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So, yesterday we managed to get some good news. Despite a wasted morning as I toured stores asking for things that didn’t exist – spending more of the morning hunting for things to attach the house to the foundation – discussing things with our engineer – realising that we’d missed something important on the diagram – rediscussing things with our engineer… before giving up at lunch time and meeting with Kathryn for the afternoon’s two person works…

…which went pretty well.

We’d finished framing up the back wall on Monday

And I’d then finished off the last bit of flooring yesterday morning before heading out on my (failed) quest. The other thing that had happened yesterday morning is that the inspector popped around (at our request) and okay’d us to wrap the back and the sides of the house. He asked for us to do some rectification work on the work that was done when the house was constructed where they’d not bothered with some of the nails (surprise surprise), but once that was done we were clear to go.

And so on went our combination of UV-protected open-joint cladding specific black wrap and tyvek. Thus making the house look wayyyy more respectable. From the back at least.

And so today I was feeling pretty good.

And then I set to on the bolt issue again. Having got a final answer from our engineer we I headed to the store – who didn’t have some of the stuff but who pointed me to a store that would. 15 minutes later I discovered, again, that our engineer had spec’d something which apparently doesn’t exist – but if I overengineered it (switching from the 1/2 to 5/8ths inch) then I could get a 10 inch long expansion bolt.

Okay.

So I get the bolts. I have the threaded bar. I have the Simpson HDU2s. I have the tools to drill the holes. I have the epoxy to fix the threaded bar into the holes for the Simpson HDU2 holddowns. I have the impact socket set to allow me to quickly tighten them up.

All is ready.

So off I went and installed three of the epoxy anchor bolts. To do that, I also have to install an extra stud because – and this will astonish you – they didn’t bother with double studs at joints. I know! You didn’t expect our house’s builders to have cut corners like that, but they did. *sigh*.

So, each bolt requires me to cut, glue, screw then nail in an extra stud. Then to drill the hole, clean the hole, fill the hole with epoxy, then place the bolt in the hole, then wait 3 days for the stuff to set before I can actually attach the damn anchor.

Anyhow, after 3 of them my hand was pretty tired from the pump action on the tube, so I figured I’d try doing some wedge anchors. And lo, things went to shit very rapidly. The first one didn’t seem to want to tighten, no matter how far I hammered it in. I thought that perhaps I’d made the hole too deep (despite measuring it).

So I did another one. And that also wouldn’t tighten and disappeared further and further into the hole.

It was at this point I went outside and looked at our foundation and discovered

It turns out our foundation is made of crap mixed with shite, producing a substance with roughly the same integrity as the 45th President of the US.

Now, I can’t say what concrete should be like here. Perhaps it’s meant to be like powdered sand stacked artfully in a heap that if you nudge it too hard falls over. But I suspect not.

My first thought, because I’m hypercritical of myself, was that I’d drilled too near the edge. So I tried once more, attempting to direct the drill more inboard and having ensured that (contrary to the planning statements) it was as near to the front edge of the mud sill as the 3″ plate washer would allow. This, it turned out, had absolutely no fucking effect whatsoever.

Suspecting that the answer to this is “you’ll have to use epoxy everywhere” I called back our engineer for the billionth time. That was the answer, at least – that was his better answer than “well, you could replace the foundation”. Uh hu. Or we could hope that a particularly large ant walks into the foundation and the house collapses when there’s no one in it, and we escape from this fucking albatross of a money pit.

At this point I was so pissed off with the whole house, and the futility of it all, and the process in general, that I was largely hoping that the wood delivery truck might accidentally back into it and cause the whole fucking thing to collapse, so I decided to call it a night.

It’s not that it’s unfixable. We can – and will – do it. It will be expensive, and way more time consuming than it should be, like everything we’ve touched on this house.

It’s not that that bugs me the most. It’s that it feels completely pointless. Why am I strapping it to the foundation? I suspect the only reason it survived the Nisqually earthquake in 2001 was that it flopped around on it’s shitty foundation like a dying fish on the shores of a river. Tying it down will, I suspect, just mean that in the next quake the shitty foundations it’s on will crack and crumble like the substandard-low-grade crap they are. We’ve managed to make the rest of the structure more solid, but there’s very little we can do for the foundations – which to be honest were half the fucking reason we bought the place.

I also, it must be said, am starting to resent having to pour 1000s of dollars into bringing the place up to code, knowing how many shitearse ‘renovations’ we looked at when buying our house, that I’m damn certain were not up to code in any vague respect.

So I’ll try and dig up some positivity tomorrow. I’ll try and find some enthusiasm to care. But I don’t hold out a lot of hope. Instead, like much of this process, I’ll just plough on in the vain hope that at some point, it’ll feel like a house not a disaster.

Today was one of those days that was a battle – and I feel a bit like I lost. We have been working on several jobs – there’s the framing at the back where we’ve replaced the sheathing and framed in the new windows. Kathryn finished the nailing on that today, so that at least is good.

There’s the everlasting pain that is the plumbing. I’m now down to one join – which is probably going to be made from two 22.5s stuck together – because it’s not 45 and it’s not 22.5 degrees, and there’s a subtle misalignment between the parts I precut a while ago, and where the vent exits the roof. I have at least managed to get the rest of it all connected together so when the plumbing test stuff finally arrives I’ll actually be able to test it.

I’m suspecting there’ll be at least one leak from one of the crappy joints. Still, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyhow, that was a complete arse today because I thought it was a 45 degree turn. It *should* be, but something I’ve done somewhere means it’s not. And I dry fitted stuff and it went together in that way that things sometimes do when you dry-fit where it clearly wasn’t going to work. But having tried my spare 22.5 turn in there that dry-fitted well enough that I thought it might work. With a bit of brute force and holding.

But I’m using different glue (because they only had multipurpose glue, not the plain ABS glue, and I figured that might be handy as I come to actually installing finish plumbing which may be PVC). It turns out this stuff takes *way* longer to dry, so as I tried to brute-force the joints, the other joints came apart. It ended up being a bit of a tedious disaster, more frustrating because it’s so close to finished and also it’s ladder work, so I can’t do it when Kathryn’s not there.

So I’ll attack it tomorrow, and hopefully get it to work.

Now, to be fair, if my morning hadn’t been so shoddily unproductive, then I would probably have had the patience and common sense to know that it wasn’t fitting well enough to work. But the morning went like this…

Our reading of the plan is that we need 40 5/8″ x 12″ anchor bolts made from galvanised steel.

Call places.

No one has them.

Call company A (poor sodding company A) who say they can get them tomorrow.

[Nip out to get plywood]

Place order with company A.

Visit Home Depot to look at what they have (and because I know I’ll need a 5/8″ SDS drill bit, because I don’t have one and an impact driver). They don’t have them either. Buy tools in readiness for installation anyhow as they are on sale and only have 2 of the impact driver, but hold off buying bit for impact driver as I’m not yet sure what size I need.

Call back company A because have moment of realisation that the price didn’t feel right. Discover that there has been miscommunication, they are ordering bolts to go in before concrete is poured. As we don’t have a time machine, cancel order.

Long discussion with company A where we discover that they can neither get, nor believe exist, 5/8″ anchor bolts made from galvanised steel.

Call engineer. Discuss plans. Identify that what we can get – which is adequate – is 36″ lengths of zinc coated threaded bar, which we can then cut to length, then epoxy in place, then screw down.

Drive back out to Company A (poor, poor sodding company A). Company A order pick for us, 20 threaded bars, 40 washers, 40 plate washers and 40 nuts in 5/8″… and 5 tubes of painfully expensive epoxy.

Drive to Home Depot, return the drillbit which is the wrong size for the 5/8″ bolts when epoxied in (you need a 1/8″ larger hole, apparently).

Literally as I’m leaving home depot get a phonecall from the engineer who points out a paragraph on the plan which indicates an alternative bolt pattern – at the end of the section after the main shearwall hold down section…after the nailing pattern… after all of that.

He explains that this is actually adequate for attaching our house as our house has got existing foundations. This requires approx 40 1/2″ x 10″ long expansion bolts.

I resist the urge to scream.

So tomorrow I get to return the stuff I bought from (poor, poor) Company A, and return the new drillbit, and replace it with the previous-fkin drillbit, and hopefully, gods hopefully, actually fix the house to it’s damn foundations once and for f’kin all.

I’m very grateful that he called, because it’s going to save probably at least $100 – and lots and lots of time, and also save me having to deal with the hideous epoxy. But…augh!

So when at the house by myself (and a little bit of the time that Kathryn’s been there), I’ve been taking advantage of the fact that the weather’s been both warm and dry to enjoy the awfulness that is the underside of our house.

I say awfulness, because there are still rat deposits that are fresh, and despite being submerged in nearly 6 inches of water before the sump pump was working, the old rat droppings are also still around. In addition, because of the water issues, the moisture barrier (ha) is covered in a layer of fine powdery silty dust, which kicks up whenever you’re under there.

So I get to wear a mask and come out looking like I’ve been dumpster diving in the desert, which is a delight.

Annnyhow. I’ve been doing plumbing. A lot of plumbing. Some of it’s pretty good, and has worked out the way I intended.

Some of it is truly shit – there are definitely two joints that are highly suspect. If they fail in testing (or at inspection) I may have to replace them with flexible joints. I ended up a few degrees off in my run from the far corner of the house to where the sewer/drain exits the building comes in – and also managed to paint myself into a corner where neither side wanted to move, so ended up with a joint where there’s not the proper overlap of the pipes. And the alignment is a bit crappy.

Still, we’ll see if it tolerates being ‘pressurised’* I’ve got a couple more joints to make in the house on the venting (so currently any sewer gas is venting into the house, which I’m not happy about, but I just couldn’t quite make the last few joints today, but at least now any water that runs into the dwv vents will actually run down into the sewer, and not into a bucket, which is what it has been doing).

I’ve also started to insulate the PEX under the floor because while it was 19°C on Monday, it’s going to be back down to freezing in the next few days, and that up-and-down means I’m wanting to be sure the pipes don’t freeze when we test the plumbing. Thankfully, as it stands while the manifold has some water in, the special run I put in to the garden hose pipe is the only one that actually has any water in. The rest of the runs have not been opened yet.

But what have Kathryn and I been up to?

Well, we’ve continued our quest to remove any remnants of the house we bought.

We’ve pulled out the old french door and framed in one of the two windows. The other of the two windows is currently not framed in (but has the original wall studs there).

We’re getting quicker (and better) at framing, I think.

There’s still some more nails to go into the siding – as it was getting pretty late when we stopped. But… the finish line is inching closer.

* Here they pressure test the waste plumbing by blocking the exits, then filling the system and the vent stack with water.

When you look at door installation information – as in, how, as a newbie to install a door – there’s one fairly consistent piece of advice. Don’t start with a French door. We are now in a position to understand that more.

On Monday we framed up our French Door’s rough frame – it ended up taking much longer than expected and we ended up getting home much later than intended, with the door still sat next to the hole. Part of that was the amount of time it took us to buy supplies – because while there’s a lot of variation in suggestions of how you should do it, a lot of that debate was made moot by the fact that around here when we tried to find the right kind of flashing no-one stocks it. No-one stocks the corner reinforcement that’s recommended. No one stocks about 3/4ths of the items we’d put on our list.

So then yesterday I spent the morning boning up on how to install a French Door – again – and trying to munge together items from the list of things we could buy, and how to create something much like what was recommended. Then I headed over to the house and prepped the frame for installation. Kathryn arrived after work and a mere SIX AND A HALF SODDING HOURS LATER we had the door installed.

There was a moment about 4 hours in where we both experienced premature celebration.

We’d screwed in both sides of the frame. It was level, plumb, square, true. We shut the doors and opened them with great pleasure. And then we thought we’d just ‘pop’ the screws in the top of the frame having shimmed it to keep it where it was…

…and lo, everything twisted and changed. The doors would not close properly. The gaps were all off.

An hour later we’d managed to get it all back in shape. Then came the joy of putting in the locking mechanisms.

And finally.

Fina-fucking-ly, it was done.

Today has been similarly traumatic. I attempted to drill a hole to run a pipe through – the only stretch of vent pipe that has to run through an exterior wall. Half way through I thought it sounded ‘odd’ – looked – and I’d managed to find a nail (that holds the siding on). Much drilling with my metal drill bits later, I managed to (using a combination of grinding with the drillbit – totally inappropriate use of it, and my tin-snips) cut the nail out and get it sufficiently out of the way that I could finish making the hole.

Our 90° drill is dead, so that needs to go back. It just stopped turning.

Then the toilet.

Now, see, our house as we may have mentioned appears to have been built by people with only a passing acquaintance with common tools, like measuring tapes and levels. And as a result, one of the ‘quirks’ is that the first beam is 4″ out of place. Approximately. I realized this when I was trying to cut new floorboards and that last section, by the front door, is 4″ longer than all the others.

Now this becomes important, because we left our bathroom wall where it was, and previously, the toilet seemed to be curiously further from the wall than you’d expect.

Now, today as I drilled my tiny pilot holes to work out where to put the new toilet flange* I kept going “what the hell”.

Because I realized that the reason the toilet was weirdly far from the bathroom wall is that if not, it’ll run into the beam. It took me a while to work that out because also, it turns out, where we’ve chosen to put the toilet is right on the join between the old flooring and the new, where I’d put an extra reinforcing 2×4 screwed under the floor.

Eventually I worked it out, chopped the hole in the floor and managed to get the flange in. The toilet is going to be irritatingly far from the wall (or we’ll need a special toilet). But… there’s not really a lot of choice. I considered rotating it, but I’ve already run all the other plumbing to there.

Still, it’s done.

One more toilet to go, the laundry floor drain, and I need to come up with some way to indicate under the floor roughly where the shower and bath drains will be; then I get to go grovel under the house again. I just have to connect up the dots, then cap the whole lot off so it can be filled and tested, along with my fresh water plumbing.

Which is to say, progress.

*toilets here sit on a plastic ring on the floor, on which is deposited a ring of wax, and then the toilet sort of… squishes it to make a seal**.
** Yes, I agree.

…who weren’t there.

Yeah, it’s been a day of plumbing – so all the runs under the house are complete. Ish. Insofar as they go from the place where they’re meant to start, through the floor, along under the floor and then they pop out in what will, at some point, be our furnace cupboard.

It’s sort of a hybrid of a manifold and a series run system. Each bathroom has 2 feeds of hot and cold – the shower (and in the main bathroom the shower/bath), and also the toilet* & sink**. The kitchen only gets one run (which feeds the refrigerator, dishwasher, pot filler and the main kitchen sink. It’ll also feed the outside hose for the back garden). The laundry gets its own run too – from which I intend to vamp the front-garden-hose tap.

That should mean that, for the most part, the hot and cold water demands don’t lead to massive fluctuations in temperature anywhere where we care. Although I refuse to get non-temperature controlled showers anyway. Having lived with them as a student and as a kid such barbarism is unacceptable in a house we build. I squeal for no-one in the shower***.

So the next step in our JIT purchasing is that I’m ordering a nice adequate manifold, and shall install it in such a way as we can just unscrew it and pop the drywall behind it. Then I need to finish the rough-in and get it checked. Much of it is done to the point of the nipple on which the taps will go. There are however a few bits that still need doing, and I need to get the laundry and fridge boxes bought and installed.

….

I do feel sorry for anyone who wandered past our house today and heard the crawlspace shouting “You complete bastard, why do you keep coiling that way!”. It turns out that while PEX is way easier than copper in many regards, its persistent desire to be a coil wrapped around you, under-floor posts, itself, other bits of pex, any random bit of anything it can find… is quite irritating when you’re working at 3< °>C / 37< °>F. Mind, I was warm enough under there because I was scrabbling around and trying to hold my head and neck out of the ratshit.

And yes, there are fresh, err, deposits, down there.

I was very glad for my filter mask.

Anyhow, I said mostly done because I ran out of clips, and all that pipework needs insulating. Oh, and (of course), there’s still the soil (DWV) pipe to run. I pulled out a section of the old today, and am starting to ponder the new. But most of that needs the top-plates installed on our walls and we’ve only installed one layer of top plate (because then we can use the second layer to help tie things together).

I’m hoping to hell that we’re doing this right. I will be really, really f’kin sad if we’ve got any of this wrong, but the inspector looked at our work and said “just keep doing what you’re doing”. So we are.

* Yes, hot *and* cold to the toilet because I think a bidet is potentially a good idea. But only if it has warm water.
** Which I still refuse to call a lavatory, despite what I wrote on the plans for the building, because that’s just wrong.
*** Uh, I’ll just leave that there.

So, I’ve been kind of quiet recently, in case you hadn’t noticed. That’s partially just sheer busyness and partially that my mood’s been kind of up-and-down. I continue to feel somewhat rootless and vaguely unsettled. A feeling which doesn’t seem to be going away particularly. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, or what to do with it. It nibbles away at me in a way I’ve not worked out how to address.

…

Anyhow, so. In other news, I went to CES for Transport Evolved.

A week in Las Vegas*… yay?

CES was incredible though – lots of interesting tech, must be great if you have time to just wander… Anyhow, I had fun, learned loads, had the pleasure of my good friend Nikki’s company and also of meeting Brandon, our epic camera man. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to do it next year too :)

…

The house, though, is the main thing that’s occupied our time. First up there’s the roof – which has been a tedious experience. The roofers are crap, that’s basically the summary. They’re careless and rushed. Which means that the quality of their work is really, really poor. They came back today to fix the mistake they made last time – where they put the skylight in the wrong place – because they “didn’t measure it”. That seriously was a component of their excuse, and I don’t think it’s half-as good an excuse as they seem to think it is.

In the process they damaged the brand new guttering.

They’ve also left seams that are very poorly bonded.

So they’ll be coming back again (more’s the pity), but we can’t really afford someone else to fix it.

On the plus side, the guttering is up and looks nice (except where they scraped it), and the catch pits for the rain water drains are in place front and back. We concreted them in, and it looks a lot nicer than the old bit of plastic tube sticking out of the ground. Our dry-well is still laughably far from dry, and we’re planning a much enhanced drainage system involving a rain-garden at the back.

We have also started work on framing – framing in the old back bedroom window and the kitchen window. The window was pretty simple**, the kitchen window was such a shoddy bit of wall that we decided to rip the whole thing down and reframe that entire section.

Unsurprisingly, since the house is car-decking*** basically stacked on a ring foundation of concrete, the edges of the floor are hideously damp (has no one heard of a damp proof course?). Hopefully it’ll improve with the new (improved) drainage system (the pump being connected and the water being transported away from the house). Also, having functional gutters may help.

We’ll see.

We’ve also started framing up for the new windows – which we are doing without actually cutting out the old siding yet. We haven’t got the windows yet because we haven’t heard from our window supplier (who I really should call tomorrow)… but it’s fun to start to imagine it.

We’ve also started replacing the rotten car-decking and removing the old plumbing. Discoveries:

– The bath leaked because the drain pipe had corroded through. Their solution to this had been to wrap the pipe in a plastic bag and fill the space with expanding foam sealant. No, really.

– The floor was rotten underneath the bathroom wall because the bath leaked.
– Apparently it was considered perfectly acceptable by the previous owner / contractors to use the tongue-and-groove bit of the flooring to support the floor when they cut through the floorboards not above any beams. There was a three-floorboard stretch which was just floating in mid-air.

Mainly we’ve repaired that front section using salvaged bits of floor. They’d used short sections of car decking in the walls and ceilings, and by sorting what we found we’ve ended up with enough to do a chunk of floor…

There’s still an enormous chunk that needs new flooring, but we’re currently leaving that open so I can go and play in the rat poop do the new plumbing. In the mud and ick.

Anyhow, tomorrow I’m off to work, then Thursday I get the joy of taking our new (used) car to the dealer to fix the 3 faults that appeared between us buying it and the end of the week after we bought it. I’m glad we sprung for the painfully pricey warranty.

Our Rav 4 EV has also been to the dealer this week for it’s 4th iteration of a door lock repair. Here’s hoping this one works.

* ugh. I am not a fan. My main Las Vegas memories are rude people, the stench of stale cigarette smoke, and general grottyness. CES was interesting, and I enjoyed the stuff I saw, but the place itself I’d say I can take it or leave it, but really I’d just leave it.

** apart from me buying the wrong sheathing, us nailing it in, then having to remove it and replace it with the right stuff. Meh.

*** 3cm thick floorboards, for those not in the US

This past weekend was utterly exhausting – we did, however, get the house enclosed. Sorta. See we managed to get all the sheathing up, but the cordless nailer I bought got part way through the day then decided it was time for a nice rest.

I’ve given it a “clean” (which involves cleaning the barrel) and will run it back tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

But the nailer deciding to have a rest meant that the sheathing is attached with fewer nails that would be ideal – most of which have been hand driven. So we’ll see what happens with that.

Anyhow, so… Taking a step back. Kathryn, Liz and I managed to get all of the asphalt shingles off (and into the dumpster); along with all of the black paper. Our amazing builders managed to get the old trusses off (mainly intact – we need to come up with some way of protecting them), and managed to get the new trusses on*. The new sheathing went on (except for the bit around the weatherhead), and lo, they came to dry in the building.

The one spectacularly large fly in the ointment was that the siding couldn’t just be stuck on because the new trusses are stepped in by between 0″ and 5/8″ depending on where on the wall they’re sitting. Because we own a trapezoid, not a rectangle.

So Kathryn and I spent the entirety of the weekend making little furring strips (or shims, as I’d call them), to space each section of siding out so it would align with the siding below. Which was clearly cut by someone who didn’t give a rats ass – because it’s all at different levels and the word straight cannot be applied to it. So each piece of siding had to be cut – and then often slightly trimmed – to get a fairly close fit.

Then we could nail them up.

Only part way through the nailer packed up.

But since the house is now sort of enclosed, we could at least take a breather…only not, because we were expecting the roof to go on this Wednesday. Only today I found out that it may not happen Wednesday, because clearly there was some question I needed to ask that I didn’t. See, the electricians came today to install the new panel and weatherhead. It’s huuge. And clean. And doesn’t look like a pile of electrocution waiting to happen.

Anyhow.

There he is, installing the panel, and he cheerfully explains he’ll be back after PSE have moved the power across. Which is happening “this week”.

I’m confused, and after some discussion I grok that the panel installation is separate from the PSE visit – and the twain shall never meet. Now, the problem is the old weatherhead is in the way of the roof. So I call our roofers and go “uh, the weatherhead is still in the way” and have yet to hear an answer on what’s happening there.

Also, today we tried to let in all the vents – and failed. So we’ll have to carry on doing that tomorrow.

I shall be glad when we’re off everyone else’s schedules, and back to “this is what we want to accomplish” and the only people who gets pissy about it not happening is us.

* after an utterly panic inducing period in which a failure in communication between the old contractor, the truss company, me and the new contractor meant that we had noooo idea that the trusses were not meant to be a perfect fit. Indeed, they’re a fairly poor fit. But that’s the way they engineered it.