Cleanup

Tiny Tuesday: Green Up Vermont

/ Scott / 2 Comments

Green Up Day is Saturday, May 2. Grab a Green Up bag from your Vermont community and hit the streets if you’d like to pitch in. Now in its 45th year, Green Up Day has been a huge success, taking thousands of tons of litter off state and local roads annually. For more information, visit Green Up Vermont or ask your town clerk.

I’ve previously discussed how construction produces incomprehensible amounts of waste. What I didn’t mention is that construction workers, myself included, are chronic litterers. It’s hard to believe how quickly a job can break down your environmental conscience, but you could hire Arlo Guthrie to work on your house, and within five minutes he’d give Officer Obie a reason to arrest him all over again.

Case in point: I’m up on the roof installing shingles. They come in bags of 20, enough to cover about 45 square feet of roof, so what do I do with each empty bag? It’s too bulky to tuck in my tool belt, and it would disrupt my workflow to climb down and find a receptacle. So I just drop it. Maybe the bag stays on the roof where I can pick it up later, or maybe it blows away. I’m not proud to admit this, but in the moment I don’t really care.

What will you do with all the empty bags?

What will you do with all the empty bags?

Which brings me back to Tiny Tuesday. Smaller buildings mean less shingles, housewrap, bent nails, etc., which means less litter, which means a healthier and more beautiful world. Isn’t that what Green Up Day is all about?

Class Dismissed

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Oh wow, the Yestermorrow class sure accomplished a lot in one week. The dining room, where it once had a creaky sliding door, now boasts a swinging glass door and a window. The front door and an interior wall received complete overhauls as well. I would have liked more time to meet the students and instructor; they covered a lot of ground in a short course and I’d be fascinated to hear their perspectives.

Front doorway boarded up while the Yestermorrow class replaces it.

Front doorway boarded up while the Yestermorrow class replaces it.

But I rarely found myself working close by the Yestermorrow crew, and it’s hard to justify chitchat when we all have so much to do. The polyurethane coating on the bedroom’s barnboard wall came out so well we decided to repeat the treatment all over. The stair surround got covered, as did the barn-style doors we built for upstairs and all the timber beams that will hold their hardware. I used an angle grinder to cut some hand-forged nails down to one inch long (so they wouldn’t puncture any hidden plumbing or electrical) and then hammered them into the bathroom walls.

Stair surround, polyurethaned.
Barn doors, polyurethaned.

A plethora of little tasks took less than a day each, sometimes less than an hour. Bob, wearing his electrician hat, installed cans for ceiling lighting in the bedroom. Mark and I cut another hole through the exterior wall (hideous job for a sawzall, with three layers of solid wood to push through) and slid in the dryer vent. I laid a new subfloor in a corner of the downstairs bathroom and jigsawed out a hole for the new toilet plumbing. I also replaced an outdoor spigot, though I didn’t hook it up to anything.

Dryer vent hole.
Toilet hole (heh heh).

And Paté removed every mote of dust from the master bedroom floor so she could unroll a cardboard-like protective surface as flat as possible. We want no expanding foam to fall on our finish floor when the insulation guys come to fill in the new roof. They’ll be here Monday, I’m told.

Master bedroom floor protected in preparation for foam insulation.

Master bedroom floor protected in preparation for foam insulation.

Batting Cleanup

/ Scott / 1 Comment

Late this week we tidied up the basement, cleaned almost everything out of the dining room, and burned a whole bunch of scrap. Then we pretty much cleared the upstairs of tools and parts so Bob and Suze could move up their personal effects. For the last three months, they’ve basically lived in the living room, clothes stashed in bins; now at last it’s time to move to the bedroom.

A clean dining room.

A clean dining room.

It’s a move of necessity more than desire. Bob is hosting a class from nearby Yestermorrow Design/Build School to help remodel his house. He agreed with the instructors to provide students with several projects downstairs. When the class arrives tomorrow, the first floor becomes their domain for a fortnight.

Therefore, in addition to cleanup, we made a supreme effort to clad the upstairs with as many finish surfaces as we could. I’ve said before that it’s difficult to install drywall properly in the best of conditions… and this house, with the walls all out of square and out of plumb, studs in all different planes, presents far from the best of conditions.

For each sheet, our first step was to run a straightedge along the studs in many directions and to shim out the surfaces accordingly. If my straightedge rocked back and forth across a stud, I knew that stud was proud and took a sawzall to slice it down to the same plane as the others. Conversely, if my straightedge didn’t touch a particular stud at all, I measured the gap and installed a shim to fill the space, ¼-inch or ½-inch plywood cut to the stud’s width and length.

Hans checks an exterior wall for any out-of-planeness that would interfere with drywall.

Hans checks an exterior wall for any out-of-planeness that would interfere with drywall.

I also installed a bunch of nailers around what would be the edges of the drywall. Normally it’s easier to accomplish this task early in the game; in my case the expanding foam insulation really got in the way. Unfortunately, that was never an option because the foam went in long before we’d finalized the wall locations. (Look at the east wall of the master bedroom, which will have a barnboard-clad triangle above and drywall below. We couldn’t have known that configuration two months ago.) So I took a jab saw to the foam and eviscerated just enough to squeeze in a smallish (2×2) nailer.

East wall of the master bedroom. Mark measures around this window.

East wall of the master bedroom. Mark measures around this window.

Working with Hans, Mark, and D.D. (though usually only one at a time), I drywalled the two remaining walls of the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and finally the stairwell. I was forced to pull out and reinstall several pieces when somebody with a better eye than I noticed bulging. The defect usually occurred at screws locations, and usually because I hadn’t scraped the insulation behind it fully flat. A drywall bulge is something no amount of mud can fix, so it always requires a do-over.

Second bedroom.
Stairwell.
Master bedroom.

In honor of the start of baseball season, today’s post “Batting Cleanup” is the third in a mega-series of articles with baseball-related titles. Read the first two articles, “In the Hole” and “On Deck”. They have nothing to do with today’s post (they’re not even about Bob’s house) but you should enjoy them anyway.