Thumb and Hammer Blog

Well, at least it looks like I got something accomplished today. There is still a little bit of drywall left to come down off the walls, but I got a really good start on the ceiling. In fact, if it wasn’t for a hidden problem coming to the light of day, I could have had the rest of the drywall down and been starting to chip away at the tile floor. But alas….as with any old house, when you open up the walls, you never know what you’re going to find. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, really. Any renovation done by the previous owner usually resulted in some structural issue.

More bad wiring revealed

Yet more bad wiring...

I had already uncovered one junction box that was inaccessible. Today I found a couple more. It appears that at one time, the previous owner might have had lights on either side of the mirror in the main bathroom (which is on the other side of this wall). From the main bathroom, there is absolutely no evidence of these two junctions. The junction box in the middle (up higher) is for the light in the main bath. You can also see the wall anchor for the mirror. And if you look closely, you can see the wire that comes out of the left junction to go to the light does not actually go through the stud, but around the other side of it. A piece of the drywall was cut out, and the wire was covered over with compound. Pretty scary stuff.

Hmmm….this looks like a good place for a door….

So why not just move the vent stack over. Might have to cut the top plate of a supporting wall, but that’s okay…..a door frame is strong enough to support the ceiling joists.

What the %$#@ was he thinking? When does it ever seem to be a good idea to mess with a supporting wall? I’ve seen it before with the windows in the back dormer. This guy just thought he could cut holes in walls wherever he wanted without having to modify the structure.

More structural butchery.

Unfortunately, in this picture, you cannot see the door frame which is to the right of the vent stack. But that stud to the right of the vent stack is just sitting on top the door frame. What is clear in this picture, though, is where the top plate was cut away for the vent stack. You can clearly see the ceiling joists above.

As a general rule, when joists overlap over top of a wall, assume that the wall is a supporting wall.

Now in addition to the other renovations and expenses I already knew about, I need to look into having the stack moved back to its original location (and therefore will need to patch the roof where it exits now). Plus I need to fix the structure, which shouldn’t be too difficult once the stack is moved.

It’s hard to work when you’re seeing red

Oh boy did I say some bad words today. I went through a lot of emotions ranging from pure anger to self pity. It may not seem like much, but the added expense of moving the vent stack is yet another expense that we really can’t afford. Every renovation done by the previous owner was done wrong and it’s costing us some big money to undo his mistakes. Three years and counting We’ve been in this house for three years. During that time, my daughter, who starts school in September, has not had her own bedroom because we’ve had to renovate upstairs. We haven’t yet completely moved in. A lot of our stuff is being stored at my dad’s, because we simply have no place to put it while the second floor and the basement are both a mess during renovations.

What’s next

At this point, I’ll finish gutting the bathroom and the basement. Then I’ll see where our finances are before deciding the next move.

State of the bin July 5.

Rubbish bin on July 5.