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.