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Back on 04 Jan, we noticed that the paint near the kitchen window was still peeling and flaking and easy to remove. I called the painting company and asked about it; they wanted to set up an appointment to talk about things. We met with them today.
We first talked about the terrible state of the front porch. The roof above the porch failed a long time ago, letting water into the structure of the porch (and probably into the house, too -- we don't know that the ceiling in our hallway was lowered because of water damage, but it seems likely, judging from the other modifications we've seen). Bottom line, if we leave the porch as is, water will continue to get inside and ruin the porch and paint job. We need to get it fixed. Kiss another $2500 goodbye.
Then we talked about all of the prep work on the house that had been done so far. They scraped, scraped, scraped, scraped. They removed the old gutters and put up new 1x8 fascia board. They treated all of the metal (roofs, nails) on the house with Penetrol (Flood), a rust-inhibiting primer (that red/brown stuff you can see on the house in the January pictures). They painted on some wood conditioners (brand unknown) to prepare the wood and improve paint adhesion. They primed the house, using Fresh Start Interior/Exterior All-Purpose Alkyd Primer 024 (Benjamin Moore). That day, they had started caulking [Dynamite 5000 (Sealant Technology), Alex Painters Acrylic Caulk (DAP)] and filling voids [Permanent Patch 101 (Shur-Stik), Flexall (Custom Building Products), Exterior Spackling Paste (Synco)]. Sounds good, right?
We were initially surprised that they primed the house so soon in the process -- we thought there would be more scraping and then sanding. When I called to ask about it, they said that the first coat of primer was sacrificial -- it would help detach the paint that wasn't entirely stuck to the house. After a few days of drying, they'd come back and do a second scraping of the whole house to remove the newly loose bits. Well, after the primer went up, there was no scraping. They proceeded directly to the wood filling and patching. I brought this up with them, and they didn't seem to think it was a problem, though I never did get a good explanation. (I'll be following up with the Benjamin Moore representative and another independent painter to see what they think about it.) Bad painters.
We moved on to the state of the paint around the kitchen window. It had us worried about the finished surface of the paint after all coats had been put on. They assured us that the paint which was left on the house after the scraping phase was completely adhered to the house. We showed them how the paint could still be picked off using a fingernail (even after the primer had been put on), and they agreed that it would be a problem. As a result, one of the workers was assigned to re-scraping that section of the house. Good painters.
I'm still concerned that work on the house isn't proceeding in the order of the plan described in the contract. I'm willing to give people a bit of a break, as long as all of the steps are completed. But things are now out of order enough that I'm thinking steps have been skipped. For example, all of the trim bits on the house that were loose enough to come off have been removed. From the contract, we were led to believe that they'd be refastened. Also, again from the contract, we expected that damaged, gouged, and decayed wood would be cleaned up, filled, and sanded before any paint went up. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm getting worried that it won't.
There will be many phone calls and physical inspections this week...
# posted by noel on 01/30/04 04:19 PM
Came home to see painters with caulk guns all over the house. They should also be scraping some more. Tomorrow Noel meets with the supervisor to go over some of our concerns.
In unrelated news, we're ditching DirecTV and getting cable. Cheaper, less prone to storm blackouts, and works better with the VCR. It'll also be nice to watch TV on a local time schedule, rather than on East Coast time.
# posted by ayse on 01/28/04 11:02 PM
We had another aggravating visit to Home Depot today. I hate the place -- I'd rather drive an hour out of the way to go to Lowe's -- but they were the only store that carried the exact type of insulation we needed for insulating under the floor (unfaced 23" wide batts, roughly 7" deep), so to Home Depot we went.
First, there was the aggravation of the staff on the floor: ask a question and they half ignore you, continuing their conversation with their coworker, then they are unable to answer you because they don't know anything about the store. Or better, this time one woman actually was backing away from me as I asked her a question.
Then there was the inevitable half-hour wait in line.
Then, as icing on the cake, the guys at the door who think they are in charge of the world refused to take "No, thanks" for an answer when they asked to see our receipt, and I had to call their bluff and suggest that if they believed we'd commited a crime, then maybe they should call the police. Clearly, they were unwilling to do that because they knew damned well that we had not stolen anything and they'd be in trouble if they called the police, so we left unmolested.
Then we discovered that we could not fit the compressed batts of insulation into the car. Some background: we chose four batts that were still compressed to fit on a pallet with several plastic bands. Stuck together, they were a bit wider than the inside of the Metro.
Brilliant idea: let's cut the plastic and stick them in the car. You have never seen insulation expand so fast. Now the batts were easily twice as big (but still compressed, mind you), and there was no way four of them were fitting in the car. We were discussing having one of us stay behind and doing two trips when the guy parked next to us offered us a piece of rope. This is how we drove home:
Odd note: it's weird how many people feel the need to honk or flash their brights at you when you are driving a clearly overloaded car with hazard lights flashing on a two-lane street. It's not as if you couldn't see the obstacle from a great distance. Why get all worked up when you can easily just pass?
# posted by ayse on 01/24/04 02:52 PM
Here's what the house looked like after they put on the wood conditioner on Thursday (taken around 5pm):
And here's what it looked like when we got home last night (except that it was dark, of course), with the first coat of primer:
The painters will now do another round of scraping -- this coat of primer will loosen some of the remaining paint and pull it up. Then they will seal any bare wood with more wood conditioner. Then patching and filling, two more coats of primer, then paint. Just hope the weather holds enough for all this to get done. (It rained last night, which is less than ideal for newly-laid primer.)
# posted by ayse on 01/24/04 11:24 AM
We came home (after dark, so pics will have to wait) to see that the house had been primed. We have a gigantic white house! Yay!
# posted by ayse on 01/23/04 06:23 PM
The painters come by every few days, check the moisture in the siding, and leave with a sigh. Maybe we'll have guys all over the house tomorrow, as it's been dry for several days now.
# posted by ayse on 01/16/04 04:15 PM
Rainy and overcast for the last couple days, so no painters to be seen. We pray for sunshine and dry weather.
# posted by ayse on 01/07/04 09:16 PM
One of the painters taping our bedroom window:
And their progress, as of about 4:45 this afternoon:
Note that they've primed the metal roofs over the bay window and front porch, and just about every piece of metal they've encountered.
# posted by ayse on 01/05/04 04:54 PM
The painters arrived with much banging and knocking at 9 am, and have been hard at work doing mysterious things involving stinky chemicals all day. Here's a photo I took of them doing the rust fixing: applying a sort of paint/chemical thing that keeps the rusty nails from continuing to rust and soiling the paint job:
Other house stuff: Noel finished installing the new back light, which replaces the scarily wired floodlights which pointed right into our neighbors' yards and windows. We chose this cheap fixture from Lowe's, which seems to fit in fairly well with the utilitarian nature of the back of a Victorian house.
Also, I finally finished painting the house numbers. Short version of the story: we decided to buy a new mailbox to replace the crappy old one that sits out front. We also wanted to make house numbers that were visible from the street -- we had two sets of numbers nailed to the house but they were invisible because they were placed on the unlit side of the front columns and painted the same colour as the house (brilliant). So we bought a new white mailbox, and I pried the old house numbers off and assembled one set that was usable. I stripped the paint off by soaking them overnight in paint remover, then sanded them, primed them, and painted them with gloss black paint. They look very slick, if I may say so myself. Now I have to figure out how to attach them to the mailbox.
# posted by ayse on 01/05/04 01:02 PM
I had this very vivid dream, you see, and in it we were part of a glorious revolution of home renovation....
No. Actually, not. Instead, I was thinking about how hard it would be to live in the house and tear out the floors, and then it occurred to me that if we could put off dealing with the floors for ten years, we could probably afford to do it then. Then I started wondering what else we could put off for that long, and what we would need to do to limp by until then.
And so was born the Ten-Year Plan.
The idea is this: Instead of doing things now that will be so perfect and wonderful that we will never want to take them apart, we work on the house now with the assumption that in about ten years we will be gutting the place and doing it the more expensive and longterm way. So no more tearing down all the walls for us; we'll tear down walls only as needed to do the projects we really want to get done.
We sat down after breakfast and made the big list of Ten-Year Plan projects, which is reasonable considering that at least three and a half years of that time will have me in graduate school full time. One of those projects is taking down all the wood panelling, which I am really looking forward to. We may need to paper the walls under the panelling to get the plaster to stay up, but at least we'll have light, airy rooms.
Projects to be done in the context of the Ten-Year Plan:
# posted by ayse on 01/04/04 03:22 PM
There's nothing more disturbing when you're half awake, wandering downstairs to turn on the espresso machine and take the dog out, to groggily realize that the rain you believe to be running down the outside of the kitchen window is actually on the inside. Water covered the countertop, had soaked the formica backsplash, and saturated the plaster wall behind the sink. It stank.
Ahh, December '03. After returning from our holiday travels, I finally decided to do something about the water infiltration problem. Ayse bought some caulk at the local hardware store (they're getting rich off of us, I'm sure) and I went up on a ladder. Caulk, caulk, caulk. It's not going to prevent all of the water coming in, since there are huge rents in the wood siding above the window (where they patched the hole from which they removed a nice double-hung). Hopefully it'll prevent glacial Lake Agassi from forming on our countertop.
Before caulking, I needed to do a bit of prep work, which mainly involved removing paint chips. (The painters came by with a carbide-blade scraper a few weeks back and removed a bunch of the flaking and peeling paint.) As I cleaned the area around the window, I noticed a lot of paint was still coming off. Ayse came out as I was finishing up and, with her fingernails, removed a bunch of paint from under the window. Hmm. We need to talk with the painters.
# posted by noel on 01/04/04 11:22 AM
This is not exactly house construction related, but after only five or six hours of obsessing, and a half a day of installing software, I managed to move the Casa Decrepit blog over here to my own site. I owe it all to Movable Type, a blogging package that kicks ass. Also, I owe a lot of this site's css to some wonderful examples by Owen Briggs. I've been inspired to start getting the rest of the Blue Room out of the ninties. Since there isn't enough to do on the house, apparently.
Other house news: it's been raining. Outdoors and in. A rather large leak developed in the office, so we did the obvious thing: put a bucket under it. Seems to be water coming in around the chimney. We're going to have to do something about that. Also, water was basically pouring in around the kitchen window (not terribly surprising as that window is basically not sealed in any way), so tomorrow Noel may go out and caulk it, just to keep us dry.
I can't wait for the house to be weathertight.
# posted by ayse on 01/01/04 10:32 PM