This cOld House 17

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post. Progress has slowed considerably on the open projects and things have calmed down. Thankfully, after three solid days (and 4 inches) of rain, we froze solid. While the water under the house is unaffected by this, at least we no longer have to deal with runoff from up the hill. (It runs into the back wall of the house, seeps down along the wall to underneath the various levels of the basement, and then percolates back up from the hydrostatic pressure through minute cracks in the the floors and walls.) Also, the dusting of snow we've been getting almost every night tends to blow/slide off the roof before it melts and leaks into the house. So we are relatively dry inside. Here's where we stand:


ROOF - we are about 3 weeks out on the roof repairs. The copper around the big chimney all needs to be replaced. We are also doing the flashing on the back dormer and the window pan for the girls' bathroom. Additionally, we are mortaring the chimney cap and re-pointing the really badly deteriorated areas, and then sealing the brick and mortar to help arrest any further water damage on the chimney. Also, we've begun to lose slates on the south face. This is the loooooooong side of the roof. Once one pops out, all the others around it get loose and it's just a matter of time, (or a big wind) before a whole lot of damage is done. We are doing a total tear-off of a square and a half, (a square is 10 feet by 10 feet, or 100 square feet,) and replacing it all. We had planned on doing a section at a time starting with the worst looking areas, but the leaks and damage that have surfaced are necessitating a rather large portion to be done this year. We'll continue as planned next year, doing one copper window pan and replacing individual damaged slates on the front hip.


We added a sump-pump in the lowest level of the basement. (What a messy job that was.) There was so much water under the house that when they jack-hammered through the slab, a small geyser erupted. It was only a one day process and judging by the amount of water we see being continually pumped out, it was the right move. This has stopped the leaking - we think. We won't be able to tell if it works until the spring thaw, when the water begins to move freely again. Also, because the sump-pump piping will eventually be tied into the drainage system around the new garage, it's just a pipe sticking out of the basement wall that dumps the water at the base of said wall. Dan thinks most of the water keeps making a round-trip. Time will tell.

I was able to chip all the glazing off one of the bathroom windows and get the leaded sash out of the steel frame. Rob has the frame and is working on replicating the wood for the girls' bath. We also got a the estimate for re-glazing the windows in place. This won't allow us to refurbish the wood frames but it is a quarter of the cost and should stop further water damage as well as tighten up the air flow. We have pretty well decided we will stick with the old windows. We just have so many options for improving them - total re-furbishing at $1000 per sash, glazing for about $250, a hybrid of us versus someone else doing it for peanuts, and then adding storm windows in areas where we feel we need them. Between all of these solutions we can tailor our choices to match each windows' requirements. (Some are worse than others and need total refurbishing, others just need glazing and a storm window.) I'm satisfied it's the right decision.

The girls' bath has come to a screeching halt waiting for us (Dan and I) to get it painted. I thought I was close but then the Paint-Nazi got involved last weekend and decided to rip out the medicine cabinet, re-sand and tape all the cracks, and generally make the 85 year old walls 'perfect.' We didn't get the prep done last weekend, this weekend is a guard weekend, next weekend I'm off to Lexington to do some visiting, and so we are at least another three weeks out.

The concrete guys showed up early on Monday morning and poured the floor of the garage. Then two guys spent ALL DAY working it. When I looked out at about 9:30 AM it was pretty flat but those guys kept working it for 7 more hours. I didn't understand what took so long until I read about it. Then they covered it up with blankets and I haven't seen them since. We are still a couple of weeks out for the flexicore roof.

It's pretty cold here this week. We have ice on the inside of the windows in the morning. The house is chilly and it has urged us to move forward on the storm windows and putting up the shrink wrap plastic. We found some Johngineered storm windows in the basement and have installed them. I'm taping around doors that aren't being used. The furnaces seem to be going non-stop. The girls are wearing slippers without me nagging them to do so.

We ordered some carpet some weeks ago - a nice commercial grade to be bound into a rug for the dining room. The floor is taking a beating from the chairs scraping across it and with some of the joins between the planks having opened up more than a quarter inch in the last 85 years, enough food to feed a large family of rodents routinely gets trapped. (Getting down on my hands and knees after every meal to pick it out with a butter knife is not in the cards.) When we were shopping, I had one criteria - can I wipe yogurt off of this surface? And we splurged for a nice, warm, cushy cut pile for the living room, again, to be a bound area rug. They should arrive tomorrow.

My tree guy is in the neighborhood today and so we are going ahead with some maintenance. The Hackberry Trees need the deadwood out and we'll start on Ivy mitigation before the spring growth spurt. Same with the Catalpa, although we'll leave some of the massive Ivy roots attached, just pulling the leafy, weighty parts off the top. As far as we can tell, the Ivy trunk, (which is a good 4 inches in diameter,) is actually helping to stabilize the tree. We are hoping to keep the Catalpa for a few more years. It's about 70 feet tall and losing it will really scar the yard. You can see it dwarfing the house in the picture of the south face above. Its lowest branches are peeking into the picture on the right side.

Water, Water, Everywhere 16

It is so hard to write this post. I feel like I've been ranting for weeks with no end and none today since we are at a particularly low point. I wish I'd never seen this house and that we'd bought the charmless house in Wisteria that looked like it had an overbite.

Water is running down the chimney flue in the attic on three sides. I have four garbage cans stationed up there and have pretty well given up capturing it since it changes course every few minutes.

Windows are leaking in the girls bedroom, bathroom, the guest room, the attic room, our bedroom and then I stopped looking.

The basement has water running all over the place, every floor at every level is wet.

I just need a quarter acre tarp. Maybe one of those big tennis court bubbles.

I wonder if Dorothy Lane Market delivers Killer Brownies?

I am cursing Johngineer, knowing that he had to have been lying through his teeth when we asked him about the water worthiness of this house.

This Wet House 15

This is Dan's civil engineering project - a small canal set to drain the moat around the new garage.

It has been raining for three days straight.

We have been taking on water for two and a half days.

I went up to the attic bedroom to clean Tommy's cat box and discovered it full of mounds of clumps. I thought "Wow that cat pees a lot," and then I saw the tell-tale holes made from a drip-drip-dripping action. Sure enough the beam and ceiling above was wet. The good news is that the cat box and litter pretty well caught all the water. We have a garbage can in place now.

We have at least two roof leaks and water is seeping in the cracks of the floor/walls on three levels in the basement/garage. We discovered another leak at the bottom of the stairs from the kitchen to the front hall, but that will be fixed when the new garage gets a roof. Likewise on one of the two leaks in the old garage.


The big chimney has copper all around it and it looks (from where we were standing,) as though the seam is cracked. If this is the case, it's a quick fix, if not it means a bunch of copper work, and either way the entire chimney will need to be re-flashed. That is not very bad news, since it means that the actual slate is still holding and so far the only problems we've had are copper related.

The basement is also somewhat easy to fix. This house does NOT have a sump pump. That's rare for the age/location. We can add one fairly inexpensively, (under $500,) and it looks as though that is what we will be doing. What I'm not sure of is if one will do the job or if we will have to do two or more since the ground water is seeping in on three different levels.

Our true problem is that the house is built on a hill and the whole back and side yard slopes towards the house. So all the ground water runs to the house, then hits it and goes down, creating hydrostatic pressure, which then forces the water up wherever it can manage to go, such as minute cracks in our basement floor, walls etc.


Adding an element of danger is the fact that the swimming pool is located fifteen feet outside the dining room and although it was drained at least a foot down when it was winterized, it is now within an inch of overflowing. If it overflows, the water will go directly into the basement. Since the pool currently looks like a biology experiment, Dan has taken it upon himself to set up a siphon with the garden hose this afternoon to take the level back down out of the danger zone. We hope.

The electricians left on Friday after a very long day where they were pushing to get everything done. They got kind of sloppy near the end and we have a long punch list for them. Glen finished the tile in the girls' bath, but there are a couple of spots where the grout looks low - I'll ask Rob's opinion on Tuesday. Rob started replacing the drywall in the bathroom and even got a good coat of mud on. He'll need to put a couple more on and then sand the floor and then I think we'll be ready for paint. We are holding off altogether on the window until we make a decision on replacing or repairing. The plywood is on the inside of the frame and there is water leaking in underneath the damaged sill. Not sure what we'll do to weather proof that until the roof guys come out and lay the new copper in a month.

I've had a reminder in the last couple of weeks about verbal vs written instructions and I'm going to have to be much more careful about documenting stuff.

I'm getting irritable from having subs traipsing in and out all day every day. We aren't expecting the flexicore (garage roof) to be installed for another month and we are about done with plumbers et al for the inside project so I'm expecting some peace and quiet in the next few weeks. And I'm looking forward to it.

This cOld House 14

True to its name, the portion of the house heated by 'furnace 2' got down to a chilly 49 overnight as Dale was unable to get the part he needed to fix the brand new furnace in the basement which quit yesterday. He returned this morning and was able to correct the problem and we had gained about 10 degrees in the first hour after it began working. We are back to normal now, and cautiously watching the others for additional citrus signs. (Lemons?)


The concrete guys stopped by long enough yesterday morning to drop off blankets and tuck in the walls. With temps dipping into the twenties over night they needed to keep it hot enough to cook (cure.)

Glen is moving along on the tile. Tommy happily crawls into the floor every morning when Glen arrives and I don't see him until the house is quiet at 6:00 pm.

The electricians, (bless their hearts,) are hard at work completely re-wiring the kitchen. They've been here three days straight and have still some more work to do. It's taking much more time than I anticipated but as an added bonus, they managed to fix the call button box when they were fixing the doorbell. They work a bunch in Oakwood, and while they had seen call buttons before, they were quite excited to see that they were still operable and hooked up to the original mechanical box. They'd never seen that before.

Payne and Co., (the drainage people,) have their liliputian equipment stationed out by the living room and are making good progress on the excavation there. Their back-hoe is so cute! Rob's guy will be patching the holes in the foundation with some hydrostatic cement, then the whole thing will be water-proofed, gravel and drain tiles installed, all the drains and down spouts tied in and then back-filled to grade. Again a bonus, the arbor vitae I dislike had to be torn up to facilitate the excavation.

When Rob took out the windows in the girls' bathroom, he fitted the hole with a 1/4 piece of bead-board plywood. It was over 85 degrees in the bathroom this morning, testament to the amount of heat we are losing through the darn windows. Dan says we have a solution... just cover them all up with plywood!

I did meet with a storm window guy yesterday and that option looks better and better. More on that later.

This cOld House 13

Well, happy birthday to me!

Right now at my house I have a tile guy, a plumber, four electricians, a whole crew of concrete guys, my G.C., his carpenter and the drainage guys are on their way. To paraphrase Steve Martin in The Jerk, "Things are gonna start happening here now!"

I was not expecting the electricians today, and had I known they were coming, I probably wouldn't have worked so hard to remove debris on the floor this weekend. They have a couple of days work so I really shouldn't clean up until later in the week. The wood floors are taking a beating from the rubble, (plaster dust, sand and chunks,) and we are trying to mitigate damage by wiping up every night. It is, however a Sysyphian task.

The good news is that we can now plug in them modrun new-fangled thangs (like a DVD player) in the girls' room. Also, I should have plugs that work without kicking off breakers in the kitchen, light switches that control only the lights, not every outlet in the room, power to the pool house, more than one phone outlet, and the ability to use the lap-top in the living room by the end of the week.

With lath and plaster houses, the metal mesh they lay over the lath strips to hold the plaster wreaks havoc with wireless signals. The cordless phone only works in half the house, the computer's wireless router only reaches to the dining room, and when the guys are working in the basement they have to turn their phones off or they go dead in an hour from frantically trying to find a network.

Tommy Cat has broadened his domain to include crawling in behind the walls in the bathroom we have all tore up and getting up under the eaves, where he has discovered a loose floor board leading to the 10 inch space between the girls' bedroom floor and the ceiling below in the dining room. He disappears for hours at a time and emerges a completely different color than when he went in. We have a black smudge on our bed cover from his nocturnal forays and returns. When we pet him, our hands turn black. We did attempt to block him out of the bathroom but he meows like a fiend when he can't get in and has actually found another way to get there. Rather than fight it, we are letting him go. He also found his way into the pipe chase in our bedroom to the master bath, but we've managed to dissuade him from there by leaving the other bathroom open. The mouse poop in the kitchen has been diminishing all week and I did not find any this morning.

The concrete guys passed their inspection this morning and they are pouring walls right now.

Rob managed to pull the girls' bathroom windows out, so we now have a clear look at how bad the water damage on the sill is. It's BAD! We will be pulling the whole window frame out and rebuilding it to the dimensions of the not-yet-discovered solution to the window problem. I have another window guy looking next week - a restoration specialist from Cinci.

I will post now because I'm so excited, and add pictures later when the electricians stop cutting power indiscriminately.

This cOld House 12

Today was a pretty significant day. The concrete foreman, Doug, showed up to check progress and we got a big gravel drop. That makes the mud pit look a little more like the beginning of a garage. The hole has dried out a bit after the buckets of rain we got over the weekend and Doug said his crew would be by tomorrow by noon with forms to start the walls. Yippee.



They started tearing up the girls' bathroom today. Rob said they'd break up the tub to get it out and I mistakenly figured they'd be cutting it into pieces. The process was somewhat more violent and involved Larry, a ten-pound sledgehammer, and porcelain shards raining down through minute cracks in the kitchen ceiling.




The rodent abatement system is installed but is not working exactly as planned. The first couple of days Tommy hid upstairs in the attic room where we deposited him upon entering the house. The night of the second day he meowed to get out of the room and we let him start exploring. He seemed to be getting comfortable but when we turned in for the night he had some trouble settling down. We figured he'd just start investigating the myriad of pests currently residing with us but instead of eradicating them, he's an audible alarm that sounds all night whenever he hears something, which is constantly. We aren't quite sure what the problem is, as we were assured the cat was well behaved and a good hunter. It's entirely possible the cat is suffering from target saturation. We are torn - we dislike the mice, but we are rather fond of sleeping, and while we would like to keep the cat and lose the mice, if we can't correct the situation we'll be keeping the mice and losing the insomnia.

I met with the first of the replacement window guys. (As opposed to the repair/refurbish window guys I met with several weeks ago.) The refurbish bids came in higher than I had hoped. Every window in the house needs work. Some are worse than others, but all need re-glazing, and when I say that I'm not just talking about re-glazing the sash in the frame, rather, the material between the individual glass pieces, (diamonds) and the lead came has deteriorated to the point where the panels are no longer air or water tight. This involves first getting the window out of the oak jamb, removing the panel from the frame, pulling the entire panel apart, cleaning the glass pieces, cutting new came, fitting it back together (with the new glazing between glass and came,) and re-soldering the whole she-bang. Then stripping the frame of 85 years of paint and rust, cutting out the metal that has rusted through and welding new pieces in, painting or sealing the frame, fitting the leaded glass panel back in, re-glazing it and putting it back in the (hopefully) re-milled oak jamb. It's about a $900 process and at the end of it, we'd still have a single glazed window that needs some kind of a storm window custom fitted. Oh, and did I mention that we have 76 leaded sashes? (And 10 additional steel casement windows.)

I've submitted a request to the This Old House television program website. Gosh, I hope they find my witty inquiry worthy of investigation.