Aren Cambre’s Blog

A vacant house apparently breaks HVAC.

About 18 months ago, the blower motor conked out, allowing the compressor to run for who knows how long.

This time the thermostat got screwed up, running the heater for many hours. The heat was at 62, but the inside was probably 100 degrees before our house watcher discovered it.

I dashed home and swapped in a new thermostat.I hope for the best!

Looks like all our fishies survived. [CORRECTION: all three ghost shrimp and a Mickey Mouse fish died within 2 weeks. And the fish tank is now leaking.] I opened all windows in that room to introduce 32 degree air and threw a load of ice on top.  After 20 minutes, the water temp was still 87, so I threw another load of ice. Doesn’t this look weird?

I hate to think how much natural gas we churned through getting the house that hot on a 32 degree day.

[CORRECTION: I lost no prepaid domain registration time. Dreamhost's domain transfer requires purchase of a 1 year additional registration on top of existing registration. Existing registration time is retained.]

1and1.com lost my business.

Yesterday, that web host screwed up my hosting package, causing a multi-hour email and web outage.

Being sick of 1and1’s routine incompetence, I already plotted my escape. I changed settings so my domains would no longer auto-renew. I probably had $30-$35 of prepaid domain registration time left with the 6 domains I am keeping, so I figured I would keep them registered at 1and1 and transfer later.

Instead, 1and1 screwed up all my DNS settings and initiated a total package cancellation, causing a major service outage.

This was the last straw, so I expedited my move to Dreamhost.

I am almost running again. Let me know if you got any bounces on emails sent to me.

Even though Dreamhost has a mixed reputation, it can’t be worse than 1and1.com. Some of my web apps run noticably more quickly. And their support staff responded with a coherent answer. Wow!

Ta daaa!

The new floor color is amazing.

The den/living room ceiling is finished! Late week, it was taped, bedded, textured, and painted.

Here’s how it looked after the taping and bedding:

Then it was textured and painted:

Yay!

Did you notice that the plastic sheeting is down? The room still has no attic insulation, so we’re keeping it mostly closed off from the rest of the house. But we can at least go into the garage without going into the front yard.

All that’s left now is to sand and refinish the floors, install the blown in fiberglass attic insulation, and finish out the recessed lights.

Oh, and replace most of our furniture. Argh.

The drywall crew came out Wednesday morning and nailed up the ceiling!

I went ahead and let the contractor take care of the wallboard squares I cut out for the speaker wires and data cables:

Next step is for the paint guy to do the tape, bed, and texture job. After that’s done, I can remove the plastic sheeting separating those rooms from the rest of the house!

This update is delayed by the flu and a business trip

The carpenters ended up replacing almost all the joists:

You may notice the recessed lighting. We figured that since everything is apart anyway, we might as well get some recessed lights installed.

Here’s a view looking forward:

We got 6 lights total, all of which will be in the den area of this joint den/dining room.

Here’s a detail of one of the lights:

The sheetrock should go up this week.

Since everything is so exposed, I will run some data cables before the sheetrock goes up. My plans are:

• Two Cat 5e cables that will terminate right by the TV, anticipating future data use around the TV.
• A Cat 5e terminating around the dining room table on the other side of the room.
• A Cat 5e terminating near the couch which faces the TV.
• A Cat 5e cable that terminates outside the front porch and garage outdoors, both for possible PoE-driven security cameras.

The other end of these cables will terminate in a hallway closet.

I will punch the ends of these tables in the den/dining room, but I’ll leave them exposed for now in the closet.

Since last writing about my ceiling collapse, I’ve had a little progress.

I completely cleared out the room:

Looking backwards:

Notice the new joists? The restoration work has started! I signed the contract with the contractor 8 days ago. The carpenters replaced 5 joists that were obviously sagging, but in the process they found that several more joists have sags and that the stiff back is not really installed properly. They are coming back this week to replace the entire stiff back and replace about 8 more joists.

I put all the damaged furniture by the curb last night for heavy trash pickup:

It was all gone the next morning! I feel sorry for the dopes who will deal with the insulation.

I got that picture by setting the camera to ISO 80 and a 16 second exposure. No significant lighting faced the furniture, so I lit it up by waving a flashlight back and forth during the exposure.

I worked on the room with the collapsed ceiling today.

Here’s where I started:

After 5.75 hours of cleaning, here’s where I ended up:

Of course, there is no ceiling, so the insulation dust from the rest of the attic can still waft into the room. I still have to keep it sealed off from the rest of the house.

A helpful neighbor let me borrow his scoop shovel. I spent most the time just scooping all the insulation and sheetrock fragments into bags. This is the shovel on our couch:

The larger pieces of sheetrock are in three stacks.

About 20% of the ceiling was left. I knocked almost all of it down. It was behind the fan:

Here’s attic insulation where it belongs: on top of the remaining ceiling:

Even though our dining room table looks OK, it turns out the top layer is an imprint, so it’s not refurbishable:

If the table can be buffed, it may be salvageable. Otherwise, if it’s nicked and gouged, it’s not fixable.

I stuffed 28 42-gallon contractor bags:

It’ll take a while to get rid of those!

This roof vent’s squeaking is driving my wife nuts:

Without the ceiling and insulation, its squeaking is loud.

You may be wondering, “Aren, why are you doing this when the insurance company is paying to fix this?”

It turns out that the insurance company is cutting me a check for about 70% of its assessment of repairs. If I spend less than 70%, I can pocket the difference. The gap between 70% and 80% is my deductible, so I would pay that out of pocket. If I spend between 80% and 100%, the part they call “recoverable depreciation,” the insurance company will refund me for that part.

Ironically, this cost structure gives me incentive to hold the costs down for the insurer. If they had a rule whereby I had to hire a contractor, it’s likely they would spend all of the “recoverable depreciation” and then some.

I’ve run some numbers, and I think I can probably get the whole job done for around 35%-50% of estimated costs if I do it mostly myself and hire a handyman to help. That means I could pocket 20%-35% of the total
estimated costs and in fact pay no deductible.

If I do end up going with a contractor, then all this cleaning is for naught. But at least I have the peace of mind of knowing the room is somewhat clean!

More updates on the ceiling collapse.

Culprit

The ceiling collapse culprit may be more complicated than the short nails.

The house’s attic gable vents are above the den and the master bedroom. Coincidentally, the den’s ceiling collapsed, and the master bedroom has a slight ceiling sag. The insurance estimator theorized that some wind-driven high attic pressure plus the weight of the insulation plus improper nails may have caused the collapse.

The insurance estimator noticed a master bedroom ceiling sag, so he recommended that the insurance fix this by driving drywall screws into it and scraping and retexturing.

Whine

Today is the 7th day we’ve had no den and dining room. We are lucky since our house is still livable and functional.

The biggest inconvenience is losing 400 square feet.

The second biggest inconvenience is my skittishness about the plastic sheeting closing off the disaster area.

The closed room has three vents. Even though I shut them off, enough air leaks through to increase pressure in that room, causing the plastic sheeting to balloon out when the heater runs.

I have the sheeting held in place by 3″-4″ of that blue paint-safe tape, but I’m constantly afraid it will stop adhering and open up. If the heat turns on while it opens up, it will blow the insulation-laden air into the rest of the house.

In an abundance of caution, I turn the heat off when we leave and at night. My wife just loves those freezing cold mornings! :-)

The nice thing is if I open a window while the heater runs, the pressure differential sucks fresh air into the house. That’s a nice way to inject fresh air into this place!

No TV!

Our TV is sitting in the hallway–the ceiling collapsed while I rescued it–but the only cable connectors are in the den. (Shortly after moving in, I removed the cable connections from the other bedrooms–I feel very strongly against having TVs in bedrooms). Therefore, we’ve had no TV for a whole week. I love it! Can we have no TV forever? Please?

Some day I’ll write why I hate many TV programs.

Insurance

I hope to hear some kind of dollar amount from the adjuster early this week. The estimator made a mistake–ordered different resurfacing treatments for different parts of the wood floor of the closed off room–so that plus some other issues have been holding up the adjuster’s offer.

New Furniture

The inspector said our couch, love seat, dining room table set, and some less significant items are total losses. Apparently, it’s impossible to get the fine Rockwool particles out of the couches, and the cost of resurfacing the dining room table and its chairs exceeds the cost of a new set.

I am so glad I opted for the personal property replacement value coverage. The insurance company will cut me a check for these items’ depreciated values (i.e., garage sale values). Because of this extended coverage, we can buy new equivalents of these items and get reimbursed for the difference.

Upgrades

Since the entire ceiling is out, I’m seriously thinking of installing recessed lighting in the den. I’ll probably do it myself and ask the contractor to wait a day between demolition/cleanup and nailing up the new drywall.

The question is what kind of lighting to do? I only have 9′ ceilings in that main room, so I’m afraid traditional 6″ recessed lighting may look huge. Plus I don’t like how hot incandescents run; that room is already too warm in the summer.

I like the look of halogen recessed lighting, but some sites say these may be best for directional lighting. I may also look into dimmable compact fluorescent-based lights.

Mean Kitty

My younger cat Olivia, nicknamed “Mean Kitty” by my son, recently discovered how to shred furniture. Furniture shredding is unacceptable with new furniture, so I have a hard decision: get her declawed or give her away.

Even though anti-declaw arguments are exaggerated and full of holes (link), I am still uncomfortable with the procedure.

But even if I do it, I will have spent money on a kitty with a terribly defective personality. She is already reclusive, skittish, and dislikes my wife and son. She comes out only for me and only when I am in seated or lying down, and only when nobody else is around.

When she was a kitten, she was nice to everybody, and she wanted to sleep on me at night. I don’t know why she changed so dramatically!

Would she do better in a one person, no child household?

I hate giving up a pet, but I have a cat with a terribly defective personality occupying one of my two cat “slots.”

I don’t know what to do. If it has to come down to risking her being put down, I’ll probably keep her. But I may investigate placing her somewhere else.

A bidding contractor found the likely cause:

This is not a drywall fastener. It doesn’t even meet 1951 standards. This is some tiny 1″ nail. It may have had 1/2″ of wood engagement.

About all that was holding up the drywall was paint!