So the back door looked naked to me. I decided that I wanted to put a screen door up, since the weather is getting warmer and it’ll be nice to leave the door open to get some fresh air into the kitchen. I checked to see what Lowes had to offer and saw all sorts of doors to choose from. After some pondering, I decided to go with a storm door that also had a screen on it, instead of a simple screen door. A nice duel purpose door that will work nicely in the summer, as well as in the winter.

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So the guys who did one of the load bearing walls in the basement gave me a quote of $575 to do this one back wall. I had no intention of hiring them to do it, since I felt they didn’t do a good job with other basement work (detailed in other posts here), but I thought it would be interesting to find out how much they’d try and gouge me for.

This is what the corner wall looked like before. Pretty ratting with loose stones and lots of dirt, cobwebs, you name it.

This is what it looked like after. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It looks just as good, if not better than what the guys did on one wall.

Total cost? $9.69. Let me spell that out. Nine dollars, and sixty nine cents.

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I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that the guys who did the foundation work and house jacking in February (detailed here) were idiots. Considering that I forked over 3 grand for the work, which totally put me in the hole financially, makes it worse. Ahh my first rip off. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re shopping for a lot of things at lowes.com, it’s a good idea to write down what you have in your shopping list before you hit the checkout or update quantiles buttons. I tried to order quite a few things from there today and when I went to update the quantities, I got the following error on nearly everything in my cart:

ERROR
Your requested change of quantity for [thing I was trying to BUY] can not be fulfilled at this time and has been reset to a quantity of 0.

Gee, thanks a lot Lowes.com. Thanks for allowing me to waste a couple hours of my life going through your site selecting things I wanted to give you money for, only for your screwy system to tell me most of the items cannot be fulfilled, and then go ahead and CLEAR MY CART of those items without much of a warning. How about a friendlier error message? Not only is it annoying to have to go back through the entire site finding what I had so I could write it down and see if they might have the same things at a nearest store (or at Home Depot), it’s pretty rude.

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Check out this ugly door. That piece of crap was the side entry door (by the driveway). Chipping paint, cracked glass, split wood and all. It was one of the things on the list to get replaced, ASAP. This past winter, it would freeze up and not open at all. I would have to go out the back door, walk around to the side, and kick it in from the outside if I needed it open.

The door was replaced on March 10th 2005, by a nice guy named Steve who worked for the same company that did the insulation and window work.

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I asked the company who did the windows if they also installed doors. Sure enough they did and I got a brochure. I was originally going to only replace the horrid side entry door, but ones in the brochure looked good so I decided to go ahead and get the back one replaced as well. It was also on the fritz, although nowhere near as bad as the side door.

The sticker on the new doors.

A standard one-glass energy star door, which seems to be very popular around around here, was chosen. I figured it would be a good replacement for a similar one-glass door and be good for the view into the backyard during the summer.

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The house has 32 windows total. 31 of them were drafty old windows that look like they haven’t been replaced since the 80s…the 1880s. When I got an energy audit a few weeks ago, one of the things the guys said was a major cause of lost energy were the old windows which had no insulation value whatsoever. Apparently back in the day, they didn’t care since they used coal stoves and stuff which would keep a house pretty warm, despite the lack of little things like insulation and energy efficient windows.

Anyway, 30 brand new Alside Energy Star Double Hung Northern Zone Vinyl Replacement Windows with Low E/Argon Glass cost me $7,700. That comes out to exactly $259 each. Apparently when you buy that many, you get a discount since the guy who installed them said any price under $300 for these types of windows is a bargain. Especially considering a lot of the windows here were difference sizes and were all custom made to fit. The only two windows I didn’t want replaced were the one in the bathroom, which looks like someone already replaced with an energy efficient window in the 80s (1980s) and another window that is actually in a small closet that I want to knock out and board up.

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So the house is sinking in the middle, thanks to old crumbling foundation, strange cut beams and previous owners over the decades that never bothered to fix the problem correctly. There was an ad in the local paper about some guys that do foundation and house jacking work, so I called them up. A guy named Peter came out and took a look and basically told me what I already knew. I had problems.

1. Some of the support beams are sagging and leaning on pipes. Not good. The sagging beams were also causing big dips in the kitchen and dining room floors.

2. Crumbling load bearing wall in the middle of the house. Apparently the entire main beam of the house is right on top of it… This scared him the most.

Peter gave me a quote of $3,000 to fix everything and I said I’d let him know. Later that day, I called him back and said ok let’s do it. I considered trying to jack the house up myself, but since I didn’t know the first thing about it, I figured it was best left to the experts, to prevent totally wrecking things even more. He came back out with his business partner to take another look the following day and said they could start me the next week, on February 14th.

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The attic was also insulated during the two days of insulation work I got done on February 9th and 10th.

They did it on the first day, and it took about an hour to get it filled with new R-38 cellulose. One of the guys, a nice fella named Ron, climbed up there with a hose, crawled all the way to the front of the house (over 4 rooms). That’s an impressive feat in itself, considering the entry hatch is at the very back of the house and the attic is a tiny crawlspace.

Once he got up there, he started spraying and back up slowly until the entire thing was pretty much full. While he was doing that, some other guys were up on the roof installing new air vents.

Before

After:

Don’t you just feel warmer looking at that?

So I got an Energy Smart loan (read more about that here), and on February 9th 2005, the contractors I picked showed up bright and early at 9am with 2 straight trucks and a crew of 5 guys.

They started by checking the attic and basement, then went outside and drilled baseball-sized holes on the exterior walls. That didn’t look good, but apparently it’s how they do things now so the hoses can really get up in to the walls and blow in the insulation. I haven’t counted how many holes they drilled in total, and will probably never really know if I did since they removed some of the vinyl siding to get to the wall then put it back, but there was a lot of drilling and a lot of holes around spots of the house that isn’t covered by siding.

The way insulation is blown in is kind of neat. They just shove the hose into the hole as deep as possible, then turn it on. The stuff gets shot in and when it can’t go in anymore, the machine basically stops. Then they pull it out a little bit and it auto-starts and blows until it stops. Repeat over and over until the hose is completely out of the hole. Then they plug it up with some wood circles and put spackle over them.

The last place the blew the insulation in was the back of the house. There is a little patio back there that someone obviously added on probably 100 years ago. Behind the shelves, there were none of those old little holes indicating insulation had ever been blown in. They drilled, and sure enough, completely empty.

Amazing. Not a damn thing. You could see the back of the wall from the next room and a wire or two. Speaking of wires, Ron, one of the guys, is a master with the drill. He says lots of younger guys just ram it through when they’re making those holes but they really don’t need to because the drill does the work and there is a chance a wire could be back there. If you look closely at the image, you can see a wire right behind the hole. That was close.

So they stuck the hose into the drilled and got that empty wall filled. That should save a lot of energy alone! It took about a half hour top to bottom (big wall) before it filled up and they plugged and spackled the holes.

Overall, it took two days to blow the new insulation into the walls of the house. They were doing other stuff too so I don’t have exact calculations, but they were here for a total of 14 hours over two days. I thought it would take longer to do the exterior insulation, let alone the attic, basement crawlspace and all the weatherstripping. So that was pretty quick. The guys (Ron, Steve, Jason, another Steve and about 3 others who’s names I didn’t catch) are very good at what they do.