The chimney comes down
Work could then continue in the attic, trying to minimize the scattering of concrete as much as possible ... |
Diggin' it
Basement window # 3
That same window was next up for rework, and a particularly challenging one to deal with. The air-conditioner had fit through it just about *perfectly* with only a little extra blocking and foam to hold it firmly in at the right drain angle. Back then the frame had been in marginal condition but still sufficient to hold the unit up. Sealed into the wall on the north side of the house, the tiny 5000 btu/h unit served rather well as a whole-house humidity-reducer in the summer and ejected the collected water to the outside. About all it could handle was the latent load and didn't give a whole lot of cooling per se, but that helped keep the basement less slimy in high summer and the rest of the house a little more comfortable in general. Not bad for a trash-pick! But with a new HVAC system for heating/cooling on the way, it was time to decommission this ol' hack and turn the opening into another permanent insulated wall section especially considering a slight possibility that one of the HRV ducts might pass through it. |
Oil tank go byebye
Final furnace cleanup
In general I was rather proud of the state of the basement by now. I'd launched a bunch of the junk out of it, eliminated things that were harboring mold, swept out all the spider webs, brushed and vacuumed all of the sill area and joist bays in readiness for spray-foaming, fixed the door and had the windows in progress, compacted all the remaining contents toward the center to give full access all around the perimeter, and in general completed a ton of cleanup and actually turned it back into usable workspace -- both for myself and contractors about to come in and do their thing. And everything that happened down here was part of the overall design of how the house would work after the retrofit was done. |
Front door rework
Pink and green: ugly house, but a nicely insulated front door. This had also
gotten its weatherstripped threshold treatment a while before and had already
proven itself leak-tight. The glass area is still a thermal problem but I
wanted to leave it open -- the overall conduction area is greatly reduced,
and I have an extra piece of XPS that can attach behind the two windows
on the inside for the really cold periods.
Eventually I would paint the whole assembly, but it was fairly weather-protected where it stood and could serve as another construction example for a while. At this point I had the rest of ex-air-conditioner basement window # 3 done with its PVC panel in place, and more backfilling tight against the wall below. Let's see the rodents try to make a playground out of *this*. |
Basement window # 4
Punching holes
One less wire
At one point I spotted the guy from the town water department going around
the neighborhood taking meter readings, and asked him who I needed to
contact to authorize unhooking the wire between the meter and the outdoor
interface to eventually move it to another such wall-penetration. He
told me that the right answer was to not bother with the wire anymore
but install one of the remote RF units that allows reading the meter from
a passing truck instead of having to traipse onto each property and plug
the reader into every house. I already knew the old reading methodology
wasn't particularly reliable, having received at least one erroneous bill,
so this seemed like a fine idea even if it slightly violates my sense
of controllable data perimeter. The power meter had already been changed
over to a remote-read long since, so why not the water as well to eliminate
any further need for utility workers to walk all the way up to the house
to do their jobs.
Besides, the meter wire was in the way of where work would be done on the electrical panel, and I decided to simply unhook it anyway [which I could despite the little cover and seal over the screws at the meter]. Thus, the water dept could come out any time they liked and do that changeover before the next reading/billing cycle. |
So a couple of days later a guy showed up with the RF unit, and installing it was about a 15-minute job. Now instead of the wire running outside, I have the wall-mount version of one of these(pdf). The guy just zip-tied it right to the meter plumbing and hooked up the little wires -- no worries about placement, concrete-block walls or being below grade or even the pending presence of a lot of foil-faced polyiso on the house, as the spread-spectrum burst evidently punches through just about anything and gives a strong enough signal at the street. The spec says it blurts out a meter status every 14 seconds or thereabouts, and the internal battery lasts damn near forever. |
Fascia forensics
Basement window # 5 (second keeper)
Cutting a long thin piece of flashing was easy enough on a guillotine-style paper cutter; bending it lengthwise was another matter. A quick-n-dirty bending-brake setup was needed to get anything close to a straight bend. The white strip is the light side of the typical white/brown painted aluminum roll flashing sold at the big-box; I had originally bought it to fashion some covers for fluorescent light fixtures but it would be fine for this purpose too. A leftover strip of PVC served as a tool to push down evenly and actually do the bend, although this flashing is deceptively tough enough that it still had to be sort of done in sections. It came out pretty even, though. | |
Oh, right -- and the stuff in the trash bag speaks to how I actually took a break from house stuff earlier that day and changed the oil and trans-fluid in the Prius. Can't forget about one's other little obsessions, can we? |
The chimney bricks find a new home
_H* 120521