Procrastinet

"Towards a 2BR" Part VI: Hello Water My Old Friend

filed under: Demolishments and Renewvations

Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

No god DAMNIT no! We were supposed to be in the clear! A full year since the basement was waterproofed, and a very wet year at that, without a drop of untoward water. The sinking, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time a thunderstorm was predicted had finally faded. The fact that 1/3 of our livable square footage is downstairs no longer felt like a constant liability.

Friday afternoon, under the tender lavishments of the remnants of Tropical Storm Cindy, our basement flooded.

Tragic enough that we still have a flooding problem. Worse, it happened during the bedroom renovation, with all of our bedroom furniture (not to mention us when we sleep) downstairs, so to pick up the carpet tiles and suck out the water I had to move TWO ROOMS' WORTH of furniture. Read it and weep:

More kvetching and wailing, plus the actual bedroom update, below...

On the upside, modest though it is: my waterproofing actually held. Water was *not* coming in through our walls. Water was, on the other hand, coming in - no, sheeting in, sluicing in - from the BASE of the wall we share with the building next door, at floor level. Which means, fairly unequivocally, that water was standing in the basement next door, up against the shared wall, and running down into our side.

So while I do have to figure out who owns/runs/is responsible for the building next door, and how to get them to remediate their basement flooding (it's an empty raw basement over there), at least all my work last summer wasn't for absolutely nothing. Just, you know, MOSTLY nothing.

Figuring out that the problem is next door makes a lot of things make sense: why there was no intermediary dampness, just dryness or a dozens-of-gallons flood. It has to pool next door to the point where it can make it through the wall. But once it does, it comes rolling on through as quickly as I can vacuum it out.

Back to the bedroom project: at some point over the weekend I would have probably noticed that my timetable was unrealistic anyway. But then I lost Friday to the deluge, and hence didn't do the plumbing. Then a good bit of Saturday was spent rotating carpet tiles outside into the sun to dry out:

So all in all the schedule has been utterly blown.

I realize, in the project timeline, that Friday was Day 13. Uh huh. A little self-manufactured Friday the 13th.

Day 14, Saturday: Went to buy drywall at Lowe's, and overloaded our poor car to a piteous extent. It doesn't look all *that* bad in the picture, but keep in mind that each sheet of drywall weighs approximately 32.7 tons:

Astoundingly, that's only half of the drywall I needed - but I was worried about trashing poor Cassie's suspension, as I'm fairly sure you're supposed to be able to see the top of her tire in the wheel well:

I set about re-doing the plumbing of the baseboards, taking more care this time and - this is key - remembering to solder from the OPPOSITE side from where the heat was applied. Once the far side is hot enough to melt the solder, you know the WHOLE PIPE is hot enough, to which everyone who knows how to solder pipe will give me a resounding "NO SHIT DUMBBUTT."

A couple of the joints were taking the solder strangely, which I think had something to do with too much flux or some such rookie mistake. Still emotionally bruised from the flood, depressed at the ruination of my schedule, and grimly aware of how long it would take to rip all the plumbing out and do it all AGAIN, I went to have the water turned back on.

The pipes gurgled and whooshed, as the water filled the system and got closer and closer to my new work. I tried to maintain a zen state of acceptance, largely because I wasn't optimistic that the new joints would hold. Finally, the water reached the bedroom pipes, and with a resounding woosh they filled and pressurized.

And the joints held.

Well, okay, one leaked. But you know what? I'm going to hit that with some heavy duty marine grade epoxy and CALL IT EVEN. Shhh. Don't tell. So for all intents and purposes: THE JOINTS HELD MUTHAFUGGA THE JOINTS HELD!

It was a rough day - I have to take my triumph where I can.

I got started on the drywall and roughed in the first part of our closet before having to clean up for Jeff's bachelor party (soon to be its own, booby-filled blog post):

Day 15, Sunday: Got home from the bachelor party at 4:30am, with the makings of a fearsome and multifarious hangover. At 9am Lisa woke me to remind me that she was taking Max to Nana's for a cookout, so if I needed the car I had to go right then. Ohdearjesus.

So off, barely conscious, to Lowe's, for another ten (TEN!) sheets of drywall, plus our pre-hung pine slab doors. Heavy. Sad. Headache. Body hurting.

Behind schedule already, so right to work, somehow convinced that I could catch up if I just kept working. Didn't help that every time I bent down to pick something up I felt like I was going to faint. Got the closet fully drywalled which took frickin' FOREVER because you have to do every little surface, like the back of the top of the door opening, and each annoying little piece has to be measured, scored, cut, rasped, and screwed in place.

During lunch I made an astonishingly optimistic list of how I would finish the drywalling all in one day: I would frame the rough door openings with wood, install the foyer switch box, rough wire all the boxes, patch the drywall next to the doors, drywall the soffet, insulate the soffet and foyer, insulate Max's wall, drywall Max's wall, clear the pile of scrap wood from our room (by chopping it up and bagging it), insulate our back wall, drywall our back wall, and drywall the dozen little holes I've cut to plumb or run electrical. Oh and then frame and install the doors.

Um, yeah, no.

I got some of it done, though: the door openings and swtich box, and I insulated Max's wall with sound attenuating fiberglass:

And then covered it with the first of two layers of 1/2" drywall. Hopefully with all that soundproofing Max will never have to deal with the Freudian nightmare of hearing his parents, um, talking.

I knew it was time to stop when I tried to put the top run of drywall in place (7 feet in the air) - which is always fun to try alone. I roughed in a piece of scrap to rest it on, but one end was about 1/4" too high, so it wasn't really supported. I held it tenuously in place while climbing back down the ladder, somehow convinced I could do something about it from below.

Looking up, I realized that I hadn't secured the sheet at the top. Which means it was free to fall away from the wall. Which it did.

Seeing a 4' x 6'3" piece of drywall loom over your head like a breaking wave should probably inspire some fear or panic in a moderately rational person. I conclude I was no longer in a rational state, because all I thought was "huh."

The panel hit the ladder above me and shattered, draping around it like icing on a cupcake, but left me alone. I guess it thought I had been through enough already that weekend.

So I didn't get the drywalling done yesterday. Realistically, I'm not going to get the drywalling finished tonight. It's possible it won't be done tomorrow night either. Plus I have to re-install all the basement carpeting we removed to dry and put the furniture back, so that we can stop living in a basement that resembles the warehouse they hide the ark in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

There's an expression that they used in Deadwood last season, which I'll paraphrase from memory: "To hear God's laughter, make a plan." In my hubris, I made a plan, and a schedule, and printed them on the internets for all to see.

And got myself smote.

(Cue the Procrastimom explaining how this cynical and superstitious take on things is bound up in outmoded Judeo-Christian paradigms of a non-abundant universe that doesn't wish us to succeed.)

Posted by rjt at July 11, 2005 11:46 AM