Adventures in Renovation

I woke up bright and early this morning to meet with the guy who's going to hang and finish all my drywall upstairs. I've been really excited about this because it's going to look a lot closer to finished once the drywall is up. I'll have real walls!

But this morning he was late so I called him to make sure he was on his way. This is how the conversation went:

Drywall guy: "I told you Tuesday at 8."

Me: "Yeah, Tuesday. Today."

DG: "No tomorrow."

Me: "Today is Tuesday. Yesterday was Monday."

DG: "No tomorrow. I come Tuesday."

So after a while I stopped arguing. Obviously he's confused by the Memorial Day holiday. It's fine if he comes tomorrow. No problem. We of course could not agree that tomorrow was Wednesday, but with any luck he'll show up tomorrow. Unless tomorrow he tries to tell me he already showed up yesterday (Tuesday).

Posted by at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My grandfather's hammer finally bit the dust. I was trying to pull a nail out of a 2x4 and the handle just split right off. That hammer had character you can't buy anywhere. I'm gonna miss it. It's at least 60 years old. My dad told me that hammer chipped the one claw when a neighbor borrowed it while they were demolishing a fireplace.

It was pretty handy too. I could buy a new handle for it and fix it but it just wouldn't be the same.

I think I'll have to bury it in one of my walls. Like when they buried the bodies of the workers who died while building The Great Wall of China in the wall itself.

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Don't do this.

Don't spray expanding foam in a can all over your galvanized pipe and hope it won't fall off and drip all over the floor. Because it will. And that crap is really sticky too. It doesn't come off your skin unless you use nail polish remover on it.

I was following advice I found on the internet from this 'Ask The Builder' guy. Right before I started I thought, "Is this really going to just stick to this? This could get really messy." I really should have known better. Maybe it's because I didn't clean the pipe with mineral spirits before. Maybe then it would have worked fine. Either way, wrapping the thing in fiberglass insulation would have been easier to begin with like this guy suggests.

The good news is, my bath fan seems work well enough despite my miscalculations. I hooked it up to the power yesterday and ran it with the old toilet paper test. Thats where you see if it will hold a piece of toilet paper against the grill. It doesn't seem to be making too much noise either so I don't think it's straining the motor too much. I'm going to just go with it and if I need to fix it later, it won't be too hard to open up a hole there again and switch out the pipe with something larger.

Posted by at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sunday I reran the electrical through the new rebuilt closet. I also added a box for a closet light and a switch that connects the the door jab so that the light turns on when you open the closet. I've always wanted one of those. A smart house is a sexy house.

Hopefully I didn't muck anything up for my electrician. I hope he doesn't get mad when he finds I moved everything around. So far I've had to move the electrical outlets in the bay window out to the new steel framing, this whole closet thing, and I also want to add a light in the bathroom. I could have called him back, but he's not as big on redoing stuff as I am.

Posted by at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I installed the housing and vent for my new bath fan. Everything went pretty smoothly. I drilled a hole through the old access hatch that used to go up onto the roof. I figured that might have a few less layers of built-up roof on it. It also had a coupe layers for sheet metal flashing, but nothing too difficult for my new DeWalt tools! ha ha!

My new fancy roof cap went on beatifully. I picked it up last thrusday out in Halethorpe at US&D, a HVAC supply place. When I went in and asked for the part the two guys there looked at each other and and scratched their heads. "Flat roof? You need it for a flat roof?" Apparently I'm the only person in Baltimore who doesn't have a pitched roof. At least the only one who wants a bath fan. After a while they did find finally find the flashing I needed. Maybe I should have just gone with the wall vent. Ugh.

After I installed it, I noticed that the metal housing for this thing is totally covered in little holes. Holes for screws, nails, knockouts for the electrical. Now I have to figure out how to cover this things so that it doesn't spew moist bathroom air into my attic and grow mold everywhere.

So I started to do a little research and realized I did a lot of stuff wrong. First off, I need to use foil tape or duct mastic to connect the vent duct instead of regular old duct tape. I kind of knew this already but since home Depot didn't seem to be selling the stuff, I wasn't worried. But regular duct tape, or even industrial strength duct tape is going to get old and crumbled after a while. Yet again, Home Depot doesn't know crap.

The bigger problem is my 4" pipe reduced to a 3" pipe which impedes the ventilation and then to make matters worse, there is a 90" bend right at the fan. Panasonic recommend against all of these things.

Fortunately the duct is really short and my bathroom is really small so this might not be a problem. The fan is rated at 80 CFM and I only need probably 50 CFM. Basically, I'm going to have to hook this thing up and test it to see how well it works.

It's my own fault. I should have just stuck with the wall vent I ordered. I wouldn't be having any of these problems if I had done that. All because I didn't want to ugly up the back of my house.

Will it work good enough? Am I too anal? Can too much information be a bad thing?!

Posted by at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I smashed the The Ugliest Tub Saturday. Only took about 10 minutes. I almost broke Greg's sledgehammer in the process. The handle is a little more splintery now. I videotaped the whole thing for posterity so I'll upload something from that soon.

I hit myself with the sledgehammer a couple times too. The problem is it's a really solid tub so the sledgehammer doesn't just whack through it every time you swing. A lot of times it deflects off. On one swing I completely missed the tub entirely and slammed into the floor. Surprisingly enough the floor is still in pretty good shape. Nothing worse than the marks that were there before. They don't make 'em like they used to!

Posted by at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I didn't quite get everything done I thought I might last weekend. All I really did is finish the supply pipe plumbing for the bathroom upstairs. Bryan came over and helped me weld some copper in the basement where the copper meets the CPVC. I turned the cold water on yesterday and there don't seem to be any leaks!! I just cemented some caps onto the lines that I'll cut off later. So if there's a leak I should have found it when I turned the water on and it pressurized the pipes hopefully. Tomorrow I'll try the hot water. Cross your fingers.

Also, yesterday I got a new tub. Matt Rocks (yes, that's his real name and of course he's in a band) was gracious enough to donate his old claw foot tub from the house he's renovating next to Patterson Park. It's exactly the same size and style as mine but in WAY better shape. So this week I'm going to smash my old tub with a sledgehammer. It should be interesting. Or at least very loud. It's like whacking a giant cast iron bell. A very, very loud bell. I'll have to video tape it for posterity.

Vicki really wanted to help me with drywall so yesterday I told her she could help me laminate the ceiling in the middle room upstairs with the thin 1/4" drywall. I figured that would be easier because it's lighter than the regular stuff. It was too heavy tho. Too heavy and awkward. So we ran some cable and phone lines instead. Looks like I going to have to rent a panel lifter. That's cool tho. I hear those things are well worth the rental fee. Still tho Vicki is really disappointed she can't help. She's getting really excited about the possibilities of living there. She scoped out her closet yesterday and we talked about putting in big shoe racks.

Oh yeah. Shoe racks, baby.

Posted by at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Coming back from my house yesterday, I came across this old woman motoring down the 41st Street bridge into oncoming traffic! It was so funny I had to turn around and drive back to get a picture of her. Motorized wheelchairs in the middle of street is a fairly common sight in Hampden. They usually stay off of four lane roads tho. Especially when there's a pedestrian sidewalk right next to her.

Posted by at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm back, baby! After a two week hiatus, I'm back in the groove. At first I was a little nervous about getting back into the plumbing supply pipe and stuff, but it's all falling into place nicely. Soon I'll be hanging the drywall. I can't wait! It's going to feel totally different after the drywall goes up.

Last night Dave Benway (aka Drywall Dave) came by and put up a metal stud wall around my bay window. The new metal frame will make it easy to hang new drywall. I was having a really hard time trying to figure out how to shim out the sunken bay window so it would be straight enough to drywall. The new wall extends the bay window only 2" (with drywall).

I'm totally psyched about this weekend. Rock!

Posted by at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)