Since my camera is kaput....

Here's some from someone else.
I call this one, "Bad place to put an electrical panel"




















And this one.... called "Bad placement of a wall heater"















And for Galt's sake, get some safety goggles!















Um.........

Sunday night update - 2nd electrical inspection tomorrow

Argh. It's 10 PM and I just took a shower. One of these days it's going to be nice to not expect a muddy runoff down the shower drain.

Anyway, we've been working on the 3rd floor most of the day today. Mainly we've been furring and framing in the storage area, getting it ready for the spray foam insulation, and building a new partition wall so that we don't need to have an electric outlet on it, but wth, we're putting one in anyway. I'll get a picture soon and update.

Why all the fuss? Well, we're having the second electrical inspection tomorrow. The good news is that when we were trying to figure out whether we really needed an outlet along this 6' wall, we talked to Sheila Spradling at NKAPC, and she waived the fee for the re-inspection. Very cool lady there.

So we put in a bunch of new outlets (five to be exact), rewired another smoke detector on the 3rd floor (a full 12 feet from the one at the bottom of the stairs--harumphf) moved some light boxes and a wall.

Heck, at least I got all of the gunk out of my hair in the shower. If I knock my head on an attic joist one more time I'm gonna scream. If I knock my head into another NAIL in an attic joist I'm gonna scream bloody murder.

I'm tired. And we haven't had dinner yet. I need a glass of wine.

Wish us luck.

Aw crap. Failed the Electric Inspection.

And we worked so hard, too.

I don't think Bob from the NKAPC even looked at the jbox wiring or the connections, which is where I figured they'd be focusing on. Noooo. We lost it on NOT HAVING ENOUGH OUTLETS.

Apparently we missed that part where any wall that is 6 foot or greater must have an outlet. So the wall that covers over the fireplace in the kitchen (which isn't 6" but was close, and is 42" away from the island, which will have 2 outlets) needs one. And the knee wall on the second floor stairs in the office. And the fireplace in the office. And the third floor? Three more. (Two in areas that may never be even reached).

The breaker boxes were replaced and look GREAT if I do say so myself. I thought that would be the most excruciating part of the inspection. After all, it was the hardest. (For me anyway.)

I mentioned before that we wanted to move them from the basement (where they were split into two boxes for the two apartments in the house) into the first floor dining room. Here's where we started:












And here is what we ended up with. I think we should've scored points just for cleaning the darned thing up, y'know?

But that wasn't all. Noooo. There's this code that says we can't just ground the house by connecting the grounds to the copper plumbing pipe and the 10' copper rod embedded under the basement. No, we need a SECOND 10' copper rod embedded into the foundation six feet away from the first one. Sheesh.

The guy gave us our NKAPC sheet with the list of needed outlets and the grounding rod, then checked the part where it said did not pass, needs re-inspection. He also checked the part where we now need to pay a re-inspection fee. I think it's like $30-$50

So it'll take another day to order the NEW (6%$#@*&) copper grounding pipe and dig a hole into the foundation, and run new wires for the six *^&%$#@&^%$* outlets that will never be used, but just in case someone 30 years down the road wants to plug in a vacuum cleaner in a crawl space in the third floor attic, they'll be able to.

Moo. I'm the new cash cow.

Getting Electrified

We started the process for installing the electric and I have only one thing to say: Ouch.

We're drilling 1.5" holes in the 2x10" dining room ceiling joists (height +10') to run the electric from the panel throughout the house. The current panel is in the basement, but we're moving it upstairs into the dining room for easier access-- (not to mention the fact that the current panel is right where the water comes in from the street. Zzzzzt zzzzt.)

I started by using our hammer drill with a 90 degree attachment - to squeeze into the tight spaces between the joists. I was using a forstner bit to start and a paddle (flat) wood bit to finish off. The forstner bit started off great, but got dull very fast, and the paddle bit had such a long shaft that it was difficult to get in between some of the joists (we reinforced them with 2x4x16's a while back and this cut down on maneuverability quite a bit.)

Drilling the holes in 90 degree heat, well, it sucks. First of all, wear goggles. Not just eyeglasses like I tried. No sireee. Even with better safety glasses on, I was still pulling shards of lumber from my eyes.

And wear a face mask, not necessarily a respirator, but I was breathing in a lot of sawdust without one, and got a cheapie paper mask ASAP, which worked.

And for the love of lumber, wear a long sleeved shirt that buttons at the neck. I was pulling little curly cue slivers out of my cleavage for an hour.

Now here's what NOT to do: Using the forstner bit and with one hand firmly on the handle of the 90 degree attachment and the other on the base hammer drill trigger, once you;re about halfway through the 2" joist at full speed, angle the drill just slightly out of the 90 degree angle you're cutting at. This will successfully get the bit stuck in the hole and the drill will do one of three things, all of which happened to one or the other of us over the two days it took to drill the holes:

1. It will break loose your grip in your trigger hand and although the drill will stop spinning, it will do so momentarily after knocking into your face.
2. It will wrench your wrist so badly it will swell for days
3. It will unbalance you and knock you off your ladder.

Anyway, I have a bruised ego and a bump on the head and DH has two wounded wrists. Definitely not as easy as it sounds, folks.

We got the wire delivered, at least the first batch anyway. You really understand the cost of copper when you start pulling wires, folks. The lights and switch boxes cost about $200, these spools cost about $600.

We're planning on mostly recesses 6" lights for the dining room, kitchen and .. well, most everywhere that we're not putting in specialty lighting (like the drops for the kitchen and the chandelier over the dining room table).

Putting up the can lights now, we needed to keep in mind that the drywall is going to be set into 1x4" furring strips, so we had to adjust the cans lower than it looked like they're supposed to be. It should all fall into place soon enough.

We've also drilled smaller 1" holes along the kitchen wall for electric, and have started pulling the wires, but have discovered that our plumbers have installed a pipe right where we want an electric outlet to be situated, between the refrigerator and the stove.


Looks like we're in for another work around. ...

Anyway, we're working into the kitchen today and should have some more pictures if I can keep the sawdust out of my eyes.

Furring & Roofing : a busy day.

First of all, I wanted to show another image of what we did with the furring on the second floor with the 2 foot oc measurements and how we furred in the windows. The blue lines represent where we had to add in the extra 2x4's, and the orange lines represent the regularly spaced 2' 2x4's.

Of note is the gap we've left at the bottom near the floor. We've spaced for another 2x4 along the bottom and a 1 1/2" gap for wiring and electric. This space is so that we can cover the wires at the vertical 2x4's with a 1 5/8" standard nailer plate (to prevent the drywallers from hitting a nail through the wiring at the bottom of the wall.)

Also, the red arrows point to where the E-W wall used to attach to the East wall. Here, of course, is exactly where a 2x4 needs to go, so we pulled out the rest of the plaster (most of it was pulling away from the brick from the demo process anyway) and we're tapconning and gluing in small 1"x2" boards to the brick, as to be flush with the plaster for when the 2x4 goes on top, it will be flush with the other 2x4's.

It should work.

OK, I was going to write about the roofing process... it's day 3 for Benchmark Roofing and I've got a few problems, but Reimier Lumber just called with our lumber delivery order, So we've got to run.

To be continued....

A look at the roof, boxgutter, and floor joists.

Well, the roof work has begun and last Saturday the fellas from Benchmark started working on the box gutters. Woot!

Much of the framing that the gutters sit on was just total rot, so the first thing was to firm up the supports.

The guys made quick work of replacing the bad wood and set up these new frames, seen from the inside of the third floor at the roofline.

I gotta say, they worked all day and into the night when they couldn't work any longer due to darkness taking over.

So far so good. There are actually 2 gutters that need repaired, one on the East side of the house, which is shown below (nice work on the molding, guys!) and the second is perpendicular to this one, and just above the left side of this box gutter where the two angled rooflines meet in the center of the house. That one's still a work in progress... (but what isn't?)


At this point I want to point out that the box gutter on the front of the house is still in decent shape, but we did have one little problem: The electric lines coming into the house from the street were intertwined with the downspout at the front of the house. Matt Maynard (of Benchmark Roofing) pointed out that this could possibly be a danger to him and his crew, justifiably so!

So off we went to put a call in to Duke Energy to resolve the problem. After a quick conversation we were assured that they would send someone out to inspect the lines. Well, I gotta give them credit, they were quick about it.

They came and took down the downspout while we were out.

I think we'll be calling Duke back.
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OK, now on to the floors:
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On the first floor, in the Northeast corner of the house (red arrow in above image), we have a pretty bad rot problem due to a defunct (aka rusted through) vent stack between the first and second floor.

In case I'm not being clear here: Hole in roof --> cast iron vent pipe--> hole in pipe dumping water into the wall and onto the second floor joist, down to the first floor joist, maybe for years now.

After pulling up the floor boards on the first floor where the rot started (trying to preserve as much as I could fo the good sections for use in the repairs we'll be doing in the front 2 rooms) I discovered this:

The top center of this image (Northeast corner of the house) is where the vent stack was dumping water into the house. You can see that the far left joist is gone and some previous repairs were attempted to shore up that corner, but they forgot to fix the problem (the stack pouring water into the house) so it's all still a mess.

But here's the killer.... the floor joists themselves.

Let me start with the history of the house. The east side of this room (about 6'x15') was once an outdoor area with basement access from the outside. (see image below) You can see the framing for the door in the floor in the Northeast corner of the room. Since this was once an outdoor area, the floor joists are pretty stable where they once stood under the exterior wall, about 6 feet in from the current East wall.

To support the floor when the original owners decided to expand the back room and encompass the basement access, (expanding the room by 6'x15') they sistered some beams to the existing joists and supported them on the existing foundation.

But then, someone decided to dig.

They dug out a lot of the dirt and half of the wall that was once supporting the exterior wall. They put in some lovely duct work that now is total cr@p.

So now we have this:

Yes, these joists (a solid 3"x10" beams) are only connected by three nails each and overlapping by only 4 inches with no support whatsoever underneath.

The scary thing is, they're REALLY stable.

We'll be shoring these up with a 2x6 crosswise underneath where the joists are joined together and support them with a metal post underneath.

The we'll be placing 2 layers of .5" OSB on top for the flooring.... as soon as we have a roof that doesn't dump water back into the house. :-)