This cOld House 23

It rained last night. When I was searching for a witty quote about water to open this entry, I couldn't find one that adequately described what was going on. However, I can relate to this one, (at least the first half of it):

I hate water ~W.C. Fields

(Actually the whole quote is, "I hate water - fish f*ck in it." ~W.C. Fields)

Status report. I have been told that the roofers are supposed to come today to dry-us-in. That is, they won't actually fix anything yet - we are still about a month away for that, but I have been advised that the chimney and the valley over the art room will be temporarily stanched. They will also look at the tarp over the window in the girls' bath and see if they can seal it. (Still leaking there.)


This is the leak around the chimney. I didn't bother to go up into the upper attic to show the leak on the backside as well... basically, the chimney, embedded in the corner where the two wings of the house meet, is functioning as a hole in the roof. God knows it doesn't actually function as a chimney.


This is the leak in the art room. We poked a hole in the plaster ceiling because it was so close to the light and we didn't want any build up around the fixture that would lead to short-circuits and death by fire. It has worked pretty well, because not only are we not dead, but the light still works too.


This is the leak in the basement. While it is much much better than it was, and the seepage from the old boiler platform and the crack in the floor has been stopped, it seems that the sump pump has not completely licked the problem. We are still leaking out of the pinholes in the concrete steps down to the lower basement. (We also have the leak coming from the outside wall of the coal bin, but are confident that when the new garage roof is finished, that one will be eliminated.)


Here's a new one. When Rob set the lid last week, he kind of pushed the downspout snake out of the way, which ripped it open. When they knocked off the flying buttress on the corner of the front wall to make room for the new garage wall, they left a hole. These two holes are in very close proximity, allowing the cascade of water off the roof to be directed into the hole in the side of the house. I know there is a Socratic chain here, but I can't put it into words... maybe hole in downspout + hole in house + water in downspout = water in house.


And finally, the sump pump did NOTHING to improve conditions in the laundry room, which flooded much worse last night (thanks to the melt as well as the rain) than it did even in the record breaking downpour we had in January. Korrect Plumbing will come take a look at adding a new drain, or another sump pump at this level. I think our choices will be either a sump pump for $1,500, or trenching the back yard and adding a french drain (like we did around the crawls space,) for $15,000.

Update on the pool: Phil the pool guy stopped by to take a look. He remembered the pool from when the Messicks lived here, (PJ - pre-johngineer) and said the pool is in pretty stable shape. We will have to have it drained and cleaned in the spring, and also have the broken valve replaced and the lines pressure tested to see if there was any damage other than the cracked valve from the freeze. That's kind of good news to us.

Tommie-Cat is getting fat. He used to free-feed at his old home, but there were 7 cats there and from what I understand, he wasn't very high on the totem pole. The vet told me to limit his food and it's been problematic. Because he likes to party all night, I've been locking him into the kitchen. When I got up Wednesday morning I found he had attacked the challah bread that was on the counter and also yarked all over the kitchen. Yesterday he helped himself to a good portion of the ground turkey I had just browned when I went to change Naomi. The vet warned me that a heavy cat is more prone to health problems but I'm to the point now where I feel like I'd rather have a dead happy cat than a live nasty one. Besides, I figure he'll trim down once he gets outside in the spring/summer, like the rest of us. Eat on, Tom!

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The lid arrived yesterday. It came stacked on a truck and a big crane loaded it off the truck into the yard and then worked placing the slabs in order from the south side to the north. Unfortunately, I had a baby sitter scheduled so I could do some errands and while I was able to see them put the first piece in place, by the time I got home it was done! There are 7 slabs of pre-cast concrete spanning 24 feet and weighing about 3 tons each. Next we need to weld and anchor it in place, (as if the 6000 pound slabs are going anywhere,) and then pour a 2 inch slurry of concrete on top.




Here's something (finally) we did right! We've put that shrink-wrap plastic up over the windows in the girls' room and thank goodness we did. All of a sudden this week we found a yellow jacket in the girls room. We knew that there had been a few last fall, but as the week wore on, all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity from the nest in the wall and we now have over 50 of them in various stages of demise trapped behind the plastic. Stefan, (the exterminator with whom I am now on a first name basis,) said there's nothing we can do until we can pinpoint the entry/exit from the outside. With the ground still covered in icy snow, he couldn't get his ladder out to do that. But we are first on his list once we get a good thaw.

Dan says it annoys him when I do posts with no pictures so I have added some pics to my last post. I'll endeavor to put at least one in from now on.


I've discovered Tommie's new 'office'. (As you may recall, when the walls were open in the girls' bath, he would climb into the eaves and crawl under the floorboards, staying all day long, emerging covered in dust and dirt around supper time.) We closed up the bathroom wall this week. Coincidentally, the cat has been waking me up at night wanting to party and so at night I've been putting him in the back half of the house (kitchen, with access to his litter box down in the laundry room,) where he promptly found another ingress to the bowels of the house. He went down this morning and I haven't seen him for the past 6 hours. There is a large opening in the laundry room wall for what used to be the ducting for the original coal fired furnace. We found it when we tore out the rotten root cellar shelving after the last flood. I was doing laundry this morning when Tommie skulked in and jumped into the hole.

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Update on the gas bill pool. I've canceled the contest since I had the dates wrong for the billing cycle and didn't want to be accused of any impropriety, (Pop,) and also, I had virtually no takers! The gas bill for January 11 to February 9 (29 days,) was $641.22.

We are still crawling at a snails pace on the other open projects. Dan gave up on doing the walls ourselves, so we had Rob get his drywaller over to tape and mud the cracks. Daylight (yup, that's the name embroidered on his shirt,) did a very nice job taping up and patching where the new window frame went in as well as going over the tape job I did on the cracks and filling in some other bad areas. We will be ready to paint this weekend and will stain the floor next week with an eye on having the bath complete by the week of March 5.


Rob and Co. came by this week to build a temp wall and set a steel beam over top to hold the flexicore panels which are supposed to be installed tomorrow, (I'll believe it when I see it,) and finish off filling in and drilling through the old window openings to hold the angle iron against the kitchen wall to which the ends of the flexicore will be welded/bolted. And they shoveled out the ice and snow so they would have a nice work surface, instead of an ice work surface.

We discussed door options and Rob and Co. will be building a set of walk thru doors for the old garage where we are taking out the lift door and building a solid wall. We'll also remove the original sliding carriage house door (now fixed in place), build a wall and put a high transom window on the other side. That should go a long way in improving the temperature in the garage and kitchen/office/art room on top.

We are not looking forward to having the opening cut between the old and new garage. Concrete cutting produces a dust so fine that it's like smoke and seeps in everywhere. We know that even with measures in place, we won't be able to stop the dust from seeping in all over the house and then settling everywhere. That will happen in about a month once the inside of the garage is trimmed out and the lift door hung.


The cat finally caught a mouse (with proof) this week. The mouse was getting pretty bold considering Tommie's been on board for a couple of months. He must have lulled him into a false sense of security. I was up in the middle of the night on Tuesday and was presented with the rodent. It was fresh! Thanks, Tommie. The cat has also figured out another way into the walls/floor as he turned up filthy again this morning, with all the usual holes still blocked. If only we could train him to administer a shot of that foam sealant wherever he's finding these holes.

We have a meeting with the landscape architect on Saturday. We are going to take a look at the side lot as well, working towards a master plan for re-foresting it. (Dan wants to plant a labyrinth, complete with reflecting pool/gazing ball in the middle - I guess this goes along with his grand plan for the conservatory over top the limestone patio outside the dining room.) We hear that Seibenthalers (the go-to nursery/landscape co. in these parts,) has a kick-butt tree sale in the fall and the more you buy, the more they discount. We'll be waiting for that one.

I'll be ready with the camera tomorrow should the crane and panels show up.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Today I had the pleasure of meeting Dewayne, Electrical Inspector for the Neighboring City to Pleasantville, (who does the Pleasantville construction inspections.) Unfortunately, he had nothing good to say about the power in my kitchen. He had deja vu when he pulled up to the house to inspect the new panel we put in last week, and when I got to talking to him about some apparently open issues that the City of Oakwood cited us on our property transfer inspection, he started to recall the disastrous inspection he carried out here when the kitchen was redone. (And that he was never recalled to final the stuff, presumably because it was never corrected.) I am currently awaiting a copy of his laundry list.

Tim and Troy and Matt are wreaking havoc in the basement, pulling out galvanized pipe to beat the band. Tim said there was a LOT of pipe, like three times what we actually needed. This is good news since we opted to NOT install the recirculating pump on the hot water heater. So while it currently takes about 2 minutes for hot water to make it up to our bathroom, it should be cut in less than half when we replace the pipes with a more direct route.

The bid came in for the new gas service/pipes and it's a go. We'll do that as soon as we have a front wall on the new garage so we can attach the new meter.

The concrete guy happened to show up at the same time Mark came by to grind out the stumps from the trees we took down Tuesday and they had a meeting of the minds, so we are all set to start digging TOMORROW or Monday. I'm so excited! By the way, watching the 'lumberjacks' take down the trees was a thing of beauty. It was like a ballet the way the guys all knew their moves and jumped in and out to get it done smoothly and safely. And today the stump grinder kicked butt! I want to grind stumps when I grow up. Mark has one of only 2 in Ohio and 340 in the entire country, a stump grinder that just freakin' ATE the tree. It was like a 20 inch circular saw on the front that swept back and forth decimating anything in its way. The teeth on the blade were about 3 inches long! Very cool to watch.

I got the bid on restoring the windows and was NOT happy. I called Rob to get the Pella or Andersen or Marvin guy to come over and discuss replacement options. I also got an e-mail from the garage door guy and am awaiting a bid for that.

By the way, I fixed our garage door that was broken. It was a four dollar and eighty one cent personal victory after thousands and thousands of dollars of defeat this week.

This weekend I believe we get to test drive our squirrel abatement system. I hope Kitty is mean when it comes to wildlife because she has quite a lot of established residents to show who is boss. There is a rotund woodchuck that lives under the pool house, dozens of gray squirrels, (some as big as small cats,) a raccoon, and a hedgehog looking thing that wanders in the dark. Go Kitty Go!