Home Repairs – unixwiz

September 25, 2012

Home repairs, third edition

As a continuation to my other home repairs (part 1, part 2) this summer was no different. This year it was 2 major projects, the first was to repair the chimney, and the second was a new roof. First some pics of the chimney:

The finish of the chimney is a parge look for now. I will probably paint it some time later. The chimney cap was a poured concrete one as the original had completely deteriorated.

Next up is the roof, as you can see in the picture above, or not, there are black streaks going through it. So before it got bad, I replaced with with 30 year dimensional shingles..

All told it was around another $10,000 in repairs. Totaling over $30,000 in the last 3 years.

October 20, 2011

Major home repairs part duex…

So as a continuation of last years home repairs I did a couple more major repairs in 2011. This year was some doors and a new deck. I started with the doors in August, replacing the front door and basement door. The front door was leaking heat/cold so bad that it was time to be replaced with a more energy efficient one.

Old door removed, getting ready to seal the footer before putting the new door in .

After the front door was installed, the basement door was next. It also leaked water, air and was not energy efficient.

IMG_20110826_142207 — The jam of the old door.

IMG_20110826_142355 — What was left of the old door jam. nice water damage..

New door and storm door. Rot free jam as well.

After the doors were replaced, I noticed a dramatic difference in the house. The front door no longer was extremely hot or cold on the inside, which is awesome. The next big project was to replace the deck that I removed last year around this time.

IMG_20110908_101218 — laying the decking boards.

IMG_20110909_090930 — stair stringers built.

IMG_20110909_134259 — Deck boards laid and railings up

The bonus project that was done was replacing the basement window with a new energy efficient one.

All told with the above work and fixing a water leak that was in the wall going to my kitchen sink, it was another $11,000 in home repairs this year. Next year I hope to replace the patio door, fix the chimney and possibly get a concrete driveway done..

November 13, 2010November 15, 2010

$11,500+ in home repairs

This year has been a busy and expensive year. Started off in February with some “snow” in the attic. I decided to add some more insulation to the attic to help out with the heating and cooling:

Attic after installation of R-30 Insulation

Next up was the finishing of the second bedroom. Not going to show those pics here..

Then in June my clothes washer decided to go on the fritz, so I had to replace it. This is when the rest of the money started going fast. In the beginning of July we had some really bad rain storms. I came home one night to find water in the garage around the walls. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, but it had been almost 6 years since I had seen it. What I found next was not what I had expected. I walked in to my finished family room and noticed that the carpet was wet. It seems that there was so much rain that it had come in to the garage and in to the family room through the basement wall. The carpet was completely soaked. Here is a pic of the carpet wet. The dark blue area is just part of what was soaked, that is where the carpet had started showing the water because the pad was completely soaked there.:

For reference this is what the carpet looked like before:

Here is what I found when I started ripping up the carpet:

What the rain did to the drive way that I had recoated with 24 tons of gravel 7 months earlier:

So in order to fix the “water” problem, I had Bakers Waterproofing from Pennsylvania come and install a water guard system in my basement. In the simplest terms it is a gutter that is placed under the concrete floor that allows the water to go in to a sump pump to be pumped out of the house. They warranty it for the life of the house as long as I live here, or for 25 years to the next person that owns it.

Before they came, I encased the area they were to work in in plastic. The family room looked like one of Dexter’s kill rooms:

dexter room — before the demo in the family room, looks like dexters kill room

Here are the pics of some of the demolishing of the basement to install it:

underneath stairs going in to family room

concrete poured with de-humidifier access port

After the concrete has dried the family room looked like this:

So now that the basement had been fixed, something else had to happen. And true to Murphy, my air conditioner died the week that Bakers was here to do the basement work. So I had to have Air Service come out to replace my central air conditioning system.

So what better way to finish out the summer of money spending then getting ready to replace the deck that was getting too old. Here is a before pic of the deck when I bought the house:

As you can see it has a little bit of a bow in the middle of it. Fast forward 7 years and this is what it looks like:

This pic really shows the bow, (3 inches). Needless to say who ever built the deck had absolutely no clue how to build a deck or to properly support or anchor it. Picture of the deck with it over half way torn down. Thanks to my Bosch Drill and Saw:

What made me mad (but sort of glad for the demo part) was that they had only “sunk” the support posts about 3 to 4 inches in the “concrete” footer. The footer was only about 5 inches thick and no where near code.:

One of the posts had a nice amount of termites in it:

And a final picture with the deck down. I left the ledger boards for now:

One thing I forgot to mention, and you can see in this pic, is I had new seamless gutters installed. During the winter storms we had, part of the gutter near the back bed room got bent so far that the water would run off the roof and hit the back side of the gutter and bounce back against the house.

And the final thing that I have done this year is to get new carpet put in the family room so that I can try and get it back in to order before the holiday season:

carpet pulled up, getting ready to remove the pad

So what will 2011 bring? Hopefully I will get the deck replaced early in the year so I can enjoy it and some grilling during the summer. I also need to repaint the walls in the family room. ( Was wanting to do it before the carpet got installed, but they came to install it earlier than they had thought they would since it was special order carpet. ) I also hope to refinish the master bedroom in 2011 as well.

May 31, 2010

almost 7 years, finally done

Started over 6 years ago redoing one of the bedrooms in my house. I finally finished it this weekend. Needless to say, I absolutely hate wallpaper, it is the root of all evil. If you are going to put wall paper on, have a hopefully professional do it, so when people want to remove it, it doesn’t rip the backing off the wall board down. Here are some pictures of before, during and the final look.

August 19, 2009August 19, 2009

Where is my pool?

I usually love coming home from a business trip. Nothing like my own bed, my own shower, etc… But monday night was something I did not want to come home to. When I pulled in the driveway I could not understand why there was water on the driveway when it hasn’t rained in quite a while. I then looked at the retaining wall next to the driveway and there was a nice little bit of water “falling” over it. Still could not understand where it was coming from as where that water was the only thing there was the gutter drain, and it hasn’t rained.. So I then look up in my yard and what do I see a little 3 to 4 inch water fountain coming out of the ground. The ground had risen about 3 to 4 inches around where the water was and made a nice little hump. Oh SHIT…. I immediately ran up and shut off the main water valve at the water meter. The water fountain goes away and the hump goes down… Oh shit my water line has broke….

So I called MUB and they were like “Sorry if it is between the meter and your house it is your own problem.” Freaking awesome, they place the meter 2 foot from the road and there is like 35 feet between it and the entrance to my house. So I grab the shovel and start digging and digging and digging. One thing about a water leak, it sort of tells you where it is at by where the fountain was. So after a while a friend from work and his dad and my parents show up.. My friend and I continue digging. All the time thinking that the line we are looking for is a metal line, because it is metal at the meter and metal in the house.. But NO for some stupid ass reason they put converters on it and converted it to 3/4 inch PLASTIC. So we keep digging and then turn the water on a little to have it “clear” the way so we can see where the line is. Finally after about an hour we find the pipe. It has about a 1 inch slice in it.

Now it is 5 minutes till 9PM, haven’t eaten yet, been on the road for 5 hours and now I am realizing I am not getting any water this evening. My mom tries to make a dash for Lowes to get parts, but they are closed by the time she gets there. So I grab the 15 gallons of water my parents brought down and try to clean up some.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning I make a dash to Lowes as soon as they open. “We are sorry, we don’t sell the stuff to fix your pipe”. WTF, you are a home improvement store but you don’t sell stuff to fix pipe even though you sell the pipe? So off to Hugarts, this is one of those places where if they don’t have it, more than likly you don’t need it in the first place. With parts in hand I head home to fix the pipe. If you have never worked on 3/4 inch water supply line that is plastic, (this being my first time), it was a chore. Luckly the piece I cut fit the bend perfectly that was already there. But the hard part was putting the joiners in and getting everything tight. So here is what it looked like when I was done:
pipe
Not sure if you can tell from the pic, but this was just over 2 foot under ground. So with the pipe fixed it is time to fire it up, turned the water on and everything seems fine.

Now was the time to try and figure out how much water had actually came out during the little problem. I looked at the meter and all I saw was this:
meter

So doesn’t tell me too much as I don’t know how they read the meters. (I say this because on my last water bill all it said was 287 was the meter reading). So I called MUB and they said they would come out some time before 3 tomorrow (Wednesday) and do a meter reading. I could not fill the dirt back in because they had to “verify” that my line did break.

So MUB shows up today and I go out to talk with the guy. I asked him what they were actually reading when they read the meter. Short answer the first 3 digits. So I thought to my self oh shit… See the current reading was 447,420. When my meter was last read (6.1.09) the first 3 digits was 287. So that tells me that between 6.1.09 and today there has been 160,000 gallons of water go through my meter. As a prospective, my bill (based on 3 months) is usually only 6,000 gallons. So 160,000 gallons is enough for me for 6 years. This is when I told the guy, “damn that is a lot of water, wish I had a pool to put it in.” He sort of laughed and said that is more water than goes in to a pool. (So I looked it up, 160,000 gallons of water is equivalent to 27 foot cube. That is a metric fuck-ton of water, to quote a DefCon goon….)

So the MUB guy leaves and now I start filling in the hole, thinking to my self how am I going to pay for the equivalent of 6 years of water and sewage. Here is the ~~coffin~~ I mean ditch that I had to start filling in:
ditch
It got to the point it was too hot and I pissed off some yellow jackets so I went in side and waited a couple of hours. Went back and finished filling it in and it now looks almost like it did before I started:
after

So now I have to call MUB tomorrow to see what they are going to do. Hopefully I can get a waiver, as there was no way to tell the line was broke until the fountain sprouted. I guess I could go out side and read the meter every day, but who does that?

So leads me to the title. I wish I would have at least had a pool to put all that water end, at least I could have enjoyed it, rather then digging through the mud and clay for 4 hours.