Whatever she wants

Jules: Mmm-mmmm. That is a tasty burger. Vincent, ever have a Big Kahuna Burger?
[Vincent shakes his head]
Jules: Wanna bite? They're real tasty.
Vincent: Ain't hungry.
Jules: Well, if you like burgers give 'em a try sometime. I can't usually get 'em myself because my girlfriend's a vegetarian which pretty much makes me a vegetarian. But I do love the taste of a good burger...

---

Last fall, my wife got a bug to start a garden, which pretty much means that I was going to be starting a garden. Or at least the construction of a garden - I’ll let her tend to the daily maintenance and bask in the Zen moments of tranquility found in our backyard.

Since our yard could have doubled as a backdrop for a dystopian post-apocalyptic future, bringing a garden into the equation would be quite a task. Years of owner neglect and squalor from the days when our abode was not inhabitable by minimum government standards meant that the backyard was a treasure chest of junk. Rocks, concrete, Styrofoam, beer bottles, and other less easily identifiable (perhaps for the better) elements lay buried under the dirt and clay. Not the organic environment to grow something – certainly not something you intend to put in your mouth.

(What will I do? Inhabit it, and build a garden, apparently.)

This required raised beds. After meticulously modeling our backyard into sketchup, I was able to better understand my wife’s napkin-scribbled ideas for a Mecca of peppers, tomatoes, onions, parsnips, and even pumpkin.

The house last fall, before we realized what skeletons lay underneath. Not literal skeletons - or at least we haven't found any of those yet.

The proposed garden.

After trips to most of the home improvement stores in the greater Philadelphia region, we finally stumbled across one that was carrying cedar. Cedar because it is rot resistant (better than putting a polyurethane coat on pine). Yesterday I built the raised bed, with the capacity for 45 cubic feet of soil. Feeling satisfied, my joy turned to dismay as I realized I now had to fill that 45 cubic feet of space with the aforementioned soil. That amounts to about 1.7 tons of dirt that had to be hauled to the backyard via walking through the ground floor of the house, 100-feet, one 80lb. bag at a time. Needless to say, I’m not done yet.

Prepping the yard for the raised beds.

Emily helps level things out before going vertical.

This shirt wouldn't stay white much longer.

A third of the dirt has been laid down. The project will hopefully be finished on Tuesday.

All blog posts about repairs to the house are tagged, so if you want to look at them together, simply select the ‘home projects’ tag over on the right panel or click on the link in this sentence.

CV Industries Desktop Portfolio

I've created a few more customized desktop background pictures for my design portfolio. Once I have a solid collection, I'll add that to the list of services that are offered through Legible Ink, Inc.

Below is the same design with a different set of pictures.

Click on either picture to see larger versions.

Because I enjoy being organized.

The other day I started using sketchup again. I created an accurate model of the house and most of the furniture so I can rearrange things without hurting my back. First order of business was the study, which will someday also be the entertainment room. If Emily and I ever get a widescreen LCD television, this is the room it will go in. Partly because we don’t want a TV to be the focus on the ground floor, and also because having a row house, the study is the only room that does not share common walls with our neighbors, so a TV with stereo surround would be more respectful in the study. Below is a mockup from sketchup showing acquisition of a TV prior to getting an entertainment center.

Insulating the Basement: Part II

A lot of my readers have seen pictures of the house as each room is completed. I’ll put together a great compilation once all the rooms are finished (however many years that might take). Along the way I have also been documenting some of the improvements that I have been making. I never thought that I would have to learn so much about home repairs so quickly. All blog posts about repairs to the house are tagged, so if you want to look at them together, simply select the ‘home projects’ tag over on the right panel or click on the link in this sentence.

Insulating the Basement: Part II (Click here for Part I)

So when I last left off, I had discovered that behind several decades of dirt and grime that made the windows anything but transparent, I had found no insulation and, in some cases, no glass.

After another trip to Lowe’s, I picked up a big bag of the pink fiberglass insulation. The insulation is mounted to paper and is 3 ½” think, standard opening that 2 x 4 studs would create for new construction. As you can see in some of the images from the previous post, I was working with changing depths that maxed out around 13” deep from the drywall to the window.

Before I could begin with insulation I had to prepare the windows. I filled up a bucket pail with broken glass that was just lying on the window shelf. Some shards were still in the sash, so I put on some gloves and broke them with my hands to get them out (breaking glass on purpose is always fun and great stress relief). After getting that out of the way, I created unique shapes that could fit inside the chicken wire mesh beyond the missing panes and broken sashes and seal the opening around the pipes that feed into the HVAC system.

For the next window, I just covered up the missing panes with insulation and kept the others in place. These would all be surrounded by up to 13” of insulation, so with an eventual R60+ value, I just wanted to secure what was in place.

Here’s the new double pane window after getting the first layer of insulation. I would then use a criss cross pattern, alternating the location of the gaps between pieces of insulation.

Because I’m working through a 12 inch square hold that sits over 4 and a half feet off the ground, putting in the insulation was a bit more difficult than the pictures show. The presence of a wall, mostly intact, between you and your project is a slight hindrance to say the least. I would cut very large pieces of insulation, roll them up and pass them through the hole, and then unroll them. Then, balancing upon a stepladder and using a hand that’s gripping the ceiling as best as one can grip the ceiling, I would place my head, other arm, and as much torso as will fit through the one foot hole. Wearing gloves, protective eyewear, and a mask that made my protective eyewear fog up, I worked effortlessly. I say effortlessly because once the first layer of insulation went up, it became very dark. It’s kind of hard to hold a flashlight when you only have one hand and it’s already holding fiberglass insulation. So there I struggled for many hours, balancing on a stepladder while doing advanced yoga poses with half my body inside a small hole with foggy glasses, a flashlight taped to the wall that is never pointing where you want it, and only one hand to mount insulation designed for a space 4 times thinner than what I was stuck with.

I got through it. After mounting multiple layers of insulation and expending the entire bag enclosing just 4 windows, I then filled much of the remaining space with the environmentally friendly non-scratchy recycled paper insulation. I used this fill in gaps between pieces of insulation as well.

If any of you are ever in a situation like this, it is important to remember not to compact the insulation as air between the fragments helps slow heat transfer. Pressing it down will devalue the level of insulation.

Project completed. According to my excel spreadsheet and computations, the average energy usage, while accounting for outside temperature, is down 40 percent as a result.

Adventures in Home Ownership

A lot of my readers have seen pictures of the house as each room is completed. I’ll put together a great compilation once all the rooms are finished (however many years that might take). Along the way I have also been documenting some of the improvements that I have been making. I never thought that I would have to learn so much about home repairs so quickly. All blog posts about repairs to the house are tagged, so if you want to look at them together, simply select the ‘home projects’ tag over on the right panel or click on the link in this sentence.

Insulating the Basement: Part I (Click here for Part II)

We’ll start with the biggest issue: insulation. I am the only member of the household that ever walks along the first floor with no socks on (usually in the morning when I’m making my wife breakfast and lunch). As the months passed by and the season slowly changed to winter, I began to notice that certain parts of the floor could vary in temperature quite dramatically. I didn’t give it too much thought at the time. After all, it was the basement that was below the floor and basements are supposed to be cool.

When we got our electric bill in January, something was definitely wrong with our heating system. Many questions began to come over me and I wracked my brain thinking back to the depths of my childhood to try to remember. How often did my parent’s heating system kick on? How long would it run before it shut off? How long would it stay off before the heat dissipated and it came back on again? What impact would an electric heating system have versus a gas system? I have shared walls for part of the first floor and what would that have on heat loss?

The next day, as I was pouring over these questions, I was outside and looking at the basement windows. We have 4 basement windows as viewed from the outside – 3 original single pane true divided light with wood sashes, and a new double pane nearest the kitchen door. 2 of the original windows had been boarded up with plywood from the days when the house was in complete disarray prior to being flipped. The first developer had put in the new window, but he went bellyup and sold to the second developer. The second developer did not want windows in the basement, so he put up new drywall in the basement and so, viewed from inside the house there are no basement windows.

Suddenly it hit me. The spots on the first floor that were substantially cooler were aligned with the basement windows below. I peeled off the plywood and wiped away the sixty years of cobwebs and spider webs and dirt. I peered inside and discovered that there was no insulation between the drywall and the window. Behind the next window, some of the sashes had disintegrated and panes were missing. Heat had just been sucking right out of the house.

I didn’t have a drywall saw but that wasn’t going to stop me. Drilling a hole in the basement wall with the biggest drill bit I had, I confirmed that I had made a spot that lined up with the first window. Estimating from the outside about how far I had between the studs, I proceeded to use the smallest drill bit to make about a hundred holes in the shape of a square. Then, using a kitchen steak knife, I cut it out (worked great) and... well it is certainly a weird feeling to cut a hole in a wall and find a window on the other side!

That door is from the closet in the master bedroom - I'll write about why it's in the basement another time.

Old, original windows. The foundation of the house is between 90 and 100 years old. Some of these windows were original, or appeared as such.

I proceeded to cut out the remaining holes and find all the missing windows the the basement. Each time I cut a hole in the drywall, I could feel the breeze as the heat was just getting sucked right out the window (or in the case of the new double pane in the image below, it was escaping around the frame).

The cracks around the window frame here were not so evident prior to this. I took a screwdriver and removed the stone, joint and tuck work that had turned to dust, and that opened up the hole more dramatically. Once this was done, I took a half dozen bottles of the spray foam and proceeded to seal up all the cracks around the windows.

I took a long exposure to capture this telling image. How weird to have the light coming into a basement that did not have windows before.

More fun as the story continues in Part II.