Renocation?

Ah, glorious hiatus. So very relaxing…

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of something resembling a brief break from the renovations. After finishing the bathroom, we reached a logical place to pause for a while. Logical in that there wasn’t anything we felt we needed to get finished before Christmas, and nothing that was so offensive as to upset any potential house guests (i.e., the Top Brass and my mom over the holidays and – just last week – le Grand Pere).

Once the holidays are over, of course, we’ll be tackling the upstairs bedrooms, but for now we’re enjoying the efforts of our labour so far, and dealing with some minor things around the house.

Like, for instance, this bloody thing:





I think I’ve posted about that tree before, but to recap, it’s a rather annoying palm tree that a) scratches across the stucco and windows whenever it gets the slightest bit windy, b) is growing up into the roof (seriously – who the hell would plant a damn palm tree RIGHT under the eaves? Where do you think it’s going to grow? Down, maybe?), and c) is probably disturbingly expensive to buy as a sapling in the first place, let alone to replace as a mature tree. Worse yet, the tree had a resident little green frog that the War Department thought was just too cute for words. She insisted we figure out a way to deal with the tree that wouldn’t disturb the little frog.

We had a couple of suggestions of what to do with it, most notably to get it out of there somehow and sell it to someone (with no taste, presumably – Frank?), but that would probably have necessitated getting some kind of bobcat or other machinery into the back yard. The War Department also wasn’t so fired up about digging that close to the house, either.

So we just cut the damn thing down.

ACTION SHOT!


If the wanton destruction of vegetable matter disturbs you, by the way, this may not be the blog for you. Hee hee!

Anyway, we no longer have to worry about the palm tree pushing up our brand-new shingles, but now we’re faced with a new problem: how do we get rid of the carcass? We left it lying there for a week or two so the frog could get the hint and make its way to a new home, but now it’s just sort of this massive heap of damp crap with some fronds sticking out the end. Oh, and the stump is still there as well – haven’t tried to get the roots out yet.

So really, we’re only about halfway done on this project. I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it.

Carry on, nothing to see here.

Yet another toilet saga

I dunno what it is about toilets in this house - maybe it's because we have three of them, and they're all in cahoots about how best to annoy the shit out of me. Or maybe it's just the Toilet from Hell, spreading its influence through sheer malevolence...

Anyway, when last we checked in on the downstairs powder room, I had just grouted the floor. (Man, is it really that long since I posted? Yeeesh. No wonder I've been getting flak from the regular readers. Sorry about that.) Since then, we installed the vanity and sink, painted and rehung the door, and, well, installed the toilet.

Three times.

Sigh. Yes, there's a story behind that; get comfortable, and I'll spin you our tale of woe...

I must admit, right up front, that a large part of our issues with the toilet, at least at the beginning, are my fault. You see, it was my first real tiling job, that slate floor in the bathroom, and let's just say that maybe doing slate wasn't the best idea for a rank amateur such as me. The tiles weren't anything even approaching uniform in size, they were not cut square, and they varied widely in width - even across a single tile. Couple that with a lack of experience on my part, and you have a recipe for an uneven floor. It didn't look too bad:



But as we've seen, looks can be deceiving. That being said, I did put quite a bit of effort into the tiles under where the toilet would sit, and thought I'd done a fair job at that, at least. So I was pretty confident that we would be able to seat the toilet on the flange fairly easily.

Hahahahahahahaha! I'm so stupid!

Anyway, this particular project started with a trip to Rona to buy a toilet flange extender kit, a wax ring, and some rubber wedges to help level the bowl on the slate (you know, just in case). We got the parts home, and set to installing the toilet.

You know, I don't even remember exactly the steps we tried to follow the first time. Maybe I've blocked it out, maybe I just don't really want to remember, but let's just say it's a good thing wax rings are cheap. We tried installing with the extender and a wax ring, and it didn't work so hot. So we took the wax ring off, and set the toilet in place without it, and tried to level it using the rubber wedges. That didn't work so hot either, and neither of us was at all confident that we'd be able to do it all.

It was time to call in the professionals. Well, A professional, anyway.

Sadly, Leonard the miracle worker had given up the plumbing business in favor of sailing around the Southern Hemisphere on a tall ship or something, so we needed a new plumber. I called the guy who installed our floor, and he recommended a company that he had used a fair bit. Well, those guys were too busy to come and install a lone toilet, but they recommended a guy they had used for some other small jobs, and as luck would have it (and after I name-dropped the company that recommended him), he was available to drop by and install the toilet for us.

So, a couple of Fridays ago (a day later than he had originally planned, but at least he called and let us know, right?), he showed up, and promptly installed the toilet - in about thirty minutes, start to finish. Hell, he finished so quickly, he even had time to take a quick look at the drain under the vanity - which, of course, leaked after I installed it the first time. I thanked him profusely, saw him out, and headed off to work.

When I got home after work, I noticed some drops of water beside the toilet, underneath the tank bolt on the left side. Huh, I thought. Maybe he didn't tighten it enough for fear of cracking the tank.

So I grabbed a wrench and gave the nut a couple of extra turns. No dice. After checking it over a few times and fiddling with a couple of seals, and realizing that it still leaked, I talked it over with the War Department. I figured I could probably fix it myself if I took the tank off, but we agreed that we didn't really want to pay a professional to do a job and then have to fix it ourselves anyway. So I called the plumber back, and set up a return visit. (The vanity still leaked after he was done, by the way, but I figured that out and fixed it myself.)

So the following Thursday, he came back, removed the tank, doped up the gasket (which is what I had planned on doing), and reinstalled the tank. He tightened everything up, I saw him out, and headed off to work.

The next day, I got an email at work from the War Department, who had double-checked the toilet on her way out in the morning, and noticed that it was still leaking. I sent her an email back that had a lot of swearing in it.

So that afternoon, I got home from work and checked the toilet again. Sure enough, it was leaking at the gasket between the tank and the bowl. I called the plumber again, and he said that it might be because either the tank or the bowl had a casting flaw that was causing the gasket to not seal properly. He said he could come back and install the other toilet (the one we had bought to replace the Toilet from Hell, ironically), but that it would cost us for another trip as the defect wasn't his fault.

Well, this, now, this was starting to piss me off. So I had a closer look at the toilet, and noticed that the tank really wasn't secured all that tightly. As a matter of fact, I figured that if I just straightened it out and tightened the bolts, it would work just fine. So I emptied out the water, doped up the rubber seals, and reseated the tank - nice and tight this time.

No dice. Still leaked from the gasket between the tank and bowl. Much swearing ensued.

So once again, the War Department and I talked it over: I reckoned, now that I knew how to install the bowl over the flange, I could install the damn thing myself. She agreed, and the next day I dragged out the other toilet and unpacked it, and then started removing the other toilet.

Well, right away, I noticed some weirdness. For starters, the plumber hadn't used the right plastic and brass washers on the floor bolts - he had used the metal ones meant to connect the tank and bowl, and therefore had nothing to snap the little plastic bolt covers to. He got around this problem by filling the bolt covers with plumbers putty and squishing them down over the bolts. Not quite how I would have done it, but I figured maybe it was a plumbers' trick to make it easier.

Then I noticed that he hadn't actually used the right washers to connect the tank bolts. The ones he used were too small, and had actually cut right through the rubber washers underneath when I had tightened them up in my efforts to stop the leak the night before. I wondered about this, too, but the plumber had bought a new gasket and tank bolt set when he came back to "fix" the original problem.

Anyway, I got the first toilet out, and started installing the new one. It took me about an hour, start to finish. It doesn't leak.



It does make me wonder, however, whether the "old" toilet has a casting flaw at all, or whether the plumber was just rushed because it was such a little job, and he had other things he needed to get to. I do know that he didn't follow the instructions that came with the toilet, which called for TWO sets of washers and nuts on the tank bolts (which makes a lot of sense to me, actually), and for plastic clips and brass washers on the floor bolts...

Anyway, the bathroom is officially done. I don't have any pictures right now, because I installed the flooring transition piece this morning and the door is still block with boxes...

I'm just kidding. Here:





Maybe one more shelf or something, just above the toilet there? No hurry to get that, though - I'm still saying it's done.

That's not all we've done this weekend, however. We had bought a couple of new lights to replace the ugly-ass pieces of shit that hang on the front of the house, on either side of the garage door. These things:



Yeah, there are actually three of them, but we only got two lights - another lurks outside the front door, but its days are also numbered. Anyway, the War Department actually started this project herself, but it quickly became a joint effort - and a whole day affair, at that.

The trouble started when she took the first light off the wall and found this:



In case you were wondering, that is not up to code. Technically, it's not really AGAINST code either, if only because the people who came up with the electrical code never in their wildest dreams imagined someone would be so goddamned stupid as to install a light on an OUTSIDE wall like that.

Let's review, shall we?

- piece of 3/8ths plywood carefully cut to form a precise (and flammable!) mounting bracket? Check.

- bracket from another light fixture fastened haphazardly to the plywood mount? Check.

- duct tape AND electrical tape? Check.

- no sign whatsoever of any caulking or weatherproofing? Check.

- two different sized marrettes? Check.

- a flat-head, a Philips, and two different-sized Robertson screws all used in the same application? Check - and a big-ass nail, to boot.



Yeah, this couldn't have been more messed up if he tried. Oh, wait - it totally was. No, I'm not kidding. It gets worse.

The light closest to the electrical panel. was mounted in a proper "pancake" box - not ideal, but probably up to code at the time the house was built. It seems, however, that someone wanted to add the second carriage light on the other side of the door sometime after the house was built. To do this, they made a hole in the drywall and fed in their electrical wire (what does it say about us that we were actually quite happy to see that it wasn't speaker wire?), and then poked it through the junction box. So far so good, but then they ran it across the wall at the front of the garage, and fed it THROUGH a couple of holes in the brackets for the garage door. Yes, METAL brackets. That, as we say in the trade, is double-plus ungood.

Anyway, it took us another trip to Home Depot, and a full afternoon of cutting, swearing, wiring, and caulking, but we now have two very nice coach lights on either side of the garage door; here's one of them:



The story, of course, does not end there. But to tell it properly, we need to turn this over to

This Week In Mayonnaise

I mentioned above that the person or persons who installed the light had cut a little hole in the drywall to access the back of the first light so they could tie in the electrical wire. Well, this is what it looked like after they had patched it (I propped the piece I cut out back in the hole so you could see - it's not staying there):



That's not the best part, though. Oh no, the best part is what they stuffed the hole with so they'd have something to backfill the mayonnaise against:



Mmm.... flammable!

Anyway, it's getting late, even with the time change, and I've got some wine to finish. Before I go, though, I'd like to leave you with a little bonus.

Remember way back when, I spent an entire post waxing on and on about how you really start to learn about the previous owner of a house, even when you don't want to know?

Well, something arrived in the mail the other day, addressed to Frank, that explains SO MUCH. It's a magazine - more of a catalog, really. It's called Bits and Pieces and... well, how about you just take a look at the cover, and see what they're selling:



Oh yeah. Me - ow, baby.

Stay-cation: The Last Days

I should have known better than to be excited about a day with nothing planned. Turns out the War Department was just full to the brim with ideas for Friday, and none of them involved anything even remotely fun.

And of course, it was the worst of her ideas that we wound up working on all day.

Wanna know what it was? I'll give you a hint. It's the common theme within all these pictures:









No, it's not that it's all overgrown. Well, it is that, but it's not SO much that it's all overgrown as it is what it's all overgrown WITH. (Ending a sentence with a preposition is fun!)

Blackberry canes!

Dear jebus, the blackberries. We've been putting off this particular chore for a while now, and we paid for that procrastination dearly. You can kind of get an idea of what we were dealing with from those pictures up there, especially the second one. That big cane on the left side of the picture is actually coming down from where it grew up into and through the dogwood tree.

Of course, municipality bylaws indicate that you're not allowed to HAVE blackberry canes on residential properties, so we grabbed our thickest (not-quite-thick-enough) gloves, a couple of shovels and the pick and headed out into the yard to take them on.

Four of the scratchiest, sweatiest, annoyingiest hours later, we had this:







Wait a sec. Let's take a closer look at that gate, shall we?



So, to sum up: the gate (which is not actually a gate, but a "repurposed" section of one of the two wrought iron trellis thingies) is held up by two broken broom sticks, a couple of spare bits of rebar, two different kinds of speaker wire, electrical tape, and baling twine. Well, at least it's not crooked or anything.

I should also hasten to point out that the reason we didn't tackle the largest area of blackberries, the one behind the brush pile/grass clippings, is because the War Department seems to think that that's where the little bunny in our yard lives. And she didn't want to disturb it. So we'll be finishing this particular chore next spring. Provided, of course, we can convince the bunny to move out and get a damn job, that deadbeat freeloading hippie.

Anyway, that was our Friday. On Saturday, we took the day off, aside from a couple of short errands and some light housework, and even went down to the park and tossed the baseball around for a while. (Heh, 19 degrees in the middle of October: love it!)

On Sunday, I put two coats of sealer on the bathroom tiles and we got the bathroom door ready for painting while the War Department worked on a bunch of other projects. Oh, and we finally got our mattress delivered, which means I can finally take some pictures of the finished bedroom! Well, as soon as we get some more of the artwork up on the wall, anyway.

So that was our stay-cation. We didn't exactly get ALL of the things done that we wanted to, but we got the bathroom pretty much ready to put together, we got to spend some time in the backyard enjoying the sun and the copious amounts of wildlife, and we ate like freakin' KINGS for pretty much the entire week. (Seriously - the pepperberry chicken was only the start of the good eats.) All in all, I'd have to call it a success.

And of course, for a whole week, we didn't have to go into the office either, so that was pretty sweet.

Stay-cation: Days Five and Six

Sorry about the lack of update yesterday, everyone. It was just the realization that we're not going to get even close to finishing the bathroom this week was a little disheartening. Well, that and the fact that the tiles looked pretty much exactly the same after setting them in place as they did when I dry-fit them. I did manage to get them all down in thinset on Wednesday, but then of course had to wait 24 hours before I could grout them on Thursday.

As it turns out, we have to wait SEVENTY-TWO hours* after grouting the tiles before we can seal them. Seeing as how everything else we need to do in there (with the exception of the electrical, and the War Department can whip that off in twenty minutes or so) needs to have the sealing done first, and we can't seal until Sunday at the earliest.. yeah, we ain't getting it done this week. Maybe by next Sunday...

* (As recommended by the grout manufacturer. Some sites advocate waiting THIRTY DAYS before sealing slate tile. Needless to say, screw that noise.)

But not being able to finish the bathroom doesn't mean we haven't been busy! Aside from the bathroom, so far on this stay-cation we have managed to knock off some other projects.

• For example, the War Department got her chainsaw working! Now, I know this doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that a) the chainsaw was made in 1976, b) she had to make no less than three separate trips to the parts store to get the right stuff for it, c) she had to remove and rebuild the entire carburetor, and d) I was absolutely no help whatsoever (the one thing she wanted my help with I couldn't do because of my great fat sausage fingers), it's pretty impressive. She spent almost the whole day on Tuesday working on it while I was cutting tiles, and finally got it running on Wednesday.
  
  
  
  Now she just needs to do the same thing for the weedeater, and we'll be golden.



• She also cleaned and caulked the gutters and downspout at the front of the house. They were so clogged with roof debris and pine needles and whatnot that every time it rained, water would stream over the edges and down the sides, turning our front entryway into more of a shower stall.



• I finally managed to install the soap dispenser that came with our kitchen faucet. Probably wasn't really that big a deal, but I did have to make an extra trip to Home Depot (my second of the day).



• We hung a mirror in the family room! Now I know THIS doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's literally the first piece of artwork or decoration that we've put up on the walls downstairs.



• We took yet another load of garbage and recycling up to Hartland. I think this makes six? Seven?



• Amy spent another two hours power-washing the driveway. We're about a fifth of the way done now. Good times.



• I got started organizing the files in my office... okay, now I'm reaching. Anyway, here's a shot of the tiles actually grouted. Joy.
  
  

So, as for today's progress... well, I don't know what on the schedule. Depends on the weather and what's left on the job list for the week, I suppose. Apart from waiting around for the guy to come and give us an estimate on the gas fireplace, I really don't know what we're going to do today.

And it's kind of a nice feeling, actually.

Stay-cation: Day Four

So maybe this update every day thing wasn't the best idea. I'm not sure if people would rather read a short post every day about what we did the day before, or whether I should just save it all up and do a monster post on the weekend when we're all done.

I do know that these little posts are seriously cutting into my video game time...

So yesterday was all about getting the tiles cut and fitted for the bathroom. Given that the bathroom is only about 30 square feet, you wouldn't think it was an all day job, but as I keep reminding people who ask why it's taking so long, I'm not exactly a professional.

Anyway, I hied myself off down to the Home Despot yesterday and rented the big wet saw again. I had to wait almost fifteen minutes to get someone out to help me load it into the truck, but I'm getting used to that by now. Slackers.

Once I got it home, I thanked the capricious Victorian weather gods for what turned out to be a pretty nice day, and set up a little cutting station in the driveway:



A tip for using one of these bad boys: keep the pump in a bucket of fresh water instead of in the tub under the saw. That water gets all gummy and dirty really fast, and the clean water means the pump doesn't get clogged, and it helps wash off the tiles when you cut them. (Just remember to keep an eye on the level of water in the bucket!) I think I went through about ten or twelve bucketfuls - hence the hose waiting at the ready. I also put down a rubber mat to stand on; partly to ease the pain of standing on concrete for long stretches, but mostly so I wouldn't be standing in the dirty water while I was cutting and thus not track it back into the house.

Anyway, not much else to say about the job yesterday. Including two trips to pick up and drop off the saw at Home Depot, it took me about six hours to measure cut, and dry-fit the tiles. The hole around the toilet flange was really fiddly and painful, but I'd managed to plan out the tiles so that I only had to cut two instead of three or four. (Okay, that wasn't planning so much as dumb luck, but still.)



So today I get to actually set them in thinset and maybe - depending on the drying times involved - grout them, too.

Stay-cation: Day Three

Just a quick update on yesterday before I go get started...

Yesterday was all about two things: getting the bathroom painted, and planning out the tile placement for the floor.

Two coats of Restoration Hardware's "Flax" later:



After realizing we kinda got shafted in terms of how many tiles were scratched or otherwise crappy, and having to plan out where to put the bad tiles to minimize their effect on the floor:



I'm off to Home Depot to pick up the tile saw. It's going to be a long day...

Stay-cation: Day Two

I was going to post this entry last night and actually get caught up with my idiotic scheme, but we had our little Thanksgiving dinner last night and seeing as how it was just the four of us, and two of us don't drink wine, I couldn't let such a nice bottle go to waste, could I?

Well, that and we didn't actually sit down to eat until 9pm. But mostly the wine...

As I mentioned in Day One, our primary goal of this stay-cation is to finish the downstairs bathroom. Of course, a lot of what we're doing is painting, that means a lot of waiting around for things to dry. Which means side projects!

The first order of business yesterday was to clean the walls and ceiling in the bathroom in preparation for painting. Once that was done (and we had waited for the walls to dry), we replaced the fan motor - which cleaned up pretty nice:



It's still not the quietest bathroom fan in the world, but it beats having to rip out half the ceiling to install a new one.

Unfortunately, the new fan grill we bought is slighter smaller than the original, so the War Department had to caulk the edges of the hole around the fan to pretty it up a bit. Which meant another two-hour wait before we could paint the caulking.

Given that it was unseasonably warm outside (highs of 19 degrees!), we headed out to see what we could make of the sunroom issue. Imagine our surprise when we pulled off the rotten trim to find that the room WAS actually designed properly! The roof flashing has a proper drip-edge on it, and the siding extends well past the sill plate on the bottom. We're pretty sure the trim was added after the permit and inspection had been passed - it was obviously not installed professionally, and completely compromised the overall design.

Once the trim was removed, we pulled back the rocks in the little ditch around the sunroom so they weren't right up against the siding.






I think we're still going to wrap some heavy plastic around that corner to keep any more water from getting in through that huge crack, but the good news is the sunroom should make it through the winter without too many modification.

While we were out there (and after mowing the lawn yet AGAIN), we also pulled the earth away from the wall outside the kitchen where it had piled up against the trim:



Yeah, looks pretty bad, but it'll the keep the bugs and the moisture from wicking up the stucco and rotting out the sill plate.

Well, by that time, the caulking had dried, so we painted the bathroom ceiling, went out to Rona and ran some other errands, and then came home and put a second coat on:



(I like that soft pink a lot, by the way. It's going to look really sharp with the baby-blue walls and creamy, butter-yellow trim.)

And then we watched some baseball, did some other chores and eventually got around to making our Thanksgiving dinner. Not exactly a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, I must say: pepperberry chicken and mushroom risotto:





Damn tasty, though.

Stay-cation: Day One

Welcome to the first and hopefully-not-annual-because-I'd-rather-be-in-Hawaii-quite-frankly Don and Amy's Stay-cation! This year's project: the downstairs bathroom.

That's right: we're taking the next week off work to try and finish the downstairs bathroom. Painting the ceiling and walls, tiling the floor, installing the vanity and toilet, painting and installing the trim, fixing the electrical, and generally trying to make it awesome. It's an ambitious project, but the good news is that it won't take up every hour of every day - there's a fair amount of time we'll have to spend waiting for things to dry or set up, and that's time we can use to relax. Sorry, not relax. Heh, got my words mixed up. I meant to say: figure out how to make the damn sunroom weathertight for the next six months.

Hopefully, I can find at least a little time each day to post an update here on the blog. Yes, I'm actually going to try to make this a daily update, at least for the next week. And yes, I'm posting Day One's entry on Day Two. Nothing like getting starting when you're already behind.

On to Day One!

We actually spent most of yesterday driving around running errands and looking at gas fireplace inserts for the bear pit, but the War Department did manage to finish the drywall patches. What needed patching, you ask? Heh, these things:



Frank's idea of adding color to a bland little room, I suppose. (Heaven forbid he should actually PAINT something...) He had three or four of them stuck high up on the wall, and when we peeled them off, they took the top layer of paper off the drywall. What with that and the enormous hole I gouged in the side wall when I removed the old counter top, there was drywalling to be done.

Fortunately for us, the War Department is getting to be pretty damn good at mudding drywall (there's a skill you'll likely want to leave off the old resume lest you be asked to do some touch-ups around the office), and she had them fixed up in no time.

It's a tough bathroom to take pictures in, but I gave it a shot, and hopefully you can get a sense of the project's scale (and how much dust is generated by sanding a few small drywall patches.







We also wanted to replace the old fan, but given that it's really not that easy to get to the existing one, we might give cleaning it off a shot, and see if that makes it any quieter. You can probably see why I think that, given the fan's current condition, it really couldn't hurt:



Oh, and we also removed another candidate for worst light fixture:



Just... no.

Tune in tomorrow (or later today) for the next installment!

Dr. Strangewood

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mold...

If there's one thing we've learned in our years of renovating this house and the last, it's to expect the unexpected. Actually, if I wanted to avoid lapsing into a pointless cliche, I'd rephrase that to "expect shit to be broken". Oh, I know! Here's an even better one - words to live by, really:

Trust in incompetence, and you will never be disappointed.

Particularly - ESPECIALLY - when it comes to designing sunrooms, apparently.

Oh, by the way: all my readers complaining that there wasn't nearly enough schadenfreud in the last post? Yeah, this one's for you...

We knew when we moved in (have I used THAT particular phrase enough on this blog, ya think?) that the sunroom had some issues. After all, the wood trim on the inside looked worn out, all of the windows in the ceiling had blown seals and condensation between the panes, and there were some pretty big gaps between the windows and the trim on the outside. So it's not like we didn't know it needed work, but still...

This whole mess started when the War Department was fixing one of Frank's botched attempts to run speaker wire out through the walls and to the exteriors outlets and fountain pumps (via sprinkler piping, of course). She couldn't help but notice a fair amount of discoloration on the drywall, the baseboard, and the carpet in the west-most corner of the sunroom. We both figured it was water damage from rain getting in the massive gaps around the window casings and the War Department spent several perfectly good weekend days at the end of the summer carefully caulking the holes with some nasty brown silicon.

Needless to say, it turns out we were wrong. As soon as the weather turned towards fall, the sunroom started to smell distinctly mildewy, and the carpet in that corner was noticeably damp every time it rained. We figured the best course of action might be to just cut away the carpet in that corner and try and keep the concrete dry through the winter.

Given the nature of the house, however, cutting away the carpet was really only the beginning of the problem:



That's... not good. That's very ungood, in fact, for a number of reasons, but let's stick with the fact that there's evidently a lot of moisture in that corner of the sunroom, and leave aside - for now - the fact that the people who built the damn thing apparently didn't remove their wooden forms between pouring the footer and pouring the slab.

To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, here's what that corner looks like from the outside.



You can already tell from the huge crack in the siding (it was slathered in mayonnaise when we first noticed it, but the War Department peeled it off before I could get a picture) that there's probably going to be a water issue with that wall, but take a closer look at the top of that corner where the roof flashing meets the trim:



What the hell? What were the idiots who designed this thing thinking? Where the hell did they think the water was going to go?

Look, I haven't been doing this renovation thing for THAT long, and maybe I've watched more Holmes on Homes than is really healthy, but for Jebus' sake, even I know that's just BAD fucking planning. The water running off the roof is actually DIVERTED right onto the end of the wood! Look at this:



You can probably picture the water coming straight down along beside the window casing and running right off the edge and into the trim all the way along that slope. Where did these idiots think the water was going to go? Did I ask that already? I don't care!

To be fair to the original builders, the sunroom was an addition to the original house. Yeah - keep that in mind as you read the rest of this post: the sunroom is only about 15 years old, as opposed to the 25-year-old house.

Anyway, I refused to start ripping off the trim outside, given that I knew it was going to be a complete shit-show underneath and we hadn't even had dinner yet, and I didn't want to be crawling around trying to make it weather-tight in the dark. So we put off the outside until next weekend, and went to take another look at the inside corner.

I cut back the drywall on the one side, and right about then is when I figured out that we were probably heading right up Shit Creek, and jettisoning all our paddles:



What the...? I don't know that's ants or termites or wasps or what, but whatever it was had long since abandoned it to a couple of pill-bugs and some teeny little ants. Oh, and of course there was more on the other side:



See, the problem isn't really that insects have gotten into the wall, or that there's rain coming in from the roof. The problem is that those ... nests, or whatever, are what's holding up the entire corner of the structure. The dark stain along the bottom on the right side there? That's actually the remains of the sill plate. The tall nest on the left? That's what's left of the jack stud supporting the window. There's no goddamn wood left; it's insects, all the way down.

As an added bonus, this is what the back of the drywall looked like:



Kinda makes my throat tighten up just looking at it. Gross.

We figured that the little drainage ditch of white gravel around the outside of the sunroom was not an original feature. The lawn probably came right up to the walls and the gravel was put in later when the trim at the base of the wall started to rot. We're pretty sure of this because I really shouldn't be able to just push a drywall saw two inches into the sill plate without even really trying:



Rotten to the core.

So I pulled out all the moldy insulation (or as much of it as I could reach), swept up the ants, and sprayed the whole thing down with pesticide to kill any remaining creepy-crawlies. It looks, frankly, like utter shit:



I really don't know how we're going to fix this before winter, or if we should even try. My vote is to wait until spring, and then tear the whole thing down and build it up right.



Maybe Mike Holmes will come by and show us how it's done.