OMG… WTF?
Hi all. Another week, another set of huge questions about the house. And the dog. And life in general. Joy.
To be honest, though, the dog questions are still just that… questions. She’s still as stable as we can make her. There is another vet appointment this afternoon where we will hopefully get another round of good news about her hematocrit. And if that happens, we might be able to adjust her medications yet again. But all of that happens after this post goes up, so it’ll be next Friday before there’s more on that front. Or you can send me an email and ask at any time.
And of course it’s the house that is causing me to ask questions about life in general.
First, when the abatement ended last week, we were left with some serious issues relating to the floor in the laundry room:
What you see above is where the laundry sink (left) and the washer (right) used to be. They were on a tile floor, and the plywood that was under the tile was rotten. And the rot continued under the wall on the right in the photo above.
That was not a good sign, so they focused on removing the floor in that room and found all kinds of water. Here are a few photos of the general area:
Interestingly, the damage to the plywood floor wasn’t caused by a leak from the sink or the washing machine. Instead it was the result of water coming in from outside. And as seen in the photos above, it was coming through the concrete in several places.
What is going on in that room is complicated, and we are guessing to some degree, but it seems that:
- The room was originally a patio. We can see the old locations where posts sat on the concrete slab and held up the beams before there were walls.
- That means the patio was part of the original house, since the beams go over the patio and on to support the ceiling of the original master bedroom.
- At some point, someone decided to enclose the patio. They poured a bit of raised concrete around the outer edge of the patio slab to support the new walls.
- But the concrete they poured was very poorly done, and it let water through, particularly near the seam between the slab and the new stuff. The damp areas in the above photos are a result of decades of seepage.
As a result of all that, we need to dig down around the exterior of that room to reduce the soil level and add waterproofing to the exterior to keep the water from coming in. But we had a day without a labourer, so the trenching was put off for 24 hours.
But work didn’t stop. Oh no. The next surprise was in the kitchen and living room. It came when the kitchen looked like this:
And the living room looked like this:
As you can see, they started taking down the brick wall next to the chimney. It came down easily. Oddly, when standing, it encompassed a few square feet of area that was just wasted space and mostly trapped air.
The actual surprise was all the water found around the chimney near the ceiling. So much water that we thought there had to be a roof leak somewhere, but it’s a “new” roof (4.5 years old), and the location of the water made no sense in terms of a leak. With that much water getting in, we would definitely have seen staining in the drywall somewhere. But we had no signs of a leak anywhere.
A night of cogitation led to the idea that it was not a roof leak but was instead a result of condensation. I came to that conclusion after remembering the dripping water we used to have from a bathroom vent fan upstairs. In that case there was a long (25' or so) run of 3" flexible hose from the fan to the outside of the house, and water would condense in that hose every winter and drip down into the bathroom. It was a surprisingly large amount of water given the situation.
In this new case, the chimney is very poorly built and drafty. Warm indoor air was meeting cold outdoor air in all kinds of places, and the result was condensation. And it couldn’t evaporate because it was trapped inside the area enclosed by the bricks.
This was confirmed by removing drywall in other places around the ceiling, including upslope from the wet area, and finding only dry wood.
Once we had it opened up and ran a couple of dehumidifiers overnight, everything dried out. That isn’t to say that we have eliminated all the water. Not yet. But it will be gone eventually. When they are ready, and the weather gods cooperate, the contractors will remove the portion of the chimney that goes through the roof, and any wood that is wet or rotten will be replaced. That will solve the condensation issue for good.
And there was nearly a full day of cleaning up after that mess was made. All the bricks in the photos above had to be taken away, along with a ton of other demolition mess. We haven’t seen the disposal bills yet, but they will be large, and it’s not done.
But it doesn’t end there. When they had more help, they started digging along the back of the house where the water was getting into the family room. The plan here was to dig down low enough to allow the contractors to waterproof the exterior of the concrete slab and remove a pointless step. Here’s a photo of what the exterior there looked like before the digging:
You see the step up in the middle of the path outside the house there? That’s not a good thing at all. So we decided to take it out entirely and follow it around the corner to the side yard. Here’s a much older photo of the side yard showing the step up over there:
So they started digging. In the process they exposed the drainage pipe, which is… unique:
The downspout that shows in the bottom right of that photo simply connects to some perforated pipe that stops. It goes nowhere. And that downspout handles nearly all the water coming off the entire roof of the house!
And looking around the corner:
There’s the pipe from the previous photo in the top right, stopping at the corner of the house. (There’s an extension going off to the north, which we assume is just to provide more area for water to disperse into, but who knows.) The downspout pictured above goes into some corrugated plastic pipe that couples into some old cement drain tile. At this point I assume it heads off to the front of the house, where it just dumps into the yard somewhere. Maybe into a pit of gravel.
1960 construction was very lax. No one seems to have worried about getting water away from the house and into the storm sewers.
As I type this, it’s raining, and that pit in the backyard has turned into a giant puddle. The contractors have a pump in place to keep it from getting too deep, but we really don’t understand how it ever drained before.
The contractor is bringing in his drainage contractor soon, and we’ll see what he has to say. This’ll be fun.
And we’re still not done. The construction of the house itself makes me think that it was done by drunken 3-year-old children using a pile of scrap lumber. Seriously. Random bits of wood everywhere, shoddy construction at best, and lovely things like this:
That window was on the back of the house overlooking the patio. When the room was enclosed and the interior bathroom redone, they just left it there, glass and all. As you can see, they notched it to get a stud into place, but otherwise it was left alone.
We will rip it out and add it to the gigantic pile of garbage that we are disposing of. That part of the new bathroom will be the shower, and we simply can’t leave it there. It should have been removed ages ago.
The project will be a success in the end, but it will cost a pretty penny.
That said, we can already tell that opening up the kitchen as we are planning will be a big win. And getting rid of the various sources of water getting into the house… that’s huge too. So while it’s a lot of chaos at the moment, it will all be worth it when we’re done.
May all your projects go smoothly!