Postponed Projects Become Awww Sheesh

Repairing the wall, full of rotten wood.

Back when I was teaching ceramics classes in Utah, to a mostly LDS audience, I realized I would have to temper my tongue. Accustomed to swearing like a sailor, it was like rehab for communication. It wasn't until I couldn't swear freely that I realized how descriptive profanity can be. One might argue that profane speech might be seen as excessive, but you can't deny the combination of  simplicity and descriptive power that comes with the best placed profanities. Which brings me back to the original title of this post...  Awwww shit.

The brief: replace the window in the back room of the apartment (now my shop). 

The not-so-brief: awww shit. The window leaked (for 20+ years) and the roof leaked into the wall. The water was held against the giant beam in a bucket of foam that was sprayed on back when we had the ceiling sprayed. The beam went from being dry-rotted, to being very wet rotted.  When I stuck a screwdriver into the wood to see how much of it was still structurally sound, it sank without much effort. 

I scraped some of the foam off and uncovered nothing resembling wood... but instead smelling just like potting soil. 

Rot in front, rot inside, rot behind.

 

After doing some impromptu demolition, Leto and I uncovered the mess. The beam was toast. The siding board (if you can call it that) on the outside of the wall was rotted out too. Oh, here was another interesting tidbit. The "siding" over the wood siding boards was metal printing plates from 1970. Apparently back then you could get a burger and fries for less than a buck. Says so, right on the printing plate. That'd be a nice happy meal.

With the rotten wood dug out, Leto turned to scraping foam off the concrete. This closed cell spray foam is weird stuff. It sticks to everything, permanently. Like Gorilla Glue. Leto ended up using our oscillating multitool to cut/scrape it all away. If you haven't seen someone using one of these tools... avail yourself. And when you buy one, make sure you practice on something you don't care about... Play first. It comes with a very odd learning curve. Straight blades make curves, but curved blades are best for straight lines. 

About this time we asked ourselves: why not hire someone to do this? 

We looked into a couple options, received quotes. Then laughed our butts off. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen.

That whole beam was rotted leaving just a thin husk behind.

 Why had we waited to repair the wall? That's a strangely emotionally loaded question. Over twenty years ago, when we moved into this house, we knew this space (in all of its unheated, uninsulated glory) would be perfect for the studio. As anyone who has ever had to build a studio while broke, you make do so you can make stuff so you can make money so you can buy more stuff. Which means that the wall took the backseat... and bit by bit, it became covered: first in tools for the pottery studio, then racks of shelving and piles of boards once the studio closed. It was only uncovered completely when we were renovating the rest of the building for the construction of Leto's apartment. 

Photo of clay covered wall/tools

 

Uncovering this section of wall, tearing off the clay splatted OSB and finding an oh-shit-mess inside it wasn't surprising. But it was still a gut punch. Both for the memories that were tied to the layers of clay and glaze splattered everywhere, but also knowing that it would have been much easier to fix decades ago. 

A potter's tools are seldom clean for very long

 

 

Back to the fix: once we excavated the rot and dug everything back to sound wood, it was time to figure out what we could do to fix it. Realistically there were two options: repair the wall, piecemeal, or tear the whole thing off and reframe it and rebuild it from scratch. When you're heading into winter, with nightly temperatures below freezing, having an entire wall missing for an extended period isn't the best idea. R-value absolutely zilch. Nope. So we option for door number one. Repair it piecemeal. 

 

Things we learned as we worked; the guys who built this space were not carpenters or contractors. They were excavator/backhoe operators, looking to throw up a quick shelter for their backhoe. Whatever was handy was fine. The 2x4s that framed the exterior wall were anything but 2x4. Sometimes on old houses (our house is an 1845 farmhouse), you find wood that really is 2x4. But the older and more rural houses you are far more likely to find 2whatever x 4something. Not one stick of wood was the same dimension as the one beside it. Guess they didn't run down to Home Depot back in 1970 when this was thrown together. 

Rather than tearing out those framing members, we opted for the idea of sistering new lumber, and patching gaps with cripples of new 2x4. You can probably imagine, nothing was easy. Measuring one board to the next gave baffling numbers. Everything had to be done, one at a time. Oh, did I mention winter is here. Cutting lumber outside even for a "little" project like this is nuts. But cutting stuff inside means sawdust everywhere. Since Leto and Kade are living in the apartment now, the last thing I want to do is make that air unbreathable due to dust.

All of which is to say, we set up outside as it was Ithacating (for those who don't know, that is the name for the combination of rain/snow/sleet that the Ithaca area gets in Nov/Dec. It often resembles angry styrofoam pellets that want nothing more than to funnel into your ears and down your collar.) We would work until our fingers were unreliable. At the risk of losing the ability to count to ten using both hands, we would haul ourselves back inside... thaw out a bit... build a little... measure some more bits... then go back out. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One of the big issues of rural living in the north is that good weather and daylight are in short supply once winter creeps in. As we got closer to finishing we zipped into town to pick up insulation (rockwool!) and OSB to replace what we had taken down. Years ago, I wouldn't have any issues driving back from the hardware store in the dark. Now... I'll just save it for the next day. Too great a chance of meeting a deer on the road. Those buggers never have their proof of insurance cards on them. 

 

Here's what it looks like now. The face of victorious completion.

No squirrel nests made from fiberglass, no air movement, no rotten beam.

What does any of this have to do with gardening? It's December. The garden is pretty well frozen. I could wax poetic about ice and snow, but I'll save my Robert Frost impersonation for another post. Doing DIY construction is all about taking something apart, being astonished at how badly someone else did something.... then figuring out how to put it back together (hopefully better!). Along the way, I usually learn something. If nothing else, I learn what folks who have more money/time/resources would do if faced with the same situation. Somewhere further down the road, I look at the completed work and usually feel accomplished. I know that someone else could have done it better/faster/whatever. But they didn't do it. I did. Leto did.

And that's where this ties into gardening.