Home Ownership And You!

VR3

Im not going to argue anything you are saying. My experience is the Southeast where termites are a real problem. If you feel secure with it then it's cool.

Jstas

Alright, back to story time.

One of the things that wasn't part of the room initially but I ended up noticing after we tore the walls down was how poor the condition was of the door frame. It was the original front door to the house and it looked like someone had really butchered it a couple times. Additionally, it wasn't square and the door frame itself was racked. You can see it in the header here:



Also, for whatever dumb reason, someone had put a 2x4 spacer in to one side so the door didn't even sit centered in the opening. The 2x4 was also not secured to the framed hole but the hinges for the door were secured to it. That created a situation where the whole door frame would twist every time the door was opened or closed. This caused problems with the door opening and closing, obviously.

You can see it on the left side here



The other additional problem that you can see here is that the door frame sits proud of the framed wall and it is actually recessed on the inside of the house. This was remedied poorly with some painted melamine. Captain Halfass loved that stuff so it was likely him who did it. I don't have pictures of that, though, because it was hard to see the difference where it was and we didn't realize it was melamine until it disintegrated during removal. But here you can see the shadowing showing that the door frame was all screwed up.



So I'll get to the door later when I get to the trim.

Once we got the floor all squared away, we finished off the utilities in the room. One of the things I wanted was a utility sink. Every laundry room should have one. We didn't have copious amounts of space because of the shape of the room so we got a single tub and stuffed it in the corner. This is where the tub was going to go. We put it there to get measurements for the plumbing and then moved it to finish the window sill and trim. We also needed to figure out where to drill the new sewer line hole.



I still have more pictures to take of the finished stuff as I'm still working on the room. Finish materials have been hard to come by over the past year. It's getting much better but prices are still high so budgetary concerns limit how fast I can acquire materials.

So, the floor. It's a wood laminate with backing that isn't MDF and it isn't vinyl but it is a cellulose based synthetic that is water resistant and honestly, hard as a frickin' rock. It's floating too so it went in easy peasey and honestly, looks great.



It was pretty easy to get formed around the existing plumbing like the gas line too.



To reuse a picture, the lighting is two zone. There's the laundry zone which is one light and the closet zone which is 3 lights. The lights are shallow mount LEDs that are essentially held in my spring clips that get pinned behind the drywall. No need for a high hat or anything. Just drill a hole, pull a wire, install and go. You can see how bright it is with the 4 lights. They use about 8 watts each.



The other thing we did was we got a used radiator and put a radiator in the room. The room doesn't necessarily need to be cool in the summer but with how well it's insulated, heat in the room was not a problem last year. We wanted at least heat in the room because of the pipes and water lines. So we added the radiator.




Next post I'll go over trim, doors and other fun stuff.

At this point we are now into the first week of January 2022. We've been at this for about 2.5 months with about 2.5 weeks of holiday time in between.

Jstas

mhardy6647 wrote: »

At least up in New England, termites tend to be found in opposition (so to speak) to carpenter ants. If you have one, you don't have the other (at least, that's what they say up here).
Carpenter ants are pretty common up here.

It's mostly the same here. More ants and bees than termites. Only rotted buildings that are falling down and unsalvageable, like The Pool House and The Outhouse that were here had both termites and ants.

VR3 wrote: »

Im not going to argue anything you are saying. My experience is the Southeast where termites are a real problem. If you feel secure with it then it's cool.

Like I said, they aren't as big a problem here, mostly because of how harsh the winters can get. They don't go dormant in the winter but they do tend to hunker down in the nests and "wait it out".

But I've gone through great lengths here to eliminate the potential bug problem sources around the house because Captain Halfass didn't do any of it.

Also, I went and looked it up just to be sure and NJ does have restrictions on where pressure treated can be used. Given that this crawlspace is under living space, pressure treated is not allowed to be used.

We could use metal or masonry but the way it is done now will pass code inspection. But that's why we put the hatch in so we can inspect it regularly and repair if necessary. If bugs end up becoming a problem, we'll handle it. I get where you're coming from but things are different in different parts of the country. We can get away with stuff here that you can't else where and vice versa. Like I see the in-laws houses down in Texas and I can't believe what they get away with in regards to stuff like plumbing and it'd never pass code here. Mainly because of the harshness of the winters.

But, down in the Southeast, you guys have hurricane strapping for certain types of structures. Up here they never heard of such a thing. But when was the last time you saw an ice dam prevention system which amounts to a roof heater installed in Souf Cacalacky? In Texas they have storm shelters but no real basements, everything is on a slab. Up here, people have basements and depending on the age of the house, the basement might be a "cold" basement which isn't climate controlled. Cold basements often have dirt floors too and you don't see storm shelters 'cause they have a tendency to fill with water. You also don't see too many slab built house up here either because water runoff in certain areas has a tendency to float and break slabs.

Jstas

The trim.

The house has a specific but common type of trim and we wanted to go with something similar. Except, the house uses 6 inch wide boards with a beading attached to the top. Since it was all milled in 1925, it's hard to get exact, matching dimensions with modern lumber and millwork. So we went with as close as we could, my only requirement was it had to be real wood. No MDF, Masonite or cellulose based polymers. Real, primed wood.

The contractors went through and did all the baseboard after the floor was in. They also did the windows sills and the window casing. They did the door casing too but I'll save that for a different post, I gotta take more pictures of it anyway to adequately describe it.

So we put trim all around the everything, including the closets.











The only problem was the outlets, with the old floor height, were above the baseboard height and it wouldn't have been a problem. But with the false floor and leveling efforts, the floor was now about 2-3 inches higher than before. That landed the outlets in an odd spot.

The contractor wasn't sure how to go about it because of how they were sitting and rather than pay him piles of money to figure it out, I told him to just clean it up so it doesn't get damaged and I'll figure it out later. So this is what he left me with at both of the old outlets on the inside wall.



Ugly but it kept the outlets from being beat up until I could get to it. He also did a trim lip around the hatch with a finger notch to make it easy to lift up the hatch.



They did a traditional "Craftsman" style casing around the windows and since the walls are faily deep we ended up with some nice sized sills.



They hung some cheap, hollow core, closet doors for us too.



I did all of the paint work including doors and trim. Doors got disassembled and unmounted, painted and then remounted. I'll get pictures of the finished doors later. Besides, I gotta detail the entry door fun as well.

I went and grabbed some real nice wooden blinds from Levelor for the windows and man did they come out nice!





At this point, though, I messed up my left knee crawling around on the floor doing the baseboard and climbing up and down ladders to do paint work around the ceiling. I also tore a tendon in my right foot and all that made it really hard for me to do any repetitive work in the room. The contractors were done around January 18th after starting around October 18th. By the time I got to the point where I was injured it was the 3rd week of February. It took about 4 months for my foot to heal. The fam went to Texas to visit family and my **** employer at the time wouldn't give me off to go with them. So I stayed home and in July, I finished the baseboard trim around the outlets and finished off the electrical and closet door trim. I also painted the entry door and the trim and casing around that.

I posted about those last August or so but here's shots of the outlets again.










And here's the hatch trim before painting.



After painting.



Here's the finished outlets






At this point, the closet insides were not fully painted yet, just primered. I'm still not done yet because there's more planned in here for laundry organization but like I said, materials availability and costs have limited progress. So we're still going.

Jstas

At this point, this is where we started






And this is where it stands now.






The plan is to install cabinetry along the wall and around the washer/dryer and sink. We have the shelving in for temporary relief but now that I can get cabinet grade plywood again in the amounts I need for a reasonable price, I can get to making what the better three quarters wants in here. The outlets that are halfway up the wall are there because I'm going to put either shelving or cabinets below and the outlets are up top so there are accessible on the fold out counter spaces that she wants there.

But it was a colossal effort to get it to this point and it was a legit 2.5 months of work by 6 people in total to get here.

Still not done.