Home Ownership And You!

Oh, also, hung some Christmas lights up.

This isn't even all of them. It's only about 3,000 lights. I have 2400 more to put up.

No, it's triple sistered 2x8s for the header plate. The 2x3 is just a nailer plate for the siding.

OK, so bear with me here, this is a big story.

We bought this house in August 2017, the fam moved in October of 2017. I had a ton to do before that happened. But the property was in pretty bad shape. Run down, over-grown and just uncared for. This picture of the garage was taken the day of closing. Pretty shabby.



So I dealt with a ton of crap with this garage for a little over 2 years before I got fed up with it and started working on fixing it. The garage door breaking was the last straw. But it had to be the first thing fixed because there was no point in fixing anything else until that was fixed. But now that that was fixed, I moved on to other things.

You can see in the pictures of the garage door that there are pillows of insulation in the roof. I will tell you right now that even after the door being fixed, all that insulation did was hold in humidity and grow mold. Why? Because it was only single faced and stapled right up against the back of the sheathing. It smelled whenever it rained and would drip water everywhere when the humidity got high enough. Additionally, faced insulation that isn't covered is a severe fire hazard. Bad idea for a garage.

So I decided that it was going to come down. I covered everything in tarps as best as I could, I got myself a couple full Tyvek suits, gloves, booties and a P100 mask kit. Donned myself some goggles and a face shield, grabbed my 4 inch cultivation rake. I then proceeded to rip down about 2,000 sq feet of insulation that was caked with mold, sawdust (also moldy), rodent droppings, bird droppings, nesting material and snake skins as well as an ant colony and a wasp nest.

It took all day and filled the 20 yard dumpster twice over with just insulation. The only thing I've ever done that was nastier was cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy down the shore.

So this is what came down.

I started with the bay where the door was replaced because I knew there was electrical problems up there and I wanted to see if I needed to address them immediately before I moved on.



This picture is what filled up the garage bay where the door was replaced



This is the rest of the garage



This is the dumpster. At this point, there is nothing else in this dumpster but insulation and a door that was flat on the bottom of the dumpster. This isn't even all of the insulation. I still had one more trailer load to throw in and it made it another 3 feet taller. This had even settled a bit because it started raining on me and I had to cover the dumpster with a tarp so the insulation didn't soak up all the rain and cost me a fortune in weight.



I did the insulation first on purpose because I knew it would pack down when I threw two buildings on top of it.

So this is what I was left with when I was done pulling the insulation out.



In this picture,






I still get wisps of insulation and paper falling down from time to time but that's no big deal. But you can see the moisture and mold problems in a few of the pictures.

Here's the fun little presents I found that were problems before and never fixed right. But this is what comes from "expanding" a garage improperly. I have not done much besides some halfassed stuff myself to plug up these holes as the entire roof is going to need to be replaced anyway. Like, completely. It's not congruent and the "joints" where the new roof for the extension meets the old roof all have issues.






Next up, the Pool House.

So, the Pool House.

It was a 6 foot by 9 foot structure that was built on a slab. It was old. Like built in the 60's about the same time that the pool was put in. The deck was replaced some time in the late 70's, early 80's, I think, when modern pressure treated stuff first became widely available. The pool house was not built with such things and whomever built it understood nothing about draining water and grade levels.

So when we got here, the pool house was covered in vegetation. I didn't even realize it was there the first time we came and I thought that the 5th structure listed on the property was the gazebo on the island. But since that's not enclosed, it's not considered a structure for tax purposes.

I kinda ignore it for a bit because it smelled and I really wasn't looking forward to messing with it. But it was so overgrown that I did not know that a tree had fallen on it and broke windows. I found this out because during the summer of 2018, there was a rancid stink coming from it. I just figure it was a mold bloom because the lake got overrun with algae and mold too. Just a bunch of rain and really hot.

Yeah, no, I was wrong. A raccoon climbed in the busted window and couldn't get out. It died. Then a 2nd raccoon climbed in to go and dine on the first, festering raccoon carcass. It too perished.

Fun.

It also seems like someone used it as a bathroom. So as summer 2018 waned and things got colder, the stink went way down and with my new chainsaw and a bunch of other sharp things that you swing at stuff, I went and hacked the jungle back and shredded it all in the beast. I was going to work on taking it down in the summer of 2019 but, bathroom fun happened as well as the water tank repair so $3200 later I had no money for a dumpster rental 'cause there was no way I was cutting all that up, bagging it and dragging it to the curb.

So i rented the dumpster for the garage and took all that time off because the pool house was coming down. So in November of 2019, this is what it looked like. Keep in mind, this is AFTER I cleaned up around it.













So I enlisted the help of my friend Brian. He came down and helped me with this because he's just as if not more psycho than me in tackling such projects.

Went to pop the door off the hinges thinking I might be able to sell it to some idiot that does stuff like "Flea Market Flip" but the door was so soaked with water that the hing screws ripped right out leaving on the top hinge attached. So I persuaded it with my 4 pound persuader and it came off. We then emptied the pool house.



Next we pulled down all the panelling to see what the structure was and used the sawzall to start cutting fasteners at all the joints and pulling electrical. That is, after we traced down where the electrical was tied to. Because the day I did the garage, I took a break and went and checked the circuits and they all showed dead. The day of demo, they were live. Then they went dead, then they were live again. So we had an adventure there. Long story short, traced it back to a breaker in the service panel under the pool deck and the break lever actually wiggles inside it's housing. So fun.

Anyway, I cut the main line to the pool house with an ax because I was already passed my nerve limit for the day with it. We cut the fasteners on one side of the roof and we had hooked up the tractor with a cable to see if we could get it to flip over but the yard was too wet and the tractor would get it to just under half way over and start losing traction. So we had to try something different. Cue me with a 2x4 and Brian on the ladder to stead the roof while I re-positioned the 2x4 as teh roof went up.



It was heavy as a hell but we got it flipped off in one piece where I could cut it up with the sawzall.





Then I used the trailer I built to cart the whole thing to the dumpster after we cut it up in to more manageable chunks. This is a shot of the dumpster with just the roof and the broken door on top of the insulation.




We then proceeded to cut the rest of the building apart as we knocked the walls down in one piece.









We carted the junk up to the dumpster in the trailer and this shot was the last major load. It was also the shot right before the trailer hit a soft spot in the lawn and toppled over bending the front bracketry all to hell so I had to take 45 minutes to fix that to be able to keep using it.



Once we were done with the building, while Brian was cleaning up the small parts of the mess, I scraped up the asbestos tiles off the concrete pad.

This was the aftermath.





I'll rebuild the Pool House one day. I still have to clear more stuff around it because I want to build a waterwheel that will help me keep the lake and the channel that makes the island aerated and flowing with water.

That was a messy, disgusting building and I'm glad we were able to get it done. I thought I was going to have to pay someone because it was way too much work for me by myself. It was too much for me and Brian too.

Up next, The Outhouse. That story will conclude the saga of The Great Dumpster Rental of 2019.

Hey hey! Look what I found! Improperly repaired water damage! Imagine that?

THANKS, CAPTAIN HALFASS!




Time to make a boatload of noise cutting the rot out.




At least it's not drafty. At least not any more than the window is. That's not installed right either.

So, I've been working on the office/lieberry at the house. In my previous abode, I converted one of the 3 bedrooms to a home office and had floor to ceiling bookshelves in the room. They were not built in despite looking like they were. I brought them all with me to the new house.

So the goal is to get those bookshelves modified and installed in the new house. However, I had to fix the problems with the room they were going in, first. Additionally, I found that the room had solid wood floors underneath the carpet.

In the corners, where I was able to easily check, the floor wasn't that bad. Had an orange tinge to it but really not too big of a deal. But that's important for later.

So you saw the pictures above with the water damage in the wall above the window. Well, I got that fixed, just needs to be painted. I didn't take too many pictures because all it entailed was cutting some 2x4's and some shims to get everything straight to the existing wall and then hanging sheetrock and mudding it out. It's still not perfect but the window was installed poorly (imagine that) and I leveled the sheetrock to the window and cut the ceiling in from there. But I didn't rip down big chunks of the ceiling and there's a bit of a dip where there's likely some swelled sheetrock from water damage. Most people would blow it off and not care or even notice but I notice and it bugs me. But it's a colossal effort to fix and I'm not doing it right now. Maybe in the future.

Anyhoo, no pictures of that, really. So, ends of the room, the floor was in fairly good shape. As I pulled up carpet, the fresh new hell got deeper and deeper.

Short story? Captain Halfass covered up water damage with new carpet and left it there to mold and rot under the carpet.

The whole story, now.

So I got the gray carpet up. This is the worst of the fun I found.



Doesn't look so bad, right?

You'd be incorrect.

This is why.



You see the 3rd and 4th boards in from the wall? The joint between them is raised an inch and a half off the subfloor, like a mountain ridge. I always wondered what was up with the bulge in the carpet there, why it would flex down and pop back up. Now I know.

What this is, basically, is water damage. The roof leaked above the window. I thought it was the window that leaked but when I pulled the trim, the frame was solid and dry. Also, the rot inside the wall...looks like Captain Halfass neglected the gutters and they filled up with crap and pushed water up, under the flat roof which then trickled down to where all the water damage was. It dripped down the window and seeped into the flooring where the old oak eagerly sucked it up and swelled.

That swelling caused cupping halfway across the room. Since Captain Halfass didn't do anything about it and just covered up the damage after the leaks were fixed, the cupping is permanent. The boards either need replacing or severe sanding.

In this picture, you can see the severity of the cupping progression from top to bottom as it gets closer to the wall. The first 2 feet of boards near the wall were cupped so bad that they flashed like a disco ball when you ran a flashlight beam across them.



This is a floor level view about halfway across the cupping



And this is where it finally starts to be stable wood again, about 6 feet from the wall.



So after assessing the entire floor, the boards directly under the leaking area were so far gone that they were not salvageable. So I got my hand oscillating cutter and pulled them out.





I even tried sanding them some to see and they were just bad. Here's where I had sanded again after I pulled the board. I wanted to see if these would clean up or start splintering and disintegrating under the sanding like the boards I removed did. Here you can see inklings of fresh wood which meant I could get to a fresh surface. Unlike where the boards I pulled out were mold blackened through most of the board.



Now here's where the fun starts, like pulling carpet, padding, tack strips and staples wasn't the fun part!

I thought I was working with 3/4ths inch thick flooring or at least 5/8ths 'cause the extension is fairly new and would have been the oak flooring in everything else from the 50's and 60's around here.

Nope.

3/8ths thick tongue and groove...or, rather, bevel and groove. One side of the boards are a V-notch, the other side is a double bevel that makes a V that fits the V-notch. This floor is quite old because I talked to a flooring guy and he told me that this would have been what's called a "contractor grade" now and fell out of use around 1955-1957 when more modern, precision milled stuff started hitting the market. Given that this extension on the house was put in around then, this floor is about 65 years old or so. Problem with that is...fat chance finding it. About all you can find is the straight oak boards and even then, they are 5/8ths thick which was too thick for this application.

So what I had to do was I went and bought four 1 x 8 x 6 red oak boards. I then ripped them down to 1 x 2 x 6 boards which were still too thick. So my dad set his saw up to rip down 1/2 inch thick boards from those 1 x 2 x 6 boards. We then ran them through the planer and took off 3/32nds. We didn't cut them down to 3/8ths because it would allow me to sand them down to level with the surrounding boards. Those surrounding boards weren't 3/8ths even the entire length because of the water damage. So here's the new red oak boards in the repair.



I ended up face nailing them with 1 1/4" 16 gauge nails since there was no tongue to nail in to. We tried cutting the bevels and Vs to match but as precise as my dad's tools are, we couldn't get it done. So I face nailed them with the tiny nails so you can't even tell. All I did was sand them with the wood and then a little dab of a dark brown stain on the now shiny heads and they disappeared in the polyurethane.

Thing is, though, remember that orange tinge I mentioned? Well, when I started sanding, which you can see in the top of the picture with the repair, there was a host of odors from pet accidents to how the floor in my grandmother's bedroom smelled when she became incontinent. So that was fun. But once I got to the parts that didn't have those smells, there was more than just the woody, pencil shaving smell that oak has. There was a sweet smell, like shellac. Given the orange tinge and when the floor was installed, there's a 95% probability that the floor was shellacked when installed. Since the compounds needed, polyether polyols, to make polyurethane varnish were not introduced by DuPont until about 1956 and didn't see wide-spread use outside of new construction until about 1960, shellacked oak floors were what was done prior.

OK, so big deal?

Well, it is. 'Cause I started sanding spots that were gouged to see how deep the damage went given how thin the floor boards were. What I found was the vibration was making what looked like localized finish damage pop up in huge blisters. Especially around the water damage.

You know what it looked like? Did you ever go to a bar, sit at the bar and the bar's top finish has these cloudy, orangey-yellow splotches everywhere? That's what happens when you get a nick in the top coat, water gets in to it and you put hot and cold stuff on it. The finish layers separate and the cloudy splotches are space between layers. It happens most often when someone takes dissimilar finishes and covers one with the other. Like putting polyurethane over shellac or acrylic over lacquer.