Sometimes it is just too much.

A lot going on. 

Progress is still being made, but something has to give.  Rather than give up on any construction projects, or quitting my day job, the blog had to take the hit.

We have visitors.

Sarah's parents are here and they are proving pretty helpful really. 

Rather than squeeze us all into the RV, we have done it before, Sarah and I moved into the project house (Big Stinky) and gave our room to her parents.

The tarps give a cool, blue ambiance.

The projects continue unabated.

I really need to back off the opening up the kitchen meme.

I opened it up so much I had to install a temporary roof support.

Then, double king studs with trimmers and a 2x8 plywood header sandwich.

And we have a rough opening for a sliding glass door.  I sure hope it fits.

I supported the roof with a 6x8 timber nailed to the floor. It had some scrap 2x12 leftover from the stairs nailed to teh top to increase surface area. I made the header with two 2x8 boards sandwiched around a section of 3/4 in plywood.  The sill is a 1x4 cedar plank which I will cover up with flashing tape when we get the OSB on.

Nothing much.  Oh yeah, and...

A new hot water heater.  Papa did the wiring.

So yeah, after I fixed the sink tonight, Sarah and I even had hot and cold running water.  We even have a working shower!  Moving right on in to the 20th century. 

Let's see.  What else.

Got all the old siding off of one side. 

Rewired the outlet that was under the window.

I also fixed the refrigerator door that fell off and we are putting GFCI circuits in the kitchen and bathrooms. 

So yeah, busy.

But.  We also have visitors.  That means we have to get out and show off our beautiful chosen home state.

We started with this familiar place.

Unfortunately, I left the manual focus on the camera and didn't realize it. Many of the pictures are terrible.  Man, I'm out of adventure photography practice. I can use a circular saw though, so there's that.

Posts may be spotty for a bit.  I'll try to keep them up though.

The joy of many projects

I think I've said this before, but there are good things about having a thousand things to do.

We started off today with the idea that we would hang a little more sheathing, maybe even make the corner of the house and turn to the last untouched face. 

That would have been nice.  But, an all-too familiar story played out instead.


It was almost a repeat of the last blog post.  We discovered.

Another nest?  Another?!?

Yeah, pretty healthy one too.

Exactly as fun as it looks.

Finally cleared out most of the infestation and surveyed the damage.

More joists needed replacing. 

Sigh.

That meant going inside and pulling up the sub floor. Which was on top of more cabinets.

It didn't look like any sheathing was going up any time soon. 

On the positive side, we've really opened up the kitchen.

That, if you will recall, is one of the joys of having a thousand projects to do. A thousand and one doesn't seem any different.

Two thousand, on the other hand.

Then, of course, it started to rain.

Yeah, still trying to get rid of that trailer.

And not just sprinkle this time. It rained.

Staying classy

Nope, no sheathing today.

Another joy of a thousand projects is you can always just switch to another one if you stall out. There is always something to do.

We have visitors coming soon.  Sarah's parents are coming for a while. Sarah and I decided to buy a mattress and sleep inside Big Stinky while her parents are here. It can get squishy when you put four adults, two kids, and a hundred-pound dog in the RV. Her requirements were a working toilet and a sink we could use for washing our hands and brushing our teeth.

Piece of cake.

Shouldn't be too bad.

Yeah.  That's gotta go.

Time to pull out the old.

What kind of sadist makes that bolt that long? You know it's rusted.

Came out easy enough. Time for cleanup.

Sad when the toilet is the nicest thing in the house.

A much more reasonable bolt.

Some things got done.  Some things didn't. I suppose that's normal.

Another opportunity to flood the house, and I didn't.

Yet.

As we have discovered, sometimes a good flood takes time. The best strike when you least expect it.

I'm going to go check the toilet.

Back to work (hospital) tomorrow. 

Discovery

Let's talk about the process of discovery.

All you lawyers out there can take this one off, it isn't that type of discovery.

We're cruising along. The sun is shining, it's a little warm and we are pulling of siding and trim. Gotta get it off, you know. There is a trim piece that goes between the siding and the skirting. As we move around the house, we might see something like this. 

Nothing too bad here.

 It looks like that most of the way around.Shouldn't be too bad.  Let's take that trim piece off and have a good look.

That looks less comforting.

Okay, so this looks a little worse.  Things are still mostly intact. There's still hope, right?

That rim joist doesn't look too solid.  What happens if we tap it with a hammer?

It's probably only a little surface problem, right? An eighth of an inch back, that's solid wood.

Errr...uh no. Not so much.

I guess we need to cut that wood out and see what's behind door number one Monty.

Serious tools of destruction. Don't laugh at the Harbor Freight.

Can't forget the good, old, hand tools. 

Let's investigate, shall we?

AHHHHH!!! Put it back!  PUT IT BACK!

Yeah, termites.

But not the bad kind.  Okay, so there isn't really a good kind, but not the worst kind.  These guys only really destroy rotten and wet wood.  Get rid of the wet wood and we are fine.

Easy, right?

Riiiiiiggghhhht.

I didn't take as many pictures here as I would like.  Mostly because I was in a life or death battle with a trillion little insects and didn't have time to fiddle around with a camera.  But, it turns out, this joist was right under the kitchen cabinets.

I'd been wondering if we would have to take them out.

Had been.

You see, this is how a simple project, like putting up new siding, changes into something much longer and more involved. Everything we remove seems to reveal more stuff we need to remove.

We kind of knew this going in though.  Oh well, can't be helped.

That's gotta come out.  Time to move some cabinets.

Good thing I have helpers!

Homeschool today is power tool usage in home demolition!

 Just think of the education these kids are getting. 

Again... Everything we take out reveals more work to do.

That can't be sanitary.

Let's just rip it all out.

So, there we are.

The kitchen looks much more open with half the cabinets gone and the sink pulled out.

So that's good. 

I guess there's a downside, but I can't see it yet.

More work tomorrow.

No flood today!

Sometimes it's the little things that make the day.  I didn't flood anything today. 

The work continues unabated. 

The days are becoming remarkably similar. Pull off the rim and band joists and the siding, discover rot, remove said rot, put in new wood. Repeat as necessary.

There has been a lot necessary.

We were progressing along fine and then this showed up.

Rain clouds

Rain? In western Washington?  The hell you say.

Yup. Rain clouds.

But, having been trained in the ancient maritime tradition of reading the weather, we were ready. Or, I read the forecast on the Internet and bought some tarps.

Something like that. 

Actually, since we had almost half of the house covered with sheathing, we decided to add the water resistant barrier of our choice, #30 asphalt felt. This covered the windows and gaps and protected everything we could cover from all but the most torrential of downpours.

It ain't winter yet. A few passing showers was all we had today.

Pay no mind to the unlevel nature of the felt.

It's harder than it looks if you are under nine feet tall

We decided to forego having windows on any part of the house

 Sarah and I wrestled with that roll of heavy asphalt paper for most of the day. I would curse its weight and Sarah cursed the stapler. She had trouble, initially anyway,  getting the staples in flush. I would hear the bang of the stapler impacting the house followed by the tap, tap, tap, of her shame as she had to pound them the rest of the way in with her special tool.  She got into the groove after a while though and we made decent time. No, no... Let's not talk about my crooked paper or my tap, tap, taps of shame... Let's focus on Sarah here.  

Look, kids on lawn tractors! 

Michael has been working. A little every day.

Max is too small to reach the pedal without tripping the seat safety. He just got to drive it.

Back to work tomorrow.  Back to only a few, short hours to work on the house each day.


Back at it full time this weekend.

On the plus side, one of our neighbors gave us some of his old tools.  I don't know how much use I'll get out of them, but we will see.

I shall name you Kickback Death

You shall be called Finger Eater.

Everyone, meet Electric Death.

Don't worry, I'll read the manuals.

I also discovered that, at night, one of the garage windows look straight out of a horror movie.

Just imagine the clown on the other side!

 Sweet dreams!

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.