Friday, 23 Feb 2007 Granpa Seal came to help out today and we got a lot of work done in preparation for the extra help we would have on Saturday. We cleared the tarps, moved the trusses, finished up the walls that had already been laid out and set up scaffolding. You can see the long wall laying down under the scaffolding.
These rolled up tarps weigh about 175 pounds a piece.
The walls will be up soon.
Since the torrential rains and water damage, we have had a number of 1 workday weekends. It has also rained during some of the weekends (tarps are doing their job, so not much water in the house), so for various reasons, we have not a lot of visible work to report. Some of the work that we have completed:
This past holiday weekend was a split weekend of Friday and Monday work. Friday We had a full crew : Greg, Mark, John, Pop and me. We pulled off the tarps, moved the trusses and cleared a big workspace to begin building the walls. Greg called for 75 2×6’s to be brought up and I thought that was way too many for one day. How wrong I was. Our lumber piles are slowly steadily being depleted. We got the long walls built and ready to stand up.
The weather forecast called for sunny and clear days for Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Since Pop was coming back on Monday, I decided that we didn’t need to spend any time putting the tarps back on. We would make sure they were in place after Monday’s work day. Look at the pictures. It was crystal clear. Sunday Sunday? I thought this weekend was work on Friday and work on Monday? Sunday afternoon the forecast changed. 30% chance of rain Sunday night / Monday morning. At about 3:30p I got up on the roof and began clearing off the tools and such that were under a temporary tarp. Pop had seen the forecast as well and arrived at about 5:15p to begin the normally 3-4 person job of placing the trusses and moving the heavy tarps into position. At 7:30p while we were still on the roof, the deluge began. It only lasted about 10 minutes, but that was more than enough for Toby to let us know that water was coming in over the dining room table (again). We kept working. We went in the house at 10:30p. Monday At 1:15a I awoke to the hellish sound of rain hitting big fat drops on the tarps. Ugh! At 1:30a, I realized that in adjusting a section of tarp that I had not re-fastened it down. I got out the yellow slicker and hiked around the back and tied off that tarp. There was very little pooling, so no harm no foul. As I was getting back in the house, Toby told me that there was water coming into the living room (again). I went up on the roof, under the tarps and low-crawled over to the section that I could see had a huge pool of water. I was able to clear the water over the edge of the house and to adjust the tarp so that the water would shed instead of pooling. No more leaking. At 2:30a, cold and wet, I flopped back into bed for an hour and a half of tossing and turning while rain continued to pour. At 7a, I got up and checked the tarps. Other than the one section (which I had fixed) they performed quite well. Pop had slept through all my tromping and banging up on the roof! When Mark arrived, he said in a questioning voice ‘How did you get the tarps in place?’ like he couldn’t believe that the two of us had done it by ourselves. For Monday’s work, we opened up the tarps and built some more walls. In the afternoon, we closed up the tarps and buttoned everything down (hopefully). It was a long 2 days. Max told me that he would read me a story that night, and I fell asleep around 8p to Max reading about Lightning McQueen and his adventures in Radiator Springs. UPDATE: Weather Underground reports that we had almost 3/4 inch of rain overnight (Saturday – Sunday).
Monday I had decided to stay home to comfort the family. Toby was still frazzled and the kids hadn’t really seen me all weekend. We had missed ‘family day Sunday’. I walked by the front window and saw something on the carpet. I bent down to pick it up and saw that it was a piece of saturated drywall. I looked up and saw a horriffic sight: a new crack in the ceiling. There was no time to hesitate. I ran and got my tape measure and some wood. Since I was going to be working under a falling ceiling, I put on my hard hat. I used some plywood and some 2×6’s to support the ceiling and that relieved the immediate problem. My idea for the ‘permanent’ solution was to run a 2×10 above the window and support the drywall sheets. I got some 3 inch screws and big fender washers to tie everything together.
We now have a columnar support over the front window, and 6 – 8 foot long strips of plywood running along our family room ceiling.
Sunday At 4:00a, Toby woke me up with dreaded news. The ceiling crack was growing and the rain water was pouring in. It had been continuously raining all night. I went outside, climbed up on to the roof and saw that there were many areas of the tarp that had formed pools of water and were continuing to collect water and were growing. I went inside and saw that the crack had grown in the few minutes that I had been on the roof. I realized that the water had to come off the roof. So I grabbed my little 1 gallon shop vac and prepared to suck the water off the roof. But at 1 gallon at a time, I knew it was going to be a tedious process. So I grabbed the big 5 gallon, 2.5 horsepower shop vac that we had and took it up to the roof. I plugged it in and began ‘vac-ing’ the water off the roof. It only took about 20 seconds to fill up the shop vac, and about a minute to drain it. One thing about the shop vac was that the switch was broken. So I had to plug it in to turn it on and unplug it to turn it off. It made me very nervous to be doing that over and over in the rain on the roof in the dark standing in puddles of water. But I survived. I filled and drained the shop vac 11 times, keeping a running count in my head. I couldn’t believe that I had shop vac’d 55 gallons of water off the roof. By the 11th round, it was beginning to get light and while waiting for the water to drain out I read that the shop vac was not a 5 gallon shop vac, but a 16 gallon model! I stopped keeping track of how much water I pulled off the roof at that point, but it was nearly 200 gallons, all before 7 am. And the rain kept coming down. At 6a, I had called my dad and asked him to come back to help me make some new roof trusses over the front of the house. Help was on its way. Going under the roof tarps, I had seen that the pooling tarps were collecting the water and then filling up the space between the floor joists, with the weight of the water pushing the drywall down. So when I removed the water, the pressure on the ceiling was relieved. Toby said she watched the ceiling return to a more slightly normal position. Although there was no (less, it was still raining) water weight pushing on the roof, the drywall was still soaked and had popped many of its nails. The wet drywall had no strength and was continuing to come down, the crack was very wide and seemed to be only held together by the paint! At that time I realized the ceiling was going to come down. When Max and Lucy woke up, I had pointed out the ceiling and told then that they were not to go under it. They stayed in the living room. I was running around trying to find my tape measure in the house in order to get measurements of what needed to be shored up when the ceiling came down with a crash. (God was gracious among this whole ordeal. If I had been able to find my tape measure, I would have been working under the ceiling when it fell.) I ran in to the living room and scooped up Lucy who was about 3 feet away from the edge of what had fallen. She was a bit shocked. Toby didn’t say a word to me, she just got on the phone and called her friend Stephanie. Stephanie came right over and picked up the kids and volunteered her husband Mike to help out. Toby cried and cried when Stephanie arrived, then she gave Stephanie a bag of clothes and the kids (with their bag of breakfast pretzels) and they were gone. Stephanie had agreed to take the kids to church and keep them while we worked. The rain let up and we just had some slight misting. My dad arrived and Mike (Stephanie’s husband) showed up and I went up on to the roof wearing my yellow slicker to figure out what kind of truss situation we would need. We figured that out and began to plan it out when Jeff Weinbender showed up and said ‘How can I help?’ It turns out that the Jeff’s mom was with them for church and so they had driven by the house to show her the construction. Justina had pointed out the house by saying ‘It’s the one with the guy in the yellow slicker on the roof.’ When they got to church, Jeff walked back over to my house, ready to help out. With Mike and Jeff’s help, we were able to give some ‘fall’ to the roof in areas where there hadn’t been any before. Having those two extra sets of hands made getting the plywood onto the roof so much easier. About noon, Justina came by with pizza and grub for the working crew. Jeff had to leave after lunch. I went to Lowe’s to get some new pieces of drywall for the inside, and Mike and my dad kept working on the new ridge of the roof. The rain was still holding back. When I got back from Lowe’s, Mike and Pop had completed the roof framing and were finishing up replacing the tarps. Mike took off and my dad and I tackled the drywall situation inside. I thought that we would be done by 5p. At 9:30p my dad left. I was so tired I decided to stay home on Monday to help the family recuperate.
You can see the bulges in the ceiling along the edges.
Saturday At 4:00a it started raining, hard. Like pounding hard. We had not put on the flashing around the new stove pipe, so at 0 dark 30 we all went up on the roof and worked on that. It took about an hour to get it on and the tarp cinched up tight. We did some more work on the tarps and then went back inside for breakfast. It continued the steady rain. We were able to call John before he left to cancel his workday. We had been up until 11:30 working on the fireplace and then working outside at 4:30a. We were able to get some ‘inside’ work done. We went to get a new camillia bush, but they had all be killed in the frost. My dad worked on the posts and I worked on trying to adjust the tarps. At about 5p we called it a day and Pop and Mark went home. I fell asleep at 8:30p with the rain still coming down.
