The old perches

That shovel is the only thing holding me up

That's a pile of block!

So, when we first bought the place, Emily and the kids remained in Nashville finishing out her job.  I started to work on the new place without their help.  My Dad came down and we went to town.  The steps were the first order of business.  I plucked the concrete pads from the wall and started digging.

Foundation...

Almost done!

The fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to get new, permanent steps in place was to form them from cement blocks.  Dad hauled numerous tons of block with his truck and we made our block steps.

Those steps served us well for 5+ years but eventually, the winter rains got into the block and froze, causing some of the blocks to crumble and break.  After near death (several times…I didn’t want to over-react afterall), we decided that the steps needed some work.  The kids and I chipped out the old block.  We had to cut sections out of some blocks, but most were pretty ok.  Abigail in particular seemed to enjoy the hammer and chisel so I see a possible career path for her if leader of the universe doesn’t work out.

I took a day off last week to form up frames so we could pour new concrete over the remaining blocks.  It was sort of difficult that way because we didn’t have a lot of extra room to make the steps bigger.  Too high and no one would be able to reach the first step, etc.  So, we poured another 1.5 inches or so on top of the old block.  I hand-mixed 17 bags of concrete on the hottest day I could find.   I didn’t think the van could handle carrying all 17 bags at once so I started mixing the third that I had and sent Emily on two more trips to get more concrete.

The framing waiting for concrete

Ahhh...music to my...feet? Arms and legs? Well, it was like music anyhow

We waited and fretted and finally unveiled the new steps sans framing.  The new steps are beautiful and hopefully will avert life-and-death situations for folks coming to visit.  After all of the work, we noticed that we forgot to write our initials in the concrete.  I figure we’ll revisit everything in 5 years or so anyhow, so maybe we can do it right the next time around!

Ok, I know, I am going on and on.  I just can’t imagine what would make someone decide to connect an obviously very skinny wire (diameter of 0.0201 inches) to a very not-skinny wire (diameter of 0.0808 inches…4 times the diameter of the other).  Even if you know little about electricity, I would think one would at least pause for a moment upon seeing such a difference.  Check this out for a graphic

Fortunately my house didn’t burn down.  I don’t know how previous owners didn’t have problems aside from the fact that the lights were probably rarely used because of their location.  As we work through the issues in this money-pit adventure of home ownership, I shudder to think of what else lies in wait for us.

Anyone else see crazy stuff in your house and wonder how you survive?

Anyhow, in the time I have on the weekends, I have been working on our house.  It’s mostly slow more so than steady, but I have to ponder my progress in between stopping points.  Emily wishes I pondered a little less I think, but I always have to work up the nerve to tear into the next portion of a project.  Once I start, I am usually fine…it’s just that starting part that’s tough.

Anyhow, I have been working on the basement bathroom for…uh…a year or more?  Yeah, I know.  Well, it’s because the shower had me scared.  Our basement shower has water pressure like a fire hose so that makes it potentially awesome.  The problem is that whoever installed it did so with absolutely no vapor barrier and with a drain profile that makes the floor so steep that it is hard to stand in.  It was really really ugly and poorly done too.  I decided to redo the whole mess and let it watery awesomeness be available for our usage once again!  Yeah, sounds good doesn’t it?  As I said above, I had to work up the nerve to do something about it.  Once I crack the first tile, all was well, but getting to that took a great deal of pondering.

I started banging on the floor with a sledge hammer and a chisel.  I needed to get access to the drain underneath so I could remedy that awful slope in the floor.  My house has a mixture of clay tile and cast iron drain pipes.  I originally thought that the shower drain was cast iron.  It had a cast iron top piece.  As I worked my way through the concrete, I discovered that the cast iron pipe was a decoy…it hung over a larger clay tile drain depending on gravity and good luck to let the water fall through the cast iron and into the clay…and it basically worked.  I was using an electric hammer to do a lot of the work (after an unfortunate finger/chisel/sledge hammer incident).  I worked without a care until I discovered the clay…holy cow I did not want to break that or replace it.  It was in great shape and under a lot more concrete so I decided to leave well enough alone.

The famed finger of the unfortunate finger/chisel/sledge hammer incident

Eventually I got it opened and in tact.  The clay tile is a trap so water was laying in the pipe.  I was able to feel through the trap and found that it was clear (yes, it is big enough for me to run my arm through it!).  The local plumbing supply place hooked me up with some pvc to join to the clay since my original plan to use a boot to cast iron was foiled.

I got the new drain in place and started the process of layering concrete and metal mesh and rubber liner on the floor to make a proper shower floor.  The original floor had a slope of 3 inches.  By code, the floor was supposed to have a slope of 3/4 of an inch.  

My shower is not yet finished, but at least I now have a vapor-barrier-enhanced-properly-sloped-much-nicer-looking-shower-in-progress!

Like a good dog owner, I want to protect Ginny from neighborhood dogs as well as gypsies, tramps and thieves…and Cher.

Oh yeah, lets’ take a moment to listen to Cher when she still looked somewhat human:

Anyhow, our house didn’t have a fenced in area so my cheap-skate brain kicked in and I started digging fence post holes.  Actually, we first had to cut down a mess of a tree that was on the one corner of the property where the fence was to go.  The tree had grown up pretty badly into the power, phone and cable lines that run on the edge of our property.

I marked the lines

Camo AND a chainsaw!

Again, being cheap, I couldn’t see paying someone hundreds of dollars when I could crawl up on a conductive aluminum ladder near the power lines to cut the junk down.  Slowly but surely, I was able to pick away at the branches until I could safely drop the tree.  Once done, I commenced digging and have almost completed the fortress as Isaac likes to call it.

The tree used to be at that far corner

(we did chainlink on one side so Ginny would be able to see out)

So the fence will be great for keeping Ginny safe, but it also hides the mess that my neighbors leave about in their yard.  They collect animals and stuff and just seem to be unable to haul all their junk to the curb on trash day.  I won’t rant too long (but boy I could).

Our view (sometimes) of the neighbor's yard...before the fence. Yes, it is a chewed up couch cushion.

Let’s just say that the thousand bucks we spent on this fence has saved us many thousands in mental health bills.  Emily has found her zen place behind our new walls!

Mine was worse than this...and it was raining

You see, in the spring-time, the black locusts make thousands of little leaves and flowers that fall off, oh…um…about this time of year.  They are small enough that they are not stopped by gutter guards so they accumulate in the gutters.  I clean them every year but if my timing is not right, they build up and absorb just the right amount of water from light rains to form a great organic gutter-dam when the heavy rains come.

Anyhow, the dam did its dam thing last night and backed up the gutter right above one of the window wells to a basement window.  We noticed water coming in the house and I looked up and saw water in the window.  It was like my own little aquarium!  I ran outside in the pouring rain (and I mean pouring) to clean out all of the gutters.  I really hate climbing a ladder in the rain but I was able to break all of the dams on all of the gutters which washed all of the dam junk out into the yard.

I had to go back and dip the water from the window well as best I could.  I guess I could have waited until it fully drained into the house but that didn’t seem like a good option.  By the time I was all done, I was soaked through to the bone…and then it stopped raining.

I am going to buy a new blade for my chainsaw today…

The most pitiful closet of all...lightless

We do not have excessive closet needs but we do have some closet needs.  Emily uses the closet in the master bedroom (which is smaller than the closet I had as a kid) and I use the one (of the same size as Emily’s) in the spare bedroom next door.  I guess to differentiate the master closet as special, the original builders included a pull-chain light in her closet.  My closet, however, being only a guest closet, was not likewise equipped.

Emily's closet...once a showcase for closet lighting

We’ve been doing all sorts of projects on the house and this weekend, as part of another bigger project, I decided it was time to remedy my pitiful light-less closet.  You see, a happy closet is one that has a light and a switch…not just a pull chain.  I am proud to say that I have the happiest closet in the house.  Emily’s closet, though once a happy closet, is now feeling switch envy.  I suppose it won’t be far behind mine as its owner won’t tolerate the closet’s whining for long.

What I used to see in my closet

My closet now...can you feel the joy?

Anyhow, for a short time at least, I have the happiest closet in our old house and another of my dreams is fulfilled!

I got some more stuff last night to try to fix the low spots.  One thing I got was a new level that would be large enough to span enough distance but no so large that I couldn’t put it crossways in the bathroom (so I got a 2 foot long level).  As I laid it all sorts of ways across the floor, I really started to see just how badly screwed up the concrete was.  No small patch was going to fix this issue.  The only solution in its current state would be to add another level of self-leveling concrete and hope it worked better.  Um…heck no.

Breaking up is hard to do...

Being a stubborn SOB (no offense Mom), I decided that there was no way this floor was going to beat me.  Luckily I have just the tool to remedy the situation.  Several months ago (years if you ask Emily), I started chipping concrete/plaster off of the walls of our office.  For that job, I bought a handful of new cold chisels.  They paid off once again.

The concrete mixer...isn't it cool?

I spent a good bit of time (and yes, more cussing) breaking up the screwed up concrete so I can go about this mess in an entirely different way.  The floor wasn’t too bad to start.  Once I get this concrete removed, I am going to manually level the few spots that aren’t even with regular portland cement or some other floor patch (not sure which yet) and move on.  Call this a $50 education for me I guess.  Education is always money well spent, right?

Well, I hope you can use my experience before you are faced with the same situation…breakups really really suck!

Neil has some thoughts on it too:

We have three bathrooms (thank goodness!) and it seems like one is always torn up for one reason or another.  Anyhow, I have been working on the one in the lowest level and am ready to lay tile.  In preparation, I checked the existing floor for low spots, high spots, spotted newts, see spot run, and giant red spots.  Unfortunately, I had several of these.  One can lay tile on a goofed up floor, but the goofs either break tiles or look like someone who knows nothing about laying tile laid the tile.

Not wanting to look like an amateur, I knew I had to fix unevenness of the floor.  I have never used self-leveling concrete before (I AM and amateur, I just don’t want to LOOK like an amateur), but I knew it was the solution for all of my floor-spot-related woes.  The idea is that one pours a somewhat thin layer of special concrete and then watch in amazement as the concrete covers the floor and dries to a smooth, level surface.  Sounds easy, right?

The blue primer drying

Well, mostly it is.  Let me back up…first I had to paint a primer over the bare floor so that the floor would look more blue.  I am not certain that it really did anything else, but I gotta tell you, it did a great job of making my floor more blue…so, it was a huge success!  The blue primer finally dried (Emily watched as I napped…she wasn’t about to let me sleep a minute longer than necessary…she wants this project done!) and I stumbled downstairs to mix the concrete.

Self-leveling concrete...still wet and almost smooth

Back when we first got the house, we bought a huge stirrer that you use with your drill.  It’s built to mix in a 5 gallon bucket.  We tried omelets a few times but it never seemed to taste right out of the bucket so we use it only for mixing paint and concrete now.  Normally, concrete is mixed in a bathtub or a wheelbarrow or something like that with a hoe and child labor.  The drill-mixer is not usually used for concrete, but the directions called for it specifically (good thing I pre-bought that tool!)  So I mixed a 50-lb bag of the stuff following th directions and then I spread it over the floor.  I had to move it around with a large float I made from old wood scraps.  That seemed pretty reasonable.  I didn’t expect to pour a bunch of concrete out and have it magically float evenly over the entire floor.

Dried concrete...almost level

The next part bugs me a little though.  I smoothed the concrete over the floor and had it pretty smooth.  To me, “self-leveling” meant that the stuff would flow evenly across the surface and sort of absorb imperfections in the floor…the low spots and tiny imperfections and such.  At first, it did appear that it was going to behave.  As time went on, however, it became clear that it wasn’t going to work quite like that.

The tile laid out...just begging to be installed...

I cussed it thoroughly and the floor mostly leveled as it hardened (and it hardened quickly), but it is by no means, perfect.  So, in the next day or so, I am headed back to the home improvement store to get some more self-leveling concrete to patch the few screwed up spots.  Part of my problem may be that I got rapid set concrete (not on purpose) rather than extended set…I won’t make that mistake again.

So let me warn you very clearly…if you ever use self-leveling concrete, be sure you have it pretty smooth/level as soon as you can…I’d hate for you to have to cuss your floor like I did!

I mentioned awhile back (many months I guess…holy cow!) that we’ve been doing some pretty extreme work inside of our house.  Stay with me here…I promise it is related.  We’ve hemmed and hawed, we’ve cussed and dodged and pondered and tried to do just about everything we could to make this project take as long as possible.  Of course, by “we”, I mean “I”, not that there was any doubt.  But now, as weather has turned from wonderful and sunny and nice to Winter, I’ve run out of excuses and had to buckle down and make some sort of progress on the house.

See...it's white!

See...it's white!

We water-proofed the walls on the outside as part of the foundation work we had done this summer.  I added additional water-proofing inside as an insurance policy and so I can satisfy my desire for over-kill.  We added foam-board insulation and studded out new walls from the uninsulated masonry walls.  From there, it was easy to add proper insulation and make the rooms usable.

Well, it's not white but it's new!

So, we’ve been mudding and sanding and mudding and sanding until our house is much like a dessert town after a sand-storm. There is grit and dust everywhere and for some reason, the cat’s fur and kids sock feet haven’t been able to keep up with the dust that has been generated.  That’s all until last night.  Last night, you see, Emily painted the drywall…there will be no more sanding in that room.  The walls are snow white with primer and absolutely look as pretty as I do in my beard…well, actually, a lot better than that…but you get my point!

The family room, office and lower bathroom are the worst as far as cold goes.  The walls are solid masonry…outside->brick->block->plaster->inside…basically a huge cold conductor into the house.  We demolished the office and bathroom first and have studded out new walls from the masonry and added water-proofing and insulation.

Uninsulated wall

For my birthday, my brother-in-law and his wife bought me a thermal leak detector…one of those devices that can take instantaneous  temperature readings from a distance.  So, now that I have the office studded out and insulated, I thought it might be fun to compare the wall temperature of the new area with the uninsulated space of the rest of the area.  The entire area is basically unheated now as we are working so I suppose the difference would be more significant if we separated the areas a bit more and actually heated the area properly.  Anyhow, in the new area, my temperature reading was 64.7 deg F.  Not more than 5 feet away, I took a reading on the uninsulated part which was 54.5 deg F!  So, without separating the areas much at all, I can still see a 10 degree difference!

Insulated wall

I took some additional readings which I thought were interesting.  In our bedroom, we suffer the same problem as the other rooms…the walls are uninsulated.  Although the are made of different materials, none of those materials is warm!  So, I took a reading on the bedroom wall which was 64.9 deg F.  I then moved to the new insulated window that replaced the old fashioned original windows.  The temperature of the window (windows are generally considered not to be great at keeping cold out) was 70.8 deg F!  I couldn’t believe the window was a better insulator than the wall!

The wall

The window

So, I am certain now that the insulation projects I am doing are beneficial and the new windows I installed are well worth the money!

So what about you?  Ever quantify changes you’ve made to your place?  Have any good insulation stories to tell?