Luke’s brother & his girlfriend  are also renovating a house, and although it is a very different project than ours, we are embarrassed to realize that their project seems to be getting done more quickly than ours. And they started WAAAAAAY after we did.  Of course, we have very different situations which have resulted in different rates of progress, but perhaps there is nothing better than a little sibling rivalry to hurry a project along! They don’t read my blog, so fortunately this won’t be an incentive for them to further kick our asses.

In similar news, we have new neighbors who just bought the house across the street, and now seem to be gutting and rebuilding it. This is very exciting for us– since they seem to be our age, and seem to be doing something similar– that is, they bought a cheap house (presumably because that’s what they could afford), and are now putting a lot of sweat equity into fixing it up.  After several years of ongoing trials & tribulations with our nearest neighbor, we are thrilled to see some folks that we might actually have something in common with– and who might be interested in bettering the neighborhood rather than trashing it.  The new neighbors are making fast progress (compared to us)– though they have a big incentive since they have to be out of their rental house by the end of the month…. less than a week.

And as for the other neighbor– at the very top of my wish list is a nice, big, 6 foot fence between us and the guy who tortured us for a year with his abused and barking dogs. (The dogs suffered along with us). What is that they say about good fences making good neighbors? I don’t think this guy is capable of being a considerate neighbor, (especially since the torture continues), but a nice big fence might help us to be a more compassionate neighbor to him.  I want the fence more than I want a bedroom, or a bathtub, or a tiny bit of private and/or creative space.  I want it even more than I want the exterior of our house to stop being a source of embarrassment.  I want it even more than I want to see plumbing & wiring going into the house.  So there may be some serious post-hole digging in our near future. I can’t wait. If I could cash in on some birthday or Christmas karma in order to get a fence this summer, I’d gladly do it.

In the mean time, we have managed over the previous month or so to get the windows upstairs replaced. We’ve been dreading the replacement windows because the old portion of the house has so many issues with walls that are bowed, out of plumb, etc.  But the first set of windows wasn’t so bad. Of course, we started with this set of windows because we thought it would be one of the easiest, but still it wasn’t the nightmare we’d all imagined. An extra bonus is that it is very visible from the street, and every project that helps the property look better is a huge boost to morale.

Here is the scary old window before being torn out. Since it had broken long before we bought the place and the former owners had merely tacked up a piece of plywood, it contributed significantly to the “haunted house” look of the place.  It will be semi-shocking if we someday own a property that doesn’t scare small children.

Here’s the progress from the inside.

Here’s the house with a big hole in it prior to the new framing going in.

Luke working on new framing inside the window opening.

The windows installed.  (Next step: replace the shingles I took out in order to install the window and also enable the installation of the roof flashing. Then we need replace the trim to match the historic trim and scrape, prime, and paint the whole shebang. Anyone want to volunteer?).  Interestingly, after much debate, we ended up installing our own nailing flanges on this window. We hadn’t ordered nailing flanges for the windows in the old portion of the house, because we weren’t sure exactly what sort of conditions we were going to run up against in the installation process. Plus, it saved us $1000 to eliminate nailing flanges on those 14 windows. (And we’re frugal that way).  But in this particular condition, it seemed like it would really help make the whole thing work if we had flanges, so we did them ourselves. We bought some L shaped galvanized metal at Home Despot and then siliconed & screwed the flanges to the window frame. To our surprise, it worked really well, and the flanges went on easily and made installing the windows a breeze.  Oh, and the total cost was about $10 for both windows.  Quite a price difference.  Below is a picture of our nailing flange. Once the trim is installed, you’ll never know that they weren’t factory flanges.

After a generous amount of time moldering away in the field behind the house of our friend, Kent, it was resurrected and brought to our property where it sat on the back porch for quite a while, waiting for rehabilitation.

Here is Luke, hanging out inside the tank.  Those of you related to Luke on the Dutton side may note that this photo has a rather Cebah-like air about it. Or at least it seems that way to me… though Cebah would likely have a more mischievous look in her eye if she were peeking out of the top of a huge steel tank.  Perhaps the photo above just sort of reminds me of the one below, taken in June 2008:

Anyway, we had this stainless tank sitting around on our back porch for a while. Luke installed all the fittings, and then filled it with water before we lowered it into the basement.  Since our basement lacks a floor drain, and is lower than the sewer, we would have been less-than-thrilled if we had gotten it down there and found that it leaked.  And since he had a large-ish body of water in his own backyard, Luke chose to take a little dip.  Don’t ask me why.  It didn’t last very long, as our water comes out of the tap very very cold.

After satisfying ourselves that the tank wouldn’t leak, we commenced cutting a hole in the floor of our mudroom to get the tank into the basement.  The current method of getting into the basement involves a poorly-built stairway which will not allow admission to an extremely large and heavy tank.  So, in our relentless pursuit to leave no piece of this property unchanged, we brought out the sawzall.

Eventually, we plan to demolish the current stair down to the basement, and turn this into a trap door/ steep stair combo.  This is unfortunate, as I am not a big fan of trap doors, having grown up in a house with a trap door that was always extremely inconvenient.  However, we’re not awash in choices on this one, and I worked really hard to try to find a location where it wouldn’t interrupt the circulation in the house too much, and wouldn’t constantly be in the way. We’ll see.  For the moment, we’ve got a big hole in the floor which, as it happens, is only very slightly larger than our tank.

After framing the opening, Luke’s cousin, Dave, very generously built us a special low-profile dolly to move the tank around on.  This was a necessary annoyance because the ceiling in the basement is rather low– too low to allow the tank to be moved around on our regular dolly.  You can see the dolly (below), under the tank. (Incidentally, it was made out of some high-quality casters that were rescued from the dump, and freed from the obnoxious steel contraption that could only be described as a student welding project gone-awry.)

Then, sometime last fall, when my parents were visiting, we decided to give them a little thrill and “let” them help us get the tank into the basement.  We removed the (temporarily installed) back door,  wheeled the tank into the mudroom, and maneuvered it near the hole (which was covered with a sheet of plywood).

Luke hooked a chain-fall to the nearest rafter, and my Dad helped him test it out. We got a strap around the tank, and hung it over the hole.

We removed the plywood and lowered the tank into the hole.

The tank makes its way into the basement. The low-profile dolly is on the floor, ready to receive its tank.

We discover that the wood spacer used to keep the top edges of the tank spread apart is too long to fit through the hole, so Luke cuts it off, while my Mom looks worried.

The tank disappears into the basement.

So there you have it.  An afternoon spent moving extremely heavy things, without anyone throwing out their back or getting a hernia. Next up: the mechanical room work.

So– you want to see a section through my house?

Kind of depressing, but also kind of cool.  Instead of seeing Joe baking and Suzie showering, you see our brick chimney trying to hold itself together on the second floor, a new door waiting to be installed (first floor, far left), a vacuum wishing it would be used more often, some lath barely hanging on to the side of the staircase, a pile of fiberglass insulation waiting to be freecycled (upstairs, right), and a retractable lifeline hoping to be taken to a job site (upstairs, far left). There’s also an white, empty box (upstairs, left) that is the original packaging for our new-ish (and fabulous) chop saw.  If you look really carefully at the rafters on the far left, you can see the copper line coming down from the solar collectors in the roof, feeding heat through the basement and into the house (it is covered in black pipe insulation).

This section through my house is brought to you by the letter “D”.  “D” is for demolition– demolition of the former east wall of the oldest portion of the house.

Above, you can see the old shingles, and the ratty 100+ year old windows.  When we bought this place, these items were outside. Now they are inside. You can sort of see the diagonal lines where the old kitchen roof used to be. It ended just below the windows. Below the shingles, in the area where I’m pulling nails, you can see a hodge-podge of poor decisions, such as horizontal clapboard siding, which was unceremoniously sawed through (using a drill!) to insert a scary exhaust vent that was attached to a truly frightening wall heater that was probably responsible for a few minor carbon monoxide poisonings. (Is there such a thing as a minor carbon dioxide poisoning?)  Below that is some faux-wood paneling, and quite a few studs (not visible) that haven’t reached the floor in at least 50 years.  (We suspect that the house’s previous occupants were probably freezing to death, so they started chopping away at parts of the structure to get some firewood.)

Here, the shingles have been removed, and you can see the diagonal sheathing beneath.  It is rough-cut 1x boards, the widest of which is at least 24 inches wide.  Amazing, old-growth lumber, which we can’t bear to burn (even though our supply of firewood is getting a little thin these days).  We’re hoping we can make a table-top or something out of it at some point. Unfortunately, as a result of the former owner’s propensity to hack out everything historic or nice, there isn’t a lot of the really wide boards that are still intact.

The wall is being dismantled.  Including a couple of  old rough-cut 2x4s that are well over 20 feet long!

It was sort of sad to see the historic old wall go, but it is giving way to a somewhat more modern, open floor plan.  And it was in deplorable condition. We saved the historic front of the house, where it is more significant (and more intact), but here it is nice to see the space opening up, and taking shape.

P.S. Thanks to my husband, who just made me dinner so that I could write this. So actually, this post is brought to you, not by the letter “D”, but by the Luke.

And from the outside:

Before: Scary-looking owner-builder nightmare that makes people wonder if anything is ever going to happen. (Even when there have been lots of less-visible things happening).

During: Tyvek covers all sins.

After: The house starts to look like a real construction project again.  Very exciting.

So, we ended up using Serious Windows.  This was a last-minute diversion from our original plan.  We saw the Serious windows that some friends had recently installed, and were impressed with the high-quality mechanisms of the casements.  So we did some research, and ended up going with them over the clad wood windows that we had been planning to use. (The price was fairly similar). A major selling point for us was the fact that Serious Windows acknowledge that people– yes, even people in the United States (where energy is often assumed to be “free”)– sometimes want to install windows with a high SHGC (solar heat gain co-efficient).  In other words, most window manufacturers in the U.S. use special films that block out much of the solar heat, (while also keeping heat/cool inside the house).  This is a good & energy efficient thing to do in many cases, but in some cases, it is very desirable to have passive solar heat gain. (Free heat!)   In our case, we went to extraordinary effort to rip out a rotten wooden floor, pour a radiant concrete floor, and cut in numerous windows on our previously-blank south elevation.  So we have a big thermal mass that can absorb solar heat in the winter when the sun shines in, and we want our windows to admit that heat, not block it out.

When we asked our regular window rep (the guy that we were planning to buy from) about this issue, he gave a confusing and nonsensical answer which basically boiled down to: “you don’t understand how it works, and it really doesn’t matter.” Serious Windows, on the other hand, takes this issue on, and makes it simple.  For each window you buy, you get to specify whether you want low SHGC or high SHGC.  Simple enough– the customer/ designer gets to decide whether or not it will be desirable to have significant solar heat gain through the windows. In our case, we chose low SHGC for all east, west, and north windows, and I specified high SHGC for all the south windows.  (I sort of wonder if I should have specified high SHGC for the east-facing breakfast nook window, but I didn’t– it remains to be seen whether or not I will come to regret that choice.)

So, the other reason we chose Serious Windows:  they also are extremely efficient– much more so than typical energy star windows. This is because they pay a lot of attention to the entire window construction (not just the glass), and avoid thermal breaks by using foam-filled fiberglass frames.  The fiberglass is theoretically extremely stable, won’t rot or warp, and-the best part of all– never needs to be finished! (Which I see as a huge bonus, because the last thing I want to do is spend eons sanding and finishing window frames.  I have the capability to be infinitely anal– trust me, I am capable of spending multiple lifetimes on  simple task like sanding & finishing windows.)  Serious Windows also get very high R-values out of the glass itself by taking a double-pane window, and adding a film (or multiple films) and an extra air gap in between the 2 panes of glass.  So it is essentially a triple-glazed window, without the added weight (& expense) of having 3 panes of glass. Brilliant.

Oh, and last-but-not-least, these windows were made in Colorado, which I think is great.  If I have to spend a butt-load of money on something like windows, I’m glad that all that money is staying in my home state, and that thousands of gallons of fossil fuels aren’t being used to ship these things around the globe.  Actually, window manufacturing is one of those things that  has not been shipped overseas, and that is a really good thing.

Now, for the downside of our Serious Windows. I think that their quality control in the manufacturing process could use a bit of improvement, and there are some details which are just rather poor.  Almost every single window we got had some paint/ surface imperfection issues.  With wood windows, a slight ding in the surface can be sanded and refinished. With fiberglass windows, this isn’t possible. I requested some touch-up paint, which I imagine I’ll get in my mailbox before too long, but still it is annoying to pay Serious Money for windows, and have multiple cosmetic blemishes.  We also have one window in which the two pieces of the frame were not co-planar, and had caulk smeared around in a bit of a mess. (The company said this was within their manufacturing tolerance, and was not their responsibility.) Another window had a small broken piece (which they are going to replace), and their weep hole/ drain detail on the single hung windows is just downright poorly executed and ugly.  All in all, however, I know that once everything is said and done, I’ll quickly forget about a few cosmetic annoyances and love the windows for the next 100 or so years– which is how long I expect they’ll last.

Finally, our rep– Nick Amato at Cornerstone Building Solutions has been great.  And of course, that’s worth a lot.

More pictures coming soon…..

So, we got the solar thermal collectors up on our roof a while ago.   And I’m just now getting around to posting something about it.  We purchased a bunch of used collectors and a stainless steel storage tank a while ago from someone who was parting out an older system. There were lots of thermal systems put in the 1980′s that didn’t necessarily work all that well: we’ve seen some that were so badly designed and executed that they couldn’t possibly have EVER worked.  Eventually these systems end up being de-commissioned because the homeowner wants to re-roof or whatever. I should note that there were also some systems built in the 80s that were well designed and executed.  Those systems tend to still be running just fine and providing their owners with lots of “free” energy.  Even though their controllers and other equipment in the mechanical room is now extremely dated, they still work fine. However, in our corner of the boonies, most of the 1980s thermal systems tend to fall in the former category rather than the latter one.

So the used thermal collectors are Novan brand from the 80s.  The great thing about traditional thermal collectors is that they’re pretty bullet-proof as long as you don’t abuse them (or shoot bullets at them). Frankly, the collectors we bought were probably not treated all that well, and in retrospect, we paid too much for them, but I guess we have to chalk it up to “experience” and move on. We’re slowly learning how to be better negotiators when we buy used stuff, but there definitely is a learning curve for timid folk like us, and unfortunately, we made this purchase on the steeper part of the curve. In retrospect, we perhaps should have walked away from the deal when the seller got all huffy when Luke pointed out some obvious deficiencies in the items in question.  For example, the stainless steel tank theoretically came with an internal copper coil heat exchanger, but in reality, the coil had been filled with a non-antifreeze substance (such as water), and left to freeze.  So there was a split in every single loop of the coil.  It wasn’t really possible to cut out the damaged part and reconnect the coil with couplers, because the copper pipe was all bulged and weird along its entire length.  The coil ended up going to the scrap yard, though getting a good price on copper scrap helped ease the pain.  And  the thermal collectors had all been cut open by some previous owner– so every single silicone seal had to be removed and replaced.  Some of the riser tubes inside needed repair, so Luke brazed those. In the end, we had to take every single collector completely apart, clean the glass, remove all the silicone (and crud), and reassemble & silicone them.  I did all the silicone work, because I have a strange affinity for picky, meticulous, repetitive work.  I find it sort of relaxing and meditative. I guess that’s why I like knitting.  I became a pretty expert silicon-er.

Considering all the work we had to inject into these collectors, there is no way that it would ever be cost-effective to put used collectors on the customer’s system, but for ourselves, we’re a couple of cheap bastards, and tend to be suckers for projects that are going to require unreasonable amounts of work.  Our choice in real estate is proof enough for that! Renovating these collectors did prove to be a lot of work. We spent days dis-assembling, cleaning, and re-assembling.

Anyway, for several years, we had these thermal collectors and stainless steel tank floating around, waiting to become a part of our brand new solar thermal system.  (“Floating around” is perhaps not the best choice of words, since all of these things are extremely heavy.)  Last fall, we got the collectors up on our brand new roof. (I posted a video of the hoisting process here.)  I’ve added some photos of the process of getting the collectors renovated and installed on the roof.

Isn’t this a beautiful place to be “in storage”, waiting to be given a second shot at life?  In the front is the stainless steel tank (lying down), and behind the tank is our stack of thermal collectors.  (Behind that is the Sangre de Cristo mountain range.)

Here is one of the collectors during its renovation process.  The glass has been removed from the top, and in this case, one side of the frame has also been removed. (I can no longer remember why because we did this many moons ago!)

Here, Jim is installing a Jim-contraption which will be used to hoist the panels onto the roof.  The block & tackle will be attached to the upper end of this 4×4.  The lower end of the 4×4 was tied back to the wall in order to  keep it from going anywhere.

This photo shows the setup on the roof. 3 of the 4 horizontal rails (uni-strut) have been installed. The boards on the right are 2x6s that create a “ramp” that runs down to the ground. Directly above the “ramp” is the Jim-contraption that will hold the block & tackle.

Here, the first thermal panel is being lifted up the ramp, both by the grunt laborers in the picture, and by people on the ground who are pulling the rope on the block & tackle.

Here, Dave and Luke are lifting the first panel onto the higher set of rails. Once they get it up there, they’ve got some cleverly placed wood blocks that will allow the panel to rest on the rails and be slid across to their final location.

The second collector has been lifted up and is being slid laterally (left) to its final location.

This photo sort of gives shows the whole set up (though it is extremely difficult to get an all-inclusive shot because of trees and property lines).

At the end of the day, it would have been really nice to get windows and siding installed prior to doing this project.  But, as with all things, our methods tend to be a bit convoluted.  We had a funding deadline to get this stuff done, and we also wanted to get the solar system pumping heat into the house in order to make winter just a little less miserable.  As I write this, it is 7 degrees below zero outside and dumping snow.

Luke’s cousin, Dave, came out and helped us in the fall with various projects.  The major goal of his visit was to get our solar thermal collectors up on our roof.  This is a time-lapse video that Dave took of the collectors going up on the roof.  We pulled them up a ramp made out of 2x6s, using a block & tackle, and a Jim-contraption that was attached to the roof. It worked amazingly well, and put an end to a series of marital disagreements in which Luke wanted to spend a grand or so hiring a boom lift to get the collectors up there. My objection was both financial, and practical/spatial. The south side of our house is fairly near the property line, and the collectors were going on the back portion of the house– there’s no way that we would have been able to get a piece of machinery anywhere close to the roof without ripping out some cherry trees or something.  Anyway, the $8.50 solution worked amazingly well, and we were grateful to have help with the lifting.

Here’s the video:

This is the upstairs after the roofing had all been torn off. The light was actually quite beautiful coming in through the skip sheathing.

Another photo of our upstairs without any roofing.  We never anticipated while we were ripping off the roofing that the upstairs would become temporarily transformed, but it was.  It was sort of sad when we had to put the new roofing materials on, and the space once again become dark.

Conference on the roof.  You may be wondering why the guy in the “22″ shirt has his legs cut off. That is my father-in-law, and in this photo, he is standing on a ladder in the attic, with his body protruding through the opening we were cutting for a new skylight.

In this photo, taken from the alley,  you can see the skylight framing next to the red ladder.

Here is the skylight framing from inside the house. The 2 new skylights we added are going to make all the difference in the world when it comes to making the upstairs rooms into beautiful spaces. Note the incredibly small rafters: rough-cut 2x4s, which are tiny according to today’s building practices…. but these things have actually done a pretty amazing job of holding things up for the last 100+ years.  The rafters are amazingly straight, despite some sub-standard structural choices– there is very little (if any) sagging in this roof. Of course, having a 12/12 pitch helps out quite a bit in that department, since it keeps too much snow from accumulating on the roof.  These rafters are probably as thrilled about the new roofing as we are:  the new roofing is considerably lighter per square foot than 1 layer of wood shingles + 2 layers of asphalt shingles.

Here I am re-nailing the skip sheathing on the rafters.  I nailed every single piece of skip sheathing into every single rafter, usually with several nails per intersection.  I’m normally well-suited to such repetitive tasks, which I tend to find sort of meditative (like knitting!), but in this case, I generally found the task to be incredibly difficult and annoying and seemingly endless.  But it was definitely a necessary step…. over the years, original nails had become loose, and were also in fairly short supply.  Since we were adding 2 inches of foam and then screwing a new sheathing layer of OSB into the original skip sheathing, the only thing holding our roof to the rafters would be the nails that hold the skip sheathing onto the rafters.

Here is a picture of the poly-iso rigid foam going onto the skip sheathing. You can see that the foam is in 1″ sheets, and thanks to the dedication of my father-in-law to such tedious tasks, every single joint is staggered in both the horizontal & vertical directions. On the right of this photo, you can see the intersection between the roof of the old house, and the roof of the “new” kitchen addition. Since the kitchen addition has modern-sized rafters (that is rafters with some actual depth), we didn’t need to  use the rigid foam on that section of the roof, because we’ll be able to get plenty of insulation between the rafters.  However, it took quite a bit of head scratching and  discussion and planning to get the 2 roof planes to come together perfectly.  And thanks to Curt, Luke, and Jim, it is pretty damn close.  After the roofing went on, the slightest bump between the 2 roofs was detectable by those persons who knew exactly where to look — and this was tremendously bothersome to certain persons who spent a great deal of time & energy fussing over that bump (Luke & Jim, I’m talking about you).  But in the end, we’ve covered said bump with solar thermal collectors (to be discussed in an upcoming post), and it is of no importance whatsoever. Plus, I challenge you to find a “professionally” built re-roof that is straighter or more bump-free.

Sheathing becomes a family affair.  Here, Jim hands OSB to the seated Kim, who is then apparently passing it along to Luke.

My brother-in-law, Olin, does his best Buddha impersonation on the peak of the roof during a brief break from the laboring.

Luke makes a cut in the roofing. Thankfully we had most of the pieces cut by the roofing supplier (Recla metals), but we did have to do some cutting ourselves.  This piece of roofing is in its pre-rusted state, clearly from the bottom of the stack. (see my previous post, where I discuss our decision to use rusting metal for our roof.)

Here is another photo of the roofing being cut.  You can see the uneven rusting pattern on the piece of roofing on the ground.  This all sorted itself out quite nicely once it got up on our roof.

This is a photo that sort of shows our scaffolding/ ladder arrangement. Having a row of scaffolding near the roof edge was truly invaluable for getting this job done.  As were our $40 ladder hooks, which we used to hang the big red ladder on the roof so that people could get up and down easily.

The beginning of the tear-off on the north side of the roof, on a picture-perfect summer day.

Lest anyone ever accuse me of claiming to rebuild this house myself– here is a sampling of the clan of folks who helped us with this project.  None of them wish to be seen in public working on such a shitty-looking house, which is why they are all wearing masks.

Here, all the old shingles have been removed from the north side of the roof.  It’s all downhill from here!

Another photo of the inside while all the roofing is off.  I can’t even begin to tell you how amazing it was to have the upstairs of our house be filled with light and airiness.  This place has never ever been bright or cheery or welcoming– at least not in a long, long time.  It has been a dirty, dingy, ugly space– probably since they day that someone put the first layer of shingles on about 100 years ago. While we did have to cover this over and darken the space, it made me excited to get moving on making this a lovely, inviting space.

Our stairway with light streaming in!

Brothers on a roof.

Here, the roofing is going on. Very exciting!

A long view of the roofing going on.  On the north side of the house, we first put roofing on the “old house”, and then we went back and put it on kitchen addition.  This order of working had something to do with getting the roofing straight on the roof, and getting all the lines of screws lined up.

Finally, a picture of Olin on the roof (I think he was putting in roofing screws), with our PV system in the background.  Sloooooowly, our property becomes less of a disgrace!

Let me apologize in advance for going on & on about this re-roofing project, but it was a big project– in fact, it was probably one of the biggest projects we’ve done so far.  Does it dwarf the ripping out of the rotten floor and replacing it with a radiant concrete floor?  Was it bigger than the 6′ deep trench that we dug 100′ through the yard to replace the utilities?  Does it overshadow the small matter of fixing up the world’s most horrible building, and turning it into a lovely little mini-house?  How does a reroof compare to building a new & obscenely tall kitchen structure while simultaneously ripping down the old structure?  It makes my head hurt just a little to think about it.  Especially when I think about how much we still have to do.  Though in the interest of my ongoing sanity, I make a concerted effort to never think about how much we have left to do on this project. I firmly believe that the only way to stay sane in this situation is to focus on each small goal as we accomplish them.  And sometimes I focus on the fact that most people (well, Americans) spend 30 years paying for their houses, and we’re NOT going to be doing that– we’re paying for it now in blood, sweat, tears– and yes, dollars.

Anyway, back to the roof.  We did the main house roof (not including the hipped porch roof) in 3 sections; two sections on the south side, and then we did the entire north side in one go.  For each section, we ripped off all the old shingles, re-nailed all the skip sheathing to the rafters, added 2 inches of poly-iso rigid foam, and then added 1/2 inch of OSB over the foam (staggering all the foam & OSB joints).  We then put down roofing paper, and then… finally…. after much agony, got to the satisfying business of putting the actual roofing on.  Compared to all the preparation, the roofing itself went on incredibly quickly.

After some discussion and shopping around, we used a rusting metal product from Recla metals.  From the very beginning of this project, which some of you may remember started around the end of the last ice age (because we work at a pace which is best described on the geologic time scale), I wanted to use rusting metal for our roof.  The stuff has become kind of popular in recent years, perhaps for good reason. I love this material because it is a real material which changes and gathers patina over time.  Kind of like copper, but without the unbelievable price tag.  Excuse me for anthropomorphizing my house, but the place was probably completely shocked to find itself covered in a real material. The poor thing was drenched in materials masquerading as other materials for nearly half a century. Plastic tiles that were supposed to look like ceramic had been glued to the walls. Masonite paneling that was intended to look like wood paneling had been thrown around onto many random wall surfaces (usually to cover grievous sins that had been committed to the plaster, or to cover the shame of poorly installed insulation).  And, my personal favorite,  wood trim that had been covered in a thin plastic material which had wood grain printed on it.  Yep. You read that correctly: FAKE WOOD THAT IS MADE OUT OF WOOD!  In other words, this place was dressed up like a cheap hooker wearing too much heavy makeup.

But now things have changed. We’ve stripped that poor hooker down, and we’re ready to make an honest woman out of her. Or something like that. (I suspect this analogy is about to get out of hand, so I’ll get back to the roofing.)  For this project we used rusting corrugated metal.  It is basically just plain steel that is allowed to rust and weather as it chooses. In theory, a thin layer of rust forms on the surface of the metal and that layer protects the underlying metal from further rusting, like Cor-ten steel.  Cor-ten steel is a proprietary brand name which is supposed to be a special alloy of steel.  The stuff we bought isn’t Cor-ten, and frankly I don’t think there is any special alloy involved with this stuff— it’s just plain sheet steel corrugated into a roofing product. Some people might be worried that the roofing will rust out, but I’m not. In this incredibly dry climate, it takes a really long time for things to rust. I’m not sure I’d use this material on an ocean-side beach house, but in this alpine desert the roofing will undoubtedly last longer than the house.  My father-in-law has plain steel corrugated roofing on his house that is well over 100 years old, and it hasn’t rusted through at all. It will probably last another 100 years easily, and his roofing is about half as thick as the stuff we used on our roof.

Another reason to like this roofing is that I think it is actually pretty environmentally friendly as compared to other products we could have used. It doesn’t qualify as an energy star roof (because of its color), but it will last forever, it’s likely made at least partially out of recycled steel, and  it is 100% recyclable in case future generations want to rip it off and put up something made out of plastic (to commemorate the work of the previous owners). It was also made by a small company in Colorado, which makes me happy.  The other bonus is that this stuff is pretty tough– and is much more durable than a thin, painted steel roofing product.   A painted steel roofing would have gotten completely scratched in the awkward process of dragging 20′ long sheets up the roof in some very tight spaces, and in the process of dragging the 8 solar thermal collectors that we installed on this roof recently (which I’ll discuss in a later post).

When we got the roofing, it didn’t have a lot of rust on it. Then, in our typical glacial fashion, we left the roofing sitting in our yard for several months while we prepped the roof, and went about the business of procrastinating.  During this time, it rained quite a bit, and we got a lot of really uneven rusting that happened on the top couple of sheets.  Since I am a professional worrier, my natural tendency might be to worry about the uneven & odd rust patterns; however worrying about the natural process of rusting that was happening on some roofing that was designed specifically to rust did seem a little beyond the pale. (In fact, we paid extra to get the stuff that rusts.)  Anyway, by the time we got the roofing up, it had some strange looking rust patterns, as a result of how each piece had been positioned in the pile in the yard.  But surprisingly, within a week or two, it all evened out, and now the rusting actually looks quite uniform.

We don’t have all the trim finished on the roofing yet: we’re still missing some of the niceties of life, like fascia boards, and the dreaded chimney flashing, but it feels amazing to no longer have to cringe every time it rains or the wind blows. People who buy finished houses probably don’t wake up in the morning and marvel at how amazing it feels to have siding or roofing that is firmly attached to its substrate. But I do.

It would be a gross understatement to say that we needed a new roof.  With every large gust of wind, pieces of asphalt shingle were blowing off the south side of the roof and landing all over the yard, adding to our “landfill chic” aesthetic, which I referred to in an earlier post.  The house had one layer of wooden shingles under 2 layers of asphalt shingles, and it was these asphalt shingles that were taking flight and floating all around the neighborhood like autumn leaves, only without the romantic & picturesque connotations.  I can only imagine that these asphalt shingles were purchased on sale at Montgomery Wards, just like every other damn thing on the entire property.  (Did they sell asphalt shingles at Montgomery Ward in the 1970s?)  Anyway, these were extremely thin, cheap shingles that were then blasted heavily by the sun until they turned into shingle-pulp.  (Notably, the shingles on the north side of the roof were in pretty decent condition.)

Before we started, I was a bit anxious about working on a 45 degree roof:  while I’m not completely terrified of heights, I’ve also been known to be a bit of a chicken when it comes to such things.  But when it came right down to it, I was fine. We set up a long row of scaffolding along the building, about 4 feet below the roof edge, and used ladder hooks on a large extension ladder to climb up and down the roof.  And we each wore harnesses.  We have both OSHA safety harnesses (which are worn like a vest), and climbing harnesses (which are worn like a diaper).  We found that we much preferred the climbing harnesses, because you can “sit” or lean against them to work.  The OSHA harnesses, with rope attachment points in the middle of your back, don’t allow for such luxuries, and require you to have a firm footing and carry all your weight at all times, which can sometimes be exhausting when you’re working in odd positions or trying to stay upright on a 45 degree slope.

This is me ripping off shingles while wearing an OSHA harness. I'm standing on the skip sheathing. The portion of the roof with white roofing paper on it is the kitchen addition.

After all is said and done, I’m really glad to have gotten intimately involved with the re-roofing of our house, and I’m glad to have pushed my boundaries of comfort a little bit when it came to the job of scurrying around on a 45 degree slope.  I grew up in a family where “risk” is a  bad word and ones feet are generally supposed to remain planted firmly on the ground at all times.  But pushing those boundaries of comfort are a good thing, and, I think, a part of staying young, flexible, and adaptable.

This is not to say that I’d like to make it a regular habit to replace roofs– it is definitely a hot, dirty, highly labor-intensive task.  The dirt that is stirred up when ripping off 100+ year-old shingles is not your ordinary, run-of the mill dirt. No. It is real dirty-dirt.  The sort of dirt that blew into town on a viciously windy spring day 100 years ago, lodged itself under a shingle, and then proceeded to collect dust on itself for a century or so.  This is the kind of insidious dirt that has taken up residence in the tiniest of remote crevices, and expects to stay there for all eternity.  And when that sort of dirt is disturbed, it has vengeance on its mind, and it lashes out, gluing itself to anything and everything– including clothing, hair, and the space under your fingernails. It worms its way into the top of your shoes, wriggles into every pore, and settles into a fine layer all over the entire property.  This ancient dirt resists scrubbing; choosing instead to smear or leave behind a stain on my jeans to remind me that I conquered the re-roofing of my house. With the passing of the old roofing and the advent of the new, we’ve officially left no piece of our house (or its ancient dirt) unmolested.  I guess that officially makes this “our” house.

Luke & his Dad standing on the scaffolding at the lower edge of the roof. Do you think those shingles needed to be replaced?

This endless remodeling project requires us to go to the dump fairly often, and we generally find it to be the most depressing place on earth. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I suggest you visit your local landfill just to see how wasteful and thoughtless our country has become about resources.) At the same time, we’re trying very hard to move our own property away from the charming “landfill chic” aesthetic that it had when we first bought it (and that some of our neighbors tend to embrace in their own yards).  So we’re always trying to get rid of things without actually taking them to the dump.  We have a bit of a contest going on to see what we can get other people to haul away to their own property, while providing us with a little more clear space on ours.  One of our favorite tactics is to put things out on the curb with a “free” sign on them, and we’re always amazed to see what disappears.  When the 1970s television sat out on our curb for over a week, Luke bet me that it would “never” go away.  But I have faith that someone will eventually want our crap, even if it is incredibly crappy. Sometimes it just takes a level of patience that is commensurate with the crappiness of the possessions in question.  It took about 2 weeks, but incredibly, the 1970s television disappeared. Ditto the incomplete set of 1960s Britannica Encyclopedias.

So, when we ripped the old cedar shingles off our porch roof,  we tried to figure out a way that we could avoid taking this filthy, broken, nail-infested  pile to the dump.  So we posted a notice on our local freecycle list serve, advertising our dead shingles as “kindling to keep you nice & warm this coming winter”– and I’ll be damned if we didn’t get someone who was super excited to come out the very next day and haul away the entire trailer load.  Thus proving once again that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Footnote:  As we review our successes with foisting our crap the all-too-willing public, Luke chimes in to remind me that we never managed to give away the “Atlas of China” that was published by the CIA in perhaps the 1970s. Come on people!  Don’t you see the Ebay potential in this rare volume?  What is wrong with you? (If anyone would like to volunteer to take this little gem off our hands, please feel free to email me with your address, and I’d be more than happy to mail it to you.)

We started our larger roofing project with a practice roof: the smallest piece of the project that we could find.  This was a small hipped roof  over the front porch. We thought the shingles on it were original to the house which was built in 1905, but then we found some paper labels on the back of a few of the shingles that had a date of ~1935 on them.  The porch actually wasn’t original to the house, so perhaps it was added on in the late 1930s.  The nice porch really is what makes the house work on the front side, and seems to be the only addition to the house that was done well and really complemented the house.  (Quality, craft, and thoughtfulness all went downhill after the 1930s around here, apparently!)  Our very first project on the house was to rebuild the rotting porch floor and columns, but like most projects around here, we never manage to put the “finishing touches” on things before moving on. So the porch still looked kind of shabby as a result of badly worn & shaggy wooden shingles, so it was nice to make the porch look a little better by replacing the roof. (Unfortunately, we still need to attend to several trim issues and scrape & paint the whole thing before it will start to look really finished.)

Once we ripped off the old wood shingle roof, we discovered that we needed to do a bit of structural work on the roof itself. There were some places where the original structure had not been built terribly well, we we did some reinforcing.  Like the rest of the house, this roof had “skip sheathing” on it. In other words, the sheathing (or surface that spans the rafters and supports the roofing) was made up of 1 inch thick boards that had gaps in between them.  Back in 1935, people didn’t have much access to sheet goods (like plywood), but there were lots of forests & sawmills around, where you could get hefty boards.  We took some of the skip sheathing off to work on the structure beneath, but then we replaced it and and put OSB over the top before adding the metal roofing.  While we were working on the structure, we added in several pieces of structure that we can someday use to attach our future porch swing to.  I hope that we can someday be proud enough of our house to actually sit on the front porch!

So, we decided that our roofing situation was getting a little desperate. Even more desperate than the window situation, which is also pretty bad, and even more desperate than the siding situation, which is just plain ugly. We decided that if we didn’t get a new roof on the house, we were going to start doing irreparable damage to the whole structure, particularly since we’ve been testing the physical limits of a few pieces of  Titanium roofing membrane on our addition for <ahem> several years now.  Plus, all the UV damaged shingles from the south side of the house were blowing in the yard, and we all know that it’s a bit embarrassing to have parts of your house blowing off and hitting passersby.  So, anyway, we decided that the first order of business was to get a new roof on the entire house.  And it’s always a simple decision involving a money pit (aka renovation project) that starts one down the slippery slope commonly known as “scope creep.”

It turns out that before we could put a new roof on the house, we needed to add a dormer to make space and light in the (future) upstairs bathroom.  Because you wouldn’t want to put on a brand new roof and THEN start cutting into it to make a new dormer.  But it turns out that before we could add a dormer, we’d need some kind of permanent structure to hold up the dormer, since our house had been propped up on a motley assortment of beams, posts, and hydraulic jacks ever since we poured our concrete floor. (If you don’t remember the concrete floor– believe me, it happened a long time ago). So, we needed to rebuild the central structural wall downstairs in order to support the 2nd floor which would be necessary to support the new dormer.  Except that we were also planning to bolster up the over-spanned floor 2nd floor joists by sistering the existing 2×6 joists with new 2x10s.  And it turns out that the only good way to get the 2×10 sisters into place was to put them up before adding the new central structural wall. Now in order to do this sistering project, all we needed to do was rip out some old knob & tube wiring, and spend about $700 at the lumber store. So we did that, and set about doing the sistering that would allow the framing upon which the new dormer would sit so that we could re-roof the house so that the house wouldn’t be such a damn embarrassment.  (Yes, a match and a gallon of gasoline would be much easier, and we have considered it– but people do tend to frown on such things– even more than they frown on old shingles blowing off and hitting them in the eye.)

So, we framed up a bunch of stuff.  And we don’t have a new roof yet.  If I haven’t lost you yet, here’s a few pictures of the progress.

In this picture, I am laboriously removing the tubes from the old knob & tube wiring, so that we can get the new floor joists flush up against the old joists, so that they can be tacked together. While extremely old, this knob & tube wiring is not original to the house. They had pried up the T&G floor boards on the 2nd floor to thread in the knob & tube wiring  between the original plaster ceiling and the 2nd floor. This might be a sad little old house, but it is no stranger to renovation.

In this picture, Luke & Jim remove a temporary beam that was holding up the 2nd floor because the new structural wall needs to be put in the same place. The house is temporarily held up by another beam that is hidden behind the one shown. You can see the temporary columns sitting on jacks in the center of the picture.

I’m nailing up joist hangers on the west end of the house to support the bottom part of the new sisters.  Since the original joists are 2×6, and the sistered joists are 2×10, there is roughly 4 inches of joist hanging below the top plate. In order to prevent the sisters from splitting out and becoming effectively 2x6s, we added joist hangers to catch the full depth of the joist.  And if you’re thinking like a builder, you’ll realize that this means there will be no upper nailing surface for the drywall, since the joists extend below the top plate.  Sigh. This is just part of the renovation fun.

Most of the new structural wall is in, and we’re lowering the trusty beam that held up our house for longer than we care to admit. In case you’re wondering where one gets a beam that is approximately 12 inches deep and 16.5  feet long, the answer (in this case) is not at your local lumberyard.  If I remember the story correctly, this beam came out of some sort of chicken house that my father-in-law tore down in the 1970s. Probably because he knew that someday he’d need something to hold his son’s house up with.

This is the upstairs where the new dormer will go, as a result of lots of lovely new framing downstairs. The kneewall framing has been removed in this photo, in preparation for some major demolition.

Luke and Curt take the first cut out of the roof. This small and dark space is about to get a whole lot nicer.

The roof has now officially been compromised, thanks to 5 minutes work with a couple of sawzalls.  There’s no turning back now.

Luke enlarges the hole with his demo skill saw.

The roof gets dropped piece by piece to the dump trailer below (hopefully not on passersby), as the hole gets bigger…

It’s now a totally different space than it was a few minutes ago. Gotta love framing: quick and satisfying progress!

The rain of sawdust, as the hole extends above the collar ties.

Framing the new dormer end wall on the floor.

Luke hangs off the beam that will support the old roof rafters & the new dormer rafters– just to prove it is strong enough. (This picture isn’t taken from the optimum angle, because it looks like he’s got his feet on the ladder, but really he’s showing off is pull-up skills.)

Luke tests our new beam from above. The new dormer rafters are now framed in.

Men working above.

More pictures of people’s butts, as the people are trying to get the roof sheathing done at the end of the day.

The dormer from the front of the house.

Well folks, that is a smattering of the work we’ve been doing lately. Before I sign off, I should note that these photos don’t adequately depict our secret weapon. Actually, we have 2 secret weapons that don’t actually show up in this blog. One is my mother-in-law (Ruth Ann) who has faithfully kept us fed with scrumptious food whenever she’s around. She also re-stained the porch floor in the picture above, and has done an amazing job of making our yard look less like a toxic dumping ground, and more like a verdant garden. If I had a picture of her enchiladas, or her sushi salad, I’d post it here, but I have neither. I’ll have to remember to take pictures before eating one of these days.

Our other secret weapon is my Uncle Carl, who has served as my personal adviser / structural engineer/ adhoc architect, sometimes on an emergency basis.  He has faithfully taken all my emailed scribbles and scribbled on top of them with lots of advice.  I did listen in structures class lo these many years ago, (I actually loved structures), but I don’t use the principles on a daily basis, and never in real-life, so it has been amazing to have Carl at my beck & call to answer all my questions, and remind me about all the things I’m forgetting about.  Building your own house is quite an education, and I’m grateful for all his support & guidance.

A few readers of this blog may have surmised that our little renovation project is actually kind of  out of control, and that we’re sort of in it for the long haul (like it or not), so it is great to have some secret weapons. Thanks!

]]> http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/framing-and-a-new-dormer-too-in-service-of-a-roof/feed/ 3 laura http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/deadlines/ http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/deadlines/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:48:42 +0000 lauracm http://homeisaprocess.wordpress.com/?p=235 ]]>

New fence, old fence, and the unfinished house behind

To the casual observer, this scene may seem rather odd. “Why,” you might ask yourself, “would anyone in their right mind spend an obscene amount of effort building a brand new fence when their house has been sitting, unfinished and relatively vulnerable to the weather for months, (going on years)? Well folks, the answer is simple: deadlines are what makes the world go around.

While our poor house has languished in a half-finished / half-abandoned state, deadlines have focused our energy on other things. The need to move out of our “rental” house in order to return it to its rightful owner pushed us to get the mini-home finished. Which it is now. Except for the ceiling in the bathroom. And caulking/floor trim around the doors. And exterior siding. And a finish on the water heater closet. (If you’ve built your own house, you know what I’m talking about. It seems like such a miracle to have actual functional plumbing that “minor” details go unfinished for obscene periods of time.)

And now that we’ve got a warm place to inhabit (yes! I’ll post pictures soon), we have other deadlines bearing down on us like a freight train. See, a year ago, our utility company announced that it was reducing its rebates for grid-tied solar electric (PV) systems. They gave 24 hours notice to get an application in under the older (more generous) rebate structure. And they gave one year to complete the project and still collect the rebate money. As you can guess, our year is waning very quickly, and we have to hustle in order to finish the PV system, get it inspected, and then wait nervously and fearfully while we wait for a very big check to repay us for our efforts.

So, what does a fence have to do with it? Well, it turns out that the only place to put a large-ish PV system on our property is along the fence on the north side of the property. Our very large trees shade most of the south-facing roof, and the little bit that is largely unshaded (over the future kitchen) will need to be used for our solar thermal system, which is more shade tolerant than a PV system. So we decided to rebuild our incredibly decrepit and shabby-looking fence into a new fence / racking combo. The beautiful new fence will face the street, and the solar panels hanging off of it will face the yard (and the sun).

We’ve hired our friend Andy, and expert welder to do the steel work for us. (Another friend was shocked when she heard the “news” that we’d hired someone to perform a building-related task for us — “WHAT? there’s something that you guys can’t do yourselves? What is wrong with you?”)

Andy and his partner, Tammy, weld the new fence sections in place.

While it is technically possible that we could have done this portion of the project ourselves, it would have exhibited very poor decision-making skills on our part. We’re not always very smart about this house-building business (read: self-torture), but we’re smart enough to know when to hire, and when we do, we’re smart enough to hire smart. Every one of the (few) people we’ve hired to help with something has been amazing, and Andy is no exception. His profession is welding, and he is quick, meticulous, and experienced. Oh, and he’s got all the right tools. So, he is taking care of the metal portion of our project, and we’re taking care of the “back-breaking labor” and solar portions of the project. Had we done the metal work ourselves, it would have taken months– maybe even decades– to complete, and it wouldn’t have looked nearly so nice. We would have missed our deadline. The deadline forced us to be smart enough to hire Andy. The rebate from the utility company also helped us hire Andy.

Augering holes for concrete bases

Prior to erecting the fence,we augered holes in the ground, spent a very detail-oriented weekend setting posts (not an easy job for the uber-anal amongst us, particularly with steel because you can’t screw supports into it), poured concrete, and then got Andy & his partner Tammy to install the horizontals. We’re now in the process of screwing wood to the metal “panels.” My idea here was that the wood would be sort of “framed” by the metal panels, and although a few details slipped through our grasp (spacing issues that likely nobody but me would ever notice), it is looking quite good.

Reclaimed wood going onto the new fence structure.

The wood is from a house that Luke & company tore down a couple of years ago. Prior to being roof decking (?) for a supremely ugly and ill-conceived residence, it evidently came directly from a sawmill that was staffed entirely by drunk people. Or maybe there’s some other factor that caused every single board to be different. The boards vary tremendously in thickness, width, species, and density. Many of them are even tapered in width (and sometimes thickness.) Most of them have major flaws that we’re trying to incorporate as nicely as possible. Needless to say, this stuff would be a real nightmare to work with if you were trying to build a building with it– but it works quite well for a fence, and it has a lot of character, which I suppose is one of the major aesthetic advantages of using reclaimed wood.

So,we’ll finish up the project, despite the growing cold and lots of other things pulling at our attention. There’s nothing like a little pressure to force you to stay up late, work in the cold, and push the boundaries a little. I can’t absolutely guarantee that I’ll post pictures of the progress because blogging doesn’t involve any deadlines, and that is precisely why I’m such a bad blogger. (Perhaps this is also why I always have so much trouble getting the book-keeping for our business done… the only firm deadline is April 15th, and I can usually fake it the rest of the time.)

Incidentally, it is precisely because deadlines make the world go around that we need more of them in our lives. And we need deadlines if the world (as we know it) is going to continue to go around. Every state in this country needs deadlines to force its utility companies to get a percentage of their power from renewable energy (called renewable portfolio standards –RPS), so that we don’t all just languish in the illusion that our bloated, coal-burning habits don’t actually exist & don’t actually have consequences.  It was Colorado’s RPS that made this project happen– and while I do have some real issues about the way the Colorado is addressing its energy future, at least it is happening.

Other photos of the process below.

By the way, I wrote this post several weeks ago, before the project was finished, but never got around to uploading photos and posting.  My old slow computer, slow internet, and our photo organization system made dealing with photos a frustrating process and a real deterrent to posting on my blog.  We’ve gotten all those issues (mostly) resolved now, so you will no doubt see an overwhelming number of updates on this blog.  I don’t however, recommend holding your breath.

Luke demolishes an old coal shed in the yard to make way for the new PV system. This is a lovely metaphor, isn’t it?

Steel structure taking form. The old fence is behind, to give us privacy while building the new fence.

Mocking up the placement of the PV system.

It has been several months now since we had our friend Curt help us with drywall. It is nice to have a few expert friends that we can call upon when it comes to skills that we don’t actually have in-family. Before hanging the drywall, Curt and Jim strapped the walls, to help cover a multitude of framing “sins”– the legacy of a poorly-built building that we are trying to turn into a well-built building. (Another way of looking at this particular building project of ours is that we’re trying to put lipstick on a pig…) You can see the strapping in the photo below (the horizontal boards that are running in front of the studs). Per our usual style, we manage d to sift through the pile of boards in the yard and find some old flooring boards from our ex-kitchen to use for this job. (Actually, Jim did the non-fun job of sifting through the board pile in the yard– so thanks for that!)

Jim and Curt hang the first sheet of drywall:

Partially hung drywall:

Luke mixing drywall mud:

Spraying drywall mud, while making some attempt to keep it off the ceiling with Luke’s handy masking tool:

After spraying on the texture, Curt did a great job of tooling it, so that we got a relatively smooth texture. Then I obsessively (and unnecessarily) sanded everything, as you may recall in this post about my adventures in drywall sanding. We then spent weeks debating about color choices, visiting the Sherwin Williams store, and investing in one of the most expensive liquids known to man: paint.

All our color selection agonizing only got worse once we actually started the painting process. This is mainly because I’m not very good at letting go of the fact that this crappy little practice house cannot fulfill all my desires for perfection. It cannot encompass every single idea, nor can it achieve exact color perfection. Our idea was to have one bold, orange colored wall, and the rest of the walls a white-ish color. We selected a cool white that we thought was–well– white. Besides being very expensive (for a liquid!), paint is also incredibly devilish. I guess this is why all the great painters (Monet, Picasso, Rothko, Mr. Pantone) devoted their so much time to the study of color.

The color we chose was actually quite blue once it went up on the wall. I might have been tempted to believe that the paint store actually mixed the wrong color, except for this illustration of how very different a swatch can look in different contexts:

So yes, the Sherwin Williams color, “Front Porch” is actually a very blue color, at least when painted on the inside walls of our little practice house. It’s not a bad color, just not the color we expected. Perhaps this is the universe’s way of trying to get me to lighten up.

Once the painting was done, we laid the flooring. Despite our initial reservations, we installed a floating Pergo floor. We wanted something that would be easy to clean, and, above all, cheap (this is a practice house, after all). I am no fan of Pergo– it is essentially a highly industrialized product that uses all the wonders of modern manufacturing to make plastic look like wood. This is not necessarily the most politically correct product to use in a family (Luke’s) that has spent years harvesting, transporting, cutting, finishing, and other-wise transforming (by hand) all manner of woods into useful objects & building materials. But. Sometimes, in the long game of life, pragmatism must win out over romanticism. Pergo isn’t very romantic, but it is practical and quick (and made in Germany, which makes Luke happy despite the carbon implications), and in this case, pretty inexpensive. Actually, obscenely inexpensive on a relative scale. We found this stuff at Home Despot for about 60 cents per square foot, because they were discontinuing it. And it actually seemed to be of higher quality than the newer stuff that is in the range of $3-6 per square foot. So we bought it, even though we had to go to about 3 stores to find enough of it to do the entire floor (sorry, carbon footprint). It turns out that we were too cheap to pay 25 cents per square foot for the silly foam underlayment that Home Despot tries to get you to put under your plastic floor. It’s the same thin sheet foam that is used as a packing material for shipping fragile things, and it is supposed to protect the floor from squeaking–or something. It is probably intended mostly to protect the consumer from walking out of Home Despot without maxing out a credit card or two. We did use old-fashioned tar paper under our plastic Pergo floor, to prevent it squeaking against the sub-floor.

Finally, a private message to the person who took all the cut-offs from their Pergo-laying project and packed them back into a box and returned the box to a Home Depot store in Albuquerque: you suck.

But before I get started on my story, I have a Rorschach test for you. What does the image below– a random assortment of ink spots– remind you of?

This week, I received an email (via my father) from my uncle, who lives in Stamford, Connecticut. It seems that he was going about his business, doing some work in his basement, when he got a phone call. The person at the other end of the phone line asked him if he lived on Rock Rimmon Road, and whether he’d seen a 200-pound chimpanzee running around. It turns out that my uncle has primates for neighbors, and that a chimpanzee that lived in the house next door, had a very bad day and brutally mauled a woman before being shot by the police. The incident turned into a bit of a major human-interest story, and hit all the major news outlets, including the BBC. The story got even more convoluted when the New York Post ran a cartoon depicting said chimpanzee, which many people interpreted to be a racist slur directed toward Obama. So, there you go: you’re innocently minding your own business, trying to get your overdue projects done (my uncle is an architect, therefore overdue projects are ever-present), and suddenly you’re interrupted by the animal kingdom taking over your neighborhood… and the international news… and the national political commentary.

This afternoon, I was laying the finish floor in our mini-home in the back yard with my father-in-law, while Luke worked on some wiring issues. He had stepped outside momentarily, and when he returned, he announced, “there’s something in our chimney.” He had apparently wandered into the “big house,” and heard some scratching noises emanating from the chimney of our wood stove. We assumed that it was probably a bird that had gotten trapped in the chimney– not such an uncommon occurrence. I went back to working, and Luke continued to wander around the property, involved in some project. After a while, he came back inside and said, “it’s a squirrel. I saw it inside the wood stove.” At which point, I became interested enough to forget about my Pergo-laying project, and go investigate. It turns out that, at some point, a squirrel was frolicking on the ridge of our roof– probably running along our power line, jumping into our spruce tree, and then taking a jaunt along the ridge. He evidently climbed a couple of feet higher than the ridge, onto the brick chimney, and from there another foot to the top of the stove pipe sticking out of the chimney. But the top of the stove pipe offers no play surface for squirrels– only a 25 foot drop straight down into a darkened squirrel hell. From there, it was a 90 degree turn and an 8 foot slide down into the wood stove’s upper flue chamber. From there, he could likely peer out the glass doors on the front of the wood stove, but the amusement park ride was pretty much over. He found that he could scramble his way back up the last 8 foot section of slanted pipe, but the 25 foot vertical drop was beyond the scrambling powers of even the most motivated squirrel (though he did manage to make his way several feet straight up, and hold on by his little squirrel-fingernail for a few minutes.)

Here is Luke, un-fastening the stove pipe, in order to deliver Mr. Sooty (as I like to call him) from his creosote chamber.

You can see that he’s armed with his DeWalt flashlight, and a stick, both of which he is preparing to point at our sooty intruder. At the moment that this picture was taken, the squirrel was trapped just inside the horizontal pipe that you can see sticking out of the top of the brick chimney. This is what a truly pissed off squirrel looks like:

It may be difficult to tell from the photo, but this is supposed to be a brown squirrel. But his trip through our chimney has rendered him rather blackened and he seemed to be doing a lot of wheezing. We tried to coax him into a bucket, but our attempts were unsuccessful, and he eventually ended up flying out of the chimney pipe and falling 8 feet to the floor below, creating a lovely Rorschach test pattern on our concrete floor. From there, it was pretty much the standard scene you might imagine when you’ve got a soot-covered, half-crazed animal running all over your cluttered job site, being chased by a girl with a 5-gallon bucket and an unnatural fear of rabies.

Eventually Mr. Sooty found his way to the opened door, and darted under the front porch, where he will hopefully recover some of his dignity and think twice before hopping onto any more chimneys.

Below, is a picture that sort of shows what the place looked like before we started working on it.  Except that the space wasn’t actually as light-filled as it appears in this picture. Here, natural light is streaming into the space because we’ve removed part of the wall on the other side of the room to add a new window.It is difficult to tell from this picture, but the floor consisted of the world’s lumpiest concrete, painted grey.  When the former owners poured the floor, they clearly had no idea how to even screed a concrete slab, so they just made a half-hearted attempt to smooth it in a few places, and then left it to harden into a horrible mess.  In the interest of expediency, we considered just leaving the concrete floor as it was, and living with its gross-ness. However, as is usually the case with our building projects, “expediency” was quickly thrown out the window in favor of trying to make the place nice.

At some point, I was sort of annoyed at myself for not being a more skilled/dedicated photographer and taking picture that accurately illustrated the lumpiness of this floor before we covered it up, so that I could share it with all 6 of my  blog readers. But then I realized that maybe you didn’t need to get the full picture. I mean, I wouldn’t take a picture of my vomit and post that on my blog, would I? Okay, so I did share some pictures of Fluffy with you, but I have to draw the line in the sand somewhere. So– no close-up pictures of the concrete horror: you’ll have to use your imagination.

We spent a long time discussing how best to cover up the lumpy concrete floor. We flirted with the idea of  pouring a new concrete topping over the slab, but eventually decided that the best way to deal with it would be to frame a new floor over the concrete one.We used up a bunch of reclaimed 2x4s that were clogging up our yard, found the highest lump on the floor (thanks to our trusty rotary laser), screwed ledgers to the existing studs, and installed framing in between.  Unfortunately, the highest lump was higher than we’d really anticipated, which meant that we raised the floor level more than planned– effectively lowering the window heights enough to make me discontented. But I was held back from renovating them AGAIN by various family members trying to speak with a voice of reason.  

As an aside, before we could frame the new floor, we had to remove all the junk from the building.  Generally, this meant cramming more stuff into the garage, but one immovable object was not so easy to deal with. A year or so ago, we acquired a workbench that I like to think of as “the revenge workbench.” You see, I have a sister who owns a piano and also has a propensity for moving every 6 months or so. Since I have married a man who has a genetic predisposition that enables him to move very heavy objects without complaint, her moving seems to have increased in frequency, and we have moved the piano many times. I figured that if we acquired a piece of furniture that is just as heavy as her piano, she would be under obligation to help move it at our convenience, and would therefore be intimidated into moving less often herself.  So we acquired a beautiful handmade workbench that is 8’9″ long and made up of cast iron legs and a 4.5 inch thick solid maple table top. However, when it came time to remove the workbench from the building in order to frame the new floor, all my plans for revenge back-fired, as she was not available to help move our incredibly heavy piece of furniture (having–ironically– recently moved away). So we took the legs off and Jim rigged up a shelf to hang the table top off the wall. Below is the workbench top, suspended above the floor. (It is also visible in the background of the previous image.)

After we framed the new floor, we installed shims between the new framing and the lumpy concrete every 2 feet or so. This was a nightmare of tedium, quite frankly, and even drove me to distraction.  But it made the new floor very solid. (The shims can be seen on the right side of the picture below.)

After framing the floor, we insulated it using rigid foam left over from our large house project. Then we began installing a subfloor, which consisted of the tongue-and groove (T&G) boards that had previously served as roof sheathing on the kitchen we tore down, and subsequently served to choke our yard with construction clutter. Although it took longer to install T&G boards than it would have taken to install sheet goods, it worked well in this non-square building, and also helped to shrink the massive pile of boards in our yard.

Above, Luke installs subfloor.

The half-completed floor project. 

After the new subfloor floor was installed, we moved on to the walls, and the task of installing new doors… but I’ve run out of time, and will have to finish the tale of building our “practice house” at the next available opportunity. Thanks for reading!

At some point last summer, we realized that the big house project was not going to be finished within a reasonable amount of time. And we needed a place to live that wouldn’t involve squatting in our friend Kent’s house. In the back yard of our property is the world’s most crooked building. When we bought the place, it had broken windows and was filled with miscellaneous stuff that had previously belonged to a elderly lady with the same name as my grandmother. We named the building “the shed,” added our own pile of crap to the mix, and focused on renovating the actual house.

The shed really wasn’t worth considering as more than a place to keep the rain off a pile of junk. Until the sense of desperation set in. There comes a point in every woman’s life when she has to lower her standards and jump into action. This can happen at 4 a.m., when the paper is due in 4 hours, you and you realize that you can’t do research ANY MORE, but must start writing QUICKLY. You buy the Ford instead of the Lexus. Plenty of ill-conceived marriages have been entered into, due to this “desperation” phenomenon. Women end up settling for the chain-smoking, football addicted lout. Men end up settling for the nagging, shop-aholics. Neither party knows what to expect, but they figure, “what the hell?”

In our case, we settled for a twisted little building in the backyard. We believed that “things would work out.” We opened our hearts and our wallets to the crappy little shed, and we got to work. We were delusional. If we had known how long and twisted the road would be, we might not have started down it. We thought it would be a quick and simple job. The building already had basic wiring and plumbing. It had walls and a roof. All we’d need to do was replace the crappy masonite on the walls with some drywall, add a few fixtures and outlets, and start moving in, right?

Oh, the tangled web we weave. Here’s the real story:

First off, the windows were broken and very crappy. We had the old windows removed from the eviscerated kitchen, so we thought we’d throw those in. Simple. We began by removing half a wall…

We frame in the new windows. But they are very short windows, and we’ve planned to change the height of the floor, so determining the “correct” location of the windows turns out to be very difficult. We reframe and change the window height 3 times. Or was it four? I can’t remember. The insanity of this doesn’t escape me, but somehow I still feel like the windows aren’t located at the right height. (Below, Luke is raising the window sill. The day after he lowered it.)

To be continued. Soon.

I spent the day sanding drywall. I had intended to just quickly knock off the worst of the ridges before we moved on to priming the walls of our little apartment. But things got a little out of control. Unfortunately, I have a nearly infinite ability to obsess over repetitive tasks. You can call this a love of meditative tasks, or you can call it latent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I prefer to think of it as a love of meditative tasks, because if my health insurance company knew about my tendencies, I’d be likely to lose my coverage. I also like to knit, and have discovered recently that taping & mudding drywall is a task fairly well suited to my obsessive / meditative personality, along with weeding gardens.

The unfortunate part of spending the day sanding drywall (besides the powdered donut thing) is that it may take weeks for me to recover all the range of motion in my right arm. I’ve recently discovered muscles that I didn’t even know I owned, because they are not-s0-politely requesting that I never sand drywall again.

I really should never have started down the path of heavily sanding the drywall. The drywall looked fine even before I spent 5 obsessive hours exercising my shoulder muscles. Our friend Curt did the drywall texture, and he did a really nice job– so the obsessive sanding was really overkill. But. But I have many many fears about drywall. I have too many years of architectural education, too many friends who are architects, and have had too many nightmares about suburban drywall splatter patterns. I associate poorly-finished drywall with cheap developer houses and dentists’ offices. And I would really prefer not to live in either one of those places.

Thinking about drywall may seem like the biggest waste of time in the world– akin to contemplating one’s navel — but because of our little drywall project, I find myself studying the wide world of drywall finishes everywhere I go. The bathroom in the taco place has a chintzy-looking splatter pattern (designed to cover all sins of poor construction and be finished in less than 30 seconds per square foot). The drywall in the insurance agent’s office has heavily textured mud with intentional trowel marks (designed to cover all sins of poor construction and accept a mottled paint pattern in order to look faux-ritzy). The drywall in my brother-in-law’s rented house has an extremely light splatter pattern (designed to provide a fairly smooth look without actually requiring much sanding, but in actuality providing a finish that doesn’t hide all the seams and other flaws of a quickie drywall job).

Our drywall? Pretty smooth, hopefully pretty clean & contemporary-looking. Hopefully it will be worth the effort, and hopefully it won’t result in any permanent nerve damage to my aching arm.

Tomorrow, we paint.

P.S. sorry for the lack of picture of the progress currently being made @ home is a process. I know that I’ve made promises.. and I’ve failed to deliver. This seems to be the way my life is going these days. But I promise this: the before and after comparison will be fabulous!

We’re almost finished with the little apartment we’ve been fixing up in the back yard.  Which means that soon we’ll be able to stop commuting 1/2 hour each way to work on the house.  I promise to post some pictures this weekend.  For the moment, we’re off to work on drywall … we’re leaving as soon as I manage to drag Luke away from his little lathe project in which he is building a tool to fix the timing on his latest acquisition, a Volkswagen. See? We have a lot of catching up to do…. I’ll be back soon!

Winter is upon us.  You know it’s official and unavoidable when you realize that you haven’t felt your feet for 2 hours, or when your husband spends the entire day trying to get a few vehicles started with an alarming array of battery chargers, block heaters, trips to the auto parts store, and unabashed swearing.  You know you’re in trouble when the battery in your car freezes, when your bedroom reaches 45 degrees (not kidding), and you discover that your snow shovel has frozen itself to the tundra.

Winter is lovely for those who can sit in their houses and dream of Colorado mountains and skiing, while enjoying an afternoon in front of the fire with a pot of hot chocolate. But the romance is pretty much lost on us, because we live in a very cold house (our “rental”), and we’re sentenced to spend our weekends trying to make a livable place at the house in Monte Vista.  When a windy day guarantees that we’ll get to spend hours excavating our cars from underneath snow drifts, there is just nothing to recommend the endless season that comes between autumn’s siren song and the flirtations of spring.

Luke’s Mercedes and our Land Rover (some may remember it from our nuptials), buried for the duration.**

Our embarrassingly large collection of semi-antique vehicles, being dwarfed by a pile of snow.**

Our cold “rental” house– the house where we actually live (the one with the 45 degree bedroom), until we can get our little project livable.

**Those of you who know us personally, and follow our ever-evolving car collection, may notice that this particular iteration of the collection is actually a bit outdated. That’s because these pictures are from last year.  The featured snow drifts remind us of all the fun we get to look forward to in the coming months. It was 15 below zero last night.  It was 10 degrees below zero at high noon.  It’s nice to know we’ve only experienced the tip of the proverbial iceberg.