House: Sunday hustle & an unplanned circumcision

So last week sometime the spray foam people decided to show up on Monday rather than Tuesday, and Saturday was Gillian's birthday party, so I ended up with a pretty narrow window of time to finish all my prep. There wasn't a ton that was still left to do, but enough to fill quite a few hours.

First things first: fixing the screwed-up B-vent. I didn't take a picture, but my roofers had called me to tell me the vent pipe for my water heater was coming out of my roof at a funny angle, and "what did I want them to do about it?" I told them just put the boot on it and be done, because when I left the pipe, it was pretty straight, but maybe a little skewed.

When I got home I saw the pipe -- it was protruding from the roof pretty much perpendicular to its surface. It looked horrible! So I resolved to first find a shorter pipe, because it seemed awfully long, and also to secure it properly (previously, it was a slightly outlandish series of pipe straps holding it in position).

Finding the 2' double-wall 3" pipe took me about an hour of driving from Home Depot to Lowe's to another Lowe's. Of course it was in the last store I searched. I explained to my friend Melissa that it's impossible to call one of these stores to ask if they have anything in stock, because

They might say they have it when they don't
They might say they don't have it when they do
If they tell you the truth, you still can't trust them (see 1. & 2. above)

Anyway, I had a piece of angle iron that I had been intending to use to secure the pipe earlier, and so on Sunday I popped out the old pipe from the boot, replaced it with the new shorter pipe, and secured the thing so it wouldn't move, period. More detail than you want:

Ceci pipe ne va pas nulle part.

(

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Pipe smoked, I stared at my water heater for a few minutes, wishing I could spend the time to get it hooked up now that the hard part (venting) was done, but decided it'd be best to move on to other more pressing matters, like the wiring situation.

In the front of my house there are 3 areas that needed my attention: the porch light, the duplex switch next to the front door, and an outlet just below it. All these were wired with knob and tube, and rather than tying into it and boxing it in with the spray foam, I figured I'd just rewire it with new Romex.

I decided this time that I'd better cut open the walls because the electrical boxes I had would be impossible to hit with a tape from above, and if there was any insulation in the walls, it would be absolutely impossible. I wanted to know the answer to that question too.

I rotozipped some access openings for myself and fairly rapidly was able to fish down wire from above. I decided to put 2 14/3 into the switch panel, just in case I needed to add capacity sometime in the future. I suppose it might have been smart to do something similar with the outlet too, so perhaps one outlet could be switched, but it's too late now! Here's the finished work (well ok, it's not finished, but the part I needed to finish by Monday is finished):

I spent some time in the attic doing final cleanup, pushing all the remaining out-of-service knob-and-tube wiring going into outer walls back down into the wall and removing the knob, so anyone opening the wall and looking at the wiring will immediately recognize that it's defunct. I wonder what the owner of the house was thinking when they sheetrocked -- I cut through just 3/4" sheetrock to get to the wiring and insulation in the front, yet the old wiring was left behind. (Prior to that I wondered if they maybe had just sheetrocked over the lath and plaster, as they have done with the ceilings.)

I've heard so many different opinions on rewiring knob and tube so I still wonder if it may have been folly to do so, but when this sheetrock job was done -- probably less than 30 years ago from the look of the insulation -- it would have been cheap and easy to rewire with Romex. Oh well. Easy enough to do it now too.

Final result in the attic -- well, again, not final, but done enough for insulation. Yes, I wear those awful crocs when I work on my house. I'm lazy.

In this last picture you can see the 14/2 to the porch light (from the left), two 14/3 from the switch at the front door (top middle) and the single 14/2 going to the front outlet.

At around 7:00 I realized my flat bar was missing -- probably sitting right next to my old pipe wrench, wherever that is -- so I had to take another trip to Lowe's to pick up a new one for finishing the demolition on the outer wall in my bathroom, because the insulation guys were going to spray it too. (I like the idea of a bathroom with no drafts, and that's what spray foam excels at -- sealing air leaks while insulating too.)

I had to pull out a bunch of trim to clear the outer wall completely, and one of those pieces had a towel hook on it that I wanted to save. The screws were stripped though, so I figured maybe if I just cut the piece of trim the hook was on, I could detach it later. Radial arm sawed through one side, cut through a small trim nail, and then figured, hey, I might as well separate the small trim piece from the larger one. Clumsily though I sliced my thumb on the razor-sharp half-nail I'd cut through with the saw.

Detour upstairs to the kitchen. Let it bleed for a bit. Taking a look at it, it seemed like a clean cut, and I knew I still had work ahead of me. While holding a paper towel on the thing to allow it to clot and stop bleeding, I remembered I had a sample package of Dermabond, so I used it to seal the cut. A little more waiting around for the thing to cure and I was back in action, mostly.

Finally, once all the sheetrock was torn down, the insulation (R-11 fiberglass) pulled out, all of it bagged & put on the back porch, screws unscrewed, nails pulled, all debris swept up and bagged, and the floor vacuumed, the result was pretty nice: