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 8

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!

This cOld House 7

It's been a slow couple of weeks with Dale working in the attic on the new HVAC and nothing much else going on. I met with the plumber and electrician to go over what all our wants/needs are. I had a sitter a couple of afternoons so I could head on down to the tile showroom and pick out something small (and cheap) for the girls' bathroom.

The bid came in for the garage project and it was WAY higher than expected. I keep underestimating most jobs, I suppose because I haven't worked in the industry for a decade or so. I met with the GC and Architect to do some expense control, as well as with our real estate agent to get some guidance on what price he feels this house in this neighborhood can support. He has sold it twice, and knows the area well. I want to pick his brain on what feedback he got from other folks who viewed the house when it was on the market. I'm hoping that the boring stuff we are fixing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, etc. is the kind of stuff that scared other buyers away, and that we can expect some recompense from these outlays. (Slim chance, but hope springs eternal.)

We did get some nice bids for the girls' bath and the rest of the plumbing. It's a go ahead. And with the temperatures dropping in to the 'teens in the past week, I'm VERY eager to start work on the garage, budget be damned.

I had to fire the electrician today. I was satisfied with neither the work nor the service and he pissed me off one too many times. Back to the drawing board there, with no really good alternative available.

We will be starting on the basement pipes tomorrow. The HVAC is all done except for the A/C which we won't be needing any time soon.

Today the tree guys are here razing my front yard. It will start the neighbors talking for sure! I'm trying to get some good picture in between doing laundry, blogging and keeping the kids fed. I tell 'ya, there's real beauty in watching pros do what they do best.

Last night the garage door jammed. We managed to get it closed, but there will be no more ingress/egress through that route until we are able to either fix it inexpensively ourselves, or replace it altogether with the new wall and double walk thru door.

This cOld House 6

The last couple of days have been very very busy around here. Dale started on the attic HVAC unit, cutting through ceilings for duct work and hauling the hardware upstairs to the attic. Hey did you know there's not a scrap of insulation between the attic and the the living space below??? There's a quick fix for some efficiency. I'm waiting on Rob's insulation guy (Rob - my general contractor,) to get me some numbers. Dale was missing today, working on fashioning ducts in the shop which worked out terrifically as the power (and water) was off in the house for most of the day.

Rick,(the carpenter who fixed the living room floor,) Larry and Bob Sr. have been tag-teaming on the beam in the garage. Rick and Larry built three support walls to hold up the cantilevered room over top and then mid-way through the second day Rick and then Bob worked to remove the beam that was all ate up. There were three 2 x 8 planks and a 2 x 4 involved, with one 2 x 8 remaining pretty solid. They replaced the remaining two and the 2 x 4 with three more 2 x 8 planks and hung the joists on hangers. The sub-floor was pretty ate up as well, but we can't really get to it as it is under the wall from above. Bob was confident that it wouldn't be an issue.

Tim the plumber was able to get all the water pipes out of the way, shutting down the downstairs bath until the project is done. He had to move some valves and add a couple to get it isolated and shut off, and then cut and capped the pipes. The electric remained in the way.

Right when Rick was getting down to the nitty-gritty pulling out the beam the electricians showed up. These were replacement electricians as the original guy was too busy to get to the panel to meet Bob's schedule. So Tom and crew swarmed in at noon and cut the power, ripping out the old 200 AMP panel, moving the meter and installing a new 200 AMP panel over by where the new A/C condensers will sit outside the old garage. Then they added a new 100 AMP sub-panel where the old panel was, and hooked up the rest of the house back to it. All of this took care of the main line which had to be moved out of the way of the beam replacement project, as well as various and sundry fire hazards discovered when we ripped down the drywall ceiling in the old garage. Tom is coming by tomorrow to see what all else needs to be done. (Making the plugs kid-safe, fixing the code issues in the kitchen, running new clean power to the A/V and computers, adding a phone jack so we can answer the phone in the living room.) Dan also said something about running some CAT6 (ethernet) around as well.

Rob and Co. (That's the two Rick's, Bob Sr. and Larry, so far,) will have no more to do once the beam is done until I get a firm bid on the new garage and the bathroom remodel. As it is we're about 2 good man-weeks into T & M (time and material) stuff and that makes me nervous. The living room floor had a price tag on it but they found more damage than anticipated, and I have only my own estimation on what the beam will cost us.

Tim the plumber had some good news for us in that we now have a pretty good plan on how to clean up the miles of pipes in the house. The girls bathroom is now a must do, for several reasons, but once it is done, we will have over half the house re-plumbed, (correctly and legally,) including all the supply in the basement. It will be great to get rid of all the old galvanized piping down there as it's corroding as I sit here, waiting to spring a leak. (Not to mention the 17 rusting valves in the laundry room alone.) He managed to replace the main shut off valves, install a pressure regulator and baffle, several angle stops and bring the kitchen gas valve up to code. Unfortunately when he reduced the water pressure from 115 PSI to the recommended 85 PSI, we lost all pressure to the upstairs fixtures. (The cold lines are almost completely corroded shut, which is why doing the girls' bath has moved up the priority list.)

I met with a landscape architect to work up a proposal for the front of the house when we tear it up to put in the garage. He seems to be right on track with what I outlined and I'm sure if he watches his spending, he'll do a bang-up plan for us. I meet with a different landscape architect tomorrow to do it all over again.

My other landscape guy dropped by today, (the one who did the clean-up on the yard) and I grabbed him to talk about the stretch of mud along the back of the house. He's working up numbers for me for putting flagstones down. Dan wants to get a second opinion on the catalpa tree, so I'll be calling around tomorrow to get someone out. It is not an immediate need - we can probably wait a year or two before we have to yank it down.

Today the gutters were cleaned for the last time this season. All the trees are now bare so we no longer have to fear a gutter back-up, (provided we don't have a problem with an ice dam.)

All in all we've had a pretty good week with no real surprises. (Although when Tim grabbed an old recirculating line to indicate it needed to be removed, it broke free of its moorings and fell on his head. He had to temporarily tack it back up.) As it turns out, once the termite-beam was removed, the joists were found to be solid, so we didn't have to replace any of them. I haven't had the heart to tell Rick we still have a soft spot in the living room floor behind a duct that he probably didn't see. (He is nursing broken ribs from a car accident last week and I can't imagine shimmying around my crawlspace would be very good for the ailment.) And Other Rick, (the one who worked on all the doors earlier in the week,) appears to have glued my back door shut, which will have to be freed. That back door really needs to be replaced, but we are holding off on frivolous stuff like that. It works just fine for now, (if you put your shoulder into it.)

I'm actually starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, this tunnel is a detour I was forced into on my way to building a garage. Still, it's good we are taking care of these things in such a manner that they shouldn't bother us for another 30 years or so. I'm really quite thrilled that the plumbing has presented itself to be a short term project that won't be nearly as difficult as I had feared. And Dan, who is the voice of reason (budget,) also agrees.