A Hole in the Wall

We are going to visit my spouse's family in Montana this Xmas. Thing is, there's this big hole in our exterior wall.

We'd hoped to be finished with the framing in this area before Xmas, but that didn't happen. We both got sick (and busy). In order to feel more comfortable leaving for the weekend, we boarded up the hole with 2 pieces of 4'x8' 5/8ths plywood sheathing (that we will reuse during the framing process). We also stapled some plastic over the plywood to protect it.

We should have done this days ago. Very ghetto.

Jingle Bell Rock

This first photo is for everyone who wonders about rain in Seattle. My brother-in-law left the wheel barrow out (we usually keep it under the carport) after his visit at Thanksgiving. If you remember, it snowed a lot right after Thanksgiving so we didn't bother to move the wheel barrow. This photo shows the wheel barrow three weeks later. The snow and additional rain have filled it right up. At night, the water in the barrow often freezes solid, though lately it's only been skinning over. I dumped it today (through the fence into the neighbor's lot). His grass and trees needed the extra water. They looked parched.

As my spouse mentioned in the previous post, we scored some rock. One of the landscape contractors that I work with (I work for a landscape architect) is moving his yard and offered me first choice on some of the crap he doesn't want and doesn't want to move. He knows that my spouse and I have a fixer-upper and is a really nice guy. Mostly what he has is a lot of stone left over from old projects. What's the one thing nobody wants to move... that's right... heavy stuff. I've always hated carrying boxes of books when I've moved and I think landscape contractors must feel twice as strongly about stone.

My spouse and I were in the area and drove by to take a look. There sure was a lot of nice stone. We were a little hesitant since stone is heavy and the most we feel comfortable loading up my spouse's truck with is about a half ton. The contractor could sense our desire for the stone as well as our hesitation. He said we could use his company truck if we wanted. Wow! Now we couldn't refuse. The truck is one of those Isuzu NPRs that are the workhorses of small companies. This one even has a dump truck feature. Double wow! We said we'd come by the next day and take as much as we could.

This all happened during the weekend that we were living at our friends' place in West Seattle (due to lack of electricity everywhere else). My spouse wasn't feeling 100% so I was on my own. I called up a friend who had said that he likes hard manual labor and convinced him to come and help me move rock. Loading the stone was time consuming. We could only carry 2 to 3 rocks at a time. In the end, we were able to get about 4 tons of stone into the truck before we just couldn't motivate ourselves anymore. The stone is of three different varieties: gray with orange highlights, gray with purple highlights, and gray with brown highlights (sorry, I don't know the names of the varieties). They look like basalt.

Here's photo of N-friend at our house about to be crushed by the stone. Watch out!

Actually, I was planning on stacking the stone on pallets at our house. N-friend said to me that it sure would be nice if we could dump the rock in the driveway instead of unloading the truck by hand (he didn't know about the dump feature on the truck). At first I was hesitant because I didn't want the rocks to break apart but after moving a couple of rocks by hand, I fessed up that there was a dump feature and that we should use it. N-friend was nice enough to take some photos of the process.

The stone just wouldn't slide out of the truck bed at first. Finally after lifting the dump bed almost as far as it would go, some of the rock slid out. At little more lift and the rest slid. I had to drive the truck forward a little to allow the rocks to have a place to fall since they were piling up on one another. Using the dump truck made me feel so professional. Kind of like I knew what I was doing.

Here's a photo of the pile of stone (as well as the empty pallets). The pile is a lot bigger than the picture makes it look.

Our plans for the stone is to build a column at the end of our driveway to mount our house address on as well as to build a small planter wall along the edge of the driveway. The planter will be primarily for a hedge that we are going to plant so as to separate our driveway from NE 146th Street (seen in the above photo just beyond the stone pile and red truck). Our nice neighbor on the other side of 146th is going to contribute to the hedge fund. Should be nice in the end. Here's a concept of what our driveway entry might look like.

After dropping off the stone at my house, we when back to the landscaper's yard and N-friend got some flagstone for his backyard. We went through the same process of loading the stone and dumping it. I've offered to help him install the flagstone when he has time (which will likely be in the spring sometime).

Happy Solstice!

Windy Shitty

Excuse the language, but it's the way we feel.

So, in case you haven't heard, our area got hit with winds around 93 mph on Thursday night. We got curtains of rain. So much rain that water was squirting up in the air, 4 feet up into the air, through storm drains. Not pretty. We've had really weird weather this year. First there was the snow storm, and now this weird week of wind. I was home sick, so I missed the flooding on Thursday night, but my spouse came home SOAKED from picking up a movie. His clothes were totally saturated, and he had only been outside for a moment or two. Anyway, the power went out late Thursday night/Friday morning. No power = no heat. Which would have been okay, had we a fireplace. Or, you know, WALLS. The temperature dropped very quickly on Friday. My place of work was open, but I was still sick. A friend called around noon and invited us to her place in a different part of the area. She still had power. Bless her heart! She and her husband, good friends of ours, took us in (we're still staying with them - still no power). Special thanks to them for providing us with heat, hot showers, a good bed, and wonderful company.

It's funny how much we miss the rat hole. As crappy as it is, it's still our home.

Also because of the wind, my brother didn't end up getting to come into town this weekend. The radar at the airport went down, and so his flight got cancelled. And he rescheduled. And it got cancelled again. So he gave up. No brother for me this week, and no huge push on work on the rat hole. *sigh* That means we gotta wait until after the new year to break down the old walls and put in the new.

In the meantime, we got rock. Mmmm. Good rock. My spouse will write more about that later, with pictures. Yay pictures!

The "bad" news: No damage was done to the icky house in front of us in the windstorm. The good news: our house didn't get damaged at all, either.

Monstrosity Update

No, I'm not talking about our house. Our house is the rat hole, not the monstrosity. ^_^

So, the horrible house (the monstrosity) in front of ours is finally on the market. It has been on the market over the past few weeks, but it wasn't really ready to be shown. The agent had an open house this weekend, and I only saw one family show up. I made sure to sit in the nook, dressed in my red bathrobe with messy hair, and stared at them whenever they looked my way. It was a good time. We're hoping that our blue tarp, tires, and piles of broken concrete in the front yard help the property values. Part of me wants to do worse things, like make sure I'm walking around naked, or pretend to have screaming fights with my spouse and throw bottles against our fence so they shatter, but I just can't bring myself to do it. Plus it's too cold and I'm too busy. Heh.

Here's a link:
Kenmore Area Home in Kenmore (I kid you not)

In other news, the old guy that used to own the house, the one that lived here for so many decades and had the train set, stopped by and chatted with one of our neighbors. According to the neighbor, the previous owner said he liked the house "better before the other one was built." Apparently he used stronger language than that, but the neighbor was too nice to repeat it. At any rate, it was neat that he stopped by the neighborhood, even if neither of us got to visit with him. It just reinforces the community consensus that the new house is not a good addition to our neighborhood.

We were way too busy last week and this weekend to do any additional work on the house, although we're still feeling triumphant about the beam. It's so much nicer in there! My brother's coming out again next Friday and will be here until Christmas in order to help us out. The plan is this: knock out the remaining walls, reframe, put up plywood, and install windows. We probably won't get the sliding doors installed, but that's okay. We'll just nail up wood in the meantime. That way the house will be closed up when we go visit my family for the holidays. Then, when we return, we'll be in good shape to reframe the rest of the room, put in the other beam, and then we can get the framing inspected. If it passes, it's on to the next part - installing electricity, and that means heat, glorious heat. It won't be in time for the holidays, but the fact that it's on the horizon is enough for me.

Beam Saga Finale

It's been getting cold here. Sometimes the windows ice up. Here's a photo of the kitchen window above the sink from one morning last week.

Despite the cold, we've been moving forward with our construction efforts. With the posts in place and the beam in location, we've secured the beam with some Simpson Strong Tie brackets. With the beam secure, we've added 2x4 supports between the beam and the rafters. Before all of this, there were five such supports (though not directly under the rafters). Now that we've rebuilt this area, we've installed eight (one under each rafter). This is a big improvement. With the rafters supported, our makeshift roof supports have come down. Here are 2 photos of the process.

It's absolutely amazing how much better the space feels without the low beam. The higher beam makes the living room space feel very open and unimpeded. Plus, without the makeshift roof supports in the way, it's much easier to get from one side of the room to the other. Here are a couple of photos of the finished beam assembly.

The second photo looks fish-eyed (distorted) because it is. The beam is not warped. In fact, I can hang on the beam and it doesn't flex at all. However, my B-i-L hung on it while he was visiting and he got it to flex, but he's a little bigger than me.

Here's a photo of me not reaching the future location of the finished ceiling. What a big difference the beam relocation makes! We had initially considered leaving the old beam where it was. We are so happy that we decided to replace and lift the beam. The effort has been so worth it.

The ceiling joists will be face mounted to the beam and the drywall boards will be screwed directly to the bottom of those joists and the beam. The next step is to build new roof supports and rebuild the exterior walls so that we can raise the ceiling on the east side of the beam (shown in the "Praise the Beam" photo).