Saturday, August 23, 2008

Hot, Sweaty, Exhausted

It was going to be a working kind of Saturday today; H and I are trying to keep Pete and Steve on schedule, so we need to do what we can to keep the ball rolling. I started early by going in to check all of the perimeter insulation in the floor joist cavity - my earlier investigations gave me little confidence things were okay. Sure enough, the first area I looked at had the heat tubes up against the rim joist with no insulation separating them (see first photo). That means if you had an infrared goggles this winter and you looked at the house, there'd be a bright red spot right at the floor line where lots of precious heat would be emanating through the wood. There were a couple of spots like that, and a couple spots where I was looking out through small holes to the inside face of the Tyvek (that stuff that Nascar prefers), so I foamed them up real good and put the batts lovingly back into place.

One thing I did find that surprised me; it's a Sparky thing. It looks like he must've ran out of ground wire that had to run back to the main water line because when I took off some of the insulation to inspect, I saw that he had a line of grounding wire running diagonally through the ceiling of the Man Cave, and one of the holes drilled in the joist was made in a way that separated the diagonal bridging from the joist on both sides! (See next photo, showing copper cable and dangling bridging) I nailed the bridging back into place; don't know why it wasn't done earlier. I started all the insulation inspecting at 6:00 and finished the "repairs" by 10:30 pretty much on schedule.

That's when Heather arrived on her bicycle to begin the process of using all the concrete rubble stacked up in the front yard as filler, on which that giant orca-sized dirt pile in the back will provide additional fill, to build up for the front yard patio (a.k.a. "Breakfast Deck"). Daniel joined in the fun about noonish, and together the three of us worked on stacking alternate layers of dirt and rubble to make an earthwork lasagne (without the cheese).

And I had a hare-brained scheme to get a concrete saw to cut up the old basement driveway into chunks that could be neatly stacked too. That turned out to be about the slowest process in the history of Wedgwood, so I switched to a (gasp) 60 pound demo hammer (aka The Breaker) and "Owhrrr, owhrrr, owhrrr!!!") , and let me tell you, the tool only does part of the work. That was hard labor - I remember why I like working in an office again.

By about 3:30 the three of us were all just dragging our heinies because of the heat, but Judy (of the Jack & Judy hip roof and large windowed house down the street) came in for a brief tour (mostly to see the Nanawall of course). When she left, she was able to join the Thumbs Up Crowd too. Check out that shirt. We seem to be providing a pretty fair amount of entertainment for some of the neighbors. Richard came by while I was using the 60 pound mother of all demo hammers, sticky sweaty and barely able to lift the thing out of the pavement after it drilled through it like a hot knife through butter. He was talking about using it in the basement to lower the slab height someday. Oy! The worst thing is, we wouldn't get to watch him if he's in the basement.

Just a tip; if you're under six feet tall, get someone else to use this demo hammer thing. I'm just under 5'-10" and it was a chore to keep lifting it- a couple inches would have helped. But everyone needs to find things out in their own way, eh?

Meanwhile, Pete put in more than a full day, mostly leveling out the troublesome basement floors (Danny's room on the left and the Media Room on the right). My architect friend Jon was recommending some high tech cementitious self leveling stuff, so I almost bought some yesterday, but I called Pete to find out how many bags to get. He said "How much are they?" "Forty bucks a bag." "Oy! Ya know - I am positive I can do it with good old fashioned concrete and that's only three bucks a bag." "You're the boss!" Amazing. So he was in the nice cool basement all day, mixing and pouring thin layers of concrete while the rest of us were out in the hot sun entertaining the neighbors.



At the end of the day, we are just totally exhausted from moving dirt and rubble, amazed at how Pete and Steve can just bang out this kind of work day after day, and on weekends they go on thousand mile long bicycle rides - or hundreds of miles anyway. They are amazing. Danny and I drove by the house about 8:00 and Pete was still finishing up a few things. Long weekend day for the wicked, huh?
The original blog is still toast; it must be forever. Ah well.....this'll do. Ciao.