Ceilings, Snow and Trees

Here are a few photos of the new ceiling, falling snow, and Xmas tree.

First, the new ceiling.

Before the new ceiling could be truly affective, large gaps between the new ceiling and the old ceiling had to be filled. We found that "Great Stuff" polyurethane foam worked quite well for this.

This year it snowed and our walls weren't open to the outside. Oh, the little pleasures!

And because the mood struck us...

Now With Fewer Rats

I just have not been able to get online lately. I guess it's just that hectic time of year.

Anyhow, a couple of weekends ago we continued where we left off - hanging ceiling drywall. The part of the ceiling that used to be the sun porch was finished, as you know, but that left the rest of the room. Hanging that drywall meant getting rid of some 2x4s beneath the second beam we put in, so it was time for what we like to call "surgical demo." We use that term to describe when we need to destroy something without destroying everything else around it. Enter the handsaw and chisels.

So about this same time, we'd been dealing with the rat. Considering its leavings, we figured it was only one. We had put all our food in the kitchen in plastic containers, and so the rat wasn't a problem yet, but we knew it could become a problem and we needed to take care of it. We weren't sure what the best way to kill it was, and so we put out both traps an poison. A couple days later, the traps still hadn't sprung. That was Friday, since we got the implements of rodent murder on a Wednesday.

That brings us back to Saturday, when we were doing our surgical demo. We'd been whacking on things, and stuff was falling down from the ceiling onto the floor. We'd been walking through the little passageway between the den and the laundry room/entryway all day, and then, suddenly, something was in the middle of the floor. It was a rat. A large, gray, fuzzy rat. It didn't look anything like the slick, glossy brown rat I had seen poking around outside our house over the summer.

The rat just lay on the floor. Its eyes were still shiny, and it was awfully fuzzy and cute. When we poked it, it didn't move. And so the poor thing died. It wasn't even stiff when I picked it up to take it outside, so it must have been pretty recently dead. We felt sad, but there wasn't much else we could have done. Poor rat. I hope it didn't suffer much.

Anyway, Sunday some friends came over to help us hang more ceiling drywall. It was the first time they had been over, and they were VERY helpful. We got most of it hung.

Because our room is so nice now, and we're actually hanging out in it, we decided to get a Christmas tree. So now we have a festive rat hole. It's almost like a home. Except that everything's still crappy. But I can finally see how it will slowly get better.

This past weekend, we finished up the ceiling drywall and confirmed the location of the Solatubes. It's gonna be good! Maybe if we're lucky we'll get all the drywall up by the first of the year.

We have pics on the camera, but I haven't really had time to download them, and when I might have had a second, I was too lazy. So if I post at all between now and 2008, I'll post those pics.

If I don't post, Happy Holidays from us at the Rat Hole!

Thanks Were Given

So, as you know, we were able to get the insulation up in time for our guests. The electrical inspector came on Wednesday and signed us off for cover, and so Wednesday night we put up some ceiling drywall so we could have the lights over our table at Thanksgiving.

Here's a photo of hanging the drywall.

The lights weren't as easy to install as we thought they might be - turns out the directions were horrible and it wasn't necessarily very intuitive to figure out. But figure it out we did, or rather my spouse did, and they ended up looking lovely. We put up the table, put paper on the floor to protect guests' socks from staples and glue, and voila! We had a functional room.

And a lovely, functional room at that. The light came through the windows nicely, and the lights are on a dimmer switch, so as it faded into evening we turned those on. We had six people over for Thanksgiving, and all eight of us fit comfortably at the table, and we played videogames in the room while dinner was in the oven. It stayed plenty warm in the rat hole, and everyone seemed to be comfortable. I think a good time was had by all.

For us, it felt like we were finally turning a corner. It is no longer unbearably cold in the house, and after such a pleasant week in our new room, we're feeling excited. It feels like we could actually LIVE here someday. It feels like it could be very close to the home of our dreams someday. We also feel proud of ourselves for creating such a pleasant space. We look forward to getting the drywall up and the Solatubes in so that the room has even more light and substance. Once the bookshelf is in and the fireplace is finished, it should be a charming room.

So, our sense of accomplishment and the company of our wonderful friends, combined with a warm and happy home, made for a lovely and fun Thanksgiving.

It's hard to believe that it's been two years since we closed on the house. What a long way we've come since then!

Insulation Installation

As I've already mentioned, we got our insulation delivered last Friday. They literally dumped it in our driveway, and it just sort of lay there on its side. It looked so funny that I ran to get the camera, but by the time I got back, the delivery guy had righted it and driven away.

Here's what we got ourselves into with the insulation.

When we had our framing inspection on Friday, I had a few questions for the inspector. One of the questions was to verify what R value of insulation we needed to put in our walls. He said R-19. I asked if that was true even for 2x4 construction. He said yes. I asked if R-19 would fit in our walls, since it was meant for 2x6 construction. He still said yes. So we panicked, and had R-19 insulation delivered instead of our original R-15. That night, we were doing some reading, trying to figure it out, and everything we read said that you couldn't fit R-19 in 2x4 construction without compacting it, which would reduce its R value to R-13. That made putting R-19 in our walls seem really stupid to us, since we wanted an R value of 15 or higher, so we traded our R-19 in for our original order of R-15. When we had our insulation inspection yesterday (which we passed!), the inspector, who's sort of the head inspector, said absolutely R-15 was the right choice, and confirmed all our suspicions about R-19. I believe his words were something along the lines of, "Oh no, you can't put R-19 in 2x4 walls. That's like trying to put 5 lbs of dog doo in a 1 lb bag. You just can't do it."

I liked our inspector. He was very helpful, nice, and knowledgeable. And after all our anxiety about the insulation inspection, he just stood in the middle of the room, turned around once, and signed off. All that worry for one minute of time. Oh well, we passed, and that's what matters!

So here we are installing our kraft-faced R-15 batts in our exterior walls. It went a lot more quickly than we thought it would.

My husband had a knack for getting the insulation without it bunching, so I decided not to mess with a good thing. He put in the batts and I followed with the stapler. 1500 staples and two days later, my arm and hand are still feeling destroyed.

Here's what the ceiling insulation, which is R-38, looks like when you cut open the package. It does this cool blossoming thing. We liked it.

The ceiling insulation actually went quite quickly. It was even easier than the wall insulation, in that we didn't have to cut around electrical things like outlets in the same way. We just had to cut around the can lights, and that was it.

And here's the view in the attic. It looks so fluffy and cozy!

We used formaldehyde-free insulation, and it held together really well. We hardly itched at all, although we still wore respirators and goggles and the whole bit. It took us about 5-6 hours to install everything, and we finished up about 1am Monday morning. Ugh, long day! But we got it done and now our house actually stays above 50 degrees. We can even turn on the heaters. Hooray!

The only bad thing is that the electrical inspector couldn't come out yesterday or today, so we have to wait to put up some of the drywall. But he said that we could put up drywall wherever there wasn't electricity run, so that's what well do tonight, and hopefully we'll be comfy cozy for Thanksgiving, or at least cozy enough.

The Fireplace Installation

We actually got the fireplace delivered last Wednesday, and worked frantically for the next couple of nights to get the thing installed for our framing and mechanical inspection on Friday, which we passed. Yippee!

Here's the fireplace, right were kbot and I left it on Weds. afternoon.

And here's where we needed to put it.

The above photo was taken after our final framing push, with everything all nice and measured and pretty. We went to put the fireplace in and whoops, it wouldn't fit. This was expected, since we would have to tilt the unit and slide it under to get it past the fireplace header (the horizontal member in the photo). No worries there. We tilted it, pushed, tilted it, pushed, and uh-oh, it will wouldn't fit. After about 5 seconds of really being worried, we realized we could just take off some brackets. That worked like a charm, and in it slid.

Next came the pipe kit for the chimney. When we ordered the fireplace, the salesperson had said we were getting a 6-inch pipe, and so when we measured we didn't order an angle kit because we thought we had a straight shot to the roof. What we actually got was an 8-inch pipe, which after the double-walls and safety whatnots, ended up actually being a 12-inch pipe. Which was just barely not a straight shot. We ended up having to lean the pipe a little bit, which worried us. When we tested it, though, with a bit o' burning something, no smoke came through any of the seams and it seemed to be drawing fine. I guess we'll find out for sure when we light our first fire! Hmmm, maybe we should do that before we put up the drywall, just in case...

Anyway, we were a bit worried about how the fireplace would look because it was just so darn big. Once we got it in, though, we were very pleased. It's a little wider than our bookshelf, and it actually looks quite nice paired with it. We think it looks so nice, actually, that we installed an additional pair of can lights to shine on the fireplace and whatever artstuffs we put on the mantel and hang above the mantel.

Here it is finished.

We spent a lot of time angsting about our framing, if it was okay, was it okay to tilt the pipe, etc. When the inspector showed up on Friday, he spent a good bit of time looking at things, and then signed us off, no problems, no issues. Which made us VERY happy. We also got our insulation on Friday, so that made us happy, too.

I'll leave you with a shot of the piece of our roof that we cut out to fit the fireplace pipe through. We thought it was sort of pretty, with the moss and the red-brown of the shingles. I think maybe the house has finally driven us insane, that we're considering this sort of thing pleasant to look at.

The Electrical Installation

Okay folks, now we're going to go back in time, since I finally have downloaded all the pics we've been meaning to share.

This post has pics that date clear back to our electrical installation. That seems so long ago now, even though it hasn't been long at all.

Anyway, here's me, finished with wiring outlets.

And here's a picture of our fan-forced in-wall heaters. Which are working splendidly, by the way.

And here's my poor husband, getting ready to crawl under the house to fix the wires that spawned the quest for mudrings and the subsequent wiring of a regular ol' box. This one was actually taken after the electrical inspection.

He scraped his head pretty badly on the last trip under the house, since he was basically belly-crawling between a layer of foil and kraft paper. Gotta love that low joist.

Since I have the day off, I'm going to take this opportunity to post tons of photos, so stay tuned.

Insu-&*%$#@-lation

Yesterday wasn't a stellar day. I was working from home, waiting for the insulation to be delivered, and waiting for our fireplace to come in so I could go get it, and all without taking off so much time from work that I couldn't leave home at 4 to get to an appointment. Plus I wanted to accomodate our stellar friend Kbot's schedule, since he was so graciously willing to come over in the middle of his workday and help out.

So I called the fireplace shop. And called. And left messages. And called.

And by 9:30 am or so I wasn't feeling positive about the insulation, either. So I called. They had no record of our delivery being scheduled. I didn't have an invoice. Emails and calls to the husband took a couple of hours to get answered; I suspected he had the invoice. The lumber place we ordered our insulation from called us back. Still couldn't find our order. Who had we talked to and ordered from? I couldn't remember. Finally the husband calls back - the invoice was in his truck, as I suspected. I went to call the lumber place back and realized I didn't have the name of the guy who I had been talking to. He called me just moments later. He had found our paperwork. Our insulation had never been ordered - the associate we talked to Sunday had to order it on Monday, but he was out sick Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday and Thursday were his days off.

I think my head exploded about then.

The guy who I had been talking to ordered the insulation for us, though. It should be here tomorrow. I dearly hope so.

Shortly thereafter, I finally got the call from the fireplace shop. Our stuff had come in! So I dashed over there to get it. I go to the will call door, and this tall, large man opens it up. He proceeds to move the fireplace, pipe kit, and everything else into the back of my truck. By himself. No buddy-lifting. Just him and his gigantic arms around the fireplace. I was in awe. It didn't help he was a flatterer.

I drove home, Kbot met me there, and we got everything into the house. The firebox was freaking heavy!! And there was another big box full of pipe that was also heavy. And that guy moved it all by himself! Pretty amazing. Strong guy.

So we finished the framing off last night, and the spouse did the pipes today. Hopefully we'll actually get the framing inspection we requested for tomorrow. I'll post pictures soon.

Fire-&*%$#@!-place

We have guests staying with us for Thanksgiving. They are low-key, flexible, tolerant guests, but they are still guests, and dear guests at that. The plan was to have drywall up for Thanksgiving so that all eight of us could eat dinner in the rat hole and be relatively warm, if not comfortable.

In order to acheive this, we needed to get our fireplace on Friday so we could finish framing it, get our framing and mechanical inspection on Tuesday, insulate and have our insulation inspection and our second electrical inspection on Friday or Monday.

Too bad our fireplace didn't come on Friday.

They said the trucking company was delayed in Oregon, and they wouldn't be delivering the fireplace until Tuesday. Okay, fine. I have a flexible work schedule, so I shuffled things around with work, as well as with a friend who we'll be dog-sitting for while she has surgery. (We're taking care of the delightful little sheltie we've dog-sat in the past.) I had called the fireplace shop twice yesterday and never got a call back, but my husband and I were hopeful that it would come in and we could spend all Tuesday night framing, no matter how late we had to stay up, and then request on Wednesday a framing inspection for Thursday.

Too bad the fireplace shop called me this morning and told us that the truck with our fireplace probably wouldn't get it until Weds. morning, if we were lucky. Fabulous. Our insulation is also supposed to come Weds. morning. And I have to leave at 4pm for an appointment. I don't much want to drive around with the fireplace in the back of my truck, and so a friend is going to come help move it into the house. Bless you, Kbot. Anyway, that's if I can get the fireplace at the right time. If that time works out with the delivery of the insulation. If, if, if.

And then there's the matter of getting the inspections we need, and getting the house passably warm for Thanksgiving. Nope, we're not freaking out, not at all.

Electrical Inspection

Last Friday we had our electrical inspection. It went pretty well, actually. He took a quick look at everything and thought it looked fine. We had to move our junction boxes up a bit higher up in the attic space, since they were sitting on top of the studs and wouldn't be visible above the insulation we wanted to use. No problem there. We also had put some wires that were going into the bedroom into a box, which turned out not to be cool. So we cut a hole in the wall on the hallway side and put it in a box there, so hopefully that'll pass muster now. He had said we could either expose it by pushing the box out a half-inch, or we could use a mudring. We didn't really know what a mudring was, so we went to the local hardware store. A friend had previously explained it to me, but it turns out I wasn't getting it. Turns out a mudring is a metal plate that goes over the top of the box that brings it flush with the drywall, so you can mud (i.e., use joint compound) around the box and still access the wires in the box. Go figure.

The other thing we had to do was fix our outside light, over what used to be the side door and is now our front door. The inspector was very unhappy we hadn't fixed it yet. O_o Um, what? Anyway, we replaced the light (wires had been run from a box to the right of the door to a crappy, unprotected porcelain fixture above the door. $4 and 10 minutes after we finally started on it we had it fixed. Still, when had he told us we had to fix it? I thought it was weird my husband never told me about that, since he usually had a good memory and attention to detail. We chatted about it, and it turns out that neither of us were actually there for our initial electrical inspection (back when the new electrical service panel was put in), and it was the electrician that was present. The electrician had never told us about the porch light. Oh well.

So, we got permission to insulate, and then we have our second inspection. We were hoping to do that this week, but we won't get to, for reasons I'll outline in the next post.

Original Imitation

The weekend before Halloween, after we tore up the floor for where the fireplace and built-in bookshelves will be, we decided to knock out the window in the nook. This window isn't an actual window to outside - it's a leftover from when the nook actually DID look outside southward, before the sun porch was built out. The window was boarded up, but the outline of it remained, which was strange.

We decided long ago to keep the window there, and open it up again for use as a pass-through. We thought it would be a cool way to keep an aspect of the original house and also open up our space a bit. So we opened it up to see what it would look like.

Here's from the nook side:

And from the dining room side:

We liked the way it looked quite a bit, a lot more than we thought we would, so out came the rest of the paneling.

As we were doing the demo, we realized a lot of the members were really cracked or sort of rotting, so we took a few out. Then we took a few more. And then we realized we really should just take the whole wall out. I don't know how this keeps happening to us. We thought this wall would be quick and easy because we only needed to remove a few things.

Not so. Here's the nook with everything removed. This wall will eventually be between the table in the nook and the table in the dining room.

We ended up tearing the window completely out, and then RE-framed the window.

So even though we were going to keep the window in an attempt to preserve the feel of the original house, we tore it out. And put it back in. So now it's a fake original window. We still like it.

I think that our north wall of the living/dining room is now comprised mostly of headers...oh well.

Floor News

I just realized over the weekend that I never got around to posting anything last week.

That was a shame, because I could barely remember what we did. I just got around to downloading the pictures today, and luckily they jogged my memory nicely.

Last weekend we made great progress on the electrical, and we also framed for where the fireplace and bookshelf will be. In order to do that framing, though, we had to tear up the floor down to the subfloor. I was actually pretty excited to do this, and not only because it wasn't nearly as fussy as the electrical work my spouse was trying to do. I was actually looking forward to seeing what sort of newspaper we would turn up this time, since I remembered what we found the last time we tore up the floor in that area.

The floor came up very easily last time. Not so this time.

Here's the floor with the topmost layer of flooring taken off, exposing the wainscoting layer underneath. That layer was relatively easy to remove, even though some of the nails were tough, simply because it was an actual flooring product.

The second layer wasn't fun at all. Not only were there a bazillion little nails, but the wainscoting would just shatter if I tried to apply any pressure to it. The nailheads would tear right through the wood, too, so I ended up with all these little spikes. Needless to say, we will not be using this technique or material for flooring in the future. Not that we would have considered it for a moment, but our opinions were merely cemented by the experience.

Underneath the wainscoting was a layer of whatever the precursor to linoleum or vinyl was. Maybe it was linoleum, I have no idea. At any rate, it was the stuff that had a wood pattern on it, the stuff that was the original floor of the house. That went, too.

And finally we were down to the newspaper. They were all from fall/winter 1934, which was very cool. More pics of the papers in a moment. Once the papers were peeled away, we were left with the original subfloor, which was very cool-looking. Too bad we can't just refinish and use those as our floors, but we really would like to actually have a subfloor, and plus it would be tough to replicate that throughout the rest of the room.

I tried really hard to save some of the newspaper, but it was just too adhered to the floor. I'm hopeful that when we start tearing up the rest of the floor, we can get a big enough piece in good enough condition to preserve. I took too many to post here, but I think you get the idea.

And this one was just too appropriate:

I'm going to try to post the rest of what we did last weekend, which involved pretty much ripping out another wall in the nook, as well as what we did this past weekend. It involves heaters and much happiness.

Patchwork Roof

We finally extracted what's left of the old chimney. It wasn't hard, but somehow having a huge hole in your roof is unnerving, and getting around to dealing with the chimney took some time. We could have picked a better day for it as well. It was misting in the morning, and by the time the repair was complete it was raining pretty heavily.

First the chimney came out. All that took was going up on the roof and lifting it out. If we'd only know it was going to be that easy! Then we had to rip off the galvanized sleeve that the chimney sat in. It was nailed and tarred in place. It wasn't too hard to remove. A little patience when removing the nails was all it took. Note: when roofing, knee pads are recommended. We'll remember that for the next round.

The patch was a cinch. We cut some plywood to fit the hole and nailed it in and supported it with some 2x4's.

We had to cut away the shingles that were surrounding the patch to prepare the area for new roofing felt paper and new shingles.

When the new shingles were being nailed down, the rain was really coming down. The room down below got a little wetter that we'd anticipated. All the rows of new shingles got nailed down except the last one (the top one). That one got glued in because there is no way to nail it in since it got sandwiched under the next row of old shingles. While the patch isn't the prettiest in the world, it seems to work just fine. Besides, we'll be re-roofing next summer for sure.

A note about the color... we couldn't remember what color our shingles were while we were at the store. We guessed wrong and were too lazy to go back and make the exchange. Oh, well. Our neighbors in the monstrosity can gaze at our handiwork.

It's a Wrap!

Last weekend we did a few sheathing repairs and wrapped our
exterior walls with Tyvek brand house wrap. It wasn't too hard. While
we could have used staples, we elected to use broad-headed
galvanized nails (as Tyvek recommends these nails as best for the job).
We wrapped up to the top of our windows but no higher because it got dark.
Hammering nails in the dark (even with the use of head lamps) is difficult
and somewhat dangerous in our experience (and we have a far
amount of that now).

We'll do the rest soon. We're trying to decide if we are going to use cedar lap siding or Hardiplank. The decision comes down to price and looks.

A Little Nookie

Okay, so it took me all week to get to this, but here it is.

Our big project last weekend was to replace the nook window. This would complete all the windows on the east side of the house, save the guest room, which we'll do when we get to that room. Replacing the nook window would allow us to reside, and so we ordered our window a while back and did it last weekend. The weather was fabulous, and the installation went pretty well. As you already know, we enjoyed the wallpaper discovery.

Here is the window as it appeared originally, in all it's single-pane, pellet-gun hole glory. Note the wood panelling. Gotta love it.



Luckily, the window wasn't very difficult to remove.



This is when we found all the cool wallpaper.



Oh, look. No insulation. At all. We weren't surprised, really. It just means that the entire front of the house probably doesn't have insulation, either. (Again, not surprised.) The paper they used to back the sheathing was very water damaged, but we couldn't really figure out why.



We ripped the paper out and had to reframe the window a bit, bringing it up to the same height as the new windows in the dining room. And we put in more of a header, since one didn't exist previously. It just seemed like a good idea.



And here we are with the window installed. Hooray! However, we really need to get out of the habit of installing windows at night. It's not fun. Ever. I think the only new window we managed to install during the day so far wasn't even a window-it was the sliding glass door. Still, we think the window looks nice. This one has a film over it to protect the glass, which we liked. The previous windows didn't have that nifty little feature.



Here's the outside of the house. We think it'll look really nice, once it's all wrapped up and sided.



We're trying to decide on siding right now. We've already done the de-siding, after all. Haw haw. (The blogging gets a little iffy around here at the end of the week, apparently.)

We're vascillating between 6" smooth-faced HardiPlank and 6" cedar. The HardiPlank is more durable, and cheaper, but you can't do mitered corners, which I LOVE. The cedar is more environmentally friendly, and you can do the nice corners. Since we're just siding a small portion of the house, the cost difference won't be that huge, which makes it a little more tough to decide. We'll have to make a decision soon. We need to order the stuff, and then we need to side as soon as we can so we can reattach our gutters. It's raining like crazy here with no signs of letting up.