With great power...

...comes great responsibility:



It's awesome, but it's also just a little scary. And yes - that really is the very best picture of it I could take with the old camera. Seriously. I took twelve shots of it...

Anyway, I'm not really up to making a full accounting of all the changes over the past few days, but I did want to tell a little story about ducts, and furnaces, and the way renovations get done at Don and Amy's house.

We decided on Sunday that it was time to move the duct that ran from the main trunk of the furnace, across the ceiling of the bathroom, down and then along the laundry -room-side of the support beam, and back up into the floor joists, where it then split into two lines: one heading into the kitchen (which was working okay) and one heading to two (count 'em, TWO) dead ends.

Having spent most of the day Saturday (and a goodly portion of Thursday night, to be honest) chasing down the tools and materials we needed to do the job, we got cracking on Sunday. The first step was to remove the old ducting, and this proved to be remarkably easy, once we realized that there was very little securing the damn things in place anyways.

Once all the ductwork was out of the way (and had been stamped flat by the War Department so it would lie properly on the rest of the recycling pile), we attached a couple of lengths of duct to the existing kitchen run so that it would lead right back to the furnace. This was also pretty straightforward.

Once we had the duct close enough to the furnace, it was time to cut into the trunk and attach the take-off. This... well, this is where things started to get a little squirrelly. See, we'd been all over town looking for a proper sheet metal cutting tool, with absolutely no success. The only thing we had to cut the duct with were a couple of pairs of aviation snips. Now, the aviation snips are perfectly capable of doing the job, but they don't do quite as nice of a cut as these. Still, you go to work with the tools you have, right?

So we carefully drew up a template that matched the size of the take-off, marked it out all nice and proper on the furnace, and drilled pilot holes in each of the corners. I then got up on the little step ladder with the aviation snips and.. couldn't get the tip of the snips into the hole without munging the metal of the trunk.

Well, not to be thwarted by some dumb tin can, we hauled out Amy's jigsaw (which had been put away with the blade sticking out and trapped between the two halves of the case - BAD DON!) and got it fired up and ready to go. I put the blade in the hole, lined up the little laser guide, pulled the trigger, and started cutting.

About three-quarters of an inch into my cut, just as I was thinking "Jeez, this is pretty smooth... it might actually work-"

Ping!

"Huh."

"What? What was that noise?"

"Hmmm..."

"Was that the blade?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Did it fall into the furnace?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Shit."

"Oh yeah."

Well, we couldn't really see into the furnace very well, so we soldiered on. The good part was that the jigsaw cut had expanded the hole enough for the aviation snips to fit in, so I managed to make a reasonable facsimile of the required hole. The take-off fit snugly (but not too tight), and after a few hours of sweating, cursing, yelling, and crying, we got the angles and ducts all cut, screwed together, and taped up.

But... (oh, you knew this was coming, don't tell me you didn't) it was about this time that Amy brought up the missing jigsaw blade. She reckoned that it might be possible that the blade had fallen into the furnace fan. If we turned the furnace on, with the jigsaw blade trapped in the fan blades, it might just destroy our furnace.

This, as they say, would not be good.

Well, we had already taped up and finished the hole we had already cut in the side, so we took off the furnace "access" panels to have a look. We saw a lot of wires and gas pipes and other stuff we knew better than to mess with, but there seemed to be no access into the "fire box". Then we noticed an old patch on the side of the fire box, covered up with duct tape. Now, as any handyman knows, you never, ever, ever use duct tape when sealing ducts (no, I'm really not kidding), so we were going to have to replace that tape anyway.

With the aid of my hand mirror (I use it to see the back of my head, shut up), we managed to get a look inside the firebox and sure enough, there was the jigsaw blade, sitting on a small ledge immediately beside the exposed blades of the fan. It was pretty evident that if we turned on the furnace, the fan might very well dislodge the jigsaw blade and lead to a very messed up furnace.

This next part is a little hard to describe, so bear with me...

The fan is the lowest part of the furnace, sitting pretty much right at the bottom. Immediately above the fan are the heating "coils". They're not really shaped like coils, but more like upside down T's. There are three of them.. oh, screw it. Here:



(Tremble in awe at my mad MS Paint skillz! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!)

Ahem.

Anyway, you can see how the shape of the furnace coils and the location of the jigsaw blade would make for a difficult extraction, particularly when you also consider that it's dark inside the fire box, the distance between the hole in the side and the bottom of the coils is a good four feet, and the opening in the side is only about six or eight inches square... yeah. Not easy.

We started with the simplest of tools: a kitchen magnet suspended on a string from a piece of wooden dowel. In case you were wondering what the heating coils are made from, I can assure you that it's ferrous metal. In terms of a magnet on a string, that's not good.

The next approach was to tape the kitchen magnet to a yard stick. This worked about as well as can be expected, which is to say, not at all. Our friend Rick dropped by about this point with a magnet on the end of a telescoping rod, but this ran into the same problems as the magnet-on-a-string and magnet-on-a-stick: we simply couldn't get the magnet down between the heating coils and past the tight spot between the "T's" at the bottom. Not only that, but we risked damaging the heating coils with repeated bashings of the magnet(s). It was time to try another tack.

Salvation came in the form of a squat, black, rotund piece of equipment that we had almost begun to take for granted. The shop vac! (You can see it lurking ominously in the background in previous blog posts, namely here and here, and quite conspicuously in the foreground here.)

So, I pulled the beast over and fed the nozzle carefully into the hole in the side of the firebox. It was a little long and rigid to fit around the corner, so I detached it from the hose, slid it in gently, and then reattached the hose. (See FOOTNOTE.) After several attempts, I managed to get the nozzle positioned where I wanted it, but Amy had to hold the shop vac up off the ground so there would be enough play in the hose. We turned on the shop vac, and almost immediately there was a tinkling sound as the jigsaw blade was sucked up into the nozzle.

Of course, now we had another problem. You see, I had to take the nozzle apart to get it through the hole in the side of the firebox. But the shop vac didn't have enough power, or the blade was too light, to suck the damn thing all the way into the bag: it was twirling around inside the nozzle. If I took the nozzle apart or turned off the shop vac, the blade was going to fall right back into the furnace - possibly into the fan itself.

So here's the situation: Amy's holding up a 40-pound, fully operating shop vac while I have one arm inside the firebox up to the shoulder while I try and finagle the nozzle of the shop vac up high enough so I can put my hand over the end. I felt like an outcast from a James Herriot novel - you know, if he ever wrote about enormous metal cows or cyborgs. (Those would have been good books, actually. I would have read them.)

Anyway, to make a long story not quite as painfully long, I managed to get my fingers over the end of the nozzle, and when Amy turned the shop vac off, the blade fell out into my hand. We extracted the shop vac, inspected the coils as best we could to make sure we hadn't damaged anything, and patched up the hole in the side of the furnace with a new piece of sheet metal and proper foil tape.

And to commemorate this momentous occasion, I present the first ever picture on Don & Amy's Basement Reno taken with my new camera:



And yes, I drew on it! The black arrow is the new line we put in to heat the kitchen, the red arrow is the new patch on the side of the fire box through which I was trying to extract the jigsaw blade, the yellow lines are a really crappy attempt at showing the position of the heating coils, and the green arrow is a very rough approximation of where the jigsaw blade landed inside the furnace.

Phew!

Anyway, we picked up some more two-by-fours, so I should be doing some more framing on Hallowe'en while Amy tends to the candy-sucking trolls at the door. Depending on how all of that goes, I may or may not have some decent pictures to post tonight.

Happy Hallowe'en, all!




FOOTNOTE: Quite possibly the most boring sentence ever written that contains the words "long and rigid" and "slid it in gently", but this is a family blog.
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Yet more framing... with ducts!

I actually started this post, like, two days ago, but then I did some more framing, and now everything I was thinking of writing on Tuesday is wildly inaccurate, and I have to start again. Yeah, I probably could have posted earlier in the week, but the post would have been something like:

"Ugh.
(picture)
Bleargh?
(picture)
Nice jaeorb?
(pictures)..."

Aren’t you glad I waited?

By the way, if you’re a fan of the crappy-ass pictures I take with my crappy-ass camera, well, I have Good News and Bad News: the Good News is that this post contains a buttload of the aforementioned crappy-ass pictures; the Bad News is that this might be the last post I’ll be able to complain about my crappy-ass camera. Because, really, if I can’t complain about my crappy-ass camera, I think we all lose a little something, if you know what I mean.

And if you don’t, well, never mind. Just click the link thingy and we’ll get started.

I’ve been in something of a hurry to finish the framing so we can get the electricians in and get an estimate from the guy who was supposed to be doing the ductwork (more on him in a minute). After three consecutive nights of framing, framing, and more framing, I’m happy to report that I’m almost done.

Before we get into the pictures of the new stuff, however, I thought I’d take a quick trip down memory lane and revisit what the place used to look like, back in the rose-coloured days of May:



Ah… so spacious, so “open-plan”. And we just couldn’t wait to wall it all off.

Here’s a shot from roughly the same spot (okay, fine, it's about four feet to the right and from a different angle) now:



It’s a veritable forest! It might be just a bunch of crappy spruce (honestly, I can’t believe how bad this latest batch of two-by-fours is – they’re all warped or full of knots or even cracked right down the middle), but they’re vertical and sturdy enough. Besides, they’ll all be covered up by drywall eventually anyway, so … well … so it’s kind of a wasted effort making them look nice, isn’t it? (And yes, there are a couple of braces missing from that wall - it was 20 past 10 when the battery in the drill ran out and I realized I'd forgotten to plug in the charger, so I called it a night. Heh, one of those braces only has one screw in it, actually, and it's not even driven in all the way yet...)

Let’s do some more!

Here are a couple of shots from the Dread Wall of Pink:





You’ll notice that I’ve even finished the bracing for that wall, and down into the corner. This is so that we aren’t wasting time when the electricians want to install electrical outlets in that wall.

Furthermore, I’ve started constructing the bulkhead along the support beam where the majority of the electrical wires will go:



(That block underneath is just for support while I get everything cut and screwed into place. I’ll take it off before the drywall goes on.) You can see how the bulkhead extends on the other side of the office and into the laundry room:



And of course, all this cutting and trimming and banging around has changed the scope and shape of my carefully sorted piles of wood, too. I now have only two piles; useful bits:



And firewood:



On to the ducts!

So, as I mentioned, we had a guy lined up (informally) to come in and rework the furnace ducts to supply heat to the office, and take out some of the more questionable bits like, say, this one:





That line comes off the main trunk of the furnace, comes down on the other side of the support beam, goes up again into the joists, and then splits off. One branch goes toward the register in the kitchen (which works), and the other goes into two dead ends. It also has arguably the worst taping job I’ve ever seen.

At any rate, none of the work we need done is all that complicated, as all we want to do is extend the cold air return to vent the office, lengthen two runs so that they supply heat to the office, and redo that appalling line to the kitchen so that it a) doesn’t have more kinks than a leather fetishist in Vegas, and b) supplies heat to the laundry room and kitchen instead of the kitchen and a pair of dead ends. The problem is that we’re not totally sure that what we want to do is to Code, or how big the cold air return has to be, or whether what we want to do is even advisable. (I’d be happy to just go ahead and do it, and bully for the inspector if he even notices, but the War Department is concerned about “efficiency” and “circulation” and “carbon monoxide poisoning”. Pft.)

Not that any of our concerns seem to matter, because we can’t get anyone to even come out and give us an estimate! The guy we were going to hire can’t even show up to look at the job until December, and the guy he recommended to us hasn’t called back. The people who installed our furnace won’t speak to us until at least JANUARY, and the people I called at random in the phone book haven’t bothered to call back to set up an appointment – they apparently don’t need the work anymore than anyone else.

So, ironically enough, the person we might have to consult is: the inspector. I think we’ll be writing up an email and including some of the pictures to explain the situation, and ask him if what we plan to do is acceptable. Of course, as Amy has already pointed out, the inspector won’t care very much if we’re getting enough to heat to certain areas (they’re not all that concerned with your comfort, just your adherence to the Code), but he will be able to tell us if our plan isn’t likely to pass his inspection.

Anyway, this post is long enough, I think, and I’m sure I’ve posted enough crappy-ass pictures for one day. If all goes well, the next picture I post will be the last one I’m forced to take with my crappy-ass camera. The subject matter of said picture?

The new camera, of course.
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It's almost a real room!

With my back feeling better (or close enough), it was time to return to what is fast becoming the theme of October: framing! I'm already thinking that my costume for Hallowe'en will most likely consist of a couple of two-by-fours lashed to my arms and a Chippendale calender hanging from a tack in my forehead. If anyone asks, I'm a studded wall. Har har.

Anyway, tonight was actually somewhat productive, and I have the pictures to prove it!

When last we visited the corner of the basement by the electrical panel, I had just finished laying down the footers for the wall that will eventually form the back of the closet, and separate the workshop from the office. Tonight I started to install the studs for that wall; here's my progress so far, from a couple of angles:





It's kind of tricky to build that wall, largely because there's nothing there to attach the top plate to. That large clump of wires will be running through a bulkhead at the top of the wall, and the angle of the ductwork there (that's the main trunk line for the furnace) means I have to leave some room at the top - not that there are any floor joists in the vicinity anyway. Most of the structural strength for that wall is going to come from the studs that form the side wall and front of the closet - which I haven't quite got to yet. We still need to figure out where the bulkhead for the vent stack (visible on the side of the bathroom wall in the second shot above) is going to go, and where we have to install the cold air return - which might have to go into the bulkhead anyway.

I'm not planning on doing the bracing in that wall any time soon, either - it's the shortest distance between the saw and the work bench, and I'm really not looking forward to having to go the long way around every time I put something down and can't find it again.

Oh, but I did manage to get rid of some old wires that were just hanging there in the way:



That little chore wasn't without its cost however...

The Injury Report

(This is quickly becoming a far TOO regular feature on this blog...)

• When I was removing that green wire, the very end of it caught on a nail in the wood, and when I gave it a good tug, popped free and stabbed me right in the lower lip. It didn't draw blood, and I don't think it left a mark, but lemme tell ya - that hurt. A lot.


• The wood of our joists and support beams is very old and very, very dense. In the course of trying to remove a particularly obstinate staple, a very brave screwdriver gave its life for the cause:
  
  
  
  The worst part? That was the War Department's screwdriver and now I have to buy a new one. Sigh.

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Me and my aching back

So, something of a mixed bag of results this weekend. On one hand, the framing continues, and the outside is coming together nicely, but on the other, well, that's why I have a feature called the Injury Report, isn't it?

First up, the War Department managed to find a project that not only makes for a good picture (well, the best picture my crappy-ass camera can manage), but makes for a better picture than MY project! I hope this doesn't start a trend. After all, if I'm going to be writing all the posts, I want all the glory. (True story: when I sat down to post this, I asked Amy, "How come I have to write all the posts?" Her response, "Because you like that shit." So there you have it.)

While I toiled in the basement putting up studs and using the hammer drill and hurting myself, Amy decided to take advantage of some mild, sunny October weather to put the fence back together. She had saved most of the uprights when we took the fence down, so it was just a matter of cutting a couple of two-by-fours to the right length (which I, having ready access to the chop saw, did for her), and reattaching the boards.



Looks pretty good, doesn't it? Of course, what you can't tell from that angle is that the replaced section is all nice and straight, and the other half of the fence is all crazy tilted and askew, making for a rather odd view when looked at from the side. But that's a job for another day...

As mentioned, I was down in the basement doing some building of my own. The first few studs - the last ones on the Dread Wall of Pink - went up pretty quickly, with only a little fiddling around the electrical panel:



After some consulting and brainstorming with the War Department, I laid down the footers that will form the back wall of the closet:



Amazingly enough, the tapcons went in for all seven of those holes as smooth as you please. The only problem was when I went to stand up afterward...

The Injury Report

• The muscles in my lower back have siezed up right proper like. It hurts like a son-of-a-bitch when I try and lift anything (like a cat or a piece of two-by-four), and has improved only slightly since yesterday afternoon when it first happened. As you can well imagine, this has somewhat limited my usefulness today. Okay, it's completely limited my usefulness today.

That's it for me. I'm going to go lie down again. Gingerly.
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The framing continues...

Well, despite having to tend to a flu-stricken War Department, I did manage to get some more framing done last night. It's not that impressive (though it was a little tricky in some places):



(And yes, the supervisor kitty says it passed his rigorous inspection.)

Almost done that wall, actually. I wanted to put a couple more studs in before I called it a night, but the sawing and hammering (directly underneath our bedroom) was giving Amy a migraine. Oh, and while we're on the subject of making a lot of noise, can I just say that I'm really starting to hate tapcons? Out of the three tapcons I had to put in last night, I broke two off inside the concrete, had to drill two extra holes, and destroyed yet another drill bit, necessitating yet another a trip to Home Despot five minutes before closing. Stupid things - I'm really not looking forward to putting down the subfloor with them.

But it wouldn't be right to post just one picture and leave all my loyal fans (ha!) hanging, so I figured now might be a good time to take you on a little photo tour of the workspace.

First up, a couple of pictures showing what happens when you buy two-by-fours in eight foot lengths for a basement with a seven foot ceiling. I try to keep the remnants into two piles. The first pile contains any pieces long enough to still be of use for braces:



The second pile I just call kindling:



So, remember when you were a teenager, and your room was really messy, and you told your mom not to clean it because you still knew where everything was and you didn't want her messing up your system?

Yeah? Wasn't that, like, the biggest frikking lie ever?



That's the workbench. Yes, it always looks like that. No, I don't really know where everything is. I just stick my hands into the pile and hope I find whatever it is I'm looking for before the pointy bits start to really hurt.

Next up is the sole source of entertainment available in the basement, the World's Crappiest Radio:



Don't let the labels or CD-shaped door in the top fool you. Only the radio works, and even that sucks. Well, to be fair, a lot of the suckage is the fault of the crappy radio stations in Victoria, but even if they were better, the radio itself would still be a piece of shit.

And finally, here we have the floor drain in the laundry room:



You may be wondering why the cover for the floor drain is sitting on the floor beside the drain rather than, as its intended purpose and indeed its very name would suggest, covering the floor drain, Well, because we have cats.

The supervisor kitty has decided that the most important thing in the world is whatever is in that drain. Not that there's anything in the drain beside the little valve thingy, but he's convinced that it's mightly important that he be able to inspect that drain at all times.

For example, when I finished up last night, I put the drain cover back in place, and put a laundry basket over the drain. On my way up the stairs, I passed the cat coming down. I hadn't even taken my shoes off before he had the basket out of the way, and was working on the drain. I heard the clatter of the metal cover on the concrete floor before I made it halfway down the stairs again.

Brain the size of a walnut. Remarkable.

Anyway, with a little luck, I might finish the framing this weekend! Wouldn't that be sweet?
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Insert Thanksgiving- & framing-related pun here

I tried to think of a good title, I really did. Somehow, "Happy Framesgiving" and "Frappy Thamesgiving" and "Thanksframing Gifts" and even "Sir Frames-a-lot" just didn't seem to give it the special oomph I know everyone expects from me, so I'll leave it up to you to make your own joke. (Give me a break - I'm tired. And full of turkey. Actually, I'm tired BECAUSE I'm full of turkey. And because I did a lot of framing today. You didn't think I was just trying to combine Thanksgiving and Framing because I felt like a challenge did you?)

That's right, after more than a week of enforced idleness thanks to the Top Brass' visit (not that I couldn't use the break), it was back into the trenches and full speed ahead this morning. While the War Department puttered around outside "winterizing" the barbecue, summer furniture, and assorted lawn care equipment, I belted on my tool belt and set to framing. (Once again, I got the job that makes for better pictures.)

The first thing I did was finish putting up the studs on the other side of the doorway opening that I started a little more than a week ago. You can now kinda see where the door between my office and the laundry room will be:



(Ignore the supervisor kitty - he's not really inspecting anything, he's just hoping I forgot to close the basement window.)

Once that was done, I could start on the hard part - framing around the support post. It's a little hard to explain, so I'll just show a few pictures of the finished product, and try to describe what it is you're looking at here.



That's a picture of the wall just inside the doorway. The big, window-like opening on this side of the wall will be a built-in bookcase - eventually. The studs behind that opening are actually part of the bathroom wall, coming down on the other side of the support beam.

Here's another picture of the same thing, looking back towards the office door:



And the same corner from the other side, with the bathroom door (or the opening where the door will be eventually) visible on the right:



And finally, just because it was a damn tricky bit of framing, and I'm kind of proud of the job I did, here's a close up of the corner detail:



Oh, and if the more observant among you are wondering why the top plate on the office side of the new wall didn't go all the way to the floor joists, it's because we're putting a bulkhead on that side in which to run all the wires:



(God damn it, my camera sucks.)

Of course, the REALLY observant among you are wondering how I managed to do all this work and still cook a turkey. Well, I made the big turkey dinner yesterday, which is why there was no update for your Monday morning. As for my impending turkey-induced lack of consciousness? Two words, my friends: LEFT OVERS.

Oh, and before I go sleep off this turkey coma, it's time for another edition of everyone's favorite feature...

The Injury Report

• I have two small scrapes on the back of my right thumb. Normally, this wouldn't be noteworthy, but... oh, nevermind. I was going to say that they really hurt when I put on the rubber gloves to clean out the cat box, but ... meh. It's not that bad. I just didn't want to be left out.


• Amy has an ingrown toenail, and she had all these freaky red blotches on her foot. She cleaned it out with hydrogen peroxide and put some Polysporin on it, though, and it doesn't look nearly as cool any more.

That's it for me. I'm off to bed, where I intend to groan myself to sleep on my huge, turkey-filled belly.

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