The Floorboards Are In!

So this morning my brother offered to help, but I had to work on another house first!  Agh!!!  Ask again, brother!!!  :)

The first stop this morning was one of the rental properties.  A tenant had called me Sunday and told me that his garage door stopped working.  He could hear it spin, but the belt kept jumping off the track.  So I went over there HOPING for a tightening up of the belt and an easy fix.  Uh, that would be too easy.

The motor still spun, but the belt wouldn't engage.  Hmm.  So I pulled off the cover on Sunday and found out exactly what was wrong.  The plastic gear had been eaten!  I've replaced one of these before, so I was happy about knowing what to do.  It's crazy I'm "happy" about knowing how to fix something, but that's part of landlordship.  Things break!  Oh, do they break.

Before I pulled off the unit, I said, "I wonder if we will have little white shavings in here."  The tell-tale sign of a stripped gear!

She was stripped!

The garage door companies were closed yesterday for New Year's Day, so I had to wait until this morning to get the part.  Around $30.  I had an old gear I could have used, but I figured it wasn't worth the risk.  I don't want called about this again!

The actual gear replacement went fairly quickly.  You just pop out a pin, slide it on, and pop the pin back in.  But, in typical fashion, we had a much bigger project ahead of us.  For whatever reason, the previous owner mounted the garage door opener at a fairly big angle.  Dad was confident that they simply placed their mounting bracket on the closest studs.  Very plausible!  Dear Previous Homeowner, Go buy a longer mounting bracket!!!

Ummmm, can anyone see a problem here?!  A short bracket led to an off-centered install!  C'mon now!

And that's exactly what we did.  Dad went out to Menard's to buy a longer bracket while I put the gear assembly and opener back together.  Once he was back, we did our typical Father-Son-Make-the-Project-As-Long-As-Possible-By-Making-The-Most-Amount-of-Mistakes-Possible memory together.  First we mounted the bracket wrong so we had to take out the lag bolts and re-install.  Then we mounted the opener a bit non-centered.  Then we mounted one of the smaller mounting brackets backwards.  I mean, it's hilarious even thinking about bad we were!  We certainly like to triple the time of our projects.

But the door worked!  It went up and down!  I had to adjust the downward length of the door quite a bit (as the door slide jarred significantly when it went down), but that was easy to do.  We were done!  Not a quick fix, but a good one.

Well, as I started to take pictures of our project after we were done, I just couldn't get the door lined up straight in my camera!  My camera has centering bars, and it was obvious that we were not centered.  Ugh.  I couldn't accept it not being right, so I called Dad back in.  We measured side-to-side from the center, and sure enough, we were off by a couple inches.

We thought we were done, but notice the bowed slider bar.  We were off-centered!

So we grabbed the ladders again and moved the opener over!  Finally!  The door opener is now centered!  A job well-done.  It took about three hours from start-to-finish.  Yikes!

Look at that straight bar directly lined up with the center of the garage!  Beautiful!

But NOW we could move on to the next project:  putting new floors in my house!  What is wrong with us?!  It's like we like to work.  We headed to Pa's house first to get a quick bite to eat, then headed for my new house to do some grudge work.

The goal was simple:  Get the new subfloor installed below the dishwasher and cabinets.

The only goal today:  Install new floor!

We measured and cut a piece of floorboard to fit.  But as mentioned yesterday, we had a significant problem with the jacking situation.  Because the bottom wallplate was not continuous along the hole we needed patched, I couldn't jack up the wall very easily.  We soon realized that although it would be nice to have one solid piece of floorboard in this section, in order to jack up the wall enough to get underneath it, I needed to leave one sill open for jacking.  So that meant cutting the board in two.

We cut the board right along the middle of the joist for easy installation.

That was easy enough.  Cut it right along the middle of the floorjoist.  But after that, it was nothing but back-breaking work.  Even with the house wall jacked up, the floorboard was still very difficult to get under the wallplate.  I was happy to see that I had 6" exterior walls, but that meant a lot of hammering!  We were coming in at an angle too as the new piece was being mounted from on top of the old floorboard, so that created some tension, too.  But we just hammered.  And hammered.  And hammered.  And little by little, the new floor wedged its way underneath the wall.  Or at least tried to.  We ran into a pretty big problem once the floorboard met the vertical rim joist.  Because we were coming in at an angle, the new board was clipping the very top of the rim joist.  So I had to pry up the new floor on top of the joist as Dad hammered.  What work!  But we got it in!

The first piece is in!  The wall is resting on solid wood once again!

It's actually pretty neat to think that the house has a solid foundation to rest on again, though.  That 1/4" compressed wet wood from yesterday is now 23/32" thick!  And dry!  And solid!  The house is sturdy again!

But unfortunately, this was the easiest of the two pieces.  Actually, in order to make the next one go in easier, we decided to cut it into a third piece!  That way we could slide the new floor into the opening in the floor but not at an angle and just hammer straight in.  In theory, it would slide ever-so-lovingly underneath the wall and sit in place.

That was not to be.

We had an even worse time on this one!  We hammered.  And hammered.  And hammered some more.  We had to literally work together, with Dad hammering one edge of the board while I did the other.  The board ever-so-slightly moved.  I mean, it was just creeeeeeeeeeeping along.  Ugh.

It was late in the afternoon already, and we were struggling from a long day.  But we just had to get this project finished!  So we motivated each other and kept hammering.  And hammering.  And hammering.  We FINALLY got the second piece in.  Wow, what a day.

The new floor is in!

That black line on the wood became our motivation.  Just two more inches.  Just one more inch.  Just 1/4-inch!

We literally jacked up the wall of the house, inserted new floors underneath, and set the wall back down!  Wow!

The third piece was simple as it just fell into place!  But what a great day!  This hopefully represents the last structural setback for this house.  It was such a feeling of relief.  I really feel like today is a turning point.  Now it's time to start putting the house back together!!!  I've been taking it apart for way too long now.

The rotten floor yesterday.

The solid floor today as viewed from the same angle!

Today was just old-fashioned hard work.  But the job was done right.  I'm so happy that we have a house resting on solid footing again.  But in doing the job right, I really started to question the work my contractor did.  I inspected his floorboard replacements, and I was so saddened and disappointed and frustrated to see that he literally just cut the floorboards along the wall and installed new.  He took the easy way out!  That means the house is still resting on rotten wood!  As Dad said, "Andy, we could have done that."  Yes, we could have.  And with a bill of $1800, I felt duped.  Basically, outside of installing the two doors, I was paying him $300 to cut wood and hammer it into place.  In each section!

I was sick.  How to find a guy to trust!  That takes pride in his work.  It's so frustrating.

Our floor goes six inches past this wallplate to the outer edge of the house!

But my contractor's stops right before the wallplate!  He took the easy way out!  Look at the massive difference!  Our work goes seven inches deeper!

Of course, Mom showed up after work, and we just HAD to keep working!  No rest for the weary!  She started working on the non-painted area behind the stove, and I took to trying to clean up all of the mold and mildew still on the walls behind the counters.  I decided to just cut out the bottom sections which were crumbled anyway.  And then I started putting new pieces back in.

Before...

And After!

I would LOVE to get these cabinets back in tomorrow, and that means I have to have this area ready to go!  So even after Mom and Dad left, I mudded...and mudded...and mudded some more.  I HATE mudding, and I quickly realized I am still terrible at it.

Patching the crumbling drywall.

The first coat of mud.

Not the prettiest!

It didn't help that I cut out small pieces with no real support behind them, so they flexed a bit too much.  But I kept mudding anyway.  It was behind a cabinet, right?!  I still hate it not being smooth.  Well, I put on a second coat that looked a bit better.

It's STARTING to get better.

And then a third.

It's not perfect, but it will do.

Wow, what a day.  I stayed up late to mud the second and third coats.  I'll sand and paint in the morning, and then the cabinets should be able to be installed!  What a step FORWARD in the right direction!  I needed this!

The house is finally being put back together!!!