Best of the season to you, my five readers! Happy Easter, Happy Passover, and I’m sure there are some other, made up holidays that I’m forgetting here.

Where the hell have I been? I’ve been fixing up da turkey coop. Yeah, it’s a big time consumer, even though the major portion of the work is contracted out. There are several subjects I want to catch up with, such as the Blue-White game this weekend and the NLRB ruling with regard to unionization, but I won’t be commenting about them here. Nay, this post is strictly blowing off some steam about the home improvement project. So, read on at your own risk.

“Cardboard over Cardboard”

My house was built in 1980, and it’s a two story affair, with brick over concrete block on the first floor and wood frame with siding on the second. The second floor, however, had some wooden walls, so I had to keep equipment like a stud sensor, handy. The Commercial Flooring of the house was carried out only just recently, so the house has been with the same roofing by metal roof companies for almost four decades and whenever there were minor issues we would always call Sunnyvale TX 5 Star Roofing Company – Roofscapes. For years I’ve seen the Masonite siding deteriorate, getting mushy in spots. This year, I decided to bite the bullet and replace it.

It should be noted that Masonite swells and rots over time when exposed to the elements, and may prematurely deteriorate when it is used as exterior siding. In 1996, International Paper (IP) lost a class action suit brought by homeowners whose Masonite siding had deteriorated. The jury found that IP’s Masonite siding was defective.

Of course, I bought the house in 2000, and the previous owner probably pocketed the money from the class action suit. And, yes, parts of the siding had swollen and rotted, as per the court’s findings.

One contractor described Masonite as “cardboard”. He asked me if I knew what was behind the siding. I didn’t. It turned out to be Celotex, which is another fiber board product that is known to deteriorate and is no longer used for this purpose here. So, Masonite over Celotex = particle board over particle board = cardboard over cardboard.

The job here will consist of removing the Masonite siding and installing new 1/2″ plywood over the Celotex, which is very difficult to remove, as it falls apart. It will provide me with additional insulation. As the plywood is installed, it is covered with a plastic moisture barrier. Then comes the siding, which is James Hardie formed concrete stuff. Encased in concrete, I can make a bunker out of the place to forestall the forthcoming Zombie Apocalypse.

Three days into the job, the crew has removed siding and put up plywood on about 20% of the upper floor’s exterior. There were only two workers — a third guy had a death in the family, and he’ll be joining the party next week. The hammering and thumping will resume promptly at 7 am Monday.

Playing ‘Possum

On the first day of the project, the foreman apprised me of the presence of a family of opossums living in my back yard. I had never seen them there before. Perhaps they heard about the impending siding job and were looking to pick up some work.

So, yet another chore to be handled — ‘possum removal. I could remove them quite easily with any of several firearms I possess, but there are several problems with that. Like, what do I do with the carcasses. I don’t think ‘possums make for very good eating and I can’t just leave them for our numerous vultures. I don’t believe that the bears will eat cold meat, either, although there are certainly enough hungry bears around here to admit the possibility. I don’t want to expend the energy to give them a decent, Christian burial, particularly around Easter. What if they’re resurrected?

I guess I’ll have to call a wildlife removal outfit. That’s automatically $300 or so.

An Outlet for My Excess Energy

The guys plugged their compressor into one of my outdoor electrical outlets and reported that they “didn’t get no juice” from the bottom one of the duplex. That was on Day One of the project. I told them that I would replace the outlet after they left for the day, so they would have a good source of “juice” in the morning.

Now, that particular outlet had been a problem for years. It is not a GFCI itself, but it is on the end of a run with a GFCI between it and the service. The GFCI is in the downstairs bathroom. I have noted through the years that everytime it rains, that GFCI trips. I suspected that the outdoor outlet was the cause, but I never got around to checking it out — until Wednesday.

So, the guys left and I opened ‘er up. The first thing that happened was that the outlet fell apart. I noted that the rubber gasket on the supposedly weatherproof outlet cover had gotten old and was cracked. It would obviously not do a very good job of weatherproofing anything. Upon removing the remnants of the outlet, I found the interior of the switch box filled with a pile of rust. The actual galvanized box had rusted out due to all the water intrusion through the years.

And thus, it was the case that the 10 minute job I had anticipated turned into three hours, including two trips to my favorite home improvement store. I had to replace the damn box and the outlet, as well as installing a new weatherproof cover. When I volunteered to do the job, I knew I already had an outlet in my junk box, so no big deal. Yeah, right. I also had a switch box in my junk box, but it was the type that is used for old work in drywall and with the projections that were designed to secure it in place in a hole in drywall being too large to fit in the hole in exterior brick/block and with me being too lazy to chisel out more of a hole, I decided to get a new box.

So, after I installed everything properly, paying strict attention to NEC grounding requirements, I was all proud of myself. I went to get my caulking gun to lay a bead of silicone around the outside of the rubber gasket to finish the weatherproofing and found that I had no silicone caulking compound. I forgot that I gave the remaining tube of it to a guy who was working on my windows last month. Oy, vey! Another trip to my favorite home improvement store.

Oh, and my caulking gun. Cheap Chinese piece of shit that it is, it decided that it wanted to stop working properly in the middle of this job. What should have taken two or three squeezes of the trigger required a constant pumping effort. Jaysus! But in the end, I was happy because I had been meaning to get around to doing something about that outlet for maybe 10 years or so.

Yeah, I procrastinate.

I might blow off some more steam here soon. Or I might not. This home improvement stuff sure soaks up my time, and the non-stop pounding from 7 to 2 sure makes me want to be somewhere else!