The Big Dig

So today was excavation day.  I scheduled the oil tank removal guy, the excavator and the guy who was supposed to locate the power line to the well, all in one day.  I later found out that Steph scheduled an appliance repair guy to show up today too, but that's another story. 

Word to the wise:  When scheduling several people to appear at once, it's a good idea to check in with all of 'em a few times just to make sure everybody's still on track.  I had originally scheduled somebody to come out and find the power line to the well (which runs right through the excavation area) to appear either Monday or Tuesday night.  I called him in the middle of the day Monday, and I found out that not only was the guy unlikely to make it out before the excavator showed up, he had lost all of my contact information. 

Left between a rock and a hard place, I had no other choice but to call somebody else.  I got on Digsafe's page of private locating contractors, and started sending out emails and phone calls.  Martha at the Verterre Group emailed me back from her phone at 6AM the next morning and was on the phone with me by 8:15.  I can't say enough good things about these folks - if you need something done that involves environmental or field services in the northern VT area, get in touch with these folks.  They know what they're doing. 

Andy Duling showed up at 8 with his souped up baby jogger:

Resemblances to wagons, yard carts, lawnmowers and baby joggers notwithstanding, this is actually a ground penetrating radar unit that can do all sorts of neat stuff.

A few passes across the back yard located the power line that runs to the well. 

See?

Yeah, me neither. But apparently Andy does, which is why I kicked down 200 bucks.  So he stuck a few flags in the ground to indicate where the power line was, which my excavator guy then immediately cut through with the excavator.  Take two hundred dollar bills and throw them in your woodstove. 
 

See the sparks flying? No? Neither did I. The well pump wasn't going when he hit the line, but I suspect nobody would have noticed anyway.

About this time, Paul Daly from Daly Environmental Consulting showed up. He lives in South Royalton, and operates an environmental consulting firm that specializes in oil tank removal. He's another guy that totally knows what he's doing - if you need a guy to pull out a tank in southern VT, he's your guy.  He spent a fair amount of time poking around on top of the tank and sniffing the mud that was around it. 

Smells like teen spirit?

The goopy clay soil prevented an easy tank removal, so my excavator guy had to yank on the tank from several different angles before it finally moved. Then, he hooked a chain to it and pulled it out. As it came out, Paul said: "Tag, you're it!"

Here's why:

Well, this is the story of a man named Jed...

A closer look:

Black Gold!  Texas Tea! 

The tank had obviously been leaking. A hunk of steel left underground for 30+ years will start to suffer.  There's no picture here of me grabbing my skull and cussing, but rest assured that this happened.  Paul was kind enough to hold me while I cried.  After mopping up my tears, he explained Vermont's policy on this stuff.  I needed to get a letter from my insurance company stating that they wouldn't cover this kinda thing (and trust me, they won't.) and then the state would cover the rest, minus a $250 deductible.  This petroleum cleanup fund is the result of a small tax (about 1½ cents per gallon) on every gallon of petroleum product you buy. 

At first, I felt bad about tapping into this fund.  My initial thought was wondering why everybody should have to pay for what is really my problem.  Then I realized that I'd payed 1.5¢ per gallon for a long time, and that I bought a house with a bad tank, not knowing the implications. Through no real fault of my own (outside of ignorance), I have a minor environmental disaster on my hands. Left to my own devices, I'd have to shoot for the cheapest option rather than the safest, which the state doesn't have to do. It's probably the best solution.  In the end, I will pay for it, but instead of paying out now, I've been paying for the last 25 years. 

Larry, my excavator, ran the tank down to Paul's trailer, where Paul cut a buncha holes in it and mopped out all the sludge. 

MMM... Sludge!

Which he left in a 55 gallon drum that according to him will "Suddenly mysteriously disappear from your dooryard in a couple weeks."  By which he really meant "The hazardous waste guys will come get this."

Larry, in the meantime, was busy excavating.... 


He'd managed to get the foundation exposed all the way to the corner of the house. I jumped into the hole to repair the banged up power line.

I enjoy electrical work, but this was my first time doing underground underwater electrical work - crimping and sealing off stuff with water seeping in and dirt falling on your head makes for an interesting work environment.

The view from my office - six feet below grade, what fun!

Halfway there - crimped and heat shrunk.  Playing with fire again...

The finished product - crimped, heat shrunk, double taped, blessed by the pope.  Hope it holds up! 

Larry, in the meantime, was busily rippin' up the yard on the side of my house.  This guy has been driving an excavator for close to 40 years, and knows what he's doing.  It was originally my intention to do this myself, but it was only a hair more expensive to have a pro do it.  Here's Larry doing "Extreme makeovers - Excavator Edition" on the front hill.  Notice the steep angle, the buried crap (including tires, old mattresses, carpet, various and sundry bits of building materials, plastic sidewinder missles and Isis jewlerly) and the tree branch in his face - Larry is hardcore. 

I tested my repairs to the well power line and found everything was working fine, so I moved on to the next step.  Larry was done at this point, so I moved on to laying some of the pipe.  Larry pointed out that the narrow channel cut for the end run of the pipe might collapse in the rain forecasted for the next few days, and it might behoove me to lay out that section now in case the trench collapsed. 


I laid in a line to give me a rough idea of what direction I should be heading:

And then I started laying pipe:

Trench warfare:

 

This kind of drain is described as "drained to daylight", so this is a good sign?

While I was playing plumber, Larry showed up with a big load of crushed stone for the bottom of the perimeter drain...

And this little guy joined me in my hole to help out:

All in all, a very productive day.  We're heading in the right direction, despite the fun that lies ahead with the state's petroleum cleanup fund. 

More ghetto goodness

We were on vacation last week, so I didn't do a thing. This weekend, I started to install the interior perimeter drain, rebuilt the half wall in the storage room, and did a bunch of cleanup.

Our plumber came while we were gone and started to install the new oil tank - we're pulling out the old underground one when we do the excavation for the exterior perimeter drain. Despite us asking him no fewer than three times where he wanted to install it, he never would say. When we came home, we found that he had moved my entire pile of various sheet goods, leftovers, old shelving, what have you. Then, apparently, the new tank wouldn't fit there, so he had to send it back.

Once the new tank is in, I'm going to remove the old underground tank. Stay tuned for more homebuilt gantry action.

This weekend's primary focus was to get the storage room put back together so we can sort of reclaim some of our life - the playroom is currently full of everything that used to live in the storage room.

Before we decided to rip the whole house apart, remove the deck and excavate the back yard, I had decided to try an interior perimeter drain first, as a much cheaper alternative to removing the deck and excavating. I got the parts from Squidgee Dry for about 400 bucks delivered. Basically, it's a plastic gutter that gets glued to the floor, and then drains into the existing sump. You glue the pieces together using a polyurethane adhesive that comes in a caulk tube, and glue the whole works to the floor. A sheet of plastic directs any water down the foundation wall into this gutter, where a bit of tubing leads it to the sump. I have the parts already, so I figured I'd install them in a sort of belt and suspenders approach.

First, I glued all the pieces down.  This was quick, painless (except for getting the caulk on my phone...) and easy.  The next part was to chisel out a bit of concrete so that the tubing from the drain was out of the way...

Safety first...  Concrete dust makes for some seriously crusty boogers. 

The rotary hammer made short work of cutting the channel:

Then it was just a matter of running the hose from the outlet:

 

into the sump, and patching up the concrete.  I'm probably overthinking this part, but I hate having crap on the floor that gets yanked on or tripped over or otherwise causing a hassle. 

I popped upstairs to find Steph working on the kitchen paint job:

She hasn't done a lot of painting, and she wasn't too thrilled with the task. 

Paint on the notebook...  Oops. 

Once I got the perimeter drain installed, it was time to rebuild the half wall.  If you have to get nails into concrete, you get to play with a Ramset.  If that word doesn't make you feel butch, I dunno what would.  Say it out loud.  See?  Don't you feel testosterone coursing through your veins?  It uses a .22 shell to drive nails.  Playing with explosives in the house, and not even getting in trouble for it.  What could be better?

RAM-frickin-SET!

Toolbelt and Ramset in a single shot - even Charles Bronson would give this the thumbs up. 

Then, a few carefully crafted tubaforz later, and I have myself a wall.  I had to notch the studs to clear the perimeter drain and the bit of wiring that was there, which took up a little time.  In retrospect, I did this kinda backwards - I should have just measured everything, then built the wall as one unit, then dropped it in.  It would have been faster than what I did, but it worked out OK in the end. 

Not bad for a total rookie:

Another area that I didn't properly think through - I should have leak-tested the perimeter drain before I built a wall over it, rather than after.  Luckily, with Naomi's help, I was able to leak-test everything, and it was watertight. 

Up next, it's insulation and wallboard, and we'll have our storage room back again, woohoo!

Long time, no post!

Ghetto house update!

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!

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.