As usual for this time of year, we’re rushing to finish up projects before it gets too cold and/or before the snow starts falling. Thus, I’ve either been too busy, or just too tired from working on those projects to write about what’s going on.
The mouse invasion continued after I wrote about it last entry (I caught two more bringing the total to 19), and although I had recalled a great number of mice we caught during the rodent infestation we’d had a few years before, I had forgotten its cause.
But then I remembered that at that time the mice were getting into the house right after our new on demand hot water heater had been installed. The installation resulted in gaps both between the wall and the newly added natural gas line into the house and the vent on the new water heater.
The mice apparently were using the gaps to get into the house because after I put expanding foam into the gaps we didn’t catch any more.
Once I remembered that I did a check around the house looking for holes. Right away I discovered a mouse sized gap in between the coolant lines on our new central air conditioning that had been installed this spring and the fiberglass insulation that had been stuffed into seal the gap.
So I sealed that opening with expanding foam as well as another suspicious hole I found near the front porch. Since we had also just upgraded last year to an ultra-high efficiency furnace that vents through PVC pipe, I also decided to add a wire grid covering to the PVC exhaust pipe since I thought it possible that mice would crawl through it while it wasn’t being used as well.
Since then we have’t caught a single mouse. The air conditioning coolant lines enter the house in the basement very close to where the plumbing for the master bath sink goes through the floor; apparently they had been coming in from outside and simply bee-lining for the peanut butter baited trap in the master bathroom lavatory cabinet.
The moral of the story is that if you catch more than a few mice, odds are you’ve got an entry point they’re using to get into your house…
As we’ve begun our mortgage refinance in earnest theoretically we should be getting some money soon that will help us make more significant progress on the new building. We have a lot of equity in the house because I was trying to have most of our mortgage paid off prior to my retirement.
Once we committed to constructing our new building it was clear that I would be retiring with a mortgage regardless.
We’re planning on staining the concrete floor of the new building, so all the building materials need to be out of the main area. As I noted last week there were still a lot of building materials on the floor there.
So I moved the lumber elsewhere in the building, and then built some racks in the new garage stall on the house and moved all the unused vinyl siding from the new building there.
I also moved the polyethylene sheets off the main floor into the second floor. They were last used to help the concrete floor cure and had been covered with straw to insulate it right after it had been poured.
While the floor isn’t totally clear of materials yet, it’s getting there.
One of the projects I had been putting off was the lighting on the second floor. We have no immediate plans to use much of the second floor of the new building so we were trying to avoid finishing it until we had to. But some time ago I realized that if we didn’t add ceiling lights before we insulate the ceiling it would be much more difficult to add the lights later.
Since that realization some time ago I’ve managed to forget about that problem, mostly because we couldn’t afford the insulation anyway.
But now that we’re hoping to have the building ceiling insulated sometime soon it was time to start working on getting those ceiling lights installed.
The cheapest solution for the lighting upstairs was to use recessed lights. I started researching prices online, comparing prices from vendors with “free” shipping and those without, eventually finding them cheapest at Home Depot.
I placed an order, and while waiting for them decided given the number of lights I would have to install that I needed to make a jig to hold them between the trusses while I attached them.
I’ve noticed that many online videos detailing new construction recessed light installation skip over attaching the fixture itself. The light fixtures have a tab to align the fixture with the bottom of the truss but no way to hold the fixture up while the four rails are connected to the framing. The few recessed lights I’ve installed in the past have shown me that I would need a third hand to help me.
I looked for ideas for a jig online without any luck, so I designed mine from scratch. It hangs on the tops of the trusses, and the recessed light can sits on it while it’s being fastened to the trusses. One arm swings away to facilitate hanging it initially and is spring loaded with a mini-bungee cord.
Since the bottom of the recessed light can sits on the crosspiece, the jig is designed to hold the bottom of the can about 5/8″ below the bottom of the truss (the thickness of the ceiling drywall).
By the next week I started receiving the lights shipped via UPS. But based on the shipping invoices I started to suspect something was amiss – the invoices showed 6 boxes shipped on the order but the total number of lights was shy of the number I had ordered.
I contacted Home Depot to find my suspicions were correct – they inexplicably showed my order fulfilled even though they had only shipped part of my order.
After some time in an online chat and on the telephone I was able to rectify the problem (they had no explanation as to why they showed my ordered filled despite only having shipped some of it). Since the original order was considered completed, I had to place a new order for the missing lights.
For my trouble they shipped me the remainder of the lights I had ordered at a discount, so in the end I was satisfied with the resolution, especially since by that time I hadn’t used most of the lights I already had anyway.
Once I got (some of) the lights, I started installing them. For shipping the lights were installed with the rails installed across the short dimension of the light fixture, so I’m switching them all to have the rails on the long sides.
But I was quickly to find that the installation of the lights itself wasn’t the hardest part of that project – it was figuring out the spacing of the lights.
My initial plan was to have a row of lights centered in the room, but the way the roof trusses were framed prevented me from installing lights there. Instead I had to add an extra row of lights – I ended up with four rows of lights instead of three.
I used strings to mark the alignment of the lights; a construction laser would have been handy here but I don’t have one…
Since I placed an advertisement on Craig’s List for the unused floor trusses, we’ve had no offers or contacts about them. So it’s starting to look like it’s going to be a disposal exercise for them rather than a sale…
Although I started working on siding the house years ago work on the new building has generally pre-empted work on the house. With winter weather right around the corner I knew that if I waited much longer that it would be next spring before I worked on the house siding again.
Now that most of the new building work is inside I opted to spend some time working on the house again.
The gable end of the two car garage was partially sided, and its peak was to receive the plastic shake siding that we put on the gables of the new building. But prior to installing the siding, we were going to replace the brown fascia and soffit as well.
I’ve found soffit installation to be unpleasant, so it’s been an easy project to avoid. That, and during the summer there are lots of paper wasps flying around in the eaves of the house whose activity had started to diminish with the arrival of cooler weather.
I removed the remaining courses of the existing siding, the brown soffits and fascia, and replaced it with green soffits. I have to order more green fascia so that is a project for another time. I also put housewrap on the front of the garage.
However, in the midst of that project we heard that the mortgage underwriter wanted us to patch and/or paint the seam in the ceiling under where the load bearing wall had been removed in the house.
So I spent an evening taping the joint and putting joint compound on it.
Unfortunately many of the aforementioned projects required I work over my head while standing on a ladder. That takes a toll on one’s shoulders and neck, and I’ve been pretty sore from it.
Last weekend Kim didn’t feel well and eventually went to urgent care at the doctor’s office. However, based on her symptoms they thought she might be having a stroke so they rushed her via ambulance to the hospital.
After hours of being hooked up to a heart monitor and after an MRI they decided it wasn’t a stroke and eventually let her go home. The only problem is that they didn’t really determine what was wrong with her. Now she’s going to have to see some other specialists in the hopes they can determine what caused her symptoms, some of which have since abated somewhat.
On the subject of pet peeves, because of a special offer I recently subscribed to a few magazines, including Discover. Within a month of receiving my very first issue, I received a notice that my subscription was up for renewal.
Of course the only real way you can tell if your subscription on any given magazine is about to expire is from the address label, which as you can see clearly says August 2013.
That’s not even mentioning the fact that I first subscribed to the magazine on September 1st, 2012 and received my first issue in October 2012, which if my subscription expires in August of next year means they’re shorting me a month of subscription anyway.
Although technically one could argue that anytime one subscribes to a magazine or service that it’s implicitly up for renewal, I find these types of magazine renewal notices pretty disingenuous (and highly annoying). There’s no reason for them to omit one’s subscription expiration date in the renewal notice, unless they’re trying to mislead you into re-subscribing well before you need to.