Home Disrepair

Old House Gets a New Furnace from Perfect Air

2012-01-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

The latest adventure at the hacienda here has been the old floor furnace deciding to give up the ghost. I had problems with the furnace 4 years ago and it ended up costing a bundle to repair it. So, when it went on the blink again this year I was open to removing it altogether. There comes a time in the "repair/replace" discussion when you have to eliminate the repair portion as being throwing money into an open hole in the ground. So, then the discussion became one of "replace it with WHAT?"

New floor furnace? No longer allowed in California. Something about open flames beneath floor surfaces and fires. Sissies.

New wall furnace? I spent about a week investigating that idea and looking at options. The problem with a wall furnace in this house is the hallway is really tight to begin with, losing 6" along the wall to a furnace makes the passageway really problematic and uncomfortable.

New central forced-air furnace? This turned out to be the answer, not the one I wanted to hear since the cost was about five times more than the bill to just fix the old floor furnace again. However, how many times do I fix the floor furnace before I'm kicking myself for not just bringing the house in the 21st century and making it comfortable? What finally won out at the end of the day was the thought that if I have to spend another 10 years in this house, wouldn't I rather just have a modern heating system to make my home comfortable instead of repairing that old floor furnace who knows how many times? I answer myself "yes" and let the games begin.

I got bids from 3 contractors and eventually chose Perfect Air (based in Long Beach but servicing the surrounding areas of Lakewood, Bellflower, Cerritos, Seal Beach, Artesia, etc...) based on their reviews on Yelp. I like Yelp, I like the whole concept of customers being able to review service providers. It helps the cream rise to the top.

So, Perfect Air came out this week and installed a new furnace into my little 1939 bungalow. We now have 6 glorious ducts pumping warm air into all the rooms instead of one central floor furnace charged with heating the whole 840 square feet. We've had to make some adjustments with the new system, the biggest being that we aren't able to leave the hall door closed when it's heating because the pull from the return vent is so strong it pulls the door shut and the cats can't get between the back of the house and the front - which is a crisis in their little furry worlds. But that's a minor adjustment. Otherwise, we're pretty thrilled.

The inspector from the City was thrilled. I'll quote him below because companies like Perfect Air should rise to the top.

"I've been checking this young man's work for three years now, and I am telling you, you have a winner." -- Dan Rodger, Mechanical Inspector for the City of Long Beach.

Pictures!

Location of the old floor furnace

Perfect Air removing my old floor furnace

Perfect Air installing new ducts

My new forced-air furnace!

Home Energy Assessment

2011-08-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

As part of my latest contract, I had a the opportunity to get a Home Energy Assessment done to understand the process and benefits. The assessment is a 3 to 4 hour process where the contractor goes through your home in detail looking at the way your house functions as a unit. In the past, homeowners and contractors viewed a structure in individual pieces; windows, insulation, HVAC, etc... The "whole house" approach is a new concept that focuses on the building envelope and how it relates to energy-efficiency.

What happens during an assessment is the contractor will test all the elements of the building envelope and the energy systems for the home. The biggie is the Blower Door Test. This involves closing all the doors and windows, placing a high efficiency fan in the door and depressurizing the house. Once the build has been depressurized, air leaks are easy to identify. Air leaks are critical because they effect heat and air conditioning loss -- also known as money leaking out of your home.


Hughes EnCon Blower Door Test

Above is my contractor, Hughes EnCon performing the Blower Door Test. Once the house has been depressurized, the contract goes through all the "openings" in the building envelope looking for air leaks. The big ones you can actually feel, like my unsealed attic opening and vent for the whole house fan. The window openings were fairly tight, but my doors all had large gaps where air leaks were (unsurprisingly, this house is 70 years old and has shifted a great deal during that time and all the exterior doors are original to the house.)

Hughes EnCon testing for air leaks with smoke wand

Using a smoke wand, Hughes EnCon shows air leaks around a badly sealed whole house fan. The contractor also uses an infrared camera to show where my insulation was not so good and gaps were left around light fixtures. Another thing the contractor does is perform combustion safety testing on gas fired appliances such as water heaters, dryers and stoves to make certain that they are properly venting and there are no gas leaks.

The contractor will examine a year's worth of utility bills and give you a list of possible upgrades/improvements that will help your home become more energy efficient - which saves you money!

New Driveway Gate

2011-03-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

At last, our new driveway gate is installed! I showed off the design in this post here. I designed this in Adobe Illustrator and had it built by Creative Iron Works of Signal Hill.

Creative Iron Works did an outstanding job and worked with me the whole way on gate function, optimizing the design and color selection for the wood. I couldn't be happier with my choice of vendor, Creative Iron Works was exactly the type of company I'd been looking for to complete this project.

Old Driveway Gate Going Away


New Driveway Gate Installed

The stain used on the wood was Minwax Red Oak and the wrought iron on the gate was powder coated black.

Adding to the Irrigation System

2011-02-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

The latest project here is another one that's been on the list for a loooonnnnggg time. The more things I can put on a timer, the happier my weekends are!

With the mission of automation in mind, I added a new irrigation run to water plants along the far side of the driveway. This, of course, involved running a line UNDER the driveway.


Planning the irrigation run

Irrigation is not the worst of improvement projects, but it is one of the messier (not quite as bad as furniture refinishing, but certainly right up there.) Running irrigation under driveways and walkways is a muddy proposition since it involves water and dirt.

If you are planning to try this yourself, you'll need a walkway tunneling kit, which is available at any big box improvement store for cheap. The tunneling kit is really just a nozzle and cap by which you use your garden hose and a piece of irrigation PVC to blast a tunnel under the concrete with water. It requires some planning since your PVC pipe has to be long enough to reach completely under the concrete.

Which also means that your trench in which to run the pipe has to be long enough to accommodate the length of the PVC pipe. Since I only had about 28 inches to work with in terms of trench space there in the middle, it required 3 separate pieces of PVC that were joined together by couplers. You can see the segments in the picture below.

Getting this project done was a waiting game since you have to wait for the water to filter down into your soil after you've spray blasted your run under the concrete. In heavy clay soil like mine, it can take an hour or more. This project took about 23' of PVC and various couplers, elbows, a new battery operated timer, and plenty of patience over two days.

Plus some muscle relaxers for an aching back, afterward :)

New Garage Side Door

2011-02-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

Our latest project has been to replace the side door on the garage...at some point you'd think we would run out of parts of this house that are at the end of their lifespan and need replacing, but sadly no.

The side door to the garage has spent 70 years getting splashed on during the winter since none of the previous owners ever put up a gutter so that rainwater wouldn't end up pouring off the side of the garage roof and right in front of this door. It hasn't helped that the door is right next to the hose bib and we tend to like to do cleaning tasks in the area that also end up splashing the door.

This is the old door, badly rotted.

And so, off came the old door and we picked up a new basic exterior slab door at the local big box home improvement store. We ended up having to do some considerable cutting down since the old opening is several inches smaller than the width of the smallest door they had at the store. The new door was also pre-primed (yay!)

After some cutting and sanding, then hole drilling and painting, we have a new door on the side of the garage. Not only did we add a threshold and door sweep to make sure we are catching any water issues right at the door, we also bought a Plexiglas panel to put on the lower part of the door.

New door with Plexiglas panel.

This is our last garage project until later this year when we start on the second set of interior cabinets, which can't happen until after I get some electrical work done (currently scheduled to happen when I bring in electricians for the kitchen remodel.)

Re-setting the walkway

2011-02-01T19:36:00.000-08:00

This lovely project was one that I've had on the list for two years (easily). I originally installed the front walkways in 2006 using Pathmate stone molds and this one turned into a mess within year. All the mortar between the stones cracked and crumbled. What I eventually realized was that I hadn't done a very good job leveling out my stones during the initial install. Since the stones hadn't been leveled, they started flexing when walked on, which lead to the mortar cracking.

The initial install in 2006

It got to be entirely too easy to move re-setting the walkway stones down the list in favor of more pressing items, but since I'm on a "complete all outstanding projects" rampage the time has come.

I found it easiest to work one row at time, this allowed me keep the original placement and shape without having to go back and guess. As I pulled up each row, I removed all the old mortar and some of the bed materials under the stones. Then I added new sand and look a lot of care in setting the stones back in LEVEL and solid.


Resetting the stones, one row at a time

It took about 4 hours to complete this project, a new bag of mortar mix and a bag of sand. I have hopes that this time I did a better job..ah, that learning curve!

Finished reset of walkway stones

Driveway Gate

2011-01-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

The time has come to replace the gate for the driveway and add a new gate on the side of the house. After my house was broken into in 2007 and a second (unrelated) attempt was made last year, it has become apparent that the house is just too "inviting" and looks potentially "easy" to an opportunist. So, additional fortification was on the menu for this Winter to make the hacienda more secure.

This is the old gate: warped, ugly, and ready to fall off the hinges.


Old Driveway Gate

The new gate will be glorious - I've designed the ironwork myself and the construction will be done by Creative Iron Works in Signal Hill. Budget this time around will not allow for the gate to be motorized, although that is in the plan for the future. Motors will add another $2500 to the project and those are funds really needed for the kitchen remodel later this year.

Design for the new gate:

Re-roofing the Garage

2010-12-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

The garage roof started leaking last spring and I knew we were going to have to re-roof before the winter rains hit. The garage still had its original roof from 1939, plus an extra layer of shingles on top of that. The side that faces Southwest had really deteriorated to the point where it was starting to slough off in light wind.

We expected this process to be messy since there was no sheathing underlayment, just cedar shingles nailed right onto the slats. In preparation for the amount of debris that would be falling in, we pulled everything out that was on the floor and then tarped down the walls to create "slides" for debris to end up (mostly) in the center of the floor.

Tarping the Garage Walls

This system worked fairly well and got easily 9/10's of the debris. We still had to clean off the beams and some of the edges of the walls, but most of the gunk landed right where we wanted it and easy to sweep up.

The re-roof took approx 1.5 days. The first day was tear-off of the old roofing, cleaning and repair of some damaged spots by termites and rot, followed by new sheathing. The second day, they put down the tar paper and shingles.


Ready to Start Sheathing

Whirlybird Goes Here!

All work was done by Long Beach Roofing and we were happy with the job they did. They cleaned up each day and were a pleasure to work with.

Almost Finished!

Garage Cabinets - Finished!

2010-12-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

At last, this project concludes. Results below, before and after:

What we started with - old garage shelving


New garage cabinets and shelving - well worth it!

The shelf section next to the cabinet was built with 12" melamine since we needed to accommodate the swing of the door. There will eventually be another set of cabinets and shelving built to the right of this area - but that won't happen until I have some electrical work done on that side (scheduled for AFTER the kitchen remodel early next year.) Next up on our hit parade this fall/winter is a re-roof of the garage.

Finishing & Organization

2010-11-28T17:01:00.000-08:00

So, thar’ she is! Up on the wall and tarted up with snazzy handles (on sale at Lowe’s!) Cooler than any garage cabinet has a right to be. Speaking of Lowe’s – who would have thought that they would have GREY peg board! I stopped and stared in the aisle – it was like the heavens had opened up and ray of sunlight burst through. FINALLY! Somebody understands my needs at a big box retailer. (For the sake of brevity, I’ve left out a very long story of firing Home Depot and Lowe’s multiple times over the course of this project for failing to have shelves stocked with supplies I needed. Basic supplies. I can buy a Mexican Coke but you can’t stock 12” white melamine with pre-drilled holes at every store, Home Depot? What the hell is that? Sorry, done ranting….)

Grey f’in peg board! Hot damn.


My New Garage Cabinets

Doors & Organizers

Because we kept to the 4’ height, we got two doors out of each 8’ melamine board. Your local big box retailer will have a little kit to set up your hinges and get them drilled correctly. Buy it. You won’t be sorry.

I left the inside of the cabinet white to help with visibility. We have plenty of lights on the work table, but it gets dim as you look upward, so the white helps bounce light out of the cabinet. Under the cabinet, we put in an LED undercabinet light strip. In our zeal to organize things, we even took advantage of unused real estate in the corner and turned it into shelving for drill batteries.

The Pièce de résistance of my new garage cabinet is the bins.

Where before there was chaos and madness, nothing could be found and we bought things twice because we couldn’t find the first one. We never knew exactly what we had. Then came the bins, and they changed…..everything.

Really, when you come right down to it, it was always about the bins. You know that TV commercial where the couple asks the architect to design a house around a faucet? Well, we built a cabinet around some bins. It is the plain, honest truth.


Plastic Bins Now Organize the Garage Cabinets

So, knowing that our cabinet inside sections were around 22” deep, I needed to find bins that would maximize the depth of the cabinet. I think we’ve established by now that I research things to death, no? Anyway, finding companies who want to see you a wide variety of bins individually is not easy. I found only one manufacturer that met my bin needs in terms of size, Quantum Storage Systems. I ordered blue bins that were 14 ¾ deep, the fit perfectly on my 16” shelves. I grabbed larger yellow bins for stuff that needed a bigger bin, like gardening gloves. (Just because I know somebody is going to want to know this: www.randmh.com was one of the few companies I found who had a full range of bin sizes and would ship individually, rather than packs.)

All the sandpaper ended up being stored in a magazine holder, available at any office supply store. Works great.

We also put plastic bumpers on the inside of all the doors so minimize damage to the cabinet over time.

The final phase of this project is the shelving to the side, the subject of the next post.

Assembly and Installation

2010-11-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

Assembly and installation took place on two different days. We’re in our late 40’s here, so we move a little slower on projects now than back when we were tearing siding off the house without a care in the world a mere 6 years ago.

Once we had stripped the wall of the old crates, we had nice blank wall to work with!

Our blank wall in the garage - ready for a cabinet!

We had designed our cabinet in 3D using Second Life, so we knew all our cuts and exactly how things needed to lay out. We planned the cabinet to stay as close to cut sizes so as to minimize unused resources. Our design was for a 6’ wide by 4’ high cabinet that would be broken up into 3 sections. Two sections would get doors and one section would be open for tool cases to slide in and out, we called that section “the cubby.” 4’ was pretty tall, but that allowed us to get two upright pieces from an 8’ section with no waste. The end pieces from our top and bottom of the cabinet were (2) 6’ pieces and the 2’ sections left over became shelves for the cubby. No waste. The backing board did leave a 2’ segment, but I’ll find a use for that, somewhere!

I wanted 16” shelving everywhere it was possible, this area stores a lot of big and bulky items and 12” shelves were just not going to cut it. So, the depth on the main cabinet is 16” and on the side shelves we had to go with 12” to accommodate the swing of the door.

It’s a big damn cabinet.

We built it down on the ground in front of the garage and lifted it up to the workbench in stages. We had fixed 2x4’s to the walls on 2 sides for support beneath, then secured from the top and other side with brackets. The final push to get the cabinet from the work bench up onto the brackets was a little ugly, but we did it.

Note to self: add a garage winch system into dream home plans....

Cabinet base installed

Next we will add the doors, do a paint touch up and start organizing the work station. Yippee!

Painting Melamine Cabinets

2010-11-18T09:59:00.000-08:00

So, after the decision was made to paint, the question became about paints that will be good for covering melamine. I heard wind of something called Cabinet Coat. Couldn’t find it anywhere. Then I heard Home Depot has some kind of cabinet paint that would cover melamine perfectly, the paint team at Homer had no clue about this product when I asked.

FINALLY. I found Cabinet Coat at Ace Hardware. Only they didn’t stock it at the one I first checked at – but they could special order. The kicker was, it wasn’t really tintable to the degree I wanted for “garage grey.” Then, wonder of wonders, I find that Ace makes a cabinet and door paint that IS tintable with a Deep Base. Huzzah!

We had to call around to some of the larger Ace franchises to find one that had Ace Cabinet, Door & Trim Paint in the Deep Base (Sku 1320654). Happily, a location nearby had it on the shelf. And thus we were off to the cabinet building races.


Ace Cabinet, Door & Trim Paint

My only real regret was that I failed to follow good painting technique and blew off sanding and priming. I suspect I would have gotten a tougher finish that was more resistant to scratching, but I just wasn’t willing to go that level of prep for garage cabinets.

I also made the mistake of following advice on the internet to use a foam roller. This = big mistake. The foam left all sorts of bubbles in the paint.

Horrendous idea.

Had to sand the cabinet doors back down and repaint them. The correct roller is a traditional roller designed for ultra-smooth surfaces. A paint team member at Lowe’s suggested a 6” roller for adhesives as a good choice. This roller delivered a much better finish. Grey over white needed two coats. Almost all the pieces needed a little touch up after cabinet assembly and installation. I’ll post back over time with reports of how the paint holds up over long term use.

**11/28/13**
I have a favorable report on how the paint holds up. It's been 3 years and the cabinets still look great.

Funny story...I decided to add another cabinet in the garage and as I was about to start painting I found myself blank as to what I'd done on the first cabinets. Did I sand? Did I prime?

So, I went looking for one of the blog posts that I had used as a resource three years ago on painting melamine. Didn't find that blog post, but I did find THIS one (you're reading right now) where I specified what I had done. I just had to laugh.
I answered my own question by documenting the project on my blog....

The Garage Cabinet Project

2010-11-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

The first project I’m going to profile is the latest disrepair inflicted on my homestead: Garage Cabinets.

The more home improvement I do, the clearer it has become that a well-organized and decently stocked workshop is a must. We’ve been making do with a less-than ideal arrangement put in place by one of the previous owners of this fine, Southern California residence. The original shelves were not actually shelves, but shipping crates sent to American Wholesale Hardware, Co. I’m guessing that a previous owner of the house worked there, hence the elaborate shipping crate storage system along the walls.

The garage shelves BEFORE. Yikes.

Needless to say, this might have been fine for someone not using the garage as a workshop. For me, they had to go.

So, the mission was to pull out all old crates and makeshift shelving and build in cabinets that were designed for the tools, supplies and other miscellaneous gack that accumulates in this spot in the garage. I optimistically assumed I could buy some prefab cabinets, pop them together, slap them up on the wall, and be done.

Foolish girl. I should have known nothing so easy had the remotest chance of occurring.

I started my journey to proper garage shelves where all home improvement journeys start: trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, and OSH. Everybody had WHITE melamine cabinets. The few cabinets that were proper garage-gray were really …..well, butch. I wanted a garage workshop, not a NASCAR maintenance pit. Internet research revealed a whole lot more WHITE utility cabinets. And not even in sizes that made sense for what I wanted, so obviously we were going to build these cabinets from scratch.

Once the decision had been made to build the garage cabinets custom, the project narrowed down to supplies. Most of the big box home improvement stores had prefab sheets of 4’x8’, 16”x8’ and 12”x8' – even with shelf peg holes pre-drilled. Except it was all in WHITE. Feh.

Fast forward to the local specialty lumber store, where I’ve gone to ask about custom ordering gray melamine. They tell me that special ordering gray melamine would be prohibitively expensive; using a special cabinet paint tinted gray would be a better solution. And thus, it came to pass that the cabinets would be painted gray. In my next post, we will move on to the scintillating topic of cabinet painting.