Tag: 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:

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:

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

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:

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.