Less basement, more garage and yard

I tried for, like, a half-hour to come up with a pun that covered blog post vs. fence post, but they all sucked, so I didn't.

You're welcome.

Anyway, there's not a lot of basement left to cover, to be honest. I know the War Department had said something about cutting down an existing closet door to cover up the closet under the stairs, but that thing just wasn't going to cut it, so we've contracted my mom to sew us a nice curtain, which I will post pictures of just as soon as we've got it up.

Other than that, the only things left to do downstairs are the thresholds for the doors, which will be somewhat complicated to make, and will require the use of a decent workshop. And that, of course, would require moving all that crap out of the garage, covering the walls, building work benches, finding storage, and all that other stuff.

As it just so happens, that's just what we've been working on...

We started the process of finishing the garage by moving the bare minimum (in case it started raining) of stuff out of the garage and into the driveway, so we could access the back wall:





And then... well, there are a few steps missing in terms of photographic evidence, but we hung 1/2-inch plywood on all the walls (that took two weekends) and built the first of two workbenches (that took another weekend), hung the old white cabinet from my office on the rear wall, and started work on the second bench... which is proving to be something of a bugbear as we need to mount the radial arm saw in it, and trying to figure out how to align the fence is driving us nuts. When I have a picture of that, I'll post it, but for now:



Anyway, seeing as how we were so close to finishing the garage, we figured it was a GREAT time to start a new project!

Er... no, wait a minute. That's not how it happened at all. See, we knew we had a long weekend coming up, and what better way to while away the May Two-Four than to spend the whole weekend busting our butts erecting a fence!

Okay, so the neighbours approached us, and offered to split the cost and labour of replacing the rotting piece of crap that passed for a fence between our backyards. It's hard to get a sense of the utter crapitude from just the one picture, but you can see the ramshackle old piece of shit here:



Anyway, we were quite happy to have a go at it, so our neighbour ordered the fence panels and materials last Friday. Of course, that meant that, bright and early Saturday morning, I headed down to the tool rental place to get a clamshell digger, an eight-inch auger bit, and this bad boy right here:



Oh, yeah. We doing this thing with POWER tools, baby.

Ahem.

Right, so, the first order of business, take down the old fence. Here's 360 kilos of the crappiest old fence that ever fit in the back of a pickup all ready for a trip down to Ellice:



Here's what it looked like when we stopped for lunch:







Once again, I didn't (or couldn't) document all the between stages and whatnot, but suffice to say that between the time I picked up the auger and about 7:30 on Sunday evening, we done erected a fence:







We couldn't have done it without our neighbour, Cory, who spent all day Saturday working his butt off while suffering from the mother of all hangovers, and the neighbour on the far side of Cory, who had put up his own fence not that long ago, and not only showed us how to properly plumb and set a fence post, but stuck around long enough to put up all nine posts. (And drink three of our beers, but that's why we bought them, after all...)

Phew. So, time to finish the second work bench, make some thresholds, design a bulkhead/drop ceiling solution for the laundry room, and we can call this damn thing DONE.













Heh, like that's EVER going to happen...


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Perimeter Drainage: Is it worth it?

Welcome back to our special series, Is It Worth It?, where we ask the question no one else (except the people on Canada’s Worst Handyman, of course) dares to ask: are all those things you do during a basement renovation really worth doing yourself? Or should you just bite the bullet and hire a professional before you really screw things up?

Last time, we covered demolition, and it was pretty much an unqualified “give ‘er!” This time, something trickier: digging out your perimeter drains and replacing the weeping tile.

Our experience
Oh man, do I really have to relive this?

Well, digging was one of the very first things we started, and if you must know, we still haven’t completely finished filling in all of the holes. There’s still a dandy little impression in the driveway that requires some concrete/asphalt work.

But to recap the overall process, here’s what we did done dug as diggers:

• We dug a trench about four feet deep and two feet wide across three-quarters of the back of the house - all told, about thirty feet long (including the bit that went around the corner).


• We dug a two-foot-by-four-foot hole, about six feet deep, on the west side of the house, and another, roughly the same size, through the asphalt driveway on the east side of the house.


• We dug a trench 12 inches wide and 24 inches deep across the front lawn for the new water service.


• And, of course, the hole to end all holes, the giant monster in the front flower bed which, by the time all was said and done, measured six feet by eight feet, and was a little more than ten feet deep. And yes, it really is that big, and no, it really doesn’t look that impressive in pictures. You have to stand in it to get the full effect. (I really took a lot of pictures of that hole, didn’t I?)

Pros:
There really isn’t much in the way of “pro” for this. I guess you could make a case that doing it ourselves let us progress at our own pace, which meant that making holes for the plumber bigger, or digging an extra clean-out for the Roto-Rooter man, didn’t entail having to stay home from work while we waited around for some chain-smoking deadbeat to come by and hand-bomb a few shovelfuls of dirt over the fence until he passed out from the heat and the six beers he drank at lunch.

Um… where was I? Oh, right. We could go at our own pace, work on the holes that needed work when we had to, and didn’t have to pay someone to do it for us. Those are your “pros”.

Cons:
You do know that they make people do this sort of manual labour as punishment, right? I mean, it’s HARD. It’s even harder if all you do is sit around on your secretarial spread all day, staring at a computer screen, and then try to put in a few hours of shoveling after dinner. I dunno if it gets any easier if you do it for a living, but it sure couldn’t be any worse.

Oh, and let me assure you, it’s not without hidden costs: I went through an entire bottle of Vitamin I last summer. So, yeah. There’s that.

Is It Worth It?
Yeesh... you know, I’m really not sure about this one. I mean, on one hand, it’s just digging. It doesn’t exactly require a high degree of technical acuity, if you know what I mean. It’s something just about anybody can do, and requires nothing more than a shovel and a wheelbarrow. And, of course, a pick if you happen to be unlucky enough to live on a lot comprised entirely of clay. But really, that and a little time in the salt mines are enough to tackle the job.

That being said, I have to admit that if we were to do this all over again, I think we would have bit the bullet and at least tried to hire somebody. Manual labour is generally pretty cheap, and for a few hundred dollars, we probably could have had it all done in a day or two, as opposed to dragging it out for months (or - cough - years). While it’s certainly true that finding contractors to do that sort of work has been nearly impossible in this town for the past few years, even if it took a couple of weeks to line them up, it still would have been done faster in the end.

At the very least, I can assure you that I’d rather not do that much digging again – unless I get to rent a Bobcat!

Next time: framing!

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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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I should work less and post more...

At least, that's the impression I get from all the whining about the lack of updates. You'd think I didn't have a job OR a passive-aggressive, mildly incontinent cat, the way some people carry on. And that's just the War Department!

Anyway, despite the lack of updates, we have been busy. (Even if it seems to me I've posted that same sentiment on this blog at least once or twice before.) While we're waiting on Leonard to come back and install the remaining fixtures, we've been installing trim, caulking trim, painting trim, and doing unspeakable things to leftover bits of trim.

Oh, and digging, of course. Let's start with that, shall we?

When last we saw the enormous pile of crap in the back yard, we'd just taken three full loads off the top of it, and barely made a dent. Well, after another four trips to the Victoria Materials Depot on a hot and sunny Saturday (of which we've had precious few enough this summer, let me assure you), we've made more than a dent in the pile, we've made a dent in the back yard!



By the way, that's a nice little gig they got going on at the VMD. We pay them to drop it off (about $10 a load) and someone else comes in and pays them to take it away again! If we could have cut out the middle man, we might have been able to afford to pay someone else to do some of the work for us...

Anyway, once that was cleared away, it was back into the basement again, where Amy spent a great deal of time and energy installing the trim in the bathroom. I did most of the cutting, but the caulking, hole-filling, and paint preparation was all her:



I wasn't going to let her have ALL the fun, though, as I spent a good couple of days cursing and swearing at the window wells, which had to be closed in with plywood. Of course, this being our house with my framing job, none of them were square (of course) and no two sides were quite the same size:









Every single piece of plywood in those pictures was custom cut and shaped for its location. That was a lot of cutting, nibbling, testing, sanding, cursing, and - eventually - spackling. And no, those last two aren't some elaborate optical illusion. They really look like that. Of course, the trim is square -- it's the windows themselves that are totally out of level. (Since I took those pictures, I've covered over the edges with corner bead and sill trim, but I'm too lazy to go downstairs and take another picture right now. Next time.)

Anyway, we've got about a week until Leonard comes back, and we have to get the vanity installed, the trim done and painted, and a few other bits and pieces finished up in the bathroom before he gets here. And we have to prep, prime, and paint the window wells, build a casement for the workshop door, install the office door, get the office carpeted...

Uh, yeah. So... lots to do. I don't have a joke for that. It's just a lot of work.

Sigh.

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The satisfaction of a job well done...

...and the taste of a good beer to go along with it:



But, I'm getting ahead of myself. It's been a very long weekend, and we've been very productive. So let's get to the REAL updates, shall we?

Oh, and this is probably as good a time as any to remind you that my camera SUCKS. I mean, I may have mentioned it before, and you've seen the evidence of that, but for some reason, it was particularly crappy today. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of some of the images in this post.

Okay, I apologize in advance for the poor quality of ALL of the images in this post. Hey, at least there's a lot of them.

As required by our miracle worker (i.e.: the plumber), the wall inside of which we intend to run the new water pipes for the laundry has been erected:



Of course, that's not even half of the wall that needs to go there eventually, but it's enough for him to get started tomorrow. And, much like every other wall I've framed, this one needed to be done twice. Because I suck. And because I always forget to double check BEFORE I drill the Tapcons. Stupid squareness. It's highly overrated, I say.

Anyway, that was actually the least of the jobs we undertook this weekend. Rather, we took advantage of the good weather (probably the last of it) to go hard on the outside and get the downspouts hooked up and ready for the winter rains.

The driveway hole was the easiest, as the downspout there is closest to the main sewer drain in the front yard. We have a little more confidence that it will drain properly and so it was a relatively simple matter to connect the downspout directly to the cleanout we installed:



Looks pretty spiffy, eh?

The back yard was a little more complicated because we're a little less certain about its ability to drain properly - and because it sees arguably the highest volume of water of any side of the house. The backyard slopes perceptibly in the direction of the house, and there's no diversion in place for the rainwater from the roof.

Our solution was to design a dual-downspout system; one for summer, and one for winter. The summer one will connect directly to the perimeter drain (like the one in the driveway), but the winter set-up will need to divert the rainwater from the roof away from the foundation. Here's the winter system in place and ready for the impending deluge(s):



Note the cap over the branch of the drain where the downspout would normally go. In the spring, we'll take that off and attach a piece of pipe leading right from the downspout and into that side of the drain. Just to help with perspective, and to give you an idea of how far that extends, here's another shot from the side:



Oh, and of course, we couldn't have really done any of this had the War Department not been working hard all week to get the holes filled in and graded properly. Evidence of this can be seen in the remarkable diminishment of the enormous pile of crap in the backyard:



I'm somewhat amazed that as much of that went back into the holes as it did.

The last downspout was the one beside the window on the west side, and we approached that with much the same strategy as the downspout in the backyard. It also happens to be the side of the house with the least amount of drainage, so we needed to make sure the water from the roof drained out as far from the foundation (and the blocked perimeter drain) as possible. Here it is, all set up and raring to go for the winter:




Okay, I admit, that looks absolutely ridiculous, but you know what? I think it's going to work.

So, yeah. We've got the outside almost finished. We just have to lay down some sand and asphalt in the driveway to cover up that patch of dirt, do a little more grading and filling in the backyard, and get rid of the rest of the (not-so) enormous (anymore) pile of crap.

Oh, and in the midst of all that work, we still managed to replace the railroad ties in the front yard - and even mow the lawn!



Almost looks normal again, doesn't it? And no, we're not planning on filling in that gap around the cleanouts before spring. Amy wants to redo the front bed anyway, and there's no sense in digging it all up now (thankfully).

Oh, and thanks to a friend's determination to save his house from a quartet of leaning Douglas firs, we managed to top up our wood pile for the winter:



(And that's not all of it...) Thanks Cesar!

Anyway, I'm off to enjoy what little remains of the weekend... what? Time for bed?

Bloody hell. Read more...

More gravel than you can shake a shovel at

Who knew gravel could be so heavy? PICTURE-heavy, that is... heh heh heh. Small joke there.

Very small.

Anyway, gravel day has come and gone, and I would have to classify it as a complete success. We didn't get all of the dirt back, but we did get the gravel in and the landscape fabric down in all three remaining holes. I also managed to take lots of pictures, so fair warning: there are more picture of holes (and gravel) in this post than you probably really wanted to see all at once.

So, I started off the morning with a trip to, of course, the gravel yard, where I picked up a half-yard of 3/4" drain rock. For those of you who don't know, this is what a half-yard of gravel looks like:



It doesn't really look THAT impressive, I know, but that's still enough weight to make the truck's mudflaps scrape when going around corners or over any bumps.

Anyway, I started with the hole in the driveway, figuring that the sooner we filled that in, the less chance there was of someone falling into it. (I have no idea how that hasn't already happened. Probably because we haven't exactly encouraged visitors over the past few months...)

Here's what it looked like with the greater part of a half-yard of gravel in it:



And of course, with a little landscape fabric on top to keep the crappy-ass clay that passes for soil around here from mixing with that nice clean gravel:



It took another trip to the gravel yard to get enough to fill in the hole on the west side too, but we got that all ready for dirt before we broke for lunch:




Just for reference's sake, the TOP of the perimeter drain is 18" below the top of the gravel.

Finally, the piece de resistance (you'll have to imagine the proper accents over the vowels in that - I'm too lazy to look up the HTML); the big trench in the backyard. Before we get to that, however, let's look at some random factoids:

• In all, it took six trips to the gravel yard (for those of you that have trouble with math, that's three yards of gravel).


• Each half-yard of gravel cost $22.04 (including tax).


• We just willfully buried a hundred and thirty-two dollars and twenty-four cents in our yard. Kinda like pirates burying their treasure. But not really.(If you want it, good luck digging it up.)


• We saved $45 in delivery charges. Woo hoo.

Anyway, here's a bunch of pictures of the long hole. I really like the way that rubberized sealant set up, by the way. It's very cool stuff.






Oh, and as a very special treat, it's time for a brief edition of everyone's favorite recurring feature...

The Injury Report:

• I have a pair of nasty scrapes on the underside of my left arm where one of the handles of the wheelbarrow gouged me when I was trying to flinch away from a wasp (actually, it might have been a butterfly, I don't remember exactly), and did this funky little half-step dance move while letting go of one handle and pushing the other away or something. Hard to describe. Well, hard to visualize, and I'm still not sure how the handle of the wheelbarrow managed to scrape me in the spot that it did, but there you are...

Anyway, we're taking today off to do some shopping, chores, and other stuff. We've earned it.


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