Learning.

OK, so Andy did the majority of the back of the house.  Watching him go was an education.

I was, and am, determined to do as much of this myself as I can.  So, I have to make mine look at least as good. 

I have my work cut out for me. 

That's a carpenter's joke.

There we are, starting to take shape.

 I had removed the rotten sections of floor joist and sistered them with more joist running back to the frame rail.  It felt pretty sturdy. 

There was still a problem though.

Can you see the problem class?

 The particle board sub floor was still rotten. It had to come out. Unfortunately, pulling the rotted flooring out from between the joists and the sill of the wall was a labor intensive and persnickety process.  I could, however, pull out the joists and remove the material a little more easily. Oh yeah, and I checked for nails this time.  No impaling myself on the house today.

Don't forget to remove the old linoleum. It too went all the way under the wall.

 And those staples! And nails!  I think the weight of fasteners in this house might rival the weight of the wood.  Well, the dry wood anyway. The stuff saturated with water is pretty heavy.
But, eventually, I was able to remove all the rotted subfloor and I put pieces of plywood in place to hole everything until I was able to get a larger, continuous pieced cut and placed.

Then, I used a large scrap piece that just so happened to come right up to where  I will be putting the bathtub drain hole. I installed the piece, squared it up with a rubber mallet and a sacrificial piece of wood for banging. 

Looks almost like I meant to do it that way.

There were still some rough bits to finish up, but we had a visitor.

One of my bestest nursing friends came to town with a birthday lunch for Sarah.  She has kids about our kids age and we all skipped work to go to the local swimming hole after lunch.

It was made from an old rock quarry.

Neat old sandstone quarry.

It is spring fed, apparently. And beautifully too.

It was formally requested that I not post pictures of the ladies in their bathing suits on the Internet.

She didn't kill me for flooding the house.  Those are all the swimming pictures you're gonna get.

Then, it was back to the house for an hour or so until the kids Jiu Jitsu class.  I managed to sneak in a little more work on the house.

I think it's shaping up.

That, my friends, is an improvement.

Then, it was off to kid's martial arts class. 

Belt testing is coming soon.  Exciting times.

On the way home, we noticed the sunset was going to be a good one so we stopped at our favorite viewpoint.

Rainier

The Olympics.

More tomorrow.

Then working on the weekend.

Happy Birthday Sarah!

Yeah. 

Woke up this morning, had coffee and went to take a look at the house.  You know, the sound of water dripping in an unoccupied house is particularly disconcerting.  Terrifying in fact. It makes you move fast.  I ran inside.

There shouldn't be a window reflection there...ever.

A water fountain appeared to be erupting from the floor.  I saw the problem. 

The unintentional fountain in question.

For some reason, after holding for two weeks or so, the glue decided to give way and send ten gallons a minute into what will be Max's bedroom. I pushed the end of the tubing out of a conveniently placed hole in the wall and took off.

I ran outside.  Sarah was sitting outside talking on the phone to her brother, it is her birthday after all, and I ran past to the well house to shut off the water.

That's where I discovered the door was closed to the well house. 

And the outside knob looks like this.

Note to self: Replace well house doorknob.

  Yeah, I didn't even know where to try to turn.  It wouldn't open. At least the water wasn't pouring into the house anymore...probably.

I ran back to the house and past Sarah, and grabbed my tool bag. I got pliers and ran back to battle the well house door.  It gave way pretty quickly and I shut off the water.  As I trotted back to the house, I told Sarah the house was flooded. 

"What? Where? I gotta go, the house is flooded."

I guess I will be replacing the subfloor in Max's room after all. It looked alright yesterday.  Today, not so much.

Guess what we spent our morning doing?  Yep, cleaning up. 

Reset the counter boys, I'll try to beat thirty-three days next time. 

Eventually, I got back to work on the place. 

I left it, prior to Great Flood II, looking kind of like this.

Yesterday, when things were dry.

The ends of the floor joists and the sub floor under the sill were crumble-in-your-hand rotten.I was fixing them by cutting away the rot and sistering another piece of 2x8 next to what was left, but it left me unsatisfied.  This is where the heavy bathtub will be.  It needed to be stronger.  So I did some research and decided the sistered segment needed to go back at least to the steel frame and I needed to find a better way to join the two boards than a crap ton of wood screws.

Thanks Google!

Yeah, bolted together and then bolted to the existing, good, floor joist.

That seemed a lot better.

Then, the existing particle board sub floor was so rotten that I decided to pull it all out, all the way to the outside, and replace it with plywood.  Even under the sill of the wall.  So, I cut into it and was pulling it off the nails that held it to the sill.  A piece I was pulling on pretty hard finally gave way and I suddenly found myself one with the house.

Evil fu**er was hiding under the vapor barrier.

Yep.  I impaled my forearm on the rusty nail.

Awesome. 

It's not like it was probably rusty because the septic tank backed up and drained sewage all over it or anything. 

I cleaned it up and irrigated it with a saline flush I had in the truck. Yeah, sometimes I forget to empty my pockets at work. The kids loved watching that, by the way.

I managed to get back to work, my tetanus is up to date.

Did I mention it was Sarah's birthday.  I know, right? She didn't even mention divorce. She's awesome.

The boys baked her a birthday cake and decorated everything. It was pretty cool.

Yes, it was cooked in the toaster oven. 

Max gave mommy a present.

Singing Inna Godda Da Vida Honey!

Blow out the candles!

The boys approved.

All in all, I'll call it a good day. 

Tired

Not many pictures today.

Got a lot of work done though.  The back of the house is starting to look like it could be habitable some day.

Awesome, right.

Some more tomorrow and one more day of Andy. Then, back to being a do-it-yourself guy.

Oh yeah, and back to work in the hospital. Gotta pay for all of this somehow. 

A few pictures and then I'm taking the rest of the night off. Well, I probably should edit the book a bit before I go to bed. And, I still have to do the dishes but, at least after eleven tonight, I'm taking the rest of the night off.

Coming together nicely

A little detail on the joist fix.

Dang, this could be a home.

And then we went around the corner.

Well, Sarah did half of the dishes.  It takes teamwork.

Switch!

Remember that bathroom? Yeah, well, the sun is out. I just can't waste good weather inside so...

Remember this?

Just so terrible.

Ants and rot and disgustingness

I know that's not a real word.
Insanity is a valuable commodity, especially when it is in such short supply. So I decided to import a little.  His name is Andy and he is actually a fine custom cabinet maker and expert carpenter who makes designer spiral staircases and whatnot.  Somehow, a mutual friend convinced him to go slumming over here with me.  I felt foolish calling him, but I did.

I'm really glad I did.

See, I had this plan.  I went out and bought wood to build supports for my bottle jacks and was going to jack up floor joists in multiple locations and probably would have spent about half of today out there getting everything ready to go to work. 

Instead, Andy showed up and I told him essentially what we would be doing for the day.  I left him back there while I went inside to get my tools and stuff. I came back out to see this.

Well OK then.

While I was grabbing stuff, he just got busy ripping the joist right out.  I was a little stunned. My planning was pretty much for naught. While I was busy reconfiguring my mental map about how the day was going to go, he just kept ripping stuff out.  There was plenty of stuff that needed to come out too.

The hole where the disgusting used to be. Surrounded by more disgusting.

We kept ripping things out while we attempted to find out just how extensive the damage was. We needed to know how bad it was before we formulated a plan on how to fix it.

It was pretty bad.

The sill was rotten, the floor was rotten, the frame was rusty.

Everything

The ants were having babies and the babies were rotten.

The rot and ants extended the length of the place.

Rotten birds had built a foot-tall nest in the wall

The ants were listening to Barry White and procreating in record numbers.

See? Terrible.

Luckily, I had Andy.

Andy can do most anything. Including, figure a creative way out of this mess.

We had a problem. The construction technique, and this seems to come up over and over and over again, is they bring in the metal frame and build the floor. Then, they install the interior walls on top of the floor along with appliances and cabinets and everything. Then, they install the outer walls and finish it off by dropping the lid/roof on top of everything. The walls sit on the subflooring, and in many cases, on the floor covering.

And it was rotten.  Comes apart in your hand rotten.  Putting a fresh joist under a rotten subfloor didn't seem smart. Not to mention the rotten wall sill. Oh yeah, and the joist is attached partially by nails that are put in before the walls are up. Yeah, there are walls up there now. It's kind of harder to nail it in place.

Did I mention the rotten wall studs? It turns out ants and rot like wall studs too.  There were many that were partially rotted through and two that were totally rotten.  We pulled the rotten ones and Andy managed to get in there and cut away the rotten parts of the rest. But, how to fasten them in place?

Andy came up with an idea.

He cut away the sill, the subfloor, the studs, anything that was rotted out.  It appeared as though there was enough healthy wood in there to salvage. He ripped lengths of my 3/4 inch plywood flooring and screwed it in under the healthy subfloor and extended it all the way out to the edge. Then, the plan was to rip the joists down to fit the new distance. The studs would be custom cut out and fill the space where the rotten flooring had been. He would use dovetail joints and...OK, so not the last part.  He likes cabinets, but we didn't have all day.

We got it all back together and things were looking up.

Fresh wood, no ROT! Looking good.

You know what that means...

Something had to go wrong.

Note the location of the hole above the bolt.

Yeah, there are holes in the frame where we pulled out rusted-through lag bolts. The frame was bent and pulled out of shape and wasn't lining up with the floor joist. We rifled through a few options and decided to sister up another joist behind the one already in place so it would have a secure attachment point. I would rather over build than under build. I know these manufactured homes are kind of built to be disposable, but I want this one to be different. I don't know why, but I want to make it right.

So we pulled it all out and got busy.

Of course, we ran out of time.  I still had another trip to the hardware store and dinner and everything. So, it still sits out there undone.  Tomorrow.

Back at it tomorrow.

Back to business.

Life can't be all scenic mountain trips and world famous artists, so where were we? 

Oh yeah, destroying my house.

When last we left I had intentionally knocked a section of a wall out for the purpose of removing a shower enclosure without destroying it. It also helped that much of the wall was moldy and rotten anyway.  I'm trying to look at the bright side here.  Some see mold and rot. I see the opportunity to save a shower enclosure. 

Maybe.

I did manage to disconnect everything and pull out the shower.  What did I find?

Yeah, look at that wallpaper. Remember, this thing was built in 1994

This is the wallpaper that all the hip grannies wanted way back in '94.

As wonderful as the wallpaper was, there were troubling things found too.

There may have been some minor water leaks.

They may have been raw sewage.

Oh well.  Everything must go. We kind of knew that going in. Time to get to it.

Pulling out big chunks is fun.

Our ever growing trash pile. What does that sticker say?

Well, I think we have performed our sub-surface inspection now.

Among our many discoveries was a revelation about fasteners. It seems that they are cheap and easy to apply. So, to make up for what may lack in structural materials and building technique, they added fasteners, lots of staples and finishing nails. In some places, the 1/4 inch wall board was held around its perimeter by no less than on fastener per inch.

Literally.

Yeah, this isn't even the highest staple density area.

 And speaking of shoddy building materials...

Class D-3? I mean I didn't expect 1-A or anything, but at least C-2 or something.

OK, so I don't really know what D-3 means.

I do know what particle board is and I know it doesn't do well with water.

This is what we are left with.

The decor is much improved.

Of course, I still have to rip out the ceiling.

Good thing we performed a sub-surface inspection!

Believe it or not, this is a toilet flange. Really. It may need replacing.

All of this work will be put aside for a little while.  My mom left for home and my sister is arriving tonight. There will be adventuring. 

Oh yeah, and while the weather is good, and there is still money in the budget for assistance, there is another project to do.

Like the siding.

Or this hot mess.

Fun time is over.  Back to business.