It's been a couple weeks since the last ghetto house update. We took a couple weekends of R&R. Here's what we've done recently....
The patio door is now in, and we've moved on to the drainage issues in the back of the house. The remains of the deck foundation had to be removed, and gutter installation followed after that.
Removal of the old deck foundation turned out to be a big PITA. The old footings were sunk to 4 feet (and they still heaved up almost 18" in 5 years, yeesh!) and weigh close to 400 pounds each, so moving them by hand was pretty hard. I ended up building a sort of gantry to pull them out. I bolted a come-along to a bunch of lumber:
And a few (thousand) clicks later, the footing is out.
Repeat 10 times for a pile of concrete marshmallows.
Naomi showed up and wanted to know what I was up to. I explained about water, drainage, gutters, and so on, but what really fascinated her were the holes left over from the deck footings. She wanted to know how deep they were in relation to her height, and what would happen if she fell in. I'm a firm believer in empirical learning, so into the hole she went. It turns out that her hips got stuck before her feet touched down.
I got Eddie to dismantle the original thisghettohouse.com door - the kid loves to play with power tools.
The big project for this weekend was to install gutters. I bought the stuff yesterday, which turned out to be a huge project - retail therapy is complicated. Once again, the Subaru kicked ass - I strapped the new ladder to the roof rack and then bungeed all of the long gutter parts (sixteen foot sections) to the ladder. It wasn't pretty, but it got the stuff home. I kept thinking I was gonna get a gust of wind and the gutter parts would get folded in half.
I tried to do as much as possible from the ground. I made a couple thousand trips up and down the ladder, so I guess I was sorta successful. Two ladders (and two people) would have made this a lot easier.
I realized that I couldn't put the ladder against the fascia board, cause I was going to be screwing stuff to the fascia board. They make things that'll solve this problem, but I didn't want to kick down sixty bucks (and drive back into town) for one of these, so I racked my brain for some way of pushing the ladder back off the house. Inspiration (cheapness?) struck, and I cobbled together this thing out of bungee, milk cartons and ratchet straps...
Yeah, this looks safe...
The view from "up".
Self portrait from milk crates atop a ladder...
At the end of the day, the ghetto house now has gutters again! Up next, the new oil tank, removal of the old tank, and fun with excavators. Stay tuned!
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