Brrr.

When the Mass Save Energy guy came out, I made a point about asking about the windows because they are kind of crap. Sure, they keep the weather out, but not much more than that. I could tell by the amount of masking tape Ms Mary had gobbed on the frames that there are issues. Energy Guy said that there were loan programs, but not much more - Mass Save doesn't deal with windows, really.

Well, the weather has gotten downright chilly. With the temperatures plunging into the negatives last night, I set about turning the house into a cave, hanging blankets over windows that didn't have roller shade, and even over some that did. In the kitchen, one of the worst offenders is over the kitchen sink. The window well is about 10" deep, so I took a tension rod and put a folded fleece blanket over the opening. It's not air tight at all, as you can see from the line of light coming over the top. In some places it's only one thin layer deep, wehre you see it's lighter.

Very fashionable, thanks to my dear friend Monique.

My indoor/outdoor thermometer lives on that shelf, so I can see the temps when I'm doing the dishes. It's where my parents have theirs, so it's a familiar location. This morning, I pulled back the leopard print to see what it was outside.

34.2* inside, -7* outside.
I didn't bother looking for the night time lows.

Please, tell me again about how double paned windows are better simply by the virtue of being double paned? 
Granted, I keep the house at 60 at night. But that's 34.2* in my house. Right above the sink, with pipes and stuff that you do NOT want freezing. I left the faucet dripping last night, and dripping today while I'm gone.

In other news, the breakdown of mold men looks like:
#1 - $1700 (estimate)
#2 - 3900 (quote)
#3 - no show
#4 - $1700 (estimate)

Gutter guys looks like:
#1 - $975 (quote)
#2 - $930 (estimate)
#3 - comes on 2/11 at 10 am

Now there's a roofer in play. He's going to come out when he can actually see my roof (not just snow) and not damage anything when he goes up there. Including himself. I find this approach exceedingly reasonable.

Tales of the Mold Men (and gutter guys)

Not much fun to report. Had two more quotes scheduled from mold mitigation outfits this morning. One was a no-show. The other was nice enough. We'll see where their quote nets out against the others.
After the mold men I met with a gutter guy. Also nice enough (and on time) - his quote came in at $975 to do the two long sides of the house and fix one of the short pitches. Probably very much worth the money.
Talked to Wayne the Electrician last night. While he'd have no problem taking my money and putting in powered vent fans, he suggested talking to some roof guys about ventilation first. Snaking power through this type of old house is not easy, so it would mean running conduit up the outside of the house. Not pretty.
So more phone calls. With more contractors. Half the time I don't know who to believe. Who's going to do it right? Who's just conning me? At what point do I write the checks and hope people don't suck? If I spend every minute second guessing every contractor, I'll be old and grey and nothing will have gotten done.
Or I have to start taking classes in all of these skills, and I'll be old and grey and only half of everything will be done.

One thing I did accomplish for short money was ordering and setting out a long-acting radon detector. On 1/1/20 I'll send this little puppy back to the lab and it will be able to tell me variations over the year.

Radon meter. Can't be near windows or doors, and must be at least 2' off the ground.

This weekend will hopefully see more progress cleaning the basement.

Right now the list of things that sort of need to happen in a rough list of how:
• Gutters
• Order a few yards of Rip Rap to stuff the holes in the foundation
• Pull dirt and organic materials away from foundation
• Repoint foundation
• Hit sills with Boracare
• Get sump pump installed
• Talk to roofers - deal with vents?
• Get mold dealt with
• Get insulation installed

If my income holds out, hopefully by this time next year.
Time will tell.

Bit of a pause...

My sister wanted help with the cattle for the weekend, so there was no work on the house.
A tiny sea of fuzzy cow butts though. No one wanted to pose for good pictures when there was already hay in the feeder.

Winter Coats

More mold quotes tomorrow, and possibly a gutter quote.

Mold, it's not just for old bread.

Entertained two different mold remediation contractors yesterday. It is confirmed - the attic is hosting a not-inconsiderable amount of mold.
Come to find out, there's a huge disparity on just what exactly constitutes "mold remediation". One outfit will clean it and then paint over it. The other outfit will clean it, and then fix the ventilation that let to the problem in the first place. I'm sure there's going to be lots of dollar signs involved in either. I've got a few more concerns coming out next Tuesday to give me their two cents. I feel like I have to understand what all my options are, and these two original outfits feel light years apart.

Last night the deep freeze broke, and everything started to melt. On one hand, that's awesome, because I might get the rest of my driveway back. (I only shoveled half.) On the other hand, now I know exactly where the water is getting into the basement (and evaporating, sending moisture up into the attic, where it allows the mold to grow.) It seems that the gutter downspout extenders have done the trick on the south side of the house, but the east and north need some attention. Gutters will have to be added. On a whim, I emailed a local place to see if they can come give me a quote next Tuesday while the other mold people are here. Then I can decide if it's worth doing myself or paying someone else to do it.

Onward.

Found a use for those hot air vents.

Still messing with hardware

There's just a few bits of hardware left on the first floor that haven't been cleaned. One was on the office door in the front, and one was on the door between the kitchen and the living room.
I'm pretty sure the kitchen door is from the first iteration of the house, and I'll have a whole post on it later.
The door to the office is giving me fits. It's also one of the older doors, I think. It's not as ornate as the later door hardware. Many of the screws are frozen, and one even just fell out, taking a chunk of door with it. I've tried stripper and scraping. I've hit it with penetrant to break the screws free, but to no avail. Two of the lock escutcheons just will not budge.
I was able to get the door knob plates off though. Nothing fancy, just iron, I think. But they have these four little pins on the back of them. I think the idea was that the little pins would hold them to the wood better once they were screwed down.

Two screw holes. Four pins.

That's a great theory.
In practice, if those little plates even get a little loose, they turn into spinning saw blades. This is what it does to the door.

Looks like tiny beavers lived back there for the last hundred years.

This door does have a Corbin mortise lock, much newer than the other hardware on the door. I opened it up, cleaned and oiled everything and got the lock moving, but I don't have a key for this one either. I found it in a 1941 PF Corbin catalog:

"Good buildings deserve good hardware."

As Ian is fond of saying "Things were done, no one was spared." I think this door is a collection of all the left overs. It's the only door in the house where the lock escutcheons don't match, and the door knobs are brown, not black.

Swirly. Pretty in the light, but a little scuffed up.

I hit that door knob plate with some Gibb's so it would stop rusting. I guess I'll drill off the lock escutcheons tonight so I can clean them and finally call this one done. When I sand down the door this summer, this one is going to need wood filler in those chewed up areas. I might consider filing the teeth off the back of the knob plates too.

An Experiment

After the first pass of shoveling part of the driveway (a snow blower is going to be necessary long-term) I returned to the house to try out a project.
The windows in this house are not great. Sure, they are double paned, but that means diddly when you can see daylight through the seams in the vinyl. I do not have money for all new windows at this point, and I haven't had the time to make exterior storms. I hate the window plastic sheeting because the double sided tape either leaves an awful sticky residue on the paint, or rips the paint off entirely.
I found these plans at the Island Institute website. I don't have a table saw to rip down 2x4's, so I wandered the molding section and came up with some small rectangular stock that I hoped would work.

Dining room will have to do for a shop.

I made the first one for the dining room window, since it's the easiest to access. Things I needed for this were: measuring tape, drill, handsaw, hair dryer, narrow wood, screws, wood glue, double sided tape, plastic shrink film, and some weatherstripping.
The small stock was good, because it flexed a little to accommodate these not-square windows. But the problem was it flexed over long spans, just under the pressure of the plastic film, bowing it in from the edges.

You can see the bow at the top of this on in the dining room.

I had enough material to make a larger one for the room I'm using as a bedroom.

The center is offset to allow for the screws. Should have just been a through pin.
I measured half a dozen times, and there's still a gap at the top.

So things I learned -
A) These aren't that hard to make, but I need bigger stock (and a better place to work.) There's only one screw in each joint, and that make it so that everything wanted to spin.
B) These can't be made too tight - they need wiggle room to get in. There's where the foam weatherstripping comes in to take up the gap. (Though not as big a gap as I somehow wound up with on the second one.)

I'm pleased that these could be removed and reused, rather than all that plastic sheeting winding up in a landfill.

Snowstorm Prep

We're supposed to be getting some sort of weather tonight, so I decided to do the most natural thing in the world - cut brush.
That's what you do, right? No? Must just be me then.

Blackberry and goldenrod, and leaves that haven't been raked in years.

It all started because I wanted to dig out a piece of siding that's fallen off the shed and get it inside so it didn't get damaged under the snow. One thing lead to another, and a few hours later, I've got two cleaner spaces.

The offending missing siding is now in the shed.

Both of the areas that are still full of leaves are some flavor of garden. The pile there in front of the shed is all the brush that was in them. From what I can tell, there's a lot of hosta at play, maybe some day lily. The blackberries may have been cultivated once upon a time, but they are everywhere, and thicker around than my thumb, with thorns to match. There's still a ton of it around, so I didn't feel bad whacking these back.That very large shrub still standing is part lilac, part bittersweet, part random saplings, and part poison ivy. It got a haircut back from the driveway, but it'll need more attention in the future. There's a knee-blowing hole just in front of the shrub mass that appears to be an unoccupied woodchuck burrow.

I walked down to the road to look at the walls (and get the mail) and started looking harder. There's a few areas of the wall that will need to be put back up, but there in the middle, what I thought was a stone slide? Not a tumbled down spot at all.

Stairs!
(Tumbling to the right that will need repair.)

Brick pavers leading from the road to the stairs!

After an expensive week of mean surprises, this was pretty cool to find. This will be really satisfying to bring back in the spring. Once the lilacs bloom, that whole thing is going to be cleaned out and pruned heavily. Then the wall can be tuned up.

The little things

I wasn't going to post about this, because it didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
I mentioned to Energy Audit Nick that this house just felt cold all the damned time. Part of that was me being paranoid about oil consumption and keeping the house at 60-62, but part of it wasn't. Even in the evenings when I'd tweak it up to a luxurious 65, it just always felt cold. I knew, sitting in the living room, with my hooded sweatshirt up, the cat on my lap, both of us under a blanket, it just wasn't that warm in here, though the thermostat was quite content that it was. Who was I to argue with the thermostat?
I submit to you evidence A: (It's not an 8x10 color glossy, but it'll do.)

The white spot on the wall is where the old thermostat lived.

See the hot air register on the floor in the lower left? The one blowing warm air conveniently at the thermostat? EA Nick suggested that if I move the thermostat away from a hot air vent, perhaps things would get better. He would even give me a free programmable thermostat to replace the old manual up/down one.
Last night I decided to dive in and just do it. Electricity is one of my not-very-learned things, but this isn't that dangerous, as it's two AAA batteries talking to the furnace, not real house currant. I was just moving it to the other side of the wall/closet. (You'll recognize the closet as the one I wedged myself in to paint.)

Seemed appropriate to keep all the furnace switches clustered.
Also, that vent in the wall (lower right) is a cold air return.

 Found my 1" drill bit, popped a hole in the wall, mounted the backplate, linked a new bit of furnace wire to the old furnace wire with a significant amount of twisting and electrical tape, and viola. The furnace now talks to it's new upstairs brain.
I intend to run a new furnace wire all the way to the furnace in the future, now that I have a 49' roll of wire.  (You can't buy it any shorter than 50' from the Big Box stores.) The old wire was much lighter than this new wire.

While it's sill not warm in here, the heat is now significantly more even. That's a huge improvement. And now with the programmable thermostat, I don't have to worry about forgetting to set the heat back down when I go to bed.

Energy Audit Day

Yesterday was Energy Audit Day! It was kind of a bust.

I got some free LED light bulbs, a power strip, and a programmable thermostat for my time.
I was hoping for rebates to help with the very small pretty old fridge and the very old range.
Neither item qualified for anything.
I did qualify for a rebate on updating the furnace that is only a few years old, and the hot water tank that only about a year old, though! It all boiled down to how many kilowatt hours things use. Since small fridge is small; it uses about the same hours as a new normal size fridge, so they won't help me replace it. It's "efficient" because of it's size, not it's age. They don't even care about ranges, apparently. The furnace and hot water tank incentives are to jump to more efficient devices - heat pumps and the like.
Energy Guy Nick tested the furnace for CO2 and carbon monoxide, and it was well in the safety ranges. I did confirm that there is 0 insulation in the walls, and only about 6" of insulation in the roof. MassSave likes to see about 12". The cost to me after they do it was quite tolerable, and something I'm likely to do. They also wanted to see insulation on the rim joists, but with all the sill issues, that's not something I'm going to do.
What Nick did find that needs to be dealt with quite soon is mold in the attic. This didn't turn up on my home inspection, (there was staining, but it wasn't active then). MassSave won't put in insulation until it's cleaned up. This was pretty unexpected. Two quotes are being collected next Wednesday. I have no idea how much something like this is going to cost.

Nifty Particulates

One side benefit of getting the radon water handler installed is that they put a particulate filter in line before the radon bubbler. This serves to protect the radon system from building up too much sludge in it's big black box.
The filter housing is clear, so you can see when it needs changing. I don't use a ton of water, and the the well water is pretty clean, but it's neat to see what the filter is knocking out of the stream.

Neat.

 I'm sure much of it is blueish because that's the color of the PEX pipe that Radon Guy Dave used to zig zag all over my basement. (Blue = cold water.) Now that no one should be messing around with the pipes, it should sort it's self out. It will be interesting to watch over time, (but I was also the kid who really enjoyed sticking my head in the pond and watching the stuff under the water.)

What's Done is Done

The most expensive thing I've had to do to this house so far is also the least sexy thing to talk about and photograph.

Hrmph.

This fancy black tupper tub you see above is a well water radon mitigation unit. It basically takes the water from the well pump, bubbles it to jostle the radon out (radon wants to be in the air, not the water) and then blows the contaminated air out while pressurizing the water back to the house.
That black box, it's attached pipes and 3/4 a day's labor is $4500.

Double Hrrmph.

Here we see where the air vent exists the basement, through my plexiglass window, along with the air vent. That funny basketball sized thing on the pipe is a fan that is sucking the radon gas out from under my foundation through holes specially drilled and excavated to collect the radon gas before it passes through the cement into the basement air. This fancy contraption of PVC and fan was an additional $1400.
The nice man has to come back tomorrow and listen to the fan with me, because it's oddly loud in weird places in the house. Idling Train Engine Loud, at least to me. But I might be a bit oversensitive.

Here's where I'll make a note to myself to read all future quotes with a fine tooth comb. I went into this thinking that the total for the job was $4500, because the the number in bold at the bottom of the sheet next to the word "total" was $4500. I was pretty thrilled, until the nice man handed me the invoice. What I'd been looking at was the total for the Water section. There was no total for both Air and Water.
it's work I would have had to do anyway, but I wasn't emotionally prepared to lay it out right then. I'm really pretty angry at myself for missing it. It means that some other things I wanted to do sooner than later will now happen later.

One last insult to injury is that I'd just started considering getting a wood stove an tossing it on the unused chimney to get something resembling warmth in here.

Radon pipe, right in front of the chimney.

That idea was vetoed by the universe.

Not much fun

Even organization has to be done. Sunday was mostly getting pavers to build a shelf unit on, to get all the tools and boxes of chemicals (paint, putty, polish, etc) out of my living space.

Lowes buckets make awesome organizers.

I'm absolutely convinced at some point, that basement was utterly full of coal. In cleaning the walls, I've found it everywhere between the rocks here in the original part of the basement, from the bottom, all the way to the top course of stones.

One of the larger chunks, It really is pretty in the light.

I'm doing my part to sequester carbon by wedging it back in the gaps in the wall. It'll work fine as filler behind the mortar, I hope.

Basement Door

With one side insulated (through I think I'm going to put a sheet of foam board insulation over the top of the silver bubbles) I decided to fix the door. Everything's shifted, so the door was dragging when you opened it. I shimmed it up, filled the holes, redrilled for the hinge, primed, painted and gave it some new hardware, since the bolt that was there was useless.

Door before.

Filled in the holes with little bits of wood and wood glue.

Door after, a lovely "thunderstorm grey".

The door is slightly warped, so in order to seal it so that the draft was minimized, I've put a latch at the top and the bottom. I still need to figure out something to do for the gap at the top, and add some weatherstripping. It opens better and is much cleaner now.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning the foundation, preparing for the eventual re-pointing. The shop-vac has been absolutely key in getting in all the nooks and crannies. There's almost no original mortar left, but I did find this one piece left.

The only piece that I think features tooling.
Since new mortar won't stick to old mortar, it had to be removed.

Not sure if this was original mortar, or just left over plaster from when they were doing the walls upstairs.
The brown fuzzy stuff in the plaster is horsehair.