The Sewer is Finished - Kind of...

Well, as the title says, the sewer is finished - kind of...

The whole thing is covered and cleaned up with the exception of the old septic tank. The tank still needs to be caved in and filled. However, the guy who is suppose to pump it out left town and has not returned.

So, once he gets back, the tank will be emptied and caved in.

The yard has been returned to normal though, but without grass. We will re-seed the scar in Fall.

Looking west from the house.

Doesn't it look like a dirt road?

The cats sure love it. Don't know why, but they do and they just lounge around on it most of the day.







Looking north on the property line.

The clean up here turned out well also.













Just another view, this time up towards the house.

As soon as the contractor was finished on Monday we could hear thunder. Another thunderstorm was on it's way.

This time the rain was welcome; it helped settle the dirt.





I did take the week-end off and forgot about the house and sewer.

On Monday I picked up the hammer again and went at it.

As some of you know, I don't really like to work with electricity, but the new lines and outlets needed to be installed.

As the light bulb indicates - the power flows the way it should.









The light in the closet even works!!
















One thing SWMBO insisted on having in the powder room was an electrical outlet.

I might eventually switch this out to one of those GFCI outlets.










While I was at it the old outlet box from the 40s/50s got replaced as well.

Since we are on the subject... I wasted at least two hours Monday thanks to this outlet. In order to replace the lines I needed to trace the old ones. So, spending almost two hours looking turned up nothing - I couldn't even find where they went through the floor.

The only thing I could think of to try was to shove a stiff wire through the hole in the sill plate. When tried, the wire met resistance...Hmmmm....

A trip down to the basement, and a brighter flashlight, revealed a divot in the sound dampening ceiling cover. D'OH!!!!

Back up the stairs and to the outlet box. A firm tug and out came the wires!! At some point those wires had been cut!!! That means I wasted all that time chasing the wire that went no where.

What's really strange is I don't remember cutting the wire and the father-n-law doesn't remember doing it either.

Anyway...

For those of you who are curious, the wires are not going to be left this way. They will be tacked down with these little line holders that attach to the studs.

Tuesday was devoted to a few other things that had nothing to do with the house, so I tried to make up time today (Wednesday).

Figures...no traction was gained. Silly me, how could traction be made in a house that is NOT plumb, level and straight?

It took all friggin' day to clean up corners, add a couple of studs, make a new ceiling/shelf platform as well as a bunch of little things. But, it got done.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of thes things, but I did get a couple.

Here you can see those three studs back in place, just a few more inches into the closet. I think it is actually an additional 8 inches without the drywall.

On the left you can see part of the new stud as well as the header of the new wall. The top shelf isn't installed yet though.

Now the big deal is the ceiling in the powder room. Do you see it?! Yup, that's drywall up there.

I don't mind working with drywall, but I hate putting it on ceilings and mudding the seams on a ceiling. I never seem to get it right.

I was hoping to get this sheet of drywall put up in one piece; but N O O O O!!!!

The sheet ended up having to be cut in half and installed in two pieces. On top of this one of the corners crumbled on me. At least it's fixable.

One thing that seemed to hinder progress was working in such a small space. Every time I turned around I was bumping into something or getting tangled up in something.

And here we have the base of the wall studs.

Note there is no sill plate. Since it's a non-load bearing inner wall I left it off. Besides, that is the way I found it and I didn't feel like dickering with a sill plate that would have to be on it's edge.

Hopefully tomorrow the rest of the drywall will go up. Seeings how it took all day to do what little I did today, tomorrow should be no different.

I really need to do some work on Grover!

Till next time...

Cheers!
Larry ~

Bob's My Uncle - Electrical Cable Up-date

It’s finally done! The cable is now in the basement. Now all that needs to be done is hooking it up to the new breaker box. That will wait till we have the new main line installed.

Here are some pics for your enjoyment.

As I told y'all I'd do, here's a pic of the tiny plumbing chase hatch next to the toilet.

Don't you just LOVE that green toilet?! It matches the green in the kitchen!

We know the kitchen was remodeled in the 50s, but I'm thinking they might have repainted the kitchen sometime in the early 70s. The date stamp on the toilet is for '73. They probably ordered the kitchen paint when they ordered the bathroom fixtures! The tub is even that color.

Unfortunately I had to do what I didn’t want to do - a hole had to be cut in the chase.

The cable did punch up in the chase. The end got wedged between the wall and the stand pipe and just sort of coiled there.








Again, a cramped space, but my handy-dandy Multimaster came to the rescue! The hardest part was prying the piece of wood out.

There’s the sneaky little devil - the silver thing heading towards the tub.






This is a pic of it after I got it unstuck and heading for the hole. The fun was not yet over though.

Ah…there’s the serpent now!

Trust me - it wasn’t a fun job getting it to this point. I had to shove my arm, up to the elbow, and ‘feel’ for the cable. Once I had it I had to un-pry it from under the tub.

Once done I was able to get it to the point you see it at and then it snagged again.




This time the snag was in the attic, so I had to run up there and uncoil it, lay it out somewhat, and get it started again.

The whole bloody mess…

Now I just need to snake it into the basement.





Remember the part about snaking my arm up into the floor from ceiling? If you look at the floor you will see a bunch of fuzzy stuff. No, it is not the remains of some animal I found, but something much worse. It’s the old fiber glass insulation used back in the 50s through the 70s!!

AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

As you all may remember, I’m somewhat sensitive to the pink stuff; just think what the old stuff did! I looked like a raspberry with all the red dots all over my arm. It didn’t stop there either - it went down my T-shirt which just happened to be wet with sweat.

I couldn’t wait to shower, but I needed to ‘buck-up’ and deal with it till the job was over.

One last thing - the round, grey thing is a 10 pound weight I used to help keep tension on the cable so it wouldn’t coil back up on me.

Here it is all cleaned up with the cable heading for the basement.

Now I can say “Bob’s my uncle” and call it a day.












Till next time…

Cheers!
Larry ~

Electrical Cable and Kitchen Up-Date

It seems like forever since I last posted. May and June are extremely busy for us aside from the house. What I have been able to do is just a little but here and there mainly on the wood shop.

We have also been working on some side-line ventures as well and that is taking up a lot of time too.

The kitchen is coming along - just painfully slow. The walls are finally complete with just a few spots left to tidy up. There are a couple of locations that are not finished with plaster yet - the area where new wiring is going in and the spot next to the cabinet that is being re-done.

I did spend the better part of the day trying to get a large power cable to snake through the wall from the attic to the basement. Here’s the post where you can see the cable (4th pic from top):

http://simpsonsfolly.blogspot.com/2007/11/attic-update-we-have-floor.html

Right now I am on a break from trying to snake the thing down. It is kind of stuck and I trying to come up with a way to un-stick it without removing a part of the bathroom wall.




This is the hole I had to make in the lath-and-plaster for the cable.




Since the cable is going to follow the chase I made the hole next to the cast-iron stand pipe.

The space I have to work with is extremely tight and I about got stuck in it when my pants snagged a nail head!

The brown piece of wood with the white stuff wrapped around the center is the plumb-bob I’m using to link the attic to the basement and then pull the cable through.

I got this shot by sticking the camera in the hole and clicking. Had no idea how it would turn out since I couldn’t stick my head in to look through the view finder and the angle didn’t allow the use of the LCD screen. It didn’t turn out too bad.

The plum-bob string is that white streak at the bottom right hand corner.

Gota’ love the old wall paper! You can’t see it, put the original paper that was on the ceiling (I found it while making the hole) is a purplish/Christmas type paper.

This is the space in the bathroom that the cable is going through.

You can see traces of the original mop-board in there and there is a corner do-dad as well (I saw it using a mirror).

The cable is stuck somewhere in this area. I don’t want to, but I might have to take out that board you can see at the back of the pic. Eventually this entire area will be exposed for repair, but I can’t do it yet - not ready.

The opening to get to this crawl space is right next to the toilet. It might be - and I do mean MIGHT BE - 1’ between the opening and the toilet’s side (maybe I should get a pic). I can barely squeeze into the space, but not enough to work easily. I have to bend into a funky ‘L’ shape and the belly doesn’t want to cooperate.

I’ll see if I can fish the cable through before I try to cut the board out. The plum-bob sting is to the right center. BTW - I will have to snake the cable around the pipes. The opening to the kitchen part of the chase is about a 45 degree angle to the right bottom (follow the string).

You've seen this shot before. The top part of the plumbing chase in the kitchen.





This time you can see the string.

And there he is - Mr. Plum-bob!!! BTW - This is my grand father's blump-bob and I think it was his father's before that. Since there is a chance that they built this house, this plum-bob may have been used here before!








Well, that's the story for now. Guess I better get my lazy butt up and get back to work.

Till next time...

Cheers!
Larry ~