Brrrr.

It was coooold on Friday morning; it got down to about 25 degrees overnight. It was our first hard freeze of the season, and the crew was not too happy about the conditions. It warmed right up to the 60s that afternoon, though.

Since the last post, they continued to work around the back of the house, and as of today (Monday), they are finally done with it. They finished around the patio area and did the second floor on Friday, and then installed the kitchen window and basement doors in a half day on Saturday. Today they did the kitchen and around my office.

I am a little disappointed in how much frame there is around the kitchen window, and how the new glass is smaller than the old glass, but there isn't much we can do now. I will get used to it. The new doors are great, they close so easily, and the big glass in the front door lets in a lot of light (or as Edith says, gives you a better view of our junk).

We are getting close. Top of the 7th inning maybe, but it looks like there will be a rain delay tomorrow.

Combination post

Day 6 and 7 of work (I've been too busy to post every day). Some of our old windows had some unpleasant properties, like being stuck closed (or at least difficult to open) while also being drafty. Awesome in the summer AND winter. So, we are replacing many of the windows in the main part of the house with new vinyl triple-pane windows. The new ones were installed yesterday. Check out the old wallpaper that was behind the trim! There is still some interior trim work to do on the ones upstairs, and the kitchen sink window to replace, but they are saving those until Saturday or Monday, when it might rain again.

Today they worked around the back on the siding. Looking good.

Barring bad weather or surprises, he thinks he'll be done on Tuesday (not including painting). We'll see.

Sill-y things

Tuesday was Day 5 of actual work and Day 8 overall. The crew finished the side of the apartment and started around the back, and they elected to replace the window sills. It rained yesterday afternoon and there is a chance of showers this morning -- hopefully they can get some more work done this afternoon. Most of the big surprises seem to be over. I will try to stop taking pictures in the dark.

Intermission

No house work yesterday. Jimmy, who is clearly in charge, said The Sidekick was sick. It was also Jimmy's birthday. Birthday boy took the day off because he couldn't do the job alone, but I'm sure he didn't mind having the excuse.

There is a maple tree outside my office window, down by the water, which changes colors in the fall in an unusual way. First the leaf tips will turn red, then the rest of the leaf will turn orange a week later. I like how they become sort of translucent in the late afternoon.

We won't look like losers anymore

... at least not because of our siding. That is what Edith said on Friday night. She is very observant, and quotable.

Friday (Day 4) was an interesting day. The roofers came to take care of the apartment. This roof has a very low slope (about 1:24), and so all of the contractors recommended a rubber roof, like we already have on the other parts of our house that have a low slope. The normal way to install this type of roof is to put down some high-density foam board insulation, screw it into the roof sheathing, and then glue down a rubber membrane. Additional rubber strips go over the edges and seams, and then you are done. It has a lifetime of at least 30 years.

Our problem on Friday was that the existing roof material (several layers of cheap rolled asphalt roofing on top of an ice and water shield layer) was all glued together and glued down to the sheathing. It was practically impossible to get off, and I saw the roofers struggle with it. We decided it would be OK to give up on the removal and just mount the foam board on top of it. There didn't seem to be much harm other than not getting to see the sheathing condition, but we might not have been able to see it under the stuck-on ice/water shield anyways. After jumping around on the roof for a while, the roofer convinced me it would be OK (note: I am very gullible). Unfortunately for the roofers, somebody measured wrong and didn't deliver enough roofing material, so they had to go out during the day for more. This meant they couldn't finish in one day, and had to come back on Saturday for a couple of hours, but I guess it was otherwise uneventful. There is a sort of unfortunate white strip across the roof ridge at the front of the apartment now, but the edge had to be covered with something. Maybe it can be painted black, or maybe we'll get used to it.

Meanwhile, the siding crew was completing the new sheathing on the side of the main house. There was a small surprise when they started taking off the siding on the second floor and found they had a nice view of the attic crawlspace behind Edith's closet. We talked for a while about mounting new plywood inside the crawlspace, putting in insulation, and adding more on the outside, but decided against it because the roof is not insulated there either. There is some insulation on the back of the closet, and also in the floor of the crawlspace to keep the first floor "warm".

After completing the new sheathing, everyone on site (siders, roofers, me) agreed that it looked better already, and maybe we should just leave it like that. We decided to keep going. The crew actually started mounting siding at about 4PM, and did the front of the apartment. They make it look easy, especially if you have a nail gun. Cut to length, nail once to hold in place, adjust with a level, then secure it with more nails (thud thud thud thud thud). It took them an hour to do the front, including making a new box for the new outside lamp and assembling it. There was a misunderstanding about the window trim style (I asked to have an extra piece put under the sill) but I think it will be fixed up on Monday.

Primer Beige is OK, but Edith and I went to the paint store for an hour on Saturday anyways. I think we have settled on a color scheme. I'll keep it a surprise for now, although I know some people have heard rumors.

Om nom nom nom

I assume that is the sound that termites make. I don't know. I haven't actually heard them, and haven't tried very hard to find recordings on the web.

No phone calls yesterday! The hole shown below is now covered up with wood and tyvek. About 2/3 of the sheathing on the side has been replaced. The roofers are here this morning.

Book Review: Shakespeare's Kitchen by Lore Segal

I picked up this book at the library because it caught my eye. "Shakespeare's Kitchen". I thought, upon reading the title that it would be about Shakespeare. The cover flap disabused me of that notion. It is, in fact, a set of stories centered around a woman named Ilka whose life is, in turn, centered around a couple Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare and Concordance institute, an academic institution of unspecified focus. The reason I decided to check the book out is that I like short stories. I like short stories because they are usually a length that is digestible (for me) along with lunch, which is sadly one of the few times I get to sit down and read something that is not science. Anyway, this book turned out to be far better and more consistent than many short story collections I've read and to tell a story quite as coherently as many novels. I love the way Segal makes the format really work to tell the story, the way that the stories, which seem to be roughly (but maybe not strictly) chronological, have the quality of memory. I like the way things are left unsaid and often open to multiple interpretations (or misinterpretations). And finally, I like the way Segal uses language, how a word will appear in one place and then another linking seemingly unrelated ideas.

The first story in the collection is probably the weakest. Like the other stories, it centers around an incident but really it tells the story of Nat Cohn, a poet at Concordance institute. Nat is really not a particularly important figure in the rest of the collection and my mind did some back flips trying to fit the story in with the rest. In the end I decided (*spoiler alert*) that the story arc of this first story mirrors, quite nicely, the overall arc of the collection. In addition, being thrown into Nat's story before we meet the institute's characters is a lot like meeting a new group of people for the first time. They all know each other, they have their "in" jokes and they know each other's "stories". As an outside, you feel quite lost. By the end of the book, we are no longer lost, and so I had a much greater appreciation for Nat Cohn's story after reading the whole book than I did at the beginning.

Hello Mr. Fisk. I have another surprise for you.

The Surprise Of The Day for Day 2 was old termite damage. The porch in the back of the house used to be mounted on joist hangers which were nailed directly into the siding. Not exactly ideal, or even standard practice. Part of the project was to take off the old rickety porch and mount a ledger board there, so we can build a proper porch next spring.

The photos yesterday showed some old termite damage to the siding in this area. We knew that there had been termites sometime in the past, because we have the green circular monitoring stations all around the house and we pay someone too much money to come out and check them four times a year. We haven't had any problems since we've been here, and we assumed we'd have to take off this damaged piece of siding and replace it. However, once the crew got the old piece off, he discovered a bunch of wood behind it which was pretty much gone, it would just splinter and crumble if you poked at it. The piece that was most damaged was actually a 1x8 that was just covering the ends of some joists, and not actually serving a structural purpose, and there was a small section of the upstairs wall frame which should be fixed up. I guess he is probably going to take care of this today, he didn't have the materials handy yesterday. No pictures of this since the gaping hole in the wall is temporarily covered with Tyvek.

The rest of the house is progressing. They pulled the siding off the east side of the apartment and replaced it with new plywood. The materials are supposed to arrive today, so we should start to get an idea of the new look real soon now. The apartment roofers plan to work tomorrow.

We basically live in a barn

The title comes from something Edith said last night, as we were discussing the (de)merits of board-and-batten style siding over dinner. It is a certainly a cheap and relatively easy way of siding a structure, but I don't think it's a good idea for a house. At the very least, it requires more maintenance than might first appear. You have to be sure to replace the boards as they crack/rot, and also be sure that the battens are securely fastened to the boards. Otherwise, you're likely to have water problems, as it runs down the side of the house and behind the boards. If you are crazy enough to NAIL YOUR SIDING DIRECTLY TO YOUR STUDS, and leave 1" gaps in some places, it's also not a terribly effective insulator. We know all of these things now.

On Day 1, the crew did mostly demolition work, removing most of the battens and the existing clapboard siding. They also started wrapping the front part of the house with Tyvek, and removed the old porch off the back. Look out below! Near the porch you can see an area where there was previously some termite activity, and that the house was obviously painted red before. Also pictured is one of the aforementioned 1" gaps, and finally, a section on the east side where we were investigating what was going on at the weird overlapping line in the existing siding. Turns out the studs on the second floor actually stick out an extra 3/4", which serves to make this project more difficult. How bizarre.

There were no other big surprises after 11AM, that I know of.

House exterior project, Day 1

Two posts in one morning... hope I don't wear myself out. We are getting the house re-sided along with new windows for most of the main part of the house, and a new roof for the in-law apartmentfuture man-cave. Behold the last pictures before work begins.

The workers are here now and we already have our first big surprise, 10 minutes into the project: there is no sheathing under the existing siding! Most of the existing siding is in good enough condition to be used as sheathing under the new siding, so we will leave it up. Bad sections will be replaced with new plywood, like the whole eastern (driveway) side of the house. The new siding will be mounted over it.