… I thought I’d take the PITA phone out and attempt to get some pix of where things stand now. They’re not particularly good pix, and please understand that everything is still in progress. But here you go. North wall and exterior of the new screen porch as of today: For reference, here’s what the north side of the house looked like four years ago: The excrescence on the right is the infamous not-a-garage, gone but never lamented. The deformity sticking out on the left was … well, its purpose takes paragraphs to explain, but basically it was composed of…
Category: Home improvement
Been dry and warm. I’ve been working on the outside of the house (north wall, exterior of screen porch; I’d have pix except for my camera having died and the phone cameras being a PITA). But yesterday was misty. Enough that the “mist” dripped from the eaves all morning. So I slipped under the cover of the screen porch and returned to shingling the wall between porch and bedroom. A small fear I’ve been nursing soon proved true: I’m going to run out of shingles on the last row. On the very last freakin’ row. I hate it when that…
Last night after an hour of work on the north wall and a hour of Downton Abbey, I realized I should blog something. I began news surfing to add to the trove of linkable pages always waiting in the wings of the browser. I’d barely started into the sort of article that’s normally a grabber (another scurrilous accusation against Assange and Wikileaks) when I realized I wasn’t the teeny tiniest bit interested. Not that I’m finally cured of news junkiedom, mind you. Merely that tonight I didn’t care. It’s summer. It’s waltzing by and I’m either working or thinking about…
In the spring of 2013, I bought a house for $10,000. Foreclosed. Leaking. Full of rot. You can imagine it caused many adventures. You’ve already heard some of them. But today I have the story of a single wall. A simple wall, that’s it. Not even a particularly large or long wall. Not a fancy wall. Not a complicated wall. Not even a particularly attractive wall. Not a special wall in any way. Just a wall that it took four years of hard work to find amid all the bizarrities of the home I dubbed Ye Olde Wreck. Here is…
I felt such a wave of relief when The Wandering Monk wrapped up Phase II of this summer’s Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project on Thursday. We’re done, we’re done! Cross that project off the list! Then the wave crashed as I remembered it’s now my turn: caulk, prime, paint, shingle, install screens, trim, then … oh, it just goes on. The Monk will be back for other (though smaller) projects in a few weeks and all through the fall. Meanwhile, my break will be filled with work. Phase II was enormously more fun than Phase I (all that hard,…
… the differences between Ye Olde Wreck, then and now. The ground that sloped downward into the house, burying the foundation in forever-damp soil. The rot in that misbegotten extension. The shredded corner where some fool tore the exterior wall to its studs and attempted to prop up the failing structure with a single 4×4 post The soggy fiberboard. The plastic sheeting covering holes in the walls. The general dank, cobwebby, moldy, crumbing mess of it all. And now the solid, leveled foundation of new treated 6 x6s. The ground graded flat. The hill held back by an attractive retaining…
Because the Late and Increasingly Unlamented Handyman Mike built the bathroom without correcting underlying problems, The Wandering Monk and I, having repaired and leveled the foundation , are now faced with having to re-level major elements. Phase II of the Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project has been a breeze compared with Phase I, but today we come to the hard part. The north bathroom wall (which Mike built level without regard to what the rest of the house was doing around it) leans in. The bathroom window runs uphill. Rebuilding the wall or cutting it loose from its moorings…
Sorry for the lack of updates on the Great Foundation and Screen Porch Project, and for the lack of photos now. On Thursday we (and this time it was both The Wandering Monk and me in equal measure) finally entered the “hey, there might really be a house in all this mess” stage. In May and July we labored painfully on the foundation and rotted lower walls of the back wing. Necessary, of course. But hard, scary, and mostly not gratifying. That is, not aesthetically gratifying (except for that new bedroom wall with the glass door in it). It’s intellectually…
We (but mostly The Wandering Monk) finished the screen porch framing except for the part above the door. That, and hopefully a fair bit of siding, should be done tomorrow. Well, barring the standard unpleasant discoveries, courtesy of Ye Olde Wreck’s original builders, Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. Fortunately we’ve reached the point where those discoveries are of the “how the heck do we fit those crazy angles together” variety rather than the “why didn’t I just tear the house down when I had the chance?” sort. But there sure are a lot of those little angles that don’t like…
Doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty exciting to me. Today The Wandering Monk returned to resume construction. First order of business: begin framing the new screen porch. Here you see the framing near the beginning, with the Monk holding the screen door in place. My original plan was to use a door I salvaged from the landfill. Then the lumberyard put this very nice vinyl door on sale (roughly half of Home Depot’s price for it!), so I repurposed the salvaged door and grabbed this. This entire phase of the Great Foundation and Screen Porch project should be more…