My Name Is Mud(room)

So, after having a few contractors come in and give estimates we had Jenn's Mom's friend stop by to take a look. He used to be a contractor himself and now owns a respectable Home Inspection business. His opinion was that the room doesn't really need that much work. Cooler heads have prevailed and we've decided not to fully renovate the room.

However, we do not lack for decisive action. After watching no less than four generations of mushrooms bloom and die on our wall, today begins our crusade to take back our mudroom by the cheapest and most effective means available. After I post this, we'll be heading to the good old Home Depot to retrieve the following: a large-ish can of Thompson's Water Seal, plenty of caulk, a second deck brush, a gallon of cleaning solution, gloves, safety goggles and masks. Mr Falcone (the home inspector) determined that some of our moisture problem stems from the fact that the brick wall on the back of the house (above the mudroom) was never sealed. The bricks soak up rain like a sponge and it goes right through to the plaster walls, thus giving our guest bedroom closet that warty look, among other things. Sealing the bricks may also help prevent some of the mudroom moisture. After giving the walls a good scrub-down, we'll caulk up all the open corners and seams of the room. If, after all that, it looks like it may need a new paint job, we'll do that as well...some time in the near future.

As for "further down the road", we plan to rip up the lumpy, sloped floor and build a new one ourselves. We've determined that the current floor has had that strange landscape since it was built decades ago. They probably just put walls up around an old, badly built back porch and called it a mudroom. With some help from a few experienced people we know (and anyone else willing to pitch in) we'll pull up the old, crappy floor and put in a nice new one. One that's level and has tiles, etc.

Well, we're off to grab the supplies. Wish us luck!

Disgusting Mudroom: Update

So, I guess the last thing I talked about was the whole washing machine situation. That was eventually rectified, thanks to the good ol' Home Depot card and their "12 months no interest or payments" thing:


























The moisture continues to be a problem though, as does the ceiling:



























So much so, in fact, that we've found a new form of life had been growing in our house without our knowledge...



















Oh, you can't see it? Here's a closer look:



















Yes. Those are indeed actual mushrooms growing out of our wall. Needless to say, we are pretty thoroughly skeeved out. We've decided it's time for drastic action. We're going to talk to some contractors and get some estimates on renovating the entire room. We'll work out some sort of loan or financing or something. Next month, Jenn's car will be paid off and my old credit card debt, once so massive that its gravitational pull would bend light itself, will finally be no more. We'll have a good chunk of money every month that we're not used to having. We had originally intended to use it for new carpets and a new front door, but I think mudroom renovation has suddenly been driven home as a priority. Whatever, we may well just throw all those projects in the pot at once. Why not? Anyway, we'll try to keep this site updated with the proceedings. We're now hoping to be ready for some sort of housewarming-type party in October. We'll see.

Fun With Water, Part 2: The Big Fridge

Now, let’s talk about the mud room, or as I’ve taken to calling it this Winter, “The Big Fridge.” I think I had mentioned it a while ago, but we’ve had two hand-me-down washing machines already. The first we got from my Aunt and Uncle Betsy & John Spina when they were emptying out John’s mother’s house. It was old, but it worked well and even had a fancy knob for the cycle selector for an added touch of class!

But one day, the agitator tower thingy in the middle of the washer decided to strip its gears and stop spinning. It’s possible that I overloaded it. Still, the circular part at the bottom still spun and it still washed clothes. If you look back towards the beginning of this blog, you’ll see I mention my good friend John McGarvey…the one who helped me out (immensely) with our kitchen. A few months ago, his grandmother’s house was being similarly cleared out and there was another washer up for grabs:

It’s just about as old as the first one, but it agitates, presumably getting our clothes cleaner. We hooked it up and after the first few loads, it started leaking water everywhere with each load…regardless of what water level setting I put it on or how much clothes I put in it. We figure something must’ve broken loose during transport, so I went back to using the first washer…even though it had obviously lost a good amount of oil…more than is pictured here:

Note the good amount of orange/brown ice in the bottom-right of that picture. I’ll get to that.

So, I switch back to the washer with the glass doorknob and it works fine for a month or so. Then a month ago I went to do a much-needed load of laundry. The washer fills up with soapy water…….and then promptly dies. It blew the circuit on the surge protector, so I pushed the button back in and tried it again. It just buzzed softly and remained still. $#!%@. So, I pull what feels like 200lbs of wet laundry out of the washer and put it in a big plastic bag and lug it over to my parents’ house (thankfully only a few minutes away) and finish our laundry there.

Now we have two dead washing machines in our mud room. Fed up with hand-me-downs, we go to Home Depot. The beginning of the year is a really bad time financially, what with car insurance, inspection (complete with new brakes!), oil heating bills, etc. on top of the new mortgage. Also, we owe a lot of money on our income taxes again. Evidently we weren’t paying for the house long enough in 2006 to put us over the standard deduction, and our modest raises bumped us up into the next tax bracket. Thankfully, we have a halfway decent limit on our Home Depot card and they were having a “12 months no payments no interest” promotion on all appliances. We realize that means we have 12 months to pay it off or else we get slammed with all the retroactive interest, but at least we didn’t have to pay right then. We got ourselves a new LG Tromm front-loader. Not top of the line, like my brother’s washer, but no slouch either. It should save us a noticeable amount of money on our water bill. Also it’s musical and friendly and plays a jaunty little scale every time you turn it on, which makes me happy. I can put a weeks worth of dark laundry in it, instead of splitting it up into multiple loads, or even our comforter! This is obviously the first sign that I’m getting “old” since I’ve never been so excited about an appliance before. Still, I appreciate it just as much from a gadget-geek perspective as I do from a domestic perspective, so I figure I’m not over the hill yet. It weighs your clothes to determine how much water it should use!! That’s just awesome.

We emptied the broken washer as much as we could with plastic cups and then sponges. There was still a little bit of water left in the bottom (seen here with a slight crust of ice).

A week after ordering the washer, it arrives. The two delivery guys bring it in using a fascinating system I’ve never seen before. They each have harnesses strapped about their torsos, and they each clip an end of a long thick strap to a spot in the center of their chests. This strap goes under the washer and they use it to lift it up and move it around. It makes it a whole lot more maneuverable than if they were using a hand cart or dolly. Neat. They took the watery washer away free of charge. The other one hung out in the Big Fridge until Jenn’s uncle Billy took it for scrap metal on Saturday.

The new washer has consistently performed beyond expectations. Except for just last week…and that will lead us into the topic of the erratic weather patterns contained within the Big Fridge.

Tuesday I went to do a little load of laundry. I opened the door to the big fridge and was greeted with a blast of moist air. This isn’t unusual in the recent Winter months. Sometimes you open the door and it’s like you just got hit in the face with a wet sponge. It was like that on Tuesday. I put the load in the washer and set it to HOT since it was towels or throw rugs or something. As it starts to fill, it sounds a little funny. I check the valves on the pipes and they’re definitely open and the HOT one is getting pretty hot. I shrug and head out of there. About 20 minutes later we hear a noise that may or may not’ve been from the washer. I check on it and it had stopped right at the rinse cycle and instead of displaying the time remaining (as it usually does) the digital display was blinking OE. Dismayed, I find the manual and it says that OE means there’s a clog in the drain hose or drain filter and we just need to clean it out. I go to check the grey corrugated drain hose and it’s frozen solid. I can move it back and forth, but there’s definitely ice crunching around in there. Now, it’s been a lot colder in there before and none of the other liquids in the Big Fridge have frozen, but I guess maybe it’s because the hose is next to a stone wall or something. The first thing I can think of to do is to put a space heater near the washer, but that was taking too long and wasn’t close enough to the hose. The only other thing I could think of was to get a funnel and a lot of hot water and pour it into the end of the hose, which I did. The ice crackled and slid back into the washer. I ran the load again from the beginning with hot water and everything was fine.

The mud room has me pretty confused, though. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the roof, but it’s wet in there almost all the time. I call the room “The Big Fridge” because it not heated. We put any extra drinks in there that won’t fit in the regular fridge and they stay pretty cold. Because of the incredible amounts of moisture, I sometimes crack one of the windows to try and dry it out.

You can see here that the ceiling (or what’s left of it) can get really drippy.


































This moisture collects on the ceiling and drips onto the floor (and the washer). When it’s really cold in there, it’ll then freeze to the walls and the floor. For example:

Not pretty. Therefore, cracking the windows don’t help all that much, since it serves more to lower the temperature in that room than to lower the humidity. Not that closing the windows exactly seals the room up, as you can see in this corner:

Yep, that’s light shining through the wall there. I definitely need to pick up some “expanding hole filler” or whatever you call it and spray that stuff in there real good. Or we just need to knock the room down and start over.

I suppose it’s possible that the moisture is just runoff from the window leak problem. It’s definitely getting into the door frame leading to the kitchen.




































And then it drips onto our cruddy steps.

See? This is why we can’t have a housewarming party yet. I say that it’s possible that this is runoff from the other leak since it’s right near the kitchen window and right under the closet where we used to have a problem. However, even if weeks go by without any form of precipitation, this room will still be dripping. I can’t imagine this much water is waiting around for a week before ending up on my mud room ceiling…and then my floor. Now that it’s getting a little warmer again, I can see that the wooden boards of the roof are starting to actually dry out. That again points to my condensation theory. It’s like a cold glass of water on a warm day…but in reverse. However, it’s not that much warmer in the Big Fridge than it is outside on a cold day. I guess the difference between a 15 degree night outside and unfrozen water bottles inside is enough, though. I really don’t know. Also, I really don’t know how to fix it other than buying a dehumidifier (expensive?) or getting heat in that room (either expensive or dangerous if it’s just a space heater). Or would more heat make the moisture problem worse? What I need is a team of scientists to come and figure it out. Or a lot of money to tear down the walls and the floor and replace them with something better. The ultimate dream would be to open the crawlspace opening a little, pour some concrete on the floor of it and make it an extra storage space. Then make a new mud room with a new foundation that isn’t crumbling away, a new concrete floor instead of rotten and sagging wood and new walls where the only sun that shines through is coming from a window. And maybe a ceiling that doesn’t fall down and shower everything with mildew and mold. Realistically, we'll probably end up just doing a new wooden floor and tile over that, which I would imagine is cheaper than having someone do it in concrete. But we haven't done any serious research yet. Anyone have any suggestions?

Fun With Water, Part 1: The Leak

Not much has changed in the intervening 2 months, so I figured I’d wait until I had something to say. The leaking problem has only gotten worse since I last posted, though there may be some hope of a happy conclusion.

Last time, I told you about O’Bannon Roofing’s shenanigans and how they essentially didn’t do the job they said they would and blew me off when I asked them to do it correctly. A week or so after that post, I called a new roofer called “4 Seasons Roofing & Siding”. We got an advertisement for them in one of those “Valpak” things you get in the mail with all the coupons, etc. They seemed to have their stuff together, the website was nice, the ad said they were part of the BBB, and so on. I called and left a message explaining our situation and got a call back in a day or two. The guy seemed pretty friendly and down-to-earth. He said that 4 Seasons does most of the roof and siding work when you get Home Depot to build you something, and they even did the roof on the dry cleaners at the end of my block. I explained the whole stupid history of my leak problem and he was pretty blown away. He wondered how it was that they “couldn’t figure out the problem,” since something like that would probably be pretty obvious to anyone who’s done roofing before. I told him that’s what I thought, but I’m not a roofer. He asked me if I wouldn’t mind letting him know who it was that gave me the run around, since he had a few roofers in mind that could possibly pull something like that. When I told him it was O’Bannon, he was shocked. He was under the impression that they usually did a good job and followed up on their work, and never would’ve thought they would pull stunts like that. He said that almost all roofers guarantee their work for a few years at least, regardless of whether the house changes owners or not (unlike what I was told by O’Bannon’s roofers, that once the house changes hands the guarantee is null and void). He said he was sorry I had so much trouble and they’d come out that Saturday afternoon after a job to take a look around.

So, that Saturday, I waited around until the sun went down and no one showed up. Still, he said that they had a job that would go until that afternoon and I figured maybe it went long and it got too late for them to come check it out and whadda ya gonna do? I called them the following Monday to try and reschedule the estimate and left a message with whoever answered the phone. After not hearing anything that week, I tried again. Left another message and still no call back. So, after numerous calls with no reply, we’ve simply given up. It’s quite possible that 4 Seasons Roofing seals your roof with a paste made of gold and crushed diamonds for a measly $5. We’ll never know, because they obviously don’t want our business. Which is too bad, ‘cause I had high hopes for these guys after talking to the main roofer.

So in the meantime, as those of you in the area know, we had some snow. Snow is not a big problem as far as the leak is concerned. Sure, it was tough to get our car out of it’s spot the first time we had that icy snow, since our street is curved like the top half of a large pipe. But a few good pushes on the back bumper and we were in business. No, the snow is no problem. The problem comes in when that snow begins to melt. We get a lot of direct sunlight on our house, which is awesome. Snow at the front of our house is usually gone by the end of the day as long as it’s a sunny day. However, that melting snow made our leak problem worsen tenfold. The bright side? The guestroom closet doesn’t seem to be getting wet anymore. The brighter side? We could finally see exactly where the leak was coming from and how it operates. And now you can, too:
This is the guestroom window as seen from the bathroom. You can see that the water first appears along the line indicated by the arrow. It’s evidently coming from the roof and running under the siding until it gets to the window. It then drips down the window and pools on the outer sill.

















Some of it then seeps through into the inner window sill…
















The rest runs right down the siding to the kitchen window (and wall):






































That’s our doorbell next to “America’s #1 Hot Dog”. It still works, even soaked, and it sounds exactly like my sister’s grandfather clock. When we watch her kids, I always think there’s someone at the door once an hour. We need a regular “ding-dong” type of doorbell someday.

Anyway, so that day when the snow was melting, we had our own little disgusting waterfall right in our own kitchen. The wall next to the window was a little squishy as well. I told all of this to that roofer from 4 Seasons when he called that one time a day or so later, and he had a pretty good idea of what to look for. Maybe it was so easy of a solution that he felt my house didn’t pose him enough of a challenge and was unworthy of his roofing prowess. Oh well. I’ll keep my money, and here’s how…

Just this past Saturday, Jenn’s uncle Billy came by to take a look around. He’s done all kinds of contracting/landscaping type work, including roofing. He brought his bucket of “muck” and first took a look at the mud room roof. There wasn’t much there that looked like an obvious leak to him, but he patched a few areas with his tar stuff. The meteorological phenomena that manifest themselves in our mud room continue to be a mystery, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. We borrowed my next-door neighbor’s 40 foot ladder and Billy went up on the main roof to see how things fared there. He immediately went, “This is where it’s leaking, right? Right above the window?” I said yes and he said, “It looks like someone was up here not too long ago and did a real good job all around he roof except right here. They laid the tape down but didn’t muck over it. It’s like they just ran out of stuff and gave up and went home. I can’t believe they didn’t think this would leak!” So there was about a gap about a foot or so long without anything sealing the flashing to the roof and that’s probably where the water was getting in under the siding the whole time. I wish I had sent a camera up there with him, but I didn’t think of it. Regardless, he patched up the obvious oversight and a few other places and came back down. It did rain later that night, but I had a hard enough time washing a little smudge of that stuff off my hand. He slapped that stuff on real thick, so I’m not worried about it being washed away. We didn’t have time to clean up the kitchen window until the next day, so we’re not sure if it leaked that night. We’ll see when it rains this week. Everyone keep your fingers crossed!!

Same old, same old

It's been a while since my last post, but not much has happened in regards to our house lately. The only noteworthy thing is the continuing water leakage problem...

I had mentioned that O'Bannon roofing came out and fixed our problem. However, on Christmas Eve morning, we found that we still were getting leaks in the same old places. I called and left a message and they got back to me a week later and said they'd send some guys out again. I waited over 2 weeks without any update, even with leaving a few messages about how we were still getting water in at the window and closet on New Year's, etc. I finally got a hold of the lady and she gave me the same "oh I just got the paperwork this morning" routine, and she told me that they looked around and couldn't find the problem. Then she said that they were out of ideas and maybe I should get someone else's opinion. Instead of arguing about it, I just said, "Uh huh, sure. Thanks anyway." I have no proof that they ever came out to the house in the first place, never having gotten any copies of this fabled "paperwork". But then again, I never had to pay them anything, so I guess I'm at an impasse there. Seeking any further action seems like more trouble than it's worth, since the leak isn't threatening to cave my house in...anymore than it already has.

I think I've determined that the mud room ceiling problem is one of condensation, since the water doesn't collect up there during or after rainstorms, but just mostly when it's cold outside. Maybe there's warm, moist air coming from the basement, through the under-kitchen crawlspace and into the cold mud room. Everything in there is moist, almost at all times. There seems to be a lot of condensation on the windows, as well. I crack them from time to time on a really cold day and the room tends to dry out. It may be time to invest in a dehumidifier, as long as I can get it to drain into the pipe that takes the sudsy water from the washer. Our first really, really big-time project will be to tear down that whole room and start from scratch. And do it right.

So anyway...if anyone knows a good, trustworthy roofer, be sure to let us know. We're waiting 'till next month to continue with a new roofer so we can make sure we have enough money to pay them in case it ends up being some astronomical sum. Let's hope not. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed and banging repeatedly on any wooden surface close to hand that we don't get a big snowstorm before then. It only seems to leak when the wind is coming from a certain direction during a rainstorm, so hopefully any kind of softly falling snow won't get in whatever crazy crack leads inside our wall.

'Tis The Season

Yes...the season to forget online projects is upon us. What with the Marcellus/Waldron Christmas Kegger and shopping, etc., I forgot to update this blog with new roof news. Thanks goes out to my cousin John for reminding me at last weekend's party.

We had Kenny's roofer come out and take a look, and he had some opinions on the source of the water problem. However, he was somewhat amazed that I didn't call the previous owners' roofer to see if they guaranteed their work. I took his advice and called O'Bannon Roofing. They recognized the address and remembered working on a similar problem here not so long ago. I had to call them a few times to remind them I was still waiting for them to find the old paperwork, etc., but they eventually sent out a few guys. They crawled around up there and found the problems, which was nice. Then they told me that the work they did doesn't technically carry over to a new owner, which wasn't so nice. But then they said that since they didn't actually finish the job correctly last time, they'd fix the leaks for free anyway.

They fixed it a few days before one of those super-windy downpours, and we haven't had a problem since! Way to go O'Bannon guys! So, roof problem solved. Now we just have to replace that section of the ceiling and we're good as new.

I Don't Think Our House Likes Us Anymore

So, yikes. At least now I can't say I have nothing to post about. We've got some serious looking problems here at the House of Two Foo's (Foo & Mrs Foo, that is). Rain has become our sworn nemesis and frequent tormentor. My digital camera's on the fritz again, so here comes another video. This time, I used my less fancy analog Hi8 camcorder and captured it using the marvelous little dynamo, the Adaptec Gamebridge TV. I'll let the video do the rest of the explaining...

P.S. - I just want to add that I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished here in this post. I shot this video sometime after 8:00 PM, captured it, edited it, converted it to Flash video, gave it the little buttons, uploaded it and fixed a dozen little mistakes I made along the way. It's now about 10:10 PM and it's a fully finished product. It's even well behaved...it doesn't start itself when you load the page, it waits for you, patiently, to hit the play button. Hm. Go me.

I guess that goes to show what a little motivation can do. I wanted to make sure I got this up on the blog tonight because there's really nothing I can do to make this house situation better at this moment and I feel like doing this is as close as I can get to doing something.

This is gonna be a tough few weeks. It's kind of a "when it rains, it pours" deal, here. Figuratively and literally. We were already completely wiped out, financially, when the laptop broke and needed to be fixed. Our 2nd wedding anniversary is Sunday and we took all of next week off (Thanksgiving week, so really just 3 days as far as A. Duie Pyle is concerned) and had all types of plans to go out and do fun things, etc., to celebrate. Now it looks like we'll be spending a week looking at a hole in our ceiling because at least that's free. But...as I said in the video, things could get a lot worse. The biggest damage is in a room we don't really live in everyday, so life can pretty much go on as normal once we get the stuff cleaned up. Still...bleh.

A House Is Only Done When You Run Out Of Money

Well, $200 later, I have my laptop back, pictures and all. The Geek Squad really worked wonders, but I paid the cheap price! Thank goodness I know something about computers or else it'd be another $250 for them to install Windows XP, etc. on my new hard drive. Yikes. Evidently, I'm in the wrong business. Anyway, I'm back up and running again (knock on wood). Here's the post I wrote way back on October 20th:

I know it’s been a while…sorry bout that. We were so busy with cleaning up the house, etc. that once it got into a normal, livable state, we basically collapsed into inert, commplacent recuperation for a while. To end the cliffhanger, yes the kitchen is now complete, as these pictures clearly show. We can now breathe easily, cook for ourselves and even do wide socks-on-hardwood-floor pirouettes whenever we need to. The kitchen constantly astounds me with its wide open spaces and freedom of movement. Both of us can cook in there and not elbow each other until one gets fed up and retreats to the couch!

We did have some trouble with the stove the first couple of times we really used it. After being on for about an hour, it would really start to smoke. I’d open it up and find a puddle of black Godknowswhat on the floor of the oven. I’d use a damp paper towel on a spatula or a soapy sponge and clean it up and it’d be ok for the rest of the bake. However, the next time we’d use it, it’d start smoking again and the same stuff would be on the bottom of the oven. The ceiling of the oven didn’t seem overly grimy or anything. This happened a number of times, consecutively. We finally got around to running the self-cleaning cycle last weekend and I scrubbed the racks (which seemed to be dripping with whatever stuff was burning). We haven’t had the problem since, so who knows?

Anyway, the countertops turned out excellent. They really look great and I can’t thank John enough for his help and guidance. You’ll notice that we opted to put the microwave on a rolling cart instead of the non-sink counter. It takes up about half of the counter space and we couldn’t bear to part with that much. Now, if we want to use the microwave, we just plug it in under the sink, easy as anything.

Also, notice that the “Tuscan Kitchen” motif has pretty much taken shape…at least art-wise. We got the two cool pieces on the walls by the mud room door from Bed Bath & beyond and they seem to fit perfectly in Jenn’s vision for the kitchen.

The cutting board was a favor at Jenn’s friend’s wedding shower and also happened to fit right in. Perhaps someday we’ll do a tile backsplash on the wall above the sink, but for the time being, I’d be happy with just a little bit of lighting underneath the cabinets.

Also, I really wanted a trash can with a pedal, so we got this nice chrome one. It’s a little smaller than I’d like, but I’d like paying the outrageous price of the bigger ones even less. It gets the job done, hands free.

The bedrooms upstairs are also settling down into some semblance of order.

The guest bedroom at the top of the stairs has become a mostly organized office/retro-gaming repository, thanks to this nice piece from Ikea. Yes, it does contain a number of old game systems and games, dating back to the old NES with the original Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge (and Light Zapper gun!) all the way through to the Sega Dreamcast. There’s still some more work to be done in there, but it’s now officially a useable space.

The master bedroom is also complete, with curtains, lamps and even a nice beachy picture.