Showing posts with label mess. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mess. Show all posts

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Demolition Begins...

I started on the interior of the foyer. Until we can move the piano the POs left behind, and unwire the fire hazard electrics, it has to maintain a semblance of water resistance. Remarkably, some of it was reasonably well constructed. All that meant is that it was easier to take apart and some of the materials were salvageable.


Starting with the front wall, the plastic covered paperboard came off easily enough. The chipboard behind it was starting to compost however...




The door frame is glued to the brick (well, I did say some of it was well constructed, not all...)



*gasp* there was insulation in the wall.



The planks on the ceiling came off relatively easily, once the first one was out. Getting the first one out however, required some work. All the wall panels around the upper edge had to come off, as did some of their supporting struts. That wasn't difficult, everything was held together with a couple of nails and some glue.

There's even more insulation in the roof space. This space is actually better insulated than the attic... you know the bit above the interior of the house, where the heat is...




Is that roofing tile I see before me?



Indeed it is:




Behind the upper paneling you can see the original roof. The roof for the addition just rests on it:


And there you see the cause of part of the leak. If water gets under the roof of the addition, it comes down the valley... and in through the hole drilled to put the wiring through! Just out of picture to the left is one of several wiring junctions, complete with bare wires. That hasn't been taken out yet as I need to shut off the electrics for the entire house, because who knows what circuit(s) that's actually wired into!

Salvage: The main planks from the ceiling came off cleanly, as did the roof insulation, the pieces against the wall to the left are trash however - wood covered in glue, plastic coated paperboard, etc.



Whilst doing some gardening as a break from demolition, I uncovered a toad. It seems smaller than the one we had earlier in the year, so there's two of them around at least.




And the monster plant lurking behind the house, fighting it out with the rosebush to see how much of the garden they can take over, is flowering. Only one flower for half a dozen seven foot stalks, but it's pretty:


Friday, June 29, 2007

in which we attempt to install a washing machine

The POs took their washing machine with them. A friend (N) gave us their old one as they were upgrading. Sounds great, until we enter the twilight zone that is this house.

Day 1 (Tuesday)


The washing machine is delivered by N.

The pipe from the previous machine was still attached to the drain hole - they'd just hacked it off part way down. The pipe removed easily enough, and the waste pipe for the machine fit into the rubber connector. All seemed well.

That is until we tried to actually use the machine. At which point the water just drained right out the bottom and down the drain hole rather than filling the machine. Not helpful, and inexplicable. Until you learn that the machines require the pipe to travel up above the top otherwise they do just this, and it's only recently that a few manufacturers have come out with machines that don't have this fundamental design flaw!

So I investigated what this was supposed to look like. Everything I could find said that there should be a 2" wide stand pipe (there wasn't), with a p-trap (basically a ubend) in it, and that it needed to be open ended (not sealed to the drain hole). Fixing this seems simple enough. I should know better by now.

The rubber connector was 1" wide, and connected to a 1.5" adapter to a 2" drain hole. The rubber connector removed easily enough, but left a bent metal connector on the 1.5" to 2" metal adapter, which was screwed into the actual drain hole.

Day 2 (Wednesday)

First trip to Home Depot provided pipe (helpfully pre-cut to the lengths I needed), along with a replacement seal for the bathroom toilet tank (a separate issue - that tank was running continuously).

This connector was, of course, a non-standard octagonal contraption that was thoroughly stuck and too large for any tools I had, something I'd neglected to check the night before.

The evening also gifted us with a thunderstorm, leaking back windows in the rear bedroom, a small lake in the "family room" (that's a whole other DIY disaster courtesy of the the POs), and a power outage to go with the 95F heat.

Our Swimming Pool

Day 3 (Thursday)

A second trip to Home Depot for tools did not solve this problem - the weird octagonal adapter did not quite fit in the "universal" plumbing tool (due to its octagonalness). A side trip to Lowe's for an energy efficient (or as much as there is) air conditioner (seeing as Home Depot doesn't stock such) was successful - both in acquiring said air conditioner and a sudden downpour dropping the temperature by 20F and making it less urgently needed.

Day 4 (Friday)

N to the rescue with tools that might defeat the octagonal monster. They do indeed fit, but the monster refuses to move in the slightest, even when doused with WD-40. The application of one of the pipe pieces to the tool handle provided enough leverage (simple tools win again), and the monster gradually yielded.

The pipes all fit snugly together (even without any form of glue they appeared to be water tight, and very hard to take apart again). So I connected them to the drain hole, connected up the washer and turned it on. All seemed to go well, at least until the machine started to empty out. Which is the point we discovered that the drain itself does not empty. Or at least not anywhere close to the speed required.

Day 5 (Saturday)

In which we attempt to clear drains.
(This is a scarier process than might be obviously apparent - I found popcorn, among other things, in the dryer vent when I cleaned the laundry room... -S.)