Jarrett House North: Houseblog

RIP Joe Ferrante

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:43:55 GMT

The Old House My House blog on the This Old House site broke the news of lead tile contractor Joe Ferrante’s death. Obviously any death from heart failure is tragic, but this one hits me for a variety of reasons. The tile work always seemed to me to be closest to a black art of any of the trades on the show, and I always enjoyed watching Joe demystify the work while still making clear how much effort and intelligence was really needed to do it right. My heart goes out to his family and the TOH crew.

Surprise home projects

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:24:44 GMT

I hadn’t planned to have any work done on the house this weekend—it’s been kind of a long week. But opportunity knocked—in the form of a paving contractor.

One of the things I haven’t liked about our house since we moved in is our road. Our neighbors are fine—it’s the actual pavement that is problematic. Like a lot of people in Arlington, we live on a private road—what this means is that the city doesn’t do anything about paving, sidewalks, or storm sewers, and we get a break on rules about things like on-street parking. It’s not a great trade-off if you have a driveway, like me. The biggest issue we have is that the last time the neighborhood association had the street paved, they left an unpaved triangular strip, about a foot wide at the widest, where our property line angles away from the street. It picks up road sand and salt, grows weeds, and generally annoys us. Add to that—the pavement that was there wasn’t level, and we generally had a big puddle in front of our house after a rainstorm. But I didn’t really figure on doing anything about it.

Until the paving contractor showed up to do our neighbor’s driveway—acting quickly, professionally, with a crew of about eight guys, they had the work well in hand before 9:30 in the morning. I knew they would be working on our next-door-neighbor’s curb, so I asked the foreman for a quote.

Before noon, the crew had laid in new asphalt right up to the curb, level from one end of the property to another, with no place for a puddle to form and no room for mud. Plus they fixed a huge crack in our sidewalk for free.

Something goes right: thank you, sump pump

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:24:55 GMT

We got a bunch of rain with the Nor’easter that roared through Sunday and Monday. Did it bug us? Did it float our possessions, the way the rain last May did? Reader, it did not.

Instead, here’s what happened: Sunday was uneventful. Monday, Lisa went downstairs and reported that the sump pump had kicked on and was running steadily. I said, “Ooh. We'd better move the hose further away from the house.” The end of the sump hose was currently about three feet away from the foundation wall, pointed out into the lawn. We dragged the hose out toward the sidewalk and let it run on. At one point, when we realized that the steady trickle of floodwater coming out had flooded our sidewalk, we redirected it against the natural drainline along the edge of our property, so it could trickle down into the drainfield into the back corner.

Curiosity got the better of me at one point, so I lifted the cover of the sump where the pump was steadily working. I was astonished to see that the pit was not even a quarter full of water, thanks to the pump, but that a gush of water—like the outflow from a washing machine!—was rushing into the pit continuously as the water table inched higher from the rain. The pump had absolutely no trouble keeping up with the inflow, though; no sweat at all.

The pump was still running when we went to bed. I think it stopped overnight, but the precipitation we’re getting today probably caused it to kick back on. Still: no sweat, no problem, no moisture at all in the basement outside of the sump itself. This was hands down the best money we ever spent on a home improvement project.

IKEA hacking 2: wraparound counter

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:13:12 GMT

We wrapped another kitchen/dining room project this weekend. Where prior projects had put cabinetry on the opening between the dining room and the kitchen, this new project put a wall + base cabinet combo around the corner, in the dining room. The placement echoes the corner cabinet directly opposite, but doesn’t try to be a corner cabinet. But we did want to keep continuity with the kitchen cabinetry. Specifically, I wanted to use a single countertop surface that would wrap around the outside corner from the existing cabinets to the new ones.

This turned out to be a little more challenging than I thought. I had to construct it in two pieces, and had to do a fair amount of trimming. We are using very narrow base cabinets (really just wall cabinets mounted on legs and hung so that they stand on the floor), so I had to trim the IKEA butcher block countertop that I had purchased. Fortunately, I had already done this for the doggy bench, so it was just a question of getting enough crap cleaned out of the garage so I could set up the sawhorses and run the circular saw. This time I managed to make the cut straight and clean, so I was able to rough it in pretty quickly.

The challenging part was the transition. I saw three options: a mitered cut that would come to a point, a straight line transition that would have left a triangle of linking surface between the two cabinet tops, or a curved transition. Lisa wanted the curve, so I gulped and worked it out. I used a piece of string stretched between an awl (for a fixed point) and a pencil to draw the semicircle, then bullied my poor SkilSaw, which really isn’t intended to cut one-inch butcher block, into negotiating the curve. Amazingly it turned out pretty well, especially after I sanded it down with the orbital sander.

I have a few things left to do before I post pictures: I want to put a piece of trim on the back of the countertop to mask the fact that the wall isn’t square; use some putty or something to mask the transition between the pieces; and put the plinth on the base. But the whole project was a strict weekend: hang two cabinets, doors and hardware, and cut and mount the butcher board including the transition. It was actually kind of fun.

Hooked on Ikea

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:06:28 GMT

I am starting to think I may need an intervention.

I have three lengths of trim waiting installation for the kitchen; two new Akurum cabinets to mount to add storage to an underutilized 30" wall in the dining room; and a bunch of spare shelves to mount in the garage. But I see this post on Ikea Hacker about turning extra Pax Wardrobe shelves into storage for odd-shaped nooks, and all I can think about is how this would make the space under the basement stairs so much more manageable. And how I need to pick up some missing parts for one of those Akurum cabinets, so I could just check out the as-is section while I’m there...

This is how madness happens.

The thaw

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:18:30 GMT

It’s been in the 50s, almost the 60s, here for the past couple of days, and the ice is slowing withdrawing into the shadows. The worst of it at our house continued to be the ice pond over the French drain. As late as Sunday it was still a solid block of ice.

I came home last night to find that it was mostly water, but still a standing pool—not draining. I looked closer at the one big chunk of ice that was left and realized that it sat over the drain, so I took a pair of downed branches and levered it away. What did I see? The grate of the drain—with ice visible through the holes. So I flipped the drain gate out of the way, and saw a solid block of ice going down into the mouth of the drainpipe. Insert heavy sigh.

Fortunately, getting the grate off provided other places for the water to escape, so by the time Lisa and I got home from dinner the pond was drained for the first time since Valentines Day. Going forward, I’ve got to figure out a method to keep that drain clean.

I've been hacked!

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:50:52 GMT

Ikea Hacked, that is. My Värde doggie bench was just featured on Ikea Hacker. Thanks to Jules for the linkage.

IKEA Hack finished: Värde Doggie Housebench

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 03:54:48 GMT

As detailed on these pages back in October, I started our first real IKEA Hack project at the tail end of the kitchen renovation. We wanted a bench for the dining room and a place for our Bichons to sit while we ate. In October, I did the first part of the project—building the carcass of the bench from two 27 inch Värde wall cabinets, fastened side by side, and six Capita legs. And there the project sat while we finished the kitchen and took care of some other work around Christmas. I did manage to trim down a section of a Pronomen countertop, which had been in temporary use in our kitchen before we started the project

This weekend I finally got around to finishing the project, which entailed fastening the countertop to the bench base with 1 3/4 inch #10 Phillips screws. If I had to do it over again, I would have laid some felt down between the countertop and the bench carcass, because I notice an occasional squeak from the bench. But overall it’s a pretty functional unit, and it’s rock solid. And the dogs love it—we put in 24" dog beds and now if we’re in the dining room, they’re in the bench. If they’re not begging, that is.

Photos from both stages of the project, now including the finished bench top, are on Flickr.

New year, new project

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 22:01:15 GMT

Happy 2007! Everyone in the Jarrett House is waving or wagging at you, hoping you will have a wonderful and prosperous New Year.

And it was only 12 hours into the new year that I broke out a house project. Specifically: completing the media wiring that is installed under the wine cabinet in the kitchen. Today’s task was getting the phone jack working, and I learned a few lessons along the way.

While the new wall was open during the construction of the new opening between the dining room and the kitchen, I insisted that we spend a little extra money and get the electrician to run phone, network, and coax to an outlet over the little desk—because, after all, it would be much harder to make that run afterwards. The electrician ran two lengths of Cat-5 and coax up through the wall and connected it to jacks in an outlet, but didn’t connect it to the structured media wiring panel—not that I asked him to. I figured that doing so would be a pretty straightforward task. Heh.

The project as I saw it would take two steps for each cable:

Finish running the cable from its current drop location in the garage to the structured media panel in the utility room.
Tie each cable into the appropriate part of the panel.

Step 1, however, took a lot longer than I anticipated. Snaking the wires along the existing infrastructure took a long time, fighting every step of the way to keep the cables from tangling or binding. Then came Step 2. I confidently hooked the phone line into the block in the structured media panel, hooked in a test phone… and nothing. No dial tone.

Aside: We activated a second phone line to the house last month, and decided that this would be what we would use at the new kitchen desk. This information becomes relevant shortly.

With no dial tone, I knew I had to check a few things. So I pulled the outlet cover off to verify the colors of the wires that were connected to the jack, then double checked how I had wired it at the block. Because I wanted to make the second line primary on this unit, I had tied the blue and white pair from the Cat 5 to the second block on the phone jumper unit in the box. This was tied to the yellow and black pair coming in from the outside (Cat 3) wire and should have connected the primary line for that jack to the second line coming in from the street. But it still wasn’t working.

Everything looked correct inside the house, so I stepped outside in the freezing rain to check the outside wires. And I discovered that back in 2004, I had only hooked up one pair of wires in my hurry to get the phone working. Aha! So I returned with a wire stripper and connected the second yellow and black pair to the terminal for the second phone line…

And it still didn’t work. Now I was getting mad. So I checked a few things and realized that inside I had connected the yellow black pair with yellow first, but I had switched them outside. So I corrected the error outside and tried again… still no love.

And then I had an aha-erlebnis. I ran back upstairs and plugged the phone into the network jack instead of the phone jack… and got a dial tone. The Cat 5 line for the network jack was the one that I thought was the phone line, and vice versa. Not having done that initial wiring myself cost me a good hour of confusion and frustration—and I’ll still have more work to do to finish the job because the other cat 5 line isn’t long enough to reach the structured wiring box. But the second phone line is working, and there was no bloodshed. Hey, I’ll take it.

Houseblog confessions: the mailbox

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 06:04:35 GMT

It’s been a while since I did anything non-kitchen-related on the house, but the time had come. Today I finally got around to hanging a mailbox by our front door.

This may strike some as odd, since we’ve been living in the house for over two years, but until we replaced the front door last November we had a mail slot. This we opted to do away with after much debate. We appreciated not having to stop the mail and just letting it pile up in our foyer when we went on vacation, but we didn’t appreciate the mail slot’s tendency to let the foyer equilibrate with the outside temperature.

Thus vanished the mail slot. And for the last year the mailman has been leaving our bills, junk mail, and magazines (because that’s all that comes by mail any more, practically) either inside our screen door or on our side porch. Which is ok except in the pouring rain. And, you know, we’ve had some of that lately.

So did we opt for a period mailbox? Perhaps one of these fine numbers from Restoration Hardware or Architectural Mailboxes? Or even an antique reproduction?

Reader, we did not. We got the $24.95 cheapie mailbox from Home Depot—so cheap they don’t even have it on their web site. Looks like anodized aluminum, bends like a tin can, but hopefully it’ll do its job and keep the mail dry.

The unstoppable power of a fully operational kitchen

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:36:53 GMT

It has been a long time since our kitchen has been ready for prime time, but since the weekend’s work we now have a couple of meals under our belt and I have to say, I like the setup. On Sunday we roasted a chicken—about the simplest recipe I know (stuff two lemons into the cavity of the chicken, salt and pepper, close the cavity, cook at 350° breast side down, flip the bird over, and finish at 425°, monitoring breast temperature with a probe), but it went very smoothly.

The redesigned kitchen has some nice work triangles: fridge to sink and prep surfaces, prep to garbage and stove, stove to sink and dishwasher, dishwasher to cabinets and sink). I really appreciated them last night with a more complex meal: gnocchi with mozzarella and meatballs in a tomato and onion sauce. It sounds complex but it’s pretty simple, at least if the gnocci and meatballs are prepared ahead: one can diced tomatoes, an onion peeled and split, some butter and a little salt, simmer for 30 to 45 minutes. Toward the end toss the gnocchi in the boiling pasta water and scoop them out when they float; drop them in the sauce, add meatballs and mozzarella, and park in the oven for 10 minutes. Pretty ambrosial.

The last part of the process: our new SimpleHuman trash can. It felt wrong to have our battered old can in the new kitchen, so we gave the kitchen (and ourselves) a present. The concept of trash can as ceremonial gift isn’t new, of course; check the review of this model which notes it was a gift to the owner’s new condo. Also check out this extensive kitchen hack description, pointed to from the Ikeahacker Blog, that calls the SimpleHuman trash can “lovely...I never thought a really expensive trash can could make me happy.”

Of course, all this trash can talk reminds me of the definitive commentary on trash cans and consumerism in general from Charles Schulz: Charlie Brown buys a new trash can, takes it home and unwraps it, then comments to Shermy that he has to do something with the wrapping paper. Shermy suggests to him that he put it in the trash can, and Charlie Brown says, “Boy! That sure is handy!” — conveniently neglecting to notice that the need that the trash can handily filled was created by it in the first place.

Wrap-up, stage 1...

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 04:24:08 GMT

We returned late this afternoon from New Jersey (a visit to my inlaws which bracketed the HDI ITIM conference in Vegas) to find… done. The contractors had been here this week—plumbers, electricians, painters—and the following was completed:

Sink and garbage disposal reconnected
New drinking water filter and tap installed at sink
Dishwasher installed
Filter installed in line to icemaker; icemaker active for the first time since refrigerator was installed in 2004
Under-cabinet light installed at the butler’s station
Front door and shutters painted
Flaking trim painted inside
Bathroom door painted
New toilet installed in bathroom
Lots of trash removed from the garage

There’s a lot left to do, but the ongoing Flickr set documents some of the more dramatic changes in the kitchen.

Finally, counters

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:47:07 GMT

Unbelievably, at long last we have countertops. And they’re even installed.

The counters were one of the areas where we scrimped in the kitchen redo. We wanted to do solid surface (granite would be a little impractical for us right now) but couldn’t really justify the budget, so we went laminate. I’m kind of glad we did at this point, though, since the installed counters look great and didn’t cost nearly the amount that we would have splashed out on solid surface. The budgetary numbers we used were around $800 for the laminate counters (it ended up being a little higher due to complications in the installation), or about half the cost we were seeing for some solid surface or stone tops.

The biggest issue we faced in the installation was a window whose sill came below the installed counter height. We knew it was there when we planned the counter run but figured we could work around it. Our installer earned his pay by painstakingly chiseling the existing sill back so that he could bring the countertop to the wall, then bringing the remaining sill up to counter height. You would never know there was ever a problem if you looked at it now.

Pictures will be posted in the next few days once I caulk and do a few more finishing steps. But in the meantime, our plumbing gets reconnected on Friday—along with the long-awaited dishwasher. Can’t wait...

Flying with a cold

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:10:51 GMT

There’s only one thing I hate more than comment spam, and that’s flying with a cold. Partway into Saturday night’s performance, the cold came down like a big hammer and I barely sniffled my way through.

I managed to rally enough yesterday to finish our remaining kitchen cabinetry, a small pantry/desk area consisting of a 24" IKEA wall cabinet modded with legs as the base cabinet, plus a wine rack and a 12" wall cabinet above. It’s all done but the plinth and the countertop; pix forthcoming.

And our countertops for the rest of the cabinets have arrived and will hopefully be installed during the early part of this week... so we can get our sink and get our dishwasher installed.

Bad home improvement hacks

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:02:25 GMT

Via BoingBoing, a great collection of photos from home inspections gone horribly horribly awry, courtesy our good friends at ThisOldHouse.com. In the first gallery, you have to check out the crawlspace water feature (also known as an unconnected tub drain); be careful of the rodent photos in the second gallery.

IKEA hacking for kitchens and dogs

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:57:21 GMT

A little more work on the kitchen this weekend. I installed the molding strips under our wall cabinets (check the master kitchen renovation photoset, starting here, for the details), which was slightly more complicated than I expected. Cutting and mitering the strips was a cinch thanks to my miter saw, but I had to shape them around the molding strip on the back wall (visible in this photo) and that took a little longer. Fortunately the jigsaw made relatively quick work of that step, and I was able to get clean cuts along my rough penciled cut out lines.

The final step, mounting them, also proved challenging. We bought the molding strips upwards of three months ago, and I could only locate hardware for one set of molding—not nearly enough L-brackets to finish the job. (Note: for some reason, the molding strips I got did not include hardware in the box, but apparently the newer ones do). So I made a run down to Stoughton (where we needed some other things anyway) and got the returns department to give me eight of the brackets I needed to finish the job. The nearly final product (still awaiting caulking) is in the photoset, along with two filler panels at the end of the cabinet run. (That part gave me fits until I figured out that I could simply use construction adhesive to connect the filler panel to the cabinets.)

Along the way I found time to have a little fun for our dogs. We got two 27 inch long Värde wall cabinets from IKEA which were originally intended to form part of a butler’s pantry, but we didn’t like the way they looked. Fortunately, Lisa had a brainwave and suggested we take the doors off and put beds in. Originally we tried doing this with the cabinets stacked atop each other, but fortunately for all concerned we figured out a bench layout would be best. So I connected the two cabinets together with four of the connecting screws that IKEA thoughtfully provides in just about every box, put six Capita legs underneath, and slid some spare beds inside. The dogs seem to like it, as evidenced by the photos. The final step will be to cut up the butcher-block countertop that is currently temporarily resting on part of our cabinets and screw it on top of the bench as a seating surface—probably with a cushion. Maybe when that step is completed I’ll send this into the IKEA Hacker Blog.

The neverending kitchen cabinets

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 17:14:25 GMT

I have come to realize over the past weeks that a kitchen is something that is never truly finished. You just keep working at it until you stop.

This weekend I did the last major structural work on the kitchen prior to the arrival of the countertop and subsequent completion of the plumbing work (sink, dishwasher): I fastened all the assembled base cabinets to the back wall. I took a deep breath and looked at what I had done, and then thought, Argh. Filler panels and molding. So next steps are to scribe the filler panels on the right end of the cabinet run, where we ended up with about two inches of space between the last cabinet and the wall, and screw them into place; figure out how the molding strips are attached and get them installed; then probably (if I’m lucky) install the countertop.

Of course, our stuff hasn’t been waiting for kitchen completion to start sneaking its way back in. I cooked Julia’s French “hamburgers” last night and now there are a few extra pans in one of the cupboards. And this morning I placed a couple of salvaged pieces of the old counter on the cabinets by the stove so that we could cook safely and keep the cooking spatters out of the new cabinets. Now all we have to do is get the oven working...

Slowly moving to kitchen closure

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 14:26:26 GMT

And in this case, I mean the closure of the walls over the new pipes and electrical. But I’m not ready to show that yet, so I’ve just uploaded a few details of some of the finished work for your enjoyment. I’ve decided to keep one big photoset of the renovation as it progresses, so you can find all the newest photo-y goodness in one place (the same photoset about which I wrote before).

Basic status update: the new plumbing and electrical was completed and inspected week before last. Last week the wall was taken down, the new structural beam was installed, and the plasterers closed up the existing wall openings (as well as some old ceiling holes…yay…)

So what’s next? Well, the responsibility is back on our shoulders this weekend. I need to prime and paint the new plaster surfaces, install the base cabinets, and probably properly hang the cabinet above the fridge. Then next week our contractor’s team will hook up the stove in its new location (and, I think, install the fan hood, though I need to confirm that) and run a line for the fridge’s icemaker up into its opening. So at some point next week we will be able to move much of our kitchen operation back out of the dining room. (The photoset has a glimpse of how we’ve temporarily set things up.)

The long pole in the tent is the countertop, but I expect that to arrive so that we can install it soon. Then our contractor will re-install the sink (along with a much needed sink-side drinking water filter) and… drum roll please… our new dishwasher. This will be the first dishwasher the house has ever had, and it is the reason for the whole renovation. Funny how a few thousand dollars to create space for the dishwasher among the existing cabinets (the house has never had one and there was no easy way to hook it into the current plumbing or electrical) turned into a whole kitchen renovation.

Demolition redux: the kitchen remodel

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:45:59 GMT

It seems like a long time since we’ve written anything substantial in the houseblog—and that’s because, after two bathroom remodels and a full HVAC system replacement, we were on Houseblog Hiatus. But no longer. We’ve been removing bits and pieces of the kitchen over the last month and this weekend everything else came out. Yes, we’re in the throes of a kitchen remodel—but this is going to be a remodel on a budget. Alas, no granite for us.

You could really say that this project started shortly after we moved in, when we realized that we couldn’t get our new fridge into the kitchen. As part of that effort, I ripped out the cabinet above the fridge and realized that the plaster ceiling above it was in pieces. Since then we’ve dealt with freezing pipes, leaks from ice dams through the kitchen ceiling, kitchen cabinets that don’t close and drawers that shower sawdust on the cabinet areas below each time they are opened and closed...

So we decided that it was time to bite the bullet and remodel. I wrote about the general scope a while ago, but didn’t get into any details. So here is the plan:

Set up temporary kitchen in the dining room, complete with fridge, microwave, toaster, coffee pot, and hot plate. Done, and let me tell ya, it’s compact. As they say, we are camping with a mortgage...
Rip out all the old cabinets. Done, finally (see the photoset).
Have plumber reroute the sink plumbing and the gas line. In progress.
Remove the wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
Install new cabinets.
Hook up old stove and sink and new dishwasher (finally) and fan in their new locations (a picture is forthcoming).
New countertops.

And now we’re on the way. The photoset gives some interesting glimpses of the things that we’ve found in the demolition, and I will annotate each photo over the next day or two.

I, Roomba

Tim Jarrett — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 03:24:09 GMT

A fortuitous and formidable gadget showed up on our doorstop yesterday: a Roomba. (What can I say? It’s the Jarrett House. Gadgets have a way of finding their way here.) This particular Roomba was a Roomba Red, the entry level model, but I’m not complaining. It charged all day today, and tonight while we ate dinner it vacuumed our bedroom. With the door closed we couldn’t hear it, but it is a little noisy as it cleans the hall at the top of the stairs. Next time we’ll wait until we go out before we do that part.

The dogs seem quietly curious about it. Jefferson got up off the sofa, walked to the foot of the stairs, and looked up for about ten seconds. Now he’s happily ignoring it.

And the results? Well, the bedroom smells much less dusty—and the vast quantities of dustbunnies that I emptied out of the dust chamber suggest that it’s done a pretty good job. I’ll take a look at the other rooms later, but the fact that I’m not having to get up to deal with much of anything (other than removing the hall rug while it sweeps) tells me that we may finally have licked our bedroom dust problem—which has collided with our “no time for housework” problem too many times.

Gas leak?

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:49:48 GMT

—Oh yes. We had noticed a gas smell near our next-door neighbor’s house, and they don’t have a gas hookup so we figured it must have been a leak in the main. So Sunday afternoon the crew from Keyspan was out there digging. They found a stub that would have been used to connect our neighbors, but which hadn’t been touched in sixty years and was corroded. They also, unfortunately, found a water main that crossed right over it. Needless to say our new neighbors spent the night with friends while Keyspan and the water company fixed the problem.

Then Keyspan came next door. There had been no detectable gas when they probed our lawn—and a good thing too, since we depend on gas for hot water, cooking and, later this year, heat—but our neighbor across the street showed signs of a subsurface leak. So they had to check the integrity of the main. Of course, that ran in the street right in front of our house, so there were big holes in front of our yard for a few days while they worked on the problem.

My favorite one, though, was coming home late Wednesday night to a big hole in front of our driveway with two cones in it. I had to drive over my neighbor’s lawn to get in my driveway. I called and bitched, and they never did come by to put a steel plate over it, but they patched it yesterday afternoon.

They also did us what they supposed was a favor: having scooped out the loose sandy fill (comprised of years of road sand and salt build up) in front of our curb to dig, they replaced it afterwards. Unfortunately they chose to use topsoil instead. So now we’ll have a guaranteed mudhole plus lots of weeds.

Sigh. At least there’s no more gas leak.

The heaviest substance known to man

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 22 May 2006 18:31:22 GMT

...is carpet and pad saturated with floodwater. On Saturday Lisa and I stripped the carpet out of the basement, where it got flooded last Sunday. It was a slow job. We had to gingerly move all the bookshelves, CD racks, and other furniture pieces, which fortunately kept all my media up, dry, and out of harm’s way; we opted to just kind of shift them fully loaded rather than try to unload them, since there was no dry surface to put anything. The carpet fibers were tenaciously holding onto the water they had absorbed—until you tilted a piece of the carpet, at which point everything ran down in streams onto the floor. And there is no better sponge than the miscellaneous processed lint pieces that constituted the carpet pad that was under that rug. All told it took about fifteen garbage bags, two utility knife blades, a few bandaids, and a lot of cursing and Advil. But it was worth it; except for one remaining utility room carpet, everything is now dry in the basement and garage.

We did make an interesting discovery: a pit covered with a few boards toward the front of the house concealed the original cleanout for the house’s drainage line. A plumber who was looking at the cleanouts on Saturday reported that the cleanout couldn’t be shifted any more, but cheerfully pointed out that we had multiple other entry points into the line if it ever needed to be snaked. The good news about the pit is that it might be a good location to place a sump pump.

I’m an idiot, of course

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 15 May 2006 01:51:33 GMT

And anyone who knew anything about floods would have known, as I didn’t, that emptying the basement once wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference with how high the water table is right now. Neither of course did the French drain. I now feel a little better about having let it get clogged, knowing it didn’t make a damned bit of difference. (Yes, all the work I did earlier is for nought. Oh well. We’ll see where we are in the morning.)

Our first flood

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 15 May 2006 00:01:41 GMT

I was supposed to be at the airport by now, but that’s not in the cards for tonight. Instead I’m catching my breath after pulling a couple hundred gallons of water out of our basement—where there is still a standing inch in places.

The rain has been steady here for days, but until sometime today we didn’t have any problems. When I checked our basement and garage at 6:15 am after taking the dogs out, everything was fine—maybe a little water coming in under the garage door.

What a difference six hours can make. I went downstairs after coming home from church to get some kitchen garbage bags and found the carpet in the library room drenched and water standing in the utility room. I opened the garage door to find more water in there. I stood staring for a minute, then pulled stuff off the floor and got to work.

I used our 12-gallon wet/dry vac and, after lifting it up to the laundry sink a few times to drain, eventually figured out I could just leave it up there and vacuum from there. I then vacuumed and drained, vacuumed and drained, until I realized that the sink was draining more slowly than I was vacuuming. I took a break and came back to find the water back to the level it was originally. Gritting my teeth, I started again, but the sink filled again in a few minutes. So I took a minute and went out to the garage, grabbed a broom and started sweeping water out the door and into the French drain, which was pooled almost to the cement high point at the garage door.

Mercifully at this point I started thinking. Didn’t that drain actually work once upon a time? I grabbed a pitchfork, levered the French drain grate out of the way, and pulled a couple spadesful of dirt out of the drain. And it started draining. Then I broomed out the garage, mostly, and went back into the utility room to note that the overall level seemed lower. I got a few more shopvacs full of water out of the utility room floor, then took a break to warm up. And here I sit, warming.

And thinking. On the one hand, most of our stuff was off the floor—bookshelves, utility shelves, etc. And the new HVAC gear was built high off the floor and floodproof. On the minus side, a lot of temporary stuff got damp, and we’ll now have to rip up the carpet in the room in the next week. We definitely need to get a sump pump down there. And I need to keep the French drain clear more often, so the next time it rains 12 inches in six days we won’t be back in this place again.

But mostly I need to get back down there and start shopvac'ing again. Sigh.

Kitchen beginnings

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:25:32 GMT

Is there such a thing as a slow, incremental kitchen renovation? Beats me, but Lisa and I are hypothesizing that, up to a point, it can be done, and we’re moving forward with a plan to do one.

The first part will be to take the outside wall of the kitchen, which until this weekend housed a stand-alone cabinet, and install a set of actual cabinetry there, complete with countertop. This will require some work, namely removing a built in ironing board (which is cute, but essentially useless to us) and a rudimentary chair rail molding, but should otherwise be straightforward--especially since we’re using Ikea’s modular Akurum system.

It’s the second step, where we rip out the rest of the old cabinets, install a dishwasher and an outside-venting hood, and move the stove—and maybe rip down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room—that will be the fun part. The theory about doing incremental changes kind of breaks down at that point.

So many decisions. At least with the Ikea system there are some constraints. We’ve already picked the cabinet bodies and doors, and will try out one of the counter surfaces on the first two cabinets we bought—at $50 for six feet of counter space, it’s a cheap enough experiment. But then the other questions come: what kind of dishwasher? What about the floor? Can we fix the sag in the floor that is ominously under the refrigerator?

As they say, stay tuned...

Modern boiler, stone-age brain

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 20:38:45 GMT

I awoke this morning to realize that the heat was offline and the temperature on the main floor was about 55 ° F. Oy, I thought, and checked the boiler and the circuits. All the breakers seemed to be fine but the voltage converter (the Viessmann high efficiency unit that is the core of our system runs on 230V AC) wasn’t lit up. Fortunately there was enough hot water in the tank for a few showers. We called the HVAC guys.

Three hours later there was egg on our face and a new factoid in our brains: the supposedly dead cut-out switch at the top of the basement stairs that used to power off the oil furnace but was supposed to be inactive is still alive and now cuts power to the Viessmann. Someone inadvertently did just that last night. Nurr two masters degrees in this house nurr. We’ll have a little conversation with the electrician about that. But the house is warm now.

Not too much otherwise going on with the house right now. We have baseboard molding to replace, one more phone jack to install and wire, two more new plaster walls to paint, a basement to redo... but we’re a little hung over with home improvement projects right now and are enjoying the respite.

Media wiring, penultimate chapter

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 21:12:26 GMT

On New Years Eve, I got a chance to work on a long stalled project—hooking up the cable wiring in our distributed media outlets. As you may recall, back in June and July I ran coax to outlets in the first and second floor bedrooms and connected them to a distribution block—really an oversized panel-mounted tee connector—in our structured wiring panel. That left the last step: connecting the distribution block to a live cable feed.

On Saturday, Lisa and I (with help from Esta) mostly finished this part of the job. What was required:

First: Reroute the existing cable hookup in the basement back behind the fake wall. This takes some explaining: Our basement is built with one finished room, which has drywall walls at a standoff (about six inches) from the actual foundation wall. This leaves a convenient space to run electrical cables back and forth to the service panel, since the panel is mounted in the false wall, as well as for other kinds of cabling projects. There is even a door in the false wall, which is for accessing the house water shutoff but which works well for fishing wire.

Back in 2004 when cable was installed in the basement, the installer drilled a hole through the left top of the window frame and dropped the cable directly into the room. I drilled a hole through the false wall on the upper right side of the window and pulled the cable across behind the blind hardware at the top of the window and through the hole into the access space.

Second: Fish coax cable from the media panel into the laundry room. This was straightforward, since there are lots of cables and ducts passing through openings in the wall between these two rooms that will be boxed in at some point in the future. With everything still open, I could just pass the cable by hand through the wall into the laundry room.

Third: Fish coax from the laundry room, inside the finished ceiling of the library, and down into the access space and connect it to the live feed. This was the nightmare. The last time I looked at the access space, it wasn’t too bad: just a few cables strung across. One of our electricians had even been thoughtful enough to leave a nylon string in place for pulling future cables through. Unfortunately, that was before the first floor ductwork and the bathroom renovations were completed. End result: it took about two hours to work my hand up and fish the coax across, without getting snagged on any live electrical wires or puncturing the insulated ducts, and then to retrieve the fish tape.

Oy. Finally, though, almost all the connections have been made. Still remaining: actually test the cable outlets in the two bedrooms; insert one more tee in the false wall; install an outlet on the wall in the library bedroom; and tack up the cables in the library and the utility room. I’m most nervous about the first item. Anything could have gone wrong with the coax going up to the bedrooms, including bad connector attachment (by me), drywall nails driven into the coax (also me), insulation damaged by the HVAC guys... etc. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

Christmas with housebloggers

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:34:51 GMT

As I washed paint off my hands this afternoon, I reflected: You can always tell the housebloggers among us. They are the ones who have to finish priming and painting a wall before they can put up their Christmas tree in front of it.

To backtrack a bit: I wrote back in October about our finishing the framing for the radiator niches, and in November about getting some of the finished plaster sanded and painted. But I left out a detail—because of time constraints, we had to leave some of the work undone. We opted not to work on the two patches of walls that were obscured—one by a sofa, the other by a freestanding Ikea cabinet unit.

Unfortunately, we subsequently figured out that the only place to put the Christmas tree was next to the sofa, and that the new wall section would be exposed. So of course, now that we are all home from our respective business trips, that meant the wall had to be sanded and painted before the tree could go up.

So here I am having finished sanding and priming, gathering strength before going on to the finish coat (hopefully that’s singular). It’s not that there is so much work to be done; more that I have so little energy left, after a week spent with a prospective customer and back to back Pops concerts yesterday, with which to do the job.

Ah well. Perhaps some photos of the finished product, with a tree in front of it, later.

Back to work

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:45:53 GMT

It felt nice to have a three day blog hiatus over the weekend, just as it feels nice to get back on the horse this morning. I guess sometimes just the change of routine is important.

I got a fair amount done on the house over the holiday. I primed the plaster in the newly finished upstairs bathroom (in the process doing a very nice job of painting my hair—must remember to wear a cap next time), replaced light fixtures in our upstairs and downstairs halls, and assembled much of the organizational furniture that Lisa and I purchased during an Ikea run on Wednesday night.

One of these days I’ll have pictures; unfortunately, I can’t for the life of me find the cable that connects my camera to my computer. (Yes, I see the irony; I said we assembled the organizers, not that we actually got organized. Big difference.)

Refugee housing a la IKEA

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:55:58 GMT

I'm going to try to go to IKEA later today, so the concept of “flat pack” refugee housing—an entire dwelling for four designed to be assembled into a shipping container sized package—tickled me. 10 feet by 9.5 feet by 8 feet is not exactly a flat pack, but Vestal Design, the project creators, explicitly credit IKEA with the idea to use space saving techniques to enable mass deployment of housing. They say that, with a typical cargo ship that holds 6400 containers, one can ship housing for up to 100,000 people on a single ship. Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

Ask Houseblogs.net your home improvement questions

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:00:30 GMT

Cool new feature on Houseblogs.net, the site that aggregates the home improvement ramblings of housebloggers worldwide: Ask.Houseblogs.net. It’s still in beta, in fact there’s only one question posted right now. But I can think of no better way to leverage the collective bruised fingers and hard learned lessons of all us amateur contractor types than through a model like this. Brilliant, and kudos to Aaron and Jeannie for putting it together.

You can subscribe to the Ask feed via RSS.

Home stretch

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 16:40:19 GMT

Whew. Lisa and I are finally starting to feel as though we are over the hump for our renovation projects. The tile guy is a day ahead and will finish our upstairs bathroom today, meaning that the remaining fixtures will be installed by the end of the week and we can start painting. Last night I sanded the new plaster on the first floor—in the process realizing we had unpainted surfaces in every room in the house, thanks to the new shower and the radiator niche patching—and Lisa tacked the dust away. We’ll paint tonight.

Incidentally, for the sanding we used a vacuum equipped sander with drywall sanding screens, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Very little mess was created and it did the trick, removing the few ridges and blots left behind by the plastering work. We didn’t use a name-brand sander, just a generic kit from one of the home warehouses, and it seemed to work just fine.

There are still a few loose ends that I need to make sure the contractors get wrapped up, though. In particular, the grab bars for the downstairs shower, which we need for her dad, haven’t arrived yet, and we are still waiting for a few odds and ends of trim—soap dishes and such. But we’ve come a long way and I am looking forward to having the final stages over and done with.

Oh—and they might even be able to get the front door and storm door replaced this week, too. Swoon. Likely later, though.

Just in time, too: Lisa’s folks arrive Wednesday for the holidays, and her brother will fly in late Thursday—while her niece will drive down from Vermont on Friday or Saturday to hang out with us for a few days. The new bathrooms will get a real workout.

Showering in the dark.

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:55:03 GMT

Our new shower in our first floor bathroom is finished, and not a moment too soon as the second floor bathroom is almost completely gutted now. I took the first shower in the new space this morning, and while I was looking forward to the experience it turned out not to be everything I had hoped, because it was in darkness. Yes, a transformer blew down the hill from us at about 6:10 this morning...

The good news is that our new hot water system’s big ol’ storage tank had more than enough for two showers; our old tankless hot water from our late unlamented oil furnace would not have allowed me to take a hot shower with the power off. But I wasn’t able to evaluate the lights or the efficacy of the new exhaust fan. Oh well.

Before and after photos of the new shower and of the demolition in the upstairs bathroom when I get power back at home.

Old Arlington maps

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 06:32:48 GMT

Speaking of the Arlington list, someone just posted a fantastic find: a working map of the town dating from 1898. What is most interesting about this map is that it sets some theories of our neighborhood’s development on their head. I have been told by my neighbors, and even by the folks we bought our house from, that our land originally belonged to the folks who built the house next to ours on the corner, which dates to the 1920s. In fact, the map of our neighborhood not only shows Grand View Road, but shows the plots for our house and the house on either side, in more or less the places they are today. The house next to ours may have been built first, but it never owned our land.

Interesting what you can dig up if you look.

Taking care of business, in a flash: closing up the walls

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 17:41:30 GMT

I’d like to introduce you to the table saw on the right, also known as The Machine That Saved My Ass. Ryobi isn’t a lusted after brand of power tools the way Porter and Cable or DeWalt is, but for my money and for today this is the Power Tool That Walks on Water.

Perhaps I should back up. As I previously wrote, we figured out this weekend that we needed to trim most of the lumber we were using to frame the radiator niches so that the wallboard the plasters were to install would be flush with the existing wall surface. Unfortunately, my plan to use a circular saw hit some snags: lack of a good long work surface, inexperience with the tool, and most importantly lack of time. Because I needed to get the niches framed and insulated by Thursday morning, when the plasterers were due to start working. But I was rehearsing Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, and Thursday morning, and singing a concert Thursday night.

So basically I had Wednesday night after an abbreviated work day to rip a sill plate and top plate and studs for five wall openings, then nail them into place and insulate them. I called Lisa and shared the news. She said, “Can you get that done?” I said, “I think I need to get a table saw.” She said, quite reasonably, “But where would you put it?” Right now our garage is full of plumbing fixtures waiting to go in our upstairs bathroom, but it won't have a lot of room even in the best case scenario. I told her I would find a portable model, and crossed my fingers.

Sure enough, the Ryobi above folds down and even has wheels to roll it away into a corner. It was pretty quick to assemble. I left the office at six, had it in the back seat of my wife’s Prizm (a tight squeeze, but it fit) by 6:40, and was home and assembling it by 7:30. At 8 pm, I connected the ShopVac to the dust port and started ripping lumber, and was done by 9. The ripping process was an absolute breeze.

I started working. The process I followed was to dry-fit the plates and studs, shim or trim where needed, and then start fastening everything together. I nailed the top and sill plates into the framing above the niches and the floor joists, respectively, using a big heavy framing hammer and some 16d nails. (My forearms are still aching, btw). Then I used construction adhesive to fasten the end studs to the finished plaster sides of the niches, and toenailed the center stud into place. I should probably have used more than three studs on some of the openings, but for the sake of time I left some wider bays.

Wednesday night I only finished two bays (and applied the adhesive to the rest) before my body shut down at 10:30. Thursday morning I got up early, insulated the bays in the kitchen and our bedroom, then cursed as I realized I had cut the plates for the living room some six inches two short. I had to leave at that point, so I kept my fingers crossed that the plasterers would not have enough time to address all the openings yesterday.

On the way from the office to the concert I stopped at Home Depot and picked up two more 2x4s, then swung by the house and ripped and crosscut them to fit, and dry fit them in the living room. I was too tired after the concert to do anything else, so I got up this morning and finished nailing and insulating the remaining bays. As I was working on the second to last one, the plasterer arrived, so I hurriedly finished it and moved on to the last bay, where I had to install an electrical box as well as nailing in the framing and insulating the cavity. Somehow I managed it and was out the door at 8, passing the plasterers who were already screwing blueboard over the first cavity.

It was a close thing, and my arms will ache for a week from all the hammering. But I got it done. Thanks, Machine That Saved My Ass! You’ve earned your precious floor space in my garage.

Radiator niches and bathroom work

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 03:13:54 GMT

Ow. Ow. Even though contractors are hip deep in our first floor bathroom renovation, we still have plenty of projects of our own, including (ow ow) framing in the niches where the radiators used to be, so that the plasterers can make them flush with the walls. This, as always, turned out to be more complex than we ever imagined.

Background: we didn’t want to find a plasterer ourselves and so had put off this project, but we’ll have one coming in to finish the walls and ceiling in our new shower. So we decided we would take advantage of his coming to have him do the work. And it turns out to be affordable, provided that we do the basic framing ourselves. So on Saturday we cleaned out all the broken plaster from the niche, which turned out to be pretty much all of it, measured, and cut the 2x4s to length. Then I started swinging a framing hammer, and learned about slow progress. Really slow project. Fortunately we finished the dining room one and I even hung a box for the outlet.

Then things started to slow down. We had to remove trim from each of the other openings—intact, if possible, since we would need to reuse it once the plastering is complete. And in some cases we needed to bring up floorboards, since we had some floor to replace where there was some water damage and need to reuse the good boards to patch the bad ones.

Then there were the two pipes, that, in spite of all our HVAC installers’ efforts, were still too high to lay floor over. Fortunately our contractor volunteered to knock one off during his lunch hour—seeing that otherwise his plasterer wouldn’t be able to finish his job. And tonight I got another one done, in spite of a nightmare of bad angles and sheer fright. (Handling a reciprocating saw to cut a few inches off a loose cast iron pipe just below our bedroom floor ranks as my least home improvement chore ever.)

But that’s done, and all the lumber is cut to length. Now I just need to rig a jig so that I can use my circular saw to trim about 5/8ths of an inch off each piece, so that the blueboard will lay flush with the wall surface or below it. A few shots of the progress here, including the shower stall pre-rough piping and tile.

The mystery of the disappearing door.

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 18:29:43 GMT

While I’m pondering house changes, I can’t help but be captivated by this illustration of how to make a hidden door in a bookcase. Very cool, and solves a problem with our plans for the built in bookshelves in the library... provided I can sell Lisa on it.

We have limited space in the library room for shelves. One wall is mostly occupied by a large fireplace, and the facing wall has the staircase—which has little room for bookshelves, sadly. In the outside wall of the room is set a door, which leads to the access for the water shut-off (and also provides a convenient access behind the walls for running electrical cable to the breaker box). I had thought that the door limited what we could do with shelves on that wall, but the illustrated how tos in this article suggest we may have some options.

The choice of book for the hinge is especially good: an old volume of Sherlock Holmes. Though I might be tempted to find a more literal title, like this one, to serve as my mnemonic.

Color us nervous.

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:43:00 GMT

Well, today is the big day: bathroom renovations started at our house this morning. Our contractor is ripping out a closet and a half on the first floor to squeeze a shower into our half bath (which makes it now a three-quarters bath, I think). We’re a little nervous and have been forgetting important things to ask. Like: when you do the demolition, if it’s possible, could we get the floorboards out of the closet so we can patch the holes and water damage left where the radiators used to live?

This is also the point of no return in a lot of ways. Most of the other jobs that we have had someone else do have been quick and relatively painless: one day at most, even for the window replacements. The HVAC job was an exception, but it didn’t make a lot of dust and noise, as opposed to this job.

And there are so many moving parts: tile, fixtures, lighting, paint, plaster, all have to be managed separately. Our general contractor has been pretty good so far, but there are still things that we have to manage.

So we deal with it. The dogs are out of the way in New Jersey, and we’re at our respective offices IMing nervously back and forth to each other with budget numbers and details we’ve forgotten. You can say what you will about doing big projects yourself, but at least you know exactly what’s going on. Makes me wish I had set up a webcam or something.

Chore day

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 16:29:07 GMT

Happy Columbus Day—or Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, if you swing that way. My company observes the October holiday (and the fact that it is the only reasonable holiday candidate in October is probably why), so I have a day off for house chores.

Which is more exciting than it sounds, because there is nothing more depressing (in both the colloquial and literal senses) than a bunch of half finished projects around the house. So my goal today is to have a bunch of three-quarters finished projects when I’m done. To wit:

Figure out a way to use the large-diameter hole saw whose shaft too big for all my drills, so I can…
Drill a hole in a closet door to replace the handle hardware, for which I need to …
Buy non-locking door hardware, which will also allow me to…
Replace the closet door handle that stopped working entirely yesterday morning. After that, I can …
Move the pegboard from my old shop area to the new one in the garage, for which I will need either to mount some firring strips with the big concrete anchors I have or else purchase some smaller ones. After that, I can…
Move one of the shelf units cluttering my library into the place where the pegboard sat, and then move the other out to the garage.

But first, and most important, I need to reserve a place at the Genius Bar. This PowerBook has a bad hinge, and I need to find out if it will cost as much as I think it will to fix it.

This Old Houseblog: meeting Norm and Tom

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 14:58:22 GMT

Lisa and I went to the studio where Ask This Old House is filmed last night and met Norm Abram and Tom Silva, who for most of us housebloggers almost need no last names, much less the mention that they are the carpenter and general contractor for This Old House. It was a fun evening and a good fundraiser for WGBH.

Alas, my cameraphone got only blurry photos (as you can see). But we heard plenty of great stories and one liners, such as Norm’s confession that he and producer Russell Morash keep the furniture that Norm builds on the New Yankee Workshop (“There are two copies of each piece, the prototype and the one that I build during the show. Russell gets one and I get the other. Sometimes a family member will get one — on loan.”) and, answering a subsequent question about how Norm chooses his projects for that show, “I look around the house and ask myself, what do I need?”

Tom Silva fielded a wide variety of questions, most (for some reason) having to do with insulation. In particular, he told Lisa that to seal the gaps left in our garage walls and ceiling when our ducts were run for the Unico system, we need to use an expanding caulk called “fire caulk”—primarily because of the garage location.

I also got a chance to shake Norm’s hand and thank him, on behalf of all us housebloggers, for the content on the This Old House website, which I told him fills the role of the New York Times for an authoritative link site for housebloggers. His eyes glazed a little when I said the word blog, but he was very polite. So there you go.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:06:56 GMT

Our work continues. By now it has probably become apparent to readers of our houseblog that we are doing very little of the renovation work on the house at this stage ourselves. We really wanted to do more of it, but I know my limits and they don’t include plumbing, framing (other than demolition), or electrical work. So we have a lot of contractors around these days.

Good news is our heating upgrade is totally complete. Our oil furnace is gone, and the oil tank was removed yesterday. After hearing some of the horror stories of accidental oil deliveries filling basements after a tank was removed, we decided that the fill pipes had to go as well, and the tank removal contractor filled in the foundation holes as part of the job. Great work and a very low price. So that’s one project that has gone to 100% complete.

Another that is close is window replacement. After struggling with storm windows and drafty main windows, we closed our eyes and opted to replace all the windows in the house with vinyl-clad wood replacements from Harvey. The windows all went in yesterday, and the final trim work was completed this morning. We need to prime and paint everything, but hope to hold off on the final paint coat until we can strip the moldings, which badly need repainting but have years and years of build-up. We considered the Silent Paint Remover but are looking at a gel-based ecologically safe paint stripper called Removall.

The new windows are really nice—though the as-yet-unprimed frames have me doing a double-take every time I see one out of the corner of my eye. And it will be nice not to have to struggle with cleaning the storm windows this year. Of course, now we have to replace the window shades too (sigh).

The last change isn’t even one that we instituted, but we’re certainly the beneficiary. The chain link fence along our driveway is being removed! Since our driveway has a choke point about halfway down where the distance between the fence and the wall is very narrow, having the fence gone is a Very Good Thing for the paint on the side of my car. Plus, our neighbor is having a bed put in with some flowering shrubs in place of the fence. Bonus!

Warm water, with gas, despite everything.

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 03:36:01 GMT

A few projects drew nearly to an end this past week. Most notably, the installation and activation of the new gas-fired high efficiency boiler finally brought to a close our year long experiences with oil-burning heat and hot water.

As frequent readers of this blog will recall, our experiences with oil-fired steam heat have not been rosy. After a while of this, plus the expenses of oil (even on a monthly budget), we started thinking hard about other options. When we talked to the contractor who put in our Unico system, he suggested we consider a high efficiency gas boiler in its place. We considered, we thought, and we bought. And the installation, occurring this week when gas (and oil) prices jumped almost beyond recognition, seems to have come in a timely fashion. We’ll see how the bills work out, but right now it seems like a good move.

One funny note from the installation. We had the boiler on line by 3 pm on Friday. Lisa and her family came back from the beach at 4:30, and took a few showers. We ate, and later Lisa’s father reported that the water from the kitchen sink seemed cool. In fact, it was cold. My initial investigations suggested that all was well, just not working. The contractor said he would send someone out in the morning.

The next morning, Lisa took a shower and reported delightedly that there was hot water. Shortly thereafter, the contractor knocked and asked, before, I could even say anything, “You have hot water now, don’t you?” It turns out that, as he explained to me, there were two settings that were failing us. One, a power-saving setting, was set at the factory to turn off domestic hot water production between 10 PM and 6 AM. The other? The clock, which was still apparently set on German time. By my calculations, hot water had stopped at about 4 pm, and the 50 gallon tank had run out by about 9 pm—five hours later. Not too bad, all things considered, and even better now that the clock is set to the proper time.

Insulated

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 03:34:15 GMT

Well, partly insulated, anyway. A contractor came out for about two hours yesterday and insulated the attic—placed batts around the blower for the upstairs AC and blew loose fiberglass everywhere else, and installed screened, louvered vents in both gables. Last night was the first time the upstairs AC cut off before 11 PM since it was installed.

Unbelievable, how much of a difference this has made. Even with the AC there was still the sense of oppressive heat overhead upstairs. But now it feels like the whole house is cooler.

Our first month’s electricity with the AC was $50 less than our monthly oil bill during the winter. I think, thanks to yesterday’s work, that month’s bill will stand as a high water mark.

Next week: the gas-fired high efficiency boiler, at last. I spent last Sunday building a platform against our basement mechanical room wall where it will be mounted. The basement walls slope inward by about five inches about three feet off the ground, and the plumbing contractors needed a straight shot out of the bottom of the boiler for the pipes. So I bolted 3/4" plywood to the upper concrete wall with big-ass concrete anchors; screwed two-by-fours in a square frame around the outside of the frame; screwed another layer of two-by-fours with longer screws through the first layer into the plywood; and secured a final layer of 3/4" plywood through the two-by-fours with big lag bolts. Final result sticks out from the bottom of the wall by about 1/4" and isn’t going anywhere.

I am, though—catching a train to Lancaster, PA on Saturday for the family picnic, then flying from Philadelphia on Sunday to San Francisco for a conference for another few days. So I’ll miss the reveal of the boiler. Maybe, though, when I get back it will be working and the old oil burner will be gone. That would be something.

Progress report: no radiators; livable master

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 23:58:38 GMT

Last week initiated the second half of our first major systems overhaul project on the house. We had completed our AC work with two working cooling zones; last week work started on the heating side with the removal of our old steam radiators and the demolition of the big steam pipes throughout the house, wherever they were visible. Our HVAC contractor did a great job removing almost all vestiges of the radiators with minimal damage to walls, floors, and ceilings.

The contractors deposited the radiators and steam pipes in the bottom of a eight-yard roll-off dumpster, which I then filled about halfway to the top with miscellaneous debris from the garage and the storage space under the stairs, including a rusted solid reel lawnmower and lawn spreader, a manual snowplow, four rusted apart metal lawn chairs, fifty-year-old trim, thirty-year-old spare shingles from the previous roof, broken storm windows (which are going to be replaced during the next major project), and all kinds of other odds and ends. Heap strong back, heap sore back.

The next step in that process will be the installation of the new boiler and connecting it to the radiant heating coils in the blowers. That project is slated for two weeks from now, so no exciting machine-room pix today.

Next: the bedroom. While I mucked out our storage areas, Lisa started painting our bedroom. This was a relief because we finally got rid of the bland cream color that was previously everywhere in the house, but it was also necessary thanks to our wall-opening escapades. I helped her finish that work on Saturday. The room is now a cool blue-grey called Yarmouth Blue, and looks much nicer.

On Sunday, we finally figured out how to rearrange our space to make room for more storage. We have had our eyes, like Aaron and Jeannie, on PAX wardrobes from Ikea. We have very limited closet space and desperately need to get some more room in a hurry; only problem was, with our cool sloping rooflines (visible in some of the photos from the beginnning of our AC installation), we didn’t have enough room to get the full 78 inches of the wardrobes in without standing the wardrobes in the middle of the floor. Fortunately, once the radiator was gone from the room, it suddenly became apparent where we should move the bed to gain the extra headroom. Bottom line, our wardrobes should be on the way shortly.

And the work continues... as always...

Wrapping up the HVAC work

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 22:38:21 GMT

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the final phase of our major surgery on our house’s respiratory system. Having installed a fully functional two-zone cooling system, our contractor team will be installing hot-water coils in the blowers, adding a new gas-fired boiler, and removing the radiators and the oil-burning boiler from the house.

To prepare, I did one last bit of ceiling demolition in the workshop/mechanical room (which now hosts my workbench on one wall and the downstairs AC system on the other), and installed plywood panels over the cement wall of the basement for the new boiler. The Viessmann boiler is a wall-mounted unit, and it will sit on the same wall as the media wiring box on the opposite side of the room from the blower. Pictures forthcoming once the work is finished.

This, needless to say, was another major cause of arm pain. Nothing like swinging a crowbar (plus a hammer and chisel to mark the line in the plaster, plus the drill for the concrete anchors to secure the panels) to really get the forearms screaming.

The shoe! the shoe!

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 21:59:06 GMT

It’s interesting when your hobbies cross with family memories. I followed a sidebar link at Houseblogs.net to discover an old family friend in a list of odd-shaped houses and other dwellings: the Shoe House in York, PA.

Driving up from Bad News, VA to my grandparents in Lancaster County, we would cut through York on Rt. 30 and would always pass The Shoe, as we knew it. We never stopped, but it was always a good sign that our six hour journey was nearing its end.

Additional information on the Shoe House and its colorful builder at an alarmingly familiarly named site.

Too many progress bars, too little time

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 21:25:31 GMT

Site maintenance: I added a dedicated houseblog page to my site, which allowed me to put up a list of ~~shame~~ projects in progress, and also hopefully made the houesblog more visible than it was previously.

I wanted to use the progress bars that Houseblogs.net provides (as seen on HouseInProgress), but didn’t want to allow use of <object> tags on my site. So I looked around and found a pure CSS solution, which seems a little lighter weight.

Man, it’s scary looking at that list just how much we have to do. And I’m probably forgetting some things, like bathroom remodels...

A date with IKEA

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 17:30:37 GMT

Pavement-influenced post title aside, this might be more aptly described as IKEA as Mail Order Bride. Lisa and I are practically on tenterhooks for the 2006 catalog, and frantic to get an updated Kitchen Planning Tool. I feel like I did back in 1982 when I was waiting for my exclusive mail order Admiral Ackbar action figure (sadly now gone along with all my other Star Wars toys).

We’ve all but decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the kitchen remodel, primarily because of the budget flexibility we’ll get, but also because anything is going to be nicer than the built ins we have now. We’re planning to remove part of the wall between kitchen and dining room, relocate the stove, and fix some craziness with the sink plumbing, as well as extend the cabinets along the wall where our busted radiator is living (until a few weeks from now, when it along with all our other radiators will be removed).

Room transformation

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 22:59:24 GMT

We were so busy over the weekend, and I was so busy the last couple of days, that I never got a chance to record our progress on the latest project—closing the walls after the first round of AC install.

As recorded previously, I opportunistically ran phone, Cat 5, and coax through the open walls where our contractor ran his electrical wires, the cooling lines from the compressor, and the drip line from the attic. I was originally planning to run speaker wires as well, but Lisa talked me out of it. We will leave audio out of the second floor for now.

We wanted to get the walls closed off, so rather than completing the coax run from the outside drop to the structured wiring box, I moved ahead to installing insulation. After reviewing the options, I reluctantly went with fiberglass — reluctantly because our house’s 2x4 exterior framing only allowed using R-13 batts, and even those were somewhat compressed by the pipes in the wall. But, as Lisa keeps pointing out, it’s better than the horsehair that was there to begin with.

After the insulation, I cut blueboard to size and installed that with drywall screws. Upstairs, I was able to drive the screws directly into studs on both sides. Downstairs the studs were hidden behind the window frame on one side of the opening, but there were still the ends of some laths visible in half the hole. I cut some 3/4" by 3" standoffs, nailed those into the studs whereever I had gaps, and then ran the screws through those into the studs (in a few cases, at an angle!) to support the top of the board. It was an ugly process, but it worked well enough, and after the seams and screw holes were taped and the entire thing skim-coated with two layers of veneer plaster, it was OK. (Lisa did the actual plastering, and has concluded that it is the skill most lacking by us for this whole project.)

After the plastering was done, I installed the wall plates for the media wiring outlets, which involved terminating each of the cables and snapping the plugs into the modular wall plate. Final steps were priming the plaster and then (finally!) painting the first floor office/bedroom. I took a few photos throughout the process; the one on this entry is a teaser that (with the exception of the uncovered electrical outlet) shows the final product of all the work I just described. The original wall opening ran between the two outlet plates on the wall to within a few inches of the ceiling.

So that was the work on the office this weekend. Plus of course assembling the desk we bought at Ikea. But that’s another story. So is repainting our bedroom, but that story will have to wait until we start it.

See if you can't lock down that plaster chunk, Artoo.

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:11:40 GMT

Looking at HouseInProgress’s post about their weekend painting exploits, I was struck by the incursion of a familiar silhouette into the bottom photo in the article, just beneath those fantastic windows. Yes, the familiar big ass ShopVac, steady presence in all good home renovation projects.

Which of course leads me to the comparison: ShopVacs are the astromech droids of the houseblogging world. Tireless workers dealing with thankless jobs, they’ll all essentially identical except for the colors.

(I can’t be the only one to be geeky enough to make this comparison, can I? No, I see I’m not. I’m probably the first one to note that the high-pitched whine a one-gallon ShopVac makes when you accidentally tip it over and lodge the vacuum float in the top of the unit sounds a lot like Artoo’s squeal when he gets his droid ass shot off in the Death Star trenches, though.)