Tyler's House of Horrors : March 2013

Friday, March 15, 2013

With a little help from my friends

So with my current schedule I get the first weekend of each month off and I normally spend it going to visit Buffalo but this month I convinced my friends John and Dan Whalen to come up to help me work on the house. I started the weekend off feeling like I was kind of behind the 8 Ball but by the end of the weekend I had a full dumpster and a much cleaner house. At this rate I might even have power by spring who knows.

Upstairs Mess

So last time I worked upstairs I made a giant mess and decided not to clean it for awhile but I figured that I had avoided the task long enough so when Dan stopped by we began the long task of cleaning the six inches of insulation from the floor.

Upstairs Mess

Yep that is a bra that I found in the blown insulation from the attic. Of course

Stairs

After we cleaned up the mess upstairs we decided to tackle the carpet on the staircase. As with everything in this house I figured this relatively easy task would have some surprises.

Stairs

So while I was looking at the carpet on the stairs I found that underneath the old carpet was....another layer of carpet. Naturally I should have guessed that.

Stairs

So Dan started at the top of the stairs and managed to rip off both layers of carpet without too much of a problem

Stairs

Looks a lot better

Stairs

So while we were removing the carpets we realized that the bottom layer was attached to the stairs with finishing nails instead of staples. When we tried ripping off the carpet in a few areas it also ripped off parts of the stair treads. Only in this house is carpet part of the structure.

Stairs

Upstairs Sub Floor

I can finally say that there is no carpet in my house. Slow progress but progress all the same.

Stairwell Wall

So my father stopped by the house to see the progress we had made and he wasn't in the door more than two minutes when I heard something being broken. My father couldn't find anything to break so he just kicked a hole in the wall.

Stairwell Wall

Well once again I have cleaned up a mess my father made. It needed to get removed so I am glad my father subtly reminded me.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Left over nails

So now that I have removed all the planks from the exterior walls I have found that all the giant barn nails that held the planks in place are still in the studs. Each stud had roughly 20 nails in it so I decided that while I had some help I would see if we could get all these nails out of the walls.

Ladder Accident

So while I was on the ladder in the old downstairs bathroom I felt the ladder start to wiggle and then lurch to the side. I quickly jumped off and when I looked back I saw the ladder had fallen through the floor. Awesome.

Ladder Accident

Yep the ladder isn't supposed to lean like that

Ladder Accident

Well at least the hole in the floor has some company now. In retrospect if that hole had been a bit bigger that whole chunk of floor might have fallen apart and I would have been updating my blog from the hospital. Thanks for just being a little bit of a dick house.

Johnny

John joined Dan and myself in the afternoon and got right to work.

Whalen Men

Here the Whalen Men are busy removing plaster from the upstairs ceiling and I am busy not working at all.

Dan thinks outside the box

So Dan didn't like the fact that I dragged the garbage bin up and down the stairs so he thought he thought he had come up with a more efficient garbage removal solution. Dan would fill a 5 gallon bucket up with garbage and lower it out the window to where I was waiting in the backyard. I would then just walk over to the dumpster and dump it in. After three trips to the dumpster this way I got sick of just standing in the back yard waiting for buckets so I went back to the garbage bin dragging method. I will admit it was a really interesting idea though I am just not patient

Random Items John found

So John went exploring the basement and managed to find some gems that I had over looked. Featured here are three dirty chairs and a stick with a hook attachment at the end. How I missed these I don't know

Random Items John found

Game night anyone?

Random Items John found

Hub caps...of course

Downstairs Bathroom Floor Take 2

So after the ladder fell through the floor the day before I was trying to be careful while working around the old bathroom floor. While I was ripping out some nails out of the wall I heard something cracking under my foot and when I looked down I noticed the food was trying to eat my leg. Luckily for me it turned out the house hadn't developed a taste for human flesh my foot had just fallen through the floor. Crisis averted.

Nailin' Pailin'

So we spent an exciting couple of hours pulling giant ass nails out of the studs downstairs. Even though it took awhile we managed to get them all out but sadly I now have no where to hang up my unicorn paintings. Sadly the 13 Remington art gallery is closed until further notice.

Random Items

So Dan found these in one of the walls downstairs. On the right is a pay stub from the paper mill down the road dated 12/24/1953. In that year the mill worker had an annual total of $4,000. On the left is a rather unflattering picture of a woman wearing some kind of black spandex.

Guests

So while we were working at the house John and Dan's father showed up to take a look around the house. Just like my father Papa Whalen has an uncanny ability to just look at a house and tell you exactly how and why the house is laid out the way it is and at one point he was telling me how old a nail was that he found in a wall. After showing Papa Whalen around for a while we began talking about all the work that needed to be done and at this point I heard Dan say that my friends Tim and Cathy Connolly had shown up to take a tour of the house. After working at this house for the last couple months I never thought I would be showing people around and be able to clearly articulate my future renovation plans to the point where people become excited about how nice the house will look. Somewhere along the line I actually learned something.

Upstairs Layout

So after the discussion with Papa Whalen and a long talk with my father I decided that the layout upstairs is a complete mess so my solution is to rip out all the walls and start fresh. It will cost an extra $300 in lumber to frame up new walls but it will be worth it to get a layout that makes sense.

Subtle Messages

After working for a couple of hours I sat down on the window sill to take a break. To my surprise I almost sat down on a rusty razor blade. My house is either telling me to keep working or it is telling me to get a tetanus shot I don't know which.

Walls

So the dumpster is so full that I decided to just start throwing the studs out the window into the backyard. I figure my house is already disgusting might as well have the yard to match

Old Bathroom Floor

So now that I have removed the walls I can rip up the raised floor that was put in the old sketchy ski lodge bathroom.

Old Bathroom Floor

Surprise the floor hodge podged together. I don't know why I thought it would have made sense I clearly have not learned from the 30 other times I have discovered the previous tenants had no clue what they were doing.

Old Bathroom Floor

So when my dad looked at how the floor was raised he told me they had most likely used some 2x4's to raise the floor. Surprise they actually used little strips of wall paneling that they nailed to the sub floor. Sigh of course that's what they did

Old Bathroom Floor

Yep this is where the old toilet sat. The wood is falling apart all around it so I am assuming that the toilet had a leak. I thought I was done finding shit in this house but once again the house wanted to surprise me.

Old Bathroom Floor

So after I pulled up the floor I noticed the floor was really shaky. The rest of the upstairs floor seemed fine so I was curious as to why this little section was so bad.

Old Bathroom Floor

Yep that's a giant chunk of the floor joist that's missing. Looks like I won't be walking on this section of floor for a while.

Old Bathroom Floor

It looks like when the previous owners put in the old cast iron pipe from the toilet they put a giant notch into floor joist and about four feet down they put in another notch just for shits and giggles. Basically this floor joist isn't holding up anything so we will be addressing this little issue pretty quick.

Upstairs Layout

Looks pretty nice without walls. Now that they are gone I can scrap the weird layout that used to be up there and put in whatever I want. Unfortunately I now have about three million ideas about what to do upstairs and I can't decide on which makes the most sense.

Upstairs Layout

If I were building this house for me I wouldn't put two bedrooms upstairs and instead I would make it a nice master suite with a big master bath. Alas since I am looking to sell it I will try and cram as many bedrooms into this place as possible

Upstairs Layout

So I have a to rip down the back wall, pull down the old wiring and clean the blown insulation off of the ceiling joists and the upstairs will be completely done.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Week Long Demo Challenge

So I am on a work schedule that allows me to work seven days in a row twice a month and then I get five days in a row off at the end of the month. Naturally since I am insane I decided that I would spend my mini vacation working on a mold infested house. I started off the week with a brand new dumpster and a new positive outlook on my work at the house I figured I could make some real progress at the house. Clearly the house had different plans.

Kitchen Floor

After I got done in the attic I went to the kitchen and noticed that I made a giant ass mess in the kitchen. It took a better part of the day cleaning up the mess from the attic just so I could start peeling away the multiple layers of flooring in the kitchen so I could get at the sub floor.

Kitchen Floor

While I was working on the floor in the kitchen I discovered this hole. I have decided that this hole is actually a portal to hell and the only thing preventing hell on earth is that Satan is too scared walk through my kitchen. I don't blame him.

Destructor meets the Pantry

While I was working in the kitchen my father decided to blow off a little steam in the pantry. Unfortunately my father doesn't believe in picking up after himself so it took me over an hour and a half the following day to clean up my father's exercise in anger management.

Mud Room Drop Ceiling

So before my father called it a day he helped me rip down the drop ceiling in the mud room. Part of the ceiling we discovered wasn't even nailed in so you could just lift it up with just your hand. Once again I have to say the work that was done to this house just baffles me.

Mud Room

So one of the big jobs I wanted to tackle this week was the kitchen and the mud room. The mud room has a lot of sheet rock which should be easy to remove but it also has a pantry that needs to be demoed so we can expand the kitchen.

Pantry Ceiling

So after I got done ripping down the one pantry wall all that was left was the wall that my father said he wanted to take a look at. He said he wanted to make sure it wasn't a load bearing wall before I went nuts. After taking a closer look I used my 3 months of experience and decided the only thing that was being held up by the studs was the drop ceiling in the pantry. I was really really hoping I was right about this.

Pantry Ceiling

So after I ripped down at the studs holding the pantry ceiling up it just sat there. I thought it was going to crush me after knocking down the last stud but it just sat there. Naturally I decided the best solution would be to try and yank on it and hope it didn't fall on my face. On the plus side I found out there is a funeral home less than a quarter of a mile from the house. Convenient I know.