Sorting out the bumps in Bumpkin's room

We've only got one sloping ceiling panel left to do! We spent the day doing a jigsaw of pieces of drywall, trying to get all the power outlets and light switches in the right places. Very time consuming, and surprisingly difficult compared to yesterday's easy 'wins'. We bought a medium sized tub of ready mixed 'drywall compound' (Canada's way of saying 'plaster' - too hard eh?), which we've used about half of already filling over the screw heads, and some of the gaps. I suspect we'll need another tub before we finish the room. I think the bigger tub next time considering this is the first room in the house we've got anywhere near finished.



Tomorrow we've got the electrician's back in hopefully to finish the upstairs. We'll try and work around them. It would be nice to get as much done in the nursery as possible before our weekend off. Yes - a whole weekend off.

Footnote

Err - not entirely a weekend without DIY. Technically we've not picked up any tools, nor done any work at the house. However we did spend several hours in Home Depot and Renovators Resource buying bits for the house. Does that count?

More on the Nursery

We've had a really good, successful day. We started on the wall with the insulation on it. I've cut the left hand board a little narrow which we're going to be to fix later. The board on the right was better, even with the angle cut out of it. That angle cut has been very handy. The line follows down into that right hand corner so we will be able to cut out a square section for that corner. It is also of course a mirror for the opposite wall, which made cutting that board far easier and took out some of the guess work.

The side walls were very easy. The boards are 4ft by 8ft. The left hand wall was slightly larger than 8ft by 8ft. The right hand wall is 8ft by 4ft.

The only complications arose from the wall sockets the electricians had put on the studs, and that none of the walls are quite straight. The first board we put up, we'd completely forgotten the box and we'd made a little bit of a mess trying to find it after we'd screwed it to the wall. We learnt from that mistake and measured up the other boxes. We've still got the last wall to do with the door in it, and filling in the wall with the window in it.

The Nursery continued

With the electricians now finished in the nursery (although not live so we've got no light in there yet), so we've started work insulating and drywalling the room. There were no noggins at the top of the exterior wall, so I added some to prevent air flow through the very top, and sprayed in expanding foam to fill the spaces around to create a more air tight space.

Wikipedia's comments on vapour barrier in construction



Each stud has a bead of vapour retardant adhesive to prevent vapour spreading sideways across the stud once the drywall is in place. I've made a bit of a mess at the top in the middle. The vapour retarder in the first tube ran out, and I only had one tube. When I went to the hardware store they only had larger diameter tubes, which are far harder to use because a greater pressure is needed to get the gunk out. So I was struggling for about 30 seconds with both hands before it would come out - and then it wouldn't stop.

I also got to use my new 'toy' - a compressor and nail gun. Compressors are incredibly powerful. A 6 page manual, consisting of four pages of warnings and two pages of how to use it. Set the tank to 60 PSI, and the inch and a half long staples went into the wooden stud like a hot knife through butter. Much more than that and the end of the hoop would get buried below the surface of the wood and would tear right through the vapour barrier. It comes with a pressure regulator built in to keep it at the right operating range, so although the 2 gallon tank is at 100 PSI, the staple gun is only using 60. When the pressure in the tank drops too low, the compressor kicks in and charges the tank. These compressors are also useful for pumping tyres and sports balls. With the right equipment, you can spray paint too.

Whilst I've been insulating the exterior wall, my wife has been working out the best way to remove the paint from the old wooden window frames. The paint is in a poor state, suffering from age, sun light and damp. Trying just the paint stripper was ineffective and would have turned out to be very expensive if we did the whole house. However using the heat gun to remove the outer layers, followed by the paint stripper got almost back to the wood. The putty round the glass was in a state too, about half had fallen off, but for the most part the rest is still very sound.

In the mean time, the cat inspects the works so far:

Preparing the kitchen

The plaster at the back of the cooker was peeling off the wall in chunks. So we've stripped it back to the studs, and we're going to put up a vapour barrier and water resistant plaster board (also known as gyprock, or drywall) over that wall. We also need to repair the ceiling as that's where the chimney was.

I'll also get to use one of my new tools - a compressor and nail gun. This very scary piece of kit is noisy but should make stapling the vapour barrier very quick. The instruction manual reads more like a "How not to use this tool" than an instruction manual.

28 dollars + tax bet

We were getting rust coloured water through the hot water system since we moved in. After a little research, we discovered that North America tends to use steel in their electric water heaters. To prevent them from rusting, they use a sacrificial anode. However, as the name suggests, the anode is destroyed in the process.

A new anode was $28 (+tax), and took us the best part of an hour to replace. Turns out it was pretty easy. We turned off the cold water into the hot water heater. I was a little worried that this was going to be a problem - most things in the house have been so badly maintained I didn't think I was going to be able to turn the tap at all, but it was fine. This stops the water pressure from pushing hot water round the system. Leaving the hot water taps upstairs open, we opened the draining tap at the bottom of the tank, draining a lot of the water from the tank down a hose pipe and into the street. The water was cold as we'd poured a bath before starting. The anode was surprisingly easy to take out - you can see it next to the replacement anode in the photo:

The red box highlights the old anode, the blue is the new anode all shiny and new.

After we'd replaced the new one, and filled the tank again, we ran the hot water tap - and ended up with copper coloured water. After about half an hour it was running clean.

I bet tomorrow I'll be able to take a bath in non-rust coloured water.

Oops

Well I lost the bet. I disconnected the wrong thing in the basement, so the heater was still powered when I drained the tank. This popped the heating element. We ended up getting a plumber in. Turns out the tank has two heating elements, the lower one had already failed, so it was generating enough heat to give us most of a bath of hot water. Now we've got two elements, a new anode and very very hot water - and after a couple of days it's coming through almost clear.

The new kitchen

With only a short time to go before the sale ends at one of the local hardware stores, we decided to go for a new kitchen. The current kitchen has very little worktop space. It's going to need a major reorganisation. The cooker needs moving over a little to allow for some work space on both sides. To do that we've got to move the water heater, which is in a silly place anyway. So we're going to move it under the stairs on the other side of the room, which is currently occupied by the fridge. We inherited a fairly old fridge with the house but as with all North American fridges it's enormous. So we're moving it into the pantry. There was a big ice box in the corner of the room. We took most of this afternoon to rip it out. It was made of four lays of inch thick wood, nailed and screwed from several different directions. Well constructed, and very difficult to shift. We've damaged a lot of the wood and for the most part it's not going to be usable for anything else - which is a shame as there was no signs of rot. We also took out another of the worktops in the pantry so we can put a dishwasher opposite the fridge. That will tie in nicely with the waste and water from the sink on the other side of the door into the pantry. Now all I've got to do is see if I can take up the floor without doing too much damage to it. But that's for another day.

The mudroom, and half bath

At the back of the house is a small extension, which used to be used as a summer kitchen. There was a wood burning cooker at the back, and a sink. The cooker also used to heat water in a tall tank. However, at some point the water to the kitchen was cut off. Having done some investigations, it seems that the waste pipe is also blocked. A little more research also revealed a large body of water in the foundations of the kitchen. We've had four days of very heavy rain, and we've seen a lot of it end up in our basement, and this body of water under the summer kitchen seems to be the source. We've begun pumping the water out of the foundation and we'll see what happens there. The floor in the kitchen is very solid, and bringing that up to work underneath is going to be difficult. The next few days will be interesting.

In other news, the electrician should be coming back tomorrow and help us start work on the electrics in the nursery. I imagine he'll disconnect the old power, and show me how to install the ring necessary for the lights in there, and the one or two sockets we'll end up with.

The Nursery

We need to get the nursery up to scratch soon. Most of the plaster on the walls and ceiling is peeling off the wall, so we've started to remove the plaster off the lathe with a view to putting it back once we're done.



Not bad for an hour and a half or so's work.

More destruction

Having removed some of the plaster, we looked at the way the roof ran inside the house, and realised that there was a big chunk of space taken out of one side. Having decided that we were going to 'gyprock' (plaster board to those in the UK) the room, we went to investigate inside. You'll see timbers in the photos that are clearly original to the house - including some of the bark from the trees they came from. Possibilities here include:

• Removing the timbers: Very very unlikely as they are holding up the roof
• Putting new gyprock over the timbers: Less likely as we don't gain much by doing so
• Trying to utilise the space in some way - perhaps leaving the timbers exposed: Much more likely as it gives us some space, and creates a feature for an otherwise small room.

In the mean time we're removing the rest of the lathe. We're trying to keep as much of it as we can so we can utilise it elsewhere in the house. Photos of the new destruction to follow.



Today we finish removing the lathe from the walls, and clean up ready for the when the electrician comes in to replace the power in there. After that, we'll insulate the exterior walls, and then 'gyprock' (plasterboard to you and I) the walls and we'll have our nursery back!

Deconstructing a chimney

So far, so good. We've got it down from below the attic and down to the level of the floor in the bathroom. The pictographic story so far:



As you can see from the photos - we've finished. Tomorrow the clean up begins. We've had to temporarily nailed some board over the holes in the wall to stop the cat from infiltrating the space between the floors. Probably looking for mice, or just being a curious cat. She's good at that!