Saturday afternoon, while Finn was down for a nap, I decided to try something I’ve meant to do for months. After having left it alone in disgust since early January, I finally went back out and straightened up the side porch last weekend. All of the extra bales of pink fiberglas got stacked in one pile, the clouds of blown fiber were swept up, and I filled two contractor’s bags full of assorted garbage to be hauled away. This past Saturday afternoon, in one last-ditch effort, I went back out and screwed three sheets of plywood and a bit of drywall over the open area between the front porch roof and the side room, sealing off the area above the porch into a closed cavity. I also adjusted the relief valve on the radiator closest to the front door and made sure the shutoff valve was open (it wasn’t).
The difference in the new office has been dramatic and astounding. I left the french doors closed Saturday night, as we always do, and when I stepped out there Sunday morning the front porch was warmer than the living room. It stayed like that for the rest of the day. Sunday night it got down to about 30° outside, and as I sat in the office typing, my hands were warm—and I didn’t need to wear fleece. It was more comfortable out there than sitting in the dining room, as a matter of fact. Opening the door between the front office and side porch produces a noticeable outrush of air, which confirms my suspicion that the area above the porch was subject to constant airflow, negating any heat-retaining properties of the insulation above.
After some sweat, cursing, and great exertion, we have the new laser printer sitting between our desks in the office. It’s literally a tank—I’d say over 200 lbs., and not small enough to jockey around with only two people. We had some very appreciated help from Aunt C. and Dr. G., who were gracious and kind enough, after humping the new one inside, to help me get the old one out to the Jeep. I hooked everything up, fired off a few test prints, and got the seal of approval from Mama. It’s loud, there’s no powersave mode, and the fan stays on constantly, which means it’s really better suited in a side office or well-ventilated closet, but that’s an inconvenience I’m willing to put up with for the sheer utility and flexibility of this thing. We’ll just keep it turned off when we don’t need it. Meanwhile, I brought the Xerox in to work this morning, got it set up and tested in a mixed-OS environment, and everything seems to be working as advertised.
Finn used her potty for the fourth time this evening. Sitting in her highchair, watching us as we made dinner, and eating vegetables, she got the worried look on her face and made a preliminary grunt. Jen asked her if she needed to use the potty, and she replied simply, “Potty.” We all sat down and read a book together, and the distraction made for a satisfying and successful outcome. We harbor no illusion that she will be trained by age 2, but if she continues asking for it, we’re going to keep offering it.
All of this really couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been battling a debilitating feeling of ennui the last couple of weeks, in part because I don’t feel like I’ve made many advances lately. Work has been relatively constant, my family is healthy and happy, and we are blessed with a daughter who is whip-smart and surprising us with new discoveries every day, but for me personally, I’ve been in a bit of a rut with projects here at the house and at work. These small things have got me motivated to start pushing forward again, and that’s a feeling I like to have.
Step 1: Start carrying the camera everywhere again, and take pictures.
I spent a little time out in the side porch this weekend for the first time since Mr. Scout and I did insulation work. It was just too disheartening to be out there, really. I’ve wanted to get out there and clean up the mess we left behind for a couple of weeks now, and I took advantage of a little time while Finn was down for a late nap to organize my thoughts.
After I’d swept up the piles of leftover insulation, stacked the blankets we swapped out, and moved tools around, things looked a little better in the light. I made the decision to push ahead with the renovation this year, and now that Finn is considering potty training, it would be great to have a bathroom on the first floor again. What’s been holding us up is the complicated jigsaw-puzzle nature of renovations in our house, where one thing is usually precluded by five other things that need to happen first. In this case, we’ve been waiting for the money to have expensive plumbing work done. It goes something like this:
Buy a 4-door car.Insulate the front porch ceiling.Figure out why the porch isn’t retaining heat before closing it in.- Come up with a finalized plan for the second-floor master bathroom.
- Gut the atrium on the second floor.
- Pull up the floors in the atrium to expose the joists.
- Route plumbing supply and drains to the atrium (second floor) in prep for a new bathroom.
- Realign the toilet and sink waste and supply lines on the first floor (turn the toilet 90°, possibly move the sink back).
- Run a new vent pipe through the wall and out the roof (remove the old cast-iron on the side of the house).
- Sister new joists on the second floor to level and reinforce the floor.
- Install new windows in the first floor bathroom and den.
- Install a newer, wider porch door off the den.
- Run electric into the den and bathroom (plugs, can lights)
- Level the den floor?
- Sheetrock the den and bathroom.
- Put up kneewalls and insulate under the den in the coal cellar.
- Insulate the atrium in preparation for winter.
Admittedly, some of this stuff can happen out of order. The windows for the bathroom and den can be installed at pretty much any time up until sheetrock. I’ve waited on some things, like gutting the atrium, because I didn’t want to get things started, stall out, and let critical things like heating pipes freeze over the winter (and after this winter, I’m glad I showed some restraint). All of this will cost money, but the big-ticket item holding us back right now is the plumbing work. The ballpark I was given was in the $3500 range, which is cash we don’t have right now. And that doesn’t include the cost of a dumpster to gut the atrium, which is what has to happen before the plumbers can come in.
Some places I can save a little money and/or time are:
- Buy a set of windows at Second Chance, where there are overruns, returns, and other donated windows available at discount pricing
- Buy an exterior door from the same place
- Avoid gutting the entire atrium for now, and just doing the floor and section of the exterior wall in order to concentrate on the lower half
- Reuse some of the blanket insulation left over from the porch
- Obviously, do as much as I can by myself.
So I’m looking at an all-in scenario here, where a lot of things have to happen by the end of fall to avoid catastrophe (frozen pipes, higher energy bills, etc.) but I have to wait on any major demolition until after we have our taxes done to see if we’ve got to pay out or if we’re going to be keeping anything. And, of course, we have to wait for the snow to melt off before we can get a Dumpster in the driveway.
Mr. Scout drove over from the Eastern Shore this Sunday to help me with a two-part project: making the front porch/office warmer and habitable during 30° weather.
Recapping quickly, when the ceiling went in two years ago, I put R-19 insulation between the joists and another layer of R-19 on top of that for a theoretical insular total of R-38, which should have been good enough to seal up that space and impossible to view one’s own breath while sitting at a desk. In the basement room below, I sealed the cracks in the foundation with hydraulic cement, put in a kneewall with R-13 around the foundation, and installed a new window to replace the original 1925 equipment. All of that work had no effect. After some consultation and inspection, Mr. Scout theorized that the sill plates were uncovered and leaking massive amounts of air (which they were) and that the insulation above didn’t reach all the way out to the soffits, meaning cold air was leaking in through the ceiling.
Last week, I bought a package of Tiger Foam from the manufacturer, and Sunday morning he and I pulled all of the insulation away from the sill plates in the ice room. After he donned a Tyvek suit and fabric mask, I followed him around with the tanks as he shot expanding foam across all of the sill plates, exposed cavities, and dead spaces in order to stop the airflow under the floor.
The second step was to remove the top layer of insulation from the attic space and replace it with blown fiber, making sure we filled the soffits up front with as much insulation as we could. I’m quite sure the “carpenters” who built this porch were more than just drunk; I’d bet they were truck drivers or ditch diggers or college faculty by profession—meaning they had no fucking idea how to build a structure properly, based on how half-assed this whole thing actually is.
After we wrestled a big green washing machine into the side porch, I donned the paper suit and crawled into the attic while Mr. Scout opened bales of insulation and fed the hopper. I shoved the hose as far forward into the soffits as possible and we filled the spaces with as much insulation as we could before it choked the machine. Working backwards, I filled the soffits around the perimeter and then backfilled over the open areas, adding about 6″ to 8″ of coverage over the first layer. When I finally crawled out of the space, I looked like a snowman who’d survived a volcanic eruption; tiny fluffs of paper were everywhere, covering our clothes, the area around the machine, and everywhere we walked.
After returning the machine, Mama served the four of us a delicious dinner, and we tested the new insulation with anticipation—but there was no joy to be had. To our dismay, the room remains as cold as it ever was. The basement room below is (and has been) reasonably warm, which doesn’t explain why the floor in the office is ice-cold. The insulation in the attic is now thicker and covers much more than before, which doesn’t explain why the heat is escaping so quickly.
I guess the the next step, after a few more stiff drinks, will be to commission a home energy audit to see where we’re leaking and how we can stop the bleeding.
So, here’s where we started out yesterday morning. Mr. Scout braved the frigid winds blowing in from the arctic circle to rip out the last two jalousie windows on the end of the porch and install pretty new double-hung replacements.
We still have to finish the interior and exterior trim, as well as insulating the shit out of the whole thing (it’s still chilly out there, unfortunately) but it looks a million times better already.
Elsewhere, plans are afoot to take the girl to see Santa this weekend, as well as wrap up a good portion of our Christmas shopping.
Well, it’s official: Saturn is dead. I kind of knew it would happen, even when they claimed that Roger Penske was going to buy it (buy what, exactly? Build what? That whole story never made sense).
I’ve spent a good deal of quality time with OS X Server (Tiger) over the last couple of weeks, and my experience has been very good overall. I had a previous install to learn from, so doing things like setting up users, groups, share points and sharing were a lot easier to do than if I’d tried it out of the box. Opening up ports for HTTP, FTP and VNC went smoothly, and I followed some helpful directions to log into the server using SSH and then share via AFP over a secure connection. I’m curious to get a copy of Snow Leopard Server and look at the differences.
I also bartered some networking help for a used G5 tower, which means our setup here at the house will be current as of 2004. The big thing is to have a machine that will take a SATA drive, which are cheap and plentiful—I’ve been cobbling together servers with ancient hardware for years, so when I can put an enterprise-level terrabyte drive in a five-year-old machine for ~$100, it means I can finally collect all of our photos, music, video, and backups in one place. I started moving files last night, and with the help of a utility called SmartReporter, I’m hoping I can avoid the catastrophic failure of our last music server.
I did not know this before, but the 3rd generation iPod will not charge from a USB connection, which sucks, because Apple decided to drop FireWire 400 ports from the back of new Intel iMacs. Which means I can listen to what’s on my iPod from my work computer, but I can’t charge it unless it’s plugged into the wall.
We are inching closer to that new car, but it’s slow going.
I’m going to have to break down and dip into the home equity fund to buy three more windows for the front porch before the really cold weather hits. It’s chillier at night now, and I’m too used to being able to work out there quietly. Also, having two computers on the dining room table for a second year in a row is unacceptable—especially with all of the cords hanging at Finn-height. Meanwhile, I just ordered ten more Pullman window counterbalances for the rest of the upstairs windows. Ten is about all the budget for this month will allow, and it’ll take me a weekend or two to get them all installed. The next step is to figure out a good way to blow paper insulation into the empty window pocket cavities without getting it all over the house.
Jen and I joke that every year we make a list to do a certain number of specific things to make ready for the parade, and every year we wind up doing something completely unrelated to that list, and then scramble at the last minute to complete everything we originally intended to do. (Sometimes this is entirely my doing, but sometimes we are co-conspirators), This year, we decided to re-arrange the office around a new shelving unit, which meant moving a heavy three-drawer file cabinet and two bulky flat files to the other side of the office.
Preceding any completion of housework, I filled up the Scout Saturday morning with a final load of yard waste and construction debris and narrowly skirted self-immolation courtesy of a leaky gas tank (more on that here). Once that drama was over, we continued cleaning around the house until the girl awoke from her nap, and then it was time to run to the IKEA in White Marsh to purchase a shelving unit. Finn was content to bounce around in the backpack for one half of the trip, and then she rode in the cart through the Marketplace, flirting with the other customers and making friends while we browsed the as-is section and wrestled 150 lbs. of shelf onto a dolly.
Once home, we put her to bed and grilled some kabobs before doing battle with the allen wrench. We (well, I) failed to properly read the assembly directions for the shelves and made an hour’s worth of work into three. Sorry, Jen.
Sunday morning, after making some adjustments and leveling off the unit, we filled the shelves with three tons of printed material previously stored in various areas around the house, thus consolidating 90% of our design resources in one place.
I then cut a leftover piece of sanded birch plywood down and made a custom tabletop for the flat files with a beveled edge.
Sunday afternoon we were invited to a family crab feast (thanks, guys!), and Finn played happily on the floor while we got elbow-deep in Old Bay and Harpoon Summer Ale. I would share pictures here, but they came out all blurry.
…about the 1/2 of snow crippling the greater Baltimore area this morning is that it has confirmed a suspicion of mine about the lack of insulation in our porch ceiling. I originally put R-19 up there, thinking it would be plenty for the application, but as my lovely bride will tell you, it’s fucking freezing out there. The radiators do in fact heat the space up, but all warmth dissipates within about 20 minutes or so, making it useless for an all-season office (we’re currently using the dining room table).
This morning I peeked out the front bedroom windows and noticed the snow melting on the porch roof directly over the office area, which tells me I need at least another layer of R-19 over top of the existing insulation to keep that warmth in. Which means I’ve got to find a way to get up in there that doesn’t involve carving a hole in the drywall or using a shrink ray. Fortunately, I’ve got fresh freelance checks in my back pocket and there’s a sale on insulation at the H-D this week.
I spent all the free time I had this weekend kneeling in the ice room beneath the office building kneewalls for insulation. The idea is to add R-14 along the exposed sections of outside wall in an attempt to retain as much heat as possible, while keeping costs as low as possible.
Firstly, I had to seal up the lousy masonry with hydraulic cement, making sure everything is air and water-tight. Hydraulic cement is interesting stuff; it hardens in minutes, so it’s best to apply with nothing more than gloves. Imagine mixing small batches of oatmeal and then smearing it all over the wall before it turns to stone.
Once that was done, I started constructing the frames. For a grand total of around $60, I got two 12′ lengths of wall completed this afternoon, with two more left to do.
Additionally, because it seems to be the only window in the whole house with a correctly sized, in-stock premade replacement, I ripped the ancient, original hopper window out and installed a new one. I’ve been paranoid about this particular window since we moved in, because it’s semi-visible from the road and looked about as secure as a convertible with the top down. For $120, we got a vinyl dual-pane slider with a low U rating that fit almost perfectly. I find that these projects get easier and quicker as I do them; this one took about two hours minus a trip for pressure-treated lumber. Eventually, I’ll order three more for the rear and replace them as well.
After the basement section is done, I’m most likely going to have to crawl up into the attic above the porch ceiling and add another layer there as well. I’m really looking forward to that.
After two days of all-out work, I’ve got the porch very close to completion. The baseboards, toe molding, and finish molding are all in and painted. Network drops are wired and ready. Jen picked out a beautiful Pratt-Lambert light gray for the walls, which keeps the room light, neutral, and accents the bright white woodwork. The only things that remain are the drywall above the door to the bathroom, which needs to be primed and painted, and areas around the switchplates which need to be sanded, primed and painted.
There is a little touch-up to be done with the color here and there, but I’ll wait until the other stuff is ready to go.
Two new doors were delivered yesterday while I was painting trim, and my excitement got the better of me. So I put one of them in last night and covered up the hole above it. This evening I’m going to try and get the last of the woodworking done (baseboards and door molding) so that we can get some paint on the walls.