I used this video to replace the gasket on our washing machine last night, which had inexplicably gotten tangled on one of my shirts the other night and pissed water all over the basement floor. Glad to have that sorted out.
That up there is a couple more hours of progress in the bathroom, specifically over the back window and doorframe. I took about two hours to work out the compound angle of the crown moulding, by cutting two 2×4’s down to the right dimensions and working out a jig on the table saw. Once I had that worked out, I measured the position of the scrap wood on the crown moulding and cut it to fit. It’s off by about 1/18″ but you’d have to know what you’re looking for to notice. That particular problem has been vexing me for weeks, so I’m glad to have solved it.
When that was done, I unboxed and hauled four of the five small cabinets up to the bathroom and set them in place. This revealed a new problem to solve. There are two sets of water supply lines coming through the floor, and two drain pipes coming through the wall. The left set of piping is close to the edge of the left cabinet, but should be OK to route inside. The right side drainpipe, however, is aligned with the edge of the right cabinet—which makes it impossible to get inside.
I’ve got two options here. I can cut a huge chunk of the cabinet out to fit new piping (the redneck option), or I can cut a chunk of the wall out and re-route the drainpipe inside to get it further to the right. The water supply lines aren’t that big a deal; I can route piping sideways through the toe kick area under the cabinets to where I need it and then pop it up inside. I’m going to have a sit and a think about the drainpipe for a week or so until I come up with a plan.
Downstairs, the front window sash pockets are filled with insulation and buttoned up tight. I caulked the outside and made them as airtight as possible so that we won’t be losing more heat out the front wall of the house. My plan is to measure and buy two more for the living room windows and try to get them in before Halloween; this would mean all of the windows on the first floor, except for the galley window in the pantry, are modern replacements.
The second set of replacement windows is in place in the dining room. This was a two-day project due to all the unknowns and the extra work I had to do to get the frame prepped and the sash pockets insulated. The original windows came out easier than I thought they might, after battling years of old paint and caulk to get the moulding off. Once that was done I put in and took out the replacements a total of about six times for fitment and prep work.
The difference in light is dramatic. The old windows were the original wavy glass from 1925, and when compounded by a pair of storm windows covered in dirt, we may well have just covered them in plywood for all the light that made its way through.
These new windows go up and down like butter. They’re quieter. The top window isn’t painted shut so we can vent the hot air up at the ceiling. This is going to make a big difference.
My FitBit used to do a great job of guessing how many stairs I’d climbed during the day, and I think the best I did was something like 45 floors on a Sunday when I was going up and down from the bathroom to the basement to use the table saw or retrieve a tool or some scrap wood. I haven’t figured out how to get the Apple Watch to give me the same estimates—it’s buried within one of the associated apps and I can’t be assed enough to bother right now—but I’d guess I beat 45 flights getting the windows in place on Sunday. After fixing the power switch on the table saw in the basement, I used that to rip a bunch of boards down to get sash stops the right size. I then measured and cut a stool the proper size and shape for the inside to clean up the casing. The miter saw is up in the bathroom so I had to run up there to trim things to size and come back down to fit them in place. By 9:30 that evening I was exhausted and went to bed early. Monday morning my knees were sore and my legs didn’t want to climb the stairs at the train station.
The other big event was delivery of our cabinets on Friday. The original time been scheduled for Wednesday but when they said ‘delivery’ they failed to mention it’s just curbside, so you have to get the stuff in your house yourself. On Wednesday a driver stopped at the house, spent an hour moving the boxes out of, and then back into the truck, and left. I got a couple of calls from the company, and we rescheduled for Friday. The five smaller boxes were reasonably easy to carry inside but the big linen cabinet is huge, and the guy on the truck took pity on me and helped me get it up the front stairs and into the front hallway, after which I handed him a $20 and thanked him profusely. I’m clearly going to have to open the box and break it down to its base parts—it came completely assembled so I have to pull the shelves and drawers out of it—and enlist a couple of friends to help me get it up the stairs and into the bathroom. I hope we can get it to stand up correctly…
It doesn’t look like much, but this is Sunday’s product. The windows are secured in place, an all moulding is caulked and sealed on the inside. I need more cap moulding for the top and I need a thin strip for under the sill, as well as more insulation for the now-empty sash pockets. Once that’s been bought, I can seal this up completely and be ready for paint on a day when it’s snowing.
We got four new windows delivered yesterday, and I took about 20 minutes to fit both of these into place after dinner. They went in like butter: a perfect fit for both. I’d spent more than one night worrying about having measured them wrong and being stuck with something that wouldn’t work, but this went smoothly. And they look great too.
We also heard from the cabinet folks that those will be delivered on Wednesday…
Given three days of time off from work and a bunch of impending deliveries approaching, I figured I’d better get off my ass and make some progress in the bathroom. What was hanging me up were the thresholds over both doorways. As I explained earlier, I needed to cover up the crappy leftover wooden thresholds from the old doorway and the tile where the installer didn’t finish it up to the edge. I’d bought two sections of oak flooring, 5.5″ wide by 4′ long and 5/8″ tall and notched them out on the edges so they’d fit inside the doorframe. I then spent about two weeks puzzling over how I’d set up the router to cut the angles, and decided I needed a cheap router table to mount everything on. Once I had that, I needed to modify the table to accept an oversized bit (the diameter of the hole in the table was about 2″ wide, and the diameter of the specialized bit I bought was about 4″).
I toyed with cutting a larger hole in the table but realized that would decrease its structural integrity, so then I found some thin scrap wood in my stash, cut a notch in the center, and clamped it to the surface of the table, effectively raising the deck up high enough to clear the edge of the bit. I dialed in the depth with a few test runs and then ran both pieces of oak through, ending up with a beautiful 60˚ slope on either side ending at an edge about an eighth of an inch high. Once those were test-fit and in place, I nailed in the casing around the front and back doors for good and sorted out the cap moulding for the back corner, where the door and window casings come together.
Then I went downstairs and started disassembling the dining room windows. We’ve got replacement windows on order, but as I’d mentioned before the vertical framing had been destroyed by the goons who covered it over in 1950.
I used my trusty oscillating saw to cut one of the sides in half, pulled it out, and cut the nails off with an angle grinder. I’d found good-quality pine at Lowe’s in nonstandard sizing, so I picked up a 2x6x8 that actually measured 2 1/8″ thick instead of 1 3/4″ and cut it down to size, then tacked it in place and made sure it was square. This went in with a minimum of fuss, so Hazel and I went back out for three more boards after a couple of hours at the pool last night.
This morning I got started cutting the other verticals out and by noon had the rest of them replaced with fresh clean wood, braced to the wall studs and ready for new windows. I might have to mill new casings for everything, but it’ll be good to have clean windows in place and insulation around everything to clean that wall up. And it’ll be even better to be able to open the front windows for cross breeze when the weather gets warm again.
We hit the pool on the final day of the season, and it was packed when we got there. The forecast had been 40% chance of rain and cloudy, and it wound up being 88˚ and sunny so every other member had the same idea we did. I’d finished the dining room window surgery and cleaned up my mess by about 1PM, so I took the dog for a walk, grabbed a quick shower, and off we went. I didn’t actually get the chance to get in the water but it felt good to sit and relax and sip an illicit beer in the sunshine.
There’s a dotted line of spray paint on the lawn from one of the utilities, who came and marked their wires last Friday. Hopefully BG&E will show up today to mark their lines, because the electric fencing is supposed to be installed on Wednesday. We’re technically not supposed to use it until Hazel is 6 months old, so I’m not sure what we’re going to do just yet, but it would be great for her to be able to run the length of the yard without being on a lead. It only takes her about 30 seconds to get her line tangled around a chair, the grill, the porch stairs, and another chair, but she loves to be outside in the sunshine and I’d love to let her run free. Plus, the squirrels and chipmunks would disappear for good.
I’m going to have someone come in and give us a price on clearing and paving the driveway, because now that the tree is gone that side of the house looks shittier by an order of magnitude. Nothing is going to make the garage look any better other than tearing it down and starting over, but if the driveway was actually clean and paved, it would do a lot to tidying up the curb appeal of the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d been waiting for when the new garage was put in, but that’s not happening anytime soon, and I’d like to address the drainage on that side of the house as soon as possible. Ideally we’d have them put in two drains from each corner of the house to send all of the rainwater across the driveway to the slope on the other side, which should be a relatively simple trenching job. That would also keep the garage drier (currently the runoff flows down the driveway and straight into the front of the garage) and the driveway cleaner.
Then I’ve got to have someone come and give me a price for new covered gutters around the atrium. Now that that shitty tree is gone they won’t get as full of debris, but it’s a bitch to get up there and clean them, and they are the only ones that weren’t replaced when we did the roof 10 years ago.
I pulled a bunch of little caterpillars off the tomato plants last night, probably about 20 of them, and crushed them beneath my shoe. They destroyed the top foliage on half of the plants and in doing so killed off the third wave of fruit. Disgusted, I cut back most of the brown foliage, watered everything, and picked the remaining ripe tomatoes. There’s still some green fruit left but it’s pretty sparse, so this is pretty much the end of our tomato season for 2019. It looks like they are Yellowstriped Armyworms, which are pretty common up the eastern seaboard and love to eat crops.
After measuring and re-measuring the windows in the dining room, I called and got pricing for four new replacements, two for the outside wall and two for the porch wall. The outside wall should be a cut-and-dry operation, basically pulling the outer moulding, removing the windows themselves, and pulling the sash weight mechanicals. I think the biggest issue is going to be filling the sash pockets with some kind of insulation—whether it’s spray foam or compressed cellulose, I’ve got to find a good solution for getting in there and making sure they’re packed.
The front windows are going to be more of a challenge, because when the Doctor had them covered over, the workers chopped about 2″ off of each of the verticals in the windowframe so they don’t extend all the way to the edge that meets the wall. I’m faced with either ripping the entire dual windowframe out and replacing it, or taking each vertical board out one at a time and replacing it without moving the horizontal header and plate. The latter solution is the best, but requires nonstandard wood dimensions—the boards are 1 1/4″ thick, which hasn’t been standard since before the Second World War. So I’ll either have to have something milled or work with what Home Depot has.
Meanwhile the bathroom cabinets are on order (have I mentioned that already?) and should be ready in another 2-3 weeks, which gives me enough time to sort out the last of the geometry problems over the back door of the bathroom. Basically the windowframe and the doorframe both come together at an odd angle, close enough that the cap moulding overlaps in space. The way it’s set up now I’ve got to pull the side casing I tacked in off the door and replace it with new boards about 1/4″ higher so that the top of the window and door are at the same height.
Once that’s done I can move inside the closet and finish off the moulding inside and work my way around the perimeter of the floor up to the shower.
* * *
Hazel is getting more and more used to our daily routines (such as they are) and mostly settling in to a schedule of her own. Inside accidents have reduced dramatically, and she’s very good at letting us know when she needs to go out. Her prey drive has ramped up though, and the cats are scarce whenever she’s out on her own. Her anxiety has also ramped up to double what it was when we first got her, so there’s been more whining and crying at night in the crate. We have a quote from the Invisible Fence guy to surround the house with wire, and I’m going to call him today to schedule it.
We’re scrambling to tie up loose ends and pack for the trip; with all of the curveballs we’ve been thrown this week it disrupted our plans to get ahead. The tree guys came back on Tuesday and hauled off the large logs they felled, which were sitting in the middle of the driveway. To do this they had to use the big grapple truck, and to get that in the driveway they had to prune one side of the tulip tree way back, so now it looks like someone with half a moustache. There’s a huge pile of chips where the tree once stood, and they ground out all of the roots that were surfaced in the middle of the driveway. When we get back from vacation and it cools off some I’ll have to figure out what we’re doing with that mess, and spend an afternoon spraying the east side of the house in one uniform shade of blue.
It’s also easier to see how shitty the garage looks now. The two sheets of plywood serving as doors have never looked good, so I have to think of some ideas for how to pretty them up. Now that the tree is gone I also want to dig a trench across the driveway to send runoff from the gutters into the neighbors’ yard and not directly into the front of the garage.
Jen texted me Wednesday, in the middle of the 100+ heatwave, to tell me the A/C in the CR-V had died. Given that we’re going to take it on vacation next week, we couldn’t defer this maintenance, but I knew it wasn’t going to be cheap to fix. Our local mechanic agreed to fit us in Thursday (god bless him) and looked it over first thing in the morning. The bill wasn’t cheap but it had to get done, so we pulled the trigger. We got it back last night and it is cool again, thank GOD.
Meanwhile the Scout is in Essex for what I’m assuming will be a substantial repair to the transmission while we’re on vacation. All of this happening at the same time sucks, but the fact that the average age of our vehicles is 20 years old means they’re going to need maintenance (this is somewhat tempered by the fact that we put a total of less than 10,000 miles on all three of them yearly.)
I set up the drip hose and timer in the greenhouse Wednesday night so that it runs for 15 minutes every morning at 6AM. We’ve got a bunch of nice tomatoes coming in (and we’ll have to pick a bunch and bring them to the beach) so I want to keep them alive until we get back. I did the same thing last year and it saved everything in there while I was stuck in the hospital, although it all grew out of control in our absence. I also collected one dead mouse from the traps I put out on Tuesday evening; someone was nibbling on two of our low-hanging fruit and I decided it was time to seek vengeance. Also, the tomatillo is gone, because Jen read up on them and found that there need to be two plants to cross-pollinate each other.
Our garage looks shittier and shittier. I’m going to have to do something about that and the whole east side of the house this fall.