A Good, Old Fashioned Disaster

See, when things go wrong, it is you housebloggers that I think about. A couple weeks back, we had a nasty cold snap. It was below 25 degrees for about a week here in Arkansas. My renter was good and left the faucets dripping, but when it's that cold and the house doesn't have real insulation, it just isn't enough sometimes. Oh, and the renter wasn't home when this happened.

They discovered it when the neighbors called because they were concerned about the lake in the yard.


Note, the builders of this gem of a house decked the floors with chip-board. On the upside, this probably saved the whole house from flooding. Once the floors in the bedrooms were ruined, the water drained straight through it and into the crawlspace.

Some of the tear out heaped in the carport.



Condensation on the ceiling from all that lovely moisture.

Oh, and did I mention that our insurance doesn't cover this kind of damage. Driving rain? Fire? Tornado? Yes. Burst pipe in the bathroom? No.

So, this is all out of pocket (and being documented for a monster tax write-off next year). So far, all new plumbing, new bathtub, new sub-floors (approximately 400-500 square feet), new carpet, new vinyl, new drywall, three new doors, and . . . counting.

On the upside, this should all be finished next week because I hired the whole bleeding mess out. See! I learned something!

But plumbing is still the Devil.

Just Say No to Crack

Originally, all the Devil Queen's interior walls were covered in wallpaper glued to canvas tacked to the tongue-in-groove wall boards. After 100+ years of neglect, the wallpaper and canvas were in very sad shade, so we tore it all out.

The problem with this is that the tongue-in-groove walls were never intended to be finished walls. This means there are all sorts of fugly gaps were boards, corners, et cetera come together. Who cares about a snaggle-toothed 3/4" gap if it's going to be covered with wallpaper?

Well, now that the wallpaper is gone, I do.

Here is the big old nasty crack in the main hall.

Here's my freakish old-man looking hand for perspective. Look at that thing. If we hadn't filled the bugger with spray-foam you could nearly slip your whole hand into this gateway to the poisonous spider, fat wall-mice underworld. Yuck.

Here is the trim in place. It's a thin, 3/4" piece of cove trim from Lowes. I used 1 1/8" (I think) brads to nail it in place.

Here is a close-up shot. The wall boards are not level (vertically or horizontally), so there is still some visible crack. I will caulk the hell out of this and paint the trim blue to match the wall.

What is so sad about this who project is just how lazy I am. It took me all of 15 minutes to get this trim up and in place. This was mainly because I'd cut the trim to fit last year. If you're looking for way to make a 20-30 minute project last 4-6 months, I am your man.

Fuck me, I don't know which is worse, working on the house or making myself work on the house.

Making Fugly Fly, Part II

This problem gable is where Zombie Number 2 painted on the WRONG FUCKING COLOR. It was remedied by cleaning up the bottom edge of the overspray making a clean line of demarcation. Then, we could (semi) convincingly claim that we meant to do this and were planning to paint the rest of the house this way. Or, something. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's much better then before.