Happiness and Joy!
The roofers finally showed up! I just got the call from the home scene. They are there working on the skylight as we speak.
One of the true thorns in our metaphorical side since we moved into our house has been the incorrectly installed skylights. I’ve been up there now several times to re-caulk them. It appears that they were installed after metal roof and instead of working the upper edge of the collar up under the roof, they stuck it down on top of the roof sheet.
In any event, it was raining steadily during the March that we bought the place. At that time the skylight leaked so profusely that a rivulet of water ran steadily down the ceiling and wall. The sheetrock was all spongy and the carpet was ruined (no big loss). I threw a rope up over the peak and tied it off behind the house, put a ladder up on back deck, walked along the peak, and then climbed down the rope to caulk the joint (Brit loved that). That mostly stopped it from leaking, except for a week or so after it starts raining in the fall. I guess something must swell up enough to cut off the leak.
We’ve had roofers out a few times over the years to look at fixing it permanently but they weren’t all that enthusiastic because it would be a lot of set up for not much work and they’d be liable if it started leaking again. But after hearing horror stories about mold (Ann + Lori), we decided to try again.
Enter the roof doctors; They came out and quoted us a pretty reasonable price to take the skylight out, put a new gasket or collar (I know that’s not the right terminology) down under the roofing sheet and reseal everything. That was in August. Today, it is apparently getting done. Yah! Forward progress!
SD
PS; Ann’s post about affordable electric radiant floor heating has me thinking about when we get around to redoing our basement – that would be just the thing for our chilly chilly slab floor basement o’ dank.
To Tile or Not To Tile...
Yesterday was a school Saturday for me - my land use planning class. While our instructor droned on about Elite and Pluralist views on creating economic opportunity, I drew out the floorplan of the front room and thought about different tiling options. Home Depot has 16" slate tiles for $2.50 a piece. Does anyone have any experience with slate? It looks more challenging that regular ceramic tile in that the edges aren't of uniform thickness and would have to be floated in the grout in order to come out even. Can you bevel slate with a diamond grinder? I think I'll go work on the deck...
Paranoid or Really Noid...
The topic of my post today has very little to do with home improvement. I'm posting it here and hoping to get some intelligent feedback from experienced bloggers. For those of you who do not know, Brit and I have another blog that we (I) post to - The Tommy Blog. This is where we chronicle the development of the light of our life; our young son. Although I know at least several relatives and friends check it on a regular basis because they tell me how cute various pics are, no one ever posts to it, and I think it is the only blog most of them regularly check. That is why this post is going on the CC blog.
The other day, while in on-hold purgatory, I was listlessly hitting the "Next Blog" button on Blogger and randomly reading blog posts. I came upon one where the woman had posted a close-up of a college sweatshirt where you could not see any details of who or what was currently wearing it. It the caption she had written something to the effect that she had decided to break her hard fast rule about never ever posting pics of her children to the Internet. My immediate thought was, "My God! What have I done to my baby!" The more I thought about it, though, I wondered what realistic risks there are to making pictures of your children publicly available. Is there an appreciable risk that some slavering weirdo might see photos of our child and decide to abduct him? Obviously there are some bloggers who come out on the other end of the caution spectrum (< http://www.trixieupdate.com/>).
I realize that I don't hide where I live, or who I am, really. I have a social security number, a published phone number, webpages, and publicly available job-related contact information. Anyone who wants to can put my name into a search engine and get driving directions to my house from their location with a few mouse clicks. So, my question to you the reader, is; am I putting our son at real risk by having a Tommy Blog?
Lost Weekend At The Beach
 Accomplished nothing on the house last weekend and had a nice relaxing beach weekend with the fam. instead, which is probably for the best considering how things are going on Clark Creek. Yesterday's visit to the woodstove dealer in town confirmed what the installer told us last Thursday (his 3rd visit, hello!), that the woodstove pad we had specially purpose built probably isn't big enough to be to code for anything but a stove the size of a common house cat. Now we have to figure out how to get our floor/pad up to code. Do I try to hunt down the contractor and get him to enlarge the pad? Do we want a raised pad that extends almost halfway across the room? Should we tile the whole durned room and call it good? More fact finding missions to the county records building and the woodstove place planned for today's lunch.
If we do end up buying a new stove (current one circa 1982), it will probably be an ENDEAVOR, made by Lopi.
 Cannon Beach, Or, October 17th, 2004
I don't want to get on a rant here but....
If I’m not mistaken, today is the 12th of October. There are two big pumpkins on our front steps and a largish squash. The maple leaves have fallen and the yellowing alder petioles are tippy toeing on the end of their stems, ready to drop. If I’m not mistaken, we called a contractor and asked them to put a simple woodstove vent through our roof on the 14th of August, which they readily agreed to do. When they arrived on the 21st of September (not so readily it turns out), they put a ladder up the wall in the house in the first five minutes and promptly discovered a stud in their way. The ladder was back on the truck inside of 10 minutes and they declared it an impossible job and thanked us for our time. Not to be deterred we called the supervisor. I mean, after all our society has sent people into space. We now do it repeatedly in the private sector. People in other parts of the world build houses out of straw and dung. Surely we can move a stud and put a pipe through the fricking ceiling and live happily, right? After that ensued a complicated dance between the carpenter who worked for the roofer (doing a different job for us) and the woodstove people and us and eventually it was agreed that, yes, theoretically, the stud could be moved or even removed. Today, (29 days later) the carpenter came to remove the stud. Guess what? There never was a stud! The stud didn’t exist! We’ve been wearing sweaters in the house for no reason! We might even have a venting system by this coming Thursday (instead of the pathetic make believe stove pipe I had to invent in Photoshop to make me believe my toes were warm).
After seeing the fun pic Merideth and Beth made of how their house will look someday, I decided to give Clark Creek House a makeover. I don't have the Photoshop skillz that they do, but it was still fun.
I added the hoakey looking stove pipe. The real one is supposed to go in next Friday (Finally!!!). I put log siding over the current plain-jane T-111 we currently have. I found a place in Portland that sells log siding called Modulog. They have a tool on their site that lets you estimate the cost of putting siding on your home, but I have not played with it yet.
I also tried to fabricate a visual of the next deck we will build. It will have clear vinyl roofing like the deck we put on the North side. I wouldd like the roof to start on the front of the house and elbow around to cover an eight foot deep deck on the South side of the house. In a world without cost, we could put the log siding over the T-111 before building the new deck. That may have to wait, though, until after we redo the basement and maybe even the kitchen. We'll see!
|
