I'm Starting a New Blog

When I first talked to Nancy about starting to write about our house project, it was my intention to start a new blog but she talked me out of it.  Maybe it was the name I proposed - "The Broken House."  I have to agree that sounded too much like a broken home.. That was not the idea I was after.  So, I started posting to this blog.

Now that I have started writing, I am finding that I really enjoy it.  I am now thinking of writing about subjects that have nothing to do with Zentner family doings.  Instead of hijacking the Zentner Family Doings blog for my personal ramblings, I have started my own blog.  I have named it "Dave's Roundabout Ramblings."  The url is:

http://davesroundaboutramblings.blogspot.com

If you would like to receive an email to notify you when I've published a new post,  you can fill in the "Follow By Email" box on the right side of my posts.  If you want an RSS feed, click on the "Subscribe to" box.  If you have trouble, shoot me an email.  If you want, you can do the same for Zentner Family Doing,

I hope you all continue to follow the progress on our house project and enjoy my other miscellaneous ramblings on my new blog.

Skip Trowel Texture

Today I textured one wall of the living room (in addition to buying a Network Extender off of Craigslist, getting an awesome deal on some new hiking boots at REI, a stop at Home Depot, installing a TP holder and towel bar in the hall bath, selling some wheels on Craigslist for my son-in-law, and babysitting the grandkids.)

We are doing a texture called "skip trowel" which we first had done at the cabin and really like. This can be done by spraying the texture on the wall, waiting for it to start to dry, and then knocking it down. I am doing it by hand, instead. This involves putting globs of texture randomly on the wall and then knocking it down with a mud knife. The idea is to make it look like you just put it up there without a care in the world. It's harder than it looks!



The first challenge is that you need to get the consistency of the mud so it is thin enough that it knocks down smoothly but not so thin that it doesn't have enough body to leave a good amount of texture. Then you have to glob it on randomly so that when you knock it down, it covers most of the wall but not all. You want the "holes" to show. You also need to get the globs fairly consistent so that when you drag your knife across it, there aren't places that you have to push harder or go lighter so that the texture ends up uniform in thickness. You need to knock it down before it stars to dry, but don't work it too much. Wait for it to dry a little and hit it one more time. Don't move your knife too fast or it will "judder" or vibrate and leave little waves... Start with the knife handle high when you make the first passes, lower it for the final ones or you will get lots of knife edge lines. Don't get any debris in you mud or you will get streaks... You get the idea - just make it look like you threw it on there.



To make it harder, all the while you are doing this, you have a little voice in the back of your head saying that you know that your brother, the farmer, is going to inspect it. Farmers like to go on drives after church on Sunday. They look at their neighbors fields and cluck their teeth. Look at those weeds... At least my rows are straighter than that... What kind of an idiot would plant that... He'll never make any money watering the road... Maybe I just think this because I know when I go to his place, I'm always checking out his work. He's probably thinking, "Damn electricians, always think they know everything..." Maybe this doesn't have anything to do with my brother after all. Maybe it's my own inner demons, always searching for approval...

Anyways... the texture is looking good.

PS. Don't ever put old mud back into the bucket. You'll get streaks for sure next time you use it! And those hiking boots... I got a pair of $300 boots for $50!!! And I can return my old ones I don't like. Gotta love REI!

The Broken House III

In my previous post I said that the living room had a flat ceiling. As you can see, it wasn't really all that flat!


Originally, I had decided that it wasn't bad enough to crawl into the attic and fix but the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Plus it was going to be tough to do the skip-trowel texture we have been doing on something that far from flat. Off to the store again. Two 2x6's, some Simpson Strong-tie connectors, some screws, and plumber's tape. Time to install a couple of strongbacks.

It was a little tricky to push the 2x6's up through the garage ceiling into the attic. (I had a nice hole into the attic from the family room but I closed it off a few days prior...) Once I got them there, I had to lift the ceiling joists up to the strongbacks. (Actually, what I did was more like push the strongbacks down to the joist. In hind site, I wondered if I should have used one 2x12 instead of the two 2x6's. Not sure I could have gotten it into the attic, though.) To do this, I used the plumber's tape and a piece of pipe, like so;


The end result looked like this;


I knew from above that I had actually lifted the joist some because before I started, I set the piece of pipe down across the joists and it rolled towards the center. Once I was done, it stayed where I set it! Here's what it now looks like from below;



I did have some popped drywall nails before I started, which is what I was fixing when I decided that the ceiling needed to be flatted. Once I was done installing the strongbacks, I had lots of them so I ended up screwing up the whole ceiling. (Screwing things up is what I do best!!!) Now, with the screw holes filled and the ceiling floated out with drywall mud, we are just about ready to texture.

I had mentioned in an earlier post that I had to fix the sagging roof. I had noticed before we bought the house that there was quite a sag in the roof on the front of the house. Upon inspection in the attic, I discovered that the builders had failed to put any vertical supports up to the rafter strongback between the two front bedrooms. There were a couple of diagonal braces. After putting a jack under the strongback, I removed the diagonal braces and jacked the strongback up 3 1/2"! After installing two vertical braces, I reinstalled a diagonal brace. I still have a bit of a sag over the back bedroom where the rafters are bent after so many years without much support. We will have to deal with that later. Here is a picture from the attic;


The string you see there that I used to level the strongback is now push up by the heater duct. You can also see where I have added insulation over Nancy's office. The rest of the ceiling will get more insulation after we finish working up there.

Also, while I was doing attic projects, I used some leftover foam insulation and silicone to make an insulated attic access hatch;


By the way, those plastic netting scrubber things that ladies like to use in the bath (http://www.amazon.com/Cain-and-Able-Bath-Sponge/dp/B000FUMCPQ) work great for cleaning insulation out of your skin...

Once in a Lifetime - Hopefully

We had a very nice time at the cabin this past weekend with our friends John & Shannon and their boys. One advantage of having the tree fall on the roof is that we now have a great sled run right at the cabin! In order to tarp the roof, I had to clear the roof of about 3' of snow. Most of it ended up in a pile outside the kitchen window. With the snow we have had since then, along with the snow we shoveled off the deck, we have ended up with quite a pile of snow!

Skunkworks

Today's planned topic of high gain windows will have to wait for another day.

Occasionally, Nancy works on what she calls "Skunkworks projects." This Wikipedia link will give you some idea what I'm talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunkworks_project These are usually projects that management would like her to do but they are a ways down on the priority list. Sometimes they are projects that she thinks management may not think are worth spending time on. Sometimes they are just cool ideas that she thinks she could do pretty easily. Sometime she works on them when she is frustrated with what she is supposed to be working on. Other times, she works on them on weekends, just for fun.

A while back, she was in a conference call meeting and her boss, Joe, said that he thought that they should do something. Nancy replied that she had already done that. Then Joe said it would be cool if they added something else to which she replied she had already done that too! Then Joe said "OK, Nancy what am I thinking of now?!" Today, Joe used one of her skunkworks projects as part of a demo for a major film studio in LA. He said they loved it!

Today, I did a little Skunksworks project of my own. I am working on taping the drywall in the living room but the place was getting to be a mess. Nancy even commented that I am good at making a mess... I have a cheap shop vac that has a piece of paper over foam for the filter. It has never worked very well, especially for drywall dust. Really, it just sucks up the dust and blows it back out the exhaust port! It was time for a new shop vac.

As I was making my shopping list, I remembered that Nancy was having to dig through piles of stuff this morning to find the clothes she wanted to wear today. Living out of boxes and piles on the floor gets old after a while... Our closet has not had a clothes rod, ever since we moved in 7 months ago. I asked Nancy about putting up a clothes rod. What she really wanted, she said. was two sets of shelves and rod between them, just like I put in at our last house. Off to the store I went...



As you may notice, I didn't take time to paint. I did clean the walls first. Pretty good for a knuckle dragger, huh? The shelves are going to have to come back out when we paint and carpet the bedroom anyways. Now she wants new closet doors....

The Broken House II

The second "cuz we wanna" project has been to open a doorway between the living room and the family room. We also wanted to raise the floors in both rooms while we were at it. Nancy really wanted to do the kitchen first but I thought that the living room project was something I could work on while I was still working. As it turns out, I didn't get much done except tear stuff out and frame the new doorway. "Grandpa, is your house still broke?"

Our house is a 1500 sq ft., 3 bedroom, 2 bath, ranch (meaning single story) with a living room, family room, kitchen and a small eating area. It was built in 1964, back when there was a Ford auto plant where the Great Mall is now(which was called the "San Jose" plant since no one knew where Milpitas was.) This was before GM built their plant, which became NUMMI (the joint venture between Toyota and GM,) and is now Tesla (makers of electric cars.) These homes were built for the new expanding working middle class.

There are about 6 different floor plans in our subdivision. Ours has a perimeter foundation except for the living room and the family room, which are on a slab. Our living and family rooms are side by side in the southwest corner of the house. Both of them were a step down from the rest of the house. The living room has a 8' x 4' window that looks out at the backyard and has a flat ceiling. The family room has an 8' sliding patio door to the backyard and a vaulted ceiling. Originally there was no connection between the living and the family room. To get from the living room to the family room, you had to step up into the hall, walk down the hall five feet and then step down into the family room. To get to the eating area, you could either go through a narrow door and through the kitchen or you could step down into the family room and then back up into the eating area.

A previous owner had made a large window-like opening between the living and family rooms. When we first moved in we had one sofa in the family room and the other in the living room, both of them back to back against the opening. The temptation was just too much for the grandkids - up one sofa, through the opening, down the other sofa, step up into the hall, down into the other room, up the sofa.... I tried moving one sofa away from the opening but it was too late. Up one sofa onto the sill of the opening, back down onto the sofa again. Up onto the sill... What I really wanted was a doorway there anyway!



It was an easy enough job to take out the sill and the studs below it. There was one romex running through there which I routed up and over (slab floor, remember.) I then jacked up the beam in the family room ceiling that rested on the window-like opening header just a tiny bit so I could remove the header. The header was a little small and had sagged a little. I turned the header over and reinstalled it, raising it so that it would set right below the double top plates. I wanted to make space in one corner of the living room to put a big screen TV, so I made the doorway opening a couple of feet narrower (which helped with the under sized header problem.)

The next step was to remove the Pergo flooring in the living room. When we did this we discovered mold under it! A thorough investigation revealed that under the house was wet. Not standing water, even though there were previous signs of that, but definitely wet! Hence, the french or trench drain project mentioned in my previous post. (At this point we haven't finished the drain, just dug the trench. We'll get back to that after the ground dries out a bit and we get the old concrete torn out of the backyard so we have some place to put the dirt. More on that some other day...) We also found that the original asbestos vinyl floor tiles were still mostly there.

After cleaning up the floor and letting it throughly dry, I put down 6 mil plastic, followed by pressure treated 2x4s topped with 1 1/8" t & g plywood. This made the top of the plywood even with the subfloor of the hall. We also put rigid foam insulation between the 2x4s. You could feel cold air coming in from the crawl space in places so I filled all the gaps I could find with spray-in foam insulation. The plan is to install floor tile in most of the public areas of the house.




Tomorrow, I'll tell you about trying to find a "High Gain" window for the living room...

The Broken House

I have decided to post some blogs about our house project. Many of our earlier projects were of done out of necessity: fixing water leaks, repiping, having the drains cleaned, fixing the sagging roof, installing a new furnace, putting in a french drain... Now we are getting to doing some of the things we want to do.

The first of these, non- necessary projects we did when we had the furnace put in. The ceiling in the hallway was originally 7' 2" high. Don't ask me why. There wasn't anything in that space except one electrical wire, which was easily moved.




When we bought the house, the furnace was in the garage. The old cold air return used to run through the crawl space and into the bottom of a coat closet. When a previous owner remodeled the kitchen, the coat closet was eliminated. The cold air return plenum was rebuilt out of aluminum and came up a 2x4 wall to a register in the entryway. The cold air return ducting was all knocked apart and the bottom of the aluminum plenum had corroded away. The supply duct in the attic also had a 5" gap in it. If the furnace had worked, which it didn't, it would have pulled in air from the crawl space and blown it into the attic! It was time for an all new system.

After struggling to find a convenient location to put the cold air return, we decided to put the furnace in the attic. This solved the cold air return problem as well as made the furnace more centrally located, It also made more room in the garage, which I would like to use as a woodworking shop someday.

We had a 96% efficiency, 2 stage gas furnace, with all new ducts and cold air return installed. It was decided that the best place to install it was over the hallway but there was a problem. The joist were 10" lower there. I didn't like the low ceiling anyway so I raised it up to 8' like the rest of the house. It looks much better now.

We also added recessed can lights on 3 way switches, a hardwired smoke detector, and and an outlet in the hallway for the vacuum. Today I hung new drywall on the right side of the hall. On the left side you can see where I have added temporary drywall where the old ceiling used to be. That side will have to wait until we remodel the entryway.

The name for this post comes from our grandsons who are continually saying that our "house is broke."