Wrapping up some loose ends

So it turns out that the only time projects DON'T take about three times as long as we plan is when we pay someone else to do them for us.

Yeah.

Why do we do this again?

Anyway, looking back over my last post (wow, it's been a while, eh?), we had just finished the patio. To be fair, the amount of work we put into the patio has figured heavily in my lack of wanting to post anything here. Or at least, that'll be my chosen excuse. Hell, I don't even feel like writing this right now, but here we are...

Way back when, before we had even STARTED the patio, we had our old friend Mike over to give us a quote on replacing the window in the kitchen with a patio door. (Mike's the guy who installed our floors downstairs, and rebuilt the sunroom.) See, to get out onto our nice new patio, we had to go out through the family room and through the sunroom. Which, admittedly isn't exactly FAR, but feels like light years when I've let the barbecue flare up again, and I'm burning the chicken.

Mike had assured us that fitting a new door was just a day's work for him (hah!), and so we went ahead and ordered a nice, pre-hung set of French doors. While we were waiting on those to be ready, we dug out and built the patio, and then sat around for another couple of weeks... it really took a long time for it to be ready, I gotta say.

Not Mike's fault at all, but the door place was... well, not the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the door eventually arrived, and Mike came over at about 8:30 one fine Thursday morning to stick it in. Just in case I haven't ever shared a picture of that particular window, here's what it looked like the day before:

And these are the pictures the War Department sent me at 10:30 that morning:

Oh, and of course, she also texted that the door didn't fit, but she was LYING. VERY NOT FUNNY, DEAR.

By the time I got home, well, there was nothing really left to do but go and buy a lockset because we'd forgotten to tell Mike which one we wanted. At his recommendation, we got one with a lever handle because, even though it doesn't match the style of our existing door handles, it's a lot easier when you've got an armload of chicken for the barbecue in one hand, and a nice cold bottle of beer in the other. Not that, you know, I'm EVER likely to be using the door under those exact conditions every weekend or something.

Fortunately, I've done enough knobs in my time (TWSS) that I'm getting pretty good at it and I can install one without having to do it twice:

So the next part of this particular project was to replace the baseboard heater that was in front of the window. Of course, now there was a big freaking door there, so we'd have to come up with another solution. Fortunately for us, they make electric heaters that, amazingly enough, hang on the wall! So we bought one! This being us, it was not as easy as that. See, original electric wire that fed the baseboard heater came out at the bottom of the wall - near, oddly enough, the baseboard. Hence the name? I dunno. Anyway, we had to cut out a piece of drywall, and pull the wire up through the cavity and then across the wall to the panel on the back side of our new heater:

Fortunately, this being the kitchen, and not exactly a finished space, we decided to just put the drywall back, and mount the heater in front of it. We'll get around to mudding over that when we redo the kitchen in, oh, say, five years? Sure, let's go with that.

And with that, the patio - and the sunroom! - is officially finished. We bought a nice little patio table and some chairs (the umbrella has to go back to the store and be exchanged - cheap-ass p.o.s.), and I built a couple of planter boxes for herbs and flowers.

Sunroom:

Patio:

Oh, well, of course, we still need to do some backfilling and seeding around the retaining wall, and there are a couple of decorative bits to put in, and I really want to put a hosereel on the side there, and the barbecue is pretty ugly...

I'll say one thing for our patio, though: it makes the rest of the back of our house look like shit. Man, somebody really ought to do something about that stucco...

All about the bench... amins.

Right, so with the sunroom getting all gussied up, we started thinking about how we were going to furnish it once all the trim and decorating were out of the way. One of the things we really wanted was a bench to go along the wall under the window. The purpose of this bench would need to be two-fold: a) it should give us a little more storage space and room to put all our outdoorsie stuff that couldn't actually be kept outside (like sports equipment and birdseed); and, b) more importantly, it would give the kitties somewhere to sit where they could watch the birdies or, should we happen to be outside, us. (It would also give us a place to store the kitties if they didn't behave, but that's TOTALLY not what it's for. Well, not that often. Almost never.)

Of course, we weren't likely to find a bench that would meet the War Department's rather exacting specifications, so it was determined, by virtue of a totally fair and not-at-all-rigged vote (that included two primaries and a run-off election - stupid cats couldn't stay focused and kept eating their ballots), that I would build the bench myself.

(I lie, of course. I totally volunteered to build this bench, arguably against the War Department's better judgement, but I write this blog, damn it, and I get to tell it my way so I don't look as bad. Which means lying. A lot. As you cant tell, it doesn't always work. Okay, so it rarely works. Fine - it doesn't ever work. Shut up.)

Anyway, I started by browsing the intertubes for a few hours. After that, I got busy researching ways to build the bench; i.e., I Googled "free storage bench plans" and downloaded the first set I found. Happily, they didn't turn out to be infected by any weird Chinese trojan/virus (that I could tell), and I set about modifying them extensively to suit our requirements and measurements.

Basically, we wanted to keep the overall design of the thing simple, and so we settled on a bench that was 8" long - the length of a sheet of plywood, which could be easily cut into strips and assembled into a box, basically. Which is really what I did; this is the bottom of the beast, after I'd added a 1" strip around the bottom of each compartment to hold the bottom of the box up off the floor:

The really interesting thing about that picture is that it also marks the precise spot where I needed to start deviating from the plans as written, and making up some stuff as I went along. Well, actually the original plans didn't even call for a bottom, and wanted me to just assemble the box in place against the wall, and they were for a box that was only 60" long and not quite as deep or as high for that matter, so really I was just using the plans for the pretty pictures at this point. But I digress - as usual.

So the first REALLY SIGNIFICANT change, if you like, was to divide the box into sections, so we would have three compartments instead of one large one. THEN I put the strips around the bottom and put a piece of plywood down into each one for the bottom piece. I also had to rework the part of the original plans that called for a piece of two by four attached to a strip of plywood running along the top of the box to support the lid. I had to make six separate supports, and adjust them to fit within the trim running across the top of the dividers. Did I actually need SIX of them? No, just three, but I had to make the same three twice. (We're coming to that.)

Then I had to go back to Home Depot. See, the design called for a 1x2 trim piece to run around the top edge of the box. To clean up the edges, though, I would have to mitre the corners... which is not easy - impossible, in fact - to do when trying to use 8' long pieces of trim on a 8' long box. So I went off to buy a 10' piece, just for those extra 3 inches. (We'll leave aside the fact that I actually messed up the cut so badly the first time that I had to go back for ANOTHER 10' piece.)

Anyway, I eventually got the top trim all lined up and pretty, and I then cut and attached stiles (upright trim pieces) and the cross trim to a) cover up the screw holes from where I attached the floor and the dividers, and b) cover up the exposed ends of the plywood, and c) make it look pretty.

Then it was time to start work on the lids. Of course, those of you who are paying attention have already thought, "Wait a minute - if the 8' piece of trim wasn't long enough, and he has to cut the plywood into 3 pieces, losing at least an eighth of an inch with each cut, how are the lids going to be big enough to cover the top, especially given that there's now an extra inch or so of trim sticking out on each side of the 8' box?"

(If there are ANY readers who actually WERE wondering that.... get out more. Seriously. It's bad enough that I worry about this, I don't need your problems on my conscience.)

Well, rest assured - I has already taken that all into account. See, I knew I'd need a little bit of gap between the lids, and so the 1/4 inch I lost from cutting the lid into three pieces was not only expected but required. The rest of the overage would be taken up by the trim I would be installing around the edges of each lid to cover up the exposed plywood.

Anyway, it was time for another trip to Home Depot because I thought I'd bought the wrong hinges. I hadn't - I had just installed them backwards, which was really annoying because I had already had to detach and then reattach the lid support pieces so I could use the Forstner bits in the drill press to make the holes for the hinges to sit in - but that's okay because I wound up getting better hinges the second time even though I had to remake the lid support pieces because I glued them together like an idiot. I then attached the lids and then the trim piece that covers up the back of the box behind the lids.

You can see in the picture how the hinges are set into the lid - those are the hinge parts that I had originally installed into the support piece at the back of the box - and you can also see the NEW support pieces I had to make because the old ones had BIG DAMN HOLES in them. I also had to remake part of the rear trim pieces because I was daydreaming like a jackass and cut one of them an inch too short.

Oh, and see how one of the stiles on each end has been trimmed down a bit so that the overall width of the trim is the same on both side? Yeah - totally not my idea. It was in the original plans.

Anyway, that's pretty much all the assembly. I know it may not read like it, and frankly, retelling the story makes me seriously doubt it, but I really am getting better at this. Scary, eh?

Next step? Paint! Several goddamn coats of it, in fact.

But that's for next time when, I THINK, we might actually be able to call the sunroom.... done?

 

 

 

PS. I am fully aware that the title of this post is arguable the dumbest thing I've ever posted on this blog, and that's saying something. But I thought it was funny and if you don't like it, you are welcome to complain to someone who cares.

 

 

 

 

 

My mom thinks I'm cool.

Aloha! And, uh, other types of greetings, I suppose

Wow. It's been an interesting month (and a half another month). So interesting that I just couldn't be bothered to share it with anyone?

No? Not buying it?

Well, maybe now that I'm old (like, FORTY) my memory is shot and I just forgot I even HAD a blog? Sure, let's go with that. What were we talking about again?

Right! Hawaii! Aloha and all that! Yes, we went to Hawaii (Maui, to be precise) and it was absolutely everything you might expect a tropical vacation in the middle of winter could be. Fantastic. And surprisingly renovation-free. Or maybe not surprisingly. Whatever. We're back, and it's cold and wet here, and totally not Maui. Boo.

But, and here's where I start to sound like a broken record, you don't come here to read about our vacations, do you?

"Shut yer yap," you say. "Get to the renos and the mistakes and the mayonnaise and the hurting yourself! Especially the hurtings!"

Well, tough. This is what Haleakala and the eastern side of Maui look like from above:

Soooooo many thanks to M & M for the helicopter tour, by the way. Absolutely a high-light of our trip, and an unforgettable experience.

Sigh. I miss Maui. Fish tacos every day. World's best pineapple. Snorkeling with sea turtles. Sigh.

Anyway, enough of that - okay, one more, looking across the street from our hotel at sunset the first night:

Okay, maybe two:

Sigh.

 

 

Anyway, we ARE back, hard at work on the sunroom renovation, and while I think I've missed photographing a few steps (especially on the inside), I think you'll agree that it's really coming along nicely. First, here's a few shots that I didn't post last time of the work our contractor Mike did to the outside:

You can see how the siding now tucks UNDER the flashing on the side of the roof instead of butting up against it. You know - like it's SUPPOSED to.

And to prove that we haven't exactly been neglecting the inside, either:

Probably a good time to mention that the War Department really has done the lion's share of the finishing work so far. I put the trim up, but she's done pretty much all the painting and caulking. I installed the floor tiles, but she was the one who cleaned it all up and put down the underlayment.

Man, I haven't even explained why we wound up using those vinyl planks again, have I? Sheesh - I really suck at this blogging thing.

To make a long story short, when we started ripping up the carpet and whatnot in the sunroom, we found what we thought (at the time) was something of an oversight on the builder's part. See, about a foot in from the wall, all around the outside perimeter of the sunroom was what looked like a two-by-four buried in the concrete. (You can see it in the original picture I took of the moldy corner here.)We thought (at the time) that the builders had been lazy and just left their forms in place when pouring the two portions of the slab. Especially seeing as how it looked like it had been sealed up (at the time) with mayonnaise. When we got around to demolishing the rest of the sunroom, I yanked out the old moldy strips of wood that turned out to just be two-by-twos and figured that (at the time) I was doing the right thing. We planned (at the time) to fill in the gap with hydraulic cement.

Well, as it turned out (at the time), those WEREN'T forms but an actual on-purpose, designed part of the sunroom slab - called an expansion joint. Meaning that hydraulic cement would probably be the absolute worst thing to use to fill in the gap. Who knew?

Okay, fine, so we needed to replace the wooden slats. No worries, right? Get some pressure-treated two-by-twos, cut 'em to fit and smack 'em down. Just as well, we thought (at the time) because man, that hydraulic cement is expensive, and we would have needed quite a lot of it.

Of course, the other thing that's expensive is Ditra. That's the orange rubbery stuff you see Mike Holmes putting down underneath his tiles. Of course, he's on TV, he can afford it. We can't - which is a problem because we really can't tile over an expansion joint without it, just in case the expansion joint, you know, EXPANDS. No Ditra means cracked grout at worst, and more likely cracked tiles.

Anyway, after a lot of back and forth and discussion, we settled on using the vinyl planks we had used in the laundry room at the old place. Worst-case scenario: we take them out in a few years and tile over. You know, once we've saved up a million dollars to spend on frakkin' Ditra.

 

Oh, and I believe I mentioned the shelf I was building when I nailed my finger? Yeah, it turned out pretty nice, too:

Can't even seen the blood from that angle, can you? (It was all on the inside anyway.)

 

Well, that's it for now; aside from a little more pointless moping about Maui, of course. Which reminds me; obligatory Mountain Don shot:

It's a thing, okay? Shut up.

 

Anyway, I'm really not lying when I say I've actually already written the next post. But I needed to finish this one first, and realized halfway through that I was missing a lot, and decided to go back and add it and then it started getting out of hand, so I split the post into two pieces. Really. I'll publish the next one as soon as I get the pictures figured out.

No, really. This one time, I'm not even lying.

 

Why doesn't anyone believe me?

 

 

Oh, right. All that other lying.

 

 

(Man, I wasn't raised very well at all, was I? My parents must be terrible people. I blame them.)

 

 

Our long-awaited return

The War Department and her friends were nagging me earlier today about posting something again, and I reminded them that I will not, under any circumstances, be manipulated or told what to do, and that telling me to write a new post was exactly what they should do if they never wanted me to post again.

So I'm double crossing them, and writing a new post! Ha!

Preeetttyyy sure I'm still being manipulated here, but whatever. You get a new post out of this, so shut up.

Where were we? Before Hallowe'en? Christ, forget it. I'll never get caught up at this rate. Well, I'll try, but I'm going to miss a lot of shit anyway. Like I said before, with this blog, you get what you pay for.

Right, so the only thing we've been working on so far has been the sunroom. Well, there was that absolutely DISASTROUS interlude with the shed, but we don't talk about that around here. Not anymore. (Sssh. Don't mention the shed. You don't want to know.)

So the first thing we had to do with the sunroom was fork over a whole shitload of money to our contractor to replace all the worn out glass in the roof and to rebuild the rotten structure. (Remember?) We were hoping to replace the sliding glass doors on both sides at the same time, but given that we were already paying a shitload of money and the doors were TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS EACH, we decided to just try to clean up and do some maintenance to the existing ones instead.

Which means that I'm relatively proud to say that none of the work in the following pictures was done by us, save for the labour we put into making the money to give to the contractor in the first place.

Before he started, the thing was a bit of a mess. The outside didn't look TOO bad, aside from the plastic stapled to one side in a futile attempt to keep out the worst of the weather:

The inside, however, told another story, especially once we'd taken down all the old drywall:

Boy, THAT was fun to take to the dump! Not!

At least it let us see how bad the mold really was - turns out it was pretty bad, on both sides, no less:

Not really visible in those pictures: the fact that all of the windows that comprised the roof were toast, and therefore also comprised the lion's share of the costs. Oh, and lest I forget to mention, OF COURSE they were a non-standard size and had to be fabricated specifically for us.

On the plus side, our contractor was great and did nice work. When the glass company screwed up and sent two incorrectly sized panels and he had to patch over the roof for a week until the correct ones could be made up and shipped out, I think he was more disappointed than we were. Oh, and he showed up on time when he said he would, and came in exactly on quote. No, you can't have him. He's OURS. (And he doesn't do tiling anyway. So nyaah.)

Here's some visual evidence of his leet skills; first, removing the mold and rotten timber, and restructuring the corners and framing:

And then cladding and papering the outside:

And then wrapped the whole thing in Hardiboard and trim, with the capping and flashing installed so that the water would run OFF the damn ends of the boards, and not INTO the inside of the wall. Something I would LOVE to show you, but apparently Blogger is having trouble processing all these images, so it'll have to wait until next time.

Anyway, it's possible that we MIGHT have been able to do the same stuff he did, but there's no way it would have turned out as nice, and it would have taken us six months just to do the framing. Some things are better left to the professionals... But, you'll be happy to know, we didn't pay him to finish the inside, That, dear readers, we did ourselves, and that's what I'm sure every one comes here to read about. Or, at least laughs the most at.

But we'll save that for next time as well. For now, I thought I'd welcome everyone back to what I'm sure is the most popular feature of them all on this blog...

The Injury Report

So I'm building another shelf for the War Department's office, right? It's not as huge and impressive as the last one, but it's pretty finicky and requires some bracing on the inside (it's hollow - you'll see it when I'm done, promise). Anyway, I've got the top and sides attached okay, but I've got to get some nailing edges installed to attached the bottom.

So I'm holding a little jig I made to be sure I get the right depth along with the bracing piece in one hand, and nailing through the front (and into the brace) with the finish nailer. Everything's going great, right up until the second last piece, when I don't QUITE have the nailer at the right angle, and... well, you guessed it.

I attached the brace not only to the shelf, but quite neatly to the forefinger of my left hand.

Which hurt a lot. Not as much as it did when I sliced off the tip of the same finger oh, about four years ago. Good to know the sensation's returned in that fingertip, but still...

Ouch.

Fun with electricity

Well, it's story-time again here on everyone's favorite Broadmead-based renovation blog. The sunroom, which I was planning on writing about next, is becoming something of a saga here - a real saga, not a pseudo-saga like that bookcase nonsense I posted about last time. Let's just say that were I to relate ALL of the details (and I will - eventually) the sunroom saga might even fill THREE posts.

For now, however, I'd like to tell a story about how, despite all experience to the contrary, we can still occasionally be lulled into a false sense of complacency, and how nothing in this house is EVER easy.

For this particular story, I need to begin with - ironically enough - the sunroom. Better yet, we need to go all the way back to the last half of this old post, and the installation of the lights at the front of the garage for you to get the full idea...

Anyway, a few weeks ago (has it really been that long already? It has? Holy shnikies...), we were prepping the sunroom for the contractor to come and start fixing it. As usually happens, once we started taking things apart, we kept finding more things that needed to be fixed. When we opened up the wall beside the door on the greenhouse side of the sunroom, we found a light fixture near the top of the wall, and one of Frank's outdoor electrical specialties, the ever-popular "let's just run the electrical wire through an old, leaky piece of sprinkler pipe so we can get it out to the greenhouse" approach, near the bottom of the wall. While we were expecting the latter, what with previous experience and all, the former was a bit of a surprise in that, to all appearance, it seemed to be wired correctly.

Well, right up until we took a closer look at it, that is. Here's what the light looked like on the outside of the sunroom wall:

Funny thing about that (aside from the fact that it's attached to the wall with a BIG JESUS NAIL right through the fixture), is the apparent height of the mounting box. See, in that picture, the light is obviously mounted below the top of the sliding glass door. On the inside of the wall, however, the wire that was obviously supplying electricity to the fixture went through a small hole well above the top of the glass door. As we looked back and forth between the two sides of the wall, it became clear that the extraneous piece of wood on the outside of the wall was hiding... something we probably didn't want to see.

Of course, we first had to take a closer look at the fixture, and the weird and wonderful ways Frank found to attach things to ... other things. This picture shows the brass nut on one side of the fixture (which was the wrong fastener, btw - you can clearly see that it wouldn't screw down onto the bolt far enough to keep the fixture tight to the wall) and the nail someone drove right through the fixture - presumably to hold it to the board that's keeping the whole thing from being flush with the wall. Oh, and notice that the nut on the other side of the fixture did not match the one on this side... which you can only see because the light wasn't mounted at the right angle.

But wait! It gets worse!

No, really. It get worse. This is what it looked like after we took the light off the mounting bracket:

And this is what we found behind the board nailed to the wall:

Um... yeah. That IS speaker wire. I mean, it's an exterior light - it's not like anyone is ever going to CHECK it.

Anyway, as Bill Cosby might say, I told you that story so I could tell you another one.

The point of all this is that, after the lights on the front of the garage, and the light on the side of the sunroom, we felt pretty confident that we could handle pretty much anything in terms of the electrical stuff going on in this house. So when it came time to do something about the motion sensor light on the side of the garage, we went into the project expecting the worst. Which of course, is not at all what we found...

The underlying issue with the light on the side of the garage is that it... well, didn't actually work. We knew the motion sensor part of it was at least registering movement because every now and again, I'd hear it click as I walked past it. The lights, on the other hand, remained stubbornly dark.But it seemed like a logical place for a motion sensor light, and with the days getting shorter, we figured it might not be a bad idea to at least see if we could get it working.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that both of the bulbs seemed to be loose. Like, probably not actually burnt out, just not screwed in tight enough. But I took them out anyway to get a closer look at the light. It SEEMED to be in pretty good working order, and I was testing the range of the motion sensor arm to try and aim it down towards the walkway when it snapped right off in my hand. I guess the plastic was a little brittle from being exposed to the elements for so long, but still. With repurposing the light now out of the question, I took off the rest of the light and found, to my utter shock and ever-lasting surprise, a properly wired light fixture with a pancake box set into the stucco and fastened securely to the plywood backing board behind it. The wire that fed the box wasn't pinched in the hole, it wasn't SPEAKER wire, and in fact, seemed to have been installed by a qualified electrician. "Will wonders never cease?" I thought. "Just when you think you have this house figured out, they throw something done RIGHT at me. Shame I had to break the damn thing, eh?"

Anyway, off we hied to Crappy Tire and bought ourselves a new light fixture. Daylight sensor, adjustable motion range and light duration, the works. We brought it back, unpacked it, and the War Department went up the ladder and wired it up. Once she was done, I went up and carefully attached it to the mounting box. I tightened up the screw so it was good and snug, popped in a couple of bulbs, and Amy flipped the breaker.

POP!

"Huh," she said. "I've never seen blue flame shoot out of the top of an electrical panel like that."

So, yeah. Turns out that the pancake boxes are somewhat problematic in that when you have a long mounting screw right in the center of the fixture (as we did), it tends to line up directly with the wires being fed into the box from behind. Okay, so we need a new box. And, as it turns out, more wire. It seems that when they wired the original pancake box, they didn't leave any extra in the wall in case this sort of thing happened. Luckily for us, the wire was easy enough to trace because they had actually fed the wire out into the garage, and run it down the face of the drywall rather than inside the wall cavity.

So, to fix MY mistake, we had to retrace the wire back to the outlet set in the wall of the garage;

• Open up the drywall at the socket box on the inside of the garage.
• Feed the wire up through the inside wall cavity to the light fixture.
• Drill a 4.5" hole in the plywood backing.
• Cut open the drywall in the garage to access the back of the box.
• Rewire both the outlet and the new box.
• CAREFULLY reattach the light.

Oh, and of course, we didn't have enough wire OR a spare outlet box, so there was (yet) another trip to Home Despot in there somewhere, too.

Looks pretty good, now, though:

The moral of the story?

Oh, jebus. I don't know. We don't do morals much around here. Swearing, though - THAT we got covered.

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.

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.