The LAST Cabinet Is In!

Dad swung over for a short bit this morning, and he brought me my much-anticipated part for my dishwasher!  My sister had bought it for me off Amazon with the two-day shipping, but she accidentally had it shipped to her house!  ha!  So he picked it up from her last night and brought it by today.  We watched a quick YouTube video on how to install it (45 seconds is all it SHOULD take), but we got confused after we tried it, so we watched it again, and voila!  She is in!  The old broken soap latch door is brand-new again!  Another step in the right direction!  All of my appliances are now working (oven, fridge, washer, dryer, dishwasher!)!

The soap door hinge was broken, and the spring was missing.

All fixed for $15!

Ok, so I already made a post about how the cabinets are done...but I guess I was wrong!  I always had this teeny tiny cabinet that has been hanging out in the side of the kitchen for awhile.  Well, it was time to put it back together!

Dad swung over for a short bit this morning, and we made that our little project.  He held the massive luan board as I cut it down to size, and I think he was eager to get it installed, but unfortunately, I had to do the necessary and un-fun work of getting the area REALLY ready for the new cabinet.  That meant removing all of the cobwebs from under the cabinet, scraping off the grease from the side of the cabinet, and killing and cleaning up the black mold from the floor where the cabinet used to be.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to find an extensive amount of this mold when I pull up the bathroom floor.  It's obvious that something has been leaking between the bathroom and kitchen before.  I imagine it's the sink or toilet.  Oh, the never-ending joys!

Cutting the new luan floor to make the cabinet the same height as the ones on the right side of the stove (that sit on top of luan).

Needless to say, the cabinet was pretty gross underneath.

And it had plenty of grease down the side!  I took a credit card and just scraped it away.  Gross!

Time for the last piece!

He had to leave for something, but with the small size of the cabinet, I was able to work on it by myself with him gone.  So I cleaned the cabinet all up, cleaned the floor all up, nailed down the new floor, added the cabinet on top, and then secured the cabinet to the wall!  While working on the cabinet, I learned that the cabinet face is broken.  It needs some work to get it re-secured, but that's for a different time!  I did change the knobs, though, to match the rest!  It's the small stuff sometimes!

In the middle of cleaning the mildew.  Forgot the Before picture!  But the area along the wall had more black mold...

All dry and clean and ready for a cabinet!

I then tidied up the kitchen, and for the first time in a LONG time, I'm able to say, "The cabinets are done!!!"  Woo hoo!!!  The kitchen IS going back together again!!!

This house is starting to look like a home!  Beautiful cabinets!

With the weather a little bit warmer than normal, I also took the time to get a jump on figuring out what is wrong with my roof.  I figured I would learn a huge deal by looking at the area from the attic, so I crawled through my mess of a garage and tried to figure out a way to get up into the attic.  I literally have so much stuff crammed into the garage right now that I can't bring the stairs down!  So I hopped on my four-wheeler and pulled myself up!  I forgot how much room I have up there!  I seriously have a huge room to store stuff in the attic area.  That is going to be so nice when I can access it!  (Sidenote:  I found out my ladders are broken!  Agh!  Not sure what it will take, but it appears they are loose on one side...as in unstable...and the spring is off on the other!  But I found it laying on the floor upstairs.  Always somethin'!).

I made my way over to the area where I expected the leak to be, and I was not surprised to see footprints going back to this very area in the blown-in insulation.  As expected, someone knew about this leak years ago and had been up here to try to track it down or fix it.  I hopped rafter to rafter, following the footprints, and sure enough, I was able to find the area of the leak way down in the bottom portion of the trusses.  The wood was black, so I know it's been leaking for some time, but it looked to be very localized.  The water came in and immediately went down to the ceiling where I could see the hole that goes to my kitchen.  It was kind of weird, but where the water has been leaking, there was hardly any insulation!  It's almost like it disintegrated!  It's possible the previous owner or contractor who was up here looking at the leak removed it all, but it was quite a sight to see just a tiny bit of dirty blown-in insulation in that area.  But I was quite happy to see that the rest of my roof sheathing looked like new and in great shape.  The leak is local!

I was happy to see LOTS of insulation!

At least this house has SOMETHING going for it!

The area of the leak.  That hole there is the hole in the kitchen ceiling.

The right side of the rafter.  I think the edge of the house is directly above this spot.

Thankfully, the water damage appears to be VERY localized.

The leak itself appeared to come in right on top of a truss, and it mostly leaked to the right of the truss, though some appeared to go left.  I tried to see if I could figure out where the edge of the house was, and I was pretty sure it was right at that location, but I couldn't make it out perfectly.  But I found the leak!  It IS coming from the roof (not the Master Bedroom exterior door), and it is very localized, so hopefully it didn't do a great deal of damage elsewhere.

A step in the right direction!  Now...how to fix this?  So I grabbed a ladder and hopped on the roof to see what else I could learn.  My, oh, my, how steep this roof is!  I mean, it is STEEP!!!  I was able to learn a little bit more, or moreso, confirm what I already knew:  that the roof had been leaking for awhile!  I saw numerous tar jobs where the previous owner tried to stop the flow of water into the house.  Unfortunately, it appeared that the biggest tar job actually made the problem worse!  At the very bottom where the water rushed down the valley, they built up a lot of tar, and this looked like it would make the water ramp up and over the J-channel of siding and hit the side of the house...where you really don't want it to be!

Notice the numerous tar jobs from the previous owner.

The worst one is at the bottom.  All of that water would run down and run up and over this patch job into the J-channel and probably find its way behind the flashing if it's not done properly!  The "fix" looks like it may have made matters worse!

What a horrendous idea from the architect/builder.  This channel would be PERFECT if it ran down and missed the house and ran into the gutter!  But as it is, this whole area runs right into the side of the house about six inches in!  Also, it's hard to appreciate from a picture, but this roof is STEEP.  Look at that gutter way down there!

The likely problem is right there in that corner!

And that is a LOT of surface area bringing a LOT of water into that valley!  It needs fixed!  But how?!

Time to see how to fix this...and how much it will take to fix it.  I posted all of these pictures online tonight to try to get some answers from local contractors...and bids!

But all in all, it was a good day.  I've been wanting to get that little cabinet back in for the longest time!  Now I can start getting the kitchen in order!

And now it's time to address the (hopefully) last big problem of the house!  I know I still have to do those French doors, but at least I know what's going on there.  Time to seal off this house from the water that loves to make its way in.  Seriously, this house had water coming in from nearly everywhere.  It's time to stop that once and for all.