Al B's House rework

[AlanB]

So, this weekend, we worked on installing the kitchen cabinets / countertops.
Hanna put all the shoe moulding back in the bedrooms and hallway.

The German Mafia came out and put the cleaning on the house this weekend. Windows, floors, ceiling fans, all the nooks and crannies got a scrub brush applied.

I fought with the countertops more then I would care to admit. Been 17 years now since I worked in that business..... Made me feel old. Having to do stuff with homeowner sized tools was an awakening again. Had to think a couple times about how we did some things etc. etc.

The German Mafia was meeting at the old house this morning, to start hauling stuff too the new house. Looks like it is happening.

All the appliances showed up. $3K worth of fridge, stove, dishwasher....

Got the double oven stove. What a pain to mount the electric. Had to put it in the wall to have clearance. Took me three hours and a phone call to Mack (master electrician buddy) Who when I said, "Hanna bought one of those double ovens" he replied, yep, hits the outlet when you push it in, have to mount them in the wall, it does not matter what the instructions say.

Wish I had called earlier...

 

[rox]

Alan,

One thing I enjoy about reading your posts is your sense of humor. i cna't tell you how many chuckels you have given me over ehre in Provence. Thanks for sharing. Are you going to be selling the other house then/

 

[AlanB]

Thanks Rox,
We will sell the other house when we can, we currently have a FSBO sign up out front, but really everyone that calls want's us to owner finance... I call that Renting and they don't own the house at the end, I do...

Unfortunately, what is going to happen, is I am going to drag along so slowly that "the Division" (for those of you that do not know me, that is the 101st Airborne division Air Assualt of the US Army, hoooah) will be deployed back to Iraq by the time I get ready to sell, which will put the housing market in a less then positive light. We will more than likely end up renting till the division returns and the housing market turns up a notch again.

So, I have not been posting much, but we have been hitting a good lick at it pretty steady. I think I will call this project a wrap come labor day. Then it will just be a matter of completing the never ending task list of details that abound around my place.

So this weekend we did the following.

Loaded truck, tractor, box blade, new rototiller (buddy Jim bought it) and the pallet handler onto the big trailer to bring out to Jim's place. We played with the tiller driveline to get it working, had to add in an ORC to get the drive long enough. Hauled it out to Jim's hunting area, unloaded, tilled a bit then came home. (4 hours)

Sat just made up my mind to do something with the drain plumbing for the clothes washer and the basement sink. I cannot get it all correct in my mind, so just decided I was doing something. Even if wrong, it will give me a basis to correct from. So I ran that drain pipe, got it all hooked up. One morning trip to Lowes for pieces, should have known I made a mistake as it was only $99.37..... Got to make that $100 a day average, so I knew I was heading back for whatever it was I forgot. Also picked up a mirror for the bathroom sink finally.

Got to looking and the bottom of the drain, would be about in line with the bottom of the sink in the basement. Not good when it comes to drain lines..... Soooooo, decided to raise the cabinet up on 2X4's but had used up the PT ones.... Oh, there we go, that will be the trip back to Lowes.

Detoured and went over and changed the bathroom sink drain line out too the cast main line. It was clogged with 40 years accumulation of hair and soap and goo and would not drain well. After having gained experience with the rubber inserts and removing the lead packing on the kitchen drains, this one was a piece of cake. Cut out all the 1.5 Galv pipe, and replaced with 1.5 PVC. Rubber insert bushing where it goes into the CI bell. Went slick, and easy. Now the bathroom sink you can turn on both faucets wide open and the water all just drains away. Nice.

Then we mounted the bathroom mirror. it is hanging on these two hanger things, it is a 24 X 36 oval with a palm leaf design that Hanna liked. I turned that thing left right and up and down and never have felt like it is "centered"

Seems to be working but I may go back and mount it with conventianal clips.

Went under the sink and made hangers and straps to hold up the dishwasher lines at the back and too the top of the cabinet. I did not go with an air gap, but want it high to avoid back flow. I hate working under the cabinets by the way. I am not exactly a small guy and me in a kitchen cabinet adds up too no fun.

Went to Lowes and spent another $100....

So Sunday was to be a bit of a quiet day, Started early and went and picked up the tractor, tiller etc. from Jim's property. Tilled a bit myself, and Jim had tilled about 1 acre of ground from bare ground.... Wallace equipment tillers (we have a 962) similar to a KK gets my knod of approval. I tilled up an area he wanted done Sunday morning. I was digging up basketball sized rocks and getting them stuck in the tiller........ Man what a commotion. The slip clutch got a work out, and Jim suffered from Heat exhaustion doing all he did.

Anyway, on the way back home, called and scheduled with Mark to come out by the house, and we would look at the AC check running pressures etc. as it is now plenty hot out to evaluate the unit...... Been about 97 daily with no rain.

We got back and unloaded the tractor etc. and took a break, then started in on the frame for the basement counter / sink. Got it about built when Mark and Sherry came over. We did the tour around thing with Sherry and then Mark and I started on the AC unit. Unfortunately my low pressure side is too low, and my high is too high....... NOT a good sign. Probably a partial blockage. The unit is clean, so probably an internal block.... It is not a matched unit and that could be part of the problem, and I have no idea of the service history and who and how good they were that installed and serviced the unit................. Soooooooooooooooooo we are going to evacuate the system and blow it out with nitrogen, put in a reciever dryer and recharge the system and see what we get. Hopefully it will settle it out, if not, time for a new heat pump unit..................

So we had some nice lunch that Hanna cooked in her shiny new double oven......

And then Mark helped me roll the cabinets back on their new bases.

So then Hanni came back from Germany, so she came over for a visit. So we all went down and moved the cabinets into place and started attaching the countertop etc. etc. glued in the last of my PVC drain lines on that run, drilled the holes in the cabinet to pass the plumbing through etc.

Then Doug came over and we looked at a hitch on his new little Miata that he had just bought. Neat car, but I do not think they rate those things by hauling capacity............. So we sat down and cut apart this carrier thing to go on the back and re-worked the angles of the dangles and made it so it all sat "level" when installed in the downward sloping hitch of the Miata. It came out pretty well all in all, little tweaking here and there, but it all fit in the end.

Then we hooked up supply lines to the basement sink, this is the original kitchen sink and original faucets and all that came with the house. I should have known better, but I turned the water supply on and of course that POS started leaking everywhere........ Go figure, expecitng something from this house to work So, off we went to Wally World.... Lowes was closed, and picked up a new kitchen faucet set, and coffee so I could survive this morning, and back home we went.

At that point, I pretty much ran out of steam, read a book for a bit so my daughter and I could talk about it (the Great Gatsby) it is her summer reading project for Honors English, and her evaluation was something along the lines of "that book sucked" I think I am two chapters in, and pretty much must agree.....

Life is great....

16 years with my company today..... So another 4 weeks vacation is on the books

The kids and better half are healthy, Hanna is working doing 10 yds of mulch or so today.... The bills are mostly paid......

At some point, it is about as good as it gets.

Been living at the house now 2 weeks and it pretty consistently takes 30 minutes to get to work. It will probably get worse next week when school starts, but it is better then I thought.

Life is good as Harv would say.

 

[AlanB]

Well in the latest installement of "why did I buy this house?"

For the record it has been the driest and I believe one of the hottest summers in something like over 100 years.......

So the AC gave up the ghost. Low pressure too low, and high too high,,,, That, is not good.

So, we flushed, inspected put in a dryer / filter and it is still bad...

Probably clogged system somewhere down the line, or valves on the compressor, but either way, this 16 year old system is going to be out of there soon.

So tonight, and probably this weekends projects will involve putting in a new package heat pump unit I guess..... Yeah, that is what I wanted to do

Did get the basement sink faucet replaced and the washer and dryer all hooked up and operational.

Probably sleep back at the old house so we have AC tonight. It has been up over 100 f for the past two weeks or so... it is just miserable hot at the moment.

Party at the house for those that would like to come. 2 Sep 07. 11 am or later. Burgers and what not.

 

[AlanB]

Well, got the new heat pump in, got the ducts all in, not insulated the hard ducts yet.

Leveled the little pad for the unit, poured a little bridge pad between the unit pad and the house so the ducts would have a nice and happy home.

Redid several of the ducts going from a split unit to a package unit. I feel a package being all factory sealed will be more reliable over time.

Re-arranged my electrical box, put in a 60 amp service for the emergency heat, put in a 30 and a 60 service disconnect outside (go figure, they did not have one before)

Had some special goofy ducts made up, an 8 X 16 to 14" round with a 12" drop in it......

So, now all I need to make is the dog house, (for the ducts) and finish inuslating the ducts, and my AC will be done.

We slept the last several days in the old house as the temps were up at 100, but last night we were able to sleep in the new house, which is great.

Life is good, next big system to go wrong is septic

 

[AlanB]

All right folks, coming to the end of this adventure, and embarking on the next

The Big party is this Sunday, Skeet shooting, Backhoe driving, tractor driving, Motorcycle riding and Beer drinking....................... Hopefully in that order

God there is a redneck story in this,,,, Here, hold my beer and the shotgun while I drive the backhoe....... maybe Jeff Foxworthy will come hang out.

Anyway,,,,,, So I got the dog house built,, only one good slice acrosss my pinky but it was enough to christen the sheetmetal work with blood...... Yeah, go figure.. Anyway, got Mark's blessing on it and I think it came out OK. Couple things I would do different, faster better if I had it too do over, but what the heck...

So Hanna's freind Anette is flying in from Washington state with her son Nelson for the party, and staying with us, cool, And Ryan and Adrianna, and their two girls are coming in from Louisville Sat night to stay with us.... Cool,,,, So can you say 10 folks living in an 1100 square foot house with one bathroom, 6 of them ladies....................

So about that Septic system

When I realized what was happening, I got on the phone and started calling, got a reccomendation from the folks I normally use but they do not do "uncovers" on septics.

Called the guy, he said he would be out at 1300. Toooooooo Cool.

So he shows up, the tank exact location is a bit of a mystery to me, and looks at the out pipe, say's he is a 4th generation Turd Herder and will have no problem finding the tank. Looks how deep the outflow pipe is, then looks at me and say's "You did say you had a backhoe available right?" and then say's go get it.

Paces off from the house, points to a spot and says dig there. Dug down about 3' with Lil the village queen (for those of you that know the rhyme you are laughing, and those that don't you can only hear it at the adult hour of the party ) and tapped the top of the tank.

He stares at the top of the concrete for a second, I really do not understand what he is seeing, looks like concrete to me, but he backs up a foot and say's dig here, Couple scoops to get too depth, he starts hollering while I am at the bottom, he sticks his shovel in the hole, and I lift the top off with Lil.

We suck it out, and it was definetely past due.. The bottom stuff was actually dried up and we had to keep adding water to make it liquid. He guessed it had never been pumped. We got about 85% and I will go back and pump it again in a year and hopefully the bottom will be back to soupy nasty liquid that we can pump.

I have to add a baffle to the outflow to protect my drain field,,, Oh what fun.

But, it seems to have gone well all in all, the septic is empty so I do not have the fears of stuff backing up this weekend

So if you are in the area, and would like to come to the housewarming party... COME ON!

Sun, 2 Sep 07 11am on, PM me for directions if needed.

Been a while since we have had a good bash, and this should be a doozy. Lets just hope I am not writing about it in the Safety forum next week

 

[AlanB]

Well, here we are almost a year after we first learned we were loosing our rental property, and the great house hunt began. Certainly in some ways, time has whizzed by, while in others it has just dragged.

All in all, things have gone well. Everyone is still healthy, with relatively few injuries this past year, and all of them minor.

We have made great progress on flipping of two houses, maintained a full time job, maintained a lawncare and landscaping business, and we have all kept our sanity for the most part.

We have had some great parties, found some new pleasureable activities, and met some new freinds. We have developed many skills, refined some old skills, and learned lots of new things along the way, even some things we learned we should not have done.

The new house is liveable, but yet far from done, and the old house is almost flipped, we expect to have it by Jan, of course one of the biggest lessons we have learned is to pay no attention to my timeline estimates.......

So we did aluminum trim and vinyl soffits on both houses, 5" continuous gutter on the old house, and 6" on the new that needs to be cleaned already

We cut down a large tree that turned out was a good thing, it dropped a large branch ruining the trunk of a freinds car, then dropped an even larger branch across the roof of our truck to the tune of about $4K worth of damage.

We are steadily hacking away at clearing land and cleaning up, we make pretty regular dump runs with the dump trailer from both houses.

All in all, it has worked out real well. The kids are settling into the new schools, I am dancing with the school transportation board but we are settling in to the location, and the community, it feels like home at this point.

There is a ton more work to do, and I doubt I will ever see it all "done" but we are steadily progressing and working towards our goal. As I like to say, we are eating the elephant, one bite at a time.

So, lets post a couple pictures.

Well, lets not, changed cameras again, and now have to figure out how to resize them all. Oh joy

 

[EddieWalker]

Alan,

I've really enjoyed your posts. You have a fun way of describing what you are doing and how you accomplish those tasks. It's especially fun for me as you sometimes take a different aproach then I would have thought of.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn, but as long as you keep at it, you will always accomplish what you set out to do!!!!

I'm looking forward to seeing your pics,
Eddie

 

[AlanB]

Lets see if this works, funny what you can learn if you read the instructions and tutorials... I figured that freaking $800 or whatever ungodly amount of money I paid for it photo program (Adobe Photoshop) should be able to resize these things, now to see what they look like.

Hey, at least on my computer that worked well.

So Let me go and add some more..

This is the SECOND (it would not be the house of do it again otherwise )
side door I put in. Hanna wanted a bigger window, and this one really is cool. I took the original door I had put in here, and put it in the old house garage where a door had to be replaced, so no financial loss.

For those of you that have not followed along on the boring saga, this was a brick wall when I started.

 

[AlanB]

Allright, I think I have this figured out a bit,,, yeah, right.

Anyway, I am typing away on the Wildblue.net connection, not as good as the DSL that we had at the old house, but certainly far better then the dialup we had here when we started.

So here is the "killer" tree in the front yard, it dropped a large branch on top of a freinds trunk of her car Then, we had tornadoes and such in the area, Hanna (my DW) say's "Honey, why don't you park over there out from under the tree's" I say,, Nahhhhhhh (it's raining) all the bad stuff has blown over..... You know where this is going right. Soooooo bout 10 that night, the storm picks up, Hanna opens that new side door there, about 20' in front of the white truck, uh,,, lets see, about the time the 35' branch comes falling 60' out of the top of that tree on top of the white truck It landed on the roof and hood of the truck and blew out the windshield........ Hanna was a bit And I was more then a bit And lets see, the truck insurance was out about $4K

So,,, We got buddy Joey to come out and cut the tree...... I actually saw Joey get excited, after he sent the climber up to rope the tree, and the climber was walking the rope to the truck, Joey started cutting (20" bar Stihl for those interested) cutting backwards, and having his climber watch the remaining widowmaker that had not fallen yet.... And the tree starts rocking back towards the house................

Joey Say's, hey,,,, can you go ahead and get that line hooked up before this thing falls on his house................

Anyway, here is the tree, oh, and to keep on the tractor part, My daughter drove the 1925 NH while I cut up the small stuff and threw it in the bucket

Oh and on 167 that is a water bottle in the middle of the stump I threw down for scale.