Category: Houseblog

Pavement-influenced post title aside, this might be more aptly described as IKEA as Mail Order Bride. Lisa and I are practically on tenterhooks for the 2006 catalog, and frantic to get an updated Kitchen Planning Tool. I feel like I did back in 1982 when I was waiting for my exclusive mail order Admiral Ackbar action figure (sadly now gone along with all my other Star Wars toys).

We’ve all but decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the kitchen remodel, primarily because of the budget flexibility we’ll get, but also because anything is going to be nicer than the built ins we have now. We’re planning to remove part of the wall between kitchen and dining room, relocate the stove, and fix some craziness with the sink plumbing, as well as extend the cabinets along the wall where our busted radiator is living (until a few weeks from now, when it along with all our other radiators will be removed).

We were so busy over the weekend, and I was so busy the last couple of days, that I never got a chance to record our progress on the latest project—closing the walls after the first round of AC install.

As recorded previously, I opportunistically ran phone, Cat 5, and coax through the open walls where our contractor ran his electrical wires, the cooling lines from the compressor, and the drip line from the attic. I was originally planning to run speaker wires as well, but Lisa talked me out of it. We will leave audio out of the second floor for now.

We wanted to get the walls closed off, so rather than completing the coax run from the outside drop to the structured wiring box, I moved ahead to installing insulation. After reviewing the options, I reluctantly went with fiberglass — reluctantly because our house’s 2×4 exterior framing only allowed using R-13 batts, and even those were somewhat compressed by the pipes in the wall. But, as Lisa keeps pointing out, it’s better than the horsehair that was there to begin with.

After the insulation, I cut blueboard to size and installed that with drywall screws. Upstairs, I was able to drive the screws directly into studs on both sides. Downstairs the studs were hidden behind the window frame on one side of the opening, but there were still the ends of some laths visible in half the hole. I cut some 3/4″ by 3″ standoffs, nailed those into the studs whereever I had gaps, and then ran the screws through those into the studs (in a few cases, at an angle!) to support the top of the board. It was an ugly process, but it worked well enough, and after the seams and screw holes were taped and the entire thing skim-coated with two layers of veneer plaster, it was OK. (Lisa did the actual plastering, and has concluded that it is the skill most lacking by us for this whole project.)

After the plastering was done, I installed the wall plates for the media wiring outlets, which involved terminating each of the cables and snapping the plugs into the modular wall plate. Final steps were priming the plaster and then (finally!) painting the first floor office/bedroom. I took a few photos throughout the process; the one on this entry is a teaser that (with the exception of the uncovered electrical outlet) shows the final product of all the work I just described. The original wall opening ran between the two outlet plates on the wall to within a few inches of the ceiling.

So that was the work on the office this weekend. Plus of course assembling the desk we bought at Ikea. But that’s another story. So is repainting our bedroom, but that story will have to wait until we start it.

Looking at HouseInProgress’s post about their weekend painting exploits, I was struck by the incursion of a familiar silhouette into the bottom photo in the article, just beneath those fantastic windows. Yes, the familiar big ass ShopVac, steady presence in all good home renovation projects.

Which of course leads me to the comparison: ShopVacs are the astromech droids of the houseblogging world. Tireless workers dealing with thankless jobs, they’ll all essentially identical except for the colors.

(I can’t be the only one to be geeky enough to make this comparison, can I? No, I see I’m not. I’m probably the first one to note that the high-pitched whine a one-gallon ShopVac makes when you accidentally tip it over and lodge the vacuum float in the top of the unit sounds a lot like Artoo’s squeal when he gets his droid ass shot off in the Death Star trenches, though.)

Yesterday was the second day in a row it’s hit or exceeded 100° F (that’s about 38 C, for those of you following along in metric countries) here in Boston. On the face of it, not a rewarding day for home improvement projects. But the open stud bays in two of our bedrooms aren’t going to go away by themselves. And my spur-of-the-moment declaration that I was going to run wiring for phone, cable, etc. up the bays before I closed them has taken on a life of its own. Lisa was particularly enamored of the idea of a phone upstairs, as our new air conditioning, while not loud by any stretch of the imagination, still generates enough white noise to make hearing the phone downstairs more difficult.

So I started running cable yesterday afternoon after returning from church. And quickly learned a few things. Like: it might have made sense to drill my own holes for the wiring between floors, rather than sharing space with the pipes the AC contractors ran. (No real issues until I got to the final run into the basement, at which point things started to get very tight.) Also learned the benefit of dedicated wiring conduit and true bundled cable. I fished my lines from basement to second floor one at a time, since I didn’t have a whacking great hole to drag them through, and it took me almost all afternoon. And I still haven’t run the speaker wire, which I decided to add to the mix at the last minute because I thought it might come in handy.

But I have coax cable, terminated on both ends with F-connectors, and category 5 cable run to the office and the master bedroom, as well as cat 3 which I’ve punched down into the phone block. Next steps: pull the speaker wire; mount the receptacles and pull the cables through them; and gird up my loins and pull the cable wire across the ceiling of the library into the distribution center so the cable connections will light up. I’ve resisted doing the last point for long enough. After that I’ll insulate the bays (since there was only horsehair insulation, I feel bad closing them up without providing at least some modicum of real R-factor) and hang drywall, and start plastering. Then we get to paint. (Joy, joy.)

Unfortunately all these next steps are going to have to wait till Wednesday, since I have rehearsals at the beginning of the week.

First, the punch line: for the first time, as of about 2:00 PM this afternoon, I am making mortgage payments on a house with central air.

Details: yesterday, under Lisa’s close eye, the contractors pulled all the tubing, connected the electrical wire, installed the compressor, installed a new thermostat, and test-fired the blower (albeit without refrigerant). Today the head HVAC guy came out to inspect the system, and (long story short) the AC is now running upstairs.

Which is good, given the outlook for the weekend:

So what’s next? Quite a lot, actually: The installation of the first floor and basement air handler; installation of a new Viessmann boiler and connection to the hot water coils in both air handlers; and removal of steam pipes, oil-fired boiler, and oil tank. But that’s a matter for a few weeks in July.

Then we get to fix the holes in the walls. Currently we have two open stud bays that need to stay open until the work gets done, at which point I learn everything about plaster repair. Fortunately the holes are eminently patchable with large pieces of backing board and I will get a lot of practice in making smooth plaster coats.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn lemons into lemonade. With those open stud bays, it sounds like a great time to run coax up to the top floor for future cable modem/TV hookups. Finally that structured media panel is going to pay off. And I might as well get started since Lisa is on the road all next week.

After the workmen left yesterday, I cleared the area where they would be opening the wall in the morning, then went upstairs and tried to figure out where the equivalent opening would be upstairs. And said, “Uh oh.” The equivalent opening was right behind the radiator, right under the window. In other words, it was not a clear path from floor to ceiling.

This was a problem. What the contractor was going to do was to run coolant lines, drip lines, and electrical lines up from the basement to the attic through that bay. And the key was the copper line for the coolant. That wasn’t going to bend from one bay to another.

In the morning, the contractor confirmed my concern. We looked at all the options and figured out that the best solution was to open a bay in the office/guest bedroom instead, just inside the wall on the second floor, and meaning I had to open a little more ceiling in the basement. Sigh. But no biggie. At this point, I’m getting pretty quick at ripping down plaster, even on my lunch hour.

In the meantime, the guys were hard at work, getting the holes opened up for the vents and installing them, and doing the hard work on the wall opening. A few surprises remained. For one thing, all the contractors commented on how tough our plaster was. There were many hole saws and Sawzall blades that were sacrificed to cutting the holes in the wall. For another, we discovered the insulation material in the outside walls: an odd vapor barrier plus horsehair combination that explains our energy bills. Next priority: proper insulation.

The third surprise was the odd bits and pieces that popped out from behind the walls. I should have expected based on Aaron and Jeannie’s experiences that we would find a few things, but I wasn’t prepared for a bottle and a cardboard milk bottle cap (pictured), found in totally separate places in the house.

But at the end of the day we had:

1. Eight outlets upstairs—three in each bedroom, one in the bathroom, one in the stairwell.
2. Insulated mini-ducts running from the outlets to the air handler.
3. An outlet and overhead light (though not yet connected) in the attic.
4. Upstairs air return, installed but not yet connected to the air handler.
5. Two opened interior walls.
6. Electrical lines run from the panel, through the joists that were exposed in the basement ceiling, and tied off just at the base of their run.
7. Bonus: an extra couple of electrical lines that were run by mistake and were undersized for the needs of the downstairs air handler. The electrician asked whether I wanted them connected to outlets upstairs. “Sure,” I said.

Whew. Tomorrow, we might have AC upstairs.

Yesterday’s first day of installation went pretty well. Our contractors spent the morning preparing the small air handler by installing an expansion valve, then managed to load it into our small attic (in spite of a very small access panel and a very tight roofline) and spent the rest of the day preparing and insulating the main ducts and marking the locations for the ducts on the second floor. I didn’t manage to get many photos, but that’s our air handler and the very tight space around it.

A word about our installation: we are going for a full conversion. As I mentioned before, we’re getting a Unico system installed. Our setup consists of two small air handlers, the aforementioned attic one for the upper level and one in the basement for the lower two floors. Our contractor is combining this system with a high efficiency gas boiler which will provide indirectly heated hot water to coils in the air handler that will provide heat in the wintertime. As a consequence, we get to eliminate the old boiler and all the radiators.

Of course, this means the installation is a little more complex than a straightforward AC installation. So the workers are doing it in two phases. Phase 1, which is this week, is the upstairs work, plus installation of the compressor and removal of the steam radiators. Phase 2 is installation of the downstairs air handler and ducts, plus installation of the new boiler and removal of the old one. That phase will occur the week of July 4—when I’ll be at Tanglewood with the BSO, keeping cool in a different way.

I was very excited that I was going to be at our house for the first day of our AC install today, and that I would be able to document the whole thing, when I opened my RSS aggregator last night and realized that: The Old Man and the Street had posted a much more compelling set of first-hand observations of his AC installation than I could manage. Like our house, his is a high-velocity system being installed in an old house with no existing ductwork. Unlike our installation, it looks like the Old Man’s owners (yes, the Old Man is the name of the house) will be keeping their radiators. And I think our installation team will be moving the blower into the attic first, rather than cutting the runs for the ducts. But otherwise a very similar project.

Oh well. Being first isn’t everything, right? Hopefully our team will have the AC working as quickly and easily as The Old Man’s.

The HouseInProgress folks are taunting me (probably not on purpose) with their latest post about air conditioning. Our weather looks like that too (well, not that bad—it’ll at least be staying in the 80s), only our AC installation doesn’t start until the 20th. Looks like the Old Man and the Street is in the same boat; their installation happens next week. At least we know we’ll be happy and cool when we’re done.

As I ripped lathe after lathe down from the ceiling in our basement, cleaning a sixteen-inch wide strip running the width of the house for our new AC central trunk, I found myself humming the Police’s “Demolition Man” for the first and probably last time. I wasn’t singing it, because my face mask wouldn’t let me open my mouth wide enough.

We have probably found the only HVAC contractor in the world who doesn’t like to do demolition, and the result was a merry two hours figuring out how to take part of a plaster ceiling down. The location for the trunk is planned to run alongside the interior partition wall in our basement that divides the utility and workshop/storage room from the library. Since the ceiling is finished throughout the basement, we had to take the plaster down to make room for the trunk. After much trial and error, we arrived on the following sequence of steps to clear out the plaster:

1. Locate the nearest crack running along the outside edge of the cut (this was a remarkably good way to locate the “keys” running between the lathe, which was the right place to cut).
2. Use a Sawzall with a demolition blade (brilliant on plaster, absolutely useless on lathe) to cut along the outside edge of the demo zone.
3. Use a crowbar to break the plaster off until the end of the lathe, where it nails to the joist, comes into view.
4. Go to town with the crowbar on the lathe, bringing down a shower of plaster and dust on everyone in reach.

(About the last point: cleanup is obviously a big challenge with a project like this. We used a dustpan and broom, and a new 12-gallon shop vac, promptly nicknamed Artoo, for the floor. For the workers, safety goggles, a hat, gloves, and a mask designated for drywall and insulation work. Plus a thorough vacuuming from head to foot and a shower when everything is done.)

At the end of this, my hat is off to all the other housebloggers who made plaster removal look easy. I was still picking grit out of my ears after the shower.

Just as spring in the Boston suburbs is heralded by the appearance of mud and street sweeping trucks removing the sand from the roads, so summer is heralded by clear signs:

• The temperature spontaneously jumps about twenty degrees overnight.
• Upstairs floors in un-air-conditioned houses become uncomfortably hot, even if the outside temperature is only in the low eighties.
• There are major home contractors in every other house on your block.

Our house is no exception. With a little luck, our HVAC contractors will be working next week to get our air conditioning installed. It’s exciting for us: not only will this be the first Unico system we’ve been involved with (aside from seeing them on This Old House), it’s also the first time we will have owned a house with air conditioning. Very exciting times, indeed.

I’ll post more details over the weekend. We have some exciting demolition work to do; we agreed that we would tear out part of the basement ceiling in the boiler room to make way for the central trunk. My hand is healing nicely, but I guess we’ll find out if I can handle a reciprocating saw left-handed—or whether Lisa can manage ceiling work.

How is it that, even with all the work I put in over the weekend on our back yard, I don’t suddenly look like Jesse Metcalfe, the lawnboy on Desperate Housewives? As Larry Niven would say, TANJ. I should at least get the abs from all the exercise.

But to take a step back: we were essentially rebuilding our back yard from scratch last week. It all started with tree removal. We are planning to do some additions to the house over time, and one of the three large maples in the back yard was too close to the house. When we decided to remove it, that started some wheels in motion, and we ended up taking down two more. I have really mixed feelings about the tree removal, but we are planning to plant smaller fruit trees in their place, and by adding a lot more sunlight to the back we can eliminate the sea of patchy moss that used to dwell there.

So Friday and Saturday we bagged the leftover sawdust
from getting the stumps ground out; tilled the whole back yard;
spread something like 25 cubic feet of compost (not enough, but a
start); and put out about five pounds of grass seed. Just in time for
some more heavy rains.

Lisa spent the weekend in our front yard doing “structural landscape improvements” (meaning pulling nasty hedges out by the roots), while I helped uproot some of the stumps while reversing the last bit of damage done to the house when we moved the fridge in.

First, the hedges: with such a small front yard, we decided it didn’t make sense to devote a lot of it to hedges—particularly to hedges that grow like weeds and lose all their leaves in a spectacularly ugly fashion in winter. So last weekend Lisa took a variety of pruning tools to them and cut them down to a few inches above the ground. This was a weekend’s worth of work in itself, particularly the part where we had to bag all the cuttings. Then on Friday Lisa took a day off and started digging the roots out. Almost all the hedges had taproots that were a foot long or more and several inches in diameter, which were impossible to dig out with shovels and very difficult to sever. Fortunately our neighbors stopped by and said, “We have a crowbar that might help you out.” Thanks, said Lisa, but we already have one. “Not like this you don’t,” said our neighbor, and came back with a five-foot-long solid iron bar that had to be about seventy years old. It was cylindrical at one end, but tapered to a rectangular form at the other end with a pyramidal tip. I had never heard of using a prybar for gardening, but it’s apparently a standard item in Roger Cook’s toolkit. I’ll upload a picture later.

With the prybar in hand, Lisa was able to lever out all the taproots unaided, leaving nothing but a few smaller, easily-extractable roots behind. I helped with some of the bigger root balls and did disposal work, but all in all the job went extraordinarily smoothly, which was good because I had other tasks to do.

I spent Saturday sanding the first coat of joint compound I had previously applied over the bare frame and drywall of our kitchen doorway, then applying a second skim coat. I was worried about making a mess with the sanding, but I found a useful ShopVac attachment that kept the dust from getting out of hand. I primed most of the new wall surface on Sunday, but I need to go back and make one more pass on one side where the compound didn’t smooth out the tape. Fixing the doorway left just one problem—the ceiling over the fridge.

Over the last few months we’ve kept looking at the gaping holes in the ceiling over the fridge (regular readers will remember we discovered them when I pulled down a cabinet to make room for the fridge). We had thought about putting up a patch, but after the pain of working with the backing board on the doorway we started contemplating other approaches. Late last week Lisa asked, “Why don’t we just re-mount the cabinet?” and I had to admit it seemed like the best approach. Unfortunately I needed to make the cabinet about an inch shorter, and I only had about 5/8ths of an inch extra trim above the top and below the bottom of the cabinet. So out came the Sawzall, which I used to trim a half inch from the top and the bottom of the cabinet. It was tight—in one or two places I accidentally planed a little off the top of the cabinet—but in the end it got it done. Then Lisa and I put the cabinet on a dolly and rolled it up and into the kitchen via our porch. The last step was the hardest, essentially a clean-and-jerk from the dolly straight up to the top of the fridge, but the cabinet made it and is now resting up there until I can re-secure it to the studs.

I dream of having a kitchen in which the Sawzall has no place. I think it will be a while before we’re there.

Lisa and I went with Charlie to see the This Old House Carlisle Project this weekend. As regular readers will recall, we infiltrated the area a few months ago to find trade trucks pulled up but otherwise nothing much in the way of visible activity. This trip was a little different. For one thing, we were paying to go—which was ok as the proceeds from the tickets support a good cause. For another, there were no trades in sight (though there was still some work to be done). This tour was really about the house and what the decorators had done with it.

I’m pleased to report that even the most questionable rooms (with one exception) looked much better in person than they did on TV. The “very red” entrance hall actually looked really good, for instance, as did the kids’ bedrooms. The topiary dragonfly over the breakfast table, however, looked not just out of place but scary. We asked a number of pointed questions about the sculpture, such as whether it needed to be watered and whether the family that bought the house was planning to keep it. (Oh yeah, spoiler warning, highlight text to read: someone bought the house for about $1.8 million.)

One comment from just about everyone on the tour was how much smaller the house felt than it looked on TV. I thought that was a tribute to the architect; it could easily have felt echoey and cavernous. Some spaces, including the library, were just about perfectly proportioned and executed. But I thought the barn was disappointingly unbarnlike after the decorators got done with it. The fireplace helped add ambience as did the barn timbers, but mostly it felt like a room with tall ceilings.

Lisa and I both decided it was much more satisfying watching the actual structural work happen than touring the house as a designer showcase. And we know how I feel about interior design showcases. (I should note, however, that it was a hell of a lot of fun to check out the mechanicals in the basement. The boiler and those plumbing manifolds look even more impressive in real life.)

During the days this week while not teaching SAT classes, I’ve finally been doing some much needed work around the house. Two projects have been particularly stalled, and now seemed the perfect time to address them: patching small holes in the kitchen ceiling that we left after an ice dam adventure in January, and re-finishing the doorway from which I removed the trim so we could install our refrigerator.

—Ice dam? I see I didn’t write about this one… Here’s how ice dams form, and we had one after the first big snowfall in January that dripped water down through the kitchen ceiling as everything else melted. Since we caught the problem and drilled small holes to drain the accumulated water before the plaster crumbled and fell, all I had to do was to patch the holes with spackle and paint. I’ve got the holes patched, but at Lisa’s request moved on to the other project, since it’s a lot easier to do without dogs in the house.

As you’ll recall, our narrow 1941 doors were too small to permit a big refrigerator to move into the house, so I somewhat precipitously got out crowbar and reciprocating saw and removed the door molding from one of the kitchen entrances. And it stayed that way for some time, as visitors to our house can attest, while Lisa and I tried to decide what to do with the doorway. We didn’t want to reinstall all the trim, since we didn’t plan to hang a door there again. We talked about building an arch, like the doorway into the living room that faces the kitchen doorway. At the end we decided to go easy on ourselves and mud the exposed framing, then sand and paint and reinstall just the baseboard trim.

So I spent a few hours yesterday mudding one side and the top of the doorjamb. Or at least most of it. The surface left after the molding was removed was less even than I thought, requiring a lot of compound to fill in the holes and make everything level. One side has a half-inch gap between the kitchen wall and the wood framing of the door, so I need to go pick up something—probably blueboard or something like it—to patch the surface and raise it so I don’t consume another tub of the compound in the process.

For the record, I’m using a slow drying patching/joint compound to do the work. It’s hard to work, but I think it will dry much harder than the quick-paint stuff I used to patch the wall around the radiator cover. That stuff was scary—it was like shaving cream. Pictures will be posted once the mudding is done.

Oh yeah—the Houseblog section is now a part of the webring at Houseblogs.net, the group houseblogging site run by Jeanne and Aaron from HouseInProgress. Check out the web ring link, on the front page of my site in the site navigation, and visit some of the other great sites.