Adventures in Renovation

Camillo came over work on my plumbing yesterday and he discovered a new solution that was really obvious. For a while now I've been planning on making an "L" shape sort of to accommodate the bathtub bumping out but not moving the pedestal sink or the toilet (because the waste pipe/vent stack runs right behind he toilet and I don't want to move that). So behind the sink and toilet would have been dead space. Above the dead space was going to be a linen closet cabinet thing.

So Camillo suggested I move the sink on top of the dead space (and put a cabinet below the sink) and move the toilet to face the door. I think my Dad had suggested something like that before. I think I couldn't visualize what he was talking about until I had rebuild the bathroom walls. We moved the sink and toilet into place and it was very easy to visualize then. This configuration makes the bathroom much bigger feeling. I also like this idea a lot because then I can get a better sink. I was keeping the ugly pedestal sink just because it was relatively new and free.

There is some debate on what direction the toilet should face. You know, if someone walks in on someone on the toilet, they'd be looking right at 'em. It might disrupt the feng shui of the room. But you'd also get to watch stuff out the window when you're peeing (if you're a guy).

Posted by at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I met with an electrician Saturday who's going to wire the upstairs and replace my circuit breaker panel. And he can do it fast and cheap! He wired Greg and Regina's house on 29th street. I'm so excited!!! Things are really moving along now.

Turns out my panel is made by Federal Pacific, a company that's hasn't made circuit breakers since 1986 because their stuff causes too many fires. Fortunately my insurance company doesn't know about it. They probably wouldn't cover my house.

They're not illegal tho, because of semantics. It's called a "latent safety defect." Apparently this is not a "hazard" because there has to be some other failure to cause an overloaded circuit and a fire. Is that like when people say that guns don't kill people, it's that crazy person behind the trigger? Guns aren't 'hazardous' per say, but sometimes the safety on a gun won't prevent you from shooting yourself or someone else. Isn't just operator error when you trip your circuit breakers? Is a faulty smoke detector responsible for fires that kill people?

http://inspect-ny.com/fpe/fpe.html

And here is some fluff from a former quality manager of Federal Pacific Electric Company that contradicts it: http://www.iaei.org/magazine/99_c/stablok.htm

All I know is I'd rather have circuit breakers that work 100% of the time.

Posted by at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I put up the other wall for the bathroom. Now my cube has a shape. It's a slightly crooked shape, tho. I had a lot of trouble initially because nothing is very square. I ended up pulling out one of the ceiling joists and moving it an inch over to try to correct things. That took a while.

Also, I got a few pieces of really warped lumber from Walbrook because I didn't get to pick it out. Someone just grabbed me wood from the warehouse. So I spent quite a while trying to nail this piece of wood in the corner straight. I even cut a notch into it with a saw and banged a shim into it to try to straighten it (a trick I learned from a drywall book). But it's no use. That wood has to go.

Check out this new movie. It's 3 hours of work condensed into 18 seconds with a Ramones soundtrack.

Tonight I'm meeting with an electrician who I might hire to help me out with the wiring. It looks like I'm going to have to replace the circuit breaker panel. We'll see...

Posted by at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today Dad and I took a big load of plaster to the dump. We took out plaster from the walls of the two closets upstairs and cleaned up the plaster from the ceiling in the back. So now I've demolished every wall upstairs except one.

When went to get doors for the closets Thursday with Greg, I was measuring the openings for the doors and realized that I should probably re-drywall them. They were pretty messed up. Not really as salvageable as I thought.

Get this tho: When we pulled up to the dump, the guy working there asked to see Maryland ID. But when I pulled out my wallet, he said he had to see it from the driver, not the passenger. "But I live in Baltimore City. I don't have a truck.... I have trash. And I have a someone who owns a truck who wants to help me." He tried to explain it too us for a few minutes and the more he talked, the less I understood. Eventually he let us dump there but warned that next time we might get turned away. A while later I think I realized what he was trying to say was that he's seen people who get turned away leave, switch seats in the car and drive back in. Stupid law. It seems to me if my Dad wanted to dump a truck load of plaster, he wouldn't drive to Baltimore City to do it. Either way, I got to dump my stuff.

Posted by at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday and Wednesday I built one of the walls for the bathroom. It was so much easier to build than the last wall because I didn't have to try to put doors or crazy windows into it.

I tried to make a time lapse movie of my work with my digital camera. It has a setting that'll have it take a photo every so many minutes. So here is a movie that takes 45 minutes of work and reduces it to 4 seconds. (Music by Judas Priest.)

Posted by at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday I went and bought some new doors for my house. Just some plain, flat, hollow doors. Two are for closets and the third is for the bathroom. Greg helped me get them at lunch with his truck cuz he's such a swell guy. That and he wanted to pick up parts for hooking up Vicki's gigantic utility sink at the Current studio space.

That night we went over to the Current gallery to hook up the sink. Since that building is going to be demolished anyway, we did everything real ghetto style. Basically we knocked a hole in the bathroom wall and branched everything off the sink's plumbing. We hooked up the faucet with some flexible washer hoses. Works perfectly. That's why Greg is Da Bomb!

Posted by at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday may Dad and I put up the framing for the ceiling in the back of the house. The ceiling that drops down but is not actually, a drop ceiling (or a suspended ceiling). I keep calling it the drop ceiling and confusing eveyone. Just look at the picture and you'll understand.

Anyway, so the insulation in going in between those ceiling joists and hopefully it'll all be strong enough to hold the drywall. Just to recap if you haven't been following along, in this part of the house the roof is only 6 inches above the plaster ceiling so there isn't any room to add insulation between them. So this "drop ceiling" will hold the insulation for the back and everywhere else I'm planning on using blown-in cellulose insulation over the existing ceiling (I guess you could say in the "attic").

When I first envisioned this months ago, I thought I could just toenail studs into the previous ceiling and the ceiling joists above. The more I thought about it the more I realized it would be difficult and messy to drive nails though the plaster and lathe trying to hit the joists above. So instead, I decided to frame a box around the room attached to the walls. First we nailed one 2x6 against one wall with fluted masonry nails. The same kind some previous owner had used to attach furring strips when they put up the wood paneling. Those suckers didn't want to come out either. Check out the back right side of the room and you can see big holes in the plaster left from trying to remove them (view image). Unfortunately the 2x6's were a little too thick and the masonry nails were only going in to the plaster and not so much brick. So when we put up the 2x6 on the other side we used lag bolts and lead anchors in the brick and that seemed to work fairly well. Anyway, after we wedged in the cross pieces nice and tight and hung them with steel joist hangers so everything is solid now. I might add some steel straps between the new joists and the old joists just for extra support.

I ended up having to knock all the plaster off the ceiling, though. I was trying to avoid making any more of a mess than I had to but ceiling was sagging in the middle which got in the way of the joists going up straight. Plaster, plaster, plaster. Man, I'm really sick of plaster. It never ends.

Oh yeah, and a screwdriver and a square metal file fell out of the ceiling this time. So far, I've had a piece of glass, a mirror, a hammer and scraps of wood fall out of the ceiling trying to kill me. Now I can add screwdriver and metal file to that list (and my toolbox).

Posted by at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is my birthday. Lucky me, I got pink eye for my birthday. In both eyes!

It's getting better, but I haven't been working on the house because or it. I've been sleeping all day instead. After being sick for over a week now, I'm going a little stir crazy.

Posted by at 1:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)