Out of Plumb

What can I tell you, the whole place conspired against me this weekend. The puppy decided that everything on the table was edible including a box of shotgun shells. The easy fix of my wife’s pickup has turned into a nightmare. Swapping out the in-tank fuel pump didn’t fix the starting problem. I was able to resurrect the lawn mower for one more last hurrah! It had a stuck exhaust valve do I am sure to the extra heat generated by all of its worn out internals. Had it running long enough to mow the rest of the yard then she quit again. When I drained the oil it was hot enough to burn the paint off the side of a coffee can. I don’t expect it to run again. The only house related stuff I got done was to use the remaining 25 pounds of mud to texture. I will get more mud tomorrow and have at her again with no interruptions; I don’t own much more that can break. Enjoy another snippet from my dank basement of news wallpaper of knowledge! Maybe I should take up smoking, I am a little jittery...

Got some done on the house, mostly texturing. Hope to get more done after this is taken care of. Not much maybe 15 pounds total. Away, Away Away!

Again nothing on the house because I decided to mown the lawn. Simple right, well not for my free lawn mower and me. I was given this riding tractor and after $50 in parts promptly had the motor die. Caught fire and everything! Scrounged a new motor free from the trunk of a junked car. It used some oil and smoked but it was free, dumpster diving is a hoot.

Well today we got off to a good start with a flat tire, soon set that right we chugged off to our destiny, only to push it back with a broken drive belt. Now I could have waited for the store to open tomorrow and ordered a new belt OR I could remove the motor, torch out the frame some and use a slightly smaller belt I had lying around. Hmmm… what to do?

In the end it worked ok, except that the gas tank no longer fit and had to nestle down at your feet, eh whatever. Off we chugged! First sign of trouble was a twitching of the starter cord with the backdrop of this ominous warbling noise. I ignored it. All of a sudden the starter cord barfed out and the motor started issuing the unmistakable shriek of a spun bearing. Now I could have stopped mowing, some would even argue it would be the wiser course of action, but did I mention the mower was free? Lets not underestimate the intrinsic yet intangible value of my own amusement. I shoved the throttle all the way open bound and determined to ride my fire breathing, smoke belching steed into eternity or be damned in the attempt! The end alas came shortly thereafter. The shriek became a tic; the tic became a knock and the smoke rolled like a cathouse fire. It would have made the earth first people wet themselves.

With the setting sun at my back she popped once, twice and silence. About 10 seconds after it died there was a whoosh and a jet of flame shot from the muffler licking skyward towards the heavens. I think I might have witnesses the ascension of its soul. I plan to attempt a resurrection, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day; sometimes you just need space and time to mourn.

No house work as I continue to list things on eBay. Hope to return to it soon, the house stuff that is. Trust me on a dial up connection eBay sucks. I noticed today that I’ve used more exclamation points selling on eBay than I have used in the rest of my life. I guess it is all part of the process of whoring yourself out, hey you’ve got to stand for something am I right!?!

Nothing got done on the house this weekend as I was helping my father-in-law do an auction. Frustrating part was the people who were so paranoid about losing any of the mounds of shit that piled up that by the time we got to the good stuff lots of people had left. As always I bought piles of crap, this time toping myself with nearly 500 pounds of door lock stuff. I paid less than scrap brass prices but hope to sell a bunch of it on e-bay. It is one of the things I do to supplement my meager rations as a teacher. See what I have for sale from this auction by clicking here Crap and then view seller's other auctions. I will add some each night, but I will ask friends and family not to bid, I don't need your pity.

Did lots of taping today. Put up the very last little pieces of drywall and spent the rest of the time texturing. Used one whole box in a single setting. 40 pounds is a pleasing number, but I am very tired. I can see why people would do a splatter texture, takes allot less mud and time. I hope the people we sell this place too appreciate the effort we have put into it. That and I think it might be time for me to go and get a splatter gun.

Not getting much done these days. Tell you the truth I come home from work and I am tired, physically, mentally and of working on this damn place. Bit of a shake up at school this year, makes us non-tenure nervous until next years contract is in hand. Signed mine today, 4 years with the school so now I have tenure, guess I can relax. Hope that security helps me chill and work on the house more. Spent hours installing the hall closet door, the last big thing to be done before I can wrap up, texture and paint. It never should have taken this long, but some times simple things just go far slower than you ever thought. Had to build my own jams again to allow us to reuse another of the doors we removed. Heck I could have gone and bought a new one but to get the level of quality in these old doors we would be out $100 and it would still be made of compressed sawdust.

Given how out of plumb the wall is I had to improvise. The wall leans out so the door jam had to tip in. This resulted in a horrible trim situation in the future. If I put the sheet rock on as is trimming would be a nightmare. Walking the hall any deviations would jump out and beat you about the head like a carnie with a sack of nickles. I went round and round but decided to taper the studs to get the sheetrock to lay right rather than taper the jam which would give you horrible sight lines when the door was closed. Sounds easier than it was to accomplish. I dug up an old inside corner rabbet plane, sharpened it up and had at it. As you can see from the shavings pile, it took a while. Nostalgic in a way, using a plane about the same vintage as the house for such a utilitarian task. Just the way the original hillbillies who built this place would have done it. I hope the spirits of my inbreeding brethren are pleased, well maybe not after they read this.

Well I was somewhat distracted with family here and all but still managed to put in some time. I was able to tape all of the seams and start on the texture. I would have gone farther but I ran out of mud. That's about 7 gallons of mud on the dining room and the hall alone. Allot of mud was used trying to get all of the old drywall to fade into the new seamlessly. I am quite pleased with how it is turning out. Another part of my problem is when I started to texture I didn’t thin it out enough. Its one of those things where you are trying to do 2 jobs at once. Thin enough to texture is too thin to tape seams very well. I sort of short for a medium but it was really to thick for texturing. I will be able to thin the mud I buy tomorrow much farther and it will texture faster and easier. The switches are in and they worked great. You can see the wires dangling from the ceiling but the other two have bulbs attached. Old replacement sockets for table lamps work great for this, just screw in a bulb and attach it to the bare wires. Great temporary light. I will try to remember to put in some shots of the dining room next time because I know you are all sick of seeing the hall. Thought I would toss in another newspaper article just because I find the concept of reading an 70 year old newspaper online fascinating.

Progress continues on the taping but I was way over optimistic on the time frame. We have had some wet cold weather roll in so opening every window in the house to speed the mud along no longer works. Given some of the ugly joints I am working with I have thick sheet rock mud in places. The only recourse is to use several thin layers. It is taking a long time. That and sanding the joints isn’t nearly as much fun as taping them so I have come up with all sorts of neat ways to put it off; removing wall paper from the cellar stairwell for instance. In doing so I exposed some news paper from 1934, the Spokesman Review. I thought this ad was interesting. The crochet hats are cool and all but what's up with the NRA endorsement? Maybe if Heston had one of these his hands wouldn’t be cold anymore. I would make a crude joke about these young ladies and gunfire (bang) but my Grandmother reads this so you will have to fill in your own blank. On the next page is a little blurb about the Klan’s contributions to politics and society, “raw raw raw, in the Klan just like pa!” Open minded group of folks back then aren't they? The swastika- esque border I thought was a nice touch, pulls the whole page together.

Refinishing the floor in our living room was a bit of adventure. I did the entire demo with the original chocolate brown carpet in place. It was nice because I was able to roll up all of the mess when we were done. What was exciting was pattern exposed on the back side. Apparently the living room was used as some sort of a stockyard. Urine stains blossomed in great splendor, a regular cornucopia of urea.

After pulling up the carpet we found ourselves in a bit of a dilemma, more carpet or go wood. Underneath the padding was a worn and stained fir floor, do we refinish or cover over? In the end the deciding factor was money, I could, doing the work myself, refinish much cheaper than covering over. Now came a question of timing, do I sheetrock first and then refinish or do I refinish and try not to mark it up doing the sheetrock? In the end I decided to do both, I would sand and put 2 layers of finish sealer down, cover the floor, sheetrock and then cleanup and put the final coat on. It worked ok, the masking tape was down too long and finish was too new so removing it caused some damage at the edges.

From the start it was a bit of a comedy of errors. First when we pulled back the padding we found a bullet hole. Yep you read me, a bullet hole. Seems the previous owner had left a loaded hunting rifle in the living room that his mother then accidentally set off while cleaning. After patching that (use a small router to plunge through floorboards on either side of the defect and cut them off at random lengths so it will blend) I started to sand. I was using a drum floor sander borrowed from my father-in-law. It’s a beast, 40 years old 50 plus pounds easy. Put some paper on it, switched it on and flap, flap, flap the paper came spitting out of the machine in shredded chunks. After tinkering with the paper clamp for a while I found a way to keep it on. Fired it up touched it to the floor and pulled back to expose a beautiful strip of fresh wood and globs. Globs? Turns out the belt was melting the old varnish which then stuck to the belt, floor and machine bringing the whole operation to a halt. Left us with two options strip the floor with a chemical stripper or scrape the varnish off. I did the latter, figuring stripper cleanup would take longer than doing it by hand. I was wrong. It took days and piles of new but hopelessly plugged sandpaper to get it all done.

In the end it was worth it. The floor is awesome; we managed that balance between rustic and new perfectly. It is rich honey amber in color and shimmers with a satin glow. The combination of age and staining is something hard to reproduce. If I had it to do over I would have hit that baby with a chemical stripper first thing and I bet that would have shaved days off the job, but the effect on the patina is something I can’t predict. I also would have cut the first coat of finish 75/25 with mineral spirits. I think that would have allowed the finish to soak deeper into the wood and toughen it up. Fir floors are not hardwood floors. Drop a CD case and you will leave a mark on my floor. I have no idea why they are all the rage today. It might be fine in an upscale yuppie home but in a rough and tumble home like ours with dogs it is going to show its age. I suppose it is always easy to touch it up. What I love most is when people ask about how we got it to look like that I can look them in the eye and say “peed on it”. The expressions are priceless.

I picked up the sheet rock and switches so that I can get closer to completion. I will have a 4 day weekend this week so I hope to get all of the taping and texturing done. We have family coming over so we'll see... With the rock on, the stairway transition looks better. There will still be some tricky trim work and I have to find away to match the old bathroom ceiling to the stair ceiling, they differ by an inch and I am not sure how to do it yet. The lovely carpet you see is available for adoption if anyone is interested. Comes with a 10-10 guarantee... ten minutes or ten feet from the door. How about this, I will guarantee it will look just as crapy in your house as it does in mine, how can you say no?

Little is going on until I can get more sheetrock. It has been raining and I don’t have the topper on the truck so I have put it off. Today I reworked the wall at the bottom of the stairs to make it easier to move stuff up and down. Not to attractive yet but it will be. I spent the rest of the evening taping, something that the puppy found immensely entertaining.

Today I wired the hall lights. The old cellar door light, the bathroom light and the first floor landing light are now collectively known as the “hall lights”. They uh, don’t actually light yet but I can sit in the dark and imagine the splendid essence of luminescence. Mmmmmm, imaginary light… The three-way switch is wired, except I don’t have the three-way switches. I was going to reuse two old ones but the corner of one had broken out and you could see it spark. It has been like that since before we bought the place so I figured it would keep on trucking. My wife nixed it. I tried to tell her it was a switch and a show, something that would cost extra in Vegas. So once I get the switches we are good to go. Light me up baby except I don’t actually have light fixtures yet, just bare wires hanging down. Maybe I didn’t do anything today, I wonder why I am tired?

Didn’t get much done today. I was doing my annual blacksmithing with the kids and so I was quite tired. All I got done was the instillation of the bathroom door. We were able to reuse the simple painted door that used to be on the bathroom. Not fancy but nice and it matches the door we are using on the cellar so it will all flow. Sorry its not more photogenic, looks better in person.

Had to cut down one leg of the door jam to match the new walls. In doing so I wrecked a brand new 10” table saw blade. Made me sick, my recycled door just cost me more than buying a brand new one. Real bonehead move, hit a nail that I knew was there but thought I would miss. I was in a hurry and it bit me.

Tonight I wanted to pull the old doorframe out of the end of what is now our hall. The door is a lovely 28"er which means every time I went into the master bedroom I had to turn sideways to get my shoulders through. It also has the interesting quirk of not lining up with the bedroom door, making it all that much harder to move stuff in and out. I will post pictures soon so you can see what I mean.

It took longer than I thought it would. The way the wall was layered made it hard to pull what I wanted to remove with out wrecking what I wanted to save. In the end I got it, mostly by jamming the sawsall through the wall and cutting it carefully top to bottom. The doorway really should have a header. It hasn'’t for all these years but, you know. Bouncing on the floor above shows that whatever is there is as solid as ever. Not sure how to work extra support in and keep the hall ceiling smooth. I am not sure if it even needs it since it has been missing for 40 or so years. I will have time to think about it because we are out of the green stuff. Come on e-file!

Today we put up walls creating a hallway through the bathroom. In the old floor plan in order to get to the upstairs or to the master bedroom you had to walk through the bathroom. The room was strange anyway, over large, a real waste of floor space we needed. I was able to put a nice 36” wide hall through and the bath is still adequate. I mean we would like to have had it bigger but it was a pain to tell guests “go on about your business I’m just passing through”.

A great bonus of this was the truly craptacular wallpaper we uncovered. Looks like bricks until you get close and then you find out its really sail boats. Bricks, sailboats, heck they are destined to be together. If I hear anyone talking about historical preservation I’ll kick your ass.

Well you can see today’s project, straighten and finish rocking the dining room walls. In the picture the before wall is so many colors because NONE OF THE BOARDS IS LONGER THAN 36 INCHES! Spared no expense on this place. You can also see one of the blocked in door openings. That makes three in that wall alone. One we discovered during demolition and plan to use, one we covered back over and one we are filling in. A regular plethora of doors, I feel blessed. I added a few studs of my own in part to strengthen but mostly because I didn’t want drywall to span those huge gaps. They were just scrap boards that I used to tie all of the sheeting togeather. The wall is non structural, just somthing to attach the rock to. Filler studs brought everything down within 16 inches. On the other side of the wall is the stair well. Gives a good look at how my house was constructed. The wall orignally had those same boards on both sides, along with several layers of old panneling. Even figuring 1/2 inch of new sheetrock we still made the room one inch wider.

Got more than I thought done, even got a first coat of mud on. The wife was happy. I was even careful not to make too much of a mess as we haven’t really cleaned out the room, just move the crap from corner to corner. I tossed in a picture of the puppy because, well how could I not?

This is a flash back, a retro look into house stuff done prior to the blog, today I will tackle plumbing. The majority of the fixtures in the house were in great shape when I bought it, however I couldn’t seem to get proper water pressure at all locations. Unscrewing the end of the facets to look at the screens soon told me why, they were packed with rust. Cleaning them restored pressure but did not solve the problem, for that I had to return to the dark and scary place the crawl space. Plumbing work in the newer sections of the hose was fine, but under the old... It was like a habitrail from HELL. A mixture of galvanized pipe in all sorts of sizes, twisting here, jogging there, dead ends, reduction fittings, unused valves you name it. Now I knew why the water was slow in the laundry room faucet, it was dizzy. Given that I could only work after school and on the weekends hacking into this bad boy would have to be paced so that the shower remained functional. Take it in sections. First step cut the water and install valves so that I can isolate individual rooms. Great move to section the plumbing, you can kill just a bathroom and not the whole house, smart move and you’ll thank me later.

I’ll sum it up it was a hoot. At one point I found myself bathed in the warm glow of a police car’s spotlight, lying in the mud at the street poking around in a 7 foot deep hole filled with saw dust desperately looking for the main water shut off with a homemade wrench that I apparently am not supposed to have. The officer found my behavior curious but let me continue with my frantic quest. Remember, with an old house just because it has valves doesn’t mean they still work. When a half inch valve refuses to turn I am not sure grabbing a 36” pipe wrench is an appropriate course of action. Broke that sucker clean off. Sort of like sand blasting a soup cracker.

In the end I only lost the shower for one night, but still had a working sink so I was able clean up there. I used ¾ for the main supply lines and ½ out to the fixtures. My goal was a system that wouldn’t freeze or scald when a sink was used elsewhere in the house. It works for the main part, you will not feel the washer come on and off but if the sink in the bathroom with you is used you can tell. All of my new plumbing is copper because I have worked with it a lot in the past and it is readily available here. Straightening out the plumbing means I don’t have dizzy slow water anymore and with iron pipe gone no more rust issues. Swapping out the tiny metal drain lines for some hefty 2” PVC fixed that issue too. My sinks drain with a ferocity that is almost alarming.

GOOD TIP: Install drain valves in your plumbing at the low spots. This will allow you to drain the system should you ever need to.

So that might be a bit of an overstatement, I mean no one lost a leg. Well the little woman walked our new puppy to school to meet and walk home with me, giving the dog and ourselves a little fresh air and exercise. On the way home she told me about a little boo-boo I made installing an outlet last night. In our walls we have wood sheeting with floating outlets installed. They are mounted sideways in the void between studs, they wiggle, oh and 2 of them spark when you pull plugs out. I have to cut each one out and re-mount to a stud and because they are attached to the wood sheeting this means the sawzall. Now I love the sawzall, everyone who is remodeling should go out and buy one the very first thing, just watch how deep you stick the blade. Apparently I didn't control the depth of my penetration (put your own one liner in here) and punched a hole right through the new wall. I said some inappropriate things and then got on with fixing it. I was still able to get to the back side of the cut so I pumped it full of paintable caulk. Who knew remodeling could be so raunchy? I used caulk to stick a 3 inch square wood patch over the bad spot on the inside. Around to the good side with more caulking to match the texture and presto, boo-boo is gone. I recommend paintable caulk for this work because it is so much stronger that taping mud would have been. If the bad spot had been larger then cutting out and re-attaching to the studs might have been needed. Once I had painted it even my wife and I had a hard time locating it. Trust me, buy a whole case of painters caulking at HomeDepot, its great.

TOOL OF THE DAY!

It is a little "Cat's Paw" nail puller my wife found. Called "SharkGrip" it is made in Japan of hardened tool steel. A tiny nail puller is just what the doctor ordered to dismantle w/o destroying. It can be driven into the wood under a nail head with very little damage. I very highly recommend this. I can find out from my wife cost and source location if any are intrigued.

All remodeling begins with a good foundation. Mine was no exception. Long before any of the glamorous work began I found myself in a dark and frightening place- the crawl space. Accessed by a tiny opening in the cellar the crawl space was a place of wonder, specifically me wondering how the hell I was supposed to crawl around in there. Back in the day when child labor was fashionable the space must have seemed ample. Its ok if the floor joist are just 3 inches off the dirt, a five year old could crawl between them, boxed in on both sides. Tie a rope to their feet and give a yank when they yell. While not a over-large man, their was no way I was going to make it to accomplish the list of tasks that needed to be done.

Task List:
-Plumbing, replace everything not copper
-Heating, heat ducts and vents
-wiring, anything still attached to a ceramic insulator has to go
-Leveling, did you know untreated wooden posts rot when you set them on dirt?

Not going to happen, I tried. I wedged my shoulders in nice and tight, and when I yelled something did yank on my foot, trouble is I was alone. Only one solution, I had to tunnel. I started by cutting a larger opening in the concrete of the cellar wall. I highly recommend those diamond blades for skill saws. Burned up 4 saws cutting through various barriers but the blade is going strong. Best $14 I ever spent. Long story short cutting began what would turn into weeks of digging after work each night, on my knees or belly filling five gallon buckets then hauling them out through the kitchen. I would try to do 14 a night, doesn't sound like much but on your knees with no leverage its a lot more than you think. As I got in farther output dropped as just getting them to the opening was hard work. At one point I even built a 20' section of hokey track to make it easier. Two buckets on a cart and give it s shove. Worked great. 100's of buckets later I had filled a section of my yard 6-8 inches deep and I could go where I needed to go under the house. Its not a freeway down there but I can get around dragging duct, pipe, wire whatever. Cool things found under the house: Bullets, ceramic marbles, eye glasses and a cat, well I think it was a cat. Hard to tell at this point if you know what I mean. Still down there, god protect his furry little soul.

Inspired by a good friend of mine, "Out of Plumb" is dedicated to the trials and tribulations of remodeling our 2200 Sq foot ex-farm house in Plains MT. The date of original construction is a bit of a mystery but we have found newspapers plastered to the walls dating from 1928. The house has been added onto by generations of craftsmen of various skill levels with the orignal dwelling akin to a chicken coop. Opening up a wall is always a surprise, kind of like a birthday present from that crazy aunt you don't like. Taking it in small chunks can be irritating, but it allows the light to twinkle from the end of a very long tunnel. So far we have one room totally done, the living room but I will give highlights of past house related moments as the journey continues.