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Monday, October 20, 2008

Not everything needs to be serious and honestly I don't take myself as serious as I sound in print. Still, sometimes we all need to just let it out.

Down here in San Antone time is flying. The house we bought is 21 years old. Ugh. That means work for me. Picking which project to get into is a study in eclectics.

When we first moved in two years ago, I had to do the garage floor before the movers arrived with our stuff. My garage floors must be easy to clean and impervious to chemical (like petrochemical) spills. Once my stuff arrived there would be no way to ever 'empty' the garage again to do it, so it was a no-brainer that it was number one on my list. Off to Lowe's I went for my supplies. Of course, once the epoxy was cured, it made the walls of the semi-finished garage look terrible, so... off to Lowe's I went again.

The paint I used is kitchen and bath. That's about a 20% premium over say, plain old garage paint, but the method to the madness is ease of cleaning. You can wash kitchen and bath paint. A week later and with the walls all shiny and new looking, I had to install baseboard which meant filling in the gap between the sheetrock and the concrete floor, sealing every millimeter with a good quality (read "expensive") caulk. From Lowe's. That keeps the bugs out. Spiders I don't mind. Spiders good. Bugs bad.

With the walls and floors all looking like they should, I could now see that the ceiling was sagging just a bit. Several bits actually. Oh alright – over an inch. A little investigation revealed that when a previous owner opened up the attic access hatch to make room for a full sized drop-down ladder, he cut one of the main roof trusses to make it fit. That was bad but not unsolvable. I just had to reframe everything up in the attic to transfer the load to the remaining trusses. That's what he should have done.

Since he didn't, the ceiling joists and the sheetrock nailed to them had time - like ten years - to distress and sag. This meant that even with the rafters back up in the right place, the ceiling sheet rock stayed where it was so I had to shore it up over a couple more days to screw it into it's new, correct position. So far so good. After installing proper molding around the ladder door frame (omitted by said previous home improvement phenom) the ceiling was uptight and well, up and tight. Did I mention that I got the molding at Lowe's?

Ya know what bugs me? Installed lighting in a room with no switches to turn them on or off. Really. It annoys me. Perhaps I'm weird but sometimes I like to turn a light off (or on; I'm not dead-set against on).

In Europe and Asia for example, lavatory light switches are put next to the door outside the lavatory. Makes sense if you give it a think; after all, you usually leave such a location by the same door you came in through. It's nice to illuminate the bathroom before entering it so not to be surprised should anything be amiss in there. What I'm saying is that it's not an inconvenience.

On the other hand, a garage has a big HUGE door you might otherwise exit through. So why is the light switch for the garage ceiling light in the adjoining utility room? Ah! There's a good answer to that question too. It has to do with why the adjoining utility room door is equipped with a doorknob and a deadbolt.

To answer both these questions you have to understand the garage the way a builder understands it. That is, because the garage is not a room in the house. It's the garage. Ergo it's outside the house.

The utility room is of course "inside the house". You know that because you customarily enter the utility room from the kitchen through another door which is deadbolt deficient (remember the deadbolt?) and of course the word "room" as part of its name is a clue.

So, the 'builders' were of the mindset that the garage was "outside" the house, and you might choose to leave the garage door open all day whilst you were at work, and that's why the door to the utility room is fitted with a deadbolt. It's an 'outside' door. Light switches as we all know are ‘inside’ the house, right? You don't go outside to turn on the porch light now do you? Of course not. So it carries logically (to the builders) that the garage light should be switched from inside the house, too.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, projects, and the order in which I've been carrying them out. Well it may come as a shock to some but I don't subscribe to the theory that an attached garage is an empty space, dedicated to temporarily enshrining my automobile when it is not parked elsewhere.

I am of the opinion that an attached garage is a room belonging to the house, with just a really big door. I have constructed my opinion by way of the fact that my garage has, a) walls, connected to b) a roof, connected to c) the house, and d), it is lockable to the outside.

To support my opinion that a garage is (or can be) a room belonging to a house, a quick tour of any middle class neighborhood will reveal that most people keep an awful lot of valuable items in their garages. In fact in many garages, the number of valuable items is so numerous that a car cannot possibly FIT amongst them and must remain outside.

Generally speaking, the owners of these garages tend to keep them locked up quite tightly when they are not at home despite the fact that no car is in them. Are these people storing their valuable items outside the house as the builders would have us believe?

No? I don't think so either. Maybe the problem is semantics. Perhaps the problem with the light switch could be solved by changing the name of the garage to something else. Something with the word "room" in it somewhere. Again, let's take a quick imaginary drive around a typical middle class neighborhood and do an imaginary inventory of common uses for the space referred to as the garage, and see what it might otherwise lend itself to be called.

We know the builders want to go with "garage", we've already established that. What we're looking for here instead is a consensus based on actual use. Ready? How about "clutter room"? How about "the old cans of paint room"? The "lawn maintenance equipment room"? How about "the room we put everything in we don't use because its old or broken but we still don't want to throw out"? (Ok, that one is a little long but it did have the word "room" in it). The "storeroom" sounds good and from our survey appears accurate, but technically its just one word and I want to keep the naming rules consistent. How about.. oh screw it! How about the god-damned builders put in a light switch and we just call it a garage? Sheesh.

I digressed and got carried away. I apologize. I guess you can see from my torridity that the next thing was a light switch inside the garage. Now it so happens that the existing light switch was exactly where you might expect it to be, other than being on the wrong side of the wall.

All I needed to do was install a second switch-box on the correct side of the wall, swap out the existing light switch and replace it with two of what are called "three-way" switches (don't ask me to explain, it will take too long).

Easy right? So off I go to Lowe's but along the way I think, "You know, I might want to install better lights in the garage while I'm at it. Maybe some additional lights like fluorescents. Fluorescents that can only be turned on or off if I am inside the garage."

That single incandescent bulb the builders installed might be okay to walk you from your car to the door (provided you could magically turn it on or off from inside your car) but it is woefully inadequate for illuminating the room if it is filled with junk.

To solve that meant installing three switches, not one. And some wiring. And some lights. So I did. Well almost. I ran out of money. The switches and wires are all there, I am just waiting for a sale at Lowe’s for the light fixtures. It'll happen.

But that's not why I am writing about the switch. I am writing about the switch because it meant tearing into the wiring in the wall of the utility room. Not a problem in a normal house (what I call normal, anyway), but this house does not have normal walls. It has "textured" walls. Do you know what that is? It's a fancy term to make appealing a cost-cutting construction procedure wherein they don't actually 'finish' the walls.

Really, I'm not making this up. See, it can take a week or more to 'finish' sheetrock. You have to have a team of men and its all plastering, smoothing and sanding, then more plastering, smoothing and sanding and lots of drying time. Time is money. By texturing the walls you eliminate all that. One man goes in and sprays shit all over the walls to make it lumpy. This hides the fact the walls are not finished. An entire house can be done in a single day, and - arguably - it looks good. Builders sell this to homeowners all the time as a wall finish "style". Brilliant, right? Not to me.

The problem with textured walls is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to match the texture if you have any reason to disturb it. Like a repair. Or new wiring. Installing sconces for example. No matter how hard you try, you will NOT match the texture of the surrounding area and the section you worked on will stand out and look like crap. Normal walls are completely repairable because they're flat. Plaster it, sand it, paint it, you're done. This house has textured walls.

So I thought, "The utility room is not big. 6' x 8'. The brown color is dark and depressing. I'll go ahead and strip the walls down, rip out that old single shelf over the washer and dryer and install modern wire shelving onto every available vertical surface."

This would be a good experiment for wall stripping; you know, find out how difficult it is, what mistakes I might make, et cetera.

Every project is bigger than you expect. It's a rule.

For instance: down behind the washing machine there turned out to be a grate on the wall near the floor. It looked like one of those 18" by 6", under-the-eave soffit vents. Turns out it was an 18" x 6" under-the-eave soffit vent. What the heck was it doing down there? Prying it off I found a bigger puzzle. Er, a smaller puzzle. The 18" x 6" inch vent was covering a crudely sawn 4" x 2" hole just an inch from the floor. That's a lot of cover for a very small hole. I dug around inside the hole, inspected it with a mirror, and could find no reason that it had ever been made and decided to repair it correctly. So I did.

Then there was the issue of the dryer vent. Again, poor craftsmanship from the original builders had induced the hole to the outside to become badly deteriorated. It was an entry point for insects, and moldy from water damage, so I fixed that too. With the walls all flat now with white primer and well, flat, I could now see that the ceiling was a terrible yellow color. See how this escalates?

But, what the heck, I had plenty of paint so I painted that too. Now, in the course of installing the shelving I concluded that someone in the future (my wife?) might want to put some things on the shelves that were heavy. Too heavy for wire shelves. So on the wall that was nothing but shelves, I left out space in the bottom to install a custom wooden shelf /cubbyhole thingamajiggy, with pull out shelves and space for a trash can.

Two weeks to do a 6 by 8 utility room, and all because the garage didn’t have a light switch.

Actually, I realized just now that I'm way ahead of myself. There was a project I had to do first when I moved in. Not a lot except for this: the range vent hood did not in fact, vent. Now I'm no longer an uninformed homeowner fooled by cleverly disguised product descriptions. Oh no not me. I am well aware that most range hood vents don't. They might have, had the builders actually cut a hole in the wall for the venting function to expel through, but more often than not they don't.

I'm a stickler for accuracy so I want mine to perform - if not as advertised, at least as constructed. The woman I married is culturally distinct. She's from Punjab and man can she cook Indian food! So a vent that vents is sort of crucial to us if we want to keep our 'dry cleaning only' bills reasonable and our friends coming back.

But first an anecdotal story regarding said vent. To install a kitchen vent, you need some way for the hole to only be open during the actual venting. An open hole may be efficient, but it degrades basic home energy conservation goals and lets the rain in. So manufacturers, rushing in where builders fear to tread, provide external hooded duct thingy's with baffles and insulation and wire meshes (to keep out birds and such) for your purchasing pleasure. You simply screw it to the outside of the wall where you cut the hole for the air to flow through.

Unfortunately for me, this is not a common do-it-yourself type project so the product I've just described is not exactly found at the "impulse buy" displays at your local DIY centers. The reason I mention this is that it took several days of searching until I found one and, proudly standing in line waiting to take my purchase home, a man behind me chanced to notice it and struck up conversation.

When he made the mistake of asking what I intended to use the hood duct thingy for, my frustration before finding it at all suddenly burst and I found my chance to er, ahem...vent. I pretty much unloaded on him everything you've just read.

The surprising part of the conversation was what he said next. Would you believe he said to me that the reason he inquired was because he was a wholesale salesman for the very item I was buying?

Ok, so that's not a jaw dropper I admit. I mean, it can happen, right? And apparently it was happening. So I said to this man, "Why do the builders get away with not cutting the hole for the vent? You would sell so many more of these if they did."

His answer left me without a response (mind you - this is the guy who's job it actually is to plug these things), he said, "Most builders don't install the vent to actually vent because woman say they don't like the noise." End quote.

Huh? I refuse to believe that women are that stupid. They can't be and you know why? Because more often they're even worse than that. I can't tell you how many homes I've visited where the hostess had the range hood fan running, blithely unaware that the air flow was only being redirected back into the room through the little slots on the top of the hood.

In almost all the cases where I've seen this, the women-and often too, men- had lived there for YEARS without realizing that the vent didn't actually, you know, vent. Furthermore-and I admit I'm not in the venting trade per say-in all my life I cannot recall a women ever saying to me that she "didn't like the fan noise".

After I left the store I thought, "That had to be the worst salesman I have ever met."

Here's why. I'm thinking that his knowledge of women's collective taste in noise comes from the comments he receives from his customers. Remember though; he doesn't sell directly to the women using those range hoods. No. He sells to the merchants who sell range hoods. Merchants who sell range hoods to the builders of the houses that the women buy.

So if the comments he hears are coming from the merchants - who also do not meet the women using the hoods - then ipso facto the merchants must be hearing it from the builders.

Ah-Ha! We're back to the source aren't we? So the same people who don't install light switches because the garage is "outside", and don't finish walls because they opine it looks better sprayed with mud, are saying that their customers don't want them to vent the range hoods because they make too much noise? Uh-huh. I believe it all now. Not.

I should wrap this up. I just finished remodeling the master bathroom. That story starts with the line, "One day, my wife asked me to re-caulk the tub because it was ugly and made cleaning difficult..." I said ok and two months later we were the proud owners of a completely new bathroom. Including new caulk.

So there you go. The happiness of home-ownership. I'd tell you more about it but I have to go now to add a second story to the house. I have to because my wife noticed a roof tile was loose up there the other day and well, you know.

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