Builders Share

No Task List Needed

At various times over the course of this project I've maintained project plans, to-do lists, punch lists, spreadsheets, you name it.  I'll be cooking up another one soon I'm sure, but over the past few days, all I had to do was turn around and another task was begging for attention, so I started knocking them off one by one.

The vent box got three coats of poly-urethane along with the wainscoating and trim in the upstairs bathroom.  The woodwork there was left unfinished for a while.  Clear-coating surfaces can be tricky because it's not always easy to see which areas you've covered while you're working, especially during the first coat which gets quickly soaked into the wood.

One thing that's important to remember when clear-coating is not to shake the can when mixing.  This stuff should be treated the opposite of a James Bond Martini: stirred not shaken.  And when stirring, be careful not to introduce air bubbles into the mix.  You'll be sorry if those tiny bubbles appear on the newly finished surface.

After completing the wood finishing, it was time to install some shelves in the boy's closet.  These Closetmaid wire shelves came by way of a neighbor who was re-modeling them out of their house and into ours.  This task was pretty straight-forward: (a) use a tape measure and a level to mark the walls where the shelf anchors will go, (b) drill holes for the hollow wall anchors, (c) insert the anchors and then mount the shelves.

Hollow wall anchors always make me nervous.  I guess I've had the experience of hollow wall anchor disasters enough that I'm always expecting the worst. More than once I've drilled a hole that's too small for the anchor only to correct it by making a hole too big and having to either patch the hole or drive 10 miles to the hardware store for a larger size anchor.  This recent wall anchor assignment went ok.

With the shelves mounted it was time to work on the leaky shower head in the downstairs bath.  I re-installed the original shower head because the plastic, chrome painted head/bracket for our hand-held wand had developed a small crack.  Until I can find a suitable replacement for the cheap plastic thingy we'll have to live with conventional showers sans massage.

Then, in the master bedroom I installed a shade for the skylight.  The shade is made especially for the Velux window.  It sat in the box for over a year since I installed the window.  Don't ask me why.  I'm not sure how often we'll use it because we've come to like having the window unshaded all the time.  I suppose there may be an afternoon when we'll want a darkened room.

And if all that wasn't enough, I started in on painting the upstairs bathroom.  If all goes well this week, that could become the first completed room in the renovation project.  All the other rooms still need window and door trim at the least.

One of the problems with lists is having to face the reality of the work ahead.  That may be why I haven't kept my lists up to date.  All I have to do, though, is take a look around and there's a project waiting completion.

handyman

the diminishing pile

The renovation project that I started 3 years ago was more than just a house renovation project.  It was also a lifestyle renovation project to some extant.

Living in the country in the Northeast requires a large carbon footprint if you don't work to shrink it.  First of all we have to drive a lot.  My wife works 25 miles away, and my other job (besides renovator/homemaker) is 10 miles away.  The nearest commercial center for provisions is also 10 miles away.  We try to limit our driving by carpooling and bicycling whenever possible but there's no getting around burning a lot of gasoline.

Heating our home also requires a lot of energy.  When we started renovating the house I made the decision to install a wood stove, hoping to supplement the heat provided by the fossil fuel furnace.  I'm happy to have made the move to wood, but only by doing it did I learn the amount of work it takes to rely on wood heat.

Once we got used to using the wood stove, we decide to use it as our primary heating source.  This past winter I kept the thermostat for the furnace at 62 degrees fahrenheit and kept a fire going in the wood stove whenever we were home and not sleeping.  The rooms near the wood stove were always cozy and with the installation of my air recirculating fan and ductwork, the other rooms stayed warmish.

Burning wood has saved us a lot in oil fuel costs and helps to decrease our carbon footprint considerably.  As winter turns to spring, though, I'm eager to take a break from loading wood into the barn and splitting it up.  Sometimes the wood gets wet too, and there's nothing as frustrating as trying to get a fire started on a cold morning with wood that's a little wet or hasn't been quite seasoned enough.

And as the neatly stacked piles of wood dwindle, the empty rows remind me of the splitting and stacking that comes with the warm weather.  Wood work chores leaves less time for leisure but there's not many jobs more honest than working for your winter warmth.

handyman

Cabinetry Hack Complete (almost)

After several delays, I finally finished up the job of hiding the ductwork that's part of my active air recirculation system. 

As you may remember, I installed a Panasonic Whisper Fan in the kitchen/dining area to move warm air by the wood stove into the rooms on the other side of the house.  The ductwork took away a small corner of the master bedroom. I decided to hide it by enclosing it in a little cabinet that can be a place for a plant or a handbag or books, whatever.

Making the cabinet was a challenge to my meager finish carpentry skills but it all came out okay.  One thing I ran into was trying to make a mitered corner on a piece of wood that was too large to cross-cut on my table saw.  I used a hand-held circular saw but that didn't do a great job, just good enough.

I got a chance to use my new Makita belt sander, though.  This was handy for planing down the top and sides that were constructed of pine boards glued together.  It also served to round the edges of the top nicely.

It took me a while to get the hang of using the belt sander in a way that didn't leave grooves in the soft pine. A slow and slight back and forth motion, perpendicular to the direction of belt worked best.

The picture reveals that I still have work to do with getting trim installed around the closet door frame.  And the vent box also needs a few coats of polyurethane before I can really call it done.

handyman

ice dam reprieve

The mudroom has stopped leaking and the roof is shedding water as it should.  Hooray!

Let me offer a couple more things regarding clearing ice dams though.  If you go up on your ice covered roof to clear snow, you better be careful. 

I read a story of a local man who recently, in the process of clearing ice dams, got caught in an avalanche of snow, was swept off the roof and landed head first in the snow.  He was almost completely buried with only his feet sticking out.  The weight of the snow was so great, he could barely move. He had the good sense not to panic and wiggled his body enough to get his cell phone to drop out of his pocket to where he could reach it (remember he's upside down) and call for help.

Besides safety, you should know that chopping ice off your roof is a good way to damage your roof.  As careful as I was, I still tore a couple of shingles.  I had to weigh the risk of letting water continue to leak into the walls against a torn shingle or two. I decided that considering the amount of ice and snow on the roof (see the pile that reaches from the ground to the roof in the picture--remember, this is March folks), I wanted to put an end to the leaking as soon as possible.

ice, dam!

It's been a very snowy winter here in the northeast and now that we're on the brink of spring comes a new challenge.

In our neck of the woods the sugar-houses are busy day and night because this is the time of year that the maple sap runs.  Sugaring season happens when the temperature at night is below freezing and the temperature during the day is above freezing, thus allowing the sap to run out of the trees.  As the sap runs out of the trees, it's collected and then boiled down to make syrup.

I love maple syrup.  But a downside of this freezing and thawing in March is the formation of ice dams on the roof.  An ice dam usually forms when snow on the roof starts to melt but then refreezes.  It's a curse (damn!) because this ice builds up and prevents water from running off the roof.  Without being able to continue rolling off the roof, the water works its way back up under the shingles and down into the roof's substructure and on into the house.

There are a couple of ways to prevent ice dams.  The most basic way is to clear the snow off your roof before the thawing and freezing cycle begins.  Metal flashing along the lower edge of the roof also helps to limit ice dam formation because the heavy snow is apt to slide off, but that doesn't prevent the dam from forming behind the flashing.  This is also the case with using roof heating cables.

Before I left town for vacation, I didn't get a chance to clear the snow off the back roof and barn which both have a lower pitch than the front of the house.  I'm paying the price now. Serious ice dams formed on the back roof and on our return from sunny California, water was leaking into the mudroom.

The mudroom is a rustic-finished unheated room off of the kitchen.  The walls are covered in barn boards so the water damage is minimal.  Insides the walls is pink insulation.  Hopefully that has not become saturated.  Either way, I'm not going to rip open the walls to find out.

What I did do is go up on the roof, clear off the snow that covered the dams and then broke up the dams with a shovel.

cali vacay

Yes, even the handyman goes on vacation from time to time.  So what if there are ice dams on the eaves causing leaks into the mudroom.  So what if the smallest of projects is getting dragged out weekend after weekend.  It's time to get out of the cold northeast and head for sunny California.

And where does a handyperson go when visiting southern California?  Why Legoland of course.  Enjoy the film...