We bought this second house two years ago with the intention of remodeling the kitchen and moving in. Demolition of the old kitchen revealed some problems so, in for a penny, in for a pound.
It's not just my project, it's a whole family project - my wife and daughter have definite ideas about style and finish, so that added a little complexity. My back started acting up last summer, so since then I have been depending on my son-in-law to do the actual work. You know that old saw about how a project can be done, fast, cheap or good? Well, we have sacrificed fast for cheap and good. We are now on year three of this project and god willing and creek don't rise we'll get it completed this year.
Almost a year ago this brass pipe fitting failed. We replaced it, but I wondered why it had failed. Corrosion was the answer. Brass is apparently immune to plain water, but evidently there is acid in the soil, so underground brass fittings need to be protected. Shark Bite provided me with a free roll of the silicon tape which we finally got around to applying when freezing weather appeared imminent.
The silicon tape (I think it's silicon) doesn't have any adhesive, it just sticks to itself.
The video ends abruptly because I was kneeling on some concrete blocks and my knees started to hurt.
Because my Smart Phone camera is set to high resolution, the above video is uses almost 500 megabytes of storage, 3% of Google's free allotment.
Since we are replacing the kitchen in the new house, I decided to replace the all electric range with a gas cooktop and I also decided to replace one of the wood burning fireplaces with a gas fireplace. To do this I need to run some new pipes to supply these devices with gas. I was originally going to hire a contractor, but that would require making phone calls, talking to people, scheduling the work and forking out a large sum of money. I've worked with iron pipe before, and I have a talented second, so we just decided to do it ourselves.
The big problem with iron pipe is if you need a piece of a specific length. Building supply houses like Lowe's and Home Depot carry pipe in a variety of lengths ranging from one inch to ten feet. You can use couplings to piece together a combination of these pieces to make any length you desire. The downside is you end up with more joints, joints that have to sealed, tightened and inspected. Plus a bunch of joints in a short length of pipe looks 'unprofessional', not that anyone is every going to see it.
My first thought was that this was an opportunity to invest in a set of Ridgid pipe threading tools. They are kind of expensive, something around a thousand dollars, but if you want to get the job done without a lot of screwing around, good tools are essential. The downside is that this is probably the only project I will need them for, and then I would have to fool around with getting rid of them. They are too expensive to just throw away, so that means selling them: placing an ad, answering calls, more dealing with people.
Then it occurred to me that there is probably a service that will cut and thread pipe for you, and what do you know, both Lowe's and Home Depot offer free pipe cutting and threading. It means a couple of hours of my time driving across town, tracking down the big box store's pipe guy and waiting while he cuts the pipe, but with my back problems I'm not good for much else. I can still drive and I can hobble the quarter mile from the car to the depths of the big box store where the pipe threading machine resides.
I stopped by Lowe's in Hillsboro the other day and found that their pipe threading machine is out of order. Now what? I am not going to Home Depot, the last time I was there, there was a long line of people waiting to get in because of the stupid COVID-19 restrictions. Haven't run into that at Lowe's, which makes me happy. Okay, maybe not happy, I still have to wear a stupid mask, so let's say just not too disgruntled.
I could call one of the other Lowe's (there are three of them, all about 20 miles away), but calls to any kind of big operation is kind of crap shoot as to whether you will get any kind of useful response. Yesterday for instance I called NW Natural (the gas company) three times. The first time I slogged through their robo-cop menu and after about a five minute wait I got connected to a woman who dealt with my issue quickly and competently. The second time I was on hold for 20 minutes and got disconnected. The third time I knew the codes and so was able to bypass robo-cop and got connected almost immediately. Like I said, a crap shoot.
Anyway, I decided to try a professional pipe supply company. Got connected to someone almost immediately and explained what I wanted. Told me he would get a quote made and email it to me. Haven't heard back yet and that was two days ago.
So I drove to Tigard, hobbled into Lowe's, found an employee and sent them off to find the pipe cutting guy. It only took about five minutes for him to show up, just long enough that I was starting to wish for a chair. Now we look at my list of pipes I want cut. Turns out most of them are below their minimum length of two feet, so I only got two pipes cut. With their fancy pipe cutting machine it only took a couple of minutes and there was no charge. Hard to beat that.
Old Gas Meter
The gas company came out and changed out the gas meter for a larger one. We need it to supply all the new doo-dads. We needed to hook up the furnace so they could verify that the meter was working properly, so we did. It's nice that the furnace is working now, it's been a bit chilly here the last couple of days.
Of course, when we hooked up the furnace it didn't kick on immediately. It had power and now it has gas again, what could be the problem? Near as I can tell, when we turned off the gas the house cooled down, the thermostat said 'more heat', the furnace began it's start up procedure, but because there was no gas, it didn't fire up, which caused it to shut down and set a fault code (the little blinking LED on the control board). Cycling the power was enough to clear the fault and get it going. The start up procedure is kind of interesting.
When I lived in Houston I had a job fixing machinery and one of the machines I was often called on to repair was a Mercury pipe threading machine. This was about 50 years ago. Iron pipe had been a mainstay for water lines but was being replaced by copper pipe. Mercury had been a going business but was now fading fast. Our biggest customer was a plumbing company that specialized in automatic fire extinguisher systems, which still use iron pipe. They are tiny portion of the plumbing business.
Went to Lowes this morning to pick up some concrete blocks to reinforce a space next to the foundation of the new house. There is a step in the foundation and dirt had piled up against the wood that is sitting on the lower step. Osmany dug it out, but now we want to establish a 'no dirt' space between the foundation and hill so we don't have a repeat.
So I went to Lowes planning on buying 36 of these blocks. They are four inches tall by 12 inches wide. Two abreast they would stack up to six feet in height, which is what we need. I am hefting these blocks as I stack them on the shopping cart and I'm thinking they are five, maybe ten pounds each. I know I have a hard time gauging how heavy things are. If I can pick it up, it's light, if I can't, it's heavy. Along about the time I've got two dozen loaded on the cart I glance up at the label and notice that each one of these blocks weighs 24 pounds. That's a different kettle of fish. I decide that maybe I ought to do this in two lots. I don't want to load the cart up so much that it becomes unpushable. I'm loading the blocks in the trunk and I'm calculating just how much 27 blocks weigh (650 pounds) and I think maybe I should load some of these in the back seat so the tail end isn't dragging on the ground and that's when I notice that the right rear tire is looking a little low. Very low, actually. So I decide I should deal with that first, so I drive home, fire up the air compressor, pump up the tire and drive to the new house.
Osmany showed up a few minutes later and we unloaded the blocks. He carries four at a time down the stairs. I head to Lowes to pick up the rest of the concrete blocks and some three inch plastic pipe and fittings so we can redo the rain drain so it is below grade.
I also pick up a roll of tape. One of the joints in the old rain drain was put together with some kind of plastic tape. The joint is still secure after 40 years (presumably), so that must be some pretty special tape. It looks and feels just like the plastic used in contractor's trash bags. Looking in the pipe goop section I find two kinds of tape. One is sold out, so I buy one of the other.
Now that Osmany is supplied, I can go to Les Schwab to get the leaking tire fixed. It takes them awhile but that's okay, I've got Master and Commander with me so I am glad it takes them a while. Then they tell me that my tires are bad and should be replaced. I vaguely remember hearing something about that the last time I was there, and they only want to replace two tires for a hundred bucks each so I say go ahead.
Now I head over to Jack's house to borrow a hydraulic jack and he shows me something amazing.
Jack pushing magnets around on his welding table
He wanted some stronger magnets to hold his clamp to his welding table. It looks like he found some.
Driving in downtown Portland this morning, I pull up to a stop light and (what appears to be) an attractive young woman crosses in front of. Then I notice the sideburns.
We're working on the cross bracing on the pilings that support the new house. I had a bunch of lumber delivered the other day and I thought it might be a good idea to put some kind of sealer on it. All these braces are under the house, so it's not like they are exposed to the weather. Most of the existing braces seem to be in pretty good shape and they're 40 years old, so it isn't absolutely necessary, but still, putting on a coat of sealer seems like a good idea. I was at Lowe's the other day and picked up a gallon of Thompson's WaterSeal for this purpose.
Today we ran out. Evidently my guess-timate of how much sealer we needed was a little low. There are several Lowe's in Portland, but they are all about 15 miles away. Surely I can pick up another gallon of the ubiquitous Thompson's someplace closer. I call Rhoda, nope. I call Sherwin-Williams. The guy has to look it up in the computer. Another nope. Call two more places that don't answer. It can't be that tough. There is an Aboy hardware store not too far away, I'll just drive over there. Except you can't get there from here.
Do I get on I-5 or not?
Looking at this map on my phone, it appears that you get on I-5 and then get off at Terwilliger, but no. You are supposed to not get on I-5 but stay on Multnomah Boulevard because there is no exit for Terwilliger. In fact there is no exit till you get to Corbett, which is practically downtown. Stupid Portland. I should have known better, I've been down this road, but not all that often.
Finally get to Aboy, dutifully put on my face mask and check out the paint aisle. Sixteen zillion cans of paint and paint like substances, but no Thompson's. I give up. I'll go to Lowe's, I know they have it.
Driving down the freeway I notice a mess on the other side. There is a wreck and traffic is backed up for miles. Okay, maybe not miles, but quite a ways at least. No going back this way. Finally get to Lowe's and I buy two gallons of Thompson's even though we only need one. I buy two as a reward for having gone to this much trouble. Don't know what I'll do with the extra gallon. Use it as an excuse to tell this tale if anyone asks me about it, I suppose.
Did see a couple of attractive women walking around this afternoon. No sideburns, which improved my outlook a bit.
My legs started hurting a couple of weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, but eventually it became clear. The new house I bought six months ago is built on pilings on a moderately steep hillside. I hate having to scramble on uneven footing, so the first thing I did was hire a contractor to install a set of stairs down the hill alongside the west side of the house. They are like two and a half stories tall and I've probably been up and down those stairs 500 times since then, so I am pretty well conditioned to climbing stairs.
Those stairs gave us access to the west side of the house, but now we need access to the east side where the gas meter and the air conditioner are, so more stairs. I figured we could just cut some notches in the dirt and put some stepping stones in there, but Osmany sold me on the idea of making something a little more substantial because they are probably going to be there forever. So I went to Lowe's and picked up a bunch of one foot square concrete stepping stones. To make the steps more durable you need to support the outward facing edge. If it is just sitting on dirt, the dirt can crumble, the step will tilt and eventually your stairs will start to collapse. Well, what are we going to support the edges with? Well, we have a bunch of one foot square stepping stones, so that's what we used and now we have a set of stairs where each step is one foot higher than the last. On normal stairs, each step is eight inches high, so our new stairs are a little taller. It's not bad, and it's only for access to the utilities, it's not like people are going to be traipsing up and down these things all the time.
Except when we are working here, I am going up and down these steps four or five times a day and surprise, surprise, my legs started hurting big time.
We're putting some steps into the hillside at the new house. I just wanted some steps, but Osmany is not satisfied with half way measures, so he's building a stairway. He's down to the last few steps and he finds a couple of old steel pipes in the way. What are they? Gas lines? Water lines? Buried electrical conduit? They are only buried under about six inches of dirt, but we are good 20-25 feet from the top of the hill. Somebody could have run some pipes through here for some tom fool reason. If doesn't seem likely that they are being used, but I call the gas company anyway. They sent a man out and he dutifully climbed around the house to get to our mystery. Took him less than a minute to tell us that they weren't gas lines. We'd had 30 minutes to chew on it and decided it probably wasn't water or electric either, so we elected to cut it.
Osmany started with an angle grinder with a four inch diameter cutting wheel, but it was kind of slow going. Seems the pipe was full of wires. So I drug out my 40 year old Black & Decker Saw Cat and a seven inch cut off disk. It made short work of the pipes. Just before Osmany finished the last cut I thought to record the event so that's what you see above: Osmany finishing the last cut.
Turns out they weren't pipes at all but rather big, fat steel cables. I can only surmise that they were used for some heavy construction project here many years ago and then abandoned. Could have been from when the pilings for the house were put in, which was 40 years ago, or it may have been from when they built the street and installed the sewer, which would have been even before that. And now we've dug them up.
Roberta X has got herself a new saw: a compound sliding miter saw, which prompted me to post this. Osmany also bought one. It's a wonderful saw. big, powerful, accurate, easily turns any kind of board into sawdust. I would have bought one myself but I have too much stuff that I don't use. Osmany buying one saved me. Anyway, the saw comes with a sawdust collection bag, but it is ridiculously tiny, about the size of a sock you wear on your foot, so we looked around Lowe's for some kind of tubing to redirect the sawdust into a bucket and we found some pieces that work. The white elbow is part of a drain for a kitchen sink, the ribbed blue hose is for a swimming pool. It was a remnant so it was half price. Those two fit together well, but the elbow was a little large for the outlet on the saw so we wrapped the outlet with a couple of layers of heavy canvas strapping. It is not what you would call SECURE, but it works well enough.
P.S. This is the first post I have done with Blogger's new editor and I have to say it is a piece of crap. It's been lurking on the fringes for a while now, but so far I've been able to use the old editor. Not sure why. Maybe because I'm running Linux and I refuse to install any updates until shit quits working.
Yesterday morning around 10AM I got a phone call from my neighbor at the new house telling me that water is running out of my water meter. Called the water bureau. By the time I got there, the man from the water bureaus was already there and he had determined that it wasn't the city's problem, it was mine. I have to say, it was pretty obvious what the problem was. The line about a foot downstream from the meter was gushing water and excavating a cavity in the ground.
Osmany and I spent about an hour excavating and removing the broken pieces and then we went in search of repair parts. First stop was Home Depot, but once again there was a long line of people waiting to get in. Phooey on that, so we headed over to ACE Hardware where there were only three or four people in line, so we didn't have to wait long, but it didn't help. They didn't have any fittings for one inch PEX line. So I consult my magic elf box and I locate a plumbing supply store across the river in Vancouver. I also found one in downtown Portland, but their phone was disconnected. So off to the wilds of Washington State we go.
There was a short line at Grover Electric and Plumbing Supply and the guy at the counter fixed us up right quick and it only cost me $95. The old me would cry 'gadzooks' at such a price, but I had my plumbing battle armor on and I wasn't going to let a piddly hundred dollars stand between me and victory over a broken pipe.
Repair Complete
Osmany got all the pieces fitted and connected with the old lines, but we didn't have any pipe wrenches with us, so we called it a day. We went over there again this morning, this time with pipe wrenches and tightened everything up and it looks like we have defeated the gremlins once again.
I suspect that the fitting broke because the hole in the ground wasn't backfilled properly when it was installed, that and someone really big and heavy, like King Kong, stomped on it. Something put a serious strain on that pipe. I can't imagine what it was.
The living room in the new house is a step down from the kitchen. My wife got the idea that we should raise the floor so that everything on the main floor is at the same level, no steps. I'm generally in favor of flat floors. Steps might make it more visually appealing, but do you really want your home to contain traps for the unwary? I mean, does every time you walk into the living room need to be a dramatic entrance? Besides, if we raise the floor, we can get rid of the soffit covering a heating duct in the master bedroom. Maybe.
The living room is kind of large, and it is just over the master bedroom, which is nearly as large. Yes, the house is a little odd. The entrance and the living room are on the top level, all the bedrooms are on lower levels.
Anyway, we've got (24) 20-foot-long two by twelve's on twelve inch centers spanning the floor. The floor is going to be raised about seven and half inches, the width of a two by eight. Can we run the two by eights cross wise and on top of the two by twelves that are already there? And can those existing joists support the additional load? We want the stringers in the built up section to be cross wise so we can move the ducts from the soffit. I don't think two by eights, 24 feet long can be counted on to support much weight, and since the new subfloor is going to weigh at least twice as much as the old subfloor, we might have a weight issue. We might have to run the two-by-eights directly inline and above the old joists and splice them together to make stronger joists. That might be stronger, but it would be put a serious dent in my plan to move the heating duct.
I'm good with math, but figuring out how much all this wood would weigh, how much weight the floor is expected to support, and how much weight these different arrangements of sticks can support is something for someone who's familiar with all those numbers. Shoot, this problem might even be odd enough to make it interesting.
The boys & I are ripping up the #$%%^ pseudo-plywood subfloor in the new house and we realize a cat's paw would be a good tool to have. I have one, or at least I think I do, but it's over at John's house in North Portland, which isn't all that far, but it's over a windy, bumpy road, and Home Depot is a little closer and it's just a straight shot down Cornell Road. Time is money and how much can a cat's paw cost anyways?
Not sure why, but I think I should tell you I didn't take Cornell all the way to Murray, which is where you ought to turn if you are going to Home Depot. Instead I turned on Cedar Hills, took it to the freeway (26) and thence to Murray. I suspect I was on autopilot because that's normally the way I head home, but I'm going to claim I went that way because I have aversion to all the traffic lights I would have to deal with if I went down Cornell.
Whatever. I get to Home Depot, find a reasonable place to park, get out of my car and as I start walking toward the entrance I realize there are a couple of dozen people queued up, carefully spaced apart, waiting to get in. It's raining. I'm not going to stand out in the rain, waiting. I turn around and head to Harbor Freight, just a couple of miles away. Quickly locate a cat's paw and pick up a medium small crow bar as well. Funny about that. They had big crow bars, giant crow bars, tiny ones and small ones, but no medium / regular sized ones. We already have a three crow bars of various sizes and this one seemed like it might be a good addition to my set. Of course, we can't find the big one, which is why I was tasked with getting another one. Thought it was at John's as well, but it turns out it was at the new house, just hiding.
The cat's paw worked for a day, or maybe two, but today it gave up the ghost. The broken cross section looks like is made of compressed coal wrapped with thin steel shell. Yeah, Harbor Freight tools, when you only need to use it once.
Spray Sock This is the one I bought. Found the picture on Ebay.
Went to ACE hardware today to pick up some masks and a replacement cat's paw. They were sold out of masks, no surprise there, but they had a painters sock, which is just stretchy thing you pull over your head so you aren't breathing paint particles when you are spray painting. I don't know how well it would work with dust, which is what we wanted it for, and who knows how well it would work against a virus. I suspect not very well. The cat's paw, along with about half of their hand tools, was in a cage that required a sales person to unlock. The cat's paw cost about $12 at ACE. The one at Harbor Freight cost about $4.
When we first looked at the new house we noticed that the floors squeaked, all the floors in most all of the rooms, but it didn't seem like that big a deal, easily solved with some magic screws or maybe just some more nails. A carpet guy came out and looked at the situation, and he didn't think it would be a big deal. He'd just take up the carpets, nail down the subfloor and put the carpets back down. $1,500 for the whole house, which might have 2,000 square feet of carpet.
We finished deconstructing the kitchen and then we pulled up the hardwood flooring and now we can see the subfloor and what we see isn't pretty. The subfloor is nailed down solidly with 16d sinkers. The problem isn't poor nailing, the problem is the material itself. The subfloor is some kind of hybrid of plywood and particle board. It has wood plys on top and bottom and a center made of particle board and it is at most 5/8" thick. This house was built 40 years ago. In contrast, my current house, which was built 25 years ago, the subfloor is 1 1/4" (1.25 inch thick) plywood.
So we need to replace this low grade subflooring. All of it. All three floors. @#$%^. We started tearing up the kitchen floor yesterday and it was a struggle. Half the time trying to pry up the subfloor, the nails come with it. Half the time the subfloor comes up, but the nails stay in the floor joists and just rips a hole in the subfloor. $%^&&*.
Hoffritz Knife and Liberated Sink Portion of Granite Countertop at upper right Note missing rivet in handle
We got rid of the granite counter tops from the kitchen as well as all the old cabinets today. It took us several days to take everything apart and get the counter tops loose from the cabinets. They had been attached with copious amounts of silicon sealer and getting them apart without breaking the granite or doing too much damage to the cabinets was a bit of a challenge. The last, and possibly most difficult part was separating the counter tops from the sink. This was the last bit to be done so I had the advantage of being able to wedge the far ends of the counter up a fraction of an inch. I drove the knife in between the granite and sink by tapping on the end of the handle with a ball peen hammer. After it had gone in a couple of inches, I was able to cut around the sink by more hammer blows to the back edge of the blade. It was a pretty nice knife, I don't know if it will ever qualify as cutlery again, but it served a useful purpose. It didn't actually suffer much damage, just the one rivet (photo) and it was recovered and reinstalled and seems to be good.
Crew, rig, and trailer full of granite
I put an ad on Craigslist yesterday evening and was promptly inundated with calls and letters. I quickly pulled the plug. E-mails and texts don't cut it. Only phone calls work for this kind of thing. Too much back and forth. In any case one guy showed up at the appointed time, looked over situation, went away and came back with a truck and a crew to haul it all away. Suits me. It took all six of us to move some of these pieces. We had to carry them down a half flight of steps and some of them weighed near 400 pounds. I can't imagine how the guys who do this for a living manage it.
I was originally going to have ReStore take the kitchen apart and cabinets away, but they had to be scheduled. I had a couple guys I needed to put to work, and one day I just reached the tipping point where I said "it's time" and we started deconstruction. Call ReStore a couple of days ago to see about having them pick up the cabinets, and wouldn't you know it, they are shut down because of Corona.
I've never had much luck with selling stuff on Craigslist, probably because I have a poor idea of what kinds of things people want to buy, but giving it away in the Free section works wonders. I might have been able to get some money for this, but compared to overall cost of the project and the amount of hassle and delay involved in selling it didn't make it seem like a worthwhile proposition. I might have been wrong, but I don't really care. The granite is gone and I can move on to the next phase of this project: ripping up the old kitchen flooring.
Update March 2021 replaced missing photos that Blogger apparently lost. First time that has happened.
We had some snow last weekend, or maybe the weekend before. Dumped a couple of inches, turned Skyline Boulevard into winter wonderland. Took a couple of photos out the back door, stitched them together with Hugin. Everything worked, the Synaptic Package Manger (because I'm running Linux), download and installation, and the program itself. Amazing.
$3K. 2 guys, 2 days, 1 dump truck, 1 truck full of tools. Concrete man coming Monday.
The 'problem' was that the sewer inspection showed that the sewer line sagged a couple of inches in a section under the driveway. It's probably been that way since the house was built. Probably could have left it alone, but there's this report and it bothers some people, so I decided to get it fixed.
Seems like they didn't properly support the line when they were pouring the concrete because the low point was right where it went through the concrete wall under the driveway.
The guys from Mr. Rooter plugged their electric jackhammer into the outlet in the front of house which worked fine for a while until it didn't. Figured they had tripped a breaker. They switched to their generator until I got there. Checked all the breakers, none tripped. Realized that the fingers in an outlet had probably given up the ghost, so we got an extension cord and plugged them into another outlet in the garage.
Means we need to go through the entire house and replace all the old outlets. Cost will be minimal, outlets only cost 68 cents, but it's going to take some time.
We started taking apart the kitchen in the new house today. There is nothing really wrong with it, it has all the modern conveniences and everything works. The biggest problem is that it's out of style. My main sticking point was that if we were going to move to another house, it would need to be better than what we have now. The new house has a view and a couple of big rooms and that was enough for me, but my wife has her own opinions and the big issue for her was the kitchen. So, new kitchen.
The kitchen has granite countertops and you think oooo, granite countertops, but granite comes in all kinds of mixes of colors and this one is just difficult to like. Drop any small thing, like a screw, on it and it just disappears. The color mix makes it impossible to find that screw. Of course you aren't normally going to be dropping screws on your kitchen counter, but I'm using the kitchen counters as a makeshift workbench while I am working on the house and screws are part of everything I work on. I imagine you might have similar problems with preparing food there, but we'll never know. The kitchen is being replaced and first part of that is taking the old one apart.
I expected the countertops to be attached to the cabinets with screws that screwed into blocks that resided in cutouts in the granite. I don't know why I thought that. Possibly I got the idea from watching too many shows about building ancient stone temples. Whatever. That was not the way it was done. They are glued to the cabinets with silicon adhesive and that silicon does not want to let go.
I was originally going to have ReStore remove the old kitchen, but a confluence of factors persuaded me to tackle it myself. But I am not seeing any way of getting these countertops loose, so I call ReStore and ask them how they handle it. The guy who answers the phone says he 'isn't afraid of granite countertops, he has a sledge hammer'. Okay then. That's one way to handle it, but I have this, probably wrong, idea that somebody might be able to use them. It's probably wrong because countertops are custom made for each kitchen and it is extremely unlikely anyone will be able to use them as is. And cutting them to accommodate a different layout is problematic, to say the least.
In any case, I want to get them loose from the cabinets without breaking them. We succeeded with two of them by pulling the cabinets out from under them. We only lost one small cabinet in the process, so we are getting there.
Looks like the astragal is chewed up at the lock area.
Took me a minute to figure out what they were talking about. Astragal is a funny shaped piece of wood trim commonly used to seal the gap between a pair of doors. There is such a piece of trim on the front door to the new house and it is damaged, so the message was about fixing the door, not about space girl. I would show you the damage, but my phone photos are horribly blurred. Someday I might figure how to get clear closeups, but I ain't there yet.
Checked the mail at the new house today, found three bills from the gas company including a shut off notice. The first bill was mailed on February 6th. I called them back in early December to set up the account and it takes them two months to send me a bill, and then because I didn't hop right to it, two weeks later they send me a notice of impending cut-off. Frigging morons. Whatever, let's get this resolved right now, I've got my credit card, I'll give them a call. I call and wade through their robo-cop swamp until I get to the actual payment robot who refuses to take my payment because my street number doesn't agree with my account number. And then it hangs up on me. How dense can you get? I called back and dialed 9 for emergency as I figured that would get me to a person and it did, and they were able to get me connected to someone who was able to straighten out robo-cop.
Ordered new fan controllers for the ceiling fans. These mount in an outlet box in the wall and connect up to the household wiring. Bonus: they require two AAA batteries. WTF? You have all the power in the world at the tips of your wires and you need batteries? The bogon flux around here is approaching infinity.
We got the interior lights sorted, except for the ones on the ceiling fan. I picked up a new fan controller at Home Depot hoping it would work with this fan, but the new controller has 4 wires and the old one only has 2. How are they controlling the fan and the lights with only two wires? Must be some kind of mystical electronic B.S. I did get a photo of the name plate so I should be able to figure out what kind of controller I need.
The light in the closet in the garage wasn't working. It wasn't the bulb, the socket, the switch or a tripped circuit breaker. We finally realized that the neutral wire wasn't neutral, it wasn't connected to anything. We could have just used the ground, but that's not really kosher. After some pondering, I realized there was probably a junction somewhere where the white wire was failing to connect, but where? The Romex cable disappears into the wall and who knows where it goes after that. Well, I'm gonna find that junction, so I take the saber saw and start cutting holes in the drywall. I'm Ahab and I'm gonna get that white wire. And ain't no literary allusions gonna dissuade me from my mission.
Space between roof & drywall over garage. Rafter on the right. Just to the left of where the Romex goes through hole in rafter there is a small white square. That is the outlet box that holds the bad, bad outlet.
The Romex goes up the wall, across the ceiling to garage wall, up the wall to the roof and then down along the rafter to the outlet that supplies power to the garage door opener. We traced its progress by sticking the smart phone into the hole in the wall and taking pictures.
'Disassembled' Bad Outlet Showing Broken Fingers
This outlet was the culprit. Outlets these days are supplied with two methods on connecting to the power lines. There are screw terminals and there are holes with spring loaded fingers that capture the bare wire ends. The problem outlet had no screws, it only had finger captures, and a couple of the fingers had broken.
Negative image of patch, cropped from image at top of this post. Black screws show up as white here.
We cut half a dozen holes in the drywall to trace this wire. Alternatively we could have just pulled every outlet and switch in the garage until we found the culprit, but that is assuming the problem was even in the garage. It could have been anywhere. Cutting the holes enabled us to go directly to the source of the problem. We put back the pieces we cut out by screwing sticks across the backside of the hole and the screwing the cutouts to the sticks. We cut half a dozen holes and the patches still need to be spackled but we're getting good at that.
P.S. I think blogger has changed the default text size relative to the size of the images, so I'm going to try using large instead of extra large and see if that restores some balance between image size and text size. As usual, clicking on an image should take you to a full size version, or right click and open in a new tab, which is my preferred method.
Went over to the new house today intending to sort out the lights. There were a dozen of so lights that weren't working and a couple of switches that didn't seem to do anything. The lights are probably just burned out, and if we get those replaced, the function of the mystery switches will likely be revealed.
We get there and the temperature inside is 45 degrees Fahrenheit. What's going on? Did somebody turn the furnace off? I had it turned down to 60 as no one is living there right now, but I didn't intend for it to get this cold. First thing is to check the breaker panel to see if the circuit breaker has been tripped. Well, where is the breaker panel? My wife and I searched for it a few days ago and came up empty. Osmany and I made another pass through the house and didn't find it either. Okay, so maybe it's in the pump room, which is outside, down the hill, around the side. Nope, not there either. Check all around the house. No sign. Osmany finally locates it behind the door in bedroom #3. Open the door to go into the room and the door covers the breaker panel. You have to go into the room and close the door before the panel is revealed. Very sneaky, whoever designed this house. Or we were befogged by the unusual layout. Or we are just dense.
Okay, found the breaker panel, and no, the breaker for the furnace is not tripped. Turn the breaker off and the light in the furnace closet goes off, so there is some connection here. But the furnace controller has a couple of LED's and none of them are on, so it's like it's not getting any power at all.
I drive over to Harbor Freight and pick up a volt meter for $7 and we start tracing the wires, seeing where we have power and where we don't. Finally notice the light switch inside the closet. Light switches normally run lights, but this one doesn't do anything. The light has a pull string. Is this switch supposed to control the furnace? We pull the wires from the switch and connect them together, turn on the breaker and Voila! The furnace, she burns!
