Covering Up Past Mistakes

One game we like to play here at the Porter House is discovering how previous owners had covered up their 'work'. The most recent one I found was dealing with a shelf in the basement. At some point the foundation had been reinforced with a really nice concrete block wall. It is done really, really well, which put me in a state of both shock and awe. The problem is that they didn't finish the project, again shock and awe </sarcasm>. They got the hard part done and then just called it 'good nuff'. The retaining wall was filled with earth and then covered up with old fake wood paneling....

It is much creepier in person

I have never before seen roots with no plant attached

Pro Tip: Wood rots

Apparently the people who did this didn't realize that covering up damp earth with wood paneling wouldn't end well. This 30 foot stretch of rotten wood causes the entire basement to have quite the nasty funk.

Maybe it was a period thing

Even though we have the water problem solved for the most part, I still wanted this shelf cleaned up to actually be able to store boxes here without them cultivating a mold colony. This meant an hour of ripping up rotted wood and trying to get it outside. Unfortunately rotted wood doesn't really hold together. This project turned into me grabbing handfuls of wood/earth mixture and throwing it outside through the bulkhead. I did not even think to use a garbage bag until writing this just now....

Changing the world one handful of crap at a time

The removal was the easiest part. Now I had a nice stretch of dirt that I could use either as a cave mushroom garden or cover it with concrete. I chose concrete mostly because I'm not sure what I would do with cave mushrooms.

We are familiar with my past run-ins with concrete, so I decided to buy new bags that would cure properly. Off I trotted to the home improvement store to buy a bag of concrete. A couple bags should be fine right?

Wrong.

Pro Tip: Measure how much space you need to cover with something before buying the covering stuff itself.

Luckily for me there was a little sign above the bags of concrete saying how many bags would be needed for different size surfaces. I was still guessing but the sign said about 8 bags would cover 10 square feet, so I went with that. Interestingly the 60 pound bags were a tenth of a cent cheaper per pound than the 80 pound bags.

The guys at the home improvement store got upset when I  reenacted this...

My poor Altima did a good job of bringing 500lbs of concrete home in the trunk. Barely even whined getting on the highway. Getting the concrete in the car, out of the car, then into the basement was a different story. I am pretty sure this is the exact reason why the project was never originally finished.

Now that I had all the concrete down cellar and the hose through the window, I was ready to mix. Mixing concrete is hard work, even with the super mega mixer attachment I was using.

I'm still shocked that anyone can buy these things

Shortly after I finished with this project I remarked to the wife that concrete sets quickly. I knew this in my head but I still thought I would have plenty of time in between each bucket. Again, I was wrong. Halfway through mixing my second bucket I noticed that the first pile had already started to harden. This is when the panic set in. Now I began frantically mixing up buckets of concrete and then running to the shelf to pour them. Once I had enough poured to cover several feet of shelf, I used a piece of wood I found to try and smooth it out.

Professional tools for a professional job

This process went on for only an hour but felt like an eternity. Due to the badly done ductwork you can only walk hunched over in the basement. Walking bent over at a 90 degree angle and carrying 100lb buckets of concrete was no fun. In retrospect it was only 8 total buckets but it was still horrible and painful. Whine whine whine.

Amazingly I had purchased exactly the right amount of concrete. The last bucket filled up the final corner with just enough spare to cover the few spots I had missed. This is usually the spot in the home improvement shows where they have a montage of people smoothing out the concrete so I wasn't exactly sure to do it. I ended up using that same piece of wood from earlier and walked around hitting the concrete with the flat side. I think it made it smoother but I really don't know.

It worked well for this dude

I didn't bother cleaning up. I was covered with mud and concrete, water from the busted hose, spider webs, who knows what else from down there, and was tired. So I just left a bunch of empty bags of concrete and piles of concrete dust everywhere. However I did go back down the next day (not to clean up) and was shocked by the lack of stench. It seems like covering up the dirt and removing all the rotted wood was enough to stop the smells from wafting up like so many spirits during a raise dead ritual.

Ignore the hole in the corner of the foundation...

I should have put a fake skeleton in the dirt underneath

Now that the shelf is mostly cured I am considering going back down with some concrete resurfacer to smooth it out. In the mean time though, I have a new shelf that I can store stuff on that won't rot away on me anytime soon!

- The Porter -

Gutter Check

Just a quick update on the gutters. I believe they have solved the issue of water in the basement. It rained the other day and when I left for work I noticed the following:

Now I have to build irrigation to keep the moss alive

The great levee holding back the tides

That strip of dry land is the difference between a musty damp basement and one that is dry and still slightly smelly. Anyone who is having water issues in their basement should invest in a good gutter system for your house as the change is quite dramatic.

I can't believe it. Something actually got better. 

It is beautiful.

Now that we have fixed the water issue we need to fix all the issues the water issue issued us. Gesundheit.

If the gutters hadn't worked I was going to hire this guy

- The Porter -

My Mind is in the Gutters

Just filling up the hot tub

*Insert waterfront property joke here*

In the, what seems like, never ending battle to keep water out of our basement we have finally rectified the biggest cause of the problem, getting gutters installed. Our roof is probably 1500-1700 square feet and for the past 200 years, when it rains, water is just washing directly off it and down to the foundation then into the basement. When we purchased the house we were told of 'minor seepage during heavy rain'. That minor seepage turned into the basement filling with water whenever a weather reporter thought of precipitation.

This level of water would usually occur within 15 minutes of water pouring forth from the heavens. After a serious deluge a third of the basement would be standing water. I can only imagine that if we had several days of rain the house would just lift off the foundation and float away, conveniently giving me easy access to repair the rotted sill plate.

For Sale: One barely used luxury cruise liner. Minor seepage in the hull.

As you can tell from previous posts, I have no problem trying to DIY my way through projects that are generally considered as 'leave it to the professionals'. In this circumstance though I decided to hire out. Yes I could have purchased the kits from the home improvement store and done it myself. Those only come in 10 foot sections though and when you have 140 feet of roof sides, that is 14 more leaky seams than I need in my life. That is where the seamless gutters come into play. Unfortunately I was at work, but I hear that a truck pulled up and just shot out 140 feet of solid aluminum gutters in about 5 minutes. The word 'extrude' was used and that makes it all worth it.

You can see the slight bend in the middle that matches the house

The interesting part about using professionals is that they show up with more than one person and those people know what they are doing. How novel. 

It isn't as interesting as watching me do a project. Generally I get halfway through something and am holding up my 'project' and then need a tool that I probably don't even own. At that point I am trying to stretch and reach the closest item that now becomes exactly what I need to finish. The saying goes 'When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail'. My saying is 'Whatever problem you have can be solved by the closest thing to you at the time'.

These poor workers had no idea they were going to be working on the Porter House. They probably woke up the morning and said to themselves 'I am going to get to work, install some gutters, have my lunch, clean up, go home, and be satisfied with my life.' No no no no, that isn't how things work around here. They told me that they needed to do some 'slight prep work' before they hung the gutters. This prep work lasted about 3 minutes before they were battling several nests of angry bees.

The bees had overheard that we were coming and had prepared for battle

This was the first thing they had to deal with. If I got to work and the first thing I needed to do was try and fight off a swarm of bees just to get to the office I would go home and call in sick, or just quit, I don't know.

After quelling the uprising they also had to chase out a bird that had nested inside some decorative trim and close it up. I'm sure the bird had squatters rights but I doubt it will be able to file a claim. 

It really isn't as bad as it looks. That is what I told them at least.

Totaling up, their 'prep work' lasted most of the day and included fighting bees, making a bird homeless, cutting away warped facia board, fixing the reason the facia was warped, sealing the facia with aluminum, fighting more bees, and more things that I can't even imagine. It was so much work that they only were able to hang one of three sets of gutters on the first day, no downspouts.

They were really good about it though, showed up the next morning and finished everything up. We now have diverted all the roof water away from the foundation. We even had a 24 hour rainstorm and the basement stayed dry! Apparently all Nixon needed was some gutters and he would have been set.

la Fin

- The Porter -

Fire in the Hole! - Part 2

When we last saw our heroes they had vanquished the evil Pellet von Stovensen. However in their haste they laid destruction to the village Stovensen was terrorizing. Now comes the part of movies that no one ever mentions, cleaning up after the wanton carnage of battle. The tax rate in Metropolis must be astronomical.

Behold, I have saved the city from certain annihilation!

However in the real world we need to clean up the messes we make. Some might say that if you didn't create messes in the first place you would be fine. I say you can't make an omelette without destroying your fireplace first. With the massive hole in the back of our newly freed fireplace it was time to learn how to lay bricks effectively.

Good enough

Our first challenge lay in the fact that sometime in the history of this fireplace someone thought it would be a good idea to paint it black. Not entirely black, just around most of the middle leaving scorch marks on the other bricks. With the bricks that are left it is going to be very apparent that I have patched a hole. Paint stripper is clearly in my future. Before we can get to any of the fixing I needed to get rid of the old flue pipe. From what I have seen so far I have no idea how this is attached to the chimney, if at all.

Father Christmas has a rude surprise in store for him

You can't see all the way up to the top so I didn't want to just start yanking on the pipe. In the event that it is attached I'm not so sure the dust and spiderwebs holding this chimney together would be happy with me tugging on it. I had to be very careful because moving the pipe even slightly caused a shower of soot to come out and lots of rattling from the chimney. It was also very heavy and awkward.

I tried loosening the connections for the flex pipe to see if I could remove it one section at a time. This process included me sticking my arm all the way up and reaching the joined section with a screwdriver then trying to pry the sections apart. Since it was difficult to see I ended up just hitting the section with the screwdriver a bunch. I had not expected this to work.

If you look closely you can see that there are rivets holding the flex pipe onto part of the straight pipe. Someone went through a lot of effort to join the pipes together like that. Upon striking the pipe I found their resolve did not last very long. A joining sleeve was 110% securely attached to the flex pipe and then they just slid it into the straight pipe. Nothing actually holding the pipe and sleeve together other than dust and the dark arts. A couple good whacks and the flex pipe came down on my leg while the straight pipe wedged itself into the corner, thankfully taking the time to shower me with soot and rodent poo.

I covered the end of the straight pipe and set it inside the chimney on a ledge where there was once a brick. Not sure how the brick was removed since no human could reach it. Maybe brick gnomes were stealing them, who knows?

At this point I think it is safe to use

Unfortunately all the bricks that were painted black were not to be found. I'm sure they didn't survive the removal process so I was going to make due with the bricks that were holding the old stove up. First I needed to knock out the half bricks that were shattered so that I could replace the void with full size bricks spaced properly. This was an hour spent with the Wee One handing me chisels and saying 'Helpa, Helpa' while I tried to contain the clouds of mortar dust.

At this point things were going crazy so there are no further 'along the way' photos. The floor was covered in soot and mortar pieces, the Wee One was grabbing shards of brick to put in his tractor, I was choking on 200 year old dust. It wasn't pretty but we finally got the area prepped for repair.

Pro Tip: Soak your bricks before you lay them.

The above tip is pretty important depending on your brick type. My bricks were made out of what can only be described as hard sponges because as soon as I put mortar on them it dried up faster than a Nazi drinking from the wrong chalice. Or some vague joke about dry towns during Prohibition. 

See how happy the protesters are? They didn't want eternal life, just a decent pint.

Once I got into the swing of it the process started to work. I would dunk a brick in the bucket of water, slop mortar around the general area that I wanted to put said brick, then squish the brick into place. On the DIY shows them make it look so easy to lay brick and it actually is, unless you care about things like being 'level' or 'properly sized'. That type of tomfoolery is for contractors, not me.

With the final brick in place I fixed up around the edge of the fireplace as well. There was a nice space in between where previous owners of the house stored dog fur and cobwebs, but we have enough storage already so I decided to seal it up.

There comes a point in most of my projects where I just lose it and start doing whatever it takes to finish. This point came with filling in the edges of the fireplace. I couldn't fit the trowel in the space properly and started making a mess so I reverted to caveman technique and just used my hands. A few minutes of splattering around with mortar and everything was done. After the mortar started to set I was able to use a wire brush to scrub up all the extra mortar and detritus scattered around the work site and vacuum up all the remaining bits.

Pro Tip: Don't use your house vacuum to clean up mortar.

Just need to find some Floo Powder and getting to work will be a snap

Not too bad for an evenings work in my opinion. I have now restored the fireplace to some of its former beauty. After poking around I found 2 pintles attached into the fireplace. It looks like there was an old fireplace crane installed when it was originally built. It is very disappointing that I haven't been able to find the crane anywhere and I'm sure someone just tossed in the rubbish. Those were custom made to size and have to be installed while you are building the fireplace. There is no way I am ripping the pintles out, so now I have to scour the antique stores for a properly sized replacement. Either that or contact my local blacksmith to forge one for me. Lots of work for a small decoration but who doesn't love antique cooking tools?

- The Porter -

Fire in the Hole!

Many of my projects start out the same way: I tell the wife I want to 'investigate' something and then 30 minutes later it has gotten to a point where it is so bad that we either need to finish the project or sell the house. This is never my intention, I just investigate things very thoroughly. When I was younger my mother always made me walk around stores with my hands in my pockets because she had paid for too many things that I had 'investigated'.

I decided it was time to investigate the downstairs pellet stove!

It looks so innocent, playing with those kids toys, but hides a black heart full of regret

This is how I saw it going in my mind; the back plate gets removed and I look behind the stove with a flashlight. That's it. We see how everything is connected and I make a game plan for future removal. Easy peasy 10 minute project that gives me peace of mind. Most people who know me have figured out that I have difficulty getting something from my brain out into the real world intact. Sentences, ideas, recipes, anything. Just like when I draw a picture, it looks great in my head but I can't make my hands translate it properly.

In my mind he was a character for my book. On paper, a tortured soul from the abyss.

The back plate came off really easily, partly because it was only attached by a few screws and partly because there were several screws already missing. Once I slipped the plate off I found everything covered by some fiberglass insulation. Of course I started removing it, I needed to see behind the stove. This is where the project started to go south. First I found that the insulation had been jammed around the stove and the vent pipe. Now I am not a professional insulation guy but I don't think it was supposed to be done like that.

I'm sure the warning was hard to read due to the scorch marks

Now there is dirt and soot everywhere and all the insulation has been thrown away. At this point I was thinking that I could still just reattach the back plate and deal with the stove another day. Before I did that I wanted to move the stove a bit to see how the flue pipe was attached. "Was attached"... It was only held on by a screw and a piece of metal tightened against the back of the stove. Again, perfect opportunity to back out. Nope, time to take off the screw.

If the insulation melts onto the pipe the efficiency increases

Did you know that soot lives inside flue pipes? If you remove that pipe and move it around the soot goes from inside the pipe to outside. Physics is amazing. Now I'm really in trouble because I can't leave a pile of soot sitting on the floor. Soot is also fun to say. To clean the soot I needed to move the stove a bit more. To move the stove more I needed to empty the pellets out by hand. A pellet stove is only designed to have the pellets go in one way and come out as smoke, not to be removed half a handful at a time through a thin hopper opening. They even design it so that you can't put your hand in and sharpen the metal so that your hand gets cut up if you forget to wear gloves.

Now we are committed to the project. The stove is moved enough that it is unsafe for children and dogs, and I can't move it back because it is super heavy and gravity wasn't on my side. I am also not very strong in the traditional sense. The wife helpfully suggests getting a friend over to move the stove out of the house.

Exactly what I look like when doing a project, clueless and surrounded by debris.

Pro Tip: Empty pellet stoves still weigh approximately a bajillion pounds.

What I thought would be a 15 minute move turned into an hour long slog of moving this beast one foot at a time. With much pain and swearing we were able to get it out to the shed and hidden from sight. Now we can post it on Craigslist for sale. I will make sure to note they need at least 10-15 strong men and an eighteen-wheel truck.

A project at The Porter House would not be complete without an unforeseen issue that turns into another project. Life wouldn't be fun if a project just ended, would it? What extra project could possibly come from moving a stove you ask? Something easy like removing the extra flue pipe so the fireplace is clear? Cleaning up some extra soot? Picking the lock of the treasure chest you found hidden behind, discovering lost gold and magical artifacts?

Nope, they wrecked the fireplace to fit the stove in. Now I need to fix that too.

Some spackle and a coat of paint, no one will even notice

Time to learn how to lay brick!

We also found that Barrie Pace Ltd plaque used as a spacer under the stove. Uncle Google told me it was a clothing line for women, but if anyone else has more info on what it is/was I would love to hear from you. I don't know why but I really like the sign, so I think it will end up getting cleaned and hung somewhere. Maybe I can just hang it over the hole in the bricks and call it a day.

- The Porter -

Revenge of the Window Well

Well that didn't last long

That's right folks, the window well fix did not hold up very well, or at all. Apparently old concrete doesn't like to cure very well. Oh sure it looked nice and solid after it dried, wouldn't even chip when I hit it with a rock! One rain storm though and we see what happens. All the sand and clay from the concrete washed away into the well leaving my bricks sitting on a thin pile of very water permeable pebbles. So now I have 60 pounds of unusable concrete powder sitting in the shed waiting for me to figure out how to throw it away without the town knowing.

This guy knows what I'm talking about

I had to bite the bullet and buy new materials. This time I went with some repair cement to hold the bricks onto the old concrete well and then asphalt patch to help the water stay away. This project actually went well for the most part. I do recommend buying a mixing attachment for your drill instead of using the Gregg technique. Using an old piece of wood from a cabinet cutting to mix everything in an old paint bucket is a bit tedious. I'm more of a "don't make a plan and when you need something grab the closest item" kinda guy.

Like I mentioned, the bricks went back down fairly easily. I took the fast approach and just pushed all the gravel from the bad patch into the window well. You know, to help with drainage....

I decided against fixing the sag because I forgot it was there until I finished

This time I wanted to get more water sealing done before the rain came and washed away my beautiful masonry job. This is where the asphalt patch comes in. Apparently 'they' make this horrifying smelling goop that you can spread on cracks in asphalt to patch it up. It both looks like and has the odor of stuff you generally don't want smeared all over your house. It's outside though, and the guy on the bucket it came in looked happy, so I went for it. First I had to dig out even more weeds that had taken up residence in the crevasse betwixt my foundation and driveway. A fun part about this type of work is that no man has designed a tool to do this type of work efficiently in a 1 inch wide garden, so I just dug away with my hands till it was 'good nuff' or I was tired. These things are hard to gauge.

Luckily my moss and algae farms were able to be spared from the culling

In retrospect I should have filled in all the depressions with something first so that when I patched it the water would just run merrily on its way. Without thinking about that all I did was seal in a nice pond for the carpenter ants to vacation in when they are finished at the all-you-can eat rotten wood bar. But once the dirt was moved safely 1 foot away from where I was working I went to town on the patching process.

The bucket it came in claims it works really well

The main issue with this stuff is that it is designed for half inch cracks in your driveway. Not for resealing the Grand Canyon that has opened up between your house and the rest of the world. Generally I don't let facts discourage me and just kept troweling and smoothing until it looked like it was done. This was made difficult as the bucket said to 'Work quickly as material sets within minutes'. I took that to mean I had to throw huge piles of this crap along the length of my house and smooth it down manically before I had lumps of asphalt dried everywhere. A panicked Gregg is not who you want doing anything handy around the house. Or anything at all really.

Pro Tip: Instructions always lie

I'm going to give it a try on this other crack in my bedroom wall

It has been a few days and some areas of the patch still haven't dried. I neglected to think about the ramifications of putting this brown mess onto wet soil. The patch is trying to dry at the same time that it is trying to suck all the moisture out of the earth. So it dries a bit, gets a bit more wet, dries some more, etc. I think the patch is starting to win. However, because the patch was so thick it started to dry with its own cracks that I now have to repair. Surprisingly it lasted the same amount of time as when the DPW uses it on our roads.

It is suppose to turn black as it dries. It will match the light grey of everything around it.

I have purchased another couple buckets of this stuff to go back and repair all the new cracks and finish up the portions of the foundation that I wasn't able to get to. Unfortunately they only sell it in little buckets. I asked the guy at the home improvement store if they had bigger buckets and he said 'It is for fixing cracks. If you have enough cracks that you need a bigger bucket you may need to resurface your driveway.'. He looked at me funny/scared when I grabbed two buckets and said that I was going to use it to waterproof my basement.

Step 1 is finished. Hopefully we can get a few days of dry weather all in a row so that I can go out and finish this process. Ideally this global warming stuff will pick up and then I won't have to worry about water getting in the house at all.

- The Porter -

Unconnected Plumbing

In my foray to the basement I have started to notice that there is a lot of plumbing in this house. Not because we are overwhelmed with bathrooms and various gas/waterworks but because the old plumbing is still there hanging out. Like that friend from college who was always in your room. Whomever updated the water line to copper decided that the old main line was too authentic to remove, so they disconnected it and then built everything else around the old pipes.

This is one end of the pipe

The is the other end. Maybe the warning tag scared them.

Now this probably would not bother most people. It is one run of old pipe probably 10-12 meters long. The issue is that everything else is built around this extra pipe. Ducting is lowered, copper is rerouted, gas pipes go in circles. It looks like the people in charge of the Big Dig plotted the layout in my basement; or possibly the government in charge of Mushroom Kingdoms infrastructure.

Obviously Plumbers do very well in this society

One of the big things I will be outsourcing is the updating of our heating system. The issues surrounding that upgrade will be the feature of a future post. The main thing to know is that 'Winter is Coming' so we need heat. Since we need to update everything I would rather not leave useless pipes dangling around. So I did what any red-blooded American male would do and bought a new tool. In this case it was just a heavy-duty metal cutting blade for my reciprocating saw.

Like a hot knife through galvanized pipe

After clearing the space in the basement I went to work. This will be another common theme in all my projects: "I have never done xyz before", in this case cutting pipe. Unlike most of my projects though, this was easy and worked properly with no injuries to me or the house! I don't own any protective glasses currently because my regular glasses have kept my eyes safe so far. However cutting through the pipe created a small amount of sparks and flying debris. So I just closed my eyes, turned my head and hacked away. Safety first!

There was almost an injury though. One thing to keep in mind when cutting these old heavy pipes is that whatever is being used to attach them to the ceiling may not be strong enough after you start cutting. The first section of the pipe came down very close to my head. I can only assume that had it hit me I would have died down there, alone and covered in mud and bugs.

I survived though and was able to make the few cuts needed to properly remove the pipe. Then hacked it even further to easily maneuver in the close confines of the basement. Now I have a nice pile of old pipe that needs to be taken to the scrap yard. The more time I spent in the basement the more I realized that I need to rent a dumpster and clean out all the old materials left around. These pipes can now be added to the mass of detritus that needs to go away. 

That is $0.57 of scrap which I consider profit

This is the first set of pipes that needed removal. The next set is the gas piping. We have gas pipes that run the length of our house, loop around, come back halfway, loop again, around the chimney, and back just to get to the water heater. That's almost 25 meters of pipe to get to a hot water tank that is only 7 from the gas meter. Finally even more unconnected pipes. Can't wait to get this all removed and re-plumbed properly.

If you look closely you can see that the left 2 pipes aren't even connected

- The Porter -