Working in the backyard on Sunday morning, Jen came to me and asked if I’d seen the instrument case hidden behind the neighbor’s garage that abuts our yard. I went to investigate and found a full-size cello case laying on its side in a pile of brush behind our mulch piles, not a place I’d prefer to see a stringed wooden instrument stored. Fearing someone had stashed it there for nefarious reasons, I placed it upright and we left it there for the day to see if someone came to claim it.
At dusk, I went back out and swapped it for a small note taped to the wall of the garage: “We didn’t want your friend getting wet. Ring the bell at the blue house.” (It was threatening to rain last night). Inside the case is a full-size student cello, made last year, in great shape save a cracked neck arch.
Something about this is very wrong; the house behind us is occupied by a single woman with no children. The garage itself is locked, but there’s a canvas awning to the side where the cello could have been stored out of the weather and eyesight. And why not the back porch of the house? If a child was locked out of the house, only to come back later, why not just leave it up there? This smells fishy to me, like someone stole it and stashed it.
So what should I do if someone actually does come to claim it? My respect for stringed instruments (I played upright bass for eight years) says I shouldn’t on easy on the punk who left it outside; it’s going to depend on who rings the bell, I suppose. If it’s a concerned parent, it’s a no-brainer. If it’s a nervous kid, do I call their folks? If it’s a tweaker, I ask them to describe it and see how they do, but what then? Ideas?
This is what an hour’s work with a crowbar and a David Sedaris CD will result in; much of the floor here is in great shape, which makes me wonder why the ever covered it in the first place.
Damn. I just got a quote from Renewal by Andersen which included custom-built new windows, installation, and warranty. The cost of one of their windows was more than all six of the off-the-shelf windows I was originally considering, and three times the amount of the windows we picked out on Tuesday. The entire bill was enough to make me dizzy.
My original intent, when I began the front porch renovation, was to keep the costs low by using off-the-shelf materials to replace the crap I was tearing out. I’d looked at stuff at the local superstores and found inexpensive candidates, but I knew I’d have to special-order certain things (windows) because nothing in this house is standard size.
With that in mind, I’ve been hemming and hawing over the replacement windows for weeks now, unsure of my plans. The window openings on the porch were all framed in by drunks, so their heights all vary by as much as an inch, and the horizontal level is off by at least a half-inch. In order to figure out what I was going to do (and what shape the framing was in), I pulled all three of the front-facing jalousie windows out on Monday to see what I was dealing with. The base of the frame on the far right was in terrible shape, and I had to pull the entire thing out in order to see what I was dealing with. For a temporary fix, I cut sheets of plywood down and nailed them up until we got our new windows delivered.
Aaaaaaand, here’s where things go south.
Returning to Lowe’s Tuesday with my 10% off coupon, Jen and I looked at the off-the-shelf offerings, and she helped me realize how shitty they look. The mullions (crossbars on the top window) were inside the glass, which looks funny from the outside, and the entire window is covered with a screen, which is ugly. After some discussion, we got a quote for better quality replacement windows which turned out to be about three times as much as I was originally expecting—not what I was hoping for. With the coupon and a firm quote I figure it will go down to about twice my original budget, but this is still putting a major dent in our plans. I’ve got a couple calls in to the better window companies to see what decent replacement windows will cost; I’m not expecting miracles but I’m hoping for one. The hard part will be getting a quote for the windows minus installation fees; I’m pretty sure that’s where their markup lives.
Meanwhile, eating our breakfast in the upstairs bedroom has gotten more exciting due to the looks of shock and awe of the passers-by as they crane their necks trying to figure out what happened to the front of the house.
Outside, we wrapped a couple of branches of the cherry trees so that we might be able to enjoy some of the fruit this spring. With the exception of the Year of the Locust (when plentiful, if earthy-flavored food was burrowing out of the ground all summer), the birds have cleaned out all of the ripening red cherries before we’ve been able to taste it. The grape arbor also got wrapped on Monday to keep the bunches protected for the season (and to keep the vines off the stairwell).
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In other strange news, I had a dream last night where I was asked by Daft Punk to sit in on one of their concerts. I knew all the parts to the songs, but the “instrument” they stood me in front of was like no other I had ever seen, and made no sense. They got pissed at me when I couldn’t figure out how to play it (it was like a vibraphone stood on its side, with lots of added glowing sampler buttons that made no sense), yelled at me in French, and kicked me off the stage. I was so psyched to put on a helmet and a jumpsuit and rock out, too.
I was all ready to drive out to the gucci Lowe’s in Columbia last night to write a big fat check for nine replacement windows. I had my clipboard, I had my measuring tape, I had my wife with me and we were going to make a side trip to try out the Parsa Kabob near the store. MMMM, yummy lamb kabobs. It was at the front door, ready to leave, that I remembered something: I wanted to see if there were any coupons or discounts I might find online that could save us a few bucks.
When we first moved into the Estate here, I got a packet in the mail from Lowe’s for 10% off purchases of $5,000 or more as a “welcome to the neighborhood” sort of thing. They obviously check county records each week to see who’s recently purchased land and then send out a blanket mailing. After moving in, I let the coupon lapse because there wasn’t anything I needed to buy that would make a 10% discount worthwhile—the house needed elbow grease more than it needed raw materials.
After a quick search online I found the moving section of their website and plugged in my spamcatcher email address; the page says 3-7 days to fulfill via postal mail or email, which is plenty of time for me to continue insulating, running wire, and cleaning the space. 10% off a thousand bucks’ worth of windows is nothing to sneeze at, in my book.
Update: Yeah, bitches!
I’ve found all kinds of evidence of cost cutting here at the Estate, perpetrated by contractors, handymen, journeymen and bums who may have been “going through rough patches”, trading services, or simply drunk on the job. Scavenged, straightened nails, scrap lumber joined to form studs, leftover wire joined by junction boxes doubling back and forth through walls where it could reach the farthest. THis kind of thing is so common now that I’ve factored in the added cost of redoing everything I touch, and my SOP is to gut everything to the bones so that I can fix everything possible.
With that in mind, I had to pull a section of floor underlayment out in order to install a wall between the bathroom and the office last week. As I started levering out the fibrous board, I realized the floor tile installers were probably the only professionals ever to enter the house, because they used approximately three metric tons of ring shank nails to hold everything down. Now for a little tool edumocation: Ring shank nails are specially designed with threads along the body to go into wood and stay there, offering twice as much withdrawal resistance than an average nail of the same size. This makes them specially suited for jobs like floor underlayment, where thousands of pounding feet over the course of years on the corner of a board will eventually work the average nail loose, leaving a maddening squeak in its place.
I’ve had experience, too much experience, with ring shank nails. They were used elsewhere in this house but applied with a fraction of the brio evidenced here: one nail every two inches, and on sixteens (every foot and a half, following the floor joists). Using a hammer to pull them is a joke, because they’re designed to go in but not to come out. The heads shrivel and wilt like flowers in August drought, leaving their sharp stems sticking defiantly out of the wood. Of course, they can be driven below the surface with a hammer and a punch, but they have little or no shear (side to side) strength, so more often than not they’ll bend or twist with one good hit. And if the floor has a date with the sander, the law of averages says they’re going to shred a few belts.
My Dad had an old, blackened tool in his collection I always assumed was (and used) for snipping wire, but it was only recently that I learned of its purpose. End cutting pliers have a misleading name, because their primary design is not for cutting, it’s for pulling. It’s a blunt, wicked-looking tool with a shallow bite and a wide, curved jaw, designed with the same efficiency as a pitbull: It grabs the shank of a nail right below the head, and does not let go.
The curved edge is a lever very close to the fulcrum, which provides more focused power than a hammer and doubles to hold the jaw closed as that little SOB comes out. If, by some chance, the nail gives way before it comes out, a squeeze on the handle will snip the head as close the floor as you can get it. A tap with a punch will drive the remainder into the wood below sander depth.
I had to do some sleuthing to find a new one, because your average Home SuperStore doesn’t carry them (or, at least, their websites don’t) and I’ve got better things to do than wander the aisle of a Tool Corral trying to find where a stoned 17-year-old hid them last year.
I found mine at the local Ace hardware in under two minutes, and after I got it home I was pulling ring shank nails like daisies. I bought the 8″ Ace store brand for $13. Buy something large enough to fit comfortably in your palm, because if your job is anything like mine, you’ll be pulling nails for a long afternoon.
Having just fired up our shitty balky lawnmower for the first time this year in breezy 73° weather, I am completely overwhelmed with the urge to blow off the next week of work and overhaul the front yard of our house. The problem is that I don’t have the $10,000 it will take to have a crew come in to scrape, level, and replant our lawn, yank the hedgerow and replace it with a 6′ privacy fence, bust out the lousy concrete walks, lay down a brick sidewalk, yank the retarded bushes flanking our front door, replant new evergreens around the perimeter of the house, and trim back the holly tree.
This is the result of another five hours spent on the front porch yesterday. Half the ceiling is gone. The drywall around the front doorway is down, and there are twenty contractor’s bags full of blown fiberglas insulation waiting to go out on the truck.
I’m taking a break today, because my ass is kicked.
I took up an offer of help today to demo and haul away the remainder of the drywall in the exam room. Hopefully I didn’t drive away my generous benefactor for the remainder of time.
For those that have been in the side bathroom, this is where the big white cabinet thing used to be. The cabinet itself is now in little pieces in a landfill. After pulling down the nasty reddish paneling behind that, this is what I found. That makes two doors in the same wall. This is the one we knew about previously (that’s my new electrical box in the lower left). The moulding and drywall you see here is all gone now.
This is looking towards the bathroom. All of the drywall and insulation on the outside walls is gone, a portion of the dividing wall into the bathroom is gone, and the ceiling is completely gone.
Alternate view. We hauled over a half a ton of debris from the room out to the dump in two trips. Words cannot describe my gratitude.
The ceiling was never insulated, which explains why the atrium upstairs lost so much heat, and why the doctor eventually had a drop ceiling installed. We threw the flouresecent lighting out, because the tubes were the old single-pole design (impossible to find replacements for) and the ballast in one of the units was leaking black goo into the housing.
Next, I’m going to shut the plumbing off and pull the sink and toilet in the bathroom so that I can gut that entire space and frame it out from scratch. And then I have to figure out a way to get the air conditioner, which is as large as a fridge, out of the window and down to the ground without killing myself or anyone else.
I took a break from the day job today to do a little demolition in the old exam room.
This is so I know where to get replacement cartridges for my mask. (It’s better than hunting through Lowe’s aimlessly for a half an hour).
This is the shared wall between the house and the exam room. I figured the chimney would be in good shape when it finally appeared, and I was right. It’s covered in eighty years of dust, but it’s in great shape. The horizontal boards on the right side cover over the original doorway that used to open out into this space when it was a screened porch. Also note the original shingles at foot level, still nailed to the sheathing. Back in the day, instead of Tyvek, they used tarpaper, or in this case, heavy brown paper. Not very efficient.
I did a little exploratory digging under the floor sheathing and found some pretty good-looking pine. I’m leaving the sheathing down until the bulk of the heavy demolition is done, and then I’ll pull it up to see what we have. This is very promising.
Here’s the entire west wall minus drywall. I found a label on the back of a few of the sheets which patents it in 1919—much earlier than I’d ever thought—so the writing on the wall is definitely from 1928.
This is the shared wall between the bathroom and the exam room. I decided to pull both of the interior walls down first so I wouldn’t have to deal with insulation just yet, but there’s some up above the bathroom ceiling.
Now I’ve got to figure out a way to haul the drywall out of the middle of the floor and up to White Marsh, where there’s a sanitary landfill (they won’t let me dump it at my usual go-to location, right down the beltway from the house).