The Abomination

Sorry I haven't updated in over a year. Been busy with health problems, work, and family. To make it all better, have a picture of what the pipes under my sink looked like when I bought the house.


How many things can you find wrong with this picture?


BONUS: Here is a Cat5 Ethernet drop that's been hit by lightning!


Personally, I really like the design left on the walls.

Attic Mayhem

Simply put, your roof and attic are the most important parts of your house - anything else is just extra stuff holding the roof and attic up. The whole purpose for a house is to be a place to live in that will protect you and your stuff from the weather, and your attic and roof are what does almost all of the protecting. The roof keeps rain out of your attic, and your attic keeps the house at a reasonable temperature.
The attic keeps the heat in your house during winter, and the heat out during summer. The attic will get extremely hot during the summer, from the sun heating up those dark-colored asphalt based shingles. It will retain that heat long into the night, forcing you to run your A/C a lot longer. There are three solutions to this problem:

1) Vent the attic, get that hot air out of there.

There are many ways to vent your attic, and it can get pretty complicated if your roof is a complex shape. If your roof was properly built in the first place, it's designed so that cold air comes in from the soffits (vents under the overhang of your roof) and flows out through a vent at the top of the roof, allowing a constant "wash" of cold air over the underside of the roof. If you have a crappy old house, like I do, you might just need to install vents and an exhaust fan. Click here for some pictures and demonstrations about what I am describing. This is also important for keeping moisture out of the attic.

PROTIP:
If you have mold, mildew, and rusting nails in the attic, it's probably not venting moisture well enough.

2) Insulate the attic, or separating your living area from the inferno over your head.

This is the most important part of your house to insulate. Here is where the heat of the sun is kept out during summer, and the heat from your heater is kept in during winter. Different areas have different standards for how much insulation goes into your attic, for example, in Maryland the standards are:

- Attic: (Green: R-49) (Std: R-38)
- Floor: (Green: R-30) (Std: R-25)
- Exterior walls: (Green: R-18 to R-22) (Std: 13)
- Unventilated Crawl spaces: (Green: R-25) (Std: R-19)
- Basement walls: (Green: R-25) (Std R-11)

You can see that the attic calls for the highest R-value of insulation in the house.

You have a lot of options for how to insulate the attic, If your attic is pretty open and square, like mine, you can use rolls of fiberglass, or you can use blow-in insulation (for those hard to reach areas, or if you're too lazy to roll out the fiberglass). Another option is spray-in insulation, it's expensive but is supposed to be the most effective.

You don't want to compress the insulation once it is in, the air inside the insulation is one of the things that gives it such great insulating properties.

PROTIP:
Use a mask when laying fiberglass, and rub all exposed skin with baby powder before starting work, it makes the glass much less likely to stick to you and saves you tons of itching. I tried this, it works.

3)Reject heat before it even gets into the attic.

Don't use black shingles, they soak up the sun. If you already have them, many companies offer a aluminum-based silver paint that not only protects your roof, but helps reflect heat away from your house.

PROTIP:
If your roof is the right shape, it will reflect and focus the heat onto your neighbors house, causing it to explode. Wear eye protection.

Now, if you're one of those idiots who bought a really small house with no space to store anything (like myself), then you probably want to turn your unfinished attic into storage space. That is what I chose to do, because the roof is so low you can't even stand up in the middle of the attic - turning it into living space would be pointless, wasteful, and cruel to your guests if you turn it into a guest room. I went to Home Depot (boo) and grabbed the cheapest flat wood I could find that would still hold my weight - half inch OSB (chip board) at $5.22 per 4x8 sheet. I had them chop it in half into 2x8 sheets to make it easier to transport and manage (it's free to have them cut your wood).
My house is divided into two sections, the addition, and the old house. The addition has proper 2x6 supports and is very sturdy. I simply put the OSB down and nailed it in place, sometimes notching the edges to allow a wire through. The old house has 3x3 beams, and is not even remotely sturdy. There are many solutions, but I just wanted storage space. So I made supports by cutting a 2x4 to fit and screwed one end into the joist (the 3x3 beam I was going to be standing on) and screwed the other end into a rafter (the slanted beams holding up the roof deck). Then I notched the OSB to fit around the new supports.

Now I have a floor I can walk on and store stuff on in the attic.

PROTIP:
My friend Mark did most of the measuring and cutting for me, everyone needs a Mark. They may be out of stock of Mark at Harbor Freight, check back in the future.

Ceiling Fans: The Hanging Menace

Here in Maryland it was dry, windy and freezing only a few weeks ago, now the mercury has climbed above 90 degrees, the wind stopped, and the humidity hit the point where you only have to inhale if you want a drink of water.

As the local power company knows, Montgomery County, Maryland usually welcomes in the weather with the cacophony of a couple hundred thousand air conditioners turning on at once, converting piles of money into pure Colombian uncut cold air. One of the multitude of roaring air conditioners was attached to my house, it's metal tentacles reaching out and taking money out of my wallet and beating up the occasional kid for his lunch money.

I was alarmed, and not just because my air conditioning unit was mugging people - I was alarmed at the fact that the air conditioner took a very large amount of energy to make the house a bearable temperature, and due to the lousy insulation in my old house, it had to keep using a lot of energy. I calculated it out to an extra $100 to $120 a month to keep our house cool.

I needed a solution, so I turned to the best model I could think of for saving money, an industrial revolution era sweat shop. Looming far over the heads of the hapless and overworked rabble below, powered by their rage and their deep-rooted hatred of humanity, the ceiling fans loom.

The history of the ceiling fan goes back a long way, and with modern fans the concept is the same, move air around. In a modern home, the ceiling fan is usually only noticed when really dirty or unbalanced - or if it is mounted too low and some unsuspecting fool tries to take off their coat and accidentally hits the fan, sending the dust that's been sitting on it for twenty years flying everywhere, but I wouldn't know anything about that. When functioning properly, the fan gets a nice breeze going in the room, just enough to be comfortable without being obnoxious. It makes higher temperatures bearable without actually dropping the temperature.

Unlike an air conditioner, fans take very little energy, usually around 80 watts on their highest setting, around the power use of one of your ancient Edison-era earth-destroying incandescent light-bulbs. That is why they became very popular in the 70's energy crisis. In fact, they liked ceiling fans so much in the 70's that they had to invent platform shoes so everyone could be closer to them.

In the winter you can set the fans on reverse to push the hot air that collects on the ceiling back down to to you. I haven't tried this myself yet.

There is a huge selection of fans to choose from, though the newer fans actually tend to be much lower quality then the older fans (for example, older fans tended to come with solid wood blades instead of particle board). I read a bunch of articles going on about blade pitch and shape and motor quality, but for my price range I just wanted a fan that worked well and was cheap. I got three from Home Depot, made by Hampton Bay. $40, $50, and $60. If you want to spend a lot more, you can get nicer fans, but for me to spend more money on a money saving device, it better deliver more value - such as allowing me to travel through time or get along with my mother-in-law.

Fans come in a lot of different sizes, but almost all of the ones for sale at Home Depot were 52 inches (a measure of the diameter of the whole unit, not just the blade). To find the proper size for your fan, check out the handy chart here. I have low ceilings so I got "flush mount" fans (most fans have a "flush mount" feature). The theory behind the number of blades a fan has is more blades, more air moved at a slower speed, so less noise and bearing wear.

Installation of these fans is pretty easy, despite the massive instruction novel included with them. Installation is made even easier if you have a great friend like Mark helping you install them. For all three of the fans I had to install, I was replacing an existing light fixture, so the wires were already there. Also, they were strong enough that I did not have to reinforce the receptacle. If you do have to reinforce yours, it's not that difficult, and a lot of fans come with kits to help you do just that (not that you really need them, a 2x4 and some screws will do the job nicely)

The first fan I got went over the kitchen table, it's a 52 inch that did 4000 CFM (Cubic feet of air Per Minute) on high. Unless you were sitting directly under it you didnt feel much air at all. In the bedroom I installed a 52 inch fan that featured 5000 CFM on high and it was perfect. Just a warning to you, don't expect hurricane force winds from a regular cheap-o store bought ceiling fan, you don't really want that, you just want the air moving so that you'll feel a lot cooler and the humidity wont drown you. They look nice too.

It's nice falling asleep knowing that you're comfortable and the A/C isn't on all the time, sucking up money and small children, and the breeze is nice too.

If you are considering getting a ceiling fan, Wikipedia, despite it's obvious biases, actually has a really nice article on them.

Working on the basement walls, part 2

Well, it was time to replace the left wall of the house. It's the same as what we did in part 1 except one of the walls had to come really close to the original foundation of the house. Because of that I shall be brief with the comments.

Thanks to all who helped, The Fredericksons, Arcands, Mark, Josh, Conrad, Stephen, and Mark again.

I've taken off the lose dirt and poured mortar over what was left to help hold it in place till we have the new wall in. Also note the smashed up wall to the right, as well as the wooden support that will be removed once the wall has cured.



Another picture of the same, different angle.



Stephen, our very competent mason, standing next to the dirt that the old wall was previously holding up.




The new wall going up



We extended the footer a little under the existing foundation to make it stronger. You can see the lines we drew on the foundation wall here to check for shifting at any point in the construction process - a process that, thanks to the 2 week cure times for the mortar and concrete, took over a month.



Conrad pouring concrete into the new hole



Josh, giving the wall a stern talking-to, and placing rebar




Block going up!




See that happy new corner?





Here is what the basement looks like now . . . bit of a mess, but at least that rear wall is looking better.




The basement IS clean now, I just didn't take that picture yet :)

Installing a Reinforced Ceiling Electrical Box Gone Wrong.

Hey everyone, Dan here from the MoCo Eats blog. I don’t know if Tofuball has ever had this problem before, but I have personally found that sometimes your home improvement projects just don’t want to go exactly as planned. From the experience I had last night you might never want to take my advice on any how-to projects again, but trust me when I say this is NOT normal for me.

The mission was simple: install a reinforced ceiling fan electrical box in my bedroom ceiling, run a wire to it, and then connect that wire to a wall switch. Sounds simple right? Well as I’m about to explain, the "simple" tasks aren’t always as easy as they should be.

The Planning Process…

My entire attic is filled with blown-in fiberglass insulation so I knew I would have to suit-up as much as possible to avoid itching for the rest of my life. My brilliant idea was to purchase a full body tyvek suit which would keep the fiberglass off my skin, and it worked great . . . Except it also kept out air and kept IN sweat! If you've ever been in an attic in the middle of summer, you know how terrible that is! So, picture this, I am suited up like a HAZMAT cleanup worker, crawling army style through a tiny little opening in the mounds of fiberglass. At this point I realized that the beams there were only 8 inches apart and the reinforced ceiling box is 16 inches wide. Unfortunately the brace has to span across the beams so it can hold the maximum amount of weight, but since the beams are so close together this setup is now impossible. I retreat for now, I must come up with a new attack plan.

Once I reach the temperatures downstairs I tend to take my time planning my next strategy because the attic is so hot. Yesterday it was hovering around 90 degrees, but last week I put a thermometer up there and it read 113.4 degrees. So bottom line, if you want to lose weight this is a PERFECT opportunity! Put on that Tyvek suit and get to work. After a few short minutes you’ve magically lost 10 lbs!

At this point I have confirmed that the electrical box I have won’t work, so I have to find an alternative. I could put a wooden brace above that one and nail it into the beams, but that would involve two trips into the attic, climb up to measure, come down to cut, and return to nail it in place. That alone was reason enough to rule it out. So my idea was to find a box that has a metal brace on the side that can be screwed into the stud on one side only. I don’t recommend this method to anyone else as it’s not quite as strong as the full length braced box. But for my particular situation it should suffice.

The Installation…

So I climbed into the attic and held the box in place long enough to trace it with a pencil. Then I moved the box out of the way and cut the hole with a drywall saw. All I had to do after that was put the box in place, call for my lovely wife to help me get the height right so it’s flush with the drywall, and drive in the screws. After yelling for several minutes I realized she was in the basement and so I just waited patiently as 5lbs magically burned from my body. Eventually she came and I was able to get everything fastened properly and get the heck out of that part of the attic permanently!

Installing the Wire in the Wall…

All I have to do now to finish the job is run the wire down the wall and hook it into the switchbox. This part is super easy, just drill the hole, drop the wire and pull it into the box. Well not so fast, this too can be complicated! I measured the distance from the walls so I could drill in the right place and I marked the location. Have you ever started drilling into an enclosed wall when suddenly light appears through the very hole you’re drilling? Well I have! The distance from the trim to the wall is different in the attic and my measurements were about one inch off. So lucky me, I drilled right into the bathroom ceiling. True this is easily fixed with a bit of drywall mud, but the hole just so happened to be directly above my wife’s and my own brand new toothbrushes. Literally we had used them twice.

The Final Hookup…

Finally with my wife’s help we were able to get the wire into the electrical box and are ready to do the final hookup and install the fan. I wasn’t able to get that done last night, but I’m sure hoping the next parts of the install will be easier than the last. As a final kick in the gut, when I went to put the screw back in the switchbox I made the unfortunate realization that I had left my best screwdriver somewhere in the depths of the second attic… maybe someone else will find it in 50 years or so.

Working on the basement walls . . .

So, I don't have a lot of coin on hand, so I bought a house that was foreclosed. One of the reasons the house could not sell was because the basement constantly flooded for the last 60 some years, finally causing one of the retaining walls to collapse, as you can see in these pictures. (Click to make it larger)

Here, you can see that the strength of the wall was entirely compromised, the cinder blocks were crumbling and useless. They never had re bar or concrete in them, so when the blocks had pressure put on them, they just went, and the dirt that was holding the foundation up just kept up the pressure . . .

The old wall definitely had to come down. First we dug the loose dirt out from behind it, and covered the packed dirt with cement to hold it in place while we were working.

The cinder block wall you see on the upper half of the above picture is the actual foundation for the house.

The next step is to remove the old cinder blocks . . .

You can see what the wall of dirt looks like, now that the cinder blocks (more like cinder mush) have been removed. We had to cut a hole to accommodate the water main for the house. You can see that the dirt is really packed in there to stay standing like that! I guess having a house's weight resting on it for 67 years got it nice and compressed . . .

And now, putting up the wall . . .

Wow! That was quick! The new wall is up! Looks a bit better, I'd say. You can see the rebar sticking up from the blocks, it goes all the way through to the floor and is surrounded in cement.

Here you can kinda see the back of David's head, but you should be looking above the wall, where we filled in above the dirt with gravel so it would not pack in like dirt. There, we also have a lattice of re bar tied in to the bars sticking out of the cinder blocks. This will help make everything stronger when we cap it with cement.

And here's the cap! It took a lot of people helping, so a few carved their initials into the wet cement (most of that is off camera though). Remember, for larger versions, click the pictures!