Procrastinet

Basement Chronicles Part XXXVIII: The Professionals

If any readers are unfamiliar with the basement saga, click the "Demolishments and Renewvations" category, read 'em, and weep. We finally gave in and, for the first time, I had contractors come in. They dug a "french drain" (actually a "hydraulic pressure relief trench") around the perimeter of the basement - a one foot wide/one foot deep trench, filled with gravel, with a pipe up the middle to collect water and channel it to a sump pump. It took them all of three hours (amazing!). Now we just have to assume it will work...

It did mean emptying our friggin' basement. AGAIN. Which left the upstairs and the stairwell pretty packed:

I sealed up the stairwell from the rest of the house, because they had to jackhammer through the slab:

If anyone ever offers you the chance to have dudes operating a jackhammer IN YOUR APARTMENT, I'd suggest you go ahead and pass it up. It's frackin' nerve-wracking.

Anyway, here's the trench, already concreted, and the sump pit:

There's a 1.5" gap between the wall where the real problem was and the new concrete, leaving an opening for any water that gets in to drain straight into the trench. The gravel is still visible through it, which makes for an interesting room border. And for the first time in years, I'm actually HOPING for a heavy rain, so I can see if this sucker works... Of course, first I have to have a plumber actually hook the sump pump up to a DRAIN, since the crew wasn't qualified to do so (grrrr).

I will, you can be sure, keep faithful P'net readers posted...

KG and the Adventure of Attic

Got an email yesterday from long (long, long!) time P'net friend KG, about his "adventure" that day. It's best documented in photographs. Here's the set-up:

We recently discovered we have an attic. We knew there was a small crawlspace, entered through Keaton's room, but Ann discovered that if you go through the crawlspace it opens up into a large space that you can stand it. It has no floor, but somebody who used to live here put down boards over the rafters. Only some idiot laid down particle board in places instead of real wood.

And then the photo punchline:

The story continues:

I went in there for the first time today, and one of the particle boards snapped under my weight. Fortunately the garage door was open, and broke my fall. The downside is, we need to buy a new garage door. I imagine they aren't cheap. Still, how much would I pay to avoid breaking my leg or cracking my skull?

Here's the impromptu escape hatch that he accidentally designed into his attic:

And, because everything (yes, EVERYTHING!) can be LOL'ed, today he sent this along (which did, in fact, make me laugh right out loud):

For the whole saga, including his excellent captions and annotations to the images, plus the door once he and his wife coat-hanger-wired it back into place, check out his Flickr stream starting here.

The Nor'Easter of Aught Seven

So yes, as long time readers of Procrastinet will no doubt have already guessed, our basement did in fact flood this weekend under New York's record rainfall. Which provided the answer to several questions I didn't want answers to, to wit:

1) Wet/Dry ShopVacs can, in fact, run for uninterrupted stretches of 18 or more hours.

2) If "a pint weighs a pound the world around," a full 10-gallon ShopVac weighs upwards of 80 pounds.

3) Time it takes for a wife and toddler to make it to Lowe's and back with a second ShopVac when it becomes clear that the influx of water will soon exceed the capacity of the first ShopVac to remove it - :39. Nice work, hon.

4) Time it took for the influx of water to exceed the capacity of the ShopVac to remove it - :29.

5) Losing tactical ground to the water that is entering your basement, even for ten minutes, is stressful.

6) In a rainstorm of historical proportions, a Brooklyn building's basement can take on over a gallon per minute, filling a 10-gallon ShopVac every ten minutes.

7) The distance from the main point of leakage to the toilet is approximately 15 paces.

8) Carrying an 80 pound ShopVac fifteen paces to the toilet every ten minutes, overnight, is an excellent workout.

9) Vacuuming all night produces strange cognitive effects, like: talking to oneself at 4:00 am; addressing the water directly as if it were a cunning but respected enemy (think Civil War, when all the generals on each side had been at West Point together); the naming of ones "troops" (large and small ShopVacs) by strange monikers such as "Bitsy" or "Junior" (the small one) and "Champ" or "Old Rough'n'Ready" (the big one).

10) The constant white noise of two ShopVacs running uninterrupted for 18+ hours causes auditory hallucinations, creating the impression that someone is always calling your name and because of the noise you can just barely not hear it.

11) Looking up at 5:30am to see that what you had taken for an auditory hallucination is actually your 3-year-old son coming downstairs, of his own accord, to check on you and give you a hug and a kiss is awfully, awfully nice.

"Towards a 2BR" Part XI: The Return of Mouse Tut

Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

The more easily disgusted of my regular readers will no doubt remember, with a shudder, the discovery of a little mouse mummy in our ceiling. Procrastimom, in her commentary on that post, pointed out that it was "too bad it didn't come with teeny tiny jewels and daggers and the like, a la King Tut."

Well, here at Procrastinet, your wish is our command. So Mouse Tut has been returned to his rightful place in our ceiling, where he can continue to watch over us in years to come - but it seemed that to be truly rocking the High Pharaonic, he needed at least a headdress and sword.

One more picture, hidden after the jump to avoid offending the squeamish...

His Majesty got a bit dusty during the renovation process.

We're enjoying the idea that some day, years from now, someone will be renovating the bedroom or doing some demolition and this little crowned, be-daggered mouse mummy will come tumbling out, and they will be utterly confounded as to what he is or how he got there.

All hail Mouse Tut.

As far as an *actual* update on the bedroom, it'll have to wait until this weekend. Everything is painted, the "surprise design element" is in place, the ceiling fans are in, the new captain's bed and wicked expensive mattress have been delivered; but the closet organizer still has to be installed, the blinds for the window and storage loft have to go in, the baseboard heaters have to be reassembled, and the mirrored closet doors have to be put in.

I'm hoping that we move back upstairs on Saturday. Wish us luck.

"Towards a 2BR" Part X: Powder Coated

Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX

I haven't updated in over a week. Here's why:

Day 24, Monday: Finish 1st mud coat, Master Bedroom

Day 25, Tuesday: Sand 1st coat, start 2nd coat

Day 26, Wednesday: Finish 2nd coat

Day 27, Thursday: Sand 2nd coat, start 3rd coat

Day 28, Friday: Finish 3rd coat

Day 29, Saturday: Sand 3rd coat. Full clean-up of master bedroom. Master bedroom mudding complete! Move all tools/supplies from Max's bedroom to master bedroom.

Day 30, Sunday: Sand 1st coat, start 2nd coat, Max's bedroom.

Day 31, Monday: Finish 2nd coat.

Day 32, Tuesday: Sand 2nd coat, start 3rd coat.

I know! I know! Friggin SCINTILLATING, right?! I can't believe I wasn't posting every single day. Ooo, and the pictures! The stunning visual contrast between a picture of a wall with two coats of plaster on it against a picture of a wall with THREE coats.

I will say this about mudding and, more particularly, sanding during a massive week-long heat snap when you have to first bake a room dry with a rickety old dehumidifier and keep it sealed up and airless so the dust doesn't go everywhere else in the house which it does if you open a window: it sucks and I don't recommend it.

Here's why:

Yes, that plunging line on my t-shirt is the line above which my shirt is completely sweat-saturated. My dust mask, which I really should have replaced by now as I've been using it for this whole project plus probably the end of the basement project, gets soaked with breath-condensation and sweat, meaning I'm breathing a frothy aerosolized mixture of sweat, funkmouth, and gypsum dust. Plus, when the talc-like powder the sanding creates lands on sweaty skin, it re-constitutes itself into drywall plaster! Huzzah! So in the course of one steamy evening I can go from powder-coated to skim-coated. So smooth!

Composite pictures of the progress so far, plus the story of how I got seduced by a mattress salesman, after the jump...

The new closet/partition wall, from framing through final mud coat

The gaping wound from the old closet gets healed

Sloppy ceiling work? Hit it with mud!

The Mind-Control Psychology of Mattress Sales: A Very Long Story

I had never bought a mattress. Neither had Lisa. I've bought futons, and inherited mattresses from friends.

But we decided to upgrade to a queen-sized bed like real grownups (not that it's not fun trying to fit a sick or restless or sleepless baby/toddler into a full-sized bed with two adults, but... um, yeah, no, sorry, it *is* not fun...), which meant buying a new matress.

Costco carries a mattress/box spring set for about $499 for a queen. I knew we didn't want to just buy whatever mattress Costco had stacked on the shelves, but I sort of thought this meant we could spend, I don't know, maybe $600 for just a mattress. I consulted with PJ, and he announced blithely that "oh, you'll probably spend about a grand..."

"What?!" I shrieked. "No effing way. A THOUSAND DOLLARS for a friggin' mattress? Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?! Never in a million years."

Friday night, we saw that Sleepy's was having its "One Day Non-Specific Discount Level Probably Just a Marketing Ploy Sale" on Saturday. So when the 5th Avenue Sleepy's opened up at 10am, we were there.

Now, PJ had pointed out that, in their mattress shopping, they had classified Sleepy's as "no good." That said, they have the catchiest jingle in the history of jingles. And they were five blocks away.

The salesman who helped us was the most mattress salesman-y mattress salesman I can imagine. Just For Men'd hair, summer weight double-breasted suit, and a fetching moustache. Late middle age, probably been a mattress salesman for decades. His young partner, who sat at the desk and smirked, was the "slick/young" version, with his hair greased back in a way that made him look instantly untrustworthy - a questionable sales choice, I'd say, but he seemed to enjoy it.

I made it clear that our target price "doesn't have the word 'thousand' anywhere in it." Salesman showed us about six mattresses, hitting us with friendly combos of boilerplate mattress saleslanguage: "you spend more time on your bed than anything else you'll ever buy," "it's an investment you'll be using for at least the next ten years," and the like.

We ended up narrowing it down to three options: the Serta, which has the sheep; the Simmons, which has the individually-wrapped springs; and the Sleepy's house brand, which is cheap.

I should point out at this point that the "cheap" one was Seven Hunnid Dollaz. The Simmons came in one dollar under my One G Freakout Threshhold.

Salesdude left us alone to lie around on them for a while. Max was having the time of his life, tearing up and down the aisles of the deserted store, bouncing on mattresses, and running off with the clear plastic foot-schmutz-guards over his head.

Over the next 20 minutes, two things happened: 1) I figured out the "That's How They Get Ya" of mattress shopping; and 2) they got me.

You see, they make sure there really is a difference between the "cheap" mattresses and the expensive ones. They make sure of this by putting materials in the less expensive ones that is at least one level crappier than the materials in the one above it. By the time they're using only the stuff that's fit for people to sleep on, the mattress is a "Super Triple Solid Platinum" model that costs five grand.

There's the all-important cloth they put on the top, which you will feel in the store and then NEVER AGAIN EVER AGAIN EVER. In the cheap(er) mattresses, it's cloth. In the mid-range it's napped, sueded, high-thread-count cloth. In the high range it's distilled baby's ass.

Then there are color cues. The Simmons was wrapped in a classy ivory. The Sleepy's house brand was wrapped in sheeny, shiny, garish hotel-room grey.

Then there's the foam in the "pillow top." As Salesguy pointed out, "the Gold series has a higher grade of foam than the Silver."

Higher grade of foam? HIGHER GRADE OF FOAM?! We're talking about FOAM! The price differential between the crappiest hobo pad cheap ass Bangladeshi foam and the finest, thickest, hand-rolled executive Trump-approved luxury foam on the planet has to be about fifty-seven cents per acre. It's FOAM.

But 30 square feet of the stuff mysteriously adds $300 to the price of a mattress.

Sadly, the Sleepy's mattress, which Lisa was fine with and which was several hundred cheaper, didn't feel right to me. I think it might have had the wrong kind of foam.

So I was looking at the Simmons, and quite happy with it. Slowly, my head was wrapping itself around the notion of spending a grand for a mattress.

Then I did a very stupid thing.

"They keep the lower-grade models intentionally crappier," I thought, "and I'm already mostly resigned to spending a grand. So since I'm already spending a stupid amount of money on a mattress, how much stupider would the next level up be? And how much better would the mattress feel?"

So I went to the next Simmons over, the "Solid Gold" grade, and lay down on it.

It'll be delivered next Friday.

Yeah, so we spent more on it than I've spent on three different used cars I've bought (actually, we spent more on it than I've spent on any combination of two of those three cars).

And I bought the Teflon-coated mattress pad that he upsold me on, since it protects the mattress from a warranty-voiding stain. I openly declared "oh just put it in there, you've broken me, I'm a broken man." I looked at the young slimy guy, still sitting perfectly still behind his desk like he'd been when we walked in a half hour earlier, and his smirk deepened appreciably.

But you know. This is an investment we'll be using for the next ten years. And you spend more time on your bed than on anything else you'll ever buy.

And it's got a way, way nicer grade of foam.

"Towards a 2BR" Part IX: My Name Is Mud

Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII

I'm no longer talking about a timetable. Forget I ever said anything about a timetable. I am perfectly comfortable sleeping on a couch, and our basement is cool and (now) dry, and the bedrooms will be finished when the bedrooms are finished.

Good?

Good.

Day 21, Friday: Our bedroom door installed, along with the last scraps of drywall around the foyer. The door installation went swimmingly, with the slight exception of the strike plate having to be lowered a smidge for the door to latch. The door opens and closes so smoothly and snugly that I lose a good deal of time because I have to stop and pat myself on the back every time I go through it.

The completed foyer.

(The strangely shaped thingummy that looks like a tiny snowboard in the foyer? That's a 50" wingspan glider which I bought at Costco FOR MAX. It's FOR MAX. I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise. I mean, he didn't ask for it, or anything. Nor does he seem to understand what it is - YET. Not until we get it up and gliding at the park! What fun I'll he'll have then!)

Day 22, Saturday: Insulated the back wall. A joke: "Who's got two thumbs and would spend $37.95 extra to use styrofoam insulation rather than cut fiberglass into a dozen eleven-foot-long strips? THIS GUY!"

Anyway, it's such a pretty blue...

Plus the room was covered in a fetching drift of styrofoam shavings afterwards:

Christmas in July!

More after the jump...

Rounded out the day by drywalling the back wall and patching a bunch of the random holes - the ceiling around the fan mount, the walls around the switch box, etc.

Annoyingly, the whole wall where the closet used to be took a little over an hour to drywall - despite having irregular side cuts to deal with, and part of it being 11 feet in the air. The rest of the drywall patching, around the switchboxes and wall sconce boxes and ceiling fans? The whole rest of the day, and the next morning. Easily another five hours.

I'm all about visible results. It was, therefor, unspeakably frustrating to spend a bit over an hour doing something that made such a dramatic difference and then spend five+ hours doing something that Lisa didn't even notice until I pointed it out to her. Blah.

Little Fiddly Shit = Bane of My Existence

I did get a nice visit from The Inspector Of Buildings of My Own Woom:

Der Shirtless Kommandant

Day 23, Sunday: Finally, finally (finally) finished all the little dribs and drabs of drywalling and patching. Only a day (or, by the earlier schedule, a week and a day) behind schedule, which is why I'm no longer speaking of timetables thank you very much weren't you listening when I said so well why do you keep bringing it up then?!

Had a bit of help with the last patch, up on the ceiling in our room where the ceiling fan/ceiling sconce cables got passed through:

Me: Okay, buddy, it's five by five and five-eighths. Got it?

Max: Five! Eight! Five!

Max enjoyed the height very much, unfortunately meaning that he spent the rest of the day trying to climb the ladder. I was working on the ceiling in his room later when he came in, shut the door on Lisa, and announced loudly "I CLIMBING LADDER!"

Cleaned up the remnants of the drywall work, and broke for lunch. Upon my return, I discovered that the unused stud and heater supplies I had been keeping against the wall had been HIDING ANOTHER HOLE IN THE DRYWALL TO PATCH. Sigh. Only took about fifteen minutes, but almost made me terminally cranky.

Installed shiny shiny corner bead, which made the closet look like a cheap car someone tricked out in chrome stick-ons:

Pimp My Renovation

Began the taping/mudding. Here's my going theory: at every stage of construction, you can put off making it look really good until a later stage. Framing has to be square and true, but drywalling? Fix it with plaster. First coat of tape/mud? Sand it, fix it with the second coat. Second coat? Sand it, fix it with the third. Third coat? Sand it, fix it with paint (this last is an illusion, as the slightest irregularity in plastering shows right through any number of coats of paint).

It's like in music recording, when the engineer promises to "fix it in the mix," or in film/tv where someone's going to "fix it in post."

So: I didn't tape and mud sloppily. I'm just going to fix it in post.

My going theory will be put to the test tonight, when I see how much of a pain in the ass the sanding/second coating is. In the basement, I spent a LOT of time and heartache getting each coat of mud smooth and even and ridge-free. By the end of the process I was thinking that was a fool's errand and I should have just sanded more. We'll see how that plays out.

I'm in the closet.

"I go see Daddy! I climbing ladder!"

Not SO sure he wanted to be up here after all

Come on, sandpaper, do your stuff!

"Towards a 2BR" Part VIII: The Doors

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

Day 19 on Wednesday was, again, not worth an update. Lisa got a rare chance to go out for drinks with a friend like a real grownup human being, so work was limited to the hour and change between Max's bedtime and the baby's upstairs. Got the wall beside the foyer repaired and some more door drywalling. Whatevs.

Day 20, Thursday: Finally, finally, finally done with the drywalling of the new construction. The doorway rough openings on each side, the foyer, and the doorway where the old door was removed. Hallelujah. There are still lots of spots to patch, and the whole ghastly wound where the old closet was needs to be insulated and then drywalled, but it feels like a benchmark.

Best of all, I got Max's door in. And despite the fact that I mis-sized the rough opening - leaving it 1/2" too narrow - it fits. (Just). And opens and closes. (After some adjustments).

There are supposed to be shims on *both* sides of the door. As you can see, I had to screw the strike plate jamb (looka me with the LINGO!) right to the frame, because once I got the hinge jamb plumb (too many silent b's in that last phrase...) there was NO ROOM AT THE INN.

In fact, the door wouldn't close at all, with the top corner hitting the frame, until I resorted to the old cheat of slipping a little shim of cardboard under the top hinge, to rock the whole door back slightly in the frame. Shhh don't tell.

And technically, if you look real close when the door is closed, you'll see I didn't per se get the top of the jamb totally level, so there's a millimeter gap at the corner. Shh don't tell.

And I cheated and used power tools after 9:30pm, to install the door hardware, trying to be real quiet about it so Gerber upstairs could sleep. Shh don't tell.

Little by little, though, the whole thing is starting to look like it was done on purpose.

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

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.)

"Towards a 2BR" Part V: Neighborbaby Curfew

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

Day 11, Wednesday: In the back of my mind, I'd been worrying about our upstairs neighbors. They have a new(ish) baby, and our bedroom is right under theirs. On Tuesday, I was fairly sure one of them banged on the floor while I was working, which honked me off. It honked me off because we're friendly with everyone in the building - there's no need to bang on the floor, just come tell us to lay off with the noise.

Before you think to yourself "what a callous asshat to make them deal with your noise when you know they've got a baby," let me point out that when Max was still a baby these selfsame neighbors went through a many-week renovation of *their* bedroom(s), working loudly at all times of the day and night despite knowing our tot was sleeping immediately below. So there's a precedent here for being a callous asshat.

Wednesday saw a late start, as Lisa had a test the next day and I was on Tot Patrol. So I was doing some rather loud installation of 2x4 supports for the ceiling fan bars, screwing them into the beams which are our ceiling and our neighbors' floor. I hurried through the loud part and was done somewhere around 9:30.

Some time after 10 I was cutting holes in the ceiling for the recessed lighting, trying to be quiet about it, when Lisa came in to say our neighbor was at the door. Sigh.

We had a lovely civilized discussion, and I showed him the work I was doing and he ooh'd and aah'd appropriately. Their (now 5-month-old) baby goes to bed at about 9:30pm, so we agreed that I'd knock off loud stuff at that point. It turned out that I was working literally about 2 feet beneath the crib, so his beef was pretty well-founded.

I apologized for waking the baby, he admitted they had done the same thing to us, and everybody felt good about themselves.

Beats the hell out of pounding on the floor.

Day 12, Thursday: Had a big list of wiring jobs to get through, and the 9:30 curfew to keep me honest. The deadline actually helped keep things moving, and by 9:20, after two and a half hours of wrestling with fish tape (heh heh, "fish tape") and BX cable, I was done with the list.

I'm always amazed at how rough the first stages of building are, and how they get progressively cleaned up, one step at a time, until a couple days/weeks later the whole thing looks pretty decent. Because hoo boy does it start out looking rough:

More (fairly boring) pictures of wiring (and the Master Schedule, because I just know you care!) below...

Max's future wall sconce

My elegant solution to hanging the ceiling fan.

Yesterday I sat and wrote out a daily schedule for everything I still have to do. I figure if I make it public I'll be less likely to get all slackery and let things slide from one day to the next.

Which is important, because we're starting to get really tired of sleeping on the couch.

Thurs 7/7:
Cut 3rd can hole
Cut wall sconce hole/install wall box
Install receptacle box, Max’s side
Install 1st receptacle box, our side
Wire runs (Max’s side):
Switchbox to fan – 3-wire
Switchbox to sconce box
Junction box to switchbox – supply
Junction box to foyer switchbox
Foyer switchbox to soffet
Wire runs (our side):
Switchbox to fan – 3-wire
Switchbox to ceiling box – 3-wire
Ceiling box to cans
Ceiling box to receptacle
Can to can to can
Measure window/loft

Fri 7/8:
Order shades for storage loft/window
Calculate drywall, insulation, materials
Plumb heater run
Re-plumb heater joint below window
Install switch boxes
Rough wire all boxes

Sat 7/9:
Buy: drywall, mud, tape, corner bead, corner tape, insulation, switch box (foyer), doors (2 pre-hung, 1 slab for bathroom), closet doors, paper/tape for floor
Install foyer switchbox
Cover floor with paper
Begin drywall

Sun 7/10:
Install insulation
Finish drywall
Frame doors/install

Mon 7/11:
Begin tape/mud – 1st coat

Tues 7/12:
Finish tape/mud – 1st coat
Begin sand 1st coat

Weds 7/13:
Finish sand 1st coat
Mud – 2nd coat

Thurs 7/14:
Sand 2nd coat
Mud – 3rd coat

Fri 7/15:
Sand 3rd coat
Calculate floor/door trim

Sat 7/16:
Buy floor/door trim
Buy paint/paint supplies/wallpaper paste/supplies
Install floor/door trim
Primer coat/paint ceiling

Sun 7/17:
Paint, 1st coat
Hang wall mural
Paint, 2nd coat

Mon 7/18:
Finish painting
Install receptacles
Install ceiling fans
Install wall sconce
Install cans
Install foyer can
Install switches

"Towards a 2BR" Part IV: I Want My Mummy

Previously: Part I, Part II, Part III

Day 10, Tuesday: Started re-wiring the bedrooms today. I was feeling pretty chirpy about how much I could get done in short order - wiring is relatively straightforward, and compared to the basement this job is pretty easy. I toyed with the notion of banging through it in one night.

Then I decided to make a "quick trip" to the Home Despot to pick up a second ceiling fan support bar (Lowe's ran out). Which really was a quick trip. But when I got back there were no decent parking spots on our block. So I figured I'd run to Lowe's and return the too-long down-bars I bought for the fans. Then there was a line at the return desk and a line at the register and still no god damned parking and by the time my quick trip was over it was 8:45pm and I hadn't done a lick of work.

Working through a sulk, I chopped into the wall to make room for new switch boxes, and figured out the rather haphazard wiring the room already had:

Why, I wondered, is one - but only one - of the receptacles on the same breaker as the bathroom? Why do the living room lights and receptacles get power from a box in our bedroom, even though it's farther from the breakers than the living room is? Why was our bedroom light going on and off as I worked on the wall?

(Actually, the answer to this last turned out to be pretty straightforward, if disheartening: because the switch was (a) poorly wired and (b) BROKEN IN HALF. It's a wonder we never burned in our sleep.)

Most exciting, though, was a discovery I made while groping around in our ceiling, trying to figure out where to install the fans:

I saw something odd peeking out over the drywall. On closer inspection it turned out to be a TINY SKELETAL FOOT.

I have heard, on occasion, the skittering of mice in our ceiling before. I know the rest of the building has a mouse problem, but with four cats we don't know from mice problems. One poor little beggar got himself dead up there, and promptly mummified:

More below...

Here's the poor blighter's teeny tiny little skull:

Here's the face I would have made if I had come upon his little corpse accidentally without being forwarned by his little peeking foot:

And here's the proof that I'm not nearly as averse to chopping up drywall as I used to be:

When drywall, and more specifically its installation and repair, was still a mystery to me, I hated to cut into the wall and would instead go to great lengths to work within absurdly small cutaways. I imagine it's something like how a surgeon feels: to your ordinary Joe a person's skin is inviolate and must be preserved totally intact, where a surgeon realizes that you can perfectly well cut through it, do what you have to do and stitch it back up. Not that you don't want to minimize it, just that you don't have to be a freak about it.

Not that surgeons are comparable to some dude doing drywall. After all, surgeons train for years and years and have people's lives and health in their hands whereas all dudes doing drywall have to understand is a screwdriver and all that's on the line is their wall.

"Towards a 2BR" Part III: I Was Framed

Previously: Part I, Part II

[If you haven't read Part II, click above or scroll down - this one will make more sense in context.]

Day 7, Saturday: It was time to start framing the new wall, doorways and closet - which gave me an excuse to FINALLY, FINALLY buy a new roofrack for the car (yay Thule!). I pillaged Loew's for lots of steel track and stud, dropped it off at home, and headed out to see a friend's show. On the way, I had an idle thought: "Huh," I thought, idly, "I suppose there's always the slightest possibility that my brilliant plumbing might have a little drip or two. I should probably check before I build around it."

So I tracked down our super and asked him to turn the system back on when he had a chance. You know, if he got around to it. No big deal.

I got back from the show and prepared to start framing. Suddenly I heard the rush of water in the heater pipes. "Huzzah," thinks I, "now I get to watch my beautiful joints hold water!"

And so they did.

For about thirty seconds.

It started with a slight hiss. "Hm," thinks me, "that doesn't sound right." Sure enough, there was the teeniest, tiniest little puddle forming under the joint at the very end of the baseboard run. "Damn," I thought, "it drips. Now I'm going to have to pull that joint and re-do it. Well, at least the rest are holding!"

Another hiss to my left. Where I had, at great difficulty, run the pipes behind the existing wall.

A big hiss.

As I hurried over it became clear that it was, in fact, several hisses. The puddle they made was neither teeny nor tiny. I grabbed the dirty t-shirt that was sitting in the room and threw it down to sop up.

Another hiss. From the first joint I had done, the bendy straw part. Water sheeting out from the bottom 1/4 of the joint. "HONEY!" I called out, somewhat desperately. "TOWELS! NOW!"

"Laundry room" shouts Lisa, and I bolt to the basement. Where I am greeted by the sound of water dribbling across the ceiling and down the wall.

God. Damn. It.

Back upstairs I throw armloads of towels at the floor and sprint for the building's main entrance, to get the super to turn the god damned water back off again.

So.

If anyone needs an in-wall sprinkler system put in, give me a call. I'm uniquely qualified.

I will say in my defense that, out of 22 or so joints, only five or six failed. So, you know. I got about 80% of them right.

It had occurred to me as I finished up the plumbing job originally, that I could have saved a lot of trouble if I had simply removed the studs I was running behind - which would have meant removing that whole section of wall and re-doing it later, but would have made life much simpler on balance. With my whole plumbing job in shambles and needing to be re-done, I realized that this was the best option, and in the heat of the moment started slicing open my wall with the punch saw.

I got about seven feet up before it hit me: there was no reason to run the pipes in the wall anyway. I could just run them straight, and sure it wouldn't be as fancy and they'd be exposed inside the closet, but on balance WHO GIVES A F***.

So now (a) I had to pull out all my nice plumbing and start from scratch, and (b) I had just cut a seven foot gash in my wall for no reason.

I abandoned the saw and went to have a good sulk.

More below...

We're blessed with eleven-foot-three-inch ceilings, which is great for space but a bitch for getting things measured properly. Steel stud walls consist of track at the top and bottom, with stud vertically between them - but the track has to be perfectly aligned above and below for the wall to run straight. It took me most of the day to get the various track locations plotted out evenly on the ceiling and floor.

And then I discovered that, on the ceiling, the supports ran parallel to the new wall location, meaning there was nothing to attach the track to but bare drywall, which as we discussed early ain't the sturdiest stuff in creation. So I had to cut holes between ceiling supports and put steel splints in place between them, to screw the track to:

We had friends coming over that evening, so by the end of Day 7 all I had created was this much framing:

...and the urgent desire to shoot myself over the catastrophic failure of my plumbing.

Day 8, Sunday: One week in, and more framing. Due to the casual regard in which the original builders of our apartment held things like right angles, I discovered that measuring from the floor up did not actually guarantee something would be square and true - in fact, quite the opposite. I eventually discovered that the proper approach was to measure one end, attach that, and then just use a level to figure out where to attach it at the other end.

Eventually, the whole wall and closet was framed:

I noticed during the course of Day 8 that I lose my mind a little bit when I work for too long. I tend to forget to put on the radio, and find myself compulsively repeating snatches of songs, out loud, over and over. Today it was a song from They Might Be Giants' Here Come the ABC's, a lilting, melodic little ditty called "Can You Find Them?" which somehow I re-lyriced to:

Give me S-N-O-O-P
To the D-O-Double-G
Can you find them? Can you find them?

This led directly to Max tromping about the house crying out "f'shizzle ma nizzle!" but we won't get into that.

Day 9, Monday: Took the wife and child to Lowe's where Lisa got to observe firsthand my patented method for learning how to do all this renovation stuff:

1) I find the aisle that has the stuff you can buy to do what I need to do;

2) I pick up some things that look interesting, and read the labels;

3) I pick up some other stuff and read those labels;

4) I go into some weird kind of a trance where I stand perfectly still, looking distant and dazed and muttering to myself, for up to ten minutes.

Eventually, by some weird osmotic hundredth monkey kind of process, I figure out what I'm supposed to do, and which of the various things I need to buy to do it.

It's a good thing I warned her that this was how I rolled at Lowe's, or she'd have thought I'd gone bonkers.

We brought home our new ceiling fans, and the dimmers and switches to run everything (which are, for no good reason, WICKED EXPENSIVE), and I set about finishing the framing.

I had to chop up our existing entrance wall to put in the new two-doored alcove:

Finally, everything was framed - the entrance alcove, the two doorways and the soffet above, and the new wall with our closet and storage loft:

A nice side benefit of using steel stud is that it looks all sleek and shiny and hi-tech, and by the time all the parts are in place it looks pretty swanky:

Here is the whole framing process, over Days 7, 8 and 9:

Max celebrated by running from "his" room into "ours," through the closet, shouting "own woom! OWN WOOM!" Which helps make the whole thing feel worth it.

"Towards a 2BR" Part II: Plumb Tuckered

Previously: Part I

Last week's episode saw the emptying and demolition of our bedroom, in preparation for its being cleft in twain. Now it was time to re-plumb the baseboard heaters, adding one to our side of the room and cutting one out of Max's.

Day 2, Monday: But first, the pile of debris from the closet demolition had to be cleared, so Day 2 was spent breaking and bagging drywall chunks. It's a funny thing about drywall (okay, okay, "Gypsum Wallboard"), because it makes up probably about 90% of the structures we see around us every day, but it's only stable under certain circumstances. Outside of its comfort zone, when not screwed in place and braced every sixteen-inches-on-center, the stuff breaks like an old saltine.

Day 3, Tuesday: I must not have hit my construction stride yet at this point, because I have no recollection of what the frig I supposedly accomplished on Day 3. Sigh.

Day 4, Wednesday: I was on Max Patrol while Mommy studied, so a late start. Got the building super to shut down and drain the heater system and removed the baseboard from one wall by mangling it with a dull hacksaw.

Day 5, Thursday: What should have been a very simple soldering job came over all complex, when it became clear that the pipe that came up from the floor was not in any way perpendicular to the pipe I was trying to attach it to. Copper is not known for its bendiness, so instead of a simple 90 degree elbow I had to build an elaborate crazy straw of multiple elbows to absorb the odd angle.

I should point out at this point that I don't, technically, actually know how to solder copper pipe. I mean, I understand the principle: you clean off the joint with sandpaper, smear it with flux to draw the solder in, put the joint together, heat it with a blowtorch, and poke at it with solder until it melts and fills the joint. But I've done it all of once before.

But the solder was disappearing into the joints with dispatch, so I figured all was well. I had been daunted, but now I was all "this plumbing ain't so damned hard."

Then it came time to connect the old baseboard in Max's room to the new baseboard in our room, through the new closet and wall.

Day 6, Friday: I'll spare the details and get right to the pictures:

More below...

Pretty nice looking, right? When it was all done, after many many hours of sweating and cursing and soldering, I was so proud of myself that I kept coming back in to stare at it instead of going to bed. Copper happens to be really pretty, and the nice parallel lines looked more like art than utility. I damn near snapped my shoulder patting myself on the back.

My pride and joy? Through insufficient planning, I ended up with one joint directly behind a stud, which had to be soldered in place:

I contorted myself, jammed my hands into the one inch gap between brick and stud, wrapped the wooden stud behind it in tin foil so I didn't burn the house down, and by god got the joint hot and the solder melted. I was superman.

C'mon, you can admit it. You're at least a little impressed, right? Right? Right.

YEAH.

DON'T BE.

Tune in to Part III to find out why.

"Towards a 2BR" Part I: I Can Not Stop Destroying Our House

I haven't finished documenting the Basement Chronicles, even though the basement itself has been basically finished for over six months. I'm planning to take nice pictures for the "after" part of the before and after, but now that will have to wait as I've declared open war upon another part of the house: our bedroom. So we've relocated our sleeping quarters (and all our stuff) downstairs and junked up the basement with it.

Our apartment has one narrow, long bedroom, which until now we've been sharing with Max - he has the side to the left of the door, we have the side to the right. We decorated only haphazardly, and Max's side especially has kind of a warehousey feel - his crib and changing table are there, along with everything else we own but don't really know what to do with. Spare chairs, piles of linens, a stray lamp or two.

For about two years now I've been cavalierly proclaiming that I was going to convert the room into two bedrooms so Max can have his own. Since this will require re-plumbing of the baseboard heaters, summer is the time to do it because the heaters will be empty of scalding hot water when I cut them open. I'm between shows now, so it was suddenly time to put up or shut up.

I realized that if I thought too hard about the scope of the project I'd never get off my duff. So yesterday without giving myself time to think about it I packed up our bedroom and moved everything downstairs. After about half an hour it occurred to me what I was doing, and I started to feel a bit like a man possessed. "What am I doing?" I'd shout to Lisa as I tromped past with armloads of dresser drawers. "Why do I keep DOING THIS?"

By about 2pm the bedroom was empty:

(click on pictures for full size)

(More after the jump...)

It turns out that when a household has four cats in it, behind and under each piece of furniture lurks a marauding army of dust bunnies. Here is the armada I collected from what would, at a glance, have seemed like a passably clean room:

For a sense of scale, the black and white patch in the lower right quadrant is a toy mouse. The uberbunny was at least nine inches tall by a foot and a half in diameter. When I turned around, there was a smaller bunny actually climbing the wall behind me, trying to get up to head level to launch itself at my throat. Tricky devils.

With the room empty it was time for demolition: the closet, currently on the far side of our half of the room, will instead be part of the center dividing wall - so the old closet had to be taken apart.

Note to anyone who is too impatient to let their malfunctioning cordless screwdriver go through its longer-than-usual recharging cycle and therefor decides to dismantle a 5' x 11' x 3' metal stud structure with a hand screwdriver: don't.

So now I get to re-enter the wonderful world of dumpster rental, to pitch out the remants of the old closet, and then make with the plumbing and the rewiring and the light fixtures and the wall and the closet and the drywalling and the painting... Oy vey.

And unlike the basement, this time I'm in a hurry, as we're sleeping on the couch for the duration.

The Basement Chronicles - Part VII

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

Having waxed philosophical yesterday about the illusory nature of houses based on my experiences with demolition, today it's time for construction to take a turn. To wit: BOY this stuff is fun.

Over the weekend, I yanked out the walls that made a corner of our basement into a random, useless alcove between two closets, in preparation for combining them into one BIG closet:

Click "continue reading" to see how it turned out...

Last night I did my first metal stud work (and yes I do hope that's not prison lingo) to wall off the alcove and put in double slatted closet doors:

And now, for the first time, we get to live like civilized people with our bikes PUT AWAY somewhere, instead of junking up our living room and falling on us and the cats (and now that he's crawling, the baby) at regular intervals:

To our astonishment, walling up 15 square feet of the basement actually makes the rest feel *bigger* - somehow, that strange little alcove sapped energy from the space with its total purposelessness, and now the whole room feels more squared off, butch and forceful. I have no idea if this picture will in any way illustrate that, but I took it so I'm posting it anyway:

We're in the home stretch, with two days until guests and three days until the Big Honkin' Birthday Party, with rain in the forecast - so for now it's all about cleaning, carpeting and babyproofing. In spite of my mother's continued predilection for posting Doubting Thomas comments on each Basement Chronicle, I'm actually feeling pretty chirpy about it.

The Basement Chronicles - Part VI

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

I've officially reached the point in the process where I'm having trouble keeping track of what I've gotten done and when I did it. In the two weeks since the last entry I have: sealed the brick wall; put an 8" bumper of Quikwall along the bottom of it; built a landing for the stairs; taken down the ceiling over the landing; demolished the bathroom; removed all the carpeting; put up a 2nd coat of Drylok; demolished the old closet alcove; and started framing a new closet.

In the process, I've learned a Big Lesson: houses are an illusion.

To illustrate, check out this shot of the ceiling I removed:

Click "Continue reading" to find out why this means houses are an illusion.

Until you work on the construction of a home (or, in this case, the demolition), it's easy to buy into the illusion of houses. Everything seems to damn solid and "real." There are basic perceived facts, like "there's a wall there," or "there's a ceiling over my head." This is why it was so disturbing, all those months ago, when I first chopped into the drywall at the bottom of the stairs to see where our flooding was coming from - I was piercing the illusion that our house was solid.

Now I feel much the way I imagine doctors feel about the human anatomy once they've been with their first cadaver. It's all just pieces, that work a certain way to create an illusion of a whole.

At one point this weekend, I was throwing out a chunk of drywall from the demolished bathroom (the old stuff was furry with mildew) and found a little nail in it - one of the first things I had done to make the old basement "homey" was hang up pictures, and this was one of the nails I had used. But instead of being at eye level in the middle of a solid wall, it was in a jagged chunk being tossed onto a waist-high pile of similar chunks.

Here's what used to be the downstairs bathroom, including the studs that used to underpin the picture-covered wall:

There's something especially permanent-feeling about a bathroom - the toilet is such a mysterious fixture, sealed and bolted to the floor, with pools and tanks of water in it. But no - a couple hours and the whole thing is gone.

Anyway, enough with the maundering. (See earlier posts re: the strange cul-de-sacs your brain explores when you have hours and hours of physical but semi-mindless labor - all I can say is, you think it's tedious reading it, try THINKING it for 10 hours a day). Here's the nitty-gritty of the work that got done.

The bottom three steps that got removed have been replaced by a new landing:

This was my first time building with 1x8 and nails, rather than 2x4 and drywall screws (building sets, etc.) and holy cow is it easier to be precise, keep things square, etc. Here are the steps, finished and already buried in stuff for the next phases:

Here's the second Big Pile, not nearly as impressive as the first Big Pile but still a pain to bust up, bag up and schlep down the block to deposit in the dumpster for the building site next door (yes, I got permission):

And here's the corner, which used to be an alcove with a closet door on the right, which will soon be one big double-doored walk-in closet:

With Max's birthday party in four days, and my parents arriving in three days, I'm racing the clock to make the place habitable enough for guests (or, more specifically, for *us* so that our guests can have the upstairs) and to serve as a rain-out venue for the thousand or so small children who are coming...

The Basement Chronicles - Part V

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

So last Saturday the woes of cleaning a wall for repointing were finally overcome, and a section about three feet wide was repointed floor to ceiling. Sunday was the rest of the repointing, which is both a fascinating and utterly mind-crushingly boring process. Which means I'm going to talk about it at length.

Here are the tools one uses for repointing (otherwise known as "tuck pointing"):

From left to right they are: the "soft brush" (don't laugh, very important); the traingular "pointing trowel"; the 1/2" and 3/8" "pointing trowels"; the joint shaper thingy whose name I don't know so I'll call it the "schusser" because you go "SCHUSS!" across the mortar with it; and a tool that usually has nothing to do with tuck pointing, a "5-in-1 paint scraper."

First you mix up the mortar. You can make your own mortar from a recipe of portland cement, sand, and some other stuff, but mortar is approximately as cheap as air so there's really no point. To recycle the old Rita Rudner joke, mortar costs about thirteen cents per silo.

(Continued)

A 60 pound bag of Quikrete just-add-water mortar mix costs $2.77, and will cover about 30-35 square feet of wall. I used about 210 pounds on the wall.

When mixing mortar, I found it helped to remember the lesson that I learned while wrestling with the Quikwall: if you're working with a cement product, and you're wondering if maybe you should add a bit more water, then YES, you should add a bit more water. If there's enough water, you won't be wondering - you'll be contentedly mixing or spreading, humming to yourself and feeling very capable. If it's grainy, clumpy, heavy, whatever, and you're cursing at it and sweating - ADD A BIT OF WATER. Just a few tablespoons makes a huge difference. So. There. Now you know.

Once your mortar is mixed, to about the consistency of heavy, dry mashed potatoes, you drag the bucket over to the wall. You load up a bunch of mortar on the pointing trowel, and put the long triangular side of the trowel against the wall just below the groove you're going to fill. Then you take the long, slim tuck pointing trowel, slice off an appropriate chunk of the mortar, and press it into the groove.

Once you've cleaned the joint, you end up with something like the right side of this picture:

Here's what a 1/2-way tuck-pointed wall looks like:

There are a couple things that I've been struck by during this whole renovation process. One is the massive difference between knowing absolutely nothing and knowing almost nothing. It doesn't sound like a big difference, but it is. Compared to people who actually know about brickwork, I know almost nothing about proper tuck pointing. But compared to the absolutely nothing I knew Saturday evening during my first halting attempts to shove mortar into the cracks, I feel like a wiz.

The other thing that keeps being reinforced are that TOOLS ARE AMAZING. As you climb the steep slope from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing almost nothing, you realize that the tools you're using have been brilliantly designed to be exactly right for doing the one specific thing they're meant to do. The angle on the pointing trowel is exactly right for hugging the wall without getting caught on it. The flat, flexible tuck pointing trowels are just right for filling the cracks and cutting off excess mortar, and the 1/8 inch difference between them is perfectly suited to the difference between the horizontal gaps (bigger) and the vertical gaps (narrower).

This doesn't sound like much, out of context. But in practice it's pretty amazing. It's a reminder of the thought, practice and precision that has gone into these little rituals of building and fixing.

When you spend ten hours straight stuffing cracks with mortar and you've got no radio, you spend a lot of time ruminating. I learned, for instance, a Valuable Life Lesson from Mortaring (zen and the art of tuck pointing, I guess): don't try to get it too right on the first pass. You actually fill the cracks pretty sloppily the first time over:

Which leads to The Coolest Thing About Mortar (and other phrases I never thought I'd think, let alone write down, let alone publish online).

The Coolest Thing About Mortar is: mortar knows where it's supposed to be, and where it isn't supposed to be. It's the coolest party guest ever - it knows when to take off. Mortar's not sticky or clingy - if you want it to stay put, you have to put some pressure on it and there has to be something (like a brick above and below) to keep it in place.

During the first rough fill, the sharp edges of the tuck trowels cut off the excess - and what does stay doesn't stick very well, unpressed, to the brick. The "soft brush" knocks most of it off. Then, after a few minutes for it to dry a bit, you go over the groove with the schusser, which makes a nice round mortar line and breaks off the rest of the excess. Another soft brushing, and you've got something that looks a bit like a proper brick wall:

Tuck pointing is enjoyable, in a bizarre, boring, OCD kind of way, as long as you're not too near a corner, behind a pipe, near the floor, or near the ceiling. The 90 square feet or so in the center of the wall were a breeze. Up by the ceiling, there was no room for the handle of the tuck trowels, so I used the paint scraper to fill the vertical cracks.

Again tools prove how amazingly specialized they are - filling cracks with a paint scraper is a lame and bootleg process compared to filling cracks with a tuck pointer.

Last night (Monday), I got home earlier than expected and caught up from the Great Strypeeze Fiasco. The Drylok is now up on the two walls that had already been Quikwalled (I love these brand names) - or at least, the first of two coats of Drylok. Sigh.

The Basement Chronicles, Part IV

[EDITOR'S NOTE - THIS ENTRY WAS TEMPORARILY CORRUPTED BY COMMENT SPAM. IT WILL BE RESTORED SOON.]

Anyway, they took my old wussy grinder back without noticing that I had ground away a good bit of the working part of it, and they accepted my extra $30 for the big butch grinder. And I set about finishing the grinding of the wall.

Let me just say: if you need a grinder, spring for the 7.5 amp. The difference between the big metal 7.5 and the wussy plastic 5 amp was like the difference between a Ginsu and a plastic butter knife. Much grinding, much dust, much faster. Whee!

So now the wall had nice clean empty lines between the bricks, but was caked in brick dust. A round of sweeping and then a round of vacuuming cleared the dust, and then a good scrubbing with muriatic acid got rid of the accumulated grime.

Okay, well that's startling - I just went to look up muriatic acid to find a fun link, and discovered that it has another, better known name: HYDROCHLORIC ACID. You know, the stuff that does this to people:

See, now in retrospect I'm terrified. (Okay, yeah, no that's not a real picture. It's a dummy. But still).

I did discover that when you pour muriatic/hydrochloric acid into a measuring cup, it smokes - just like a mad scientist! Fun with dangerous chemicals.

Anyway, after its acid bath, the wall looked like the part on the right rather than the dingy dusty part on the left:

So I'm looking at the wall, and at the white paint, or plaster, or whatever, that's still all over the bricks. After all, these are old old bricks - probably over a hundred years old, if they're original to the building. And I'm thinking "I kind of like that. It gives it an old, antiqued, distressed kind of look."

And I'm also thinking "I don't like that. It makes it too busy, and next to our loud, patterned couch it may be a bit much."

So my two thoughts argue for a while and I stare at the wall. I call Home Depot to see if they rent sand blasters. They don't. I call Lowe's to see if they rent tools at all. They don't. But the woman on the phone informs me helpfully that they DO rent trucks. I inform her helpfully that a tool is different from a truck. We hang up, better informed.

I decide to go down to Lowe's anyway, and see what they have in the way of paint stripping agents. And this is where my day goes seriously awry.

I found the Strypeeze.

The fair people at Savogran, makers of Strypeeze, claim that their product will cling to all surfaces and remove paint from various things, including masonry.

They are foul, foul liars.

Here it is from their mouths:

America's #1 selling remover comes in a semi-paste formula that improves cling, making it ideal for vertical or rounded surfaces. Powerful cutting action penetrates deeper and strips away several layers of paint at a time without damaging wood, metal or masonry. It stays wet longer to improve cutting action. Surfaces can be cleaned using a scraper and the water wash-off method.

I say again: FOUL, FOUL LIARS.

I purchased the requisite five quarts of Strypeeze gel, and dutifully applied it to my wall. My whole wall. 120 square feet of newly cleaned brick.

(Note to self: in the future, how about you try a test patch, genius.)

I left the area, as the fumes were overpowering - the stuff is an ectoplasmic goo of acetone and toluene. I gave it the recommended 15 minutes, plus about 10 minutes for luck.

No luck. Scraping removed approximately 3% of the paint patches. Scrubbing with a wire brush turned about 10% of the paint into a grey-white tint for the goo, which then soaked into every pore of the brick.

I gave it another half hour, as the directions suggested you should give it more time "to act" if it didn't work at first.

Then I gave it another half hour.

Eventually, I realized that I had taken my lovely, painstakingly clean wall and covered it with $50 worth of toxic sludge for NO REASON WHATSOEVER. And that it all had to be scrubbed off, by hand, with several buckets of water, so that it could seep sullenly into my carpet and make me high for the next 36 hours.

Curse you, Savogran. Curse you and cursed Strypeeze.

On the upside, I had a slightly less bad time with Strypeeze than this guy did.

In our next episode - the techniques and tribulations of brick re-pointing.

The Basement Chronicles, Part III

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

Herewith the third installment of Basement Chronicles.

Memorial Day weekend was a limited work weekend due to various parties, but Saturday was a work day. I continued my attempt to single-handedly keep the Quikcrete company solvent, purchasing yet ANOTHER two bags of Quikwall (love! hate!) and the attendant acrylic fortifier. I have now filled an entire contractor-grade trash bag with empty Quikwall sacks and fortifier bottles. And I will be picking fiberglass particles out of my skin for weeks.

Of the two brick walls we discovered in the basement, we're keeping one exposed and covering the other. I decided, for extra damp-proofing, to encase the non-exposed one in a coating of Quikwall. It was nice to apply the concrete with a trowel, as god intended, rather than slathering it on by hand, as the rough stone back wall had required. It came out smooth enough that we may leave off the drywall and just keep that wall textured.

It also makes for the most boring picture I think I've ever taken - a plane of beige, intersected by another plane of beige:

Continued (click below)...

That smooth, boring wall used to look like this (behind the pile):

Yesterday began the renovation of the to-be-exposed brick wall. Everything I've read has said that re-pointing brick is a tedious business. Suffice it to say that I didn't get to the re-pointing yesterday, in eight hours of work. I'm still DE-pointing the brick - taking the grinder to the mortar that's there. I realized quickly that to get any kind of even appearance, I'd have to essentially grind all the lines between bricks back into the wall, even where the mortar was undamaged. That's a lot of grinding.

It's so MUCH grinding, in fact, that my grinder exploded. Seriously. Right there in my hand.

Okay, so it didn't actually explode per se. But it did get very, very hot and begin smoking. A lot. And kept smoking for five minutes, even once I got it outside.

Here's the dead soldier:

I was hoping to catch the wisps of smoke in the picture, but the wind was blowing them away. It smelled so festive.

So today I return to Lowe's and convince them to give me a new grinder. I'm going to upgrade to the heavy-duty.

Here's the wall, about 80% complete:

And here's me, about 120% complete:

And here's the dust that grinding a wall's worth of old mortar creates. It looked like Mount Saint Helen's. Remember, that's BLUE carpet on the floor:

Here's another shot, for a more dramatic, artsy take on the carnage:

So this weekend, hopefully, will begin (and complete?) the re-pointing. After the cleaning. Then comes the sealing. And the coating of the Quikwall with Drylok. Then the drywall. Then the carpeting.

Now the weeping.

The Basement Chronicles, Part II

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

Thus endeth week 2 of the Great Basement Caper.

The arrival of the dumpster was complicated by the refusal of the lock on our security gate to let Lisa get out of the house to meet the driver. She was unable to flag him down, and he was unwilling to get out of his truck and instead kept calling his dispatcher to call and hassle me (at work, with Lisa heading towards hysteria on the other line). I told the dispatcher my wife was trapped in the house (her response: a belly laugh followed by an immediate, chagrined "I'm sorry that's not funny...") and got her to radio to the driver that he should go let Lisa out of the house, so that she could move the car and he could put the dumpster in the space we'd been holding. Which he finally did, with the helpful observation "boy, I bet you're glad there's not a fire..."

Saturday was The Big Removal of The Big Pile. Captain Daniel Schachner was on hand for the whole day, showing up promptly at 9:00 am, having brought me coffee (stop it, people will say we're dating). In spite of his weak floor (I wanted to do a cute link to an article about hernia risk but could only find this... um...) Dan went completely Stellan on the pile:

(Please note that no, Dan's not four feet tall - we have stairs up through a door in the sidewalk...)

Within about an hour and half, we had the basement clear and the dumpster was full. So for those keeping score at home, a "five yard" dumpster is about right for 480 square feet of drywall and the attendant stud and insulation:

[CONTINUED - click "keep reading" ==>]

Our next task was to go over every bit of the wall with hammers and chisels, getting rid of the loose concrete that was already there. Then I got to use my new grinder (boy I love an excuse to buy power tools) to clean up all the edges and get rid of loose mortar. The grinder did this cool thing where it would hit a rock in the wall and make it glow, like when Superman turned the coal into a diamond for Lois Lane, except of course he just used his hands 'cause he's Superman.

Dan didn't want to use the grinder. I think Dan was a little afraid of the grinder. Dan and I have a little exchange program where he tries to make me act like less of a dork and I try to make him act like more of a man, so to keep up my end of the bargain I made him use the grinder:

So of course he proceeded to bogart the thing for like 15 minutes. He knew he looked like a badass, or a zombie fighter or something:

With the wall all "prepped," it was time to apply the Quikwall.

Let me tell you a little about Quikwall. No, scratch that. Let me tell you a LOT about Quikwall. I feel like Quikwall and I had some kind of torrid, destructive love affair, such are the intensity of my feelings towards the substance.

Quikwall is concrete, and fiberglass, and plastic all in one. One of its main ingredients is "portland cement," which is corrossive and irritant to the skin, lungs, and eyes. This allowed Dan and myself to use, not once but many times, a phrase we had never had cause to use before: "Dude, please stop dropping corrosive concrete on my head..."

The problem with Quikwall is, if you add the suggested gallon of water (and Acrylic Fortifier, which we used so much of I bought out the local Lowe's and had to go to Long Island for more...) you end up with a tub full of 50 pounds of Corrosive Cement Balls. And while Corrosive Cement Balls sound real funny and all, they're no fun to try to spread on a wall.

Only when Dan talked me into using more water than the recipe called for, overriding my concerns that it would be "detrimental to the chemical makeup of the cement" (remember that "dork" bit, above?), did it become manageable, and even then only after some pretty backbreaking hoe-work (now *there's* a Google-friendly term...)

For the first 50 pound bag, I used the recommended application method, which uses a fourteen inch trowel. After that, we discovered it was way easier just to moosh it on with your hands - wearing giant blue rubber chemical gloves.

We got through about 1/2 of the wall, using a total of 200 pounds of Quikwall and 8 bottles of Acrylic fortifier:

We spent some time spent watching a dude named Julio deliver lumber to my neighbor Rafi on the roof:

(That's our little bebbe dumpster at the bottom of the crane...)

But other than that and a spaced-out trip to Lowe's (I swear we spent ten minutes staring at light fixtures), we put in about a 12-hour work day. So big thanks to Dan for yeoman's service. I owe you many.

Sunday I got a late start, due to a birthday party (note to self: once you have a kid the amount of time you spend at birthday parties increases by approximately 3,789%). I had to remove our bottom three stairs:

...which creates the amusing situation of having a three foot jump down into our basement. After two more bags of Quikwall (hate you, Quikwall! Love you, Quikwall!), the wall was 90% finished.

I told myself that I left it not-quite-done so that, if it rained this week, I could see if water came in the unpatched, hole-y wall but NOT the Quikwall-shelled wall. But really, I just couldn't bear the thought of mixing another bag.

All in all, as I pledged to Dan, I'm never making fun of stone masons ever again. 'Cause I used to. I'd see one walking down the street and I'd be all like "Hey, you stone mason! Who do you think you are?!" Not anymore, buddy. Them stonemasons are all right.

Next week: coating one of the two brick walls with Quikwall (hate you! love you!), and then taking the grinder to the brick and learning to repoint...

The Basement Chronicles Part IA - Dumpster Talk

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

I mentioned in passing, in "Basement Chronicles Part I," that I was ordering a dumpster to remove the demolished remains of our downstairs living area. Never having ordered a construction dumpster, I was at a loss as to where to start - and I discovered that, unsurprisingly, the construction dumpster rental industry does not have an extensive online presence.

So I wrote down the phone numbers off the two construction dumpsters I passed on my way to work, and called them. As the emptiest of public services, since there is little chance that anyone who will read this will EVER need to order a construction dumpster, here is what you need to know:

Dumpsters are classified by the "yard," which makes no sense at all since they're not measured in yards. Thus, a "five yard" dumpster is 8' wide by 11' long by 2' tall. A "ten yard" dumpster is 8' wide by 11' long by 4' tall. You're not allowed to overfill them, but if you don't make the full ten yards by fourth down, I think you're supposed to punt.

WM WASTE MANAGEMENT ("Think Green!") has nice, clean, green dumpsters, with fancy stickers of their logo on the side. But their smallest size is ten yards, for which they charge - GET THIS - $620. That's right. Six HUNDRED and twenty dollars, for the honor of having a big green slab outside your house for four days and then having them take it away again.

CROWN, on the other hand, has ugly beat up dumpsters with their phone number badly painted on the side. This, I thought, was much more promising. They carry five yarders (listen to me, I'm up on the lingo) and charge $305. They're dropping one in front of our house tomorrow and it will remain in our custody for four days. I'll post pictures, since I can think of no conceiveable way this will be of interest to anyone.

The moral of this story is: try to never have more to throw away than can legally fit in the cans you already have out front.

The Basement Chronicles, Part I

(Click here for Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, or VII)

Thus begins the saga of the renovation of our basement. Actually, the saga began about a year and a half ago, about 6 months after we moved in, when we discovered that in a really heavy rain our basement took on water like a sinking ship. During our worst flood, I stayed up all night trying to keep ahead of it and ended up vacuuming up more than 120 gallons of water.

Several months ago, during a semi-bad flood, I took a saw to the drywall to see what the foundation wall beneath looked like and where the water was coming in from.

It turned out that the back wall was old - OLD - masonry, which had been coated with "watertight" cement which had eventually decided that the whole watertight gig was way too stressful and that it would be much more laid back to just let the water come on through. So chunks of it had fallen away to make that possible.

Anyway, the apartment next door had successfully re-treated their walls with waterproofing cement, so I resolved to do the same to ours - which meant taking down 3 of our 4 basement walls. While we were at it, we decided to replace the carpet as well, or lay down tile - we haven't actually decided yet.

CONTINUED... click "continue reading" below ==>

A couple weeks ago, we packed up everything in the basement (well, almost everything - there's still quite a pile):

and with the able assistance of PJ and Justin (go Stellan!) schlepped it all out to store in Sannie's garage.

Last Saturday, I started the actual "renovation." Turns out, the early stages of "renovation" look a whole lot like "demolition," or, more precisely, "complete and utter devastation." While I'm pleased with the amount I got done, the satisfaction that comes from turning your living area into an uninhabitable bomb site is a bittersweet one at best.

On the upside, a bit like pulling up old carpet to find lovely wood floors below, when I took down all the drywall I discovered that 2 of the three problem walls are actually brick, which we'll leave exposed when we're done.

Here are the stages of Saturday's demolition:

The base of the stairs, with the wall gone

The main living room area, "before."

The office area, "before."

After about 45 minutes, the office looked like this:

And after another hour, like this:

After another couple hours:

The office, after the old studs came down (notice the growing debris pile).

The living room.

And that pretty much did it for Saturday. I left the basement all sealed up...

...and complained about my back hurting until Lisa rubbed it to shut me up.

DAY TWO: SUNDAY

Sunday was the depressing part, as what used to be the bathroom and laundry room got destroyed.

The view through what used to be a wall.

And what used to look like this:

Now looks like this:

The final waist-high pile of debris (which eventually has to be dragged up to the street, once I finally remember to order a dumpster):

So. I found out that while there's some exhilaration to be found in going all tasmanian devil on your basement's ass, it's actually kind of depressing to spend two days wrecking your house.

Especially when you look around and think "this place only gets to be habitable again when I fix it myself."

Especially when most of the skills, like re-pointing the egregiously eroded mortar of the brick...

...are skills that I haven't actually acquired yet.

But, I've bought the tools. And I've read some books. So I'm... um... yeah.

I'm hopeful.