ground level perimeter.

Basement window before

This fusion of plexiglass and incompetence was the laundry room window. I ripped all of it out, but left the original window intact, though it was missing a couple of panes. After tucking the wires into the siding to get them out of the way, I screwed a 2×2 cedar board into the bottom so I had a flat surface on all four sides. Cutting the plywood to fit was a trick because the brick foundation is parged in a stucco-like cement. After a few trims I got it in and screwed it in place. Then I painted it, filled the gaps with spray foam, and when that had set I sealed the edges with an exterior caulk.

Basement window after

The back door had a large gap under it, due in part to the porch sloping to one side and in part to the door being a standard size and the doorway being not. I cut out a clean space using the reciprocating saw and used a two by four, along with some shimming blocks to get it level-ish under the door. This wasn’t meant to be quality work, just create a nice snug fit for the door. We filled underneath with spray foam and painted the whole thing to keep the water out.

Back door threshold

The result wasn’t half-bad. I’m sure it could be better, but ultimately we’ll be tearing the whole enclosed porch down, so I wasn’t about to make it especially pretty. It’s now keeping the elements and the rats outside and making us feel a tad more secure.

Getting Started: Locks, Bugs, and Base Camp

July 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Front door

Right after closing we headed to the house and started work. After taking a bunch of “before” pictures to feature in our various projects, the first order of business was changing the locks. Even though the tenants were gone, we wanted to make sure they stayed gone and with the house empty and us not yet living there, it was important for it to be secure from vandals, squatters, and kids.

I’m a technophile, so I’m planning to eventually have some home automation tech for the lights, security, and HVAC. We bought some Kwikset locks because they sell a line of remote-controllable, combination dead bolt locks that are compatible with Z-Wave. We’d order those right away except they’re pretty expensive. I found one on eBay, but I’m holding off on getting any more for now. They also have a neat “SmartKey” technology that lets you re-key your own locks without having to go to a locksmith. I got those installed on the garage, front and back doors. For now we’ve left the interior front and back doors as-is, and we barricaded the lower back door with a board. If we’d gotten full lock sets for all of the doors it would have been a ton of money, and since we’re not going to have two units anyway, most of it would be a waste once we convert things.

With the disgusting state of the house and the roach infestation we decided to set up base camp in the relatively clean garage. In order to prevent any contamination of our condo, we’re changing clothes there and not bringing anything back with us. We brought, bought, and ordered tools, cleaning supplies, clothes, snacks and got our operations center up and running. We even brought our toaster oven and this weekend our grill so that we can cook food. Sarah’s able to work on the house during the day most days, but I’m at work until the evening. Since our condo is twenty-five minutes away, not having to go back and forth is pretty important.

Our first orders of business were “pre-cleaning” and extermination. Sarah started by getting some of the remaining garbage thrown out and I boarded up the basement windows that were letting rats in and out. In order to get rid of them you have to first isolate them: divide and conquer. Then, anything that the roaches were hiding in and feeding on had to be thrown out. That meant tearing out the carpeting, both kitchens, and taking down some of the trim. Then we removed the tile in the second floor kitchen and part of the first floor. This was much more demo than we’d planned on doing right away.

First floor kitchen demo

There are four “toter” style garbage cans for the house and we’d filled all of them within a day and a half. Once they were emptied we filled them up with a bunch more stuff. Because we’re in a bit of a hurry, we’re taking a multi-pronged attack on the bugs. We’ve used pyrethrin spray cans, boric acid, foggers, and sprayers. We’re killing them in droves, but we won’t be happy until they’re completely gone, and that will take a bit. We set a bunch of baited traps for the rats, but thus far haven’t caught a one.  We’re pretty sure they’re there, but until we’ve got all of the holes sealed they may just be feeding outside. Once they’re stuck and it’s the only thing to eat, they’ll probably go for it.