out with the old - heaters

New year's is a good time to finally take care of those nagging chores, so we decided were going to get rid of the nasty scary old heaters in the front room and the bedroom.

Dan got the cover off this one in the front room and started disconnecting it while collected all the cleaning supplies for what we knew was going to be underneath.

And we weren't disappointed.. look, rat poop! hurray! It's been (thankfully) so long since we've seen any that it was just like the first time.

This heater was so low to the ground an attached to the wall, so there was no way to clean back there during the big decon effort. Which is one of the reasons we never wanted to turn it on. The smell of cooking rat droppings just isn't the same as fresh-baked cookies, or anything else you'd want to smell in your house.

The heater in bedroom was further from the wall, so there was much vacuuming and cleaning way back when -Dan got started before I got a pic, so it's a few inches further out than it started.. but it was more than a foot from the wall

The other reason we never wanted to turn these on was evident here.. to pull this out Dan literally just pulled a little. Nothing was attached or sealed to the vent pipe so one night of this big guy heating our bedroom probably would have been our last.

This is a very flattering picture of me cleaning out the nastiness-filled wall cavity around the vent pipe.

And this is what it looked like before. It actually doesn't look so bad in the picture.. seemed much worse at the time

Underneath, on the other hand, was a different story. Just as gross at you'd expect

Don't worry, Henrietta didn't have time to get a paw in there before I fired up the vacuum and she went running off in terror.

The gas pipe sticking up out of the floor was dead, so while I was cleaning the grime Dan was downstairs sawing it off and now that's history.

A couple of days on a craigslist free posting and the heaters disappeared like magic from in front of the house. Now that we're free from those old things hopefully things'll move quickly to get the new system up!

what drought?

Our friend Robert lent us a power washer more than a year ago, and sort of wants to use it himself (sheesh, can you imagine the nerve?!), so the first heat wave we hauled out a ladder and had at it.

The fascia board cleans up amazingly well, but the siding is a little more stubborn. It's a fine line between almost clean and bare, unpainted wood..

And the back of the house, which faces south, had a lot of paint that was just slightly sort of sticking to the house. I had to be so gentle with the spray that it barely made a dent in the filth.
Well.. that's not entirely true.. I washed off a TON of dirt (and a bit of paint), and there are some spots that are cleaner, but that mostly seems to emphasize all the unclean areas.


Another reason we haven't posted much is that we broke yet another camera! Our cannon powershot sd500 that had a super awesome underwater case we could take scuba diving broke. The pathetic thing is, it was the 2nd time that happened to us. The first one broke in exactly the same way, but we bought another one (used, they're not still made) because only that model fits the case. Turns out, it's an extremely common problem and the camera is now a pile of junk.

So we bought a waterproof, shock resistant, compact little olympus.. we'll see how that goes. Dan was hit by enough water to take down a lesser camera, so so far so good.

And in the spirit of carbon offsets, we skipped a couple showers and I watered the plants with runoff I saved in a bucket. Sadly, the water made it's way into some areas that are now releasing that not quite forgotten rats nest smell, but at least no one will notice the not showering thing..

The Countdown's On!

It's been a busy week.. Dan was out of town for a few days so I went and hung curtains at the house. It's a little ridiculous, what with the gaping holes in the walls and floor.. but it definitely makes it a little homier.

We have a little bit of a kitchen, too! I picked up a couple little ikea-type counters, and look at our fancy new fridge! It keeps things so cold I could barely drink the water that's in there!



We also got about half our garage and most of our halloween stuff packed into a 20' shipping container, which is in storage for several months. We'll have it delivered to our new house after the foundation is done.. if that ever gets started..


Today was chock full of little things that need to be done before we move in less than a week! I setup our shade structure, which is a 10' x 20' temporary garage. Dan replaced 3 of the rotted, broken treads on the back stairs which crumbled in his hands when he was pulling them up.

Then we tackled the (insanely shallow!) water main that got pulled up during the regrading of the yard. This is Dan reading the directions on the fancy fitting we got so there would be no soldering required.




Next, it was back inside to replace the wax ring on the one remaining toilet, which has been showering water into the basement every time it's flushed. Unfortunately, once we got the toilet up we could see that there no flange -- the wax ring and toilet were sitting right on the subfloor.. which might explain why the room smelled so much like urine (and not the rodent variety). The wood doesn't seem to be too rotted, so tomorrow we'll pick up a flange and some new closet bolts (the old ones were rusted down to almost nothing) and put it all back together.

Then, while I was scraping up what was left of the nasty linoleum tile in the bathroom, Dan got started on the gaping-hole-in-the-floor problem. Without a joist underneath, this won't hold our weight, but it'll keep our punk cats from jumping down into the basement. We're a little worried about them jumping/climbing up the chimney shaft to the top floor, which is definitely not kitty-ready.

Last, but not least, we made a big batch of bleach/vinegar oxidizing solution and Dan sprayed the few still-smelly spots and I scrubbed up a bit of the dust left from the tearing out of the chimney. We'll be back bright and early tomorrow to do the last daylight work before we move in!

Rats!!! Or Yay!!!!! Our Dream Home

This post is all about rats. More specifically all the dang rats nests we've been cleaning up lately. We have been cleaning the heck out of the house for the last couple of weekends. After the weekend of the floor scrubber we were totally convinced that the place would not stink anymore.....dang were we wrong. We've gutted the top floor and soaked it with the oxidizing solution. We've gutted the bottom floor and soaked it with the oxidizing solution. Both top and bottom floor smell fine absolutely no trace of rat urine stink. The middle floor (the floor where we are going to live) still stinks!!!! Well, not the back half of the floor, the kitchen and bedroom and sunroom smell fine but the entryway and front two rooms still reek!!!
We have to be moved into this place by the end of June and we are getting a bit discouraged. I unfortunately have a very sensitive nose so its my job to sniff out the stank. My nose was telling me that the stench was coming from behind the walls in the the middle room....this was the room that was the kitchen and had all the food and consequently all the rats!!!!


The main stench was coming from behind the wall where the sink was. A couple of taps of the hammer and this is what I found...
Here's the rats nest I found in the wall next to the sink. That's chip board behind it and its absolutely soaked with rat urine!! Yay!!!!!!!!
That black thing in the corner is a dead mumified rat!!! Yay double G's, thanks for poisoning them!!!

Another stud bay filled with ratty love. Here's a question for y'all. Why, why, why in the world would they put fiberglass insulation in the interior walls in the house? It's just fricken made for rats, and oh does it soak up the urine.

This is the coolest spider I've ever seen. Actually there were a bunch of them living in the walls...This thing had a huge purple pearlescent rear end. They must of been feasting on all the blowflies (they eat dead stuff) that were hatching out of all the dead poisoned rats...Wow, now I'm grossing myself out. Yay, our dream house....


Here's something that I thought was interesting. That looped wire here in this pic is LIVE!!! Just sitting there in the wall next to the chimney with no flashing. Probably got wet every time it rained!!
A major stench was coming from the area of the fire place. We are having it torn down anyways so I opened the walls up to see what I could see.


Here's a close up of the live wire. Wanna know how I know its live?? It sizzled when I got it wet with he oxidizing solution!!! Yay, what fun....in our dream home....

So, way up in in the corner of the chimney chase I spy this bit of frelling fiberglass insulation. The stench of this area was really, really, really strong....
So what do I do?? The rocket surgeon that I am?? I reach up right over my head and pull it down!!!
It was a huge rats nest with at least one dead rat in it!!! It rained rat poop on me for like 2 hours!!! (it seemed that way anyways!!) Here's a shot of the poop that rained down on the fireplace! Man it stinks in there... I think actually the bricks have soaked up ten years of rat pee and stink also!! Can't wait for them to be gone!


Remember that shot from above of behind the sink area? Well, I went a little crazy and knocked out some more drywall. This entire wall was one giant rats nest...smelled really fabulous also....yay, our dream home...


Here's the rest of the wall opened up. See the insulation that looks okay in the picture? Well it's not. The rats were running up the lathe wall behind it and had chewed out little vertical way stations all along the route up. This giant vertical rat highrise ran all the way to the ceiling joists where they chewed out the blocking and were expanding horizontally into the floor joist bays...

I bagged up all the drywall and insulation and rats nest nastyness into countless contractor bags. I cleaned up the joists with the vacuum and then it was time to hit the entire area with the oxidizing solution.

Here's me soaking the framing with the solution. I have to wear a vapor respirator and goggles cause the stuff is so nasty. I think I'm getting blonder the more I use it...I can tell when I'm hitting a juicy part cause the solution foams up a bit when its oxidizing something. I had to soak this entire wall and the chimney chase and it still stunk the next day. Today I resoaked the entire mess and I hope that when we next go back to the house it smells better. I'm going to wait till after the chimney comes down before I start to get seriously bummed about the stink. I just keep repeating to myself, ' The stink will go away with the chimney!!' Or at least it will be easier to spray way up inside the chimney chase when its empty.

Why oh why did they insulate the hell out of the interior walls of this house?? If our child ever wants a pet rat I'm going to make them read this blog!!! Because I tell you what, that ain't a gonna happen.

The bleeding walls of DOOM

One thing that's making scrubbing the walls a little extra interesting and creepy, is that in places where the glossy white paint has chipped off, the paint underneath is completely water soluble. I've never seen anything like it.. we've got green and we've got red, and if it gets the slightest bit wet it just comes right up.

I finally figured out that although scrubbing it with a brush makes a giant mess, it sticks pretty well to a sponge.. The sponge gets quite gorey and mostly disintegrates after a few minutes, but eventually the paint comes entirely up. It seems to be painted right on the plaster, so I'm concerned that it's some sort of sealant or protectant. Of course, running right off at the touch of a drop of water doesn't make for a very effective sealant.. so I'm more curious than worried.

Plus, it's a great horror scene mid-cleaning:

Before
Here you can see some nice detail on the rat tracks at the top of the baseboard. And then the rat tracks tinged with red where their little dirty feet trailed through the red paint

During
My personal favorite.. nice and dramatic!

After
Clean enough to eat off?

Back to cleaning.. really, I mean it this time

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. We've been a little busy this month.. both of us traveling for work, putting on a benefit, getting our house ready to sell, x-raying injured backs.. We've got a month to get Chez Neumansky habitable, and get everything we own out of our old place.

So we're buckling down and getting back to work. Last time we tried to scrub the floors with a deck brush and had bucket after bucket of filthy water, we wondered if there was some tool that could result in floors that we might consider touching with bare feet, and hopefully take the back-breaking effort out of the process. Sure enough, a few minutes online and what did we find but a floor-scrubber?! It's right there in the name!

We rented one this morning and scrubbed all the floors on the main level of the house. Ideally, the scrubber would've sprayed cleaning solution and sucked up the dirty water.. but the one we got wasn't that fancy. We poured our bleach/vinegar solution on the floor, scrubbed it, and vacuumed up what was left. Then we took a pass with a mop with clean water. I'm not planning on tiptoeing around barefoot just yet, but it's much better!

I think it might be time to setup an account with the trash folks.. our recycling bin is getting pretty full!

back to work

After a weekend off for a business meeting, and whole day off for a wedding (we slept in.. it was as great as I remembered sleep being!), today it was back to the cleaning.



Dan decided to take care of the stench in the room that had been used as a kitchen -- no amount of bleach/vinegar was going to help as long as the rats nest was still behind the wall.

This is an interior wall, so we're not sure why it was insulated, unless it was just to give the rats a cush life.. this is what all the joist bays have looked like ->

He filled 2 garbage bags full of rats nest.. and a couple rats

/shiver

He also disturbed a nest of spiders that are much bigger than anything I want living with us.. They all got scooped out with the insulation and debris (I hope! at least that's what he told me..)

We have plans back from the engineer, but there are a few problems with them.. so we're still not ready to start on the foundation.

48 days 'till our first night there!

and still more cleaning..

But today, we had both the inside AND the outside getting clean.

Seriously, every inch of the house needs to be scrubbed. It was so warm today, we cut loose the giant extension ladder that was bolted to the house and Dan got to work with our friend's power washer.

I know I've posted pictures from the last time we used it, but it's amazing! I couldn't take pix of Dan cleaning the very top because it was really scary with him all the way up there.. but it's so impressive I had to document it.

The fish scale shingles didn't clean up quite as well as the fascia board.. and some of the paint flecked off, especially on the curved moulding.. but the combination of the magic pressure washer and an obviously really good paint job 30 years ago is really impressive. Our neighbor told us it looked like we'd slapped on a coat of paint!

The inside is getting sparkly clean too, but it's a slightly less dramatic clean than the outside, if only because you can't see the filth quite as close to the sparkling white.

This is the room that will be our bedroom soon, and will be the guest room as soon as our fabulous master suite is done.

The closet seems to be the only part of the house that doesn't have glossy paint, so a lot of it washed right off. It's obviously not original to the house, but it's a relatively giant (double-decker!) closet.. which is good because it's now the only one in the house. If we want any more closets, we have to build them.

This is the room that was originally, and will be our, kitchen. A previous owner had moved the kitchen into the dining room, which was going to perfect because we could use that until we finished the new one. But, as you can see here, there's not enough bleach on the planet to have gotten that room clean enough to prepare food in.

I'm also going to have to make screens for every window in the house. There don't seem to be any more flies breeding in the house, but every time we open a window it only takes a few minutes before they come flying in. They're going to kick me out of the vegetarians' club for that flypaper.. but I'm willing to risk it for a house free of swarming insects.. and rodents, for that matter.

The cleaning is pretty slow going.. we still have the whole entryway, stairs and hallway, and all the floors. But we can finally open and close all the windows in the house without gloves on, and that's downright luxurious!

It's like swimming all day!

..or at least, that's a nicer memory to go with the feeling of taking a deep breath and having your lungs have a little more chlorine in them than they should..
It's been a LOT of scrubbing over at the ol' chez neumansky.. The deadline for us moving in is looming, and every single inch of the main floor and stairway needs to be scrubbed with bleach before that happens.

As it turns out, vinyl windows and high-gloss white latex paint have a lot in common.. I wouldn't choose either, but they really do clean up well! One of 2 non-original windows in the house is a vinyl slider in the sunroom (which would've originally been a porch, so there wouldn't've been a window there 'till it was closed in) and it looks like new!

We're headed back over now for an exciting day of - you guessed it - scrubbing! I'll take some progress pix today, but I wanted to post a little something since I've been pretty remiss with the posting since our computer gave up the ghost.

late posts, bona fide anniversaries, and sap..

sorry nothing got posted this weekend..

Saturday we cleaned and got the last bits of debris out from the first floor, plus Dan sprayed another coat of magic bleach/vinegar solution on the few spots that still smelled. I spent the whole day scrubbing the room that is soon to be our bedroom.. I got everywhere but the closet, which I'm afraid of.. but after vacuuming up more rat poop and spider egg sacs than I care to think about, I realized that was going to a project unto itself.
Plus, we had to knock of work early to go down the street to CasaDecrepit for a grand tour, plenty of inspiration, good food, and sake flown in fresh from Japan!

We came home from a lovely evening to a dead hard drive.. Sunday we got the computer to start up, but we need to take the dead drive to a doctor to try to recover all our files.. like all the houseplans.
And then I'll start practising what I constantly preach about backing up files!

The rest of Sunday was spent getting our old place ready to sell. A friend of ours is going to buy it - which is fantastic for so many reasons: We can come to parties in our dreamy backyard AND go home to sleep while someone else cleans up! We can come visit (and probably take care of for awhile) all the fish. We can sell it to him for much less than it's worth and still walk away with more than we would've if we had to pay commission to 2 realtors. And we don't have go through the whole staging/open house/is-it-going-to-sell-today? hassle.
All around, very exciting.

And finally, anyone reading for more than a week knows that we like to celebrate anniversaries to an admittedly corny extent.. well, today is officially the first one that is universally accepted as legitimate: Dan and I were married a year ago today, exactly 7 years after our first date.

I can't imagine life without him, I'm amazed at the things we've accomplished together, and I'm looking forward to all that's still to come.

We're planning on moving into our new house at the end of May, so for the next 100 years or so, that's where we'll be.

/sap

Spring cleaning

Taking things apart to reuse sure does take a lot longer than plowing a sledgehammer through the wall.. especially with the great craftsmanship that seems to have gone into everything here. Getting the tongue and groove out of the kitchen/bathroom has been like a scavenger hunt for which piece (wall, ceiling, bisecting wall) is on top, and for where the nails are. There is one beefy nail in the middle of each piece, at an angle into the board - this way the nail is hidden when the next board is put in place. Which looks great, but it's impossible to get the nail out without damaging the surrounding board.. I've got it down now, so the damage is minimal, and I think we'll just have a nice piece of molding running up the middle of the refinished boards.
The bigger problem is the nails on the end, which are about 50% face nailed and 50% nailed through the tongue. The wood is old and brittle, and they're nailed so close to the end, that I'm not having much luck at all..

I am, however, getting very good at pulling out toilets.. We had someone renovating a 1920's house come and pick up the cool old toilet from the garage. It still had all it's original copper fittings and float, which need a little refreshing, but will be gorgeous when it's all cleaned up.

And we gave the sinks away yesterday, so all the big stinky things are gone! I know I keep saying this, but it really does smell much better.

After we'd cleaned up for the day, Dan came though with the sprayer of magic bleach/vinegar solution and sprayed all the newly opened up walls, and everywhere that still didn't smell so fresh.

Dan's meeting with the engineer and the foundation contractor tomorrow morning, so hopefully we can get that work started soon!