Ravings of a Textual Deviant

So, there’s a small problem with my otherwise awesome new bay window.

Half of the view out of it is blocked by a partition wall between my breakfast room and my dining room.

Clearly, the partition wall must go. Spouse has been of that opinion for quite some time, but I’ve been dubious. However, when his sister pointed out how it affected the view, and how to solve the problem of fitting my grandmother’s dining room furniture in by simply closing off a totally unnecessary doorway, I could see it. We simply re-orient the dining room by rotating everything 90 degrees, combine the space with the breakfast room, and it’ll all fit much better than it does now. With extra bonus wall space in the great room (More bookshelves! Or possibly built-in desk or sewing area!) and maybe even some new built-in storage in the dining room.

Nobody will will be touching my nifty archway into the dining room, though. On pain of death.

And if we’re moving walls anyway, then we might as well adjust a second partition wall to fit an additional bank of cabinets into the kitchen and make the work triangle differently wrong by rotating the fridge. (In order to make the work triangle really right, we would have to swap the positions of the sink and the dishwasher, which would involve moving one of the new windows and more plumbing than I care to think about.)

Naturally, this will necessitate extending or otherwise altering the ceiling treatment in two rooms (dining room has a tray ceiling; breakfast room doesn’t), moving a couple of light fixtures that are installed wrong anyway, redoing the floors in all three rooms, and possibly having the kitchen out of commission periodically, which is a sure way to make me crazy (I am already suffering baking withdrawal pangs from having my stand mixer in the shop).

But it will totally be worth it, because while we have everything in upheaval anyway, we might as well paint, too. And nothing makes a room look good like fresh paint.

Right?

At we won’t have to worry about weather.

First things first, though. I need to find some nice pillows and a small tea tray for my new window seat.

All siding that is coming down, is down. There is a small amount that is only removable with precision laser cutting equipment, so it’s not going anywhere.

All the new windows are in.

The entire chimney is completely sided.

The worksite is cleaned up (I am grateful beyond the telling of it to Shannan for this…)

The end is in sight.

The bay window was finally delivered yesterday.

We had to stop work on early because of imminent rain, however…

1. All of the siding, except for a small amount along the edge or the roof, is down. This means we have likely found all of the unpleasant surprises that will require additional repair work.

Such as this one.

That’s right. There was nothing underneath the siding at the peak of the roof.

2. Another window out—its replacement is not yet in, but the opening is a) covered by OSB, and b) in the garage, so I am less concerned.

3. The $300 nail gun was unjammed by Brother-in-Law (woot!), meaning he could use it to put up siding on the north and west sides of the house. Neither is complete, but the north side needs only to have the chimney done, and there’s a good start on the west side.

4. The dumpster was picked up yesterday, and a good thing, too…

We still have two more windows to replace, the kitchen window and the garden window (which will become a bay window, which hasn’t yet been delivered yet…tomorrow, they tell us. We’ll see.) But that shouldn’t be too much of a much. Certainly not in comparison to getting the siding out from under the electrical and phone boxes while leaving the utilities connected to the house…

Or the bits and pieces by the door that were trapped up against the cement steps (thanks to Phil & his persistent use of chisel and reciprocating saw).

And last, but definitely not least, nobody had to get a tetanus shot.

1. Second tetanus shot run of the project (Sorry about that, Bob).

2. One $300, two-week-old nail gun jammed. Still under warranty but must go back to the manufacturer for repair.

3. 18 empty cans of high-expansion spray foam. It turns out that the stone facade on the front of our house is a) not actually siding and b) not properly installed.

Let me elaborate on that a bit.

The stone in the picture above appears to be some sort of siding attached to the house, right?

Wrong.

That isn’t siding. That’s landscaping rock that was built into a thin wall in front of the house and attached with a line of caulk. Also, there is nothing behind it–no mortar or anything. Well, there wasn’t originally. By the time we discovered this amazing fact, there were bees’ and mud-dauber wasps’ nests in that space…probably at the maximum density preferred by bees and mud-dauber wasps.

So now I at least know why that wall was always so cold on the inside of the house, and where all the bees and wasps were coming from. We sprayed the area quite thoroughly, but survivors kept straggling in over the weekend. By Sunday afternoon, I found myself yelling at them “Your home is gone and everyone’s dead! Go daub your mud somewhere else!”

At least the nests left something for the 18 cans’ worth of high-expansion spray foam to affix to.

And, at least that wall was basically intact.

Not so much the wall pictured below.

An attempt to remove the trim along the dividing line between the wood and the stone resulted in this:

And another five minutes of crowbar work and swearing later, the entire stone wall was down…except for about three large pieces at the bottom that had been cemented in place. That required some serious maul work from Spouse (and more cursing of our builder and his orangutans). We’re planning to side over that bit of the garage, not in the least because Lowe’s is probably out of high-expansion spray foam for some reason. And we’ll reuse the landscaping rock in some sort of landscaping feature. No idea what, but it’s quite nice sandstone that won’t fit in the dumpster even if I felt like moving it, which I don’t.

On the positive side, we now have half of the new windows in—did I mention that the windows in the front of the house weren’t even nailed into place? They were held in by the trim— and most of the siding is down, thanks to Spouse, Bob, and Phil. There’s a bit of siding left on the east side of the house and the garage, and that’s all. Except for the little bits of siding trapped against the side of the house by the front door, because the concrete steps were poured right up against the house with no spacers.

sigh

On the other hand, fifteen minutes with a razor knife to trim the extra bits of house wrap, and the west side of the house is ready for siding, as is the entire back, except for the chimney, which wants only house wrap as well. Half of the front is also ready for siding, and most of what’s left only needs the oriented-strand board base and wrap put up.

I hope the rest of the siding gets delivered this week. Not to mention the bay window, which we had to special order.

So, I think I mentioned previously that Spouse and I (and Spouse’s brother-in-law, and not  a few friends and acquaintances—thank you Tim, Shannan, John, Ryan, Andy, Evan, Bob, and anyone else who has done or plans to help) are removing the old siding an windows from our our house and putting in new. Last weekend was weekend #2 of what was originally intended to be a 3-weekend project, but we all know that no plan survives contact with reality.

The good parts of the project are a) by doing it ourselves, we can get windows and siding for 2/3 the cost of paying someone to install only siding; b)  by doing it ourselves, we can fix some problems that would probably just be covered over if we paid someone else, and c) we were able to afford fiber cement siding, so we won’t have to paint anything except windows and trim AND we won’t have to worry about the siding for 50 years. Which will probably be 25 years after I’ve looked at spouse and said “I’m sick of winter; let’s move.”

The disadvantages are a) it’s been unbelievably hot and humid both weekends we’ve worked, b) it’s physically demanding work, and c) it requires and occasional run to urgent care. (On the plus side, my tetanus booster is now current for the next nine years and 362 days. Naturally, the injection side is far more uncomfortable that the foot that had the nails in it.)

Still, it had to be done, and when it’s finished, we’ll never have to do it again. I present a before and after pictures for your perusal. The before picture is the front of the house, with the old gray siding, trim, and window. (The stone facade will be left in place). The after picture is the back of the house with the yellow siding, primed trim, and new windows (trim will eventually be slightly off-white, just enough so that it doesn’t look blue compared to the siding).

We also replaced one of the sliding glass patio doors (a.k.a., the cats’ widescreen nature channel) with French doors. We will probably replace the other one later this year, when it’s not quite so hot out.

The good news is that I have a new faucet in the kitchen sink. A faucet that only sprays water when and where I want it.

Which makes it entirely unlike my old kitchen fountain faucet.

The Good

I knew things were going too well when Spouse was able to install the faucet in very little time and with no difficulties.

Under the sink, however, was a completely different matter.

The Bad

The floor of the under-sink cabinet has spent the past eight years or so undergoing a transformation from the mild warping it had when I bought the house to the non-Euclidian surface you can see above.

Spouse thought it would be a fairly simple matter to remove the floor of the cabinet and replace it.

But of course, my house was built by brain-damaged and probably non-union marmosets.

The Yucky

Because I’d like to think that a union brain-damaged marmoset would know that you’re supposed to run a line of ductwork from the vent to the grate. Especially when, you know, there might be water in the immediate area.

Fortunately, Spouse was in Builder Mode already (still trying to construct a new bookcase for the cookbooks before the old one collapses and an avalanche of world culinary literature gives me a concussion—a task from which I keep distracting him to do things like replace the kitchen faucet) and was able to rip out all the warped-and-soaked pressboard, manufacture a custom duct, re-frame the base of the cabinet, and drop a new floor in, and clean up from the repair, all in about 6 hours worth of work (over 2 days).

Because I thought that taking out the entire cabinet the weekend before we expect out-of-town guests was a bad idea.