For those who remember our post regarding a mouse poop shower, recent developments have make that one seem like showering in a spring rain.  Our living room and front bedroom have plywood ceilings oddly enough.  That was apparently a quick wall-covering method in the days of slow (and expensive) lath and plaster.

Unfortunately, before the stove can go in, the plywood ceiling must go out.  The good thing about tearing out plywood is that it comes out in large sections.  The bad thing about plywood is that it comes out in large sections, like this:

When I tore down the first section, a plume of dirt, mouse poop, shredded insulation/nesting material, and mummified mice followed.  By the time I got to a respirator, Robin was calling down from upstairs that she could “smell mouse poop” in the air.  “You mean that general haze?  Yeah, sorry about that.”

So, once again, a deceptively simple project turns messy … literally.

Don’t you just want to hug him? That is before he rips you to ribbons. Jasper looks very evil in this picture. Maybe it’s because I am taking his picture and he only likes Lee. Hmm, maybe he is trying to hypnotize Lee with his eyes.

Lee ripped out the wood paneling in preparation for the stove. While Lee was doing that he had two curious animals wondering what he was doing. First it was Edgar looking through the stairwell. Then it was Jasper wanting to know what Lee was up too.

Here is the bared stairwell.

Edgar got some spots he wouldn’t stop licking. After going to the vet for some medications he got put in an old paint shirt and Lee’s underpants.

Every time Lee goes about trying to do a job all I hear is how he never can find the right tool. I of course always tell him that if he put it back in the same place he might know where they were at. It’s the same story all the time.

We needed to get the place cleaned out where the stove will be going. Since there are tools scattered all around the house Lee decided to put up shop in the back bedroom where he just installed the subpanel. It is his official tool work room for the moment. After he finished the job of organizing all his tools he told me that he was finding lost ones all over the house.

Except he still has an excuse. He now tells me that it will be the tool gremlins that come at night and mislay them. Un-huh.

Here is the clean area again that we will be working on. Edgar is staring in amazement. So am I for that matter. Lee wants to get the stove in this weekend. We will see though because I think he may be coming down with my cold.

We decided to put off installing the tiles under and behind the stove. That means that we don’t have to jack up the house before we install the stove. Woohoo. The reason being is after Lee talked to his brother it was suggested to wait. We have roofing, more walls and ceilings to tear out, and a million other banging around things to do. If we installed the tiles now we run the risk of cracking them during the other house work. So we are going to do a quick install that will keep us warm now and do the final finishing up later.

… and loving it! As some of you may remember, we cut all electric to our house just days before moving in as part of having a new outside service installed.  I got the well back online before we arrived, via a quick hack job (which fits the overall well setup quite nicely), but the water heater .. well, that required bringing power inside.  An electrician friend suggested that the interior subpanel would be best located just past the back door on the wall between the rear bedroom and the kitchen.

So, that’s our destination, but the journey starts outside at the newly installed meter main.  This exterior panel has slots for only 8 breakers (for exterior loads such as the well, and one day perhaps the barn, a shop, and a grid-tied photovoltaic system).  It also has lugs to connect a 200A carrying cable for an interior load center. In the picture on the right you can see the huge red, white, and black cables connected into these lugs.  These 4/0 gauge aluminum cables are obnoxious to work with, especially by flashlight in the cold.  They don’t bend well at all, so you are fighting them for every inch.  I also ended up sticking myself in the finger with a utility knife while stripping one.  That was fun.

The cables in the previous picture are bundled into a 4 strand SER cable (two hots, one neutral, and a 2/0 bare ground) with sheathing for most of its journey.  This cable goes through the wall and then down through the floor as shown.  The hole through the wall was caulked between the panel and the siding.  The cable is then protected by a plastic bushing I glued in place.  I plan to spray-foam all the holes after inspection.  An observant viewer will note that the cable sticks out into the room past the 2×4 wall framing.  This would normally be a problem, except that I plan to double-stud insulate all exterior walls in the house, so the cable will be well within the final wall assembly.

This whole install process actually started in the crawlspace.  I wrestled 52 feet of that wrist-thick SER cable into this dusty, cramped space under our floor.  With only about 9 inches of room under some beams, it wasn’t the most comfortable experience.  Actually, comfort isn’t even on the chart.  Rocks in your back, your head in the dirt, dead mice and spider webs everywhere … and a respirator to keep from sucking in all the fine dust that layers everything.  Ughh!  Unfortunately, I think I’ll probably get pretty familiar with our crawlspace.  Although I don’t plan to run any electric circuits or water lines through it, the drain lines will remain and I still need to shore up some sagged areas of the floor.

This is the only shot I have of the actual cable installed.  Good tools don’t mind a little dirt.  Digital cameras — not so forgiving.  The cable is that twisted object in the top center of the frame.  After I dragged all the cable into the crawl I pulled it over the beams along a floor joist and then pushed it up the first hole (after some chiseling to round out the opening).  I then took the other end down the floor joist into the area below the kitchen, turned a corner, and ran along the bottom of the floor joists and up into the other hole by the back door.  It’s strapped in place every 4 feet or less.  I wonder if the electrical inspector will crawl around here to see if I did this part right?

From the crawlspace the cable returns to the land of the living through a hole below the subpanel I installed a couple days ago.  It enters though a clamp at the bottom, the sheathing is then stripped, and each individual cable runs off to its respective lug.  As this is a subpanel, the ground is bounded to the panel box and the neutral is kept isolated.  The reasons for this never made sense to me until I read Rex Cauldwell’s explanation in the book Wiring A House.

Finally, here on the left is the installed panel, complete with one 30A circuit running to the water heater.  This is a temporary circuit, as I’m not keeping the water heater in it’s present location.  Technically, I should have got this subpanel inspected before I added a circuit.  If you’ve read some of my past posts, you know my opinion of the Lane County building department.  The electrical inspection process is especially designed to be inconvenient for homeowners.  You are supposed to have all circuits run and the grounds bounded and inspected before you apply power to any of them.  This really isn’t practical for a homeowner living in the space they are working on.

Anyway .. short story long, about 30 minutes after I threw the main breaker back on there was hot water coming out of the tap, and about 2 hours later Robin had drawn a big steaming tub full of water for her first official bath of the new house.  Given that our indoor air temperature on the first floor is probably in the 40s, it was a very steamy bath.

Someone was busy tonight. Remember when we were puzzling over the weird cross bracing in this picture?

Lee got busy tonight.

This is what that wall looks like from my kitchen and from the bedroom now.

Someday I hope to post about putting up a wall instead of tearing them all down.

Lee’s Note: I’d like to say that I did not simply throw caution to the wind and knock out the cross braces.  First I consulted with two different people involved in construction.  Everyone came to the same conclusion, namely:

1. This appears to be some sort of shear bracing
2. This has absolutely no value as shear bracing

Given the fact that the lath and plaster walls I took down added considerably more shear strength than these silly little diagonal pieces, I knocked them out as well.  Since we live in a potentially siesmic area, I’ll look into added more shear strength to the house overall before I close up the walls.

Our immediate order of business is to mount a 200A electrical panel inside this wall.  I’ve got 52 feet of 2/0 aluminum cable (at $4 a foot) which will carry the house load from our newly installed meter main outside, through the crawlspace, and then up into this stud bay.  Here’s hoping I can get that all done tomorrow. If so, hot water will be a 5 minute job.

Lee and I worked on cleaning out the trash shed. I am really quite disgusted every time I work on it. I think that it is worst in some ways then all the other trash that we had to dig through around the property. The reason being that it is full of recyclables and outright garbage (like fast food wrappers etc.). The other stuff that we had cleaned up while it was still trash (rotting clothes and whatnot) it wasn’t usually household nasty stuff. I really don’t understand why the former tenants didn’t take this stuff to the dump. It makes me mad and grosses me out that I am having to dig through their household waste.

I had to laugh though as I found carpet under all the trash on the dirt floor. Lee say’s maybe their plan was to vacuum it every ten years but then they couldn’t because of all the garbage they piled on top of it.

I found two dead things. One which we think was another dead cat so that would bring the count up to three. The other was just a pile of jumbled bones. I don’t know my skeletons so my guess is maybe a dead rat or squirrel?

The last couple of afternoons I have spent outside cleaning up sticker bushes, brush, trimming or cutting out small trees, pulling up ivy, and picking up fallen limbs and trash. I am now working on my second burn pile as the first one got too big again. Anyways I thought that I would show some more pictures.

The first two are of the front yard. They are the pictures that I forgot to take after Jim and Sallie were done cleaning it up last Saturday. Doesn’t it look nice? I love not having any trash in my front yard!

Next is an area that I cleaned sticker bushes out of and limbed up small trees by the fence line. It looks much better. Since the sticker bushes are gone you can actually see the ferns that were in that mess. By that is an  area that I still need to work on. Night and day in the difference though. One area you can walk through without getting torn to shreds. The other you walk through at your own risk.

As I was working I came across two different types of mushrooms. I would say “YUM” but I don’t know my mushrooms. So it might be “YUM” and then ‘CLUNK’ as I dropped down dead from bad mushrooms.

Then as I was working back by the barn clearing out tree’s, sticker bushes, limbs, and other assorted stuff I came across tree slime. What may you ask is tree slime? Well I don’t know but that is as close as I can describe it. The slime was, well, slimy, jiggly, and wet looking. I found it growing on a tree branch that I cut down.

I actually have most of the unwanted flora by the barn cleaned up. Just the big sticker spot in the fourth picture and then some tree limbing higher up to do. Once that is done then I can start working on one of the two big pastures. That is gonna take a while.

We actually ordered our wood burning stove about three weeks ago but just had Midgleys hold it for us. Lee picked it up on Thursday but had to wait for help since we couldn’t move it ourselves. The stove weighs around 450 pounds I think.

So since we couldn’t move the stove by ourselves Lee backed the truck up to the porch and covered it with a tarp. That way any would be wood stove thiefs would have a harder time getting to it. I suppose that you could have just stolen the truck but then we might have heard that happening.

My Mom and Dad brought up ramps and a hay dolly that could lift over 700 pounds. A very super sized dolly. Lee took out all the fire bricks to help lighten the weight. Then Jim, Dad, Mom, and Lee managed to get it off the truck and into the house without  killing anyone or even damaging anything.

So now it sits along the wall with all the other tools and what not until we move it again. My Dad left the dolly so that should make it easier. If Lee didn’t have such a huge deadline coming up with work I would be bringing out the whip. “Honeyyyyyyy, do you think you could work on the stove tonight pleaseeeeeeeeee?”