Kings of the Trash Heap

This weekend went much better than last. Sunday was still wet, but the water was coming from the sky and stayed out of our house.

Saturday, however, was beautiful, and that was the critical day. We'd rented a 20-yard dumpster to get rid of our construction debris. We originally rented it because we were planning on re-roofing our house from scratch, but we had since since the folly of our plan and are now just going to re-roof right over it. Saves us some hassle and panic.

Anyway, the dumpster wasn't delivered until 7pm Friday night, so we didn't get started as early as we would have liked, but that was okay. Saturday morning a couple of loyal friends came over and we attacked the piles. Some of that debris had been sitting outside since we first tore out the living/dining room (a year and a half ago), so it was nice to finally get it cleaned up. We were worried that we weren't going to be able to fit it all in the dumpster, since it was looking pretty full after just the pile at the side of the house, and we still had the entire carport to do. But we made it! And our neighbors are liking it. I'm sure anything we do to make the rat hole less of an eyesore is a good thing in everyone's opinions. Little do they know that it will probably worse before it gets better, mwa ha.

Here are some pics.

The side of the house, before and after.

The carport, before and after.

The front of the house, before and after. We got rid of the weird, assorted pieces of rusted metal gear thingeys out front.

Me loading the dumpster.

When we were finished, we knew Sunday was supposed to be rainy, and since the garbage fee is determined by weight, we decided we didn't want to pay unnecessarily just because our garbage was loaded with water. Luckily, our lot came with an abundance of nasty old blue tarps. We spread a few out, and then got one from the deepest depths of our yard, which has been sitting undisturbed for who knows how long (we've never touched it). We think this is where the slugs for our entire neighborhood come from, judging by what we saw when we lifted the tarp. Anyway, this final tarp was actually big enough to cover the entire dumpster, which makes us think it was used to keep water off the roof at one point in time or another. Lucky us!

Unfortunately, some of our garbage poked up too far above the rim, so this morning we had to take the tarps off to reconfigure some of the stuff inside the dumpster. And then it poured all day. Oh well. At least it only got ONE day of rain instead of TWO. We'll see how much we end up paying.

Waterworks

So this last weekend we went to my high school reunion.

We swore we were going to turn off the water before we left, but we forgot.

We got up early in the morning on Sunday to return home, made a pit stop to see some family, and battled traffic all the way back to the rat hole. Loaded with stuff, we went to the door, opened it, and were immediately confronted by a waterfall. Pictures don't really do it justice-it was pouring out of the light fixtures and gaps in the ceiling.

Probably the smartest thing we ever did was install the water shutoff valve close to the house, and that's where my spouse ran as I dashed into the house to survey the damage. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor of the laundry room. The bowed floor worked to our advantage.

The carpet in the den had soaked up some of the water, but not enough to damage anything in the den. We had moved most of the stuff in the laundry/entry room when we were investigating the burst pipe rot that there wasn't much in there. Except our shoes. Pretty much all our shoes.

Most of the water was in the laundry room, with just a little bit in the kitchen, and we knew immediately what had happened. After all, this had sort of happened once before. The compression fittings we had put up in the attic space to temporarily repair the lines to the washing machine had let go. We don't really know why. He rushed up into the attic space and began to drill holes in the ceiling to drain the water that was sitting up there.

I caught the water below in buckets, sponging it up as best I could with a mop.

You can see in the photo that I'm wet, but I was actually pretty soaked. My hair was all wet, my clothes were mostly wet. The washing machine was full of water from the ceiling, and the pails filled up really quickly once the ceiling drain holes were drilled. This water wasn't just any water, either. The water that was raining down upon everything was tea made from old blown-in insulation from who knows when, mouse carcasses and droppings, and D-Con. Lovely thing to be drenched in.

Several hours later we'd gotten the sodden insulation out and mopped up most of the water. It was really late, but luckily our managers were really understanding, and I worked a half day the next day. We took the time partially to rest and partially to clean up. I had to tear up a lot of the linoleum and some of the den carpet while he converted the compression fittings to threaded fittings.

The linoleum was really old, and because it was so wet, the glue stuff was really sticky and nasty. It horrible, and the floor was all wavy. In fact, our dryer seems to have sunk a little bit. Not a good sign.

We're probably going to have to tear out all the wood in that room, floor joists, footings, and all. It's just a mess. But it could have been worse - it could have been the rest of the house as well. As it is, the damage is isolated pretty much to that room.

And we're thinking about running the plumbing under the house when we redo it.

I meant to post this sooner, but being tired from the weekend combined with working late to make up the lost time and going to classes for work hindered me.

This weekend we've rented a dumpster (that was supposed to have shown up 5 hours ago, so we're not hopeful it will shoe up at all) for all our construction garbage. We'll finally be able to rid our lot of some of the crap that's lying around, which would be really good. It's even better because we suspect that rats have moved into a pile of lumber just off the side of our house. We saw a big, brown rat on Monday morning as we were standing on the porch.

I seriously doubt it lives in the house with us. Rats are smarter than to live in such a run-down place.

Den of Destruction

So after another weekend away, we made some progress on the house. We managed to demolish another wall in our scheme to make the entryway to the den bigger, and we did the demolition necessary to move the kitchen door. Now all that's left is reframing. Hooray! We also got the materials needed to start doing the ceiling joists, and hopefully we'll be getting the supplies to do our truss in the next couple of days. It will be so nice to take down all the random supports we have nailed in.

Here's the wall of the den, ready to be taken out. This is the original exterior of the house, which was pretty cool to see once we got all the crappy, white-painted wood paneling off.

Here's what it looked like once we got it out.

And here it is all the way out, from the view standing in the living/dining room.

The first permanent ceiling support went in, much stronger and better than the original, in our opinion. You also get an idea, hopefully, of how much taking out the walls expanded the space. Pretty much the entire den is open now, and the house feels less claustrophobic. What a difference!

And, finally, here's the final demo of the kitchen doorway.

We'll be moving the door all the way over to the right to give ourselves more counter space. We'll see how it goes. I should have taken some "before" pics, but I'm a bad blogger and am going to make you go fishing through the archives.

All in all, a pretty productive weekend.

Half-Strapped

Well, we have gotten pitifully little done since the last post, mostly because we've been doing fun things. We've had family in town, and gone to see family, and will have family in town again this weekend. Which is very, very nice, actually. But it does push back timelines for getting stuff done on the ol' rat hole.

We did manage to get the beam halfway strapped down, though. We need to do surgical demolition to strap down the other side, as we're not ready to take out the ceiling in the den yet. It's one of the few rooms we actually live in.

Anyway, in these photos you can see us putting the support for the north end of the beam in. About where my husband's rear end appears is where the fireplace will be, as well as a bump-out (which will be obscured by the fireplace) for the fridge so that it doesn't stick out so far into the kitchen.

In this picture you can see where we're going to move the opening from the dining room into the den. Next we'll have to open up the wall to the north end of the beam, and we'll be almost finished with the framing of the room. We have to move the kitchen door, put in the ceiling joists and scissor truss, and then we can start running electrical wiring. Hooray!

It's Beam Fun

As promised, here are photos of the beginning of the second beam installation. Hopefully we'll get some time to attach it this weekend, but we're not holding our breaths, as hanging out with family not often seen definitely takes precedence. But we'll do our best.

Now that you've seen the new floor plans, these next photos will hopefully be as exciting to you as they are to us, since they're the first steps in making our sweet little rat hole a fun, usable house with good space.

In this picture, you can see that we're putting up the braces to support our roof while we do work on the beam. This is the third time we've had to support our roof while working on the house, for those of you counting. I doubt it will be the last.

In this picture, we've removed the roof supports, the old beam, and some of the old framing on the left (we left the paneling in the other room intact, seeing as how that's one of the few rooms we actually live in).

And now here we are with the new framing taking place. You can see the new wood that marks the edge of the closet and where the new south wall of the den/living room will be. We actually got down to the subfloor in the excavation of the old framing in that section, and it looks like the original 1935 wood floor. It's sorta neat. It'll be interesting to see what it actually looks like when we tear up everything above it.

And finally, we have the beam.

It's not attached to anything yet, as I've mentioned before, but it's up there, ready to be installed. It was MUCH easier than the previous beam! Anyway, you can see where the two ends of the beam are. One end rests on the new closet space, and the other is where we'll put the other post (and eventually the fireplace). The wall that's visible underneath the beam will all be taken away and provide a nice, wide pass-through between the den and the dining room.

I think this weekend, between family events, we might go look at antique front doors, which really, really excites me. Funny, I've ALWAYS hated shopping, but I sure do love shopping for stuff to use in or on my house. Go figure.

Plans Have Changed

So, ever since we moved in and realized that the side door was now the front door, we've been trying to figure out where the heck to put the washer and dryer. We don't want it in the entry portion of the house, but where else to put it? We've had a few ideas, but none of them really felt right.

Well, the 4th of July was our Independence Day from packed front hallway nonsense. We took the day and redid our floor plans.

The original plans were posted on May 17, 2006 (over a whole year ago).

Here's the new phase 1 plan (no additions necessary):

What we've done is turned the hallway into closet space. This necessitates us pushing into our den space a bit, but we have plenty of room to do so with the installation of our new beam. We realized that once we did that, we could move the beam far enough to the north (right, as you look at the drawing) that the fireplace would be visible from both rooms, which would add a nice atmosphere and make the two rooms feel more connected. Plus then we'd have dedicated coat closet space in the entryway, which would become just an entryway and not a part-time laundry room. Hooray! Turning the hallway into utility/closet space also increases our storage, which is something severely lacking in the house. We also took string line and measure out how far we'd want to bump out the bathrooms into the guest bedroom. We think it'll still leave plenty of room in the guest room if we do so, and it'd be really, really nice to expand that hall bath (not to mention put a bathtub in the master bathroom). We also made a bump-out for the fridge so that its door doesn't stick out in front of the cabinets and gives us a bit more room to walk through, and we switched the oven to be away from the wall, which should also work out.

Then, of course, you have phase two of the building plans.

This is what our actual goal is. This floor plan allows us to have good closet space in all the rooms, have a nice great room that's living/dining/den area, and a good-sized spare office/guest room. We think that this plan works best, and we're really excited about the whole thing. Now we just have to find the money to do those additions...

In the meantime, we worked on putting in the second beam this weekend, which I'll post pictures of later this week. We want to get the beam in, and we're going to replace the eastern window in the nook so we can re-side that side of the house before winter. We've been researching insulation, electrical stuff, etc., but all that pales in comparison to the true prize: shopping for a front door. Mwa ha- I'm really looking forward to finding the perfect front door for the little rat hole, and since we have to redo the entry way this fall anyway because of the rot, there's no time like the present.

Birds = Blocked

We had beautiful weather again this weekend, which made it a bit tough to work on the house instead of play. We compromised by doing a little bit more work on our new hedge strip. Since that strip of land gets more sun than anywhere else on our entire lot, it's the ideal place to grow vegetables and other edibles, and so we went out to the nursery and got a whole bunch of stuff. We just put different types of groundcover at the beginning of the driveway (I can't tell you exactly what because I'm not very knowledgeable about plants), such as corsican mint, cottoneaster, rosemary, something with purple flowers, and some sort of cute moss. Throughout the driveway we put more rosemary, corsican mint, orange mint, chocolate mint, a few different kinds of basil, a few different kinds of oregano, and strawberries (some of which have tiny baby strawberries on them right now). At the end of the driveway nearest the house, we planted chives, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and roma tomatoes. We're very excited for them to grow.

Then it was on to the real purpose of our weekend: bird blocking. Ever since we put up the walls and the windows, the wall's still been open at the top, allowing insects to enter. Bee-creatures of all varieties especially liked to visit. Plus the bird blocking was the last thing we needed to do before we put in the 2x4s that will span our ceiling between that wall and our new beam. Every single roof rafter pair had a different spacing, though, which meant we had to make each piece of bird blocking separately and to custom measurement. It was a pain in the butt, as was nailing so close to the roof, but it's done now and we're quite happy.

You can see that we also finally put the flashing up around the windows. We'll put up the Tyvek house wrap later, as we need to replace the eastern-facing window in our nook as well so we can put siding on that side of the house before winter. We think the bird blocking turned out pretty well.

We get the 4th of July off, so we hope to clean up our living/dining area and begin work on putting the other beam in. Once that's in, up the ceiling joists will go, wiring will be done, and we'll be getting ever-closer to having a complete room in our house.

Hedge Hogs

Have I mentioned before that we have the nicest, sweetest neighbor in the whole world?

He's really wonderful, and we're lucky to have him. He lets us borrow things, helps us out, and is just a nice guy. His family's nice, too. Anyway, our driveway goes along the portion of the private road that's in front of his house, and the pavement has crumbled over time. So when we were talking about a hedge, he was very supportive, and even went halfsies on the plants with us. He's been doing a bit of work here and there, and was going to finish up on Sunday whatever we didn't get done, but we got a hair up our butts and went nuts. We just finished the whole thing. ^_^ So our nice neighbor felt sort of bad he didn't do more work on it, just because he's so nice. It was fine - we really were the ones that hogged the hedge. In reality, it's we who are grateful to him for helping us out when it's not his driveway being beautified.

Anyhoo, I had been shoveling dirt after work last week, and this weekend we finished it off. I want to say we ended up putting in 8 or 10 yards of topsoil or so, and then we planted every single plant. We ended up with six extra, but some were scrawny and so we planted those a little more closely together. You can't really tell, in my opinion.

So here's the photo bonanza. We think it turned out very, very nice, and we've already gotten comments from some other neighbors (who are also really great folks) on how good it looks. It's so nice to actually see some progress made on the house. We feel really great about our new hedge.

Stonewalling

Before I get into our hedge and the wall, I wanted to post a pic of the rot in our laundry room. The rot discovery and the water coming out of the ceiling happened over Memorial Day weekend, just to anchor it in time a bit better than my last post.

Appetizing, eh?

Okay, now back to the wall. We got the first batch of bricks back in May, and in preparation pulled out the reflectors and t-post at the end of the driveway so we could prep the area, such as dig out some of the driveway gravel where the planting bed would be. It was a rainy Sunday, and so as soon as we got the bricks unloaded, we went inside. We came out a half hour later only to find that someone had already driven over the strip between the private road and our driveway! In case you don't recall, this is where the French drain we put in last fall goes, and if someone drives over it, it can get crushed. We were pretty pissed that within minutes of pulling out the stake, someone drove over it. So, we had to put bricks down in the pouring rain. Fun.

We did it, though, and over the week after Memorial Day, we finished it off. It looked surprisingly nice. Here's the view from the street (where the post stands is where the car drove over when we pulled the post out).

And here's the view from our house, when the wall is not quite complete.

Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures of the completed project!

Whew

Well, what a whirlwind month that was!

We were busy trying to make our house livable for my family while they were here for my mom's surgery, and she was with us for a few weeks after that, so that's what we've been up to.

Now that my school's over, we're settled into our jobs, and everything looks to settle down until the streams of family come visit in July and August, we're trying to get stuff done on the ol' rat hole once more.

We ended up catching the possum in a large live trap, and took care of it for several days. Turns out it really liked to eat grapes, apples, and, of course, cat food (both dry and wet). I thought it was adorable, but my brother was of the opinion that it was horrible. *shrug* Anyway, we sprayed antibacterial stuff on its wound while we had it, gave it lots of food and water, and it seemed to be doing pretty well. There's a place here called PAWS (Progressive Animal Welfare Society or something like that - paws.org) that accepts wildlife, rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild. We took the possum there, and we hope they were able to help it get better and now it's happily building leaf nests somewhere.

Shortly after the possum was trapped, my trusty spouse went under the house to see what the damage was. That's when he found the leaf nest the possum had made in our plumbing, and he fixed the hole where it had entered. Our crawl space should now be secure. Anyway, while he was under there, he noticed that one corner of the house (the northwestern corner, the one under the laundry room-cum-entryway that has the car jack holding up the floor joist) had rotten wood and mold growing.

Now, I had been smelling something moldy in the laundry room for a while, especially once it got warm, but my spouse assured me it was just crappy, torn-apart old house smell. I didn't really investigate further. Once he went under the house, though, it was pretty obvious that the copious amounts of rot and mold were what was causing the smell. So, we moved the washer and dryer, opened up the wall, and ta-daaa! There was plumbing. Cracked, leaking plumbing. Turns out the laundry plumbing wasn't where we thought it was, and at some point in time (probably this winter) it had frozen and cracked. There was no insulation in the wall, which contributed. So we need to tear apart the laundry room this summer instead of the kitchen. I was so looking forward to having a kitchen...but oh well. We'll be able to reconfigure that room to make it more of an actual entry to our house, which will be nice. We'll also be able to widen what's now the front door, which will be VERY nice.

Once we figured out the plumbing was cracked, we immediately shut off the water and ran some new pex line. Since we're redoing the laundry room now anyway, we simply drilled holes in the ceiling and ran the plumbing down. We'll redo it nicely later on. Anyway, we had to use compression fittings to get the pex and the old galvanized to fit together. I was happy because I could do my laundry in hot water for the first time in a long time. I did several loads, and then, right before bed, we hear this odd sound.

The sound was water pouring down out of our ceiling. Turns out the compression fitting had let loose in the hot water (after time, apparently). So my spouse hurried into the attic as I ran to shut off the water, and we spent a good amount of time shoveling wet insulation/rat poison/nasty other bits into trash bags. The smell was AWFUL, and bags of wet insulation are very hard to carry. Plus Spouse found a mouse skeleton (intact, dessicated from poison), which was gross. We got everything cleaned up, and we haven't used hot water since. No lasting damage was done, as far as we can tell, and we'll find out for sure when we rip the whole thing out.

Other than that, we've been busy building the little strip for our hedge. We have the wall built and plan on finishing up this weekend with the dirt. We'll plant next week.

Stay tuned until then for pictures! Now that summer's here, we plan to have a lot more posts and get a lot more done.

To finish up, we got our official property value notice in the mail for our taxes due in 2008. The value of our property actually went up. I'm sure it's based on some other factors, like comparable sales, market conditions, etc., because it's pretty dark obvious that they haven't seen the place!