Category: House

So the past few days have been rough. I’m starting to come out the other side of feelings of utter despair – so far I’ve proven something to myself about bending, not breaking, although some of that is down to a lot of time with my wife holding me and giving me somewhere to hide from the world. Most of this is down to the evil ongoing in the world. Watching as more facists get power, watching the institutions I grew up with (the BBC, the Guardian) amplify the words of those who would have me dead and ask if it’s just “a refreshing alternative to political correctness”, seeing locally bigots running around with pride… It’s been tough.

There have also been the appalling events in the news, hate crimes happening at least every week, and most likely every single day. Murderous terrorists running around while the GOP conflate the discomfort of being called out for being an arsehole over dinner with being gunned down in a supermarket, and then having the press bothsidesism it to be comparable.

It’s left me profoundly worried about our safety here.

It’s left me profoundly disturbed and considering where we should go. The vague “we should have a plan” has become a more and more incessant clamour in my brain.

It’s made more tricky by the fact that the inside of our house still looks like this:

Which is not conducive to selling it.

Thankfully, my wife pointed out to me that while we may not be happy with contractors as a general rule, they’d be fine if we were selling it, and a good team of contractors could probably have the place done in a month, maybe two.

As it is I’ve started to nose at Canada. My wife reminded me that if we want to leave the US and don’t want to go back to the UK (where they’re still debating whether I should be a person in the press on a regular basis, and hate crimes against minorities and LGBTQIA people went up dramatically last year), then I might have to get over myself and get some more OB/GYN education and some more surgical experience. Although, that said, I also now have an MSc in Critical Care (which I didn’t have when I applied last time) and I’ve completed the NCLEX (which again, I didn’t have last time). We should probably think a bit about where we’ll go if we do, because the application timeline wasn’t terribly short.

—

Of course, particularly Sunday night, after I’d curled up and cried for a bit, I slept like absolute shit. That led to a bad day yesterday, where pretty much every job had some mistake in it. Basically my day started badly when the store had run out of the specific stainless steel finish nails we use for our cedar trim and then…

– I picked up the wrong paint – and instead of priming the last two sheets to go on the outside of the house, I instead painted them with the top-coat intended for the trim (which is just off white). I realised this as I closed the can. There is some debate about whether the paint will adhere online if you do this, with some arguing the main purpose of primer is to soak into the wood and prevent you wasting the more expensive top coat, and some arguing that primer has some binders in it to make it stick to the wood better. Fuck knows. I put top coat on all the same, but I’m not sure whether we should go ahead and put it up.

– I misscut the trim I’d carefully left long on the front of the house. It’s marginal, I think less than a mm, maybe a mm at most. But still, depressing. I’m going to have to get a sander and see if I can blend it with the ones around it to make it ‘fit’.

– I forgot to pre-paint the vertical of the furring strip next to the door. That’s meant to be black, not white, which meant I had to try and paint around the cedar I’d put up yesterday. In that process I managed to get paint onto the cedar (not a lot, and not anywhere visible, thankfully).

In the end I switched to digging the trench (which will be filled with stones) around the front of the house, which is a less stressful thing to do.

As the weather has gradually got less clement (is that a thing? I mean, it’s inclement, so surely it’s becoming less clement? ;) ) we’ve paused a little on our painting odyssey. Which is kinda frustrating – we’ve painted the eaves on the south and the west side, we’ve also painted all but the last approximately 8 feet of the north side. But the weather’s been misty and damp – which isn’t ideal for painting – so we’re holding off until the weekend when it’s meant to be just overcast, rather than mizzley.

It’s made a difference that’s big to us, but probably subtle to everyone else. Making the house feel more finished. It’s kinda pleasing, despite being a job we’d never really factored into our scheduling.

I’ve also been continuing my quest to attach all the cedar in the world to our house. I did a count today and we may, just may, have enough. It’s going to be spectacularly tight though. It’s a pretty simple, albeit long, job. And I’m not hugely looking forward to the next round of planing as I’d really hoped that the drywall would be out of the way before then. However, particularly after today’s little… experience, it won’t be.

So – we got a drywall lift. The listing (still up on ebay) says that it can lift 150lbs to a 15′ sloped ceiling. Interestingly, it’s now saying it can only lift a 4’x8′ sheet, but the manual (and I use that term loosely) that comes with it says it can lift a 4’x12′ sheet – and the extension bars that it comes with clearly make a 4’x12′ sheet possible.

However, it’s also clearly a piece of crap. Ropey welds and a wire-rope feed that scrapes the wire up against the winch wheel. It’s nasssty to use and our 100lbs (45kg) drywall sheets are clearly very near it’s real maximum, especially at full extension. Which we’ll get to.

So yesterday we put up the second and third drywall sheets that we’ve ever put up in our lives. There’s a little tweaking needed, we didn’t put enough screws down the edges (but the middle is fine). The summary of that process is: it was a total mare. It took us about 2 hours per sheet – which is a ridiculous amount of time, although some of that is just the sheer weight of the sheet, and some of it is dealing with the unsquareness of the house, but most of it is trying to get it into position. Partly that’s because we’ve gone with a single 12′ sheet cut down to the 138″ width of the room which means that it’s tight to get in there, and then getting it up to ceiling height is a pig. Oh, and did I mention – they’re f’kin heavy. Right at our limit for carrying and positioning with any kind of vague accuracy.

Also, as has been mentioned these are the second and third sheets we’ve ever put up and it turns out that starting off with cathedral ceilings is perhaps not the simplest of things to start off with.

Anyhow, despite the lift making some moderately unpleasant noises, we got the drywall up on the bottom two sections of the cathedral ceiling in our bedroom:

And so today we set to on the top sheet and a bit. Now, this is where things start to get tricky. We’re dealing with both the unsquareness of the house, and the (and this bit is our fault) unsquareness of the 13′ high walls. See, 13′ it turns out is really beyond our limit for lifting and accurately fixing. So when we got the walls ‘up’ there was not as much straightness as we’d like*. Now, cathedral ceilings are prone to cracking at the seams anyway, it turns out, so I’d found this stuff called “x-crack” which is meant to help with that problem and with unsquare walls. So having made some extra little bits of triangular wood which made a flat section at the peak of the roof (helping to remove part of our unsquareness), and applied X-crack (removing a bit more of our unsquareness), we cut and fit our little thin section that goes right up at the top.

Now the theory was that this would leave a 4’0.25″ gap at the top.

It did not.

Which is about par for how this has gone. Instead, it ended up with a 3’11.something-just-shy-of-four-foot gap, which was really quite annoying. Still, we reasoned, rather than take down the teeny drywall sheet we’d just really very carefully manoeuvred up and fixed in place, the x-crack, the triangular bits of wood then recut the wood bits shorter, fit them back…then the x-crack, then recut the thin bit of drywall to make it thinner**, then get it back up, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and we’d cut the 4′ wide board down just a smidge (which in this case is 0.5″).

That done we loaded it up onto the hoist. The hoist that the listing said can lift up to a 15′ sloped ceiling, I remind you.

About 11′ later we discovered that our lift cannot lift to a 15′ ceiling.

It’s limit is a good 18″ lower than that. And actually, when you read the specs in the manual it says that an extension bar is required for that final bit of lifting***. An extension bar which was not included. So we are pondering various ideas for what to do now. Do we do all the bits we can do and then come back for the high bits when we’ve got an extension bar? Do we even trust the damn thing with an extension bar…? It is f’ckin terrifying the way it creaks and groans lifting these boards, no matter what it’s official weight limit is. At the current maximum height I think it’s got nearly 20cm of play horizontally. I’m currently engaged in ranting complaining moderately politely at the person who sold it on e-bay. If I’d’ve known it wasn’t able to lift to our 13’6″ ceilings, I’d not have bought it, obviously. Because why would I want a lift that’s not capable of doing what we need?

At any rate, we need to come up with a plan, because currently we have a lot of drywall on the floor, and a distinct lack of it on the ceiling.

* and wanting more straightness is a damn rare occurrence around here.
** which is technically thinner than is recommended for x-crack, but is what we’ve ended up with because of other compromises.
*** Well, actually, it lists its maximum height as 110 ft (or 33.6m), which I think is probably an error.

Ta-da.

Per code, on test (a pass) and per plan.

Wheeeee

There are some fireblocking things we need to address (which I suspected there would be), but otherwise we’re good to insulate.

So we finally managed to reach an actual formal inspection point. We’ve had partial inspections which have allowed us to proceed in a non-standard order (exterior framing so we could wrap and rainscreen the building; but that’s not a formally recognised point).

But today after we worked all through the weekend we got all the work done to get the wiring inspected.

And…

We passed!

There were a couple of earth issues which he asked we change – so that’s done (it took about 20 minutes); he described the install as being neat (which I didn’t dance at, despite the urge); and he didn’t have any issues with the panel wiring, which had me quite worried. He also wanted some fireproof foam on the conduit through to the panel – so that’s done too (I had that around, just didn’t want to spray it until he’d inspected).

The panel is still missing 2 breakers – a 40A one (which arrived today) for the Rav4 EV charger, and a 15A AFCI (I think, it’s either an AFCI or a GFCI). The wires are in place for it, and the earth is wired in, but the actual breaker hasn’t arrived for one of them, and the other arrived this evening at about 8pm.

Since the weather has been somewhat inclement this week we’ve switched to doing some interior work, and have started putting up the baffles on the cathedral ceiling. The hope is that we’ll get the next inspection on Monday and then move on to insulating. That will mean we can heat the house.

Which given that we’re entering the colder, wetter part of the year is important. There are a couple of bits of plumbing to do under the house (connecting up the bath and the shower drains) and then we should be good to spray-foam under there (that’s a job we’re paying someone to do).

But at any rate, despite the wetness of the weather and the fact that we’ve not yet got the rain-water holding tank in the ground, or the outside of the building painted*, passing the inspection has injected some positivity into a project that was starting to feel like an interminable awful thing with no end in sight. At least now there’s it feels like there’s actual progress and we’re moving towards a place we can enjoy.

* Painting party next weekend folks…unless it’s raining!

So during / after my little breakdown on Tuesday (sorry about that, you didn’t really need to endure it, but hey…) I went down to BOB and forked out some cash for a few new tools (a chunkier wire stripper, a pair of “electrician’s scissors” and a less bent set of needle nose pliers which I will endeavour not to cover in engine oil and gunk, I promise), a terrifying quantity of sockets (outlets), lightswitches, little wire-joiners, wire twist joiners (which I still think are hideous, but they are easy), and some more odds and sods, and set to on the wiring.

I realised after my little freakout (again, sorry), that actually – as inspections go – for the first time we’ve ever fully wired a house – “please connect these things and I’ll come back” is really a fucking amazing outcome. I’m hoping that <em>is</em> the total of it when he comes for the do-over. But really – not getting “jesus, what have you done” is a serious prize.

So I spent yesterday fairly solidly working on the wiring – caught a mistake <em>I’d</em> made (extra, pointless wire) which I then sat down with Kathryn last night going over the circuit several times to be sure it was right before today wiring everything that could possibly be related to it, and concluding that no – that wire is pointless – and pulling it out.

I also realised that if we’re having a separate gas hob and electric oven (the new plan because we can’t afford a euro-size cooker and our kitchen is titchy, and US cookers are needlessly massive as a general rule; this way we can at least save some of the wasted space by getting two built-ins – It also means we can have the proper arrangement of appliances. Gas stove, electric oven) then we need an outlet for the spark-igniter to plug / be wired into.  So I added that one in to one of the kitchen circuits. As a side point, I’ve not seen an equivalent for the Europe’s Fused Connection Unit faceplates which are nifty things… But most of the gas stove tops I’ve seen just have a plug on the end of the lead anyhow…

So I’ve worked my way down  starting from the lounge – I think I’ve done all the sockets in the lounge, kitchen, laundry, dining room, and one bathroom (with the exception of the ceiling fan, which I need to be up in the loft space to connect). I’ve started on the main bedroom, leaving the boiler cupboard, the main bathroom, the second bedroom, the hall outlets and the outside sockets to do.

I’ve also ordered a frankly terrifying quantity of breakers – made worse by the fact that since we’ve replaced / upgraded the panel and the wiring I suspect (though am not sure) that everything has to be either arc fault or ground fault protected except for a couple of items… and actually, now I come to think about it, they may also need to be protected too. That means that instead of using a $6 breaker, I’ve had to order breakers that are well into double figures. And I’m now wondering if the two standard breakers that I picked up at BOB (which were cheaper than the online prices, amazingly) might need to go back because I’m thinking they may well need to be GFCI instead.

Which’d mean instead of $16, they’d be $80, at best ($150 at BOB).

Still. Hopefully we can get the wiring side all sorted by the end of the weekend (although the breakers won’t be in) – and it looks like it <em>might</em> be cool enough – and not rainy for long enough for us to get the last of the rainscreen up. That would be good.

Also, our rainwater tank arrived – and it’s fucking massive. Which is great, except that I’ve looked at the hole it’s meant to be going in, and it ain’t big enough. So that’s a bugger. If anyone has a burning desire to dig holes in rock-hard clay, be sure to let me know. We rented a digger and tried, and it didn’t seem to be successful.

So, I was doing some reading about prepping for inspections and wandered across a discussion of the fact that while it is ‘to code’ to have a 12/2 run from the panel and then 14/2 spurs from that run (if you have lights and outlets on a circuit), so long as that circuit has a breaker correct for the lower rated wire… apparently inspectors don’t like it. Or more specifically, they don’t like it when DIYers do it. Fine, apparently, if you’re a pro-electrician (and it’s done following the code). But likely to lead to tedious discussions if you’re a DIYer.

Which is funny because that’s how it says to do it in my code book.

Thankfully we’d only done that on a couple of circuits, so I spent some of today tweaking those circuits – removing the 14/2 (thinner gauge) wire and replacing it with 12/2 (which we had left over). Sadly, the boiler circuit (which consists of one double outlet, one light and the smoke detectors) is more of a pain to fix. But if our inspector doesn’t like it I can fix it with one run of 14/2 back to the panel and replacing the single outlet box with a double – and splitting the two circuits. Not a nightmare, but a pain.

I also plumbed in the shower – which, it turns out has a weird quirk – in that while it’s a “raindrop shower”, the showerhead is only about 14″ from the inside of the stud wall (3.5″ thick). Now – to be fair, there’s a female drop-ear that it connects to – but it was asking that to be positioned a minimum of 1 5/8″ back from the surface of the wall. Which still left the showerhead approximately 1′ from the wall. Which is insane. Add to that the fact that our bath has approximately 3″ wide surround, and suddenly you’re looking at a shower that’s only 9″ (22cm) from the edge of the bath…

Which is…not ideal.

After much futzing with it, I managed to position the drop-ear *just* inside the wall – which gains us back almost an inch and a half. I’m slightly worrying that we’ll end up having to buy a longer adapter* – lord knows the damn thing was expensive enough, but it was about the only US-spec shower we could find that fell remotely in our price range and at least faintly reflected the Crane Drexel sink.

I may also have to add a nailplate of some sort to hide in the wall because the pipe is now well less than 1 1/4″ back from the drywall surface. And the cursed thing that is the shower valve (which took a couple of hours of futzing with) probably needs a bit of the stud edge trimmed off to make the faceplate fit. It doesn’t *say* it needs that space in the directions for installation – but when you look at the faceplate it is *meant* to be recessed into the wall. Which is fine…if there’s not a stud right where the damn valve needs to be.

Still, I’m going to leave that for the minute, now it’s far enough along for the plumbing inspection – I think – and that tweak can be in the final inspection.

The list of things to do for inspection is getting shorter though.

• Low voltage wiring (network)
• Tighten last earthquake bolt (under pile of insulation)
• Vent ducting 3/4 bath (requires gable rainscreen to be present)
• Vent ducting laundry (requires gable rainscreen to be present)
• Vent ducting main bath
• Smoke detector wiring and bedroom boxes
• Exterior light box rear(requires rainscreen to be present)
• Exterior light box front
• Insulation lounge wall (partly done)
• Framing: Both bedroom / attic wall sections, section above laundry room)
• Plumbing vents – run through laundry room attic wall framing

We’ve started measuring for the funky triangular bits of framing that sit in the sections between the attic and the two bedrooms and the little mini attic above the laundry and 3/4 bath. It’s made hideously complex by the fact we really want a built in shelf above the doors in both bedrooms. Which is pretty much what you’d expect considering the number of multi-way switches we’ve installed in a tiny, tiny house.

Incidentally, USians, is premixed coloured paint a thing here? I’ve not seen it anywhere I’ve been – everywhere seems to only be mix-to-order, which is bizarre to me. I only realised they didn’t have it at Home Depot** after wandering around for about 10 minutes looking for it…

…and then was somewhat fazed – because in the UK there’s usually a few aisles of varying qualities of premixed colours (cheap -> expensive), plus you can go get whatever you want mixed (moderate -> more expensive).

In the end I got my little tin of black paint mixed… but… well… is this me being blind?

* And this is where I really, really miss UK plumbing, because normally in the UK this bit would be a compression joint and a bit of pipe you cut to length, but here it has to be threaded at the wall end – and since this has a 90 degree bend in it for the shower head… they just make it some length or other.
** Or possibly BOB, which might be my new name for it (Big Orange Box – because I tend to call it B&Q).

So, we continued our plan to put all of the copper in the world in our house. At least, it somewhat feels that way. We’ve used way more than I guestimated based on the book – which says you’ll need N rolls of W, X, Y and Z gauges for a medium size house. I thought, given our house’s smallness that we’d need much less. Turns out that we’ve needed about 2/3rds as much.

Part of that is that I like to break off rooms into separate circuits – and break off lighting and sockets into separate circuits.

Part of it is that we’ve tended to route things the “gold standard” way (over the top of windows, rather than under them).

Anyhow, today we worked on it some more… it was very hot out and the idea of putting up rainscreen even in the shade on such a hot day was pretty unappealing. As I’ve whinged before, the project’s not exactly going fast, and I’m hoping that when we do (hopefully) get the permit signed off and can start insulating and drywalling (plasterboarding) that we might get that going a bit quicker.

We still have the ply to put down on the floor – along with the heating pipes – which needs to be done before we can start faffing around with walls. And we’re starting to really struggle with all the crap in the house. Offcuts of wood that are potentially useful. Offcuts of wood that we’re thinking of using for firewood. Offcuts of ply that might be handy. Offcuts of ply that are probably scrap, but irritatingly large and thus kept around. The beams we got because I f’cked up and bought an extra beam – which turned out to be handy, because we f’cked up and cut it to the wrong length and which we might use in the garage…

The gardening stuff…

It’s all got to go somewhere. And that means a shed, realistically. Because while I’d love to throw the garage up, we aren’t in a position to do that really. We’re thinking of giving in and getting some nasty brackets with a cut list, then throwing a shed up (hopefully in a couple of days) – just because it would make things much more managable.

But that means probably spending money on an excavator rental, or hand digging a large hole. One is costly in money, the other in time we don’t have.

Which we could probably complain about more, but for the fact that we’ve booked a holiday – 8 days away from this madness. Which – despite the loss of 2 weekends, and a solid week of work – is I think needed to keep us at least slightly sane.

We put in a solid 16.5 hours this weekend on the house. And what did we do?

Well, the two front windows, the last two original windows? They came out. We’d left them for a while for various reasons. One is that we don’t like having the front boarded up, but another is that one of them (the one nearest the car) is 8ft long and the other is 6ft long. We’d removed a 6ft one earlier and it was a complete pig, so we weren’t hugely looking forward to this.

Fortunately, the 8ft one was broken (our contractors broke it) so we tackled that first knowing we could chop it up to pull it out. It turned out, however, that the joker who installed it had used whatever s/he had lying around to install it. Y’know, a couple of drywall screws, a few nails here and there. The end of a tube of caulk.

In fact, it was so badly installed that we had more difficulty getting it out because it half fell out part way through. It was hanging by a couple of nails… In the end we put a tarp on the ground, Kathryn pulled the nails and sort of let slide-fall onto the tarp where it shattered.

Fortunately, the contractors had stuck a sheet of plastic across the front of it to stop it falling apart when they broke it, which stopped most of the glass exploding out across the garden.

We then ripped out a big chunk of manky old wall…

Framed up for our new (much smaller) window

Made a little strip of ply to fill in the enormous gap in the siding left by the original builders… (which had been filled with spider nests and dead insects when we stripped the trim off)

(Over a roughly 6ft span that goes from 1.5 inches to less than 1/8th of an inch). Did these people not have a f’kin plumb bob?

And as the day wore to a close we put the siding up (we’ll cut out the window after the framing’s approved).

Sunday was a rinse and repeat:

Only in this case they had barely installed the window. It came out almost pristine. The few nails that were holding it in were mainly the ones in the trim. Oh and 2 drywall screws and a 2 wood screws that were about 20mm long.

There was also some caulk – about 20cm of it along the top edge of trim…holding the trim to the window. After Kathryn pulled some of the trim off it became rapidly apparent that we’d have to hold it in while she pulled off the rest, because it was so loose. It actually threw us both for a bit, because less than an hour after we got there we’d removed the window and weren’t mentally ready for “now we need to demo the wall”.

This one was tricker because we had to replace the header – our plans require two jack studs either side of the header (rather than one on the original header), so even though our new window is the same size as the old window (although approximately 30cm further north than the old window), we needed to pull the old header to install a longer one.

But after quite a lot of experimentation with methods on previous windows we got this one in smoothly. Albeit with some beating it with a hammer and a block of wood to get it in the last few mm (it was pretty snug).

And ended the day with the front boarded up.

So quick shower this morning a few nails (we didn’t do all the siding nails yesterday), and I’ll call for an inspection on that. Then we can wrap the front, put in the last two windows…and commence making the rainscreen.

Also, obviously, there’s the interior electrics to do, and the drywall, and the flooring, and the heating… and and and.

So, our project to almost completely eliminate the lawn has started. We had an incident yesterday at the farmer’s market. The usual kind of incident. The ‘oh, we’ve just bought a lot of plants’ incident.

We weren’t as bad as we sometimes are. We kept it to edibles.

And not that many, because, well, the house currently lacks liveability.

But, having got a couple of them in the ground last night and realised there was little hope for us to get the rest of the stuff done (because it was getting late), we laid out where we wanted the raised bed. Today I grabbed the chop saw, the nail gun and threw together our first raised bed. I then strimmed the grass as short as I could get it, threw down an enormous pile of cardboard, and then between Kathryn and I we transferred a lot of the soil which has come out of the hole that will be our rain water capture device into the new raised bed. And lo:

I’m really rather proud of it given it’s made with the shoddiest bits of wood and a couple of hours with a chop saw and a nail gun.

We also both had a bit more of a go at strimming the grass, which is proving to be a bit of a mare. It’s already long enough that it needs cutting again – which is a double pain because the (Free) lawnmower we picked up at the weekend (“Free! Free! Free!”) which is a Neutron EM 4.1 – an old battery lawnmower – does not work. Irritatingly it looks like it’s been apart (and not been well put together). So I need to do some fault finding. I note that both the motor and relay are available as spares, which is suggestive of common faults. Feh.

This afternoon, before we set to on the garden we… fitted a second window!

It’s not quite finished yet – I got a bit keen on the caulk, so we decided to let that dry before putting the final layer of flashing on.

So there’s no picture of it yet…

But…there was a picture of the hole…

It is definitely coming along now :)