We have a saying in my family — “Ask me how I know!” — which usually means that we’ve screwed something up, bought the cheaper tool or the cheaper product, and ended up regretting it. Each and every one of the below points can be followed with “Ask me how I know!” from personal experience, because I don’t always believe good ol’ Dad either. The below is in completely random order.

• Spackle: MH Ready Patch – Spackle is used for small repairs to drywall, such as picture holes or where you’ve pulled out a molly/plug. MH will stick to lots of things and will harden up well without sagging. It’s solvent based, so it won’t cause problems with oil finishes and can be used on both wood and drywall.
• Caulk: Two products. Polyseamsealis available at Lowe’s and Home Depot and many other places. Unfortunately, Loctite recently bought the parent company, Henkel (also makers of the much beloved PL Premium), so the tub/tile stuff is no longer available in matte and they may have changed the formulation. Outside, we use Sashco Big Stretch Caulk & Seal, 10.5-Ounce, which is pretty amazing stuff. It’s the most elastic caulk I’ve ever seen, but you really have to fill a crack in it — and larger cracks fill better unless you can sort of ‘glue’ the two pieces together. I especially like to use it on Hardi Board/Panel, which shifts a lot in the Texas heat. Once it dries, though, it can only be removed with lacquer thinner, if that.
И не забудьте про поиск туров
• Paint: Benjamin Moore. Super Spec is contractor crud, I use a LOT of Regal Aquavelvet, and Aura is amazing with dark or highly pigmented colors. We use Satin Impervo (oil) on trim. I have recently had decent experience with the HGTV and Duration lines of paint from Sherwin, but anything except their top of the line has performed poorly for me both in application and over time.
• Wire Nuts: Use only wire nuts with springs in them, like the tan Ideal ones available at Home Depot. Don’t buy the cheaper mixed bag of Buchanan ones with the different sizes/colors… you’ll spend more time dropping them or having them fall off in the j-box than you will actually screwing them on to wires.
• Screws: Don’t use drywall screws for construction, fencing… or really, anything but hanging drywall. For construction, I put everything together with screws because it makes it WAY easier to take apart later. I’ve done several structural changes to my house and used SPAX screws to hold interior framing together. (I typically use 2 inch or 3 inch screws.) For fences or decks, use fencing or decking screws.
• Paint Brushes: We tend to use Purdy brushes. Remember that you use different brushes for latex and oil; I don’t trust the “all purpose” ones to leave a clean line. My personal favorite brush is a Purdy Cub XL 2″ brush. Wooster brushes are also OK, but I don’t like them anywhere near as much as I like Purdy brushes. Clean them well and they’ll last you a long time.
• Drop Cloths: We put a 3-4 mil plastic drop cloth down with a canvas drop cloth over it. Why? Because without the plastic, the canvas will let the paint soak through. And without the canvas, when you spill or dribble some paint, you will step in it and then track it all over the rest of the house. Ask us how we know…
• Extension cords: Don’t get the cheap 14 or 16 gauge ones. Spend the money for a decent 12 gauge one. You can’t pull enough amps down a 14 gauge one in most cases for the tool to perform properly, and most power tools worth the name are going to pull 10-15 amps under load, not to mention any spikes or high draws.
• Sand Paper: Don’t bother buying Gator. They’re garbage, even the “higher grade” black stuff… the grit doesn’t last long enough and the paper loads up far too easily with dust and other leavings. I have had really, really bad luck with Norton discs leaving horrible dual action orbiter marks because of the “universal” five hole/eight hole design. The Dad-approved product is Mirka sandpaper.

More blog posts along this line coming down the pipe…

And then I found out that most of that mucking around in the kernel build process isn’t necessary.

RHEL5 u6 (at least my copies — note that I have the -xen kernel packages installed, which might affect things) actually has the XFS kernel module in /lib/modules/kernel/fs/xfs — it just doesn’t have the xfsprogs package, and the xfsprogs package is not available via any supported means. I downloaded the xfsprogs srpm from the XFS project page and used rpmbuild to build and install it myself.

Does anyone else in this day and age find it ridiculous that Redhat does not support filesystems larger than 16TB without some form of hackery? I can buy that much disk storage at my local Office Depot.

Note that I’m pretty sure that the mount option ‘inode64′ is required if you’re over 16TB, and that 32-bit NFS clients do not like the inode64 option one tiny bit.

One of the things I love most about science fiction is it’s ability to take an idea like “legal reform” and extrapolate it into a meaningful, personal story to illustrate the need for changes. How would you explain to your ten year old daughter why someone is suing her for the things her ancestors did? Or why she can’t sing along out loud without permission? How would you like it if your baby was sued before he or she was born? If the lawyers get their way, that’s our future.

That only includes receipts that I’ve kept; I have no clue how much I’ve actually spent. Triple the figure if I’d had to include labor costs.

It makes me sick to think that people who bought in stupidly at a peak and don’t have steady employment are getting breaks. Shouldn’t people who work hard successfully get rewarded?

(This post brought to you by NeatDesk, which has managed to collate and report on an unbearable number of receipts in the past few weeks.)

Lesson to all the kids in the audience: Homeownership isn’t for everyone. If you’re not willing to lift a hammer and you have no savings, it’s a trap you’ll never get out of.

• Part One: In which they silo everyone and nothing is anyone’s responsibility.
• Part Two: In which the corporate trolls gain power, and actively drive out anyone who’s trying to get work done.
• Part 3: Hunger can be an asset.

There’s certain things that I’m perfectly willing to do myself. There’s certain things that I’m willing to pay to have done. And then there’s things that I don’t want to touch, haven’t touched, and probably never will touch. These, I subcontract.

I’m willing to do most things myself. This includes dirty things, like digging holes, messy things, like dropping a ceiling with blown-in insulation, and dirty, messy, pain-in-the ass things like mudding and taping. My reasons vary — sometimes, I’m too cheap to pay someone else to do it, or I want the experience of taking something apart because I discover things (like additional rot and water damage or wiring problems) that I wouldn’t if I hadn’t taken it apart myself.

Things I never, EVER touch are sort of split into two categories. The first is safety, and the second is experience.

Safety-wise, I don’t feel comfortable making hookups with the main gas lines in my house in areas where they’re not accessible — in attics, walls, or ceilings. I’ll do hookups to appliances because you can smell if they spring a leak, but I don’t want it to be my fault if the gas line in my attic springs a leak and no one smells it until the heater clicks on, and KABOOM! I also feel that way about things inside the electrical panel, but having watched this video a few weeks ago might’ve saved me $150 in electrician’s fees… (Then again, the advice I got from him was priceless.)

Experience-wise, I don’t feel comfortable doing roofing modifications myself. For example, I had some turtle vents put in to vent my attic space. I don’t feel comfortable doing anything that requires a particular pace and will get screwed up if it goes wrong. For that reason, I don’t plan to put self-leveling compound on my living room floor myself before I install whichever type of flooring we eventually choose… I’ll have someone do that. I’d hate to pay for the materials twice.

I found one more thing I never want to do (again): Hang drywall on a vaulted ceiling. I paid a couple of friends to help me out with it, but it just isn’t working, so I’m going to end up subcontracting that out. I already wasted about $50 worth of drywall to do it completely wrong; I don’t want to waste any more. I’ll still tape and mud it myself, because I’m good at those things and I want to be responsible for the results.

Side note: You should’ve SEEN the four of us trying to hang the drywall on the ceiling. 5/8 in. drywall is HEAVY (about 40 lbs per 4′x8′ board), and I couldn’t until last week even lift a sheet of it by myself. We spent several hours trying to hang each sheet, and still screwed it up in epic ways that were nearly impossible to correct. I’ve got a new idea for a comedy show on DIY Network: “Gringoes Hang Drywall” Freakin’ HI-larious.

Here’s a few shots from the pilot episode…

Nice detail on that can light, ‘eh?

There’s so much wrong with how we did this, I can’t even begin to describe. First, we cut the angle to the right incorrectly. Second, we didn’t hang it high enough. Third, we didn’t notice how close to the header we were getting, which would’ve meant I was putting a up a lot of scrappy pieces. Third, we weren’t a full factor of four off of the ground, which meant that I couldn’t hang half-sheets where I needed to in order to get efficient use of my materials.

FAIL. I’m letting the professionals do it.

(If you’re doing a renovation with a general contractor, and you don’t see a series of these below your permit as the job progresses, you should ask a lot of questions.)

The “OK to cover up” means that I’ve got permission after this to put insulation over the electrical work I did. The purpose of this inspection was to make sure that I used the right wire and gauge of wire, that I stapled it properly and ran it into the box properly, and that it was connected properly in any junction boxes in the ceiling. The inspector wanted to know where each and every wire went, if I had used grounding screws on the junction boxes I had added to the attic, and if I’d used non-metallic boxes or approved romex grommets where I did use metallic boxes.

Any circuits that you alter while you are doing work are required to be brought up to code. That means that if you tie into, reroute, add wire to, or remove wire from an existing circuit, the whole circuit needs to be brought up to the current code: GFCI outlets or protected circuits in wet areas, arc fault breakers in circuits that run through bedrooms, confirm the # of devices on a circuit… the whole nine yards.

I also installed wired smoke alarms. To pass inspection, I didn’t NEED to, but it was highly suggested that I do so. Code in my area if I were to rent the house requires that there be a wired smoke alarm in each bedroom (defined as an enclosed room with a closet and a window), and a combination wired smoke alarm / carbon monoxide detector in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Since I do plan to rent at least a room out at some point, I went ahead and installed them so that I’d get it all done at once.

Honestly, I lost the most time through ALL of this to using cheap wire nuts. Beige IDEAL wire nuts work great. Yellow/orange Buchanan ones are crap.

I will need another green tag after completing the insulation, before I can put drywall up.

Insulation. First thing: It’s itchy. Second thing is that it’s a pain in the butt to get it in if you’re installing the batts yourself. Third thing is: At least you can install it yourself without paying the cost per cubic inch that spray foam gets. I did spray foam some small areas.

Fiberglass batts are a decent way to DIY install insulation. Spray foam costs about four times the cost (installed) as fiberglass (installed) — and DIY is even cheaper with fiberglass, as the spray foam DIY kits are almost equal the installed cost according to the quotes I got.

The inspector and I spent about thirty minutes talking when he was there the first time (I think he wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing and wasn’t trying to hide anything), and he walked me through the next step. He said that I definitely needed a minimum of R-30 to replace the attic insulation (which was R-11 before) and R-13 on exterior walls since I had 2×4 framed studs. I’d need R-19 if I had 2×6 framing, but that’s uncommon in the south.

In the cold roof, which is 2×8, he said that the code calls for R-19 — but he suggested (in a very official voice) that I fit R-30 in there and sacrifice a little bit of R value from compressing it. The R-30 fit, but it was very difficult to get up into the flat roof and to staple in place.

It did make it a bit worse that some of the framing was not square, which made the individual bays farther than 23″ across — to the point where I had to put some dead wood in there on the sides of the rafters to get the 23″ wide can light arms to attach. That particular rafter was really bad. It was 13 degrees out.

Why not fix it? Can’t. Fixing it would mean removing the roof decking, or at least detaching that rafter from the roof. That would probably bust a hole in the roof. Since I didn’t feel like adding an entirely new roof to the tab…

You will notice that we stapled the insulation to the face of the studs and rafters instead of inside the studs and rafters. That’s because the kraft paper is a vapor barrier. Most builders and installers won’t do this. It’s time consuming and it makes installing the drywall a pain in the butt because you can’t see where the studs are. Contiguous vapor barriers are sort of a damnyankee northern thing that you have to do when you’ve got a lot more heating days than cooling days… however, they’re there for your protection, and in this case, could be the difference between this insulation getting moldy again and not.

So, last but not least, what I learned while hanging the insulation…

First, use a sharp utility knife that you can swap blades out of quickly but that doesn’t have a lot of other crap on it to get hung in the insulation.

Second, Arrow makes great staples (and their staples are standard), but they can’t make a staple gun worth a crap. BOTH of the electric Arrow-branded staple guns (ET501, ETFX50) that we bought when we start jammed continuously and failed under use. The ET501 actually stopped working due to overheating. What ended up working DECENTLY well was an Power Shot Pro gun that I found at Home Depot. Apparently these are made by Arrow, but aren’t listed on the website…

Third, you need to know what’s behind the insulation that you’re putting in. The R-30 insulation is a full 10 1/4 inches deep when it’s inflated — that’s close to the size of a 2×12. If there’s nothing behind it and you’re applying R-30 to a wall facing an attic, then you need to strap behind it. (I used spring steel hangers in some places and stapled straps in others depending on what I was doing and how much access to the backside I had.) If there’s wall behind there, or electrical, or worst of all water pipes, you need to separate the layers of insulation so that you’re insulating around those things.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk a bit about ventilation and how that works with the insulation in the cold roof… Or I’ll share some more pictures. Need some time to make diagrams, and I’m spending my day off today taping and floating…

A bunch of people have asked what it looked like as we were doing the demo, and what it looked like after it was all bare. (Believe it or not, more people have said, “More pictures!” than “You’re crazy!”, which stunned me. Either that, or everyone already knows I’m crazy.)

So — Here’s pictures. Ladies and gents, this is why I gutted the place. And this is how much work it was, and this is how much I love my girlfriend for helping throughout all of it.

Below: Dust under the carpet padding after I pulled the carpet up. You can see where the vacuum has, er, vacuumed. (I vacuumed at each stage to keep things clear, to pick up nails and staples so that I didn’t step on them, and to make sure I could see what was falling on the floor.) Most of the floor was covered in dirt under the padding, and the carpet was dated 2004. This is why cleaning carpets isn’t enough, and why people who have allergies like me want uncarpeted houses with area rugs.

Below: Groovy wrapping on the original insulation. Remember the picture of the ceiling from Day 2? It was so moldy that you couldn’t read what the wrapping said. The places where it looks “chewed” along the top is where the carpenter ants and other critters got to it.

Hey, remember that 30 Cu. Yd. dumpster? Here’s a crummy cell phone pic of what it looked like when it was empty, right after I’d pulled the carpet out…

Below: Half the ceiling’s missing in this shot. Most of the horrible rotten stuff is down. The insulation that had been installed (improperly) when the water damage was repaired is either the black or brown stuff — I’m not sure because I’ve found the black stuff in other places in the house, but the brown stuff was more rotten and seemed older. Who knows? The black tarpaper stuff wasn’t eaten by ants; the non-tarred kraft wrapped batts were eaten by ants.

Ah, the TV area. With it’s wonderful blown-in insulation. (Actually, most of the attic is full of blown-in insulation.) This stuff was hell to clean up. I was this close to putting on my dust mask and using the leaf-blower to blow it out the front door, but we bagged it like responsible citizens… You can see how dusty it was from the amount of dust that the flash caught.

That’s the girlfriend helping bag up the crap. she’s wonderful. Note the safety glasses and respirator, and the 6 mil plastic sealing the door to the rest of the house. On the other side of the plastic, we had a HEPA filter running on high — and fiberglass STILL made it all the way to the back corner of the house.

The added sprayfoam sealing the wall between the TV area and the garage is mine; the bent-up, mineral-coated 3/8 inch copper flex is OEM (or was installed early in the house’s lifetime.) The green boxes are low voltage ports and basically just provide a clean place to collar the wiring and attach a faceplate. The one on the right without anything in it later got 1 inch conduit run down to it, and is going to be for ethernet.

Here’s the clerestory and most of the ceiling bare… Note that I left the labels on the windows. This was so that the inspector could verify that I’d put in windows with the right kind of glazing.

Here’s what the floor looked like after dropping the top half of the ceiling. I was basically up on top of the scaffold flailing with a hammer. The scaffold is 14 feet tall in total, with the bottom deck at 10 feet. The ladder is 10 feet.

… And here’s what the dumpster looked like at about this time. It’s only 1/3 full, and it’s got all the drywall and insulation in it.

Aiee! My house … it’s naked! That’s my friend’s son, Michael, helping pull the few remaining nails out of the ceiling before we started installing insulation. The grey things from the soffit on up is soffit baffles, which I installed as a little bit of extra insurance to make sure I didn’t completely plug the soffit vents up.

Blurry and Bare on the other side… this faces the back bedroom. You can see the two black cans where I’m going to install the sconces. They’re going to be centered over the buffet that goes against that wall.

I’ve already posted this picture, but… Here’s the clerestory and living room without anything in it. You can see the can lights in the ceiling. You can see the little bit of blue conduit in the background for the ethernet.

Caveat: Those are the incorrect can lights on the bottom left. They’re full-profile slanted ceiling can lights, but left no clearance between the sheathing and the can, and therefore aren’t allowed. I think I’m just getting around to ripping them out when I took this picture. I ended up eating the cost of three of them, the rest were able to be returned to Lowe’s.

And here’s the kitchen side without any drywall or insulation. Again, improper can lights on the bottom, proper can lights at the top. Wiring for the can lights was 100% correct, I just listened to the packaging — “Oh, it says it only requires a 7.25″ clearance!” — and didn’t really think when I bought them.

Tomorrow, I’m either going to post some more pictures of what I did while I had the dumpster, or I’m going to talk about insulation for a little while. Not sure yet. Depends on how much work I do…

I talked to the disposal company about hazardous materials (mold and fiberglass) in the dumpster. The disposal company I chose was Brazos Valley Recycling, because they sort out the things that come in and work to recycle as much of it as they can before they transfer the remains to the city dump. Their prices are the same as the dump. As far as a bunch of moldy insulation goes, they didn’t have a problem with it. If it didn’t go straight to the dump, any recycling would take care of the mold. Their employees also wore personal protective equipment.

I originally had wanted a 20 yard dumpster, but they didn’t have any, so they sent me a 30 yard dumpster for the price of a 20 yard dumpster. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one, but a 30 yard dumpster is big.

Another cost that I hadn’t counted on, but was related to that moldy insulation, was respirators for my helpers and I. We went with ‘real’ respirators.

If I was going to do it again, I would’ve probably gone with a full mask for at least myself to keep crud from getting in my eyes.

At $30 each, though, the masks added another hundred dollars — a lot more expensive than simple dust masks, but at least my friends/helpers are safe.

Mold Mitigation Inside

I’m not a pro with mold mitigation, but after doing some research on the internets, it seemed straightforward. For my limited areas where there had been mold exposure, as long as I was ventilating them properly, killing the mold once was enough. Again, I’m not a professional — don’t take my word for it.

For mold mitigation inside, I ended up using bleach and then Simple Green Pro 3 as mitigation products. The bleach should kill most everything, but I wanted something that would linger for a while. The Simple Green seemed to fit the bill according to the product packaging.

After cleaning the insulation out of the cold roof and below the clerestory windows, I sprayed bleach on the wood with a garden sprayer, let it dry, and then sprayed the Simple Green on. I let both dry.

And Wood Rot…

Around the fireplace, there was an area where the wood had gotten a bit rotten during the many years the roof had been leaking. The rot wasn’t bad enough that I needed to replace any of it (even according to the city inspector, who I had do a structural inspection after I exposed everything) — I just needed to stop any dry rot that might start.

There’s two types of products that I’ve worked with to do this. One is basically bondo — epoxy wood replacer. That didn’t apply because I didn’t need to replace anything that had been removed. I ended up just using Minwax Wood Hardener. It needs to be applied with a brush while wearing gloves, but it basically penetrates and crystallizes the wood. Note that the Elmers product that’s labeled similarly is NOT the same thing — use the Minwax.

Add – Order!

At this point, now that I’d gone from ‘minor’ to ‘major’ renovation, I decided that I was going to really do it up a bit and add can lighting to the ceiling. After a few false starts, I managed to locate a low-profile insulated cavity can light that would fit in my 8 inch rafters with space to spare.

Why IC? Well, the cold roof is insulated. If you have a can light that’s going to go in a place where there’s insulation in the roof, you have to have the right kind of can light. IC can lights have two features — first, they don’t depend on ventilating upwards. Second, they have a temperature sensor in them so that they shut down if they get too hot — before they set your house on fire.

Also, I decided I wanted to add sconces to the wall above the buffet. I already have the sconces, so all I need to do is add one switch and two mounts to the wall.

The can lights, wire, and dimmers added about $500 to the cost of the project.

Permits

I noticed something the other day. I was watching DIY Network, and with all the renovations they were doing to people’s houses (or watching people do to their own), they NEVER mentioned permits. HGTV mentions them all the time. Do you need a permit if you’re “just” punching a hole in the wall? Yes, you need a permit!

On top of that, you need a permit for the electrical work I was doing. And not only do you need a permit, but you need to bring existing areas up to code. In my city, they required me to install wired smoke alarms in each bedroom and a combination wired smoke alarm/carbon monoxide detector in the hallway.

I was lucky that I managed to not have to run an entire new circuit for these. What’s that about new circuits? Well, you can only have ten devices on any circuit in your house by my city’s current electric code. Switches, outlets, lighting, fans… ten. I had a bedroom that had six devices on it, and I could wire four more on. But that cascaded into needing an arc fault circuit breaker ($50) for that circuit. On the other hand, I could use the circuit breaker that I pulled out to run a circuit for the can lights and sconces in the living room — 8 outlets and 2 switches required an entire new run.

Permits cost me a total of $80 (cheap for the cost of the advice that I got), the smoke alarms cost $120 and the carbon monoxide $60, wire and boxes for those cost another $50, the arc fault breaker cost $60, the electrician cost $150 to come change the breakers out (a task I’d never done before and one I wanted to observe before I messed with…) — about another $500, which means I’m currently passing my original budget without having purchased drywall or insulation.

What can I say except, “Oops…”?

Let it be no secret: I’m a big fan of Mike Holmes. Sure, he’s a TV personality, but he seems to have the right attitude towards construction: “Take it down. I want to see what’s behind there. I don’t like it, and I want to make it right.” In my mind, this is a three step process.

• Expose the problem
• Understand the problem
• Fix the problem

I suppose this would be a good time to talk about the scale of my renovation. I’m renovating a 620 sq. ft. space that forms my living room, dining room, and entry area. The ceiling is vaulted one way up 16 feet in the living room (which I actually use as a dining room), and the normal 8 feet height in the dining room, which I use as a TV area. The dining area is against the fireplace, which is against the back wall of the house. The kitchen is against one wall, and I place a buffet against the other wall. The TV area with the lower ceiling is darker to keep reflections off of the TV when watching movies — and because it’s used far less than the dining area!

Initially, I’d planned to do a rolling renovation… I’d take down a wall at a time and get it back up before I moved on. While more time-consuming, this would’ve really cut down on the amount of scuzz that was in the air and would be least disruptive to living in the house as I was performing the renovation. But after exposing a few of my problems, I took it all down … which wasn’t all bad since I ended up doing some extra work to install some new electrical items, which really improved the look of the space.

Exposing My Problems

I knew about three problems and had suspicions or questions about a few more.

The first problem I knew about was a leak around/in the chimney. We solved this by re-flashing around the chimney, installing a diverter on the roof to guide the water away from the very flat five foot wide chimney (instead of installing an expensive cricket), and using some Blackjack roofing goo to seal where a previous ‘repair’ had not repaired the issue. On the inside of the house, a bunch of drywall deterioration was visible. When we fixed the roof, we didn’t touch the drywall deterioration. Fixing this deterioration was the original scope of this project.

Second, there was a leak around the clerestory windows. They had been leaking from the outside periodically, and condensation from the inside had leaked down the drywall causing staining on the roof. I wanted to expose the area around them to look for mold problems. I’d fixed this for the most part by replacing them with dual-pane windows a few months ago. The next step was obviously to get the drywall and trim patched up.

Third, the front door leaks air like a sieve because it was installed incorrectly and the frame is warped.

On top of those three problems, I found a two more.

Where the roof meets the clerestory, the flashing probably allowed rain to be blown back up into the wall. There was lots of evidence for this in old watermarks on the framing. This needed to get traced back and addressed.

The insulation in the cathedral ceiling was rotten. Not just any sort of rotten, but moldy rotten, full of dead carpenter ants rotten, and loaded with all kinds of toxic stuff you don’t want to breathe. I needed to figure out why this was happening and address it.

Understanding My Problems

The chimney leak and front door leak were pretty well understood.

The front door frame had been replaced at some point and wasn’t re-installed correctly. As the door opens and closes over time, if it’s not shimmed in properly, it’ll eventually kick out at the bottoms… especially if it gets wet like this one had. The chimney leak was caused after the most recent re-roofing; the rafters in the cold ceiling were twisted 10+ degrees off of plumb because they had gotten very wet, then had been re-sheathed wet without making sure they were plumb. Oops. Being off plumb created a gap between the flashing and the decking. This had been a persistent problem for ten+ years.

With the clerestory, there were an unbelievable three sources of water coming in. The first was the windows themselves. Water was condensing on the inside because it was the highest point in the house, so warm air containing vapor that people have breathed out or from cooking.

Inspection Note: When replacing windows, leave the labels on them until the project is done. This lets the inspector know that you’ve met the requirements for energy efficient glazing.

The third source was fascinating. When the roofing was last re-done, they didn’t feed tar paper up behind the siding like they should have, probably because they would’ve had to re-do the siding. As a result, water can get blown up behind the flashing — which, with the lack of tar paper, meant that water blew directly into the wall and soaked the insulation, framing, and drywall. You could see daylight through it!

You can see the water on the 2×6 that’s holding up that part of the roof. The 2×12 with sandwiched plywood that forms the header over the living room was showing serious signs of rot.

Last, we’ve got the rotten ceiling insulation to deal with. There’s soffit vents in four of seven bays that head to the peak of the cold roof. That means that warm, moist air can enter from outside, but there’s no way for it to leave — it heads up into the roof and stays there.

Resolving My Problems

The front door was easy to fix. Replace the front door with a new $150 low-e front door. Bam. Done. (I have simple tastes — and right now, ‘not drafty’ is high on the list.)

We ripped the old aluminum single-paned windows out (and the siding over them) and put in new low-e windows with energy-efficient glazing, which let us flash the edges of the windows properly and will prevent condensation on the inside. Note again that you need to remove the siding around the windows as well in order to flash properly!

To fix the gap beneath, I did a hack. To fix it properly, I should’ve fed roofing felt under the shingles (which have nails in them that I’d have to pull up) and the siding (which have nails in it that I’d have to pull up). That’s a mess I didn’t want to get involved in. I ‘hacked’ it, since the roof won’t get replaced for about five years yet and the siding will have to get pulled up a bit at the bottom in order to properly keep water out of the inside of the structure.

Fixing the insulation was interesting. The easiest way was to make sure all the soffit areas are vented, and then put in peak vents along the top of the roof. We ended up using turtle vents since they were easy to retrofit.

Problems I Couldn’t Fix

The racked rafters was impossible to fix unless I tore the roof off. If I tried to twist them back, the nails that hold the roof sheathing to the rafters would tear out, creating holes in the roof. I’d change the entire slope of the roof, which would tear up the flashing at the chimney and create gaps between the shingles, probably tearing them in the process. The only other thing that I could have done was sister in more rafters. Since the roof hadn’t moved in the past 10 years, adding more wood isn’t really necessary and could affect the structure by adding weight up high.

Unfortunately, having these rafters racked created it’s own issues. Most notably, I had planned to hang those can lights in the ceiling, and the widest the brackets will go is 23 inches. The twisted rafters are more than 24 inches apart. That’s going to cause complications with hanging the lights and the drywall.