Sometimes I even impress myself

As I have mentioned several times, The Dump suffers from a lack of gutters on two sides. This leads to a lot of water hitting the ground and sitting there right next to the foundation. This means it makes its way into the crawlspace, which has been the source of much stress and frustration. It REALLY stressed me out last year, and this year I was trying to tell myself I was prepared for the inevitable cycle of rain and pumping.

Back in late summer, I thought to install gutters before the rains started, but didn't because it seemed very likely I'd do my foundation work (including a super powerful system to remove water from the property) and a new roof. Alas, the economy tanked way more than expected and I decided I needed to keep that cash in my pocket.

After the doozie of a storm we had last weekend and the out-of-control stress I felt this week with all the pumping it required, I decided I needed to get some gutters up before the next storm rolled in. So, I downloaded some how-to info from ThisOldHouse.com, went shopping for supplies Friday night and skipped my run Saturday morning to get an early start on what I suspected would be a long project.

I have to admit, I consider most of my home improvement projects thus far to be pretty entry level and was a bit concerned about my ability to execute on this one. But execute I most certainly did. Because I was racing against mother nature, and my doubt about taking on a project of this magnitude, I opted for the slightly more expensive vinyl gutter system that snaps together with rubber gaskets at the joins instead of cementing with metal or plastic adhesive. So easy!

I got about 40' of gutters hung without too much cussing and without falling off the ladder. I ran out of gas and did not finish the task (have a 12' and a 7' section left), but am really pleased with what I accomplished.

Sure enough, it started to rain while we were out to dinner and I could not wait to get home to see how they were holding up. Instead of a waterfall off the roof, I heard water gushing down the downspout and out the end of the 12' diverter tube that takes it away fromt he foundation. Yippee!!!!!

It rained most of the night and a good chunk of today and my crawlspace is NOT full of water as I was expecting it to be. Maybe we didn't have enough rain to create saturated conditions (though he soil was still saturated from the last storm, even with 4 dry days in between) , but maybe the gutters are a big chunk of the solution to my water problem. Not bad for $150 in supplies and 6 hours of work.

And because I am THAT much of a geek, here's a photo:
On tap for next weekend: painting the kitchen.

Rainy day progress

As I type this, Redwood City is approaching 2" of rain in a 24 hour period. I'm not joking when I say it has been raining ALL day. I know our nearly-empty reservoirs desperately need it, and for that I am grateful for it to be raining.

Alas, also as I type this, I have a pump running because my crawlspace is once again full of water. This is partly (mostly) due to The Dump's lack of adequate drainage, and also partly because Redwood City is relatively low, so when there is a lot of water in a short period, it isn't able to drain away very quickly. I am MUCH less stressed about this than I was last winter. It helps that my neighbor's crawl space is full too (yep, I stuck my head in there to satisfy my curiosity!) and he has sufficient gutters.

Truth be told, I was really hoping to hold out on the pumping because my rain barrels are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Since we're perilously close to a drought, I wanted to be a good citizen and attempt to collect as much rainwater as possible for the rest of the rainy season to use in my garden when the inevitable water rationing starts (or at least be a good citizen even if there is no rationing) and pumping the crawlspace into a barrel seemed like a good way to start.

In any event, I've been indoors all day and spent most of that day scraping the 50-some odd years of wax buildup from the hall floor. This has been ongoing for about 6 months, but it's a mind-numbingly boring task, slow on visible progress, and hard on the hands, so it's always at the bottom of the to-do list. I'd tackled the hardware on the kitchen cabinets last night, so there was nothing else that seemed like a reasonable one-day project, and the wet weather meant painting was out since it would take ages to dry, so a-scraping I went.

I wish I could say a full day of work led to a miraculous transformation, but they went from bad to worse before starting to look better.

The wax was really thick and grimy at the edges, but that's where it has scraped up more readily. After making progress with the 12" on either side, I covered it with a runner and ignored it for a while since the visible parts were quite nice looking. :)

The central traffic area was smooth and most resistant to scraping off, but quite discolored compared to the exposed perimeter. After a few hours of scraping, I decided to give the chemical wax stripper a go. Not the smartest thing on a day when I can't open all the windows of the house to ventilate, but I had a one track mind about the floor. I'm less than impressed with the results, even after going at it with steel wool with plenty of the solvent.

After letting them dry, I used Johnson One Step Floor Wax which is supposed to clean and wax in one step (duh) with no buffing required. It claims to be able to remove wax too, but I knew it was no match for the amount of buildup on my floors. The label said it wound dry shiny and if it did not, that meant there was wax buildup that needed to be removed. My floors are not shiny, so there is more scraping/scubbing in my future. I think I'm going to see if I can find a brillo-type pad to attach to the sander to save my hands a bit.

Since I don't have a photo-worthy hall floor, I'll leave you with a photo of the new kitchen cabinets complete with hardware and butcher block top:
More progress to come, eventually. Painting the kitchen is near the top of the to-do list when we get a dry spell.