Home Ownership And You!

So don't feel like writing more about it right now because I'm dead tired but this is what I did on my Christmas vacation.

That's just the first coat, BTW. Got at least 2 more to do

I'll write more later.

I mean, it's possible to do it but you need to prep the old surface first with sanding and then sealing to make sure you get anything unstable off so it doesn't keep the new top finish from bonding and you need to seal it so that something like a solvent in the acrylic doesn't cause the lacquer bond on the surface to weaken and cause it to delaminate. Then your new finish comes up with the old finish and leaves bare wood beneath it where it will eventually gray from water and UV damage and possibly mold up too causing further issues.

Guess how Captain Halfass "refinished" this floor?

So now I have spot water damage from careless furniture moving that is splitting and splintering board surfaces randomly and I have excessive cupping that has long since dried out under pressure and permanently cupped the boards.

Cupping, BTW, is when floor boards get wet and they swell. They want to expand laterally but can't because they are butt up against each other. So they smash together causing ridges at the joints, just like plate tectonics. This gives the boards a convex shape and makes them reflect light like a disco ball facet. If the water damage is fresh, you fix the leak and let the floor dry out. Most times, it will uncup itself. But if you don't let the floor dry out before you do something with it, it won't uncup. If you sand a floor that hasn't dried and uncupped yet, it will dry after your sanding and uncup itself. But now, since the edges of the boards are now thinner than the centers, you get crowning. I have this problem too from Captain Halfass' half-assed finished floor repairs elsewhere in the house.

This floor is not likely to crown, though, because of age and moisture levels. But, I had to grind down about 1/16th of an inch just to get rid of the cupping. Doesn't seem like a lot but, now I still have to take off the finish which is another sixteenth of an inch. This leaves me with a 1/4 inch thick floor which means that if this floor needs repair again, it needs to be replaced. It also means that the top edges of the grooves are very thin and extra susceptible to cracking/splintering and causing deep grooves at the joints which let dirt and moisture in, under the floor. I should have gotten two more refinishings out of this but no. Captain Halfass had to screw it up with piss poor scuff sanding and putting polyurethane down over degrading shellac that wasn't stabilized. So because he couldn't be bothered to do it right, the floor's lifetime is cut short significantly.

So I started sanding just to see and repair what was needed before calling a sanding company to come in and refinish it or rent a drum sander and do it myself. Well, with how thin and damaged the floors were, all I could picture was a drum sander hitting it, snagging splintered spots and throwing planks out like a rapid fire Pez dispenser. So I decided instead to do it with a belt sander because I could adapt to the conditions easier. Thankfully it was only about 290 square feet but that $50 (on sale) Harbor Freight, Bauer brand Makita knock-off belt sander took it all and asked for more. I burned through 16 belts in total. 12 for the first sanding and 4 for the finish sanding. With the level of damage from furniture wear, neglect and a hamfisted sanding with a drum sander prior to my ownership, it came out pretty well. Oh, also, there was fresh damage which looked to be from a moving dolly for moving gun safes. They typically have solid steel wheels with non-skid urethane liners and you're supposed to use something to protect the floor but Captain Halfass didn't. I know this because there were two arched dents in the floor that came out of the closet, wiggled a bit and then resumed the arc through the door to the room. So thanks for that parting shot, Captain Halfass, you're a peach!

Here's the start of the sanding



This is at the end of the first sanding.



Yes, those are my clothes, no I did not take the picture naked. I left the dusty clothes in the room with the rest of the dust instead of dragging it all over the house.

This is the first coat of the water based polyurethane which, everybody was like DON'T USE IT! and I'm not sure why 'cause it worked great! Only issue I ran in to was as soon as the poly hit the floor in some spots, the grain raised almost immediately. That would have happened with oil based to. I didn't sand it too much, though, because, well, the floor's paper thin already. So there's rough spots.

So here's the first coat, it's splotchy 'cause 65-70 year old oak boards will suck up a new finish like a fat kid eating cupcakes. It evened out though and I ended up putting on 5 coats.



This is the finished product.





In this picture, you can see some of the damage I wasn't able to sand out completely. This is damage from a motorized hospital bed shimmying around on the floor as the mattress goes up and down. Captain Halfass had his elderly mother living here and this was her room until she needed to go to a nursing facility.



This kind of damage is all over the floor as well as gouging from a poor sanding job prior to me and I was worried that the polyurethane was going to make it all pop out. But unless you are standing over it and deliberately looking at it, you don't see it. Most of it will be covered under bookcases and area rugs anyway.

The only way I could have made this better was to replace the floor completely.

Also, the walls are only primered. They will be painted a sandy tan and the bookcases will have a red mahogany finish despite being made from white birch plywood.

Here's the trash pile from fixing the water damage in the floor and wall, painting the walls and ceiling, removing the carpet and sanding and finishing the floors. There's 8 trash bags and 12 rolls of cut up carpet. Trash dudes took it all this morning too.




Glad this is done. I was dreading it because of all the problems I found. I didn't expect the rot in the wall to be so bad and I lost a day and a half because of that. Otherwise, I would have the color on the walls too.

But this is what I did on my Christmas Vacation. I finished the work on Saturday the 2nd and started the polyurethane. I did the last coat at 6:30 AM on Sunday to get in on the drying time window. Then I went back to bed. I could barely move on Sunday. Still aching in spots and I have an injured tendon in my leg that keeps going numb but it's getting better day by day!

Tony M wrote: »

You have reminded me of my glory days when I could do what you did everyday for years.

Not anymore...what took me 6 months now takes me 2 years.

May I ask how old you are again?

That is some seriously labor intensive work you just performed. I know.

It takes a long time because of lack of time.

I'm 43.

mhardy6647 wrote: »

@Jstas , your floor looks quite good after sanding & refinishing.
It is fine for old(er) floors to have character. Houses are made to live in, and living in 'em leaves its marks.

Our soft (pine) floors are already getting plenty of character, some courtesy of out two grandchildren.

There's character and then there's neglect/abuse. The softer gouges are fine. What's got me ticked off is the long, length-wise gouges cause by dagger sized splinters being ripped out by the sander because of dry rot from damaged finishes. Or the trench that runs the width of the room at both ends in front of the radiators where whomever did the sanding the last time let the drum sander sit too long. It didn't have to happen but knowing Captain Halfass, I know exactly what he did and he did it because he spent the bare minimum in money and time on maintaining the old house and then bragged to me about how much money he put in to it. Really buddy? Where? Didja bury a box of money in the yard or something?

Many projects take twice as long to finish and I already plan for stuff to take 2-3 times as long as it should. They take so long because I have to fix stuff that I shouldn't have to if Captain Halfass had just spent a few extra bucks or spent an extra hour on something.

So, here's some more pictures.

First off, here's the pile with the mound of melamine under it to show I wasn't really kidding. It seems to have settled some over night as some boards fell off this morning. Since I don't want them sitting on wet ground, I restacked them before taking this picture.



So here's the empty island now from the end of the bridge. Two park benches and a picnic table are missing from this shot as well as the "stage".



Here's the fireplace. Missing from this photo is another picnic table and the two tables I mentioned.



BTW, I'm accepting applications for the position of Bridge Troll. My last one quit right before Thanksgiving. Said I was too mean and miserable for him and cramping his style so he was going to look for work in an environment more conducive to his efforts and talents. I told him where he could shove it. The position doesn't pay, by the way. Like, literally, I'm not paying you.

So, the fireplace. It was partially buried by dirt and refuse. It's also falling apart and it's not from weathering. Well, it's not falling apart, it's been damaged like somebody was doing something with it like using it as a skateboard jump or something. Evidence on this is the white stone slab chunk in this picture. That was a 1 inch thick chunk of marble that I believe was part of a counter top that was over the wood storage box on the right. Those stones piled up are the ones we dug out from behind the fireplace and they were under about a foot of pine needles and broken, plastic yard furniture. I'm pretty sure that there was a counter almost a foot higher over that wood box on the right and it was capped with a 5 foot by 20 inch slab of 1 inch thick marble. Marble isn't the strongest stone in the world but unless a tree fell on it and the heavy trunk hit it, there's no reason for that marble to be broken. Also, the rest of the fireplace would be damaged much worse than it is. But there's no evidence of a stump anywhere on the island near enough to the fireplace to do damage to it except for one stump that was under the other table and it's 30 feet away. So a heavy trunk wouldn't have hit it, just a canopy.

So I'm thinking someone had broken it by doing something stupid. That's an expensive piece of marble too. We were unable to find the other pieces.







I was actually going to start a fire in it to burn up the leftovers in it last year. I'm glad I didn't. Like I said, we dug out around it, 6 inches to a foot of dirt, to find the end of the pad it's on. While doing that, I found tree roots growing into the fire place. If I had started a fire with those tree roots attached, there's a good chance I would have started a forest fire. In the NJ Pine Barrens, forest fires can be hard to fight because the root systems are loaded with pine tar from the pitch pines and they will spread a fire through the root system for acres. Hence the reason we have fire breaks criss-crossing the state forests.







There is power on the island. The problem is, it's a disaster. This outlet here works when the breaker in the box isn't all wonky. It's on a post.



But, like everything else on the island except the gazebo, the post is less than ideal due to years of neglect.



Also, Captain Halfass told me himself that he had run power to the island so all this electrical fun is his doing.

So here's the divot from the stage filled in with pine needles to stave off erosion. The Gazebo is in good shape, just needs so cosmetic help. I need to take the railings off as they are cracked and split and several of the spindles are broken. I'll replace them later. But I need to get the paint scraped off and then sanded and repaint it soon. Hard to do in the cold weather, though, the paint won't dry.



Here's some shots of the condition of the gazebo. There is power and there is a light fixture in there but, like everything else with Captain Halfass, it's not been maintained and I find it hard to believe that he was renting this out with it in this condition. There's also a tree that fell right next to it in the last storm. It's been there a while, death by bugs, but it was still in place and I hadn't gotten to taking it down yet. Probably a task for next weekend.






Here's the dangling light fixture which, to me, seems like kids, either Captain Halfass's own spawn and their degenerate friends or any of the myriad of people he allowed to traipse around the property like it was a park did this damage. If you turn the red switch on, the fixture immediately sparks and blows the breaker. The power to the island is currently off because of this. Additionally, none of it is GFCI'ed.



I'm surprised it hasn't burned down yet.

The goal here is to refinish/repaint the structure, enclose the gazebo in screening, fix the electrical, hang an outdoor rated ceiling fan in the ceiling, with a light and add an outlet or two. I'll likely have to replace the shingles on the roof too. It can be pretty brutal on the island in the summer but in the spring and fall, it's a nice place to be. A small, propane firepit would extend the usefulness too.

So there's still more work to do but it's coming along. Here's some shots of the trails to the fishing spots on the island that I was talking about. These three have trees fallen across them that need to be removed.







In this one, you can see the HUGE tree he just left there because he "thought it looked cool".



This is the trail I cleared last year that goes out to the point across from the dam where the deepest part of the lake is.



Here's a shot from the gazebo. Gives perspective on how large the area actually is.

So, the first winter after we moved in, we had really bad snow storms. Several of the them. The tractor and snow thrower attachment got a hell of a work out shoveling out a season where we saw about 5 feet of snow from Thanksgiving to Easter. During that time, the previous mailbox and post got obliterated by the plow driver who swore up and down that he didn't hit the mailbox.

However, I'm inclined to disagree. The previous post was put up by Captain Halfass and was made from the same vinyl and trim that the siding is made of. Before we moved in, he replaced the mailbox he had on the post that was airbrushed with a lake scene that said "Calm Waters" or some other bullhockey on it. So we got a plain, cheap as could be, mailbox, in black. Whatever, it worked.

But, in January of 2018, it ended up about 15 feet down the road and 8 feet in to my neighbor's driveway. They actually brought it over to me when I was outside shoveling out. They also proceeded to tell me that the mailbox was on their property (it wasn't) and that Captain Halfass had moved it there a couple years earlier after he put the fence up. I told them I was planning on moving it to the other side anyway because I didn't like having to turn my back to traffic to check the mail and not having anything heavy to jump behind if I needed to get out of the way of an idiot. They seemed kind of disheartened at that. Like they were sad they weren't going to have something to hold over my head or something. Anyway, I went and looked at the mailbox and it was obliterated. The post and support were covered in vinyl but they were wood. The wood support for the mailbox was missing and the only thing holding the post up was one side of the vinyl post cover. The internal wood post was broken in half and you could push the whole thing over with 1 finger.

I took these pictures after a second plow had come through and buried everything the first plow did. When the snow melted, I found that the first plow did indeed hit the mail box because it took out about 6 feet of asphalt curbing and a 2 foot wide swath of dirt that was about 2 inches in to where the mailbox itself was located. These pictures are where I chucked the mailbox to take pictures and **** the county out. The messed up red reflectors on the sticks is where most of my curbing and mailbox landed. They surround a rock the neighbors have at the end of their driveway that they painted yellow.





I couldn't get to the dirt to replace the mailbox because the snow hung around for another 3 weeks. So I stuck the mail box in the snow and used the snow as the post. The first picture the vinyl support cover is still hanging on but the wood is gone, no idea where it went. I thought I could just put the mailbox back on the vinyl for now and as soon as the mailbox weight hit, it, it just fell right off. Also missing is the vinyl scroll piece off the bottom of the support and the finial cap that had a solar light in it. Found the finial shattered and scattered all over the road and no idea where the solar post light went either.

I fought with the country for a week before they came out and replaced the mailbox when the snow melted.

They gave me this.





They beat my cheap mailbox with a hammer and the bottom of the new post to get the dents out and then painted it with black paint and stuck 50 cent number stickers on.

The post was an untreated cedar post with a metal stake embedded in the bottom.

It was installed in March of 2018. It'd been leaning since since July of 2018. It was low on the priority list so I hadn't done much about it and just kept propping it up. But it started leaning so soon because the soil here is very acidic so it tends to rot stuff pretty quick. The cedar post got water logged and the stake inside it rusted enough that they both failed and the stake was no longer holding the post upright. When I pulled it out yesterday, the post came off the stake like it was just sitting on it.

So last year, I finally got Jackie to decide on what she wanted for the mailbox post. I ordered a new post kit that was fake stone from Amazon from a company called Eye Level. It's actually a really nice post. But, I didn't want to drop a couple hundred on a mailbox post only to have it knocked over the first time a plow came by and have to repair it all again.

So last November, I finally engineered out my idea and got to work. I thought I had pictures of it but, I don't so here's what I did.

I was going to use a concrete form but, it made it difficult to get things right because of the height the form would have to be vs. the black pipe I wanted for the post support. So I went without it.

I dug a 16 inch wide hole that was 28 inches deep. I put 4 inches of pea gravel at the bottom and tamped it down level. Then I took a 6 inch ABS pipe that was 24 inches long. I drilled three 1/2 inch holes across the pipe starting about an inch down and going about 3 inches down the pipe. Then I set it in the hole, sunk it about an inch and a half into the gravel then centered and leveled it. I then mixed concrete to fill the hole around the outside of the pipe. I left the pea gravel open inside the post hole for drainage so the post is less likely to rot from standing water.

I let the pipe set in the concrete for, like, a week before I did anything else. We had a ton of rain in that week too and the hole didn't fill up at all so my drainage idea worked! It was also insanely solid after the dirt around it settled.



So next thing I did was follow the instructions and that's where I went wrong, will detail later. I got a 4x4 post, ground contact rated. But I didn't like how much it wiggled in the hole. So I got four 2x4s rated for ground contact. Now the post was about 3 inches shorter than the instructions said it needed to be. So I made up that length with the 2x4s. Which is why the top looks weird. I ripped the 2x4's down to about 1.5 inches by 2.75 inches and then beveled one side at 20 degrees, then knocked off the bevel points. Then I centered them on the sides of the 4x4 and screwed them to the 4x4. This gave me a profile that would fit in the pipe better and not wobble. I also knocked off two opposite corners of the 4x4 so it was easier to drill holes through it diagonally.

I set the post in the pipe and marked the 3 holes on each side. Then drilled those holes through the 4x4. I put the 4x4 back in and checked alignment with a pencil and then bolted the post to the pipe with 7" stainless steel hex bolts and nylon lock nuts, flat washers on each end.





I did this because now, if the post gets broken or something gets screwed up with it, I do not have to dig a new hole. I pull the bolts out, pull the broken post, make a new post and bolt it in and put my new mailbox post over it. But knowing my luck, it won't work out that way and I'll be pulling a 120 pound concrete slug out of the ground with a broken piece of ABS sewer pipe stuck in it. If that happens, I'm building a block pedestal, filling it with concrete and rebar and covering it in pretty stone. Then I'm going to mount a camera watching it so when the plow driver hits that, I can see the look on his face as the plow just explodes in front of him. Jerkoff.

Anyway. Next I slid the fake stone post cover over the post and checked the situation.



The post is sticking out the top.

I was thinking "That can't be right". So I check the destructions again and it said it was right. Even found some stuff on the internet from other people saying the same thing. So instead of me over-analyzing like I normally do, I just went with it.

Yeah, should have trusted my gut.

So I pulled the cover off again and went and laid out and pre-drilled the holes in the garage instead of struggling with it on the post on the side of the road. Then I took it back, slid it over the post and mounted the mailbox arm.