Just in case you thought we were sitting around doing nothing

c/o City of Victoria
Public Works Dept.
Victoria,

October 21, 2009

Dear Mr. Guy In Charge

I am writing to request a refund for expenses incurred when a blocked sanitary sewer line on City property caused a backflow of sewage into my basement on three separate occasions.

On the first occasion, September 8, 2009, we noticed what appeared to be relatively clean water coming up from the drainage hole in the pan for our hot water heater. The water receded fairly quickly and, after cleaning up what remained, we called Roto-Rooter to come and clean out the sewer lines between our house and the City’s section. The visit cost $141.75, but thanks to a mostly empty concrete basement storage room, nothing was damaged.

One month later, on October 6, 2009, the sewage backed up again, this time coming up not only from under the hot water tank in the storage area, but also from beneath the toilet in our basement bathroom. There was a great deal more water on this occasion, and it was dirty, foul-smelling, and clearly sewage given the amount and nature of the particulates within it. We called Roto-Rooter again, and they came back on an after-hours emergency call. Once again, they cleaned the drains between our house and the street. Although their guarantee from the previous cleaning was in effect, we still had to pay the cost of the after-hours visit, which resulted in another bill for $141.75.

Early the next morning, the sewer backed up again, resulting in yet another flood of foul liquid throughout our basement storage area and the downstairs bathroom. Roto-Rooter came back immediately and cleaned all of the pipes and drains beneath the house, but found no blockages or obstructions that could account for the repeated backups. They returned for a fourth time that afternoon with a camera and scoped the entire length of our sewer line, eventually finding the cause of the problem.

Evidently, our sanitary sewer line connects with our neighbour’s sanitary sewer before joining the main city line. The Roto-Rooter camera found a collapsed portion of the City’s sewer line, which greatly reduced the flow of sewage into the main line, and effectively sent our neighbour’s sewage back up our pipes and into our basement.

Fortunately, we had removed most of our possessions from the basement storage room after the first incident, and thus none of our belongings (at least, nothing of any value) were damaged. Unfortunately, the sewage did permeate and completely ruin the floor of our bathroom, which we had just finished renovating less than a year ago. We have had to rip up the damaged planking, as well as the rotten subfloor, and reinstall the entire floor. We repaired the damage ourselves, so we are not seeking contractor’s labour costs, but we are seeking compensation for multiple Roto-Rooter visits, and the cost of the materials required to restore the bathroom floor.

We are therefore requesting reimbursement for the following expenses:
Roto-Rooter: $141.75
Roto-Rooter again: 141.75
Roto-Rooter again, of course: 325.50
RONA (plywood): 65.39
Finishing Store: 419.35

TOTAL: $1093.74


Sincerely,

Don and Amy


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Insert closet-related joke here

Well, I was trying to make it an even three months, but I just couldn't go another day without posting. No, really. My dad threatened me with actual, physical harm if I didn't post something. And given that he always used to be able to smack me in the head from the front seat, even when I was sitting in the very back of the Land Cruiser, I decided not to test the true length of his reach, and just post.

So, let's see, where did I leave off? Um. Wow. That long? Huh.

Well, how about we tackle the big question first, the one that everyone asks me when they notice I haven't updated the blog in ... gulp ... eighty-four freaking days:

"Are you guys done yet?"

And I'll give you the same answer I've given them for the last 84 days, "No, it's gonna be another two weeks."


First things first: we did manage to finish the floor in the laundry room, and let me tell you, those vinyl planks are great. They look good, they're easy to install, they're cheap, and they're easy to clean:



That looks pretty damn spiffy to me.

The next project was to rebuild the closet under the stairs. Actually, the next project was to add some structure to the stairs before they bent too much farther out of plumb, and THEN rebuild the closet.

So here's the first stage of the structure we added; a brace along the left side of the closet to hold everything steady - we had no illusions about being able to bring it back to plumb:



The next step was to add some bracing so I'd have something to hang the drywall on, and some extra supports for the landing:



Take a closer look at that one, especially the bracing on the left, if you want an idea of just how far out of plumb the stairs were. Oh hell, just check it out from the other side:



And here's the bracing (after some rather extensive modifications to the existing crap) on the side by the workshop:



And here it is with my solo contribution, the hanging of the drywall:



Before we get to the next picture, I feel obliged to point out that I had almost nothing to do with it. All I did was try not to make TOO much of a mess hanging the drywall. All of the mudding and sanding (and I do mean ALL of it) was done by the War Department. I tried like hell to talk her out of it and convince her to call Tony to come back and do it for us, but she wanted to do it herself, and damn me if she didn't do a hell of a good job:





I did help with the trim and painting, but the really good work there is all hers. It's also hard to see behind the cat boxes, but we also completely walled in the alcove under the stairs and painted it over to match the color in the stairwell.

Right, so that's where we stand. Next step is to figure out a door of some kind (we have an old closet door we were hoping to reuse, but once again, I failed to anticipate that, and didn't build the opening to suit it which means we'll have to either come up with a different solution, or do some nifty modifications to the door or frame).

We also need to do the ceiling in the laundry room, but that's more a long term thing. We've burned through the entirety of our renovation budget (and then some) and the ceiling isn't a high priority right now, unlike getting the garage sorted out, and repainting some of the outside trim before the summer gets here.

So, next time (and I promise it won't be long), I'll put up some pictures of the finished bathroom and office, but I did want to show one thing before I sign off.

We had some serious snow back in December, and it afforded us with a crystal clear illustration of what all our hard work has accomplished. Here, take a look at this, and then I'll explain what you're looking at:




That's the back wall of our house during the worst of the snow - we got about 25-30 centimeters, quite a lot for Victoria. Anyway, if you look closely at that picture you can tell where the wall of my office ends and the wall of the laundry room begins. You see, we haven't insulated the laundry room yet, so we're spending quite a bit of money and energy to heat the walls, which is dissipated out into the snow outside, melting it away from the brick. In my office, however, all that time and effort we put into framing and insulating the space is paying off: the heat is staying on the inside, where it belongs.
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What's this? An update? It can't be!

And yet, here you are. Reading this. Huzzah!

Okay, I really have no excuse as to why I haven't made a proper post since... oh my jebus. October?! Really? Wow. I really suck at this whole blogging thing.

Still, there's no time like the present, so how about I fill you in on all the things we HAVE been doing, and pay a little less attention to ... um ... the stuff I haven't? I mean, in my defence, we've been really busy with things like work, and family visits, and - yes - working on the basement. We've also cleaned the gutters, raked the leaves, moved a metric shit-ton of stuff in from the garage, and even found time to argue about whether we should get another cat or not. (No. No, we should not.)

But you didn't come here to read about the standard trials and tribulations of owning a house - you came here to read about how much it sucks to do your own basement reno! And in that regard, my friends, I can definitely help you out.

So... where were we? Ah, right... we had painted the floor in the workshop, got the carpets installed, and we passed final occupancy. (Have I really not posted since the CARPETS went in? Good lord....) Well, once the inspector had gone, it was time to install the floor in the laundry room. To be honest, I wasn't exactly planning on doing this until the new year, but the Top Brass are coming for Christmas, and we kinda wanted to be able to show off a "finished" (or, as we decided, "damn close to finished") when they arrive.

So we started by moving all the enormous, heavy machines out of the laundry room and washing down the floor. As a quick reminder of what our laundry room floor looked like at that stage, voila:



I believe the term for that is "fugly". At any rate, we certainly wanted to cover that abomination up as quickly as we could. Of course, like EVERYTHING in the damn basement, covering it up was a lot harder than I had expected. Oh, and it involved Tapcons, too! Joy!

I suppose that, given the alternative, it went a lot more smoothly and with less ouches than tongue and groove plywood would have, but it was still a largely unpleasant task. Most of the pieces were too large to cut on the little table saw and, as winter's here, the rains precluded setting up the big table saw in the driveway. So the jig was pressed into overtime service to cut all the panels and get them laid out.

A little note here for anyone thinking of doing DriCore (or, as in our case, Sub-Flor) in their basement as I don't think I'll do a whole "Is It Worth It Post" on that alone: make sure your floor is as level as possible. I'm not kidding. This stuff really wasn't made to go over a wavy-ass floor like ours and the levelling kits don't really work for shit. But we weren't about to spend the time, money, and effort to rent a concrete scraper and take up the top layer of concrete so we could lay down a layer of Portland Cement to level the floor. I know, I know, Mike Holmes would not approve, but then Mike Holmes probably wouldn't use this crap anyway.

Anyway, here's what it looked like after about four hours of laying SubFlor:



Yeah. I got a little faster as I went along, but not much. All told, given a couple of breaks, a few sick days, and the occasional more pressing concern, it took us a good three weeks or so to get all the panels down. Oh, and we also completely rebuilt, restructured, and redesigned the cupboard under the stairs. My material estimates were pretty good though - I was only short by two panels. Here's a couple more shots of in progress and the final product and new closet:









Looks pretty damn spiffy, eh? No? Well, we agree. Looked like crap, and had an unpleasantly splintery texture (especially in socks). So it was back off to the Home Despot/Rona to see what would could use to cover over it. The War Department had seen these neat vinyl planks that looked like hardwood in a restaurant, and she thought they would look good in our place. Well, like everything else in this project, we couldn't find them anywhere... oops. Sorry - I meant to say we actually found exactly the ones we had in mind, and they were very reasonably priced. (Yeah, it scared me a little too. I mean, that's just weird.)

Fortunately, the vinyl planks only took three days, but, seriously, what a TOUGH three days they were. My knees, back, hands, and neck were absolutely killing me by the time I finished.

Totally, totally, TOTALLY worth it. Damn, that is a fine looking floor... sad that I'm not going to post any pictures of it. No, really - it's all taped up for painting, and has cables and lights, and cardboard strewn across it. I'll wait until it's cleaned up a bit. Well, fine, one of the floor in progress, just so you can see what the vinyl planks look like and how much cleaner they look than the Sub-Flor tiles:



Anyway, I know I promised some shots of the finished bathroom, and maybe even some of my office with the furniture in place, but I'm missing the final episode of Canada's Worst Driver. So, nyaah.

More later.




For reals this time.




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We've reached another milestone

Or should I say, we've PASSED another milestone...

At any rate, there we were two weeks ago, merrily enjoying our new carpet, and busily moving stuff back into the office from the garage where it had lain forgotten and ignored for (great Caesar's Ghost!) a year and a half. I had just found a home for all of my files and papers in a new filing cabinet (scored for free from the War Department's work - sweet!) and was preparing to start filling up the bookcase.

Then the War Department woke up and realized something rather disheartening. We still hadn't had the final occupancy inspection.

Of course, this meant removing all of the stuff from the filing cabinet, putting it back into boxes, and finding a place to store the boxes while we finished off the last couple of things we had to do before the inspector could come and look.

The first of these things was the bane of our entire existence, the dye test. (See here for the whole sordid story of why the dye test has nagged us since Day One.) We had done all that work on the drains, but had never actually called the city back to have them make sure all our work wasn't for naught, and that we really are connected to the city storm drains.

As usual, and of course, getting the dye test done meant I had to physically present myself at City Hall and fork over the sixty bucks in person. I wanted to book the final occupancy inspection at the same time, but I had this niggling little feeling that if I showed the least amount of cockiness, the karmic bastards in charge of home renovation would make the dye test fail or something, and we'd be scrambling around with picks and shovels in the rain. I resisted the capriciousness of fate and simply booked the dye test.

Which, of course, went off without a hitch. These pipes are clean!

That left the final pre-inspection task: building a cover for the electrical panel. Which we've been putting off and putting off because we KNEW it was going to be an absolute bitch to design, and an even bigger pain in the ass to build.

And we were right.

As usual, the best way to explain why this thing was such an enormously unpleasant undertaking would be to illustrate it with a picture. This one's from a while back, but aside from the color of the walls, nothing in the general area had changed at all:



Covering the actual panel itself wasn't really the problem. The real difficulty lay in designing something that would cover the corner and the ceiling and tie into the bulkhead without impeding anyone trying to get into the panel to work on something. Oh, and of course, I hadn't really framed in any extra support to attach whatever we finally did design to the wall. Bad Don.

Anyway, after a few heated discussions and some wildly unfair accusations of incompetence leveled against the cats, we decided to take the simplest approach, and just build a cover in place using 1/4-inch plywood.

So I hauled out my trusty framing implements and some scrap pieces of two-by-four and set to work. Several hours and a couple of minor injuries later, I had this:



Then I made these:



Then I attached them to the framing, filled, sanded, and painted them, cut and painted a door, attached some magnets, and now it looks like this:




Ta da!

Not the most elegant of solutions, but it actually doesn't look too bad (from a distance), and it didn't seem to even warrant the inspector's notice, so I'm going to call it a job well done.

Fortunately, you don't have to book the inspections in person, but you do have to be at home to let the inspector in, and as luck would have it, (Injury Report Exclusive!) I was home nursing a really sore neck that day. Which I'm pretty sure was caused by the awkward angle at which I had to hold my head so I could paint the bottom of the electrical panel.

Anyway, the inspector showed up, checked the interconnected smoke alarms, had a look at the programmable timer for the bathroom fan, signed the papers, and left.

We passed our final occupancy inspection! Wooo!

Of course, this is by no means the end of the reno. It just means we don't have anyone checking up on our work anymore.

Anyway, lots more to come, including some shots of the finished (yes, FINISHED) bathroom, and the re-furnished office.


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Winding down the reno

Yes, it's true, we're starting to actually finish things. For instance, we've already started bringing in the stuff from the garage and putting it into my office. Which, of course, turns out to be another one of those hidden renovation costs that they always forget to tell you about on the home renovation channel.

You see, when you spend more than a year of your life doing a renovation, and blow through enough money to buy a new car (not including the money you may or may not have spent on a new car), when the time comes to move back into those lovingly renovated rooms, your old crap that you stashed away a year ago starts looking pretty damn ratty sitting on that nice new carpet, next to the carefully painted walls.

So, of course, we find ourselves having to buy some new furniture...

Anyway, I'm saving the "after" pictures of the office until I get all of the furniture and artwork in place, so this won't be an especially graphic-intensive post. I do have some pictures, however, so let's get this party started.

One of the pictures I didn't post last time was this puppy here:



That's all of the SubFlor (aka Dri-Core) panels we need to do the laundry room. Yes, they ARE just stacked in the workshop for now. We wanted to save them for the weekend my brother was in town - ssssh! He doesn't know this is going to be a working vacation yet! Hee hee hee!

Oh, and note how spiffy that freshly-painted floor looks. That paint turned out really nice. You know, once we did four separate coats (two overall, but we had to do the room in two goes).





Anyway, that's about where things are. Oh, and I wanted to take a picture of how awesome the grass looks in those patches we seeded three weeks ago... but I forgot, and now it's dark. Instead, I'll leave you with another shot of the awesomeness that is my office carpet:



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Wanna see something cool?

Carpets!



Woo!

Yeah, there's a lot more to come, but I felt I should at least post SOMETHING.



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A little more of that old in-and-out

Inside and outside, that is, as we tried to take advantage of the non-inclement weather this past weekend to button up the landscaping (read: massive holes in the ground) before winter, and hurried to get the workshop cleaned up a little before the carpets/laundry room floor go in.

Of course, the War Department was not content with just doing OUR landscaping, but insisted that we also help the Maker Of Pies and her hell-dog do their lawn as well. As it turned out, this was a good idea because once we got done helping Maker Of Pies' husband (Mr. Awesome) with their house, he came over and helped us with ours. As you'll see, this was a good trade for us...

The day began with a large truck backing into our driveway and dumping three yards of "lawn mix" (sand and topsoil) in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, the truck was back with another three yards of topsoil:



Mmmm... dirty.

We promptly left it sitting there and went over to help Mr. Awesome with his place, hoping that the rain would hold off for at least a while so we wouldn't have to shovel mud when we got back.

It only took the three of us (the Maker of Pies had the plague or something so she couldn't help out) a couple of hours to grade, seed, roll, and fertilize their lawn, so we were standing in front of our twin mounds of hard labor by one o'clock.

And that's when the real fun started.

Before:
Just in case you've forgotten what the fruits of our previous labors have done to the outside of our house, I took a few pictures...

Here's the rather sizable depression in the back yard where we hauled away all the extra dirt that was left over from digging out the perimeter drain:





Also in those pictures (but impossible to see) is the trench we dug for the electrical line out to the garage that sunk down over the past year. It's quite narrow, less than six inches, but could be treacherous when racing out there in sandals to disentangle the cat from the lawn furniture again.

In the front yard, we had the remnants of my all time favorite hole:



As seen from the street, with the big bare swath over top of where we laid the new water service line:



After:
So, with Mr. Awesome's invaluable assistance, we got started shoveling, wheeling, spreading, seeding, raking, and hurting. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the driveway was clear:



The backyard was filled in:





And the front hole was topped off and a scattering of lawn mix laid down over the whole yard:





In case you were wondering, the brown patches are peat moss that the War Department laid over top of the grass seed so it wouldn't blow away. She claims it works, and when it comes to outside stuff, I know better than to argue with her. (Yes, it could be said that I should know better than to argue with her about the inside stuff, too, but where's the fun in that?)

All in all, it went amazingly smoothly, and it's quite the relief to get that finished up before the really bad weather comes. Pretty much the only complaint I had with the whole day (aside from needing THREE vitamin I before bed) was the outside supervisor:



NOT the sort of thing you want glaring down at you when loading a wheelbarrow with yet another load of dirt, I have to say... the inside guy is much more laid back.

Speaking of the inside, we have a hard deadline for prepping the office floors and we're going out of town this weekend, so we decided to start another project that would entail moving everything out of the workshop and storing it in the office where the carpet is going to go.

Yeah, it didn't make any more sense when I was typing it than it does reading it over again now...

Anyway, here's the pictures to explain.

Before before
This is what the workshop looks like (from both ends) most of the time:





Yeah, we're a tidy bunch.

Before
Here's what it looked like after we moved all the crap out and washed the floor down twice, once with TSP and once with muriatic acid:





After
And here's what it looks like after we painted it with an alkyd epoxy concrete paint from Rona, followed by waking up with terrible headaches from the fumes and Amy deciding to stay home from work and paint over the smelly paint with some good old Armor Coat from Crappy Tire:





Sadly, no after after yet; still have some painting left to do. Anyway, I think that's enough pictures for one post. I have more, but one of them is going to be a post in and of itself.

Oh, and coming soon: a break-down of all the different tasks and jobs involved in doing your own basement reno, together with a frank appraisal of whether they're worth doing on your own, or if you're better off hiring someone to do it properly. Er, for you. To do it for you. Yeah.


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Unexpected diversions

I'm sure it happens to everyone who renovates their own house. Hell, I'm sure it happens to people who aren't renovating their own house. But why does it seem to happen MORE when WE'RE renovating our house?

I'm speaking, of course, of those little things that go wrong with stuff in the house that are completely unrelated to whatever it is we happen to be working on. Here's a fun idea: let's make a list!

Here's a short, non-chronological (and probably incomplete) list of unrelated things that we've had to fix unexpectedly while working on the basement:

• front door sill


• kitchen drain


• bathroom sink drain


• my wisdom teeth


• refrigerator


• kitchen linoleum where we ripped it while moving the fridge


• dining room chairs (reupholstering)


• the cat

...and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm too tired to think of.

Oh, and of course, this weekend's very own unexpected diversion:



The damn garbageratormajig lost one of the little blades inside and was making an awful racket. Of course, this happened while I was in Prince George, so it took the War Department a couple of days to decide that MAYBE that loud, metallic grindy-type noise wasn't a usual thing, and maybe she should just not use it for a while.

Anyway, we got a new one, but holy hell, when did garbage disposal units get so damn pricey? Of course, we couldn't find the make and model of the one that was in there, so we had to completely dismantle the kitchen drain and put in the new one from scratch, but it's done, and really only took a couple of hours. Or three. No more than four, really.

Oh, and as an added bonus, the new one is called a Badger 5. Tee hee. (I spent the whole afternoon yelling "Snake!" It was awesome.)

Anyway, the real basement news is ... the painting is finished! Wheee!

That's right, we have officially finished the painting, and even put down a deposit on some very nice carpet. It's looking pretty sweet, even if I say so myself. And here's a schwack of pictures to prove it (I took some with and some without the flash so you could kind of see the colors in different light. I dunno if it worked though, I'm still trying to figure this camera out.)











(Needless to say, if you have any ideas on how I should go about building a proper cabinet for that gaping hole around the electrical panel, I'm all ears.)

All I have to do is pop in a couple more tapcons to crunch the floor right down and we're ready for the carpet guys.

Tapcons. Joy.


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All doors, all the time. Except when it's thresholds.

So, yeah. Doors are done. Well, except for the closet doors, which only just occurred to me as I was typing that.

Damn it.

Anyway, EXCEPT for the closet doors (which really only need to be hung - twenty minutes' work, tops) we're finished the doors. That includes the bathroom door, the office door, AND the workshop door.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, the War Department decided to fix a door that wasn't actually broken. No, wait. It WAS broken, we just didn't know it was broken until she started fixing it. Painting it, actually. She started painting it, and ... you know what? Let's just get on with this.

First up, here's the door between the office and the laundry room after we put up the trim and painted it white (of course):



And from the office side:



Must admit that it was a lot easier to set up the hardware on that door than it was the stuff on the workshop door. For one thing, we needed to get a new spindle and a new knob for it, and the ones they sell at Rona are those cheap-ass, tacky little fake brass things. Lucky for us, the Restore had a pair of knobs that matched the one we already had exactly, and the spindle for them to boot. Of course, we had to wander into the employees-only section of the store and pick through some contraband boxes, but they were nice enough to forgive that transgression and sell us the bits we needed.

And after much fiddling about with cork spacers, a 3/4-inch spade bit, and a little old-fashioned cursing and swearing, we've got the hardware installed (and working!) on the workshop door:



We've decided to leave the back of the door unpainted as it sort of fits in with the rugged look of the workshop (read: drab old concrete and exposed pipes):



And yes, I will EVENTUALLY finish that last little bit of drywall - I just have to patch the hole in the upstairs bathroom first so I know how much scrap I'm going to have left to work with.

The closet has been finished, caulked, painted, and touched up in preparation for hanging the closet doors (which won't actually go in until after the carpet):



And that's about it for the doors... oh, right! I seem to have mentioned a threshold and a certain little project of Amy's that took an interesting turn...

The War Department has been wanting to paint the threshold under our front door for quite some time. It's exposed to the worst of the weather, being at the southwest corner of the house and all, and she was worried that it wasn't going to make it through another wet and rainy winter. So while I fussed about making chili (Labour Day tradition, don't you know - goes great with Edmonton kicking Calgary's ASS ha ha ha!), she got the wire brush and sandpaper out there and set to cleaning up the threshold in preparation for painting.

This is sort of what the threshold looked like when she started (except it was still attached to the house, not sitting on our workbench):



Look okay, right? Maybe just a little brushing to get off that loose paint and some extra TLC? Well, not so much...

Shortly after the War Department got going with the wire brush, she peeled off a great big piece of caulking. And then another. And that's when she realized that the job was a little bigger than she thought. Turns out that the threshold had been broken for a while, and whoever had repaired it last hadn't taken it upon themselves to do it properly, but had just caulked up the biggest cracks and slapped another coat of (crappy) paint on it.

And this is the result after the caulking came off:



Yeah, that'll be FINE for a winter or two!

Anyway, it's a good thing chili gets better the longer you cook it because we had to let it sit for a couple of hours while we cleaned up the mess, cut a new threshold out of some pressure-treated lumber and installed it into the doorway:



Looks pretty innocuous just sitting there, but let me assure you that it took some precision cuts - and not just reciprocating saw precision, either! REAL precision.

Anyway, the gap under the door has been repaired and the house is safe from marauding wildlife - the stuff that doesn't already live inside, at any rate. I'm off to scenic (HA!) Prince George for a few days to help yet ANOTHER person move, so don't expect much progress in my absence. Unless Amy decides to bite the bullet and get the carpets done while I'm gone...


Shyeah. Right.
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