A tarpaper shack...

Things have slowed down quite a bit since the initial frenzy, and now we're actually moving forward with some kind of plan. Our plan at this point is to finish up the back door get the house sewn up temporarily, and then make a decision about siding.  Once we've made the siding decision, we'll have a "let's tear off more of the house!" day again, and then a siding day (or six) after that.  That said, we did get some stuff done this weekend...

I finally managed to get the tar paper up to cover the sheathing:

I found out a couple things about tar paper that I didn't know.  The first is that it's surprisingly brittle - it looks like it should behave like paper, but it will actually crack if you handle it wrong.  The second is that the stuff stinks.  It smells horrible! 

Hanging big chunks of tar paper by yourself can be a bit of an adventure.  Down low, it wasn't hard to do.  I just had to unroll a suitable length, cut it and tack it up.  Once I was higher up, it got to be a real drag.  The procedure is as follows:

1.  Measure length of area to be covered
2.  Unroll and cut tar paper to lenght
3.  Move ladder to end of area to be covered
4.  Climb ladder with tar paper
5.  Reach for hammer tacker in toolbelt
6.  Drop hammer tacker from top of ladder
7.  Climb down, retrieve hammer tacker
8.  Climb back up
9.  Tack one end of tar paper
10.  Climb down, move ladder
11.  Tar paper falls off
12.  Curse bitterly (repeat this step often)
13.  Replace tar paper
14.  Move to other end
15.  Tack up that end
16.  Nail up tar paper

A hammer tacker is a fun tool - it's a cross between a stapler and hammer.  Basically it's a stapler operates on the force of your swing rather than the force of a built in leaf spring. 

It'll happily drive staples into plywood, where my basic staple gun failed miserably.  It's also pretty ruggedly constructed - the back of it makes a handy hammer for driving home any staple that a feeble initial hit didn't sink.  The only problem with it is that it doesn't fit nicely into my tool belt.  It's a solid chunk of metal, and it has a tendency to tumble out of the pocket at inopportune moments.  I'm guessing a dedicated holster would be the way to go. 

I ended up securing the tar paper with cap nails.  These are basically just little nails with big plastic heads attached - they hold the paper more securely than a regular roofing nail.  The research that I did indicated that if the tar paper is going to be exposed for a while, that these would probably be a safer bet. 

Note the wreckage that is our backyard in the background...

The other nice thing about the cap nails is that there's a very clear visual indication of the location of the studs, which'll come in handy when we're putting up the siding.

The inside is starting to come back together, too.  The old door was made by Peachtree, and was an odd size - a little wider and a little shorter than a "standard" door.  When we installed it, we tightened up the rough opening with a 2x4 and a half-inch plywood strip on each side to bring it in to the dimensions required by our new door.  This left a big chunk of exposed framing on either side.  I had originally thought to just cover it all with trim, but in the end I decided to cover it with wallboard. 

My mudding and taping skills are pretty weak, but in the end it'll be fine. 

While we were waiting for the first layer of mud to dry, the kids and I reinstalled the floor grate.  This allows heat from the wood stove to reach the upstairs, where it was then promptly released to the outside by our old door.  Hopefully this door does a better job.  It's interesting - it's impossible to get kids interested in eating vegetables or cleaning their room, but if you tell them they can cut a big hole in the floor, they can't wait to help. 

My coworkers:

First, we drilled holes in the corners:

Then we connected the dots with the jigsaw:

Done!

Nailing up a bit of blocking under the sill:

 Naomi was struggling with the nailer - it weighs about half of what she weighs. 

All in all, a reasonably productive weekend.  Next weekend, I'm hoping to get the interior of the door trimmed up, and then start on backyard cleanup. 

Let's take the back of the house off!

So we removed the back of the house today.  We managed to get it back up, too!  It's funny what you can accomplish when you start by knocking out a 20 foot section of wall.  Once you've committed at that level, you can pretty quickly decide to get in the rebuilding game. 

We got hit with a very short, but very intense rain/hail storm right in the middle of the workday.  This flooded the backyard in about 5 minutes, and left 2 inches of standing water.  This pretty quickly pointed out the obvious source of the basement water problem, which we'll be resolving in phase 2 of the construction process. 

Think that might be a problem?

The basic premise of the weekend adventures was: 

a) build a temporary wall underneath the rotten section
b) remove the rotten section
c) replace rotten section
d) remove temporary wall

Despite a minor problem with the measurements, the temporary wall went in smoothly enough:

Removal was easy - all we did was sawzall out the old wall.   This went great until Jim sawed through the pipe for the heating system.  He took it in stride, cause he's used to this sorta thing, but I got all freaked out.

Here's the water drippin' out of the heating system while Jim tries to hide the sawzall...

I'll get it patched up soon enough but I hate doing plumbing. Then we had to remove all the rotten sheathing around the door - I got to do this cut, and there's nothing like climbing a wobbly ladder to make a weird one-handed cut with a skilsaw 15 feet off the ground right next to a hot junction box with exposed wires. Remember, kids, safety first.

Do try this at home!  It's fun!

Then we framed up the new wall and installed it.  Jim did most of the framing work cause he's the framing ninja.  Somebody screwed up somewhere, though, because it didn't fit by a bit, so we took it out and ripped a little off the edge.

And Steph was kind enough to install it for us.

Then we removed the floor in the kitchen.   Cut it up into chunks,

and pull out the chunks:

Then we cut and fit new floor. The old floor was a double layer of 1/2 inch plywood rather than a single layer of 3/4. I'm not sure what the idea was there. Once we got the first layer in, we glued the two layers together to prevent squeaking. We got Domenick to pitch in here (couldn't keep him away, actually):

Somebody (Jeff and Jaycie, maybe?) threw together this awesome feed while we were working...

As it turned out, the door we bought wasn't quite what Jim was expecting.  As he put it, "It goes in like a window and not a door."  I didn't grasp what he meant, until he explained that a typical door goes in without a lot of concern about the sheathing, but a window goes in and is nailed to the sheathing.  This meant, basically, that until the sheathing was done, we wouldn't be able to install the door, and it was getting late enough that we weren't going to have time to finish the sheathing that day.  So, the ghetto door had to go back in until we could get the sheathing installed. 

This looks strangely familiar...

A bit of plastic to keep the bigger bugs out...

Day 2.  It was just the two of us for most of the day.  We got up and set to sheathing and such....

Steph puttin' her birthday toolbelt and glasses to good use

Once we had the sheathing done, we stopped for lunch.  As I was walking around eating my sandwich, I wandered away from the house a bit.  When I turned around, I realized that we'd actually removed and replaced a pretty big section of house!  When I was standing right next it, it didn't seem that big, but the distance lent a little perspective:

Then we switched places so Steph could enjoy the view too. 

The next task was to flash the opening.  Instead of using flashing tape, Pete suggested we use snow and ice shield.  This stuff is apparently a pain to work with - the adhesive is very sticky.  I think he described the product as "bituthene", but my brain heard it as "Bitch-o-thane" which I assumed was a reference to the difficulties of working with something so sticky.  I'm still not sure which he said, but I'll forever think of this stuff as "Bitchothane®".  Once we had that done, we were ready to install the door.  Steph didn't think she could manage the door and the ladder climb, so we made a couple phone calls and waited for help to arrive. 

We didn't get any pics of the door actually going in, but it went into the rough opening with very little trouble.  (Thanks, Dave!)  I tacked it all in, and now we have a door! 

There's still a bit of shimming to be done, and the back of the house needs to be sided, and a million other little things, but we've got a door!  It even opens and closes.  I'm totally pumped. 

Adventures in lumber and the deck is down...

Steph and I hit Home Depot today for a buncha lumber.  Steph's handy to have along, cause she's not afraid to get her hands dirty...

Steph isn't fond of the Subaru, but I love this thing.  10 footers on the roof, and 25 8 foot tubaforze in the interior:

Of course, I had to put Steph in the back too - nothing's perfect. 

And the deck is finally removed.  Once we get the siding and sheathing and framing worked out, I suppose I should think about temporary stairs...

Supervisor's seating:

Half the deck it used to be....

I've got significantly greater than half the deck removed now.  I've pulled off half of the ledger board, one row of footings, one main beam, more than half of the joists and the decking, and all of the railings.  It's coming down a lot faster than it went up.  I've got mixed feelings about tearing it down. I remember being very proud of what I'd created, and on the one hand, I'm sad to see it go.  On the other hand, I've learned a ton since then, and I'm looking forward to building something better.  Maybe something that won't heave around so much and then rot half my house away. 

Demolition work is kind of interesting.  You get to see the results of your mistakes much more clearly than when you made them.  When I missed that bit of flashing six years ago, I didn't even notice.  Now it's pretty damn clear! 

On the other hand, I'm now at the point where the demolition work is no longer fun, and I just want the damn thing off my house.  I've stopped being delicate and now I just reach for the giant sledge instead of the little hammer.  I just hope I can get it all done by the weekend!

Some pics of the recent action:

A quick rest break...

Then a few more boards off...

More than halfway gone!

The first step is a doozy:

A man and his sawzall, it's a beautiful thing....

Juego de demolicion

The closer I get to the house, more and more screws simply won't come out.  At first, I was just prying the boards off with a crowbar, but the crowbar kept getting stuck, and then I'd have pull out the other crowbar to unstick the first one, and then I couldn't get the second one out, and so on.  Each board, instead of taking a minute or two to remove, was taking ten. 

This, obviously, was an untenable state of affairs.  So I figured out a slightly different method of getting the boards off - I went underneath and started cutting the screws off with the sawzall.  It's still slower than being able to unscrew the screws, but I have a system now that allows me to remove them reasonably fast.  I smack the prybar between the screws that hold the decking to the joist, which gives me enough room to slide the sawzall blade in there, and then I just cut the screws.  Once I have all the decking separated from the joist, I can then remove the joist.

This, obviously, leads to a somewhat precarious bit of footing.  Both Steph and I nearly walked off the supported section about four times.  Pretty soon we're not going to be able to go out my "door"!

Another plug for a sawzall - if you own a home and you ever do any work on it, you need one of these. 
And, if you get yourself a juego de demolicion it'll cut through screws, nails, wood, pretty much anything you care to throw at it.  I couldn't do this job without it.

Deck demolition

I started tearing the deck down tonight.  I managed 50 feet or so of railing, and got into tearing off some of the decking, too.  With luck, I'll have it all off by the weekend, leaving only the joists to remove. 

One thing I learned - 6 year old screws don't come out very well.  The common name for this tool is "drill". 

But its real name is "Crom, Destroyer of Screw Heads".  About 1 in 5 screws actually comes out, and the rest just snap off and spin.  On the plus side, they make a satisfying noise when they snap off, even if it's gonna mean more work later.

How'd we get here?

So Beginning a couple years ago, we started seeing water in the basement.. Not a lot, mind you, like a trickle that ran across the basement floor in the utility room, from the back wall to the middle of the floor where it eventually dried up.  We'd see this every now and again if it rained a lot or if we'd gotten a lot of snow.

So I dug a sump in the basement floor.  This involved a lot of hammering and cussing and eventually a rented jackhammer that I should have rented first, but I got a nice big hole in the floor, and I got a pump in it. 

Patting myself on the back after a messy job, I thought "Yep, fixed that."

Alas, no. 

Fast forward to the spring of 2011.  We got a lot of snow.

No, really, like a lot.  

When it started to melt, we started to get water in the basement.  Never very much, but it would never dry out.  And then the carpet in the office got wet, so that had to come out.  Then I found the sheetrock was wet on one wall, so that had to come out.  Then I found the studs were rotten on the half wall, so that had to come out, and pretty soon we were down to the foundation in the office...

I did a lot of reading online and found that I needed to install gutters, re-grade the outside and install a perimeter drain.  So I bought the stuff to do the perimeter drain.  I called a gutter guy and got an estimate on a gutter.  While I was waiting for the perimeter drain stuff to show up, I went to clean up the old office.  I was kneeling on the floor, nearly done with cleanup, when I reached up to hang on to something to stand up.  What I grabbed was the edge of the sill plate.  When I pulled, a big chunk of it came off in my hand.

This struck me as bad.

So I call my buddy Jim, who's in the trades and has dealt with this kinda thing before.  He figured on somewhere between a half a day and "A three day extravaganza".  Once the initial horror of having the bottom of house rotting off wore off, I thought, "OK, that's not that bad."  Jim offered to come over and help. 

It also turned out that the back sliding door of the house was in bad shape.  Like "made of mulch" bad shape.  Jim figured that'd be an easy job, so we figured we'd kill two birds with one stone, and knock off both of these jobs over a weekend.  Steph and I dutifully schlepped off to Lowe's, bought a new door and brought it home. 

My buddy Pete, who's also in the trades, shows up on Saturday morning to help us with these projects.  He and I start tearing out the back door, which literally falls apart when I try to remove it.  We get the door out and find...  Rot.

Lots of it.

And still more rot.









So we went inside and tore off the sheetrock and insulation beneath the door, and found, yep, you guessed it, more rot.

This means the deck is going to have to come off, and the back wall of the house will need to be rebuilt.  Guess what I'm doing this summer?