This cOld House 26

It rained Monday, so the roof leaked and the roofers are behind another day. The masons are scheduled to come first and fix the chimney, before the roofers replace the slates or metalwork, presumably because masons are not so light on their feet, so whatever damage they do can be addressed by the crew after them. I got a call from the scheduler late last week indicating that I may actually have some work done this week, provided the weather holds. The good news is that I am the very next job on the list. The bad news is that they since they are in Columbus, and they don't send the weather-dependent crews out-of-town unless they have a level of comfort that they will be able to work a whole day, and it's scheduled to rain all week, we won't see them until next week, and I'll be moving the buckets around for the next little while.

The garage door arrived today to be sent off for painting. There is nothing to attach it to in the new garage yet so I guess it's just as well. I am eager to get it installed to secure the space now that we have the cut out done between the old and the new. Rob met with the concrete guy to pin him down on when we will begin to move forward on the top and back fill. I also got him to move the 'bridge' (plank that stretched form the front porch to the top of the garage, over the eight foot drop,) that was such an attractive nuisance to Naomi. (Pic is of said bridge, not garage door.)


We are quite happy with the sump pump and drain system we've been working on. The drain in the laundry room appears to be working pretty well. It's wet, but at least it doesn't run all the way around the room to the old drain anymore. The new drain keeps the stream out of the way against the cracked wall where it enters. Tommie likes it, as he'd rather drink from the floor (or toilet) than his bowl. And the sump kicks butt. A couple of weeks ago, as Rob sheepishly fixed the downspout pointing into the hole in the side of the house, he was perched on a ladder in front of the discharge. It throws about 2 gallons in a second or two of 55 degree ground water. It nailed him good!

Remember Dan's irrational desire to build a conservatory over the patio linking the living room and dining room? (His rationale: it would give us water-proofing around 17 windows, take care of the leakage down the outside basement walls in that area, give us a nice buffer to the rooms without sacrificing light and - this is new - act as a corridor to the new guest cottage for when the girls are in college and we are running a bed and breakfast. (Don't get me started... ) Well if we had more money than God, I suppose this would work. Rob found the link. I often accuse that whenever he's on the job site, the bill goes up by $4,000 (something always pops up, like another leak or some additional work,) but this time it's more like $104,000!

The floor guys put the last coat on the girls' bathroom floor. This now makes the room fully functioning, and tomorrow the girls will take their inaugural dip. (Tonight's date night.) We still have some issues up there - the window, the medicine cabinet/mirror, and the challenge of fitting a shower curtain to the oddly shaped opening. Rob and I think we have that one licked, although you never know until a theory is tested in practice. He needs to do some cutting and gluing, and I need to do some cutting and sewing.

The hole between the old garage and new garage looks good, although it's few inches shorter than we'd like because we were getting a little too close to the old window which was filled in with concrete. The wall is very thick. You can see the slab that they push out of there... it's about 10 inches. We need a little caterpiller to lift it out of the garage.




I hope to have pictures of the roofers, or the concrete guys soon. No luck today.

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!

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 2

I am grateful that we have the resources to take care of the mess into which we've gotten.

I got a call from my general contractor yesterday letting me know that he should have numbers in today, and he'll give me a shout or drop something off tomorrow so we can make some decisions about what gets done and when. The landscapers showed up yesterday and blew all our leaves, (2 guys for 3 1/2 hours,) and the clean up crew should be by by Friday to do all the weeding and dead head for winter. The irrigation guys showed up this morning to blow out the system, and imagine my surprise when I went downstairs to the pit to turn off the irrigation valve and discovered a small stream coming from the coal bin.

This was not the usual pond that accumulates after a rain. I can handle that. It seeps in under the concrete wall and collects in the old coal dip, and will be taken care of when we dig down next to there to add the new garage. This new creek was coming from the coal bin, but appeared to be more of the waterfall variety, cascading through the dropped ceiling, (which Dan wants to remove,) and running off the built up floor, underneath the wall and to the floor drain in the adjacent furnace room. I removed what we had left stored in there, (a garage box and the bar stools,) and set about going into a full panic. I called two handymans and the GC and couldn't get through to anyone and settled on the plumber who did our backflow re-cert on short notice in September. Sure enough they had a guy over here in 20 minutes. We ripped down the ceiling and found a plastic pressure sleeve DUCT-TAPED around an old galvanized pipe. Except for the expletives, I was speechless.

In shutting off the water to repair it, I discovered that the entire kitchen is plumbed off the outside line that runs through the deduct meter. (A deduct meter is a device added to count the 'outside' water that is used in the house. We don't get charged a sewer fee on the water we use in the pool, irrigation system or outside hose bibbs.) This was done by the former frugal owner and is very un-kosher.

Every time we do anything, we find something like this: The disposal plumbed incorrectly, with no trap attached; the 240 volt outlet in the laundry room... no-not for the dryer - it's just a regular outlet; the aluminum gutter straps used to hold on a whole section of roof; the 115,000 BTU piece of crap furnace that is only 2 years old but needs to be replaced because it's grossly over-sized for the space it heats (and by association, cools or in its case, doesn't cool because the blower is too grossly over-sized to run A/C.)

It just keeps getting better and better.

Good news! The carpenter is supposed to be by on Monday to start on the sunken/sinkin' living room. We may be able to get the stacks of books and boxes out of the foyer by the time our guests arrive for Thanksgiving. Wish us luck at the zoning approval meeting tonight for the garage. I hope no disgruntled neighbors show up. Dan's attending in his uniform, just in case. Bad form, to pick on the military these days.

More later, I'm going to go wash my dishes with illegally plumbed stolen water.

- R -