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unicorndukeSpent the day at the house today. Met with F's BIL yesterday to see what he thought about stuff, he has more handy house experience out of necessity and he was confident that we could do a bunch of things relatively easily.
So today, I brought another load of stuff down, unloaded it and then F and I headed over to the store to pick up our flooring! Which came in three days before the estimated arrival date. Cool! Checked in at the desk, they said to meet them at the contractor area because they needed the lift. The guy made it sound like it was a lot of flooring and tentatively asked what kind of vehicle I had. I was amused, I had cleaned out my truck bed and everything. But clearly people show up to pick up large orders with idek tiny cars or something.
It took a little bit for them to arrive, F and I hung out and chatted while we waited and then they brought out....a half filled pallet of flooring. It was all of our flooring but it was a hilariously small palletfull. It wasn't even taller than the sides of the truck bed and my truck is pretty small. They were heavy, it definitely made my truck sink a bit but not badly. We got 18 cases of flooring and each case was in the 30-40 pound range. Drove home and unloaded them. We had also picked up the carpenter pliers (thank yougraydon ! it was super helpful) and drop cloths.
We drained the first floor loop into a 5 gallon bucket and we should have probably gotten a slightly shorter hose while we were at the store but through the power of lifting the hose above our heads to drain the water, it went fine. The professionals that installed the heater boiler did a really good job, it had easy valve shutoffs and a drain. Clearly they didn't look at any other piping
Got the trusty hacksaw and started sawing. It was easy and went fine! We took them down and stored them in the finished part of the basement because it was where we had the space. The long section was the most difficult one to get in there because it was three sections total and we didn't want to do soldering copper pipes for the first time right next to a wood wall. Basically I made four cuts, two where the system went into the basement but high enough that there was plenty of space to work with later and two at the corners of the room to end up with three different sections with six total small sections.
We will probably disconnect and reconnect all of the sections from each other before we reinstall them into their place because it seems like the people who installed the whole system and patched it multiple times were not very good at it. So better to double check all the connections. We'll do the connectors and elbows with pex plastic because it's easier.
We paused for lunch and chatted a bunch. Also got on the topic of drinking directly out of containers and we determined that we should just label things because we both drink directly out of containers lmao
After lunch I had Fun With Crowbars and by fun I mean, lots of swearing. Most of the back plates of the heating unit came off pretty well if requiring both crowbar and carpenter pliers. Except the second to last one which had a 3" spiral shank nail used to hold it on. What the frick. I could not get that removed. However, there was a gap between the wall and the back of the board (mounting board) that the back plate was attached to. So I used the hack saw. We will need to cut it again and drive it further into the wall but that was a solid 15 minutes for one nail.
As I was doing this, F was picking up the back plates, cleaning them off, labeling them with their numbers so we know where all the parts of the baseboard heaters go in order around the room and moving them down to the basement and then cleaning up the nails I was just dropping in piles, she did the same with the mounting boards and was just walking around pulling nails out of the walls. So many nails holy crap.
I poked at the floor outlets briefly and they are mounted horizontally in a metal housing that covers the sides and top and I will need to unbolt them from the basement ceiling because they are bolted through the floor with the electrical fed in after. womp womp. So I will need to detatch the wires from the plug plates or cut the wires, remove the bolts, ???, profit, extend the wires up and put new outlets in somehow, idek that set of outlets has a short somewhere that I need to go looking for so we aren't even using it. It hasn't tripped the breaker but it will sometimes turn on whatever we plug in for just a second so it's probably a bad wire or neutral and I need to wander around with a multimeter and doing some wire following. Some of the outdoor lights also do that. Later fun.
Then I started prying the mounting boards off. They put them all in with finish nails driven really deep. That required some creative prying and sawing because they were behind the floor outlets and there wasn't quite enough room to get the bottom nails released from the wood by just pulling the wood forward. So I pried it forward enough that the top nails would clear the wood and the bottom ones would be half out and then saw the bottom ones to release the board.
Then we discovered that those mounting boards were not flush to the log wall like I had thought they had done. They were actually attached to small boards that were used as spacers behind them. And the empty space had become a mouse highway. There was also a big insulation nest. It didn't look recent but it was disgusting. I started on the spacer boards which were a mixture of boards and definitely just whatever wood they had laying around and found out that this was where all the 3" spiral shank nails were from. So I got two of the small boards out before we quit for the day.
The game plan is for me to come Saturday (F has work), pry more things out, vacuum and clean up, lay out the drop cloths over everything and then move in on Sunday. I've been taking stuff down every time I go and I think if I do a load Saturday, I can take Mara and the last few things on Sunday. And do nothing else that day. But moving in will make it easier to fit in an hour or two of work on something and not require 2.5 hours of extra driving and then I can start sorting and unpacking things. F hasn't set a moving date yet and there's no issues with that other than the rebuild of the interior two stairs which needs to be completed before we can lay the final flooring.
Making progress!!!
So today, I brought another load of stuff down, unloaded it and then F and I headed over to the store to pick up our flooring! Which came in three days before the estimated arrival date. Cool! Checked in at the desk, they said to meet them at the contractor area because they needed the lift. The guy made it sound like it was a lot of flooring and tentatively asked what kind of vehicle I had. I was amused, I had cleaned out my truck bed and everything. But clearly people show up to pick up large orders with idek tiny cars or something.
It took a little bit for them to arrive, F and I hung out and chatted while we waited and then they brought out....a half filled pallet of flooring. It was all of our flooring but it was a hilariously small palletfull. It wasn't even taller than the sides of the truck bed and my truck is pretty small. They were heavy, it definitely made my truck sink a bit but not badly. We got 18 cases of flooring and each case was in the 30-40 pound range. Drove home and unloaded them. We had also picked up the carpenter pliers (thank you
graydon ! it was super helpful) and drop cloths.We drained the first floor loop into a 5 gallon bucket and we should have probably gotten a slightly shorter hose while we were at the store but through the power of lifting the hose above our heads to drain the water, it went fine. The professionals that installed the heater boiler did a really good job, it had easy valve shutoffs and a drain. Clearly they didn't look at any other piping
Got the trusty hacksaw and started sawing. It was easy and went fine! We took them down and stored them in the finished part of the basement because it was where we had the space. The long section was the most difficult one to get in there because it was three sections total and we didn't want to do soldering copper pipes for the first time right next to a wood wall. Basically I made four cuts, two where the system went into the basement but high enough that there was plenty of space to work with later and two at the corners of the room to end up with three different sections with six total small sections.
We will probably disconnect and reconnect all of the sections from each other before we reinstall them into their place because it seems like the people who installed the whole system and patched it multiple times were not very good at it. So better to double check all the connections. We'll do the connectors and elbows with pex plastic because it's easier.
We paused for lunch and chatted a bunch. Also got on the topic of drinking directly out of containers and we determined that we should just label things because we both drink directly out of containers lmao
After lunch I had Fun With Crowbars and by fun I mean, lots of swearing. Most of the back plates of the heating unit came off pretty well if requiring both crowbar and carpenter pliers. Except the second to last one which had a 3" spiral shank nail used to hold it on. What the frick. I could not get that removed. However, there was a gap between the wall and the back of the board (mounting board) that the back plate was attached to. So I used the hack saw. We will need to cut it again and drive it further into the wall but that was a solid 15 minutes for one nail.
As I was doing this, F was picking up the back plates, cleaning them off, labeling them with their numbers so we know where all the parts of the baseboard heaters go in order around the room and moving them down to the basement and then cleaning up the nails I was just dropping in piles, she did the same with the mounting boards and was just walking around pulling nails out of the walls. So many nails holy crap.
I poked at the floor outlets briefly and they are mounted horizontally in a metal housing that covers the sides and top and I will need to unbolt them from the basement ceiling because they are bolted through the floor with the electrical fed in after. womp womp. So I will need to detatch the wires from the plug plates or cut the wires, remove the bolts, ???, profit, extend the wires up and put new outlets in somehow, idek that set of outlets has a short somewhere that I need to go looking for so we aren't even using it. It hasn't tripped the breaker but it will sometimes turn on whatever we plug in for just a second so it's probably a bad wire or neutral and I need to wander around with a multimeter and doing some wire following. Some of the outdoor lights also do that. Later fun.
Then I started prying the mounting boards off. They put them all in with finish nails driven really deep. That required some creative prying and sawing because they were behind the floor outlets and there wasn't quite enough room to get the bottom nails released from the wood by just pulling the wood forward. So I pried it forward enough that the top nails would clear the wood and the bottom ones would be half out and then saw the bottom ones to release the board.
Then we discovered that those mounting boards were not flush to the log wall like I had thought they had done. They were actually attached to small boards that were used as spacers behind them. And the empty space had become a mouse highway. There was also a big insulation nest. It didn't look recent but it was disgusting. I started on the spacer boards which were a mixture of boards and definitely just whatever wood they had laying around and found out that this was where all the 3" spiral shank nails were from. So I got two of the small boards out before we quit for the day.
The game plan is for me to come Saturday (F has work), pry more things out, vacuum and clean up, lay out the drop cloths over everything and then move in on Sunday. I've been taking stuff down every time I go and I think if I do a load Saturday, I can take Mara and the last few things on Sunday. And do nothing else that day. But moving in will make it easier to fit in an hour or two of work on something and not require 2.5 hours of extra driving and then I can start sorting and unpacking things. F hasn't set a moving date yet and there's no issues with that other than the rebuild of the interior two stairs which needs to be completed before we can lay the final flooring.
Making progress!!!
