It Doesn’t Have To Be That Good To Be Better Than Nothing

Well, it might not be finished, but it’s done. No, the other way around. Bah. The laundry room is completed enough to call it one.

Of course it really never stopped being a laundry room, except for a few hours a few times. For a while it was like a typical laundry room. A dark, cold, undifferentiated hole in the ground with bare light bulb that somehow increased the gloom, and a chugging drain hose from the washer to make sounds like the cat with a furball to keep you company. It wasn’t elegant for a while, but we got our laundry clean and the bottoms of our feet dirty, just like regular folks.

We’re old hands at working around regular domestic activities. It’s much, much more convenient to build things and then use them, but we don’t have that kind of time or money. We settle for pretty good, and don’t grumble. Hell, it’s a laundry room where there wasn’t one before. It doesn’t have to be that good to be better than nothing. Perhaps I’ll put that on my business card.

So yesterday we painted the last door and all the window and door trim one last time. Today we scurried around and tried to figure out which screw in the hardware bucket belonged to which hinge. But we got it done enough to pollute the intertunnel with some pitchas. Here you go:

Wow. Borderline orderly down here. A couple of old carpets make trudging back and forth less trudge-y. Mrs. Cottage likes having a desk there to plop the baskets on, within easy reach of the machines. We both use the sink all the time for all sorts of things. It’s a gloomy day today, but the room is always bright, with two fairly big windows and four LED discs in the ceiling.

If you look back the other way, you can see the old brick wall straight ahead, and the wall we added on the left that separates the laundry room from the portion we reserve for more barbarous arts.  If you look hard enough, you can see the loop handle in the floor where the floor hatch opens. The floor is perfectly flush now, and sturdier. Here’s what that used to look like:

Plenty of room for a dart alley, but the ceiling is a little low for me. You really have to stick the double twenties. You can’t float them in. Veterans of Irish pubs are used to low ceilings. I’ve been in more Irish pubs than the police, so I qualify as a veteran.

This used to look like that:

Hey, remember this charming little grotto? I love the carpet squares on the floor. They had to be the nastiest surface in our time zone. Decades of grime were ground into them. I wore a full respirator mask when I pulled them up. Not for any particular hazard. They’re not full of lead or asbestos or anything. But I didn’t want to catch jungle rot, or beri-beri- or yaws, or leprosy, or tetanus, or ebola, or whatever else might be lurking in the pile. For amusement, it doesn’t get much better than when you flip the carpet over and the label says it’s made by Amoco.

Hey, don’t laugh. My old construction friend Steve used to testify to anyone who would listen that Shell station burritos were the best burritos in the world. He’d never miss a chance to buy one in any Shell station we passed at mealtimes. Me? I never missed a chance to miss a chance. So maybe Amoco carpet isn’t that strange. It’s a tossup which might be healthier to eat.

Here’s how it turned out, after we demolished most of the pipes, and moved the big ones closer to the wall, and added a window, and a door we picked up during our town’s festival of trash, and fixed the stairs, and laid a new floor:

The door is solid fir. In pretty good shape for something heading to the dump. However, it was covered with little stickers of some form of cartoon characters I didn’t recognize. My kids watched SpongeBob and Jimmy Neutron and stuff like that. I’m not sure what’s on the TV now. I’m sure its something along the lines of a singing and talking platypus that cooks meth in mom’s single-wide or some other equally wholesome hijinks.

We insulated the floor below, and the ceiling above, with blown-in dense-packed cellulose. We insulated all the walls, too, with a melange of salvaged fiberglass batts, foam board, and more cellulose. It stays a little warmer in there than in the rest of the basement, but the real payoff is the sound deadening. You have to open the door at the top of the stairs and listen carefully to hear if the machines are running. It used to sound like an out of plumb bowling alley all day in the kitchen when we had the washer and dryer in our master bathroom. My poor wife had to listen to it all day long when she was in the kitchen, so she’s happy. Of course, I’m happy, too, because with the the lack of noise upstairs, I can finally hear the voices in my head again. They’re full of bright ideas, and I missed them.

[Thanks for reading and commenting and recommending Sippican Cottage to your internet friends. It is much appreciated.]

Hatches, I’m Depending On You, Son

The laundry cubes were thumping and spinning again, so the pressure is off. It’s good to keep disruptions of your daily routine to a minimum. Of course this whole project is one, big honking disruption to everything, but we don’t mind too much. Little by little the butterfly comes out of the worm. This place ain’t no butterfly, but it’s starting to at least be a moth.

Wandering down the passage to the stairs, you can see that we’ve boxed in the poop pipe. It’s a cast iron job that runs straight up through the house and right out the roof. Ugly as other people’s children. We have to leave the cleanout exposed up near the ceiling, but we re-jiggered it so it doesn’t stick out so much, and clonk the unwary tall visitor in the head.

Heading back the other way, we have to finish the floor over the hatch to the basement. In the comments yesterday, Anne got really confused, and asked me why I didn’t just disassemble the whole house to make the stairs under this hatch less steep. She’s laboring under the misconception that I’m trying to do a good job. I ain’t. If it makes you feel any better, do the same mental arithmetic I do: I didn’t build a crappy staircase. I built a fantastic ladder. See? Problem solved.

This hatch always stuck up out of the floor, and the hardware on it used to trip me every time I passed by on my way back from getting a bag of wood pellets. We’ll solve that problem right now. We beefed up the hatch something awful. I made a version of a torsion box. It’s a sandwich of plywood and solid insulation, and it’s about four inches thick now, and doesn’t feel like a diving board when you walk over it anymore. It gets mighty cold down in the carhole, so it can’t hurt to insulate the hatch to a fare-thee-well.

There used to be a portion of the granite foundation wall sticking into the room in the corner on the right. We boxed that in and insulated it quite a bit with the same sheets of extruded polystyrene insulation. It’ll keep it infinitesimally warmer in the laundry room.

This click lock flooring is good enough for what it is, where it is, and what it cost. It just sort of lays there, though. It’s not attached to anything. That won’t fly on a portion of the floor that’s on hinges. Or more accurately, it will fly. I cut all the pieces to size clicked them together into a single assembly, and glued it down to the plywood subfloor. I shot some small nails around the perimeter to hold it down a little better.

I bought a heavy duty pull ring at the hardware store, and buried it in the flooring and plywood. It’s flush, so no more tripping. There’s not much more to say about the last picture, so I’ll just let you revel in the amazing assortment of tools I have on hand. Two drills from the tenth century, I think. They came with ni-cad batteries back in the day, which died after many years of use. I couldn’t buy any more batteries, because everything had shifted to lithium-ion batteries. I couldn’t bear to throw the tools away. Years later I learned you can plug the lithium-ion batteries into the old tools and they work fine. Then you can ponder the environmental improvements we’ve made my mining charming metals like nickel, cadmium, and lithium by the mega-ton instead of using copper extension cords.

There’s a J roller in the picture. If you lean on the handle and roll it back and forth, it really lets the glue know you want it to stick. There’s a hammer over there by the brick wall, so I’ll have something to trip over, just for auld lang syne. There’s not one, but two kneeling pads, because even though I’m not officially in the way yet, I am getting old.

We took the old handle grip off the top of the door and put it underneath, to give you something to grab if you’re closing the hatch behind you. As you can see, adding a little floor area on the left was worth the trouble. It’s a small landing, but it is a landing. Before we fixed it, you ran straight into the wall at the top step.

You can see the sandwich construction of the hatch in this picture. A 2″ x 4″ frame, with 1/4″ thick luaun ply on the bottom and 3/4″ OSB on the top. It weighs a lot, and it feels just as sturdy as the rest of the floor when you walk on it, which is faint praise, I know, but better is better. It does get foot traffic, because as you can see, the dart board is already on the wall above it.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and recommending this blog to your friends. Don’t forget there’s a tip jar in the corner. We wager on the dart games, and I lose a lot. Thanks!]

It Was Already There So I Used It

We’ve already waxed philosophical about the stairs to the laundry room. Wrote lyric poems to risers and treads. Sang the praises  of sturdy handrails. But there was another set of stairs appurtenant to the laundry too. The stairs to the carhole. Ugh.

I’ve re-posted a picture of these stairs for your enjoyment. I can assure you that no matter how bad they look in the photo, in real life they were much, much worse than they look. If you walked on them, they swayed like a car salesman at midnight at a Christmas party. In a sane world, you’d just avoid them completely. If you’re new around here, I don’t live in a sane world, or even in the same time zone as one.

In the winter, these stairs are the only practical way to get into the carhole. The snow outside makes it impossible to go around and open the carhole doors to get in. Back when we were still burning firewood for all our heat, we’d stack eight cords outside in the summer to dry. Then we’d bring them into the carhole sometime around Halloween. Every day, we’d have to descend and ascend these stairs, carrying five gallon buckets filled with firewood. We used to look at the weather report in the morning, and figger how many buckets of wood we needed to get through the day. When it was really cold, and the wood furnace was really rocking, we’d have to feed it every two hours. That was twelve buckets of wood. For the life of me, I can’t understand how we did it, going up and down those stairs, carrying all that wood. I must have survived, because I’m typing this, but I’m not sure about the kids. I’ll be right back. I’m going to count them to make sure.

They’re not speaking to me yet. It’s been years since we burned firewood, but they hold grudges, I guess. I can’t say I blame them. But we have the correct number of them, so let’s move on.

We’re back to fuzzy pictures. Sorry. But as you can sort of see, the stairs were accessed through a barbarous hatch. To further make the trek up and down the stairs more amusing, when you reached the top step, your nose was touching a brick wall. As you can (almost) see in the photo, we demolished those stairs. I think I did it with a dirty look, but I might have used a hammer and a pry bar as well.

The opening was too short for a run of stairs, so they were pretty steep. I didn’t want to change the floor framing to make the stairs less steep. Too much heavy work, and expense. Besides, they’re not everyday stairs, so ripping the house apart to fix them wasn’t worth the effort. When you buy an old house to fix, you have to adjust your thinking to your new circumstances. Whenever you see half-finished renovations in houses for sale, you’re looking at people who don’t pick their battles properly. They think the way to renovate a whole house is to spread whatever money you have thinly over the whole thing. That’s a recipe for a real estate auction. Doing things sequentially when you’re sure you have the dough and the time is a smarter move. Just remember to do the most important things first. You know, like removing the house numbers so debt collectors can’t find you.

So the stairs would still be a short, steep run, but much sturdier. I did extend the floor framing at the brick wall to leave a foot or two more space at the top of the stairs. I pushed the other end further into the carhole, to keep from making the run of stairs even shorter and steeper. I have to duck going down, but not up. I don’t mind.

First, you have to cut stringers. They’re tricky little things if the stairs are in the fancy portions of your house. You have to gauge the height of the first and last riser cuts to accommodate finish flooring. This stair is easy, because there’s no flooring in the carhole, and only a thin sliver at the laundry room level. I see from the pitchas that we must have fixed these stairs in the summer, because we aren’t wearing our mukluks and wolverine furs yet:

I have no idea where we were working to end up with this picture. The spare heir is carrying the stringer down the driveway to the carhole. He’s smiling, which also confuses me. Oh well, we cut it somewhere.

As you can see from this pitcha, the stairs are plenty steep. We’ll build the whole thing out of framing lumber. We’ll install hanger brackets at the top to affix it to the floor framing.

A flight of stairs made from beefy lumber is sturdy, but it’s smart to put some form of brace about halfway up to stiffen it up. It’s not quite so bouncy in the middle of the run. Besides, the post was already there, so I used it. It was already there, so I used it is kinda the theme of the house, I guess.

[To be continued]

Interestingly, ‘Hot Air Chicane” Is the Name of My Nickelback Tribute Band. But I Digress

Well, digital life is finally catching up with real life at the cottage. I spent most of yesterday painting doors and trim in the laundry room. It needs one more day of work, and it’s hard to find the hours in the day, what with regler work demands. So writing about the laundry room has become performance art, not just construction. Live performances add an element of tension to an act. Can he finish? Will he finish? Who cares about some laundry room in a benighted burgh at the edge of the map? I dunno. But we must press on.

We’re in the portion of the proceedings where I need to say, and then a miracle occurs, and lots of things appear magically. The ceiling is insulated and drywalled and filled with downlights and painted. The walls are all in place, taped and mudded, sanded and painted. The finish electrical is mostly done. That’s a 220-volt plug for the dryer, with a “periscope” vent sticking out of the wall near the floor. The vent is a long, rectangular hot air chicane that transfers the dryer exhaust straight down into the carhole ceiling, where it takes a left and makes its way outside to a vent hood. The hot and cold water lines are salvaged hoses with braided steel jackets. I don’t bother with regular rubber ones. Bound to fail. These are something like 30-years-old and going strong.

What’s that thing in the corner, you ask? Where did that come from? Where do I get one?

It’s very simple. If you’d like a laundry (slop) sink in your house, simply build a gas/station convenience store, receive too many sinks for the utility area in a botched order, try to return one, get told to throw it away because shipping it back costs more than it’s worth, and then save it in your basement for fifteen years or so. Then install it on top of tile left over from the platform your pellet stove sits on, in front of subway tile left over from your bathroom remodel. Easy.

If you’re wondering why there’s suddenly an oil slick or something on the floor, it’s because we got lucky at the Orange Place again. No, there are no common streetwalkers at the Orange Place – yet. I’m referring to the aisle they keep for stuf nobody wanst no more cuz it aint fancy or nuthin and its marked down an sheeit. I’m fairly certain the sign didn’t say that exactly. I’m paraphrasing. But I’m capturing the vibe, trust me. They had some dreadful lay and click not-particularly-wood-looking-wood-look stuff for less than the cost of the pad you’re supposed to put under it. I wasn’t going to get a bahgan like that, and then hand it right back, so we found a cheap vinyl sheet that will do the trick for a pad. We bought a big pile of super-cheap flooring, all they had, and it was just enough to do the room.

Either I’m moving too fast to be photographed clearly, or my wife is taking the pictures again. I know which way I’d bet. We laid in a threshold piece to start the festivities. We’ll put the doorframes and baseboards in after the floor is in. We made all the wood trim out of lumberyard pine. If you strategically cut out all the worst knots, it makes great paintable trimwork. We’ll install them already primed and painted, and then just give them one more coat in place to finish the job.

If you’ve never laid a floor like this, it’s kinda comical. It slides all around on the trash bag pad it sits on. I pulled it out away from the wall quite a bit to work on it, and then slid it back in. It’s supposed to be able to move around some with temp and humidity changes. We were doing a lot of measuring here, to save as much waste as possible. There was barely enough, and you couldn’t get any more if you messed anything up. It concentrates the mind.

The spare heir did a lot of the floor. It’s easy and almost fun. Almost. There’s a tongue you fit into a groove, and sort of hinge it down to lock it. To connect the ends, You put a block on one end and bang on it with a hammer until the tongue slides along the groove in the long dimension to join the butt ends. That’s what the lad is doing in the pitcha.

Once we’re past the platform for the sink, the floor is clear sailing. We had to build the platform because the floor was too out of level to plop the sink directly on it. We can level the washer and dryer with their adjustable legs, but the sink would look weird up on stilts. Besides, I’m tall-ish, and raising it a bit helps when I’m washing out paint brushes in it.

There’s a loop of yellow romex wire sticking out of the wall. Insulated copper wire is color coded. White is 14-gauge wire, suitable for 15-amp circuits. Yellow is 12-gauge wire, suitable for 20-amp circuits. The smaller the number, the bigger the wire. Don’t ask, me I didn’t come up with the naming scheme for copper wire. That wire will have a baseboard electric resistance heater attached to it after the floor is in. If you see a loop in a wire like this, it usually means that it’s going to serve more than one fixture. There will be another baseboard heater on the other side of the wall. These heaters will probably get very little use, because electric heat costs more than bad government. But in a pinch, we can keep the towels from freezing solid in the washer if we have to.

Later that same day, we got the laundry back in service. Mrs. Cottage took one of her famous fuzzy photos to commemorate the event. The floor needs additional work around the trap door to the carhole. We’ll get to it.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting. Don’t forget to recommend Sippican Cottage to your friends, buy a book, or hit the tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]

Hey, The Thing Is The Thing and That’s That

So the drywall’s going up. I used up a lot of scraps left over from other projects. There were all these ticky-tacky areas that needed small pieces, so it was easy to use the leftovers up rather than chuck them out. On the right there is a sort of bonus room. The partition behind the washer and dryer formed one wall of this room, so we finished it off. It’s a fairly spacious closet, or a small utility room, take your pick. The water heater is in there. The hot water heater.

It’s funny, but there are two kinds of grammar nazis on the intertunnel. The first cohort, of which I’m a proud member, knows how to spell things, and points out when things aren’t spelled no good, naw. The second cohort hates these grammar nazis, and endlessly chants that speling doesn’t matter, you looser. But they’re just another kind of nazi. They pitch a fit if you tell them that paid is a word, and payed is another word, and it matters which one you use if you just got handed a paycheck and not an anchor rope. They don’t like to be corrected, but they’re fanatically devoted to correcting things that aren’t wrong.

Take the term hot water heater. The kind of internaut who can’t select the correct version of you your you’re to save their lives loves to take umbrage when you call a certain appliance a hot water heater. They get their panties in a knot over ATM machine, and calling multiple Lego blocks legos, too. God help you if you misspell Tatooine near them.

People try to correct my grammar from time to time on the internet. I’ve had people try to correct me when I called spelling grammar, which it is. They’re always wrong. Always. And I’m here to tell you that they’re always wrong about the term hot water heater.

Domestic Hot Water is a thing. In construction, when a thing becomes a thing, it gets called a certain thing, and that’s that. You can modify the thing with adjectives and adverbs and such, but it’s not amorphous. The thing is The Thing. The water that flows out of the tap when you twist the left-hand knob at the sink is domestic hot water. Or in the case of my bathroom sink, it’s cold water until I go down and swap out the pex pipes that feed it, because I hooked them up backwards. And the thing that produces that thing, hot water, is the hot water heater. You can call it the domestic hot water heater if you want to be a stickler. But “water heater” is vernacular, and “hot water heater” is canon. Period. End of story. And I don’t care how many ill-informed Snope-y typed people agree with you. Looking for citations on the internet is looking for accomplices, not looking for information. I’m the the citation in these parts, pardner. Now draw!

So our hot water heater will have a home of its own, along with the manifold that distributes domestic hot and cold water from the service coming in to all the fixtures in the house. And lots of cans of paint. It can get pretty cold down there in the winter, so enclosing a room with all the water and paint will make it easier to keep a small portion of the basement at 32-1/2 degrees Fahrenheit, instead of the whole thing. We’ll save a few pennies.

To actually enclose the room(s), we’re going to need one of these. Go ahead, guess what it is.

Yes, you guessed it, it’s several pieces of scrap lumber inexpertly screwed together by a bad carpenter. But it’s also a Thing. It’s a door jack.

It’s hard to work on doors. if you lay them flat on a workbench, it’s hard to get around them. It’s awful to work on the edges of a door when it’s lying flat. And edges are where all the work is, generally. So you make a door jack out of crap that you’re tripping over anyway, and save your back some aggravation. The slot (the jaws) is slightly wider than a standard door is thick.

If you’re smart, you make the cross-piece out of something bendy, and put it up on two blocks, like this one. That way, when the weight of the door hits the bendy part, it bows down and pinches the door tightly. When you lift up on the door, it bends back, and the jaws open up. If you’re working on fussy doors, you can pad the jaws, but we don’t do fussy around here, remember?

We bought two cardboard doors at the Orange Place, and rescued a solid fir door from the dump during the town’s Festival of Trash. We’ll be able to close off the laundry from the Basement Basement, and the rest of the basement, and use the fir door to make the utility closet with the HOT WATER HEATER in it cozier.

The Orange Place has a website. It’s a nightmare, like most online shopping sites. It assaults you the minute your turn it on. Things appear unwonted, and everyone’s yelling everything. If I wanted to see visions and hear yelling, I’d go to the tavern, thank you very much. What I wanted was a 6′-6″ door slab.

A normal door is 6′ -8″ tall. Well, a normal door in your house. In my house a normal door is a full seven feet tall, and weighs more than a HOT WATER HEATER. But the ceiling in the laundry is very low, and I can’t fit even an 80″ door in there. The Orange Place website said they didn’t have any 78″ doors. I went to the Blue Orange Place website, and they said they didn’t have any either.

So Mrs. Cottage and I went to the Orange Place to buy two 80″ doors, which was a drag. I’d have to cut a lot off the bottom, and they’re mostly hollow, so I’d have to put in blocking to beef the door up after I trimmed them. Kinda defeated the purpose of buying a cheap door slab. I was looking for quick and dirty.

So we went to look for the wrong doors, and it turned out the Orange Place had a whole bunch of 78″ doors. They don’t know they have them, but they do. There was lot in stock, which is unusual for a specialty item, but then again, if you don’t try to sell any, you probably won’t.We bought two, and ran out of the place like robbers.

I imagined the website and the store anthropomorphically. Two mean girls from high school who’ve gotten a little older and still hate each other. They sit two cubicles apart. A haze of hairspray lingers in the air. They apply hand lotion every ten minutes. And they’re not on speaking terms, no matter how many struggle sessions the bosses make them attend.

[To be continued]