Conference 7.286::home_work

    Many of the houses that we own are not new.  This, of course, implies
    that there were previous owners.  (Amazing logic, eh?)  Maybe it's me,
    but it seems like former owners are always insane. In my case, every
    DIY project that they did was a complete disaster. This topic is for
    relating botched jobs, mangled projects, and general remuddling that
    you inherited when you bought your house.
    
    -joet 

    We have a bathroom on the second floor.  It once had a window dead
    center of the bath/shower enclosure.  Someone didn't like it, so he
    fashioned a Marlite tub enclosure which covered up the window. From the
    outside, you saw the back of the Marlite through the window that was
    never removed.
    
    Someone put up a chimney without cutting into the siding, so there
    is this cement block structure going up the side of my house about
    1/2" away from the outside wall.  It is tied in somehow, though.
    
    The original FHA furnace was the size of a VW Microbus.  When the
    blower motor went, they put in a random motor probably found at
    a flea market.  Now, in addition to the burner cycling based on
    the heat demand from the thermostat, the blower cycles on and off
    when the motor overheats.
    
    -joet

    Yup, and it'll be the next owner's duty and covenent to say things
    about MY tacky taste!
    
    My house came with a tall pile RED, SHAG rug... in the kitchen.
    Top that!
    
    -Scott
     

    Speaking of red - the house my brother-in-law bought had a small
    room, about 8x8, with vertical red,white blue stripes, each about
    12" wide. Also, all the walls in the basement were painted RED.
    I'm not even going to mention the 6 layers of wallpaper, the final
    layer being lavender flowers, on the ceiling of the master bedroom.
    It sure is fun working overhead with a steamer!
    
    

    I didn't even mention the bedroom that was painted solid lavender.
    That's solid lavender: walls, ceiling, baseboards, doors, window sills,
    etc. It's like someone set off an explosive device in a lavender paint
    bucket and then scraped the window panes clear.  (There was so much
    purple, it seemed like it SMELLED like lavender in there.)
    
    After three coats of eggshell white, there's still a purple cast
    to the room when the sun shines brightly in.
    
    -joet

>    My house came with a tall pile RED, SHAG rug... in the kitchen.
>    Top that!
    
No problem.  Lime green shag in the kitchen (with formica cabinets that you 
could run a soapbox derby on, they were so out of level) and bright orange shag 
in the bathroom.       

Paul

    OK, Paul. You win. I am _impressed_!
    
    -Scott
    

    	When I was out looking to buy a house I saw a bathroom with
    orange shag carpet and built in lava lamps!  The owner bragged about
    them.
    

My parents still talk about the first apartment they ever rented.  The landlord 
ushered them into the bathroom with pride: "And this is the lovely bethroom that
I told you about."  Foil wallpaper, accented by flamingos in flourescent pink, 
orange, and green.  And for towel racks, three large plastic rings in the same 
lovely colors.

Paul

    I wonder if those people are releated to my "prior". One of the
    bathrooms in my house has sort of paisley-like women - they look
    like mermaids but don't have tails. One of the towel-holders is
    a gold-painted lion with a ring thru its nose. The medicine cabinet
    looks like it needs a 200 year old painting in it - you know that
    tack "gold" gilt?
    
    -Scott
    

    re: .9
    
    Sounds like Don Johnson and company would be right at home.
    
    -joet

	Well, now, this particular note has sparked a desire to share 
some info on my place (which lovingly call 'The Odd Address Trap') Which 
room to begin with is the problem...they ALL have a story!

	The bathroom (or hopper-room if you prefer) was finished in 
Early Scrounge. The fellow drove a milk truck and musta' picked up all 
sorts of 'building' material alongside the road...nails of various 
lengths, 2X4s of various lengths and Formica. He built his own vanity 
out of the 2X4s and covered the thing with the Formica. Mr No_Talent's 
wife, Ms No_Taste, proceeded to line the inside of the 'cabinet' with 1/2 
inch high pattern black-and-white hounds-tooth check Contact paper...so 
far, so good (???!??!)... The floor was covered with some kind of low 
pile carpet which was soaking up the water as it dripped from the hopper 
each time you pulled the chain, rotting the flooring below. Tiles had 
come off the tub wall around the faucets. 

	The room is a hair over 8 feet wide and so he_and_she put up a 
4X8 foot mirror above the sink, vanity and hopper. No problem for the 
women using the can, but the guys had a real problem...what with their 
reflection staring back at them while they ... (get the picture??)

	One day in June of the year we closed, I threw the ENTIRE 
bathroom out the window and rebuilt it from the studs in...keeping 
only the tub and hopper...


BTW...the mirror has been cut down to 3X5 feet and is over the vanity 
ONLY!

    
       My house has come with the exact decore that was installed in
    the early 40's and not one thing had been done since. I'm talking
    linoleum over oak floors all through the house, wallpaper that is
    so discolored that you can look at the rooms and see where every
    thing sat (in the same spot) for the past 40 years! 
       And the kitchen! Oh my my.
    
     It's going to be a long summer.!
    
    

    I still remember our first visit to our house -- the dining room
    had ORANGE walls (paint over paper).  That room was the most obvious
    in need of redecorating in an otherwise substantial home.
    
    Now, many years later, the dining room is still ORANGE, but I've
    gotten used to it.  (It is the 1st floor attic, after all.)
    
    -- Ward

    The first winter in our "new" old house, I kept smelling fumes from
    the gas FHA furnace. It was not until that spring that my curiousity
    got the best of me and I started tracking it down. 
     
     Well, it appears when they installed the furnace, the flue was
    vented into the base of the double-flew chimney ON THE WRONG SIDE.
    So what I was smelling was the exhaust from the furnace coming
    through the trap door for the ashpit of the fireplace above !
    It was then venting up the chimney for the fireplace.
    
     I climbed up on the roof to verify this and sure enough the flue
    that was intended for the furnace was clean as a whistle and full
    of cobwebs.
    
     I spent the next weekend cutting through the foundation to reach
    the unused flue. All is fine now.
    
     Get this, though, the house is 17 YEARS OLD and the original owners
    never noticed it!  Makes you wonder ! 
    
     For those of you who are curious, the house was built by built by 
    Robert Hicks. Hope he's had better luck with his subcontractors
    since then !
    

    While rennovating a Victorian house in Worcester, came across the
    following bizzare cases:
    
    	o	oak wainscoating in kitchen painted Fire Engine
    		Red.  Previous owner didn't paint behind curtains
    		or stove
    
    	o	Pantry cabinets held on with 5 penny nails.  One
    		set of cabinets came crashing down on me one
    		night.
    
    	o	Cellophane tape used on electrical connections
    
    	o	"miles" of old iron pipe that goes nowhere in the
    		basement.  (it's being replaced..)
    
    	o	Wire from Gas furnace thermostat snaked up cellar
    		stairs, up stairs to 2nd floor, to thermostat
    		hung on bedroom wall.
    
    	o	Kitchen door nailed/glued/puttied shut, so it would
    		not open.
    
    	o	Stairs to back porch missing....
    

    re: .16   
    
>    o	"miles" of old iron pipe that goes nowhere in the
>    	basement.  (it's being replaced..)

    If it isn't going anywhere, why replace it?  I can see the next owner
    of your house adding to this note:
    
    o	"miles" of NEW iron pipe that goes nowhere in the
    	basement
    
    -joet  8^)

>    		Previous owner didn't paint behind curtains
>    		or stove

Reminds me of a house I painted once.  It had been painted gray, and a second 
coat of the same color had been put on some number of years after the first.  I 
guess the people who painted it then figured that they didn't need to be too 
careful, seeing as it was the same color, even though it was easy to see the 
difference if you looked.  We noticed first that they had not painted the 
underside of any of the clapboards.  We thought this was sloppy, until we 
noticed that they had not painted behind the shutters on the windows.  But the 
real kicker came when we discovered that they had not painted behind the bushes 
either!

Paul

    Our house has a 12 x 12 dining room with hardwood floors, which
    looked nice with a 10 x 10 rug.  After we bought the house, we
    lifted the rug to find that a 1 foot "border" was all that was
    refinished !
    
    Mark
    

"Rebuilding a deck," reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in 
Building History", Fine Homebuilding June/July 1984

In the spring of 1977, my bride to be and I bought our first house, a modest, 
early 1950s ranch with a basement we planned to turn into a workshop.  The 
house had a view of a lake and bordered state parkland.  What really sold us,
though, was the large bay in the living room with glass windows from floor to 
ceiling, one of which was hinged like a door and opened onto a generous second- 
story deck overlooking the woods.

Mrs. Cooper, the nice lady who lived next door, told us that the house had 
originally been built for her by her late husband when she was a new bride.  
Deena and I considered this a good omen (blithely ignoring the fact that the 
people who sold the house were divorcing).  We loved our little house.  Living 
in it seemed too good to be true.  It was.  As we got to know the place better, 
we realized that the late Mr. Cooper had scrounged almost all of the materials 
for the house.  He'd salvaged used framing, gotten the cupola from an old 
schoolhouse, and liberated our raised-panel entry door from the front of the 
old public library.  In the course of making repairs around the place, we began 
to realize the Cooper had been an ameteur, but inventive, carpenter.  Some of 
his solutions were elegant and straightforward, while others were jury-rigged,
incomprehensible jumbles that would leave me muttering to his ghost.

One afternoon, Deena brushed against the railing on the deck, and pieces of it 
fell off - a clear sign that repairs were needed.  We looked closely at the 
boxed posts supporting the railings and found that they were only toenailed to 
the deck and had begun to rot badly around their bases, so we decided to 
replace the entire railing.  When we removed the posts, we found cupped and 
rotted tongue-and-groove decking beneath - evidence that the damage was greater 
than we had thought.  We decided to replace the decking.  I gently took up a 
few pieces in the hope that the local mill could duplicate them.  Then I saw 
the rotted joists.  At this point, we decided to replace the entire deck.

That night we made sketches for an enlarged version.  It would be a proper 
deck, made of pressure treated lumber, and it would be watertight to provide 
dry storage underneath.  We planned to do all the work ourselves; as violin 
makers, we figured we knew how to join pieces of wood.  To assist in the 
project, we enlisted the services of my friend Randy, a budding opera singer.
Randy and I decided to remove the old deck in the reverse order in which it had 
been built - no sledgehammers for us.

Demolition day dawned clear and sunny.  First the railing went over the edge.  
That part was easy.  Then the decking, plank by rotten plank.  We worked 
methodically across the joists, muttering about poor Cooper.  He'd boxed 
everything.  The railing posts were boxed.  Even the band joists were boxed.  
Then the entire floor had been boxed with tongue-and-groove decking above, and 
sheets of plywood, complete with weep holes, nailed on from below.  The whole 
arrangement was an invitation to rot.  Each boxed in cell formed a haven for 
some creature.  It was like an apartment complex.  We found the remains of 
birds, squirrels, mice, and even a small snake.  We saw the abandoned nests of 
wasps, bees, and hornets.  We worked on, and by lunch time the deck framing was 
entirely exposed.  It also wobbled quite a bit.

The far end of the deck was supported 8 ft. above the ground on three steel 
jack posts embedded in concrete.  At the top of each post was a short threaded 
section to which a metal flange had been screwed.  There were three holes in 
each flange, but only one hole in each had a hammered and bent-over 16d nail.  
For nearly 15 years, those three nails were all that held the deck and the jack 
posts together.  The wood was so soft that the nails were holding merely out of 
habit, and we decided that it would be prudent to halt work and figure out our 
next step.

I climbed down to check things out from underneath, while Randy remained aloft 
to scrutinize matters from above.  Humming something from "The Barber of 
Seville," Randy wondered out loud about the consequences of a collapse, and I 
flippantly retorted it would save us several hours of demolition.  Things get a 
bit less clear after this.  I remember Randy jumping off the shaky framing and 
yelling at me to run.  I ran.  I remember passing the last of the steel posts 
as it fell over, noting with disgust that it had been embedded only a few 
inches in its concrete pier.  Behind me I heard the crashing, cracking and 
splintering sounds of the deck as it hit the ground.

Then I heard the groan - the deep, fundamental, and awful groan of something 
letting go that's not supposed to.  It was no doubt the ghost of Cooper, 
getting even for all my unkind thoughts about him.  Cooper had not, after all,
hung the house end of the deck off a ledger, as you or I might have done; the 
simple way was not for Cooper.  Instead, he had run every blessed deck joist 
back under the house and scabbed them onto the second story joists.  "Why, 
Cooper?" I thought, as I watched the floor of the living room separate in the 
middle and begin to rise, "Why on earth did you do it that way?"  Then the 
large walls of glass in the bay came toppling out and crashed to the ground, 
followed by the sundered sections of oak flooring.  Finally, there was silence.

Well, not quite.  As Randy and I shakenly surveyed the wreckage, we heard a 
sound like gently falling rain.  Only it wasn't rain.  It was ants.  Thousands 
of them, falling out of the house.  You see, Cooper had boxed the mullions in
the bay of windows, too, and the carpenter ants, attracted by the rotting deck, 
had used them as boulevards to and from our honeymoon home.  Deena and I had 
enjoyed our home for only a few months.  The insects had been enjoying it for 
15 years.  Have you ever seen two grown men try to stamp out several thousand 
ants?  We think a few of them probably got away.

Five months and $4000 later, the floor framing in the living room had been 
repaired and new oak flooring put down.  Four new double-pane glass panels had 
been set into the bay, and a new deck finished in pressure treated wood.  It is 
the marvel of the neighborhood.  Supported on 6X6 pressure treated posts set 5 
ft. deep into the earth, fitted with uplift pins and embedded in concrete, this 
deck, I am assured, will still be standing 100 years after the house to which
it is attached by a ledger has fallen down.  And even after the most intense 
rainstorms, the ground beneath remains as dry as powder.

Our careers called us away from our beloved honeymoon house the day after our 
deck was finished.  We never cooked a single hamburger on it, or leaned on its 
sturdy rail to let our gaze wander into the soft retreat of the nearby woods.  
Cooper, I hope you're satisfied.

    Re .19 - Finishing only the border of the floor.
    
    	That is not that unusual or strange. Most homes older than 30
    years will be like that, even the most expensive ones. The theory
    was that if it was always going to be covered up, why finish it.
    In fact they usually used a lower grade wood in the middle portion
    of the floor.
                                                                     
    
    Re .20
    
    	Well, you get my award for best story so far. Sounds like it
    would have been a great 3 Stooges skit. Great writing too! Can't
    understand why you moved though :-)
    
    						
    							Mark
    

    This note really hits home (excuse the pun).
    
    We had a black and brown indoor outdoor carpet in the kitchen and
    downstairs bathroom. When I replaced it, the rubber backing had
    to be scraped off the plywood naturally.
    
    Front door hinges nailed into the wood.
    
    We have two switches that don't turn anything on (or off).
    And for that matter, I followed one and it goes to an outlet but
    the wire color code was not followed. I'm going to hand this one
    to an electrician.
    
    Molding that doesn't go the end of the wall, or match in color the
    other molding in the room.
    
    Nails to hold up curtain rods. For some reason, this really pisses
    me off. He had Brass Hooks holding up the ends of the rods and drove
    a 4 inch nail into the frame to support the middle.
    
    I realize that it's not as bad as some of the replies I've read,
    but the house is 70 years old and the previous owner restored it
    from the frame up. You would think he could've done a little better.
    What's a couple more brass supports....
    
    Jim

    re: #16
    
    	The pipe is being replaced as it's in the way of things like
    heating ducts,wiring.  The previous owner replaced plumbing by
    just putting new pipes, and leaving the old stuff in place....
    

    Mine had all kinds of safty features like a 110V 30 amp service
    - the fuse box consisted of tapping off the line with light holders
    having 10 amp fuses in them and nob and tube wiring.
    The house was empty for a year but the pilot was still going on
    the water heater and gas stove.
    The best I saved for last. The phone company had grounded the phone
    line to the gas pipe.                  

    I could go on forever about "the house that Mrs. Ledoux built" and perhaps
    I will when I get a little time...

    But in keeping with .22 along with other atrocites dear Mrs. Ledoux
    used electrical staples (the insulated kind) to hang pictures... and
    roofing nails to attach curtain rod brackets...

    More later...

-mikey

    Re: .16
    
    A lot of the threaded piping you find in older homes is there for
    the old gas lights.  We had plenty of this in the basement too.  I 
    could never figure out what it was used for until I started ripping 
    down a few walls and ceilings, lo and behold.
         
    					Steve

    re: .3 and .4
    
    Yes, I can imagine the red......
    
    Bought our house from U.S. Steel, who bought it from their
    engineer-type who was transferred...He and wife knew U.S.S. would
    buy from them so they let their teenage son do his own decorating...
    Needless to say, sonnies taste was worse than old sweat socks...Entire
    room woodwork, trim wood, windows, electrical outlets and switches,
    closet pole, louvered closet door and inside of room door was all
    painted Chinese red enamel paint, probably applied with 4" brush
    or just sloshed on with sponge, not sure of technique here......
    
    Finishing touches was a horrendous wallpaper on one wall but rest
    of walls done in white so we could live with that for a day or so.
    The paint job though required removing most woodwork, windows from
    frames, etc to strip or replace. Doors were stripped, colonial casing
    was just replaced. All electrical gear was replaced and paint scraped
    off of floor, etc. Needless to say, I hope this kid buys a house
    from someone just like himself. It was a lot of work to get the
    remains of the red off. 
    
    I assume he got his decorating hints from MOM, who painted over
    every bit of old wallpaper that she didn't recover with more wallpaper.
    She also painted over a lot of paint that hadn't been properly cleaned
    so we have some peeling problems with one room.
    
    Why did I buy the house? Good price ($10K off the asking) and it
    seemed to only need redecorating. Actually, the $10K has since been
    dropped into the house with replacing siding that had rotted plywood
    under it, a new kitchen to replace the cheapo contractor kitchen,
    and a bunch of bills for stuff like the new trim for the red bedroom.

    Re: .27
    He must have been a friend of the kid who glued dark brown cork
    to one entire wall of a bedroom in my house....
    
    Steve

    Hey! that same kid must have lived in a house I looked at once.
    We were looking at very big houses in Detroit (wound up buying a
    27 room house, but thats another story). The real estate lady was
    showing us around a house and carefully warned us the kids room
    was not very neat. As she was walking around the room she opened
    a closet door with great flourish, and a sales pitch about the huge
    closets, to discover a pile of trash over 5 feet high. The kid must
    have thrown 5 years worth of orange peels, candy wrappers, old notebook
    paper etc. into the closet. I thought the Real Estate lady would
    fall through the floor! As I remember now the room was painted entirely
    black.                                                             
    
    BTW- thanks to whoever started this note- It's been great fun to
    read.
    

      When we moved into our place our bedroom walls were covered in
    "traffic sign" wallpaper. You know, stop, go, yield, one way!
    Under the wallpaper, was woodpanel. That wasn't too bad, cause the
    last guy used lots of drywall mud to fill the grooves and gaps in
    the sheets of panel.
      One other room had a split level floor. Only about 1/2 inch
    difference between the 2 sections. But that wasn't too bad either
    because he plastered the joint there with drywall mud too! 
    He made it a nice gentle slope.
      Oh yeah, whenever he was an inch or two short with his 1/4 round,
    he made his own with, .....you guessed right......drywall mud.
    
    I have really enjoyed this file so far.
    
    Terry
                                                  

    Our place, built and decorated in the mid-1970's, has a lime and orange
    color scheme just like .6. Of course we'll redo it, but I'm taking
    careful photographs in case someone wants to restore it to its original
    condition in a hundred years or so. Someone's going to thank me... 
    
    					Val

    Mrs. Ledoux was a divorced woman with five kids. In order to bridge
    the "generation gap" she painted the whole house (not just the kids'
    bedrooms) in "hip" colors. The plesant colors include: VAX Manual Orange,
    Shroud Purple, AQUA (and I do mean AQUA!), and Clorox Green. And of
    course painting entailed doing all the woodwork and psinting over
    half-stripped wall-paper...

    In the basement I found a can of paint (which I keep because no one
    believes me otherwise) left over by Mrs. Ledoux. The paint company
    is called "MAD MOD COLORS" and the hue is "Wild Plum". This cheery
    color adorned the walls of the master bedroom... shudder!

-mike

    Fortunately, I really can't top any of these, but this is the way
    it went on one of my former houses.
    
    Scene: Christmas Morning: Main cartridge fuse blew. Got three
    spares form PSNH sub station. Blew  another one. Run long extension
    cords to unload kitchen appliances, move pportable appliances to
    other rooms.
    
    Investigative results:
    
    The cellar had a major distribution box, and three smaller distribution
    boxes, for a total of 16 glass fuses, two cartridges, and two 220v
    circuits.
    
    1 outlet on wall between living room and catchall room had one
    Major 15 A. fuse dedicated to it.
    
    One other fuse (clever devils) had the other two distribution boxes
    tied to it in SERIES, which only included (only ;^) ) :
    Cellar, with furnace
    Kitchen with all appliance outlets, washer, deep freeze
    Bathroom
    1 small attic used as a study
    Upper attic used as a bedroom
    outside lights (2)
    
    The other fuses were inconsequentially tied to lighting circuits.
    
    Solution: Divide and conquer the Electrical system. Next owner got
    a very nice 'MAP' of the electrical system with fuse ratings, wire
    size, and at least 2 circuits to the room (three to the cellar).
    [ ain't it nice to replace fuses by 100w lamp instead of flashlight?]
    
    Current house is just 'overdue' on maintenance. 2nd owner (ca.
    1884-195x) was a professional carpenter/housebuilder. Former
    owner (2nd owners son) was a licensed electrician (ca. 1916- 1976).
    
The wallpaper may be old and peeling. But, better to have peeling paper,
    than a paper/paint sandwich of multiple layers.
    
    Bob
        

(The interesting point who dunnit.)

I grew up in a house that we bought from an engineer who worked at 
Commonwealth Edison (in Chicago).  He had done a number of 
"improvements" before we got the house.

I was about 15 when the switch in the basement bathroom broke. I
unscrewed the fuse, took off the switch cover plate, unscrewed the
switch and ZAP!!  If I had been standing in water... 

It turns out, the guy had put in an auxiliary fuse box with the wires 
backwards.  All those years, the fuses had protected the ground wire!

Alex

    In an old three-decker whose electrical service had been `improved'
    by the owner...
    
    To supply power to a ceiling fixture and the only wall outlet in
    the kitchen, the electrocucian tapped off one side of a 220-v./50-a.
    stove circuit, using 14-g. Romex. The cable was terminated by stripping
    off a foot or so of sheath, clipping the exposed ground wire, and
    running each conductor through a separate knockout; the cable clamps
    evidently had to be deformed to bite securely into the insulation.
    
    I got suspicious when we managed to run a large variety of kitchen
    appliances from the same outlet one day, and nothing blew.
    We decided to invest in a new home shortly afterward.
    

    The neighbours had a master bedroom painted totally (not the floor,
    but included the ceiling) in gloss fire engine red. Guess what the previous
    owner did for a living...
    
    Andrew M.

    
    I grew up on the top floor of a 3-decker.  My Grandfather bought
    the house back in the early 1900's, a single decker.  He added-on
    and it was then L-shaped.  Later, he jacked up the house and added
    two stories.
    
    Somewhere in the mid-50's, a sashcord broke in our apartment, and
    the old heavy window wouldn't stay open.  I said I'd take care of
    it.  I pulled off the moulding and removed the window, which required
    that I cut the other cord.  I figured I'd replace both with new
    ropes and they should last another 40-50 years.
    
    I found the screws for removing a block in each side for access
    to the weights.  After removing the screws, I was having trouble
    getting the blocks out.  That's when I found out that the cut lines
    were just scored in the wood!!  It took quite a while to actually
    cut them out with a keyhole saw.  Thankfully, no other cords broke
    before we were gone.
    
    Lee

In an early 1960s house with the original owners still resident
in Wellesley, one could see the bathroom plumbing access panel in
the long hallway wall.  And there came a time, doesn't there
always come a time (?), when the bathtub needed to be turned off
quickly via the shut-offs allegedly behind the access panel. 

Imagine the horror under stress to learn that the access panel
was seemingly stuck to the 1x4 molding by layers of paint.  So
then, in desperation, they removed the molding.  And then to
realize that the 1x4 molding did NOT cover the cracks in the
drywall -- but instead, there were NO cracks.  There was NO
access panel.  There was just a frame.  (A later study revealed
that the master bath had a similar non-panel as well.) 

There was some moderately good news -- at least when an access
was hacked, there were shut offs indeed.  And my contractor is
telling me now (1986) that noone needs shutoffs or access panels,
just one huge valve at the water meter. 

       I've just added home_work to my directory so maybe i'll be the
    only one reading this but here goes..... my wife and I fell in love
    with this house (don't ask me why). I guess its about 70 years old.
    
    Kitchen: Army green painted metal cabinets with kicked in doors
             off the hinges resting on the floor. Gapping 6ft. hole
             in the ceiling. refrigerator plugged into extension cord
             through a hole drilled throught the floor to the cellar.
    
Dining Room: Bright blue w/ silver wallpaper. Huge waterstain on maple
             hardwood floors (too lazy to tighten radiator 1/2 turn)
             and a gorgeous leaded glass corner hutch! ( I can't believe
             they did'nt *%#@ that up)
    
Living Room: Lime yellow paint/chair-rail/silver top wallpaper...stapled
             square cardboard ceiling.
    
    Hallway: Holes everywhere, lime green woodwork , dripped all over
             the hard/floors... even painted some of the glass on 
             french doors in the hallway.
    
   Bathroom: Too bad to mention!
    
   Bedrooms: #1 lemon yellow #2 paneled(livable) #3 partially panneled
             over the woodwork too.
    
    notes:   the guy we bought it from considered himself a handyman.
             After two years... completely remodeled throughout
             paid 50,000.00    just estimated at 135,000.00    Ya-hoo! 

   At the beginning of the year I decided to redocorate our downstairs
    washroom. Though I was aware that it had 3 layers of waterproof
    paper stuck very firmly to the walls I set about the job with a
    good steamer and a weekend ahead of me.Since the room in question
    is 7 feet by 4 at the best it is not a naturally tenable place for
    a person to be at the same time as a paper steamer, however, needs
    must as they say.                             
    
    Having removed the first layer of paper I discovered that the other
    2 layers had been put on before the tiles above the wash-hand basin,
    indeed before the basin for that matter. Undeterred I smashed the
    hell out of the tiles, removing them, the paper, and a fair ammount
    of plaster as well (I'll say one thing for the guy who was there
    last, he stuck things down well). I discovered that by slackening
    off the supports for the basin I could get at the paper trapped
    behind it as well, by the end of Saturday 1 layer of paper remained
    on just 2 walls.
    Sunday...
            decided that since I was short on cash rather than replace
    the toilet seat and cistern I would strip the 3 layers of paint
    off them (Yes, the guy had painted the toilet seat each time he
    hung new paper) I did the seat outside, but rather than disturb
    the plastic cistern which had been Nailed To The Wall, I decided
    to strip it "in situ" I poured paint stripper on the top & side
    of the cistern, and behond the paint melted away...... 1 layer -
    ok.....2nd layer - ok........3rd layer - ok. then the cistern gently
    blistered and started to melt away as well...... water on floor
    in ever increasing ammounts at this point.                         
    
     Now, there are things that you really should not do when a situation
     is just about to get out of hand, the main thing not to do is to
    shout SH#T!! and step quickly backward. the time that it is particularly
    important not to do this, is when there is a basin, still connected
    to the water main, directly behind you.The thing that above all
    you should not have done is losened the basin from the wall so it
    is free to move. If you feel you must do all of the above, it is
    advisable that your water pipe is made out of a material other than
    plastic - plastic pipe you see, tends to break when the thing it's
    connected to falls on the floor and it doesn't. In this case, it
    did (break that is).
    
    At this point, with 2 sources of water emptying merrily into a room
    only a little over the size of the average bathtub, a guy begins
    to wonder just why the hell he didn't take a trip out somewhere
    (the dentist perhaps). it should be noted however the major difference
    between the room in question & a bathtub is that bathtubs dont leak
    water into the rest of the house through the door, this is why 
    bathtubs can never be found fitted with a door.
    
    From this point things got only slightly worse, in that I discovered
    that my house has eight stop-cocks in it, and only one of them turns
    off the water to the room I was swimming in. The stop-cock in question
    is situated in the attic, just below the stop-cock to the attic
    water storage tank that is painted red,( the one that looks like
    the one you want but does sod-all.) and under a pile of old junk
    so it can be found easily. (For the definition of easy in this context
    refer to the books "Climbing Everest The Easy Way" and "Self Mutilation
    Made Easy") I might add that since both toilet & basin are fed directly
    from the afformentioned attic tank,  turning off the main outside
    has no effect until the 60 gallon attic tank is drained.
    
    P.S. I have a large ammount of flamingo & rose patterned papier-mache
    to hand should anyony have a use for it.
    
     Chris Hall (UK CCD Hampshire)

    Thanks Chris, for the laughs.  It brings back memories.....
    And I didn't even want to come back today. Alas you have put a
    shimmer of hope into the day.
    
    It is amazing what you larn by the DIY method !!!
    
    Chuckling,
    
    Merle

    A friend of mine who has been looking for a house just told me about
    one that he saw in the course of his investigations.  To begin with,
    the realtor didn't want to take him to see it because it was so
    bad.  He talked her into it, just so he could satisfy his own
    curiosity.
    They drove up, and there was a mound of concrete in the back yard.
    It was allegedly a barbeque.  There was also an above-ground pool
    with a changing room that had showers, lined with sheetrock (!).
    Of course the sheetrock was falling apart, so to correct it the
    owner had painted it...heavily.  He'd done the wiring, except he
    didn't have any staples so he secured the wires by tying them around
    the 2x4's.
    For the back entrance to house, he'd taken one of those prefab metal
    storage sheds, cut it in half with a torch, and nailed it to the
    side of the house around the door, sealing the connection with a
    copious application of roofing cement and flashing.
    The kitchen counters were that fake ready-made plastic butcher-block
    print stuff.  He'd sawn the pieces to to length with (apparently)
    a handsaw, which he couldn't use very well, and nailed them in
    place through the top.  He'd filled the joints with wood putty,
    then sanded them down, which of course took off the butcher-block
    print on the plastic, then varnished the whole thing with polyurethane.
    All around the edge of the kitchen ceiling he'd built one of those 
    MacDonald's/Burger King style fake roofs.
    Moving to the living room, the high point was a homemade bar.  He'd
    found an old store display case at the dump (apparently) and set
    it up on concrete blocks so it was high enough.  He'd also found
    some sort of padded fake leather top for it.  He wanted the beamed-
    ceiling look, so he'd nailed (into a plaster ceiling!) some random
    width and length boards to the ceiling, then stained them (and the
    surrounding ceiling) with some sort of dark stain.
    Daring to go upstairs, my friend saw the bathroom, where the guy
    had fixed a broken bathtub by cementing on some aluminum flashing,
    then painting it with white paint that was peeling off.  There was
    a washing machine upstairs; the water supply came up through a
    garden hose run up through a partition.  The drain hose went out
    the window and into the eaves gutter.
    At that point the realtor asked my friend if he wanted to see the
    basement and he said no, he didn't think he could stand it.

    Steve

    re: .42
    
    I'm surprised that the realtor didn't say "Just needs some cosmetic
    work."
    
    -joet

    RE .42, Steve, Please give us the name of the realty company mentioned.
    I WILL CERTAINLY MAKE SURE THAT THEY DON'T SHOW MY HOUSE!
    Mine is on the market, its only two years old so I have none of
    the mentioned things wrong with it, but it bothers me that a
    professional realtor would show a house to people knowing dam well
    that it was for curiousity.  Doesn't overall sound like my type
    of realtor.
    ed badger
    

    You would rather have a reltor who tells lies in your behalf?
    The realtor said the house was worth $40,000, and that was pushing
    it.  The owner thought it was worth $89,000 and didn't beleive
    the realtor when she told him he was way off.  Reality is that
    the house is a piece of junk.  I'm all for realtors doing their
    best to make a house look good, but there comes a point beyond
    which is becomes false advertising, open for damage suits.  As
    far as showing for the sake of curiosity, there is always a chance
    my friend might have been crazy enough to buy it.
    
    Anyway, it was out in Williamstown, Mass. so unless you're in that
    area don't worry.
    
    Steve

    RE: .43 
    How true
    

    Not to bring this to too much of a tangent...
    I expect my realtor to qualify the person that is shown my house.
    If the person can't possibly afford it, I don't want his mud on
    my carpet.  Or if the person wants 6 bedrooms, mine hasn't got
    that, again, don't bug me.  Thats how a professional might work.
    No, I don't want him to lie to me, but at all times I want my
    propertyrepresented in its best light.
    The house sounds like a piece of junk to you and your friend, and
    I even got a chuckle out of it, but point is the owner thought
    what he was doing was ok, and somewhere in this universe, another
    person is like the owner and may love what they see. 
    Worth 40K, asking 89K  another reason the realtor isn't working
    for the seller.
    Shame on this realtor!
    ed
    

  <Worth $40K, asking $89K....shame on the realtor> 
  
  I think it is shame on the SELLER, not the realtor. It is the
  seller who sets the asking price, not the realtor. It is my
  understanding that the realtor determined the fair price of $40K.
  
  Lets play fair.

On the same tangent, a house just 'round the corner from me was put on the 
market at $325,000 (that's 1/3 million dollars...). Well that's fine... if 
you're in Weston, or parts of Sudbury (where the realtor was from). But houses 
in this area (a Digital HLO's bedroom community) are more $150K-ish. This house 
has (it's still on the market... wonder why?) had a nice lake view, so it might 
be worth high $100's. But who is to blame? A realtor from outta town who wants 
to score in the neigborhood and apparently has no IDEA what local values are, 
or an owner who searched around until he found a realtor that match his 
extremely inflated idea of the house's worth.

-scott

    This is not directly related to the subject,but the guy down at
    the bottom of the hill where I live just had some real nice cedar
    shingles put on his small cape,took two workers about a week,then
    proceeded to - PAINT THE WHOLE HOUSE FLOURESCENT GLOSSY FIRE
    ENGINE RED!!!
    
    	Steve
    
    
    

    re .50 - sounds like the kind of paint job that's better to live in
    than next door to :-)  
    
    a few weeks ago I visited the neighbor next door to my new house,
    he has also been building this summer but doing it all himself,
    and using recycled materials.  It was actually looking better than
    I'd expected when I saw the start, so my opinion was on the upswing
    when I dropped in for a tour....
    
    the main carrying beam for the second floor was still exposed on
    the first floor, and he proudly pointed out that the tripled-up
    beams weren't cross-nailed because there was a piece of steel between
    them for additional strength.  But I was not suitably impressed
    because I was too busy noticing that there was a 6 or 8 foot gap
    in the center of the house where the beam was broken - didn't notice
    if it was to let the stairs through or just that it didn't reach,
    but the ends on either side of the break were supported by posts
    about 2 feet from the end, while...
    
    the other ends were toenailed to the post running up to the ridgepole!
    
    nice to have the strength of that steel but I hope that some skyhooks
    came with it to take the load when those toenails get a little tired... 

    This may start to sound like a some of the others but here goes.
    
    When I bought my house, the living room and hallway walls and front
    door had sort of an orange (cross between Flamingo Pink and true
    Orange) paint on them with a blue/green sculptured wall to wall carpet
    on the floor. Ugh! I suddenly realized why the living room was my least
    favorite room after I repainted it. One wall in the living room that
    continues into the kitchen had **VERY** cheap mahogany paneling on it.
    Probably paid $1.95 per panel for it. 
    
    The kitchen had been papered in one of the worse 'kitchen prints'
    I have ever seen.  The wall paper in the bathroom looked like a
    swamp. 
    
    The previous owner (PO) 'finished' most of the basement (into what a
    friend of mine called a mouse maze - five or six little rooms). The
    idiot put a hard (read plaster board) ceiling in the basement! Ever try
    to get to a pipe or wire through plaster board?  99% of it is now down.
    He also wired the basement himself.  Switched (wall switches) white
    instead of black (neutral instead of hot) attached black wires to white
    wired wires and vice versa (how difficult can it be to put black to
    black and white to white for god's sake!) and when he had to splice a
    wire, he stapled the wires to a joist and put wire nuts on the wires.
    No box, just stapled to the joist (at least he used wire nuts). 
    
    At one point the bathroom was re-done.  There was a window on the tub
    wall. It is now covered over with plaster board and formica, but the
    window is still there which one can look through from the deck and see
    the back side of the plaster board. 
    
    The (PO) had a gas dryer.  Enclosed the shut off valve and tubing joint
    behind plaster board. Could get to the valve but not the joint (I
    wasn't about to attach my dryer to it without being SURE that the joint
    in the ceiling was tight! Another hole in the ceiling). 
    
    The electrical system was (as I recall) 60 amp service with about 4 or
    5 sub-panels). Four-rooms-on-one-fuse-and-a-seperate-circuit-for-the-
    front-door-light kind of thing.  I put in 200 amp service and broke up
    all the big circuits. 
    
    The closets have folding doors that go from floor to ceiling and are
    made of tempered hard board.  The PO painted several of them with out
    sanding the doors first so now (of course) the paint is pealing off. 
    
    The PO put up false 'beams' in the living room (a 1x6 with a 1x2 nailed
    to each side and the corners covered with molding with a 1x6 running
    along the walls at ceiling height.  To keep the 'beams' up in the
    center of the room, they punched a hole through the ceiling and ran a
    piece of wire through a screw eye screwed in the back of the 'beam' and
    around the ceiling joist. 
    
    Someone installed a furnace humidifier in the cold air return, rather
    than in the warm air plenum.  My current one takes air from the
    warm air side, humidifies it and returns it to the cold air return
    (sound crazy to me but that's the way it works).  The old one was
    not so designed.
    
    When 'finishing' the basement, the PO built a wall around the furnace
    and hot water heater, with an opening just big enough to get to the
    front of the heater and another opening for the water heater just big
    enough to get the the temperature control. The day I moved in the
    thermocouple in the hot water heater died, so I had to remove the wall
    to get to the damn thing!  He also walled in the basement steps and
    had an access door so small, it was useless for storage.
    
    When I removed one small bedroom to enlarge the living room (make it
    into a 'music' room), the walls I tore out had punched cards with part
    numbers on them!  The shell was put up, ceiling installed (trussed
    roof) and then stock walls (built with 2x2s) were added where necessary.
    It was quite a shock to find out that the add-on garage was build MUCH
    better than my house was! 
    
    There were several other 'goodies' that I can't remember at this time
    (or have suppressed them). 
    
    As the title of this note says, "Why did they EVER do that!?!"
                                        
    -Bob
                                                                         

        I think we should change the name of this note to:..........
    
                         "Why did we ever buy this?"

    

    This file made my day.  Although I am not a home owner YET, I just
    rented an apartment for the first time in Acton ($615/month for
    a one-bedroom) and am so discouraged and depressed!  I have a SMALL
    (read: camper-size) kitchen with hollow baseboards that must house
    cockroach condos, and cabinets that wrap around corners with door
    openings big enough for a jar of peanut butter!  There are holes
    everywhere and imitation linoleum on the kitchen floor.  If it weren't
    for the location (5 miles from work), a big living room with porch,
    and a big bedroom I would break the lease.  I just ask myself, is
    it worth it to nuke the kitchen and remodel something that isnt
    mine and be miserable for a year, or just fix it up and be prepared
    for the next place!  But after reading this file I feel motivated
    to go ahead and fix it up..fortunately only ONE room needs help,
    not an ENTIRE house!  Bravo to all of you for remodeling, I hopw
    when I do buy a house it will be one of yours!
    
    __Cyndi

    I tend to agree with Brian (.53), but just so as to not be thought
    of as wiser than thou...
    
    The realtor didn't want to show us our (present) house either. 
    Her concern was that it backs up to a river and we had a small child
    at the time (now MUCH bigger, obviously never drowned in the river).

    The river as it turns out was a god send for the builder, as we
    found out after the first snowfall.  You see, there's really no
    good reason to put in a septic system when you have a perfectly
    good open tributary running right through the backyard.  As I
    mentioned, we found out about this when we had the first snow. 
    I was driving up to the house and noticed this fanned out area of
    no-snow right behind the house and leading to the river.  After
    a very quick check I soon discovered that our "septic system" consisted
    of a four inch pipe into a 3x3 pit lined with nothing more than
    gods good brown earth and another four inch pipe leading to the
    river bank.  From the bank, a lovely (now rotted away) trough leading
    to the very brink.  I buried $1000 in the backyard shortly after
    this discovery.
    
    Inside, things were much more obvious.  Aqua bathroom (why do they
    always destroy the bathroom first?!) much like those mentioned 
    previously in this note, that is everything painted with the stuff.
    Of course this had to go, so being a good guy I decided to go to
    the studs and do it right.  Little did I know that the person who
    built the place had decided that the ceiling tiles needed ballast
    to keep them in place and had decided the ideal thing for this ballast
    was about 400 pounds of dry plaster dust.  The first tile removed
    made the ballast obvious, but once begun, there's no turning back.
    The wife was assigned fill the cracks around the door duty while
    I proceded to be pummeled with the plaster dust inside the bathroom
    as the ceiling came down.

    When I raised the roof a few years later, I found the same wonderful
    ballast technique applied to the entire kitchen ceiling.  The plaster
    was removed as much as possible, but I still dread the day I have
    to drop that ceiling.
    
    Other lovlies:  Two windows on the end of the house so you could
    look out of the dining room or the living room and see if the car
    was still inside the garage which was merrily rotting away on the other
    side of the windows.  
    
    The garage, an obvious afterthought was built
    of standard lumber and set onto (not into) the same good earth that
    bugs so like to crawl around in.  Funny how those bugs prefer to
    live in the relative dry space to be found inside of tasty 2x6s.

    I could go on, but if I did, it would just make me feel dumber than I
    do everytime I find another charming bit of construction.  Fifteen
    years, but every now and then I still find another mystery. 

    Just so the next owner won't be entirely miserable and bored by
    my "perfection", I've left a few goodies for him too, so look for
    his note in this space some time in the future when I'm the Previous
    owner who could do no good.    

    Stew

    re: .54 -

	Before you  get  all  energized  and  go to remodel the kitchen,
    check  your  lease,  or  at  least check with your landlord. I don't
    believe  you  can  change  the  built in stuff in the kitchen - that
    belongs  to  the  landlord,  not you? If you did the remodeling, who
    would  pay, you or the landlord. When you move out, are you going to
    take it with you??? If you really can't cope with the kitchen, break
    the  lease  and move out. If you don't want to break the lease, best
    to  just  scrub,  scrub, scrub and try to make it bearable until you
    can move somewhere else.

    Question:

        "Why did we EVER buy this?"

    Answer:

        "It was what we could afford and (optimistically) thought we could
         fix up within a year or two..."

    What we didn't take into account was the "Mushroom Effect"... (a good
    example of the mushroom effect is going to replace a lightbulb and ending
    up replaceing most, or all, of the electrical system)...

-mike

    	Well, no one's willing to admit their mistakes too, huh?!  I
    was hoping this topic would catch your eye so's we could get a laugh
    or two out of each other as we struggle through them mysteries of
    Do-It-Yourself!  Swallow yer pride and confess your boners here...!
    
    	Here's another of mine.  (I've done *everything* wrong at LEAST
    ONCE! Sometimes... more than once... sometimes it was a *habit*!)
    
    	Back in my siding daze, (mispelling intentional!) I was up on
    my pump-jack staging [Use pump jacks!  But make sure your insurance
    is paid and that you're on good speaking terms with the Lord!] about
    16 feet or so trying to pull the electric service wire off a two-story
    house so's I could put the siding on underneath it.  It was attached
    by an 8" by 3/8" lag bolt, so I was unscrewing it with my handy-dandy
    vise-grips.
    
    	Now the ground wire for these things is also the main support
    wire which is attached to the bolt.  And, being an old house, the
    live wires were exposed a little, because the friction tape had
    been weathered off.  I failed to notice any of this...  
    
    	All of a sudden sparks started flying everywhere!  Into my face
    down my neck and cascading beautifully down to the ground!  There
    was no place to go... it's tough to run away when you're on a 10"
    plank nearer to heaven than you'd like to be...  Well this went
    on for a few imponderable moments and stopped.  [mercifully]  I
    had not been shocked, [physically] although my heart felt like it 
    had been just treated for an myocardial infarct!  
    
    	Things got quiet.  Too quiet.  I looked down at the meter and
    it was no longer running.  I walked to the end of the staging and
    peered around the corner of the house and people were coming out
    onto their porches scratching their heads.  Women were complaining
    that their T.V.s had quit....  I had blown the circuit breaker at
    the main transformer for the entire neighborhood!
    
    	Walked back to my trusty vise-grips and they had been welded
    to the bolt, the ground wire and the little adjusta-muh-hicky for
    the grips had been neatly welded into place too!  [I've kept them
    for years, as a momento of the occasion.]
    
    	The Mass Electric Service man who eventually showed up said:
    "Ya know... it's takes quite a bit to set these things off..."
    No... only me.
    
    							Don Arey

    RE: .1
    
    Well, when you've done so many dumb things it's hard to pick "The
    Dumbest".                                      
    
    I'll have to sort through my collection and see if there is anything
    worthy after the first two :-).

    -Bob

    As a professional carpenter, I built a lot of staircases.  For interior
    oak stairs I used to try to save the customer some money by making
    the risers out of oak veneer plywood, using solid oak only for the
    treads. (The risers don't get the wear the treads do and you don't
    see the edges - this solution saves money, is just as strong, and
    looks just as good).

    First one went fine and looked great.  But I was in a total fog
    on the second one and cut all the risers with the grain running
    vertically instead of horizontally.  Had gone so far when I noticed
    that I finished them that way, being fully prepared to rip them
    all out when my customer saw it.  The stairs looked like the risers
    had been cut from 4 ft wide solid oak boards. Not bloody likely.
       
    The customer said it looked terrific.  I couldn't believe it.  It
    was the guiltiest check I ever collected.
    
   

    This isn't quite as entertaining as the previous notes, but does
    show that ignorance can be dangerous!
    
    When I was a single, naive apartment dweller, I decided to put a
    dimmer switch in my bathroom.  Read the instructions on the back
    of the card, didn't make much sense, oh well, got out my screwdriver
    that doubled as a butter knife, took the old switch out, put the
    new one in, put my screwdriver back in the kitchen drawer.
    
    Well, now that I've bought a house and been reading this file, and
    finding out about circuit breakers and ground wires, I realize I
    could have been a pile of ashes on the floor!

    	I had a German Shepherd that went to work with me all the time.
    'Cept when he was about 3 months old and developed this perverted
    taste for wet concrete!  Unknown to me, he was *eating* it.  Lots
    of it!  Found out about it after a couple of days when he started
    leaving "concrete evidence" around the house...  Didn't seem to
    hurt him any!  Couldn't do much in the way of training him, though,
    he'd gotten too set in his ways.

    			-< I couple I've heard >-

    	A painter I worked with out in Colorado was being plagued by
    this "little yappy dog".  So, being the they're-only-animals sort
    of hard-hearted fella, he booted the poor thing in the ribs!  The
    dog rolled onto it's side and started howling and crying and perhaps
    dying and the lady-of-the-house rushed into the room in a panic:
    The painter feigned innocence and, looking as sympathetic as he
    could, said: "What's the matter, Little Fella?..."
    
    	This same man spilled a bucket of paint onto a living room rug.
    The dog (different dog) happened to be near so he grabbed the confused
    animal and rolled it in the paint!  Then, when the homeowner walked
    in, he said: "Look what your dog did!"
    
	I had a couple of associates who happened to be doing a siding
    job at this house where two little fiesty Chihuahuas lived.  Every
    single morning when Duane and Ed would arrive and start setting
    up, the lady would open the back door and let them out.  They'd
    make a bee-line for Ed and Duane, barking and snarling and nipping 
    at their heels.  (Why do homeowners never see any fault in their animals?)
    	Well, Ed had had enough!  So the next morning, he got out of
    the truck and ran over to the corner where the dogs would soon be
    mounting their attack.  When he heard them coming, he leaped out
    in front of them and barked and snarled himself!  Well!  One of
    them took off like a bat out of Hades, but it was just too much
    strain on the other one!  It fell over on it's side and died of heart
    failure!  Ed was totally embarassed, and Duane couldn't stop laughing.
    The lady was fit to be tied... Ed has not yet lived down.  "You
    sure are *ugly* man, *UGLY*"
    
    							Don Arey

Re -1:

Terrific stories, Don!  Thanks..

(Got any more?)

					--Mike

    
    
                       -< Making sure an easy job isn't >-

   At the beginning of the year I decided to redocorate our downstairs
    washroom. Though I was aware that it had 3 layers of waterproof
    paper stuck very firmly to the walls I set about the job with a
    good steamer and a weekend ahead of me.Since the room in question
    is 7 feet by 4 at the best it is not a naturally tenable place for
    a person to be at the same time as a paper steamer, however, needs
    must as they say.                             
    
    Having removed the first layer of paper I discovered that the other
    2 layers had been put on before the tiles above the wash-hand basin,
    indeed before the basin for that matter. Undeterred I smashed the
    hell out of the tiles, removing them, the paper, and a fair ammount
    of plaster as well (I'll say one thing for the guy who was there
    last, he stuck things down well). I discovered that by slackening
    off the supports for the basin I could get at the paper trapped
    behind it as well, by the end of Saturday 1 layer of paper remained
    on just 2 walls.
    Sunday...
            decided that since I was short on cash rather than replace
    the toilet seat and cistern I would strip the 3 layers of paint
    off them (Yes, the guy had painted the toilet seat each time he
    hung new paper) I did the seat outside, but rather than disturb
    the plastic cistern which had been Nailed To The Wall, I decided
    to strip it "in situ" I poured paint stripper on the top & side
    of the cistern, and behond the paint melted away...... 1 layer -
    ok.....2nd layer - ok........3rd layer - ok. then the cistern gently
    blistered and started to melt away as well...... water on floor
    in ever increasing ammounts at this point.                         
    
     Now, there are things that you really should not do when a situation
     is just about to get out of hand, the main thing not to do is to
    shout SH#T!! and step quickly backward. the time that it is particularly
    important not to do this, is when there is a basin, still connected
    to the water main, directly behind you.The thing that above all
    you should not have done is losened the basin from the wall so it
    is free to move. If you feel you must do all of the above, it is
    advisable that your water pipe is made out of a material other than
    plastic - plastic pipe you see, tends to break when the thing it's
    connected to falls on the floor and it doesn't. In this case, it
    did (break that is).
    
    At this point, with 2 sources of water emptying merrily into a room
    only a little over the size of the average bathtub, a guy begins
    to wonder just why the hell he didn't take a trip out somewhere
    (the dentist perhaps). it should be noted however the major difference
    between the room in question & a bathtub is that bathtubs dont leak
    water into the rest of the house through the door, this is why 
    bathtubs can never be found fitted with a door.
    
    From this point things got only slightly worse, in that I discovered
    that my house has eight stop-cocks in it, and only one of them turns
    off the water to the room I was swimming in. The stop-cock in question
    is situated in the attic, just below the stop-cock to the attic
    water storage tank that is painted red,( the one that looks like
    the one you want but does sod-all.) and under a pile of old junk
    so it can be found easily. (For the definition of easy in this context
    refer to the books "Climbing Everest The Easy Way" and "Self Mutilation
    Made Easy") I might add that since both toilet & basin are fed directly
    from the afformentioned attic tank,  turning off the main outside
    has no effect until the 60 gallon attic tank is drained.
    
    P.S. I have a large ammount of flamingo & rose patterned papier-mache
    to hand should anyony have a use for it.
    
     Chris Hall (UK CCD Hampshire)
    

    
    
     Some years ago my late brother witnessed the following:
    
    Walking past a newly completed house he saw a guy walk through the
    near-completed front door, measure the width of the entrance and
    then re-enter the house. A few minutes later he re-emerged with
    a colleague and they both measured the width of the entrance, discussed
    some problem between them, and called a third guy outside. With
    a peice of chalk and a tape measure the three guys drew a square
    beside the door approx 7' x 7' and went back inside. The 2 origial
    guys walked back out again armed with sledge hammers and beat s**t
    out of the marked area, with a doorway now 9' wide and '7 high,
    one guy walked back inside. The other looked around up and down
    the road, and waiting until no one appeared to be around called
    to the second. From within the house came the sound of BD BD BD
    BD BBBBBruuuum...............................
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    and from inside the house emerged - A DUMPER TRUCK
    
               I leave it to your imagination to guess the nationality
    of these 3 guys, but your first guess would probably be correct.
    
                     Chris Hall

-.1
    
    American?

    Re: .9 "Nationality"
    
    	This is irrelevant to the topic, but it's fun:
    
    My experience has been:
    
    	The cement workers are Italian,
    	The woodworkers are Scandinavian,
    	The the drywallers are Canadian,
    	The roofers are always covered with Tar,
    	And the Irish are always in charge.
    
    					:-)
    
    
   (I'm Norwegian - my grandfather was Joseph Gulikson and his father
    	was Gunda Lourich Gulick.  Both woodbutchers.)

    A long time ago, when I was an electrician working my way through
    college, I was working on a large complex of apartments and townhouses.
    One end of the development was already occupied, we were still 
    building the other. The outside was lighted by a bunch of fixtures
    and the inspector was giving the contractor a hard time about getting
    the outside lights working because of the occupants. So I was hustled
    down to hook up the fancy time clock- This was a mechanical device
    with a gear train that adjusted for the time of sunset year round.
    A VERY expensive gadget. I hooked it all up and went on with other
    work. Soon the contractor appeared and asked if I had tested the
    lights...Me ?? test the lights? man Im an engineer (almost) I know
    how to connect a simple timer. So he flipped the manual over ride
    to see the lights. Boy did we see the light- I had the timer across
    the line, it shorted and made the biggest flash Ive ever seen. The
    dazed contractor saw stars the rest of teh day. The timer was a
    melted blob of brass.
    
    That contractor probably still remembers me- a few weeks later one
    of our temporary wires caught fire. I somewhat calmly ran over to
    his trailer and asked if he happened to have a fire extingusher
    handy. I{thought the poor fellow would have aheart attack on the
    spot- guess you shouldnt ask contractors for fire extingushers.
    
    I survived about 5 years of electrical work, and like an earlier
    note still have a melted screwdriver which I used to take out a
    4,800 volt primary fuse.
    
    

    RE: .11 
    
    
>   I survived about 5 years of electrical work, and like an earlier
>   note still have a melted screwdriver which I used to take out a
>   4,800 volt primary fuse.
 
    You used a screw driver to remove a 4,800 VOLT PRIMARY FUSE?!  I
    don't think I'd have been in the same county much less in the fuse
    box!!  You've got more guts than I have!  I've arced a screw driver
    or two across 220 and that was bad enough.
    
    -Bob

    One day when my wife's uncle was over the house, he was helping
    me change some light switches that the previous owner had painted.
    (he had a habit of painting the switch covers and switch to match
    the wallpaper).  Anyway, we had finaly reached the last one.  He
    took off the cover and asked if I had shut off the breaker for that
    switch.  Jokingly I said "I think so".  Just as he went to unscrew
    the hot wire, my cigarette set off the smoke alarm(with spot light)
    right above his head.  I've never seen anyone jump so far without
    even bending his legs first.
    
    chris d

    	I was working with this guy and we found that we shared a common
    experience, we had both worked in the Colorado Springs area.  (Divide)
    He'd been there the year before me.  "Oh?", I said "Then you must
    have been there during 'the great fire' that everyone was talking
    about!  Man, that must have been awful!  Burned a few thousand acres
    I hear, and they had to call out the National Guard to help put it out,
    right!?"

    	He hung his head and started looking rather glum: "Well, you
    see, " he said, "I was told to take the pick-up truck full of debris
    to the dump.  When I got there, I unloaded everything and then noticed
    that the dump was not burning.  (I'm from Pennsylvania, you ya see,
    and the proper thing to do *there* is to light the dump if it's
    gone out)  So I lit the dump, and the rest is history..."
    
    	"Barry!", I said, "*YOU* started that fire?"
    
    	"Yup.  Worst day of muh life!"
    
    				Takes all kinds...   Don Arey

    
    In my 100 year old house up here in Maine, I was silly enough to
    flush the toilet...I had just got bitten by a dog on my right palm
    but the toilet just didn't understand that...it overflowed for 20
    minutes and I couldn't shut off the water until the plumber arrived
    and saved the day (at $55 and one wet-vac at $62)  you can imagine
    my reaction while looking through the phone book (remember, I'm
    new to the area) for a plumber (thank God for the yellow pages)
    as I watched 3 inches of water come through my hardwood floors upstairs
    down through my kitchen ceiling and on through to the cellar...oh
    joy!!!!  It took the plumber 2 hours to remove the toilet off the
    floor and clear away the ???? in the pipes...he figures the former
    owner's baby dropped something like a bottle cap down there and
    it finally took in the pipes...Aren't I the lucky one???  by the
    way, the water was not clear water...anything that went down those
    pipes in the last 100 years came up with the water...I now have
    a brown ceiling in my kitchen...Thank God once again for insurance!
    by the way, I had only lived in the house 12 days when this happened!
    Welcome to the neighborhood....I've really enjoyed this special
    notes file and hope to hear some more from all of you... Thanks
    for making my day

An absolute minimum requirement for all homeowners to learn is how to shut off
the main services: water, electricity, gas, furnace...

did I miss any?

-mark

    
    I found out after the plumber got there...he showed me where is
    was.  This is my first experience owning a home (my dream come true)
    I'm lucky I know how to turn on the lights!  (I'm learning though)
    by the by, the plumber had to fight with the turn-off valve to close
    it...I think the house is ALIVE.....

	I have news for you, Rose.  The House *is* alive.  Most are.
	I've never lived in one that wasn't.

	They have different personalities.  Some have personalities
	of their own; some absorb the personalities of those they
	shelter.
	
	Some are malevolent; all have some ordinary ailments,
	like yours.

	I've never understood how constructing an inanimate object
	produces a sentient being.  Maybe the object reacts to the
	ingenious reduction of entropy.

	By now you probably know how to shut off the water in every
	building within two miles of your bathroom.

	By the way, if you have city water, make sure you have a
	working turn-off valve, formally called a "stop", I believe.
	If you have a well with an electric pump, if the main stop
	fails, you can shut off the pump's electricity and wait an
	eternity for the pressure to drop.  And when the power fails,
	you can reflect upon the utility of electric-powered toilets.

	Regards, Robert Who_once_gathered_snow_to_flush_his_toilets

	I cannot offer anything like the baffling spectacles described
	in other replies, but I did find a couple of anomolies in my
	last house (which was my favorite home).

	The first time I tried the dishwasher, it wouldn't start.
	Nothing.  So I went down to the cellar to see whether there
	was a switch or a tripped breaker.  I found nothing.  I
	returned to the kitchen, and twiddled the washer's twiddlers
	again.  It worked fine.

	A couple of days later I tried the dishwasher again.  Nothing.
	I visited the basement, figuring I'd find an intermittent
	electrical connection.  Nope.  I returned to the kitchen.
	Twiddle.  Nope.  More twiddle.  More nope.

	Then I started to think.  I recalled that a few hours after
	running the dishwasher the first time, I noticed that I had
	forgotten to turn off the lights in the cellar.  Ha Ha, I
	thought.  Wouldn't it be a laugh if the dishwasher was wired
	to the cellar lights?

	Regards, Robert.

	And then there was the live wire in the attic.  Non-metallic cable,
	just cut off and resting in the yucky rock wool insulation.
	("Insulation", get it?)  I have no idea what it's original use was.
	I connected it to a duplex outlet.  Handy.
	
	And the two bathrooms, one with a ceiling fan that exhausted to
	the outdoors, the other with a ceiling fan but no exhaust duct.
	It just circulated the air in the bathroom.  What happened, did
	they use up all the duct on one fan?

	And the corroded kitchen faucet, thanks to New Hampshire
	granite water, or worse.  Who knows what prowls in the
	watery depths?  My kitchen reverie wasbroken by the faucet
	detaching itself from the sink, leaping into the air, and
	dashing itself upon the ceiling, followed by a four-foot
	geyser gushing from the faucet's former mooring.
	
	This house had a large, eccentric personality, beyond
	the grasp of mere mortals.  I guess they all do.

	Regards, Robert.

    In my last house, I was the first occupant. The basement, finished
    by the builder, seemed to get 'wet' from time to time. At first,
    it seemed quite intermittent and not really problematic. (The builder
    claimed it was just humidity related)
                              
    About a year and a half after moving in, I noticed the intermittent
    wetness was getting worse. One day, I realized the wetness in the
    carpet (indoor-outdoor carpet in tbe basement) was 'strange'. When
    I walked through it, it foamed!
    
    Turns out the sanitary line from the second floor bathroom was
    punctured by a dozen 10 penny nails and one 3/4 inch hole for romex
    cable! The water leak was intermittent since the only user for the
    bathroom was my son. When we moved in, he NEVER took baths...(except
    when we had a gun at his head and he had NO way of escaping)...when
    he turned 10 or 11, he decided he LIKED baths...
    
    WHAT A MESS!
    
    The builder? Michael O'Malley, Brooke Realty and Construction,
    Marlboro, MA. Real suite (-: guy...

    Back in the Ice Ages, acutally only about 12 years ago, I used to work
    for RIVCO (yes, right there off Exit 7) building countertops in the
    kitchen shop. This was before the day of sprayers, so we used to use
    a large flat trowel with a serated edge to spread the contact cement
    on the countertop blanks prior to laying down the laminate. To keep
    the cement on the trowel from drying we'd place the trowel in a shallow
    basin half filled with the contact cement solvent. Anyone who's mistakenly
    attempted to wash their hands with said solvent can tell you that it's
    real nasty stuff... Eventually the solvent would get pretty gummy and
    the trowel would begin to stick. Well, the first time this happened
    to me I got impatient and yanked the trowel out of the basin tipping
    it over and sloshing all the solvent down my front... It took about
    4 seconds for the solvent to soak through my clothes to unprotected,
    and very sensitive body parts... The doctor said I might still have
    children someday...

My current project is taking out the dingy, '70's vintage dark panelling in the 
basement, and drywalling and plaster or painting. Night before last, I removed  
the panelling.

First, the electrical outlets were installed with plaster ears (I think I have 
the right term... they're intended for mounting outlets in drywall) in the 
panelling (which is not particularly rigid). Small wonder they seemed a bit 
insecure.

Second, one of the outlets has a stub of ~20 guage SPEAKER WIRE sticking out. 
About 3 inches. Maybe there were surplus electrons in the box, so the installer
put the "stub" in to allow them to drain? I haven't had the nerve to look 
inside the box yet. 

-scott

You may get a kick out of some strange things that happened to the house I
lived in as a kid... 

  One day I noticed water dripping from a ceiling light in the kitchen.  This
was very strange, since it wasn't near any of the plumbing for the (large)
kitchen, and the kitchen was on the first floor of a 2 story house, so it
wasn't a roof leak (besides, it was dry outside).  The room above was a
bedroom, so nothing was there to leak...  I didn't know what was happening, but
I used the oppertunity to get a weird stare from my father.  I went to the next
room and said very non-chalantly "Dad, the lamp in the kitchen is leaking." as
if it was something normal that needed attention, like a clogged sink.  I got
the strange look. 
  It turned out that a copper pipe elbow in the FHW heating system in the
bedroom was never soldered at all, and somehow, it lasted 10 years without
leaking, then let go.

  The water pipe leading into the house sprang a leak just outside where it
entered the house, so my father called the contracter that built the place.
He fixed the leak by chipping the block around where the pipe entered the
house, fixed the leak, and patched the hole with cement.  When we moved out of
there 5 years later, the concrete still hadn't dried...

  One morning when I got up, I looked out the window to see that we got a very
thick, heavy, wet snowfall, and it was still snowing.  30 minutes later, I
looked out again to see the owner of the house up the street staring at the
shed roof on his house, cussing like mad.  Why was he so mad?  Well, less than
half an hour ago, he had a gable roof!  Two other houses in the same
neighborhood also had the roofs collapse.  All built by the same contractor who
built ours...

There were other incidences, also.

-Mike

I was bringing in a copy of Fine Homebuilding this morning anyway, to enter the 
stuff on attic venting, and I thought I'd bring in some copies to reprint the 
stories they have every issue about general disasters.  Most are very funny, 
some are sad, but all are informative about how NOT to do things.  I'll enter 
them here as I get the time.  Sorry, I can't reproduce the usually-humorous 
drawings that go with them

Paul

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History,"
	Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Vol 2 Apr/May 1982

It seemed like a good idea.  Lift up an existing duplex, create some off-street 
parking, and make the building available to renters in a college town with a 
shortage of rental units.  The character of the original building was simple 
and appealing.  A double-hearth fireplace provided a handsome focal point to 
the living rooms in each apartment.  The mantels were flanked by gumwood 
cabinets hung with beveled glass doors.  The casings were done in period trim.  
The bathrooms had original claw-foot tubs with mortared-tile splashes and 
floors.  With a modern electrical system and expanded kitchens, the proposed 
two-story duplex seemed like a realistic remodeling job for everyone involved.  
To say this job went awry is putting it mildly.  Litigation abounds, and an 
economic solution has yet to be found, but this much we can put together.

The existing duplex had a very large crawl space, about five feet tall.  The 
contractor took bids from three house-moving companies to lift the house three-
and-a-half feet, which would provide space for a new foundation to be poured 
and new walls to be constructed to enclose the bottom floor.  A bid of around 
$3500, to lift the house and then lower it onto its new moorings, was accepted.

The first part went smoothly.  New walls were constructed on new foundations.  
It came time to remove the temporary beams and cribbing that supported the 
building.  Facts get murky here.  A structural engineer who surveyed the 
pictured mess said that there was evidence that only 2% of the required bracing 
was in place at the time of the collapse.  A support holding up the fireplace 
was apparently bumped, causing a sudden shift in the chimney load.  Bystanders 
reported and incredible tearing sound as the suddenly precarious stack of 
bricks lurched about, seeking equilibrium.  It was enough to overload the 
inadequate bracing and the entire second story began to move west.

The move ended in massive damage to the neighboring house.  The eves were 
completely crushed on the east side.  Lath and plaster gave way dramatically.
Bricks from the fireplace were blasted across the living room, tearing apart 
walls and furniture.  Fortunately, the living room was unoccupied.

An elderly woman in another part of the house thought that the big earthquake 
had come and tried to get out the front door; she couldn't because the house 
was now eight inches out of plumb and the door had jammed.  A neighbor helped 
her out the back.

Its nine-foot lateral journey completed, the duplex was slammed to the ground 
in a cascade of studs, joists, floorboards and bricks.  The three men working 
underneath the building luckily found refuge under the twelve-inch temporary 
I-beams and escaped unscathed, in a bodily sense; one of them reportedly didn't 
speak for three days.  When the chimney went down, it hit the floor joists so 
hard that some were catapulted straight through the ceiling.  The gumwood 
cabinets were gone, the trim was gone, and so were the nice bathrooms.

It cost about $35,000 to put the neighbor's house back together.  The collapsed 
duplex presented a wider spectrum of possible solutions:  Make a vacant lot, 
build something new, try to put it back together in its original condition, or 
forge on with the two-story plan.  The two-story plan made the most sense 
economically and was carried out.  The cost of getting the duplex back on top 
of it's foundation was about $40,000.  Ironically, costs were magnified by new 
code requirements: If the building was modified beyond a certain percentage of 
its original size, the entire structure had to be brought up to existing code.  
Since half the wreck had to be hauled away, it had to be rebuilt as new.  

Truly, a bad bounce.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Vol 3, Jun/Jul 1981.

One crisp fall morning in San Francisco, my partner, Peter, our friend and 
employee, Blake, and I prepared to pour a concrete curb to redirect the flow of 
rainwater next to a Victorian House.  We had only to dig a trench in sandy soil 
and build the forms before the concrete truck was scheduled to arrive.  The 
job would be completed in a couple of hours.

We planned to dig the tranch near the Victorian's three-story brick chimney.  I 
assumed the massive structure was supported by a thick concrete pad, and told 
Blake to locate his trench close to the chimney base.  Blake began to work in 
the narrow walkway between the Victorian and the adjacent house.  Peter 
remained in the front yard, struggling to pull his overalls over his work 
boots.  I set up my sawhorses in the sunny yard at the west side of the house 
and started to cut some wooden stakes for the forms.

The whine of my Skilsaw muffled the first crash, but I felt the ground shudder. 
Thinking there was an earthquake, I put the saw down and braced myself for 
another tremor.  Then, I heard another crash, and the ground shuddered again.  
I ran to the front yard where Peter had finally succeded in wedging his boots 
so tightly into his overalls that he had abandoned walking and was crawling 
frantically toward the east side of the house, where Blake had been working.  
Peter and I arrived in time to witness the last of an avalance of bricks 
thunder down from three stories above.  We were engulfed in mortar dust and 
soot.  We couldn't see Blake.

An eerie, agonizing silence hung in the dusty air.  I scrambled to the top of a 
pile of bricks that was well over my head.  The broken handle of Blake's shovel 
protruded from the pile.  Suddenly Blake appeared from around the back of the 
house, where he had sought refuge from the storm of bricks.  He was disheveled 
and wide-eyed.  Our relief at seeing Blake alive unleashed a fit of nervous 
laughter.  Peter, still unable to extricate his feet from the legs of his 
overalls, heightened the comic relief.  The sickening fear we had felt subsided;
there were still three of us, able to blink and breathe again as the dust 
settled.

The chimney had been built right on the sandy soil without any footing.  The 
mortar was old.  The bricks hung there in delicate equlibrium that the least 
tampering would destroy.  As Blake had dug, the soil under the chimney had 
crumbled into the new trench, causing the chimney to droop, then crack.  The 
bottom half leaned, gigantic and ponderous, out toward the neighboring house 
until the stress set off an explosion of bricks raining to the ground.  The 
fleeting cohesion of the bricks as the bottom half of the chimney fell gave 
Blake enough time to escape the deadly shower of masonry.  He leaped to safety 
just before the top of the chimney smashed against the house next door and 
shattered.  The collapse sheared away delicate Victorian molding, gutters, and 
siding from both houses.  As the three of us stared in disbelief at the 
wreckage, the concrete truck arrived, early!

We sent away the truck and assessed our position. The collapsed chimney had to 
be cleared, the rubble removed and the bricks stacked.  It was our astonishing 
good fortune to learn that the chimney hadn't been used in years, so our 
clients asked only that the chimney-shaped raw spot on the side of their house 
be covered with siding.  Eventually the bricks were laid into a patio.  
Remarkably, there was no structural damage to either house.  Peter and I drew 
on previous experience with Victorian houses to solve the mystery of replacing 
the intricate gingerbread that had been crushed in the crash.  It took two days 
to complete that morning's work.  In retrospect, some of the most memorable 
events in my building career are not the ones of which I am most proud - but why
should chimneys built on sand have any different destiny than sandcastles?

You know, Chris (Hall), you really ought to submit that story (response 40)
to Fine Homebuilding for inclusion in the "Great Moments in Building History."
It's at least as funny as a lot of them.  Now that you've written it for 
inclusion here, there isn't even any work involved in writing it.  Just extract 
it and mail it off.  The address to send to is:

Great Moments
Fine Homebuilding
Box 355
Newtown, Conn.  06370

	Reprinted without permission from "Great moments in building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Magazine, Vol 4 Aug/Sep 1981

I'm not too proud of this but enough time has passed that I'm willing to talk 
about it.  It's about Sheetrock dust and a vacuum cleaner.

We had been remodeling our tiny home intermittently for about six years, and 
the room I had been looking forward to the most was next in line.  A domino 
effect had finally brought us to the kitchen; I'd built in a room for the baby,
added a greenhouse/laundry room for the machines, renovated the garage for our 
bedroom, and completely rebuilt the only bathroom (a room that literally had 
mushrooms growing in the shower when we moved in).  Freshly armed with a home-
improvement loan and a four-week vacation from my contracting business, I set 
to work.

The plan was to tear out a wall in the former bedroom and expand an 8ft by 9ft 
kitchen into a glorious L-shaped room with triple the floor space, cathedral 
ceilings, skylights, and lots of counters.

Progress was slowed somewhat by having a one-year-old underfoot, paddling 
around the accumulating tools and debris.  I found myself constantly climbing 
down ladders to plug in a tool I'd just unplugged when I went to the garage; 
power tools and toddlers don't mix.  Even so, I was gaining ground on the room.
As the days went by and the framing and rafters and wiring and plumbing were 
installed, I cheered myself with a vision of smooth white walls, finished in 
satin oil-base enamel, soon to grace our new kithcen.  A kind of time warp 
happens while all the stuff in the walls takes place before the Sheetrock goes 
up.  The preliminary work takes so long it seems the job will never get done, 
and then the Sheetrock goes up and it appears to have occurred overnight - a 
wonderful deception.

Anyone who has ever worked with Sheetrock knows it's a marvelous product.  It 
is inexpensive, easy to work with, fire resistant, able to assume a wide 
variety of shapes, and plentiful.  Nobody ever talks about pending Sheetrock 
shortages.  A Sheetrock wall can take on a wide range of surface effects, from 
heavy texturing to glassy smooth.  I wanted glassy smooth.  I had done a fair 
amount of sheetrock work and felt confident I could do the careful taping and 
sanding required for enamel paint.  I even took a droplight up the ladder to 
shine in a raking fashion across the tape joints to make sure the junction was 
invisible.  Nothing looks quite as tacky as tape joints with enamel paint 
highlighting every mistake.  To achieve a flat plane you either need a master's 
degree in taping of the patience required to sand out the flaws.  So I sanded 
and sanded and sanded.

I had seen Sheetrock dust before, and I know what it does to people it hangs 
around too long.  It's like white noise and will go everywhere if it isn't 
controlled.  Overexposed workers and clients get surly or depressed.  To 
minimize dust incursion into the rest of our house, I put up curtains of heavy 
plastic sheeting with airlocks between the kitchen and the other rooms.  I even
changed clothes in the airlock when I was done sanding.  I swept up the piles 
and put the dust in bags.  But somehow the dust was getting through.  Sinister 
air currents were carrying it around the house.  It got into the closets and 
settled on the clothing.  I found it in the record player and on top of the 
books.  The house plants turned pale, and mottled footprints marked the most 
frequently traveled paths around the house.  The omnipresent dust was making us 
all very tense.  The kitchen wasn't done, my vacation was almost over, and 
relatives called to announce their arrival within a week.

I decided it was time to get a giant vacuum cleaner to battle the dust so I 
went to one of the big chain stores and bought a workshop-size vacuum on sale.  
It was one of those tubby eight-gallon fellows that look like R2D2.  I 
assembled the various parts and put on its little wheels and went after the 
dust.  R2 had amazing suction and picked up everything in its path, but 
displayed a depressing tendency to tip over if its wheels hit something as it 
rolled along.  It would usually tip over when it ran into its own cord, hit the 
floor with a thump, and exhale a cloud of dust from its exhaust port.  Even a 
nail would bring it down.  I concluded that R2 was very top-heavy and put a few 
bricks in the bottom of the holding tank to help keep it on its feet.  The 
bricks just made it hit harder when it fell over.

Soon the motor bagan to operate at a distinctly louder level.  It sounded like 
the bearings were being infiltrated by the dust and ruined.  I began cleaning 
the filter every few minutes and still the noise got louder.  I started working 
late into the evening to get the room sanded and painted before our house-guests
arrived.  While coats of joint compound dried under lights in one part of the 
room, I would sand away on the dry areas.  Sand, vacuum, tip, exhale, sand.

Finally the sanding was done and the Sheetrock looked good.  Inch-deep piles of 
dust surrounded the room like tiny snowdrifts at the base of every wall.  It 
was eleven at night and time for the last cleanup.  R2 screamed like a banshee 
as it picked up that dust, but I didn't mind.  I poked its nozzle into every 
corner and ran its wide carpet brush over every square foot of wall, ceiling, 
and floor.  The dust was gone, safely inside the vacuum's plastic belly, and I 
climbed down the ladder to shut it off.  As I pulled it across the room for the 
last time it hit a hardened blob of joint compound and lost its balance.  This 
time when it hit the floor, its lid came loose.

Incredulous, I stood there as the entire room filled in an instant with a huge 
cloud of white dust; it belw by the protective polyethylene walls, whizzing 
through the airlocks and into the rooms beyond.  It was the most effective dust-
distribution method ever invented.  I picked up the shrieking tank and heaved 
it through the open door into the backyard where it landed in the kid's sandbox 
and went up like a geyser, turning the backyard white.  It looked like a 
fireboat, welcoming home the troops, as it sucked up the sand and topsoil and 
spewed it back out.

I had a distinct feeling of tranquility as I unplugged that can for the last 
time.  I cut off its 20ft wire and made a nice $80 extension cord out of it.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 6, Dec 1982/Jan 1982

"I'd like some of those black, shiny nails with circles going around them," I 
said brightly.

Bob looked at me.  I knew his name was Bob from the label on his green
workshirt.  His eyes glittered like a starving wolf ready to devour his kill;
then he looked back down at the paper in front of him, pulled a pencil from 
behind his ear, and began to write.

I waited a moment, unsure of his gesture, then asked again in a smaller voice.  
Bob never looked up but spoke in a slow, evil tone, "Buddy, find out what it is 
you want and then come back here."

Chagrined, I turned and walked out of the store past three smirking men in work 
clothes.  I felt their eyes burn my neck and heard peals of laughter erupt when 
I left the store.  I cursed the lumberyard quietly and furtively.  Then, with 
the undying optimism of a man with a cause, I headed for the hardware store.

The hardware store man was with a fellow with a tape measure gadget on his 
belt.  They were deep in conversation - something about 12-2 Romex - and made 
frequent, reverent references to "The Code."  I lined up behind the workman and 
waited my turn.  Two other workmen came in with huge grins, greeting each other
and the hardware man like bosom buddies and getting what they needed.

After about 20 minutes and much coughing and shuffling of my feet, I finally 
got the courage to speak.  Just as I began, the workman looked at his watch and 
said in a voice louder than mine, "Well, John, I gotta be heading back - I was 
supposed to be back 20 minutes ago."  They both laughed, and he turned and 
brushed by me.  His tape measure jabbed me, then fell to the floor.  As he 
stooped to get it, his eyes narrowed.

"Watch it, bud," he snarled.

Shaken, I waited for him to leave before stepping to the counter.  "Do you have 
any of those black, shiny nails with little circles going around them.  To help 
them stick, I think," I stammered.

He looked at me for a moment as if in deep concentration, then said in a loud 
voice, "Those are in the left aisle."

Gratefully, I headed for what I presumed to be the left aisle.  Suddenly I 
realized he had been talking to a clerk in the front of the store.  With one 
last effort I returned to the counter.  He watched me, then reached for a 
phone.  The next thing I knew he was talking to Black and Decker about the 
jigsaws that were supposed to be in last Tuesday.

I walked out of the store depressed, and ended up in a grocery store where I 
found some nails in a plastic bag that were smooth and big but nevertheless 
would have to do.

Those were my early days as a do-it-yourselfer.  They were dark days indeed.  

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 8 Apr/May 1982.

Old farmhouses are notorious for their lack of storage space.  My wife Pam, who 
grew up in the city, had been impressed with this fact for several months when 
she began hinting how nice additional clothes closets would be.  Already 
involved with several projects, I tabled the idea.  When she presented me with 
detailed planes for his-and-hers closets with a built in vanity and shelves, I 
knew I had to start.  Her plans called for a closed reaching from floor to 
ceiling and from wall to wall, with the vanity in the middle.  Four large doors 
seemed adequate for hang-up items, and smaller doors near the ceiling would 
cover a storage area.  Hardwood-veneered plywood seemed a logical building 
material.

As I planned more specifically for the project, I recalled some of the 
techniques I had learned in a local cabinet shop, where I'd worked during my 
college summers.  Although I no longer had access to the woodworking machinery 
that could easily reduce 4X8 sheets to manageable proportions, I thought this 
was a good time for my Shopsmith Mark V to make its debut.

After a good deal of grunting and straining, my helper, Chad, and I managed to 
get the machine upstairs into the master bedroom.  Although we were working in 
cramped quarters, we ripped 4X8 plywood sheets in a 15 ft by 12 ft space by 
cutting partway into the sheet, turning off the saw and repositioning the whole 
works at the other end of the room, where we could then complete the cut by 
pulling the piece through the saw from behind.  The work went smoothly that 
day, and I was proud to show our accomplishments to Pam that night when she 
returned from teaching school.  Pam, incidentally, was five months pregnant, an 
added incentive for me to finish the project soon.  That night I went to bed
tired from my woodworking efforts and looking forward to the next day's work.

Early in the morning, Pam and I were awakened by what sounded and felt like a 
sonic boom.  If my ears were the first to sense the disturbance, my nose was 
second - I smelled something that was a cross between a cement plant and the 
open pages of a very old book.  When I finally got the living-room light turned 
on, it was no longer in its usual place, but was hanging from its electrical 
wiring at the end of a wood lath fastened to the ceiling by a single nail.  The 
living room was obscured by a dirty white mushroom cloud.  About 200 lbs of 
sand plaster lay in a heap in the middle of the room.  Realizing that not a 
whole lot could be done that night, we went back to bed, wondering about the 
stability of the rest of the ceilings.  It dawned on me that the Shopsmith must 
have vibrated the floor upstairs so much that the plaster collapsed below.

The next morning, Chad and I began on what we hoped would be a relatively short 
task.  We decided to tear out the rest of the ceiling plaster and lath in the 
living room and replace it with drywall.  We moved everything from the room 
except the drapes and carpeting, and hung plastic sheets from the doorways to 
contain the dust.  After tearing down the ceiling, I was amazed by the quantity 
and weight of the debris.  Plastering in the old days must have been hard work.

Not wanting to take any chances with the rest of the old plaster, we decided to 
install drywall on all the downstairs ceilings except the kitchen.  I called on 
a fellow worker from my cabinet-shop days - he was already on a drywall job and 
wouldn't be able to come for at least a week.  Chad and I decided to speed 
things up and do the living room ourselves.  Not wishing to tackle taping and 
bedding the ceiling joints, we put up the rest of the rock downstairs.  Things 
seemed to be working out right:  As we finished nailing up the rock, our 
finisher came and put on the first coat of joint compound.

We were in a hurry to finish, clean up and get the house back in order.  We 
grew tired of getting plaster dust on us and passing through the maze of 
covered and bunched object downstairs.  Pregnancy had made my wife more 
emotional and uninterested in food.  Add a skim coat of plaster dust on 
everything in the house and it's easy to understand why Pam didn't even want to 
go near the kitchen.  We took our immediate necessities and retreated to an 
upstairs bedroom to live.  It's quite revealing to see how this type of living 
arrangement can bring out claustrophobic tendencies in expecting couples.  
Thank God we had no children yet.

I became disgruntled when my finish man did not show up for two weeks.  Feeling 
sorry for my wife and angry with the circumstances, I strapped on the finisher's
stilts and began taping joints.  With Pam steadying my weak knees and checking 
my off-balance moves, we managed to finish taping the ceilings.  Toward the end 
I began to develop a feeling for being 8 ft tall and enjoyed applying the joint 
compound 'professionally.'  For skill with the trowel, I substituted sanding 
and elbow grease.  I was pleased to show the delinquent finisher my proud 
results when he finally returned for his tools.

The rest is history.  Reinforcements - my in-laws - arrived to help with the 
house cleaning.  Walls were wiped down, curtains laundered and dishes washed.
The shag carpet with its embedded sand proved more than a match for a 
professional rug-cleaner, so we ripped it out and put new carpet down.  I never 
much cared for shag anyway - especially the kind that circles your feet with 
clouds of dust at every step.  We finally got the house back together in plenty 
of time for the baby's arrival.

I suppose it takes a couple of years before trying experiences like this one 
can be laughed about, and that's how long ago it happened.  It brings to mind 
something I learned in college even longer ago:  Experience is a difficult 
teacher - the test comes first, and the lesson afterward.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 9 Jun/Jul 1982

On March 25,1981, somewhere in southern New Hampshire and a little after 9 a.m.,
a huge pine lurched earthward, picking up speed and hitting the ground with a 
thud.  Tremors traveled up the legs of the three people standing nearby.  In 
the day-glo helmeted mind of the one holding the chainsaw, the vibration 
signaled the beginning of a momentous project.

The day before, in the cozy offices of a country lawyer, Linda and I had closed 
on the wooded lot where we planned to build a contemporary, passive solar, 
let's-do-it-right home.  We had toyed with the idea of building our own house 
for some time.  Now everything was right.  I had six months to kill, and we had 
just sold our old place.

Ah, what dreams we had.  A little garden for herbs.  Terraces for rock plants.
All low maintenance, of course.  We pictured ourselves basking on the deck, 
sipping drinks.  Idly tossing a log on the fire.  There would also be the 
practical benefits of an energy efficient house.  It all made such incredibly 
good sense.

With this vision shining like the Holy Grail, we set to work.  The Ice-Age 
glaciers that had scraped their way down from the Laurentian Shield had 
plastered our hillside with a generous helping of clay, which stuck to 
everything that moved, and some things that didn't, like our black Labrador 
retriever, who found solace lying in the wet mud.  During excavation there was 
little that I could do except follow the bulldozer around and retrieve rocks 
that seemed, at the time, to have landscaping potential.  As I hugged and 
lugged my boulders, plodding through the mud, I felt primeval behind the 20th 
century diesel tracking powerfully across the lot.

Next came the foundation contractor, who chided his men like Patton urging his 
soldiers into battle.  But I was worried.  How could they produce a foundation 
with tolerances of half an inch or less using warped planks and seemingly 
haphazard measurements?  I chewed my nails, watched and waited.  The walls 
turned out fine.

I began to realize that owner-built houses are lavished with all the care and 
anxiety normally reserved for newborn babies.  Our carpenter friend kept 
telling us that most of the framing would never again be seen after the place 
was finished.  It didn't matter - *we* would know.  In short, we resorted to 
overkill.  If one nail would do, we used two.  If two nails were good, we used 
glue also.

The framing went fast.  It seemed like one day there was a bare foundation; the 
next there was the skeleton of a house.  There were three of us then: myself, 
Claude the carpenter, and Claude's younger weight-lifting brother, whom we 
called Bulk.  Between us we hauled and hammered, puffed and pounded.  The 
decking and stud walls started to define the spaces of our house.  Our dream 
was taking shape.

I forgot to mention the flies.  In May, the woods of northern New England come 
alive with what can be described only as black agony.  Millions of small flies 
hatch out under leaf cover.  The female of the species is out for blood - 
anything's blood.  What could we do?  After much trial and error and a thousand
painful bites, we discovered that the only way to keep these swarming vampires
at bay was a liberal application to all exposed areas of flesh and clothing, of 
Woodman's Fly Dope.  This witches' brew of indescribable pungency warded off 
the hordes, and united the three of us in a fraternity of stench.  After three 
weeks the flies departed.

As we finished the upstairs walls, nature again showed her pestiferous side.  
It began to rain caterpillars.  It was the second year of the gypsy moth plague,
and by mid-July, hairy caterpillars were chomping their way through the forest.
Swinging from the highest branches by silken strands, they landed on the house, 
on our cars and on us.  They devoured the shade that kept us from the hot sun.  
Many crawled under the pulverizing blows of our pounding hammers, and the 
structure became *truly* organic.  Like the flies, the caterpillars eventually 
left.

Our place seemed to achieve househood when the plywood was nailed on the roof. 
The shelter criterion, however damp and drafty the place might still be, had 
been met in a rudimentary way.  It was at this point that things started to go 
awry.  The house asserted itself by refusing to be built to schedule.  It 
seemed to puff up with pride and was larger than we had ever imagined it would 
be.  Like a fat, gorging infant, it began to demand more of our lives.  More 
time and money.

No sooner did we have one section of wall sided and stained than the house 
taunted us with an unfinished section around the corner.  We worked like dogs.  
Progress was excruciatingly slow.  Siding.  Staining.  Eating.  Sleeping.  At 
last the walls were finished.  Then came the agony of agonies.

Roofing is for people with perfectly flat kneecaps and a proclivity for 
hunkering on their haunches.  We ordered 90 bundles of shingles, and each 
contained 20 asphalt shingles.  We used 6 nails on each shingle (four would 
have done).  The sun baked us as we hammered the ten thousand-odd nails into 
the roof.  I developed roofer's crouch and walked with the loping gait of a 
primate.  Large holes appeared in the knees of my jeans.  After a day's 
roofing, the cartilage in my knees actually creaked.  But we had to get that 
house weathertight.

The day arrived - five weeks behind schedule.  The house, congealed from blood, 
sweat, tears and hard cash, stood externally complete.  We viewed our handywork 
with a mixture of adoration and contempt.  Then we recalled the advice of some 
friends.  Remember, they had said, that when the frame's complete you'll only 
be halfway there.  Linda and I stared at one another for a moment, and then 
instinctively got in the car and headed for the local bar.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 10 Aug/Sep 1982

Concrete is probably the least loved of all building materials, despite the 
desirability of the finished product.  Its plasticity, permanence and beauty 
are all very fine, but its great weight and the painstaking preparation 
required are only two of its drawbacks.

Experience simply cannot be replaced by book-learning in the pursuit of 
transforming wet mud into concrete.  The botched job is almost impossible to 
rework, and the better part of valor is to go around or over it.  You can hide 
it, but you can't undo it.

If you're remodeling and you encounter concrete poured for a purpose other than 
the one at hand, beware.  Discover its secrets, if you can, then proceed with 
caution.

Such an occaison arose when I was remodeling an old, not-so-decrepit pigsty 
into a dwelling.  The entire floor of the building was concrete, poured over a 
stone foundation.  The smooth surface was without cracks, and obviously younger 
than the building itself, which was late 19th century.  Unfortunately, the 
floor sloped so that it could drain easily after being hosed clean - a condition
necessary for pigs but not so appropriate to two-legged tenants.  My plan was 
to level the entire surface with stretchers, and then build all the wall studs 
on the level plywood subfloor.

Our only problem was the feeding trough, which ran the length of the 40 ft 
building and was set in from the wall about 4 ft.  A 6 in by 6 in curb 
protruded above the floor to form the lip of the trough.  The curb was not 
keyed into the floor; it had been poured in unison with it - built to withstand 
the feeding habits of multi-hundred-pound sows.  We had to remove it before we 
could leval our supports for the subfloor and proceed upward and onward.  If we 
increased the depth of the floor to run over the top of the curbing, the 
headroom would not accommodate anyone taller than 5 ft 2 in.

Consider, if you will, three strong men, two sledgehammers and an assortment of 
cold chisels.  Add the energy inherent in a crisp and sunny Monday morning in 
spring.  Oppose those combined forces to the 6x6 curb of concrete.  I had put 
my money on the Force, confidently planning to devote Monday morning to the 
demolition and cleaning up of the Object.

The stage was set for maximum macho bravado.  The three stalwarts flipped for 
first in the demonstration of destructive tactics, and then took turns.  By 10 
o'clock each had taken considerably more than one turn, and the sense of a job 
done in short order had slowly evaporated.

During a well-deserved coffee break, I fitted a carborundum blade into a skil 
saw and determined to get a bite into the base of the curb.  In no time the 
blade had smoked itself doen to its mounting, and I had penetrated the concrete 
to the depth of about 1/8."  The crew resumed the brute approach shortly 
therafter, but to little avail.

My mind began to mulitply dollars by hours by the number of men, and so at 
lunchtime I rearranged the plan.  Half of the building would have a cathedral 
ceiling, so that we could raise the floor on that half without headroom being a 
consideration.  We went over the curb, so that the living room was one full step
up from the remaining half of the building.  The crew could work on that area 
while I worried about the curb in the half that would house the kitchen and 
bath.

For two days, during each and every break, one of the men took a crack at that 
curb.  The drivers of trucks delivering material couldn't resist a swing with a 
sledge.  The postman decided that his technique was needed; he too failed.  On 
Wednesday the electrician arrived and chided us for being inept.  After 
suffering the same fate as everyone else, he went to his truck and emerged with 
a brand-new electric jackhammer.  After an afternoon of unbearable noise and 
without a bit left in his kit, he too gave up on our nemesis.

By Friday, the crew had worked around the curb as far as they could.  The 
Object stood, half of it now under the raised subfloor of the living room.  We 
had not been able to anchor stretchers to the concrete, so 2x4 joists supported 
that half.  We couldn't even have drilled a proper hole for a stick of dynamite.

I spent the weekend redrawing the floor plan.  The kitchen and bathroom were 
realigned, so that partitions and cupboards straddled as much of the curb as 
possible.  The result was a very efficient set of cubicles (each with its own 
fixture, very private and able to be used simultaneously by three people) for 
the bath.  The kitchen floor had to accomodate the remaining 3 ft of curb, 
between the range and the sink.  (There is today a slight hump in the kitchen 
floor, but Thanksgiving turkeys have made their way over it many times.  I know 
of no better way to assess the worth of a kitchen.)

Weeks after the project was completed, I spoke with an acquaintance who had 
spent his childhood on that farm with the pigsty.  He told me that he remembered
remodeling the pigsty the first time - pouring the floor and making it into the 
best pigsty in the county.  "Seems to me that that was about 40 years ago," he 
said.

As I replied, "You have a very good memory," I was thinking about the fact that 
concrete takes 40 years to achieve its greatest strength.

        This probably doesn't rate up there with some of the other stories,
    but it was fun discovering it.
        We own (and live in) a three-family that someone said might have
    been built before 1850 and added onto SEVERAL times.  We decided to
    rip out our built-in oven/cooktop, add counter space, etc.  In the
    process of getting the wiring set up properly (my first real re-wiring
    attempt), I found out that our oven/cooktop AND the range for the
    upstairs apartment were wired into the same 40-amp circuit.  I also
    found out that the third apartment's built in oven had its own 30-amp
    circuit and its cooktop another 30-amp circuit.  So with some creative
    wiring (20 years from now someone else will be saying Why did he do that?)
    there are now three separate range circuits.
        Oh, yes, the whole house is on 100 amps.  (Only one tripped circuit
    breaker that I know of tho - when we rented a carpet cleaner and plugged
    it, innocently enough, into an already-overloaded 15 amp circuit.)

        I've done a few dumb things.  This is one of the dumbest.
        One day the bottom element in our electric oven died.  This one
    was a screw-in job, not a plug-in, plug-out affair.  Feeling that it
    was in my limited range of DIY skills, I decided I could handle it.
    Trying to be verrry safe, I turned off the circuit breaker I don't
    know how many times as I tried this attachment, tested that arrangement,
    confirmed the other.  Well, after my last "this is the last time"
    connection, I went downstairs (for the umpteenth time) to turn the
    circuit breaker back on.  It was already on.  I almost fainted.

        I wonder how many replies this topic would have if the dead could talk.

re -.1:

Let's see.  Two 30-amp circuits plus one 40-amp circuit = 100 amps
for cooking.  Whole house service = 100 amps.  Must be fun reading by
candlelight.  :-)

re .16,.17:

On the other hand, you were working on the stove, not the house wiring.
If the oven switch was off (and not broken), you had no power to the
element you were replacing anyway.  Turning off the (appropriate)
breaker, or the main switch, while a worthwhile precaution, was not
strictly necessary.

Kinda like working on a light fixture when the switch is turned off.  If you
KNOW that the power is feeding the switch (which most (but certainly not all)
installation are) why bother killing the fuse.  It just taked multiple trips
down the basement.

Naturally the switch should be visible at all times to catch people who may
otherwise turn it on while you're working    8-)

-mark

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 16 Aug/Sep 1983

Don't be fooled.  This story is in the first poerson only to retain its
freshness and authenticity.  It was told to me by a friend.  To save him from
acute embarrassment, I've omitted his name.  After all, this was early in his
career when he was still making mistakes. 

My partner and I were awarded a contract to renovate a kitchen and dining room.
It promised to be a very straightforward proposition: stripping the woodwork of
old paint, sanding the wood floors and repainting.  On our first day, the home
owners were confident enough in our ability and integrity to leave the house in
our hands.  Just as well, we thought, as the smell of our brand of paint 
stripper is enough to drive a bear out of his cave in winter. 

We started in the kitchen by applying a liberal coat of stripper to the wood
trim.  I was scrubbing it down with a steel pad when I touched an outlet box
(the cover of which I had removed). Somehow the contact caused a spark.  Sooner
than I could say, "I should have turned off the circuit," the walls were
engulfed in flames.  Before I could find a blanket or pillow to beat the flames
into submission, the thick smoke from the highly flammable stripper had filled
the room from the ceiling down and was billowing floorward, making it
impossible to breathe or see - I reached the door just in time. 

My partner, who had been outside, was quick to call the fire department, and
soon we had a crew on hand.  I had heard of the necessarily brutal techniques
of firefighters and was very helpful (I thought) in telling the men exactly
which windows were unlatched so they wouldn't have to bash them open.  I should
have known better.  When the fire chief arrived, he ordered his men to break
down the door and smash any necessary windows.  Nor were they as concerned as I
was about the amount of water that they kept pumping into the room. 

My next big jop was to break the news to the owners that evening.  After some
apologies, soem crying and comforting, we were allowed to proceed with the job.
Some people never learn,  Everything went as well as could be expected.  We
replaced a little more woodwork than our original contract stipulated and
repaired some water and smoke damage, but the fire insuarnce covered the
difference. 

The job went smoothly almost to the end, when we had to sand and refinish the 
floor.  We rented a big drum sander and an edger, and started with a coarse 
grit.  The house was old, so we weren't surprised when our sanders blew a 
fuse.  I suggested that my partner go out to get some lunch while I went
downstairs to the circuit panel (with which I was now quite familiar) to
replace the fuse. 

Halfway back up the cellar stairs, I heard a familiar noise: the drum sander
gnawing at the floor.  Strange my partner hasn't left for lunch yet, I thought.
I entered the room, and found that the unmanned machine, which had never been
turned off, had careened into a wall, smashed the baseboard and plaster, and
dug in.  By the time I was able to stop it, it had chewed a good 3/8" into the
floor. 

Once I could trust myself to use the mnachine for sanding rather than ritual 
self-sacrifice, I got to work trying to repair the damage.  After a period of 
feathering and praying I managed to achieve a dish, which the owners kindly 
conceded their dog enjoyed as a napping spot.  We are still friends, but I 
haven't gotten many referrals from this job.

    re: .20
    
    This script sounds like the play version of "The Money Pit".  Did
    you have anything to do with the movie?
    
    Elaine
    8-)

actually - another moral (which I mention only because I've seen it 
violated so often) is:  If you live in a condo - find out where your 
water shutoffs are - cause there ain't no landlord to call.  (no offense mark)

	/jeff (former condo board member who received more than one
		"where's my shutoff" call at an unfortunate hour)

    Moral 1 - it surprised me that condo units don't have to have
    individual shutoffs, but in fact they don't - I had a friend with
    a similar problem and we finally discovered that the shutoff for
    a row of five units was a single valve in one of the units, the
    owners of which were away for the weekend!!!
    
    Moral 2 - come on, everyone knows that 5 min plumbing jobs ALWAYS
    take two hours and entail the replacement of 5x more parts than
    were originally thought to be bad.
    

    Another rule I've started to live by:
    
    	NEVER start ANY plumbing repair between noon on a Saturday and
        8 AM Monday morning.
    
    
    Murphy must have been a plumber.
    
    Nick

    Re .0
    
    Mark, you're a BRAVE man! Not so much for fixing the shower after
    all hell broke loose but for TELLING us all your story. At least
    you won't have to worry about the in-laws calling you to fix anything
    for a while. 
    
    Mark: Let me change that light bulb for you.
    
    In-Law: No, that's alright... the electrician is coming tomorrow
            to do it.

    :-)
    
    Thanks again, 
    
    Charly

BTW:  not that anyone should be scared away from condos..

Many condos DO HAVE individual shutoffs (ours did, just in a 
non-intuitive spot).  I think the rule of thumb is:  If it was built 
to be a condo originally, it probably has its own shutoffs, if its an 
apartment conversion, all bets are off

Just in case it wasn't clear in my original blurb, this condo DID have 
individual shut-offs, but the one connected to my in-laws apartment didn't
work!

-mark

    One thing I've learned about plumbing.  Have at least enough
    material on hand to replace every supply and drain pipe in a 40
    foot radius of where you'll be working.  Then when that 5 minute
    job enters the 5th hour (3 a.m.), you'll have the 3/4" threaded
    pipe adapter handy when you need it.  If things work out right,
    like they do every fourth new moon, you just return all the used
    materials to the store.  Or keep them for the next 5 minute repair.
    
    Phil

    this reminds me of the time we went to drain our hot water heater.
    
    First the valve broke open so we had to replace the tank.  then
    the flex pipes broke,  putting on the new flex pipes broke the hot
    water galvenized pipe in the wall.  went upstairs in the attic to
    get a grip on the pipe up there and it broke.  finally caped it
    off at the drop to the bathroon and called it a night.  took shower
    on side walk and carried buckets in for the tolet.  this took a
    few days to open the wall and discover that all the pipes were leaking.
    
    Each time some thing broke along the way involved a trip to the
    store.  And over the period of one week and much cold water we replace
    the entire house.  Cost appromix $500 includeing new fixtures, heater
    and pipes.  Also had to replace one wall in the bathroom witch is
    another story.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 18 Dec 1983/Jan 1984

Last night was not the first time it came to me, but perhaps it was the 
strongest.  We were out on our deck, my husband and I, not sipping iced drinks, 
but working steadily against the coming winter, building our mountainside house.
Squinting aginst the low sun, Peter drilled with brace and bit for the bolts in
railing uprights, and then nailed the supports in place with a template.  I
stood at a portable carpentry bench and sanded window frames that were still
between coats of primer and paint.  And for just a few minutes, there in the
dusk with the revolving crunch of drill bit biting wood, the heavy rythm of a
hammer, the chemical-tart smell of turps and the powdery feel of sanded primer
on my hands, I was back in my father's shop. 

It is in the basement.  The concrete floor is covered with rubber mats and
shavings; overhead are flourescent lights and exposed joists.  The lathe is
against one wall; the table saw, grinder and neat stacks of lumber take up much
of the floor space in the room.  And I remember the waist-high workbench with
vise, drill press, goose-neck lamp and black, dusty wall phone.  When I was
very young, I could see only if I clambered up on the stepstool, but when I
did, the array of gadgets and widgets - hanging, shelved and boxed - was spread
before me. 

The top of the bench, its edges nicked with sawcuts and chisel blows, is a
dark, dark green covered with a marvelous panoply of spots.  The earliest are
oil-based: thick, flattened drops of paint in lollipop colors - reds and
yellows and oranges from painting chairs and toys for my brothers and me - or
the more sedate browns and greens and whites of window sash, shelves and cold
frames.  In the cupboards beneath the bench are saws and blades and sharpeners,
pencils, scratch paper, sandpaper, a phone book, pipe filters and pipe
cleaners. On the wall are pegboards for screwdrivers and wrenches, hammers,
chisels and putty knives.  There is a plastic chest with neatly labled drawers,
each full of brads and picture hangers, Phillips screws and cuphooks. 

Along the back of the bench are the paintbrushes soaking in tobacco cans full
of mineral spirits.  My father had drilled holes through the handles so they
could be suspended by a nail in the turps instead of resting on their bristles.
Other cans contain nails, screws, nuts or washers, and each can has a rimmed
metal lid that can be pried off with the attached lever-key.  It was a delight
as a child to open these cans and to peek at the tangled nails, to listen to
the rattling of the rolling nuts and washers, and even, sometimes, to take a
whiff from a can full of moist shreds of unsmoked pipe tobacco. 

When my father was there, I did not climb on the bench or set the tools
clanging against their pegboards or rummage in the cans.  Instead, I watched
him, in his workshop trousers and his denim shop apron with tape, nail set and
nails.  He always wore a cap, and wisps of hair stuck out from under the brim
because whenever he had to stop and ponder, he would lift the cap and run his
hand through his hair and back over his head; until, decision made, he reset
the cap, took the pencil from behind his ear and got back to work.  As a child
I loved everything about him and his shop - those flat pencils that could be
whittled with penknives, or the ones that could be unwrapped by pulling a
string and peeling away the wrapping to expose the lead.  I loved the way he
settled his pipe in his teeth and the way wood shavings curled out of his plane
as he jointed the edge of a board and the way granular dust fell from the saws.
 I remember how I would scoop up the shavings and gather them so they became
fronds in a bouquet.  Or the curls in a parlimentary wig or the fleece of a
sheep.  Sometimes I would pull the sawdust box from under the saw table and let
the yellow-white, fine-coarse dust sift through my fingers.  Or I would plunge
my hands in up to my wrists, wriggle my fingers in the moist warmth and inhale
the released pine scent.  Other times I would dig valleys and build hills and
pat out roads in the cornmeal-like dust. 

It was fun to be underfoot, playing and no doubt chattering and listening to
the grinding and whining and chugging of the machines.  My father would move
about the shop, industrious but at ease, measuring and remeasuring, testing
corners, running his hand across smooth surfaces.  When something went awry, he
would utter the epithet of choice in my family: Dunnerwetter! 

It was a word that came up more and more often as my brothers and I began to
make secret forays into my father's shop.  There were the cages one brother
built for snakes and turtles (that were not always snake and turtle proof), the
brooder pen for chickens, the hutch for my rabbits.  There was the bulletin
board I built for my bedroom and hung until the sheer weight of it began to
pull the studs out of plumb.  There were sticks to whittle, tent pegs to pound,
bike tires to change, wagons to oil, pocketknives to sharpen, clubhouses to fix
up, science projects to mount.  For all these and more we raided the shop.  My
mother kept a few tools of her own stashed in the kitchen, but for us kids the
real treasures were stashed in the basement.  I don't think it bothered my
father that we used his tools, so much as that we seldom chose the right ones
for the job and that we never put them back.  I remember prying open paint cans
with chisels or good screwdrivers, pounding nails with a ball-peen hammer,
crosscutting wood with what must have been a ripsaw and vice versa.  We drove
nails of the wrong sizes and split the wood, turned Phillips screws with
straight drivers, and with childish frustration, whacked properly begun screws
the rest of the way in with a baby sledge.  Other than the occaisonal lecture
and empty threats to ban us from the shop, we were lucky all he ever said was
Dunnerwetter. 

We are grown now, all of us with tools of our own, two of us with houses 
underway, and our father has his shop to himself.  The brads don't disappear 
from their drawers and reappear in chicken fences; the 12d and 10d nails aren't 
mixed up together in one can; the wood scraps that aren't really scraps at all 
don't become a fleet of tugs and paddlers and cruisers too large to fit all at 
the same time in the bathtub.  Instead, the chaos seems to have moved in with 
us.  And we don't even have children constantly tagging after us or devising 
projects.  But our tool shed is 100 yards from our house site.  As a result, 
tools are everywhere: saws on the pile of soon-to-be-installed insulation; 
nails in everything from trouser pockets and nailing aprons to mayonnaise jars 
and 50-lb. boxes; and hammers in the toolbox, on window sills and on floor 
joists.  And whenever I have to hunt for something, like a combination square 
or a nail set, I think enviously of my father 400 miles south in Pennsylvania, 
in his now neat and tidy shop.  But when the framing stands square and plumb, 
or when the bubble in the level hits dead center, or when a piece of sanded 
wood feels like satin, I also think of my father, and the start he gave us in 
his shop.

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 19 Feb/Mar 1984

Recently our two year old, while climbing the bathroom shelves, knocked a glass
jar of hand cream into the toilet.  My wife's only thought was to retrieve her
favorite lotion - she didn't see the hairline crack just below the water level
in the porcelain bowl.  As the days passed, a small water stain appeared on the
floor, and we blamed our four-year-old son for bad aim.  It wasn't until a week
or so later that we noticed the crack. 

It's funny, when you start to build a home, you don't realize how soon after
you finish (sometimes even before) the maintenance begins.  You'd think a
toilet would have a longer life expectancy than 10 years, if you thought about
it at all.  Anyway, I bought a new toilet and installed it, marveling at how
quickly an often-put-off job gets done once you begin.  It was a newer model
that uses less water, and the base was designed for easier cleaning. 

The new toilet worked well for a week or so, and then the flushing action
started to slow down.  The water would creep slowly up to the top, and each
time we'd stand there wondering whether to run for the mop.  Frequent use of a
plunger was required.  There was no improvement, so I opened the clean-out and
ran a 15-ft. snake down the drain line, squirted a hose down it, snaked down
the vent pipe, all to no avail.  Maybe pumping the tank would help...it hadn't
been done since the house was built.  So I called up the local tank pumper.  He
came out and we located the tank...smack under the concrete fishpond (I know
there's a basic lesson here somewhere). 

There was nothing to do but bail out the pond, scoop out the algae and mosquito
fish for the compost pile and set to work for two half-days with sledgehammer
and pick.  We carted away about 20 loads of reluctant concrete.  At last the
septic tank was exposed.  We pumped it out, and hustled back to flush the
toilet, expecting a whirlpool.  Still clogged.  Then a friend suggested that we
try a toilet auger, so I went out and bought this strange-looking device and
tried it.  Still clogged. 

As one last move, before removing the toilet, I went to check my library of
building books and noticed one that I hadn't really looked at before: Don
Fredriksson's "Plumbing for Dummies."  In it I found humorous, no-nonsense
advice from a professional plumber.  Several pages were devoted to things kids
can drop down toilets.  There was a drawing of a rubber duck lodged halfway
down the outlet.  This rang a bell, and I remembered fishing out various
plastic bath toys from the toilet on previous occaisons and realized since our
two-year-old had recently learned to pull the flush handle maybe I'd missed
something.  Another drawing in the book showed hou to use a bent coat hanger to
extricate various objects from the toilet. 

Sure enough, one of the first snags with the coat hanger produced a bent 10-in.
plastic comb.  Surprise!  A smashed-up fish pond, a pumped septic tank, a few
new plumbing tools and much distress later, a bent coat hanger does the job
best.  Oh well, the tank needed pumping, the fish pond wasn't really in the
right place and I now know a lot more about our plumbing than I used do.  The
next time that the toilet clogs, I may just try a bent coat hanger before I
drag out the snake, auger, hose or plunger, or a sledgehammer. 

	Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History"
	Fine Homebuilding Vol 20 Apr/May 1984

The distinction between a carpenter and someone who merely does the work of a
carpenter is little understood and seldom made anymore.  So much has become
simplified and prefabricated that the principal function of a carpenter these
days is to install rather than to build.  Somehow, I grew up with an antiquated
notion of carpentry - an understanding incompatible with roof trusses, nailing
guns and prehung doors.  And so, several years ago, I set out to become a
carpenter, no more and no less.  I was ready to work at it until I could use
that title without qualification. 

When I went to work for Rus, I'd been working at it for three years, but wasn't
a carpenter yet.  Rus was acting as general contractor on the conversion of two
old barns into homes for his mother and sister.  He started me out on simple
things: shoe mold, closet shelving, window and door trim.  But then he began
challenging me to do things that I'd never done before, never even seen done: a
dovetailed towel rack for one of the bathrooms, a paneled wall with a hidden
door in it.  If Rus didn't know the full extent of my abilities, he knew at
least that they were beyond my own estimation. 

In one of the barns, Rus had reused an original set of stairs; they had been
roughly built and bore the marks of 60 years of hard use.  As the finish in the
rest of the house came up, he regretted more and more his decision to save
them.  I had long been interested in stairwork; it is one of the few areas of
the trade that has not been simplified to the point of absurdity.  So I offered
to tear out Rus's old stairs and build a new set.  He quickly accepted. They
were a stright run between two walls, narrow and steep.  But they were my first
set of hardwood stairs. 

At the top I built a short balustrade: newel post, level run of handrail 8 ft.
long and square oak balusters.  Knowing nothing of grooved handrail or fillet
and shoe rail, I mortised all 18 balusters top and bottom with a drill and
chisel. 

Rus's ultimate challenge came when he suggested that I could to the "other
handrail," referring to a winding oak staircase from a Stanford White mansion
that he had bought, dismantled and reinstalled in one of the barns.  The
stairway was 4 ft. wide, open on one side, with a quarter-turn two-thirds of
the way up.  It rose from the center of the house and was the first thing
anyone saw coming in the front or back door.  The original newel posts and
balusters had been destroyed, but Rus did have the six-piece mahogany handrail.
All along he had intended to have an old master carpenter come out to build the
balustrade.  I had been looking forward to working with the man.  I told Rus
that I couldn't possibly do it myself - I'd never done such a thing before,
never seen the original, and wouldn't know where to begin. 

But then I started thinking seriously about the handrail.  How would I go about
building it, if I had to?  As with other projects Rus had proposed, I was
intimidated at first; then job seemeed far beyond my skills.  But after living
with the idea for a few days, my mind began to break the whole thing down into
its component tasks, until I no longer saw one complex problem, but rather a
series of simpler ones. 

I remembered an old union carpenter telling me that all there was to carpentry
was "plumb, level, and square."  For years, I'd been trying to reconcile my
respect for that man with what had seemed a gross oversimplification.  Suddenly
I knew that he was right.  The tolerances varied certainly - laying out and
framing a wall need not be as precise as laying out and building a balustrade -
but the principles involved were the same. 

As soon as I began to look at Rus's balustrade as a winding studwall, I
realized that I could put the entire handrail together as it had been
originally, with its hanger screws and star-shaped nuts, and lay it directly on
top of the stair treads to determine length and position.  Then all I would
have to do would be to raise it equidistant off the stairs and put in the
balusters.  This was the breakthrough I had needed; I knew I could do it. 

And I did do it, working slowly and tentatively.  Before I mitered the turnout
section of handrail into the newel cap, I took the pieces home with me
overnight, which somehow prepared me to cut them.  I sat on the stairs and
worked patiently with a rasp to shape the curved, compound angles of the
balusters around the curve in the stairs.  I set up and took down the entire
staircase section of balustrade several times before I was confident that I had
it right.  And I struggled with the assembly of newly milled handrail and
balusters around the second-floor stairwell, starting at one end, aligning the
balusters one at a time, slipping and having to start over.  All of this caused
some consternation among Rus's family, but Rus himself understood and left me
alone. 

It surprises me now to realize that I can actually say at what point I became a
carpenter.  But when I finished the balustrade, I knew that it was so.  And the
difference had nothing to do with what I'd learned of stairwork; it had to do
with confidence. 

For years I'd looked at carpentry as though it were an exact science, a matter
of right or wrong, but it isn't.  It is a pragmatic business, governed by a
few, very basic principles and beyond which it is a question of what will or
will not work.  I understood "plumb, level and square," and knew that I could
figure out how to build just about anything.  My way might not be the best way,
but it will work. 

Certainly there is more to becoming a carpenter than acquiring confidence, and
the process is different for everyone.  But for me, it was this confidence in
my own ability to solve problems, ultimately to get the job done, that was the
final step.  This made me a carpenter - not a master by any means, but ready at
least to begin earning that distinction. 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", 
Fine Homebuilding vol 21 Jun/Jul 1984

In the spring of 1977, my bride to be and I bought our first house, a modest, 
early 1950s ranch with a basement we planned to turn into a workshop.  The 
house had a view of a lake and bordered state parkland.  What really sold us,
though, was the large bay in the living room with glass windows from floor to 
ceiling, one of which was hinged like a door and opened onto a generous second- 
story deck overlooking the woods.

Mrs. Cooper, the nice lady who lived next door, told us that the house had 
originally been built for her by her late husband when she was a new bride.  
Deena and I considered this a good omen (blithely ignoring the fact that the 
people who sold the house were divorcing).  We loved our little house.  Living 
in it seemed too good to be true.  It was.  As we got to know the place better, 
we realized that the late Mr. Cooper had scrounged almost all of the materials 
for the house.  He'd salvaged used framing, gotten the cupola from an old 
schoolhouse, and liberated our raised-panel entry door from the front of the 
old public library.  In the course of making repairs around the place, we began 
to realize the Cooper had been an ameteur, but inventive, carpenter.  Some of 
his solutions were elegant and straightforward, while others were jury-rigged,
incomprehensible jumbles that would leave me muttering to his ghost.

One afternoon, Deena brushed against the railing on the deck, and pieces of it 
fell off - a clear sign that repairs were needed.  We looked closely at the 
boxed posts supporting the railings and found that they were only toenailed to 
the deck and had begun to rot badly around their bases, so we decided to 
replace the entire railing.  When we removed the posts, we found cupped and 
rotted tongue-and-groove decking beneath - evidence that the damage was greater 
than we had thought.  We decided to replace the decking.  I gently took up a 
few pieces in the hope that the local mill could duplicate them.  Then I saw 
the rotted joists.  At this point, we decided to replace the entire deck.

That night we made sketches for an enlarged version.  It would be a proper 
deck, made of pressure treated lumber, and it would be watertight to provide 
dry storage underneath.  We planned to do all the work ourselves; as violin 
makers, we figured we knew how to join pieces of wood.  To assist in the 
project, we enlisted the services of my friend Randy, a budding opera singer.
Randy and I decided to remove the old deck in the reverse order in which it had 
been built - no sledgehammers for us.

Demolition day dawned clear and sunny.  First the railing went over the edge.  
That part was easy.  Then the decking, plank by rotten plank.  We worked 
methodically across the joists, muttering about poor Cooper.  He'd boxed 
everything.  The railing posts were boxed.  Even the band joists were boxed.  
Then the entire floor had been boxed with tongue-and-groove decking above, and 
sheets of plywood, complete with weep holes, nailed on from below.  The whole 
arrangement was an invitation to rot.  Each boxed in cell formed a haven for 
some creature.  It was like an apartment complex.  We found the remains of 
birds, squirrels, mice, and even a small snake.  We saw the abandoned nests of 
wasps, bees, and hornets.  We worked on, and by lunch time the deck framing was 
entirely exposed.  It also wobbled quite a bit.

The far end of the deck was supported 8 ft. above the ground on three steel 
jack posts embedded in concrete.  At the top of each post was a short threaded 
section to which a metal flange had been screwed.  There were three holes in 
each flange, but only one hole in each had a hammered and bent-over 16d nail.  
For nearly 15 years, those three nails were all that held the deck and the jack 
posts together.  The wood was so soft that the nails were holding merely out of 
habit, and we decided that it would be prudent to halt work and figure out our 
next step.

I climbed down to check things out from underneath, while Randy remained aloft 
to scrutinize matters from above.  Humming something from "The Barber of 
Seville," Randy wondered out loud about the consequences of a collapse, and I 
flippantly retorted it would save us several hours of demolition.  Things get a 
bit less clear after this.  I remember Randy jumping off the shaky framing and 
yelling at me to run.  I ran.  I remember passing the last of the steel posts 
as it fell over, noting with disgust that it had been embedded only a few 
inches in its concrete pier.  Behind me I heard the crashing, cracking and 
splintering sounds of the deck as it hit the ground.

Then I heard the groan - the deep, fundamental, and awful groan of something 
letting go that's not supposed to.  It was no doubt the ghost of Cooper, 
getting even for all my unkind thoughts about him.  Cooper had not, after all,
hung the house end of the deck off a ledger, as you or I might have done; the 
simple way was not for Cooper.  Instead, he had run every blessed deck joist 
back under the house and scabbed them onto the second story joists.  "Why, 
Cooper?" I thought, as I watched the floor of the living room separate in the 
middle and begin to rise, "Why on earth did you do it that way?"  Then the 
large walls of glass in the bay came toppling out and crashed to the ground, 
followed by the sundered sections of oak flooring.  Finally, there was silence.

Well, not quite.  As Randy and I shakenly surveyed the wreckage, we heard a 
sound like gently falling rain.  Only it wasn't rain.  It was ants.  Thousands 
of them, falling out of the house.  You see, Cooper had boxed the mullions in
the bay of windows, too, and the carpenter ants, attracted by the rotting deck, 
had used them as boulevards to and from our honeymoon home.  Deena and I had 
enjoyed our home for only a few months.  The insects had been enjoying it for 
15 years.  Have you ever seen two grown men try to stamp out several thousand 
ants?  We think a few of them probably got away.

Five months and $4000 later, the floor framing in the living room had been 
repaired and new oak flooring put down.  Four new double-pane glass panels had 
been set into the bay, and a new deck finished in pressure treated wood.  It is 
the marvel of the neighborhood.  Supported on 6X6 pressure treated posts set 5 
ft. deep into the earth, fitted with uplift pins and embedded in concrete, this 
deck, I am assured, will still be standing 100 years after the house, to which
it is attached by a ledger, has fallen down.  And even after the most intense 
rainstorms, the ground beneath remains as dry as powder.

Our careers called us away from our beloved honeymoon house the day after our 
deck was finished.  We never cooked a single hamburger on it, or leaned on its 
sturdy rail to let our gaze wander into the soft retreat of the nearby woods.  
Cooper, I hope you're satisfied.

    I'm in the process of redoing my living room with a cathedral ceiling.
    The living room is is the "old" part of the house, built around
    1806 with post and beam framing.  In the process of taking down the 
    old ceiling and cleaning up the accumulated crud of the ages, I
    discovered that when the previous owners installed a Metalbestos
    chimney for a stove, they cut away half the 5-sided ridge beam for 
    a distance of about 18" in some insane attempt to get the chimney
    to come out exactly at the peak of the roof.  Apparently, nobody 
    told them that Metalbestos sells 45-degree elbows that let you do 
    offsets around obstacles.  
    Furthermore, somebody (I don't know if it was them or not) took
    out two of the vertical posts and their associated 45-dgree windbraces
    when they "finished off" that part of the house.  The term "finished
    off" as applied to a room never had such implications of death and 
    destruction about it before....  I think they framed in the walls
    with 2x4's, which probably why the place is still standing, but
    it certainly does make one wonder.  I haven't looked inside the
    walls yet.
    

Friday night after work and after dinner, I decided to lay up a few block for 
our garage foundation.  We dug the hole and poured the footings two weeks ago, 
but have had trouble getting much of the block laid, mostly due to all the 
rain.  So about dusk I went out, got the partially-used bag of mortar from the 
barn, and mixed up a batch.  By the time I actually started laying block, I was 
using the headlights from the car, but it was going pretty well.  The mortar 
looked a little odd, but I attributed that to the poor lighting.  I finished up 
that batch, and went to mix another, but for that I had to get another bag of 
mortar from the barn.  I went in and discovered, next to the pile of mortar 
bags, the half-bag that I thought I had just used.  So I went back outside to 
discover that I had just laid up about 30 block using...

Wet sand mixed with landscaping lime.  

Paul

P.S.  I was just glad that I hadn't put more block on top using REAL mortar.

    Our family had a house built in New Mexico. We used to visit the
    place every day while yt was under construction (with good reason
    it turned out). It was your basic rectangular foudation. Problem
    is that there's lots of different sized rectangles. For instance
    there's the one called for in the building p|ans and then there's
    the one with the added 'L' section the foundation guy decided he
    liked better. Nobody noticed until the framer appeared. No problem!
    The framer called the foundation guy who builds a 2nd wall about
    four feet inside of the original. We had them put a door in there.
    It made a fort when I was younger.
    
    Everything went fine for a while - brick walls went up, windows
    were installed, interior walls were started and uh-oh! One of the
    windows was installed so that half was on one side of the wall and
    half on the other. No problem! They took out the window and part
    of the wall with a sledge hammer. Presto move-o everything is all
    squared away.
    
    Until the plumber got started, that is. One day we droppud in to
    check the rough plumbing only to find the pipes for the toilet,
    sink, and tub nicely placed in the front entry. After a fair amount
    of discussion the plumber admitted as how he might have been perhaps
    marginally partially potentially at fault. The bathroom was moved
    back to the correct side of the wall and the remainder of the house
    was built more or less correctly as long as you ignored the fact
    that most of the walls weren't all that square.
    
    						Trace

    One of my uncles on my father's side was the family black sheep.
    Never settled down, just sort of drifted from place to place doing
    carpentry and whatever.
    
    He was out in California staying with his brother when they decided
    to clean the garage.  Did a spiffy job.  Loaded the mess into the
    pickup and drove on down to the local dump.  Now my black sheep
    uncle was also lazy, and didn't want to laboriously unload that
    which had taken all afternoon to load, so he convinced his brother
    to let him unload the truck *his* way.
    
    This entailed backing up to the lip of the dump at about 45 mph
    and standing on the brakes.  Would have worked too if the brake
    lines had held.  It took two wreckers to get the pickup out of the
    dump.
    

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", 
Fine Homebuilding vol 23 Oct/Nov 1984

Being a small scale contractor requires a sense of humor, although, I must say,
some of the jobs you do seem funny only in retrospect.  One of my most
memorable jobs was early in my career, when I was eager to learn the fine
points of construction and would put up with almost anything.  It was building
a retirement home for a somewhat eccentric businessman.  I had already done
some minor work for him - fixing a leaky toilet and installing some carpeting.
Later I helped him remodel a motel, and then we went on to build his "dream"
home. 

Mr. Catchpenny (as I will call him) was not the easiest person to get along
with; in fact, I was one of the few guys who had managed to work with him for
more than a few months.  He knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it
done - until he changed his mind and knew exactly how he wanted it redone.  He
also spent a great deal of his time searching for the "best bargains" in town.
Once when we needed a toilet, he came back with a pink toilet with a black
seat.  "Looks great, doesn't it?" he said with a smile.  I learned quickly that
he really didn't care if I agreed or not. 

Eventually he sold the motel for a big profit, and instead of giving me the
promised bonus, he promised an even bigger one when we finished his retirement
home, which was on a wooded half-acre ocean-front estate.  He planned to go all
out on his own house, with no expense spared.  We were going to remodel the
existing structure (a one bedroom cracker-box), install solar heating and do
extensive landscaping.  The additions to the house included a master bedroom
and bath, a living room and a study; later we would add a garage with an
apartment on top.  All the additions except the garage were to be completed
before Mr. and Mrs. Catchpenny moved in, nine months from when we started. 

Catchpenny insisted we start with the landscaping.  I had my doubts about
finishing the house on time if we didn't get to the additions soon, but he was
the boss, so we landscaped.  Catchpenny decided to landscape with rocks so the
place would look more "natural."  He had a passion for rocks.  We made 30 trips
(40 miles each round trip) to the quarry for over 300 tons of alpine rock; each
rock was selected by him.  When we got back to his place, he would walk around,
pointing to the place he wanted each rock.  Quite often, he would have me
rearrange the rocks the next day, as if they were pieces of furniture. 

In addition to the rocks, we brought in trees, shrubs, and topsoil.  He also
wanted a pond, so we dug one for him, hoping he wouldn't change his mind about
it.  When he came out to look at the pond, he instructed me and the mason he'd
hired to build three brick archways to support the bridge he wanted over the
pond.  "Like this," he said, taking a stick and drawing a picture in the dirt.
The mason and I took over from there and had them finished by nightfall.
Catchpenny told us they looked great. 

The next morning we arrived at the pond and found only a rubble of brick and
mortar.  I thought we'd done something terribly wrong that caused the arches to
fall in the night.  The mason thought it must have been vandals.  When we told
Catchpenny, he said casually, "Oh, I did that.  I didn't like it.  They need to
be different."  I had to suppress a grin at the way the luckless mason was
introduced to Catchpenny's surprises.  We built three new arches that day; they
were indeed "different," and they stayed. 

Nine months later, the landscaping was finished, complete with circular
driveway and a fence surrounding the estate, with rock walls in front and iron
gates for Cathcpenny's privacy.  We were ready to start on the house, and, yes,
they were moving in at the same time.  Catchpenny assured us his wife wouldn't
mind the intrusion one bit. 

The first week we brought in 100 tons of hand-selected rock and 20,000 board
feet of beams for the house and garage.  Our landscaping took a real beating by
the time we had finished hauling the 40-ft. beams and all the other materials
to the house.  So we spent the next three weeks repairing the damage. 

As usual, while we were doionbg the repair work, Catchpenny was changing plans
on the house again.  He had acquired four huge (10-ft. by 9-ft.) antique
stained glass doors; he claimed they came from a castle in Europe and said with
typical resolve, "Aren't they great?"  At the end of a long day, he asked me to
cut a board 120 in. long and bring it to him.  Then he had us all gather around
a spot not far from the original house and at an odd angle to it, he laid the
board on the ground and stood on it dramatically.  "Here's where I want my
doors!" he shouted.  "I want the house built around them."  To this day I
marvel at how we erected the living room around those doors. 

Eventually, the entire house was finished in the same crazy way it started.  We 
added about 1,600 sq. ft. of area to the original structure, which had remained 
intact throughout.  (Catchpenny maintained it had a certain character to it.)  
We ended up scrapping the plans for the solar heating even though we spent 
three weeks digging trenches and laying pipes from the house to the cliff for 
the solar panels.  After all that work, I was glad to see it end, and I was 
looking forward to my bonus.

About a month after we finished, I stopped by to pick it up.  Catchpenny was 
overjoyed to see me.  He invited me in and waltzed me around the house as if I 
were a new visitor, pointing out his favorite parts.  I looked at my watch a 
few times to hint that I was in a hurry.  I was just about to remind him that I 
had come for my bonus when he took me into the original structure we had built 
around and said, "Look at this, it doesn't even fit with the rest of the house.
We'll have to tear it out tomorrow.  Let's start early, eh?"

    Some of these stories are real impressive.  I guess I'm not as dumb
    as some people ;-) but here is a dump related story inspired by
    the last note.  I worked at a blacktop plant for a couple summers 
    to put myself through college.  We did everything from get the bank
    run gravel out of the pit, to run it through the crusher, to mix the 
    black top.  I was driving the dump truck from the pit to the crusher
    hopper.  When I was instructed in the proper operation of the dump
    truck, I was told to make *sure* the tailgate handle was *all* the
    way down or the tailgate would not open.  Well, if you've read this
    far, you know what happened.  Later in the week, toward the end
    of the day, I backed up to the hopper, flipped the tailgate lever,
    engaged the dump hydraulics and gunned the engine.  The dump body
    went up, the gravel loosened and slid against the not fully released
    tailgate, the front wheels of the dump truck came 3-4 feet off the
    ground, the driver sh*t a brick!  Fortunately, the tailgate was
    able to open about a foot.  The material trickled out and the front
    wheels of the truck settled gently to the ground.  I just missed
    being in an upside down dump truck in a crusher hopper.
    
   		Dumb things I used to do daily
    
    Other neat "toys" we had at the black top plant were two TEREX (used
    to be Euclid) loaders.  These are the lime green mothers you see
    at road construction sites.  They are good for picking up small
    cars and about 3 cubic yards of material. (also moving a major storage
    garage about 1" easily, but that is another story)  Anyway, one
    of these suckers would pop an "O" ring seal every day or every other
    day and start leaking 400 deg transmission fluid all over the place.
    Since we *needed* the loader to work, they would just drive it into
    the garage bay (the one that was moved an inch) for me to fix. 
    It was easy.  You just lie on your back, loosen four retainer bolts,
    grab a piece of cardboard, pop off the hose, stick the cardboard
    between your face and the 400 deg transmission fluid so it empties
    into the bucket and not your mouth, pop in a new "O" ring and send
    the monster back to work.  15 minutes max!
    
    Early in the morning at the black top plant I used to pull greasing
    duty.  I got to grease the crusher.  If you have ever seen one of
    these mothers, you know it covers about 4 acres and has huge conveyors
    to carry the sorted material to individual piles.  Well, it was a pain
    in the a** to get down and walk over and climb up the ladders with
    a grease gun in each hand.  My solution was to just *jog* up the
    converyor belts to the top (40 feet off the good old firm terra firma)
    with a grease gun in each hand.  Converyor belts are a 3/8 inch rubber 
    material that runs on rollers every 3' or so (perfect stride length!) 
    and when they are shut down at night there isn't too much gravel and 
    sand on them to make the footing too treacherous.  Most of the people 
    I worked with thought I was a crazy sucker.  I have come to agree
    with them.
    
    			Not for the squeamish.

    This story hasn't got a happy (as in, "I was lucky I didn't get
    killed") ending.  This was also at the black top plant.  I was running
    a (two-handed) shovel at the time and didn't see it happen.  I got
    to help clean up.  They were changing the bushings around the pivot
    pins in the bucket loader at the bucket connections.  They tipped the 
    bucket up on its teeth so the bushings would be easier to reach.  They
    had removed the pins and bushings at the base of the bucket.  These
    are the main pins!  They carry the full weight of the bucket.  The
    bucket is now balanced on its teeth with nothing (!) holding it
    in position but the hydraulic rams which were still attached to
    the bucket by their pins.  One of the guys sticks his head between the 
    lifting arms and the rams to try to fit the new pins.  As he withdraws
    the bucket kicks out and comes crashing down.  The rams come down
    but the disconnected lifting arms stay in place.  There is much
    ado in the garage and I am called over.  His head is caught between
    the rams and the lifting arms just below the ears and blood is
    trickling from his ears.  We have to figure a way to extricate his
    head without causing any more brain damage.  After a (unknown) number
    of minutes we realize we have to remove the pins holding the rams
    so the ram can swing away and he can be lowered to the floor.  My
    cousin and I do this because the others are bolted to the floor.
    We then have to wait for the ambulance to come.  This was the longest
    20 (count 'em) minutes of my life.  He stops breathing twice but
    fortunately (?) starts breathing again.  The ambulance finally arrives
    and I help the attendants get him from under the machine.  The last
    I heard he was in a wheel chair and something of a vegetable.  If
    he had not backed out when he did he would have been cut in half.
    Like someone said "I wonder how many replies there would be to this
    note if the dead could talk".

>    Like someone said "I wonder how many replies there would be to this
>    note if the dead could talk".
    
    Let it serve as a good warning to everyone who rents a Bobcat! 
    They are cute little toys for us grown up kids, but they can also
    be dangerous.  Someone was killed last winter in Lexington, MA,
    using one of these to clear snow from a parking lot.  While the
    bucket was lifted in the air, the operator stuck his head out the
    side of the cage.  As he leaned out, his foot(?) hit the down lever
    for the bucket.  Guess what the lifting arms hit on their way down?!
    
    Jim
    (who likes his head just where it is, thank you)

    Having been a pro I've seen a great many weird DIY projects
    (usually people asking to have them fixed). But, few are any better
    than the ones in this note.
    
    I would like to add a special category, though, call it A for effort.
    These are the DIY projects where money and effort were not skimped
    on, but oh for a little knowledge.
    
    My two favorite examples of this are:
    
    1) Roof repaired by installing all new COPPER flashing,
       over the shingles?!!?
    
    2) Beautiful new deck built, floored with TG OAK planks, almost
       level, slopes slightly toward house. Perfectly even with 
       inside floor ??!!?!?!!
       Do you know how much water can come under a closed door when
       it rains hard?
    
	Alan

    My personal favorites:
    
    Walls with 5 to 6 layers of wall paper on them.
    
    A bathroom, the walls of which were painted lime GREEN on the bottom
    half, PINK on the top half, cabinets painted lemon YELLOW and
    glossy BLACK trim around everything!  
    
    But my favorite of all was an electrical cable I noticed sticking
    out of the house, just under the eaves of my roof. Nothing connected
    to it, it was just sticking out of the wall there. Tracing it back
    into my attic I was somewhat surprised that to find that it was
    LIVE!

    Before lots of "redecorating", mostly by me, my Parent's house was
    done up similarly: Bathroom - bright yellow and black plastic tiles,
    dark green linoleum floor. Kitchen - pink painted cabinets, pink
    plastic tile, dark green linoleum floor, black wallpaper...

>    I have a bathroom which is done in hot pink tile:  the floor, halfway
>    up the walls, and all over the shower walls.  The tub, sink, and
>    toilet (which would cost $1200 to replace, said the home inspector;
>    "I'll sell it to you for an even thousand" was my answer to him!)
>    are all mustard green, and the top half of the walls are covered
>    with an ugly dirty wallpaper which somehow combines both green and
>    pink.  I'm told that style was popular back about 30 years ago.
 

Jeez, at least I'm not the only one and mine isn't nearly that bad. My 
bathroom has pink tiles with a black tile border. The floor is 
predominantly gray with a bit of pink. When we first moved in the walls 
above the tile were painted an extremely deep pinkish red. First thing 
in the morning it's all you need. We painted the walls almost 
immediately - about four coats but there is still just a tiny bit of 
the old visible at a corner where the tile meets the wall. I use it to 
show people who visit that I wasn't exagerating about the color scheme.

Also, master bedroom: walls were "hospital" green
      second bedroom: walls were light brown
      third "                   " pale blue

I thought the previous owner had just waited for paint clearance sales 
or something.

    We just moved into another house in which almost every room was
    painted with glossy white - walls, ceilings, doors, woodwork, you
    name it.  Needless to say, we repainted real fast.  In repainting
    we discovered that each room was olive green underneath!
    
    Also, one of the bathrooms has white and royal blue ceramic tiles.
    The tiles form 5 ft. x 6 in."stripes" down the walls and around 
    the tub.  The remaining space over the tiles is blue/purple/white
    geometricly designed foil wallpaper.           
    
    I use the other bathroom so I don't have to face this interior design!
    
    

    Several years ago I was selling real estate and showed a home which
    I later found out belonged to a well known pro football player.
    The entry was papered with a LARGE flower print in red, orange
     and yellow as was the powder room.  The rest of the home was decorated
    in bright versions of the same colors and there were mirrors in
    every room.  The living room and dining room mirrors were about
    4 x 6 feet each, the powder room and master bathroom mirrors were
    a full wall - floor to ceiling.  The kitchen was mirrored in the
    space between the countertop and hanging cabinets and the master
    bedroom had 4 x 8 mirrors on the wall and ceiling.  I don't know
    who eventually bought the house, but it wasn't my conservative clients.

    When we looked at our present house, the sales sheet said "Bathroom
    remodeled in '85". When we went to look at it, the guy had put in
    a commercial toilet. Just like one you would find at your local
    Shell station. My wife and I laughed for an hour. We bought the
    house anyway. Guess what was the first project? :^)
    
    Tim
    

As I have been attempting to "modernize" the wiring, etc, of this 26-yr 
old house I bought, I've run into many 'stupid' things the previous 
owners did (miswired switches, splices without insulation, etc), but 
this one, I think, merits discussion, since it was apparently done by 
the builder......

We recently discovered the hard way that all the kitchen counter 
outlets were strung on the same line as the refrigerator.  Microwave 
on + toaster on + compressor cuts in = 'click' (blown fuse).

Why didn't they put the refrigerator on its own line?  They did for the 
dishwasher...(sigh).

Well, I always wanted to see if I could find an unobstructed path from 
the kitchen to the fusebox anyway.....

/j

    
    We have just started doing major redecorating in our house. We're
    replacing all the woodwork (doors, trim, baseboards), painting walls
    and ceilings, refinishing hardwood floors, recarpeting, and new
    floor in kitchen/dining area. We've got quite a lot of work ahead
    of us and boy did it start out on the wrong foot. The first thing
    we did was to remove the old baseboards. Easy job, right??? WRONG!!
    The baseboards are 4" stock planking and they go below the base
    of the floor. We had to buy a wood chisel to get them out as they
    were nailed flush with the floor, so we had to chisel the wood out
    around the nail so we could remove it. I can't wait to see what
    we find under the old carpeting and linoleum.
    
    Patty

    The previous owner of my house, redid the plumbling himself, 4 years
    ago. Just to make sure it was good and strong, where ever two pipes
    crossed each other perpendicularly, he soldered them together. It
    didn't matter if they were hot or cold, they're soldered together.
    Of course, this makes for hot and warm running water.
    
    Tim
    

    RE: .83
    
    Our ~30 yr old cape had the baseboard trim done in exactly the same
    way.  The baseboard trim goes below the hardwood floor about one
    inch.                        _
                                | |
                                | |
         _______________________| | <------ baseboard trim
                        |       |_|
                        |
                        V
                     Hardwood floor

    
    Maybe the wiring stuff is Hudson. My 60 year old house has had obvious
    retro-fits of the wiring - most terrible.
    
    So far I've found:
    
    	2 UNSOLDERED connections - they just wrapped one wire around
          another;
        3-prong, ungrounded outlets;
        A basement which was wired from the second floor(that was fun;
          blacked out a third of the house 'repairing' that).
    
    Plus the entire kitchen and all second floor outlets AND the laundry
    room were on the same fuse.
    

re: trim below the floor boards (.83 and .85, I think)

I had that problem, and was told by an old New England hardware store
guy that the idea was to prevent gaps developing between the bottom of
the trim and the floor as the floor starts to sag when the house ages.  
I kept repeating this to myself as I crawled around the walls with my 
chisel, hammer, and lockjaw pliers (to pull the nails once I had chopped 
the wood away and bent them up enough to get a grip).  It helped to think
that there had been *some* thought behind it (but it only helped a little).

/Dave

>I had that problem, and was told by an old New England hardware store
>guy that the idea was to prevent gaps developing between the bottom of
>the trim and the floor as the floor starts to sag when the house ages.  

I think it's more because the finish carpenters can come in, trim the whole 
house, and then leave, to be followed by the floor installers.  Typically you 
want the floor to be installed last, so it doesn't have to bear any 
construction traffic.  To put the baseboards in after the flooring, the trim 
carpenters would have to come back in again after the floor was installed, 
which costs more money and is more difficult to schedule.

Paul

    My mother's bathroom has some of that stuff that is supposed to
    look like tile going half way up the walls.  She hates it so had
    painted it white to make it look better (I would have torn it down).
    My sister decided it needed repainting.  The wallpaper is a light
    green and white striped pattern (I think), can you guess what color
    she chose to paint the fake stuff?
    
    She chose something resembling CANDY APPLE RED!  And did a terrible
    paint job at that.  One coat of paint with white streaks showing
    through.  Well, my mother hates it but is afraid to say anything
    because she doesn't want to hurt my sister's feelings.
    
    This same sister suggested that I paint my shower curtain rod because
    it has water and mineral stains on it.  I thanked her and ignored
    her advice.  I would prefer not to have paint chips in the bathtub!

    O.K. Here's the background.....
    
    Nine-year happily married renters, DINKS no less,
    (Double-Income-No Kids) somehow manage to outrace
    house prices and mysteriously have enough of a down payment to
    lasso the "American Dream" of home ownership.
    
    As luck would have it, they somehow found a 6 years
    old house, in marvellous move-in condition.
    
    So, the former "big city" type couple happily move into the
    country.  It should be mentioned here that the only nervous
    point is the house gets its water from a well!
    
    In the "big city" water is thought of about as often as your
    kindergarden bus driver.  It's ALWAYS there!!! 
    
    Now, being a big fan of Lassie as a kid, and remembering 
    (dreaming) about Kansas and no water,and the cost of wells, and
    picturing the call at work, "guess what Dear....", the purchase
    was made with a certain amount of trepidation.  However, 'can't
    go through life paranoid.  - Buy the house....
    
    Typical scenario - spend 95% of your money for the down payment,
    then give away the remaining 5% in the form of bribes to the bank,
    title company, guys with string and surveying equipment, the tax
    guy, and don't forget to tip the future politician (lawyer) while
    he learns how to "tuck it to you while you smile" :^(
    
    OK - all money gone, move into new palace. LOVE IT !!!!!
    "boy, dear, didn't we pick a terrifficc house? It's so 
    beautiful."
    
    etc, etc. All is fine in camelot.  Then, one day, only 9 weeks
    after crossing the line the call came; "Hon, we have no water."
    "Naw, you just blew the circuit breaker.  Go and re-set it."
    "What's a circuit breaker" the former renter's spouse said.
    "Oh Boy", muttered quietly...  "Go downstairs, look for the
    grey box, etc, etc.  I'll hold."
    ........dum de dum........
    "Hello? Still no water" 
    "S***!!, OK, I'm coming home". The ride back was most enjoyable.
    Look at the facts, you got like no money.  The well is dry (worst
    fear now a FACT), costs a billion dollars a foot to drill, what
    if they miss and gotta find a new hole and you still gotta pay for
    the first hole, and remember, you don't know ANYBODY in this town
    so... 
    
    Long story short - can't fix. Look in Yellow pages, do the 
    Helen Keller Vendor Pick (Close eyes and pick), Call and cry
    while hoping it'll rain (need water to flush).
    
    The guy shows up, starts fiddling around inside a blue box
    and shortly thereafter exclaims "Found it. You got a broken wire
    someplace"  "Phew, I thought. we didn't run out of water"
    Next day, a rig with a tower showed up and we (me too, they get
    paid by the hour) proceeded to pull up the pump.  It was a very
    enlightening experience.  I found out the well is FOUR HUNDRED
    AND EIGHTY FEET DEEP! My water probably comes from Montreal.
    We found the frayed wire, about 3 feet from the torpedo pump.
    We also found out that the wire was 2 sizes too small for the run
    so we replaced all of it with 8 guage wire ( big bucks :*( 
    
    Five hours later we were in business, nine hundred dollars
    lighter, scampering around to cover the check, when I saw
    my next door neighbor pop out to investigate the going's on.
    
    New neighbors are great sources of information.  Seems the prior
    owner was a weirdo engineer for a computer company in Lowell (no
    names=no libel or slander) who 5 months before was getting sand
    in his pipes.  Now, as I discovered, the normal thing to do would
    be to * change the filter * in the housing.  This guy must have
    figured this was not going to stop the problem 4ever so Einstein
    decided to make a three legged tripod, hook up a pully or two,
    and then pull up all 24 - 20foot long pieces of pipe and wire
    (480'). On Easter Morning, no less.
    First thing he did was to slide one of his wife's pantyhose legs
    over the torpedo pump ( I guess to make a prefilter ), and then
    dropped it back down (assembled).  Two flushes later, the pump has
    to come on, immediately gets clogged with sand pebbles being larger
    than the weave  in the stocking, and it's back to the drawing boards
    for Mr. Univac.
    Pull the pump again, remove stocking, but this time, only put 460'
    of pipe back into hole.  Logically, if the pump is further away
    from the bottom, it shouldn't suck up the sand. However, let's not
    think about motor torque and it's tendency to whip the pipe about
    1/4 turn when energized. While we're at it, let's make sure there's
    lots of extra wire (20') down there so when the motor starts, the
    wire will whip around and scrape against the side of the well.
    
    Scientifically, if a rubber coated wire is subjected to abrasive
    action for a period of time, the rubber will wear away, exposing
    copper.  Additionally, copper when subjected to the same abrasive
    forces will also wear away eventually chewing it up so it breaks.
    
    Moral of the story - Ask the neighbor if the owner was ever seen
    pulling his pump up on a tripod on Easter Morning.  If you get a
    "yes", DON'T BUY THE HOUSE or BUY A STORAGE TANK.  @:^)

    Ok, I got another well story.  We bought our first house last year
    and in the course of the inspection found the water source was a
    shallow well.  This made me nervous because I grew up with a shallow
    well that went dry by the fourth of July every year.
    
    Talking to the sellers I found that a new well had been drilled and it
    had never gone dry.  On a hunch, the next time I was at the house
    I pulled the old well cover completly off and took a good look.
    Sure enough, there was the new well head under eight feet of water
    at the bottom of the old well.  I bought the place anyway, when
    the pump goes I'll just rent scuba gear.
    
    Mike H.

    	...it's that the terms "plumb", "square", and 16"OS have
	to be removed from your vocabulary!

	Now, how's this for taste:

	Kitchen walls made out of AQUA plastic tile board (sheets
	like wood paneling only coated with aqua plastic then 'hit'
	with a large 'waffle-iron' to make the squares) held 
	together with metal strips and large staples.  Floor to
	ceiling!!   

	And the folks that put that up must have really loved it 
	because they didn't even put in *any* cabinets or counters...
	...just lots of aqua tile board!  We still aren't quite sure
	what color the floor is *supposed* to be.

	My old gas stove must have been 'hatched' in this kitchen.
	Widest door opening is 27", narrowest stove measurement
	is 42" (yes it's huge).  It ought to be fun when that baby
	has to come out!

	Ahh, the bathroom - directly off the wonderful kitchen and
	tiled completely (and I mean completely - floors, walls,
	back of doors, and don't forget the ceiling) in 4" peach
	tile!  Of course it took lots of elbow grease and oxalic 
	acid to discorver the color.  Now I'm not against the color
	peach, there's just so much of it!

	Tub, what tub?!  I do have a shower stall reminicent of the 
	school gym - 5' x 7' with *eight* shower heads (one for your 
	head, one for your feet and six more 'strategically' placed 
	down two of the walls).  You need an engineering degree to run 
	all the controls.  And I defy anyone to step in there and not 
	come out clean! 

	Do you like cabbage roses?  My prior sure did - several layers
	worth or various colors in every room - and peeling away to be 
	sure you can see all the layers at the same time!  Now wasn't 
	that nice of them.	

	Don't like sagging crumbling bedroom ceilings?  Neither did 
	we - besides it was all old horsehair plaster (or so we thought)
	that had already been patched (not well) several times and at 
	this point was in dire need of replacement.  Pulling down an 
	old plaster ceiling is easy - until you get to the part that
	the prior patched with concrete!!!  Now wasn't that fun to pull
	down?!
	
	We've been in the house three years now and so far the cabbage 
	roses are gone (they lasted about 3 days after closing), the 
	horsehair plaster removed, insulation and re-wiring done, new 
	walls and ceilings are up, refinished all hardwood floors and 
	the kitchen is coming out this summer!  Guess I'll have to live
	with a peach bathroom for a while longer....

	Ah well, what else would we do with our vacation time!

	Conni

    Re: 93
    
    Gawd, I hope you took pictures.  They are nice to have.  You know
    "before" and "after".  Besides no one is going to believe you.
    Pictures will help but even those can be faked.
    
    Stan

    
    re .94
    
    Honest injun, I promise I'm not joking!!
    
    You bet we took pictures, lots of them!  When my mother first
    saw the place she couldn't believe that such bad taste existed
    and that we would voluntarily pay money for it!  She ran from the
    house and didn't come back until we at least stripped the wallpaper.
    
    Well, the house is solid as a rock and in our price range at the
    time.  And cosmetic bad taste can be fixed, it just takes time - lots 
    of time when you DIY.  Even my husband and I couldn't bring ourselves 
    to move in for over a month after closing!  
    
    The ugly wallpaper was steamed off immediately. The master bedroom 
    and hallways (up and down) are completely re-done including new skim 
    coated walls and ceilings and re-finished hardwood floors.  The other 
    two bedrooms have new walls and ceilings that are just about finished 
    (probably be done next week on vacation).  The kitchen will be around 
    for about another month or so and the bathroom will probably be
    there for years.   We've also done (or had others do) lots of plumbing,
    re-wiring, installed a new heating system, and lots of landscaping.
    We've been in the house for three years now, and the projects never
    seem to end!
    
    Geez, maybe I should have had scheduled tours and sold tickets!
    
    Conni
    

    Ummm... I wasn't going to ask "why did you ever buy it".  I assumed
    it must have been cheap and you liked indentured servitude for the
    foreseeable future.  {:-)  Welcome to the wonderful life of home 
    ownership.
    
    Stan

    
>    Geez, maybe I should have had scheduled tours and sold tickets!
    

re .92:  OK, how about this: the house I'm buying has an *underground*
well head - it is buried under the driveway!  Fortunately (?) it is
gravel, not asphalt.

    That MAY be a blessing.  If you ever have to dig it up, and you
    don't want to do the digging, the backhoe doesn't have to drive
    all over your yard before they can dig.  Just a mess in the driveway
    which is much easier to repair.
    
    
    As for it being underground, there's really no problem with that,
    and I'd rather have an underground wellhead myself.  less of a chance
    for it to freeze.
    
    
    -bill

>    re .92:  OK, how about this: the house I'm buying has an *underground*
>well head - it is buried under the driveway!  Fortunately (?) it is
>gravel, not asphalt.

    Do you know the exact location where to dig for it?
    Where would you rather have it?  Buried under your driveway or
    sticking up in the middle of your front yard, like mine?

    Underground is fine...AS LONG AS YOU KNOW *EXACTLY* WHERE IT IS!
    My uncle's is underground.  He thought he knew where it was.
    The pipe sprang a leak when I was visiting him, and my cousin
    and I started digging where it was supposed to be.  It wasn't.
    We dug a little closer to the house...and a little further away.
    More towards the driveway...more towards the back yard.  We
    finally found it by digging down next to the foundation until we
    found where the pipe came through the wall, then following the
    direction of the pipe.  By the time we were done the yard looked
    like it had been overrun with demented 200-pound woodchucks.

In 10 years, or 20 at the outside, I predict that people will be saying
to each other, "Why did the previous owner install a huge wood deck over 
a perfectly good back yard?"  Some houses have decks big enough to
play volleyball, with maybe one deck chair and one barbeque sitting
in a corner.  What is all that space for?  I've even seen a house where 
the entire front yard has been replaced by a wood deck, but I've never 
yet seen anyone sitting on it.  Small decks are great, but like shag rugs
and mod colors, I think that big yard decks will not be considered one of 
their era's positive contributions to American house design.

	Enjoy,
	Larry

PS - No, I *don't* know exactly where my underground wellhead is!  Sigh.

    "Do you realize that our grandparents used to BURN oil and
    wood, just to keep warm?  What a primitive lifestyle they had!"
    
    pbm
    

    Re .102
    Could the large deck have something to do with not wanting to maintain
    a lawn? I have often wondered why did I ever let the builder seed
    everything for grass. I wish it was covered with almost anything
    else.

    Just completed selling my second house (lived there for 5 yrs).
    The prev. owner should have been banned by LAW from owning a hammer
    or screw driver! His DIY handiwork was:
    
        1)Needed outlets in basement, so tapped off furnace line.
        2)Began sheetrocking an upstairs den, but never heard of taping
          joints-just spackle
        3)Left a picture window held in place by 4 finishing nails that
          were put in to hold window until moldings were installed, from
          1976 to 1983 (when I moved in). The moldings finally got
          installed in 1983!
        4)Never put a ceiling or finished floor in den mentioned in
          (2)
        5)Attached dishwasher (hardwired) by tapping off an outlet in
          kitchen (wire ran from dishwasher down to basement, across
          floor joist, back up to kitchen, up a wall, and to the outlet).
        6)Installed drain pipe from a leader to foundation drain system
          with french drain perf'ed pipe, with perfs facing down, so
          water would leak out as it ran away from the garage!
        7)Installed the worst quality kitchen cabinets imaginable (they
          currently reside in the basement to hold tools and nails)
        8)Built a non-pressure treated deck and did not use preservative
          stain. Header beam not proprly attached to joists and footings
          not below frost line (each winter, my screened in porch door
          won't open)          
        9)Kitchen and dining room ceiling lights on same circuit as
          den wall outlets
        10)Septic system distribution box originally UNDER entrance
          walkway, which was a part of a non-pressure treated railroad
          tie retainer wall/steps system (easy to tear down though,
          it was ready to to fall on its own)
        11)Enclosed section of roof off den with no vents at all!!!
     
    At least the new owners have the above handiwork corrected, but
    there is probably still some surprised hidden in there that I don't
    know of yet!
    
    Eric    
       
       

    
    
    The previous owner of my house liked doing his own electrical work.  He
    thrived on putting up light fixtures.
    
    He was either :
    
    1) well intentioned and ill informed,
    2) trying to do away with members of his family.
    
    
    Specifically, he *never* used wire nuts when connecting wires together.
    He would use either duct tape (first choice) or  electrical tape, after
    half heartedly twisting the wires together.
    
    The most interesting  example of his work was in the fluorescent fixture,
    turned on and off  by  a pull chain, over the kitchen sink.  He decided
    to ground the case of the fixture by running a short piece of wire from
    the case to the black wire  coming  out of the wall ( Hmmm, black means
    no electricity, right?  ).    I first noticed something was wrong while
    changing the bulb, standing barefoot on the kitchen floor.  
    
    Live and learn,
    
    gjd
    
    
    Note:  If you don't see anything wrong with what the previous owner did,
    please read up on electrical work before you DIY.

Other 'clues' that the last homeowner did less-than-safe electrical 
work...

1) 3 way switches where both must be on to get light
2) black tape in the fuse box

In the last year, I made a complete pass through all the light 
switches, outlets, and fixtures in our house.  Amazing!!!  outlets 
wired by solder, wired w/1 push-in and one (loose) screw....my 
favorite was the bathroom fixture with a small outlet below it,
when I took down the fixture, the outlet was wired with NO wire nut, 
tape, etc (unless you count the charred fiberglass as 'insulation').  
Must have used it for a hair-dryer....

    We moved into our current house 2 months ago. When I changed the
    dimmer switch in the bathroom to a regular switch (why would anyone
    want a dimmer in a bathroom?) I noticed that wires were wrapped
    with MASKING TAPE!!!
    
    Fortunately, this guy didn't do too many DIY projects - he was a
    real bozo!
    
    Mike

    	A point of interest, when did wire nuts become standard use
    for house wiring? While doing some re-wire on my fathers old farm
    house a comon means of joining wires was to twist, solder and then
    dip in some rubber stuff which then sets-up around the wires. 
    Was this standard or just some strange DIY wiring?
    
    	...Dave
    

    My house must have some of the original "solderless connectors".  They
    look like wire nuts, but when you spin off the plastic cap, what's left
    is a brass ring with a little set-screw on the side.  You're supposed
    to push all the wires together, slip the brass piece over the top, and
    tighten down on the screw to hold it together.  The plastic piece which
    goes on next to insulate the whole thing is reverse-threaded (why?).
    
    Jim

> They look like wire nuts, but when you spin off the plastic cap, what's
> left is a brass ring with a little set-screw on the side.  You're supposed
> to push all the wires together, slip the brass piece over the top, and
> tighten down on the screw to hold it together.

	As far as I know, these are still made.

Larry

    
    try this one on for size. It was in a close to 100 year old house.
    
    A- tube and post wiring.
    b- 30 amp service.
    C- pushbutton light switches.
    D- upstairs/downstairs switch for hall 
    E- one light in lower hall one light in upper hall
    F- pull chain on upper hall light (part of the fixture not a screwin)
    G- lower hall switch in same box as porch light
    H- lower hall switch on/upper hall switch off/porch light on 
        *** UPPER HALL LIGHT GLOWS DIMLY**** porch light sort of dim
    I- use pull chain to shut off upper hall light and porch light goes
       to full strength.
 

    I didn't mess with it and we did not use the pushbutton switches after
    that was discovered. I hope the landlord fixed it after I moved
    out.

    
    Re: -.1
    
    >>  C- pushbutton light switches.
    
    What's wrong with push button light switches?  I've got a couple
    of them, and I wish they were still made.  I think they belong in
    my 90 year old home.
    
    -tm
    

Re: .-1

Pushbutton switches are still made.  They don't get stocked many places, 
but if you look in "Victorian Homes" or some such magazine, you'll see 
and ad from a company that makes pushbutton switches that meet the 
current electrical code.
					>>>==>PStJTT

    re. -.2
    
    Not a thing wrong with push button switches in the proper setting
    AND if they work.
    
    It was just a comment to prove the age of the house/wiring.
    
    BTW the living room light had a rotary push button.
    push on/push off as well as turn one click ==  one bulb in overhead 
    turn two click == two bulbs, turn three click == three bulbs (full
    light)   
    
    That was the only house I never attempted any electrical work except
    changing light bulbs.
    

    RE: .108 (Why a dimmer in a bathroom?)
    
    Here's one reason - it makes a better night lite than those little
    7 Watt bulbs do. Especially *if* there's no outlet in the hallway,
    and you want the little ones to be able to find their way to the
    bathroom safely.
    
    (At least that was *our* reason)
    
    Bill

    The rubber goop on the splices is probably what is called "splicing
    compound".  It comes as a roll of self-vulcanizing rubber tape,
    with a peel-off backing.  It may still be sold.  When you wrap
    a joint with it, you peel off the backing, stretch it tightly,
    and it vulcanizes into one solid mass.  The complete sequence
    for a splice would be:
    	Twist wires together
    	Solder
    	Wrap with splicing compound
    	Wrap with friction tape

                                                          
    re: .108 and 116
    
    	sshhhhh, i'm talking in lowercase so my wife doesn't hear since
    we're putting in a new bathroom light. ;-)  they might have the dimmer
    in the bathroom so the wife could check her makeup under different
    lighting conditions...
    
    	but please, don't say this too loud until our bathroom is done,
    ok?  ssshhhhhhhhhh
    
    							-c

    Re: dimmer in the bathroom
    
    One can imagine showering wih a friend under soft lighting,
    but I digress from practical home ownership topics...

    My mother will be eternally grateful for the dimmer I put in her
    bathroom, because she can't stand bright lights early in the morning.
    

    Re: Stupid DIY electrician dept.     When I put in a new bath I
    noticed the medicine cabinet lights (row of 5) had one set of wires
    for lights 1-3-5 and another for lights 2-4.  So I said to myself
    "Why did they ever do that?" and tied both sets of wires together
    to the bathroom switch.  Now even with the smallest lights I can get,
    all 5 lights on is still blindingly bright.  A double switch was
    obviously intended, but now everything is closed up and a retrofit
    just isn't worth it.   So now I'm going the bathroom dimmer route.

    My favorite of the many dumb things the previous (only) owner of
    my 50's vintage house did himself-
    
    the clothes dryer was vented under the back porch - into an ENCLOSED
    storage space!  the smell and mildew on the bottom of the floor
    of the porch was verrry interesting and could have won a science
    fair project!
    
    needless to say, I extended the vent to the outside and sprayed
    lots of Clorox solution!
    
    	-Barry-
    

    .121 brings up a good point. Our dryer is vented under our mudroom
    (former owners added this ell about a year ago.) The room is built
    on p.t. lumber - not an enclosed foundation. The outside is enclosed
    with lattice panels. Is this a safe place for a dryer to exhaust?
    
    Thanks,
    Mike

    lattice panels would probably be ok.  as long as the vent is to
    the 'virtual' outside and all of the hot air and moisture is not
    trapped inside.  The problem may be that the heated, moist air will
    rise and be trapped by the floor joists and floor.
    
    To be safe, I would extend the duct to the outside.
    
    mine was siding panels with NO ventilation!
    
    	-Barry-

    My favorite(has its fun points) thing the former owner did in my
    house is add a second bathroom without adding a vent stack for
    the new toilet. Now when ever you flush the one in the hall(old)
    the new toilet bubbles up water and makes a rather loud gurgleing
    sound. Now why I say it has it fun points just after my wife
    (now ex) and I moved in she happened to be using the gurgle seat
    (prior to our knowing about it) when I flushed the other, it made
    its noise and out she ran. The look on her face kept me laughing
    the whole day.
    
    Other things I found were: wires spliced and taped no box.
    -Door bell transformer hanging from the floor joist by its 110v
    connections this time there was a box but no cover.
    -steps to the basement drop 7 feet in 10 feet resulting in very
    narrow treads and and very steep (a ladder would have been better).
    -white pine facia boards on the new addition which quickly rotted
    out because the shingles were flushed up to the facia -vs- overhanging.
    -installed a dishwasher using(starting at the outlet->drain)rubber
    hose to a pvc trap under the house which was connected to 6' galvanized
    conduit yes GRC! which was leaded into the cast iron soil pipe.
    -15 amp service to the garage which was actually installed right
    just tooo light to run any real power tools.
    -exposed romex surface mounted on the outside of the house running
    to the photo cell for the yard lights.
    -2 breaker boxes one in the back of a closet the other outside.
    -about half of the light switches were installed upside down which
    I found a major pain out of those most were using the push ins.
    
    I could think of many more but thats enough for now.
    
    
    -j
     
    

    
    In our new home (4 years old) it seems like they went out of
    their way to put the light switches on the wrong side of the door,
    i.e. near the hinges, not the doorknob.  I don't know how many times
    I've opened the bathroom door while reaching for the switch, then
    had to close it or walk around it to turn the light on.  Another
    good one is on the SAME three-switch panel, the lights are off when
    the switch is down on two of the switches, but on the third it's
    reversed.  I'd better switch it around before I get it memorized
    this way and end up leaving the lights on!

    Bill

    I knew it was bad when the floor in front of the slider was giving
    way when we stepped on it...
    
    Last week they tore down the old deck on our 8 year old house. 
    What they found sure was depressing.  The old porch had been
    installed using roof flashing (is this the right name for the
    flashing with the slots every few inches?) between the wall and
    deck.  The slots in the flashing just channeled the water right
    into the wall from day 1.
    
    There had been a 4x6 beam running under the slider into the
    family room.  What was left was a piece on one end, a piece on the
    other end and a LOT of sawdust in the middle.  In one end was
    a cavity about 4 inches in diameter and 6-7 inches long FULL of
    carpenter ant eggs.  All the studs and the sill (about 15ft long)
    were pretty much destroyed as was about 1ft of flooring into the
    family room.
    
    The next day consisted of building supports for that end of the
    house, ripping out 15 ft of wall, cutting out the rotten floor
    and floor joists in the family room and then rebuilding.  What
    a drag.
    
    And to think most of it might have been prevented by using the
    right flashing and proper installation...sigh.

Bummer.  I prescribe reading 857.29 immediately.

I spent Saturday helping a friend clean up the basement of the house
he just bought.  Reconstructing events based on what we found, here
is what I think several generations of previous owners did:

1)  The basement floor was wet, so they painted it red.

2)  The paint started looking bad, so they painted it green (without
    taking up any of the decaying red paint).

3)  Somwhere in here they didn't like the condition of the walls,
    so they laid untreated studs against bare cement (no vapor
    barrier) and nailed up plywood with the bottom resting on the
    frequently damp floor.

4)  The paint started to look bad again so they put down linoleum 
    on one part, and fake wood tiles on top of plywood on top of 
    cement over a raised area at one end.

5)  The linoleum started getting bad so they laid down a carpet
    over everything.

Needless to say, taking all this up was a pretty nauseating experience.
We haven't pulled down the plywood from the walls yet, so I don't know
what's back there.  But along with the mold and less identifiable
items under the rug and linoleum, I found a solid mat of roots!
They came in from under the plywood by the wall with the most water
damage, and formed a solid mat between the old adhesive and the paint.
Now that's a wet basement!

I guess the previous owners (lots of them) had the theory that if there's
a problem, cover it up, if if starts to smell bad, use Lysol, and if it
gets worse, move.  It makes me wonder what's under the vinyl siding
they put up a couple of years ago.  Oh, well, it's a good location...

	Enjoy,
	Larry

    Here begineth the story...
    
    First imagine an oldish house, nice wood, nice neighborhood, nice
    family inside. Not a house like some described in this note, but
    well appointed and kept up...  indeed, the previous owners had gone
    so far as to upgrade an old, old FHW heating system with a spanking
    new FHA system. The only thing they didn't bother to fix was a few
    holes in the floor where the old FHW system pipes had come up from
    the basement to the radiators -- I mean why bother, they weren't
    big enough to cause any trouble.
    
    Now, the junior members of this family were twin girls, and like
    many young ladies, could make Morris the cat seem like a binge prone
    gourmand -- sometimes they just didn't _like_ to eat what was put
    before them.  We all know how it is  -- peas, beets, liver and onions,
    meatloaf and pot pies do not always appeal to kids as much as to
    health and budget conscious parents might like.
    
    (Are we begining to sense the flow of the plot here?)
    
    Now this particularly family was a tad old-fashioned; dad worked
    late at the office, mom worked hard at home, and the kids got fed
    early. No adults sat with them. Just mom shouting from the kitchen,
    "No dessert until you finish you peas ladies", and occasionally
    coming in to see that her will was being heeded. 
    
    Well it didn't take those two intrepid girls long to find that hole.
    It took even less time to dump those peas and beets and liver and
    onions and meatloaf and pot pies and, at one time or another, everything
    _except_ ice cream and cookies down that little hole. Now they weren't
    caught because it so happened the basement was dry, the house bug
    free, and the food that went down that hole in the floor landed
    behind a wooden partition. And nobody ever looked for years and
    years until...
    
    It Was Time to Sell the House!
    
    The realtor and the father and the would be-buyers were all in the
    basement when the the lady would-be buyer said, "Gee, whats behind
    that wall?" and the father/owner said proudly "Well thats where
    the boiler for the Forced Hot Water system used to be -- you know
    the one I told you we replaced with the new gas furnace."
    
    And then he took them around the corner and showed them where the
    boiler used to be. 
    
    Three feet tall and about seven feet around was a pile of some of the
    oldest peas and beets and liver and onions and meatloaf and pot
    pie you ever did see.  The couple left never to return. The twin
    girls, now juniors in college, came home that weekend at their father's
    request and while their mother did their laundry -- remember this
    is a slightly old-fashioned family --  they used shovels and 
    occasionally a pick to fill a lot of garbage bags while their father
    watched with a smile on his face. A safe distance away.
    
    Moral: Eventually, just desserts will get you your just desserts.
    
    :-)) 

My priors redid a lot of the wiring in my 62 year old house.
I wasn't worried about the odd outlet with hot and neutral
reversed - that's an easy mistake to make and easy to fix.
I got a little more worried when I removed a lighting fixture
that was falling off the wall and found that the wires hadn't
been bent around the screws (and the box wasn't grounded).
But that's nothing on the Case of the Mystery Outlet.

See, there's this old light on the porch, plus a new flood light 
outside the porch, which are controlled by two switches.  Flip
the switch inside the door and both lights come on.  Flip just
the switch outside the door and just the porch light comes on.
Flip them both and just the outside light comes on... I wonder
if that's really what they meant to have happen?

Now I finally get around to testing the outlet they installed on 
the porch.  (Not GFCI, I wonder if they had it inspected?)  With
the lights out, it doesn't work.  A switched outlet on a porch?
So I flip both switches.  Great!  The circuit tester says that
it is wired correctly!  However, I'm not an engineer for nothing,
so I try the other two switch positions.  One way, the tester
says that hot and neutral are reversed, and the other way, it
says that hot and ground are reversed!

Well, it's not quite that bad.  What's really happening is that
the receptacle is somehow paralleled with the lights, so that
when the porch light is on, the hot wire on the receptacle has power,
and when the outside light is on, the neutral wire has power.
When both are on, both have power.  

Now, if you are looking for some diversion, I have two problems for
you to work on.  The easy one is, how can you wire two switches to
two lights and an outlet to get that effect?  The hard one is, what
did they think they were doing?  Does the wiring they performed have 
the faintest resemblance to something they might have wanted to do?  

Here's a table of what's going on.  A special prize of an old fashioned
2x4 that really is 2" by 4" for the most creative solution.  :-)

	Inside	Porch	Porch	Outdoor
	Switch	Switch	Light	Light	Hot	Neutral

	up	down	off	off	ground	ground
	down	down	on	on	power	power
	up	up	on	off	ground	power
	down	up	off	on	power	ground

Enjoy,
Larry

    
    	RE: .130
    
    	Is it possible that one of the switches is a 3-way?

    RE:130   You need to provide a bit more info, such as: number of
    conductors, type of switch. Your problem is why I cringe anytime
    an amature/homeowner attempts to be an electrician. I've seen more wiring
    jobs that "should" of burned down the house long ago.

    Larry,
    Have you considered entering this note in the BRAIN_BOGGLERS notes
    file.  Some of the people in that conference will have a great time
    with your problem and probably come up with an explanation of how
    your wiring is wired.
    Good luck
    Mike.
    

    Larry,
    
    I figured out how to get the lights to work, but the outlet is still
    a mystery.  You're *sure* that your data is right?  I can't believe
    this could have done by pure random ineptitude.
    
    Bob

    OK, I think I have the how, the why, God only knows.  Since a diagram
    of this rats nest is impossible, I'll describe the connections:
    
    1. First the switches have to be the 3-way type
    2. From the panel bring a hot lead (black wire) to the "down" position
       of the inside switch and the "up" position of the porch switch.
    3. Bring the neutral (white) to the "up" position of the inside switch
       and to one side of each of the lights.
    4. Connect the center terminal of the inside switch to "down" side
       of the porch switch, the "hot" side of the outlet, and the other
       side of the outdoor light.
    5. Connect the center terminal of the outside switch to the neutral
       of the outlet and the other side of the porch light.
                                                                  
    			WHEW!!
    
    Below is a crude picture of the switches in case my terminology
    is confusing.
    
    
       "up"   "down"
    	o__	o
        |\ 
          \      The switch toggles back and forth between "up" and
           \     "down" connecting those terminals to the "center"
           0 
        "center"
    
    
       
    

    Re. .130
    Problem number one
    The wireing diagram is as follows.
    
              +--+                       +--+
              | /|-----------------------|\ |
     P--------|/ |                       | \|--------------+
              |  |--------+--------------|  |\             |
              +--+        |             /+--+ \       Porch light
                          |            /       |           |
                       outdoor        |      Outlet        |
                       light          |        |           |
                          |           +--------+           |
     N--------------------+--------------------------------+
    
    >>The hard one is, what did they think they were doing?
    
    The new outlet was wired for an auxiliary light that was not needed
    when both lights were on but only when one or the other was on.
    
    >>Does the wiring they performed have the faintest resemblance to
    >>something they might have wanted to do?
    
    Yes exactly. See chart below:
    
    Inside  Porch   Porch   Outdoor                  Outlet
    Switch  Switch  Light   Light   Hot     Neutral
    
    up      down    off     off     ground  ground    off
    down    down    on      on      power   power     doesn't work
    up      up      on      off     ground  power     on
    down    up      off     on      power   ground    on
    
    :^)...
    _Bill
    

    
    
    	RE .136
    
    		For this diagram to be correct the outlet would have
    it's neutral side connected to the neutral in the fuse box through
    one of the light bulbs. This is easy to verify by removing them
    and seeing if outlet still works in the previous on positions.
    
    	Reply .135 seems to fit the equation better. 
    
    		...Dave 
    

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", 
Fine Homebuilding vol 24 Dec 1984/Jan 1985

Our house's first Christmas won't be exactly as we had dreamed.  But then, six
years of dreams are pretty hard to live up to.  There will be no snuggling up
to the fireplace in the living room, because things aren't ready for an
official warming.  Things are barely warm, in fact, for there are windows yet
to be installed, along with other holes to plug.  The woodburning stove in the
kitchen is doing the job for now, and when all the heat-retention systems are
working, the house promises to be tight and warm. 

Certainly we notice the seemingly endless number of jobs left to be done. Its
hard to miss the bare gypboard, or the absence of kitchen cabinets.  But the
house is eminently livable, and all ours.  The wedding presents are out of the
barn loft, the rugs we have been lovingly collecting are on the floors. Moving
in has given our lives a new calmness, a new enthusiasm, and dissolved the
rootlessness and yearning of our years in a small trailer. 

In one corner of the living room stands a handsome cedar that had been growing
next to the garden.  We have several others growing in the wrong places on the
farm, and each will one year be a Christmas tree.  This year we had to scramble
to find enough lights and ornaments for our tall treasure.  Eva, who is
three-and-a-half, and I worked long afternoons with glue and felt, and ate
endless handfuls of broken popcorn, to decorate it as it deserved. 

The point of this Christmas that makes trees and meals and gifts almost
unimportant is simply that we are here in the house.  Wild horses could not
have dragged us away this year, although in years past we eagerly accepted
invitations to leave home, if only for the day. 

Building your own house is one of those activities that others find hard to
fathom, like professional wrestling or self-sufficiency gardening.  It's not
always worth what you go through to get it, they say.  But for many folks,
designing and building their own home is the most challenging and important act
of their lives.  The responsibility is, at times, overwhelming - the relief of
completion is just as emotionally consuming. 

When we moved to Sycamore Creek Farm in rural Stokes County, N.C., a few years
ago, we cleared a long drive up to a hardwood ridge and dragged in our
secondhand 50-ft. by 10-ft. trailer.  Our dream was a stone house, a dream that
had been David's before we were married.  First we had some basic homesteading
to do: a well house, a chicken house, a garden, fruit and nut trees, and a
large surface-bonded workshop-barn.  All along, we pored over Ken Kern and the
Nearlings, and I itched to be out proving my strength and stamina hoisting the
granite stones piled in our woods, lifted from the soil when our ridge was
planted in tobacco long ago.  It would take a year, we figured. 

When it seemed that the excavating and transporting of the stones might be more
than we wanted to tackle, David began investigating post-and-beam construction.
And when he found a load of huge handsome timbers salvaged from an old
warehouse, we were on our way to a timber-framed home.  At night he studied
Stewart Elliot and Alex Wade.  We broke ground early in our second summer on
the farm, just after Eva was born, elated and content in the assumption that we
wouldn't be in the trailer much longer.  We set our sights on Christmas, and
started dreaming. 

We made compromises.  My greatest spirit-booster was the hiring of a carpenter
and his helper to do some framing, and to put up siding, nail down flooring,
and hang drywall.  I began to think we might really get through this, and they
were good company on my days at home.  But some of their work bordered on the
slapdash, and David spent a lot of time correcting it.  When they left because
we ran out of money, despair set in again.  The second child was coming, and
the entire project was on David's shoulders.  The building site, just behind
the trailer, was too dangerous for Eva and me to spend much time there.  At the
end, three summers after breaking ground, the children and I moved off the farm
for a few weeks because we found a buyer for the trailer before the house was
ready for us.  David worked on, without utilities or cheerleaders. 

We were warned by a friend against trying to finish a house after moving in. It
was too hard on marriages, she said (as if ours hadn't endured enough).  It is
true that we have become less zealous in our desire to have everything
completed yesterday.  It is true we have made some things almost impossible to
finish - like the living-room floor, now taken out of the immediate running by
a Christmas tree and a piano that no one feels like moving.  But we had no
choice but to move in, and unfinished or not, the house has been our salvation.

When new guests arrive, we begin by pointing out, as if they might not notice,
that there is still a lot to be done.  But then we offer for admiration our
marble tile counters; our cedar-paneled bathroom with oiled slate floors,
counters and stower stall, and a fern-laced view into the woods from the huge
tub; our large kitchen area with its commercial-size refridgerator and gas
stove, brick floor and French doors leading into the to-be-installed integral
greenhouse; our airy bedroom with its arched windows from which we watch the
sun rise over the neighboring ridge each morning, and its skylight over the
bed, from which we count the stars at night. 

This is not a modest house; we have bounteous living space.  But then we are
not modest dreeamers.  The years of hoping and fantasizing made us supremely
demanding of ourselves and our house.  And it's responding to our demands,
giving us our near-completed dreams in three dimensions.  You might call it the
spirit of Christmas, contagious even to the posts and beams, now garlanded in
balsam and surrounded by poinsettias and beeswax candles and rose and spruce
potpourri. 

This Christmas we will stop entertaining the question, never having answered
it, of whether certain things are worth certain pains.  We will roast our first
goose, make toast after toast, extend ourselves in every indulgence and into
every corner of the house, some hitherto unused.  This will be the start - not
the designs fropm the drawing board, or the groundbreaking, or the topping out,
or the moving in.  This Christmas will be our champagne bottle against the
hull.  Merry Christmas to us, at last. 

re .135,.136,.137

i vote for .136 for 3 reasons.  

1) it's the same solution i came up with!  
2) on closer inspection .135 does not meet the 4th condition.
3) before the 2nd (ouside) light and the outlet it would appear to be a 
perfectly normal 3-way switch for a porch light.  whether this is likely 
is tough to tell from my diagram, we'll have to defer to the originator for
a judgement call. 

-craig

And the winner is... Bill Brackett!  Not only does his diagram work
correctly (sorry, Bob), but as far as my dad and I can tell by tracing
wires, it is what they really did.  And it really is a rat's nest, by the
way -- one of those wiring jobs where you have to push hard to be able to
screw the switch plates back on.

Bill's explanation in .136 for what that outlet was good for certainly 
qualifies as creative!  Tracing wires has led me to a much more mundane
solution.  The outlet is below the porch switch on the wall.  The
porch switch has a three conductor cable running to it, and they just
extended it down to the outlet, attaching the black wire to hot and the 
white wire to neutral.  That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?  

Also, I have finally worked out that Craig is right in .138 -- they almost
did get themselves a pair of three way switches controlling both lights.
If they had just changed one connection in one junction box, it would
have worked.  The lights, that is.  The outlet was beyond help.

Anyway, Bill is welcome to claim his genuine antique 2x4 just as soon
as I get my building permit approved so that I am allowed to mess with
a bearing wall.  Free antique lathe & plaster will be included on request.

	Enjoy,
	Larry

PS - I refer to the outlet in the past tense because it is disconnected
with the bare wires taped off, and will remain so until we rewire that
whole blasted circuit.  My dad is a retired power systems engineer and 
has his standards.

    
    
    	Larry,
    
    	You still didn't answer my question. Did removing the light
    bulbs indeed disable the the outlet? Or was there somthing missing
    in the diagram in .136 regarding the neutral to the outlet? 
    	In addition if you had been using any big power hogs in that
    outlet you probably would have burned out light bulbs rather fast.
    
    		Just wondering...
    					...Dave
    

Dave,

My dad disconnected the outlet before I read your note, so I haven't
been able to check that.  But we traced the wiring and that is indeed
how it is connected.  I've been using a lot of power tools on/near the
porch, but for some reason I always plugged them in inside and ran a
cord under the door.  Then one day my wife plugged the drill in outside
and found that it didn't work, so I came to check it out and the ugly 
truth emerged.  

Hmm... maybe *that's* why they wired it that way.  If you only have one
of the lights on and turn on something connected to the outlet, the other 
light automatically turns on!    Now *that* would be a brain boggler!

	Enjoy,
	Larry

    Re. .139
    
    Thanks for the prize, real 2x4s are hard to come by these days.
    
    RE. Lath and plaster. Go to your local liquor store and ask for
    boxes, they love to give them away. Fill them up as you take down
    the wall and put them out for collection. It gets rid of the mess
    and shocks the hell out of the neighbors.
    
    _Bill
    

    We all must be experts now, this note has gotten quiet..
    	Anyway I agreed to help a friend hang drywall for his first
    time last Sunday.  I had spent Saturday hanging 'rock at my own
    house I slept a little late on Sunday morning, arriving about
    an hour late at my friends place.  He is an impatient person so
    he decided not to wait for me.  When I arrived, he was absolutely
    glowing, having hung three sheets without any help.  His happiness
    soon went away when I informed him that he hung the drywall *THE
    WRONG SIDE FACING OUT*.  It took me half an hour to explain why
    the smooth side and tapered edges needed to be facing out.  Hopefully
    I won't have to make another entry here when it's time to mud the
    joints.
    					=Ralph= 

    While living in Ohio, a friend was complaining that he couldn't
    determine how to disconnect a circuit from power.  Since the house
    was only a few years old (built in 60's), I began to question the
    intelligence of this individual.  Being a wonderful person, I offered
    (perhaps in a condescending tone) to show him how to throw a breaker 
    to the off position.
    He accepted my offer with a knowing smile.  I plugged a light into
    the offending circuit, and proceed to flip each breaker off and
    back on with no effect to the lighted lamp.  "Ah ha" said I, "this
    must just be a branch panel and the circuit comes from the main
    entrance."  Wrong, this was the only panel.  After eating a small
    portion of crow, we started to turn off all the breakers.  Ater
    the 5th one, the light went out.  Began applying power again and

re .144:

If that wasn't deliberate, imagine the "suprise" the previous owner would have
had if the "redundant" breaker went to the other hot leg!

-Mike

    My house is now 10 years old.  It was built by a supposedly reputable
    builder.  I say supposedly because neighbors and real-estate agents
    have said so.  I bought it when it was 6 years old.
    
    I was getting my house painted this summer, and I wanted to replace any
    rotted wood before the painters started.  The board under the front
    door between the thing you step on and the top of the brick platform
    which serves as the front steps seemed to be soft, so I ripped it off.
    It turned out that this outside board, the plywood sheathing and the
    band joist were all rotted, and the sill was partially rotted (the
    outside 2").  Thank goodness the floor joists were still OK!  All this
    was because the brick landing was high enough to overlap the siding,
    and was built right up against the house.  Water got trapped beween the
    brick and the house, and rotted it all.  The problem was aggrivated by
    some things that looked like a small steel plate welded to the end of a
    piece of rebar.  These were installed with the plate flush against the
    inside of the band joist, and the rebar protruding through the band
    joist, sheathing, outside board and cemented into the brick landing.  I
    think it had some wicking action which drew water along it into the
    band joist. Also, the brick landing had moved when the ground settled,
    and seemed to have torn up the band joist by pulling on it. 
    
    I ended up hammering the first row of bricks into oblivion to leave a
    gap beteen the remaining bricks and the house.  I also replaced the
    band joist and rotted portion of sill with pressure-treated lumber, and
    siliconed the sh*t out of all the cracks between the replacement joist,
    sheathing, sill and the original material. 

    Why did they build the brick right up against the house?  They must
    have known that it would rot, but they didn't care.  Why did they
    put those stupid anchors in there?  The weight of the bricks is
    definitely enough to crack the band joist if the landing shifts.
    Why didn't they use pressure-treated lumber behind the bricks? 
       

    
    Steve (who feels better after getting this off his chest)

	Over the Thankgiving days off, I went down to the Allentown PA
	area where my wife is from.  Her parents are getting a new house
	built so we went to the lot to look at it.  I almost died.  The
	framming is done and guess what they used for the outside of the
	house (on which vinyl siding is going to be placed)?  Give up?
	How about 3/4" 4x8 sheets of pink insulation!  Even with the
	vinyl siding on I would be able to put a fist through it!  
	This is NEW construction!  Add that to a list of items 
	to check for before buying a new house "Can fist be put through
	outside wall?".

bjm

    
    Are you sure there wasn't plywood/waferboard underneath the fiberglass 
    panels????
    
    My house has the fiberglass panels on top of waferboard.

    Mike

    I watched an entire housing development and Condo "Park" being built
    that way in Anne Arundel Co. MD. about 8 years ago.  The only
    place they used real plywood was top and bottom of each corner.
    
    I had friend that lived in one, and when we put the doorbell in
    for the front door, he made the hole for the wiring with a screwdriver.
    It only took one good smack.
    
    His wife is pretty big in Real Estate down there, and she told me
    that they were doing most of the new construction that way.  We
    had quite a conversation about it.
    
    Steve

re: .149
	The only plywood in the place was on the roof and floors.  I did not
	notice what thickness though.  The father-in-law said that in the 
	place that they now live there is NO building code at all!

bjm

	Re:  .147

	There is now structurally rated foam insulation that can be used to 
	sheath walls without plywood or strand board.  It is subject to puncture
	damage, but puncture damage is highly unlikely.  Larger impacts will be
	disipated buy the siding and insulation.  

	Brian

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", 
Fine Homebuilding vol 25 Feb/Mar 1985

One summer day in 1947, I drove out of the Kittery, Maine, Navy yard, towing a
cement mixer.  It lurched along reluctantly behind me, rattling noisily. It
weighed considerably more than my prewar sedan, a six-cylinder in which I had
absolute faith.  I had not the slightest doubt about getting home that night,
mixer and all, and home was 80 miles away. 

The mixer was war surplus, and I had bid on it sight unseen.  I was no
contractor, and utterly inexperienced in the building trades, but I was going
to build me a house of concrete (That, however, is another story.)  When I went
to the Navy Yard to claim my prize, the surplus machinery was all lined up in a
row.  My cement mixer was second from the worst, and the worst one was just a
pile of rusty pieces.  Well, it was my mixer, for better or worse.  I had
anticipated something a little more dainty, but this was swell.  It had a large
hopper on one side which, when loaded with sand, cement and gravel, could be
raised and dumped into the mixer at the flick of a lever.  It had a water tank
on top, which could measure out so many gallons at a time.  And it had a
four-cylinder engine.  I was sure of that because I could see the cylinders,
and the pistons too.  "Hey," I called to the man in charge, "Where's the head
for this engine?  Where are the valves?  Where's the radiator, the water pump,
the magneto?" 

In a few minutes, most of the missing parts had been found, but the radiator
had vanished for good.  Finally I was given a similar one from another machine.
We hitched up the mixer to the drawbar that was welded to the car frame for
that purpose, and I drove off. 

It was immediately apparent that this "trailer" would not handle well.  The
cement mixer apparently hated the thought of leaving its old friends, for it
kept jerking the car violently.  Worst of all, it weaved constantly.  Just for
an instant, I doubted the feasibility of hauling this uncooperative contraption
80 miles.  I stopped to inspect the hitch, which was tight.  Yet the weaving
continued.  At about 25 mph, the whipping of the top-heavy machine became
dangerous.  So undismayed but resigned to the prospect of a long, slow trip, we
drove on, my prize and I, up U.S. Route 1. 

Route 1 at that time was a concrete-slab two-lane road, and as I drove slowly
along from slab to slab, the mixer bounced around like a frisky elephant.  Long
lines of motorists piled up behind me waiting to pass.  Through cities and
towns I runbled like a mechanical Pied Piper with a horde of followers. Evening
came, but I didn't stop for food.  I wanted to get as near home as possible
before darkness overtook me and the mixer, which had no lights. 

I must give credit to my rugged old car.  It lugged that machine up most of the
hills in high gear, without apparent strain.  However, on the downgrades, I had
to downshift into second or low gear to keep things under control.  The mixer
lurched alarmingly when it struck broken-up areas of the road.  Even at slow
speed, a sudden stop was impossible. 

As I drew close to home the lashing movement grew worse, and the next
inspection stop revealed that the tongue that secured the mixer to the car was
cracked halfway through.  If it broke, the machine would wander out of control.
 Determined to keep on towing, I reduced my speed to a crawl.  With a safety
cable fastened to the mixer and several assorted saints hovering overhead, I
eased along.  Night had falled whne I rolled slowly down the hill to my house. 
Then I tried to back the machine up the hill into the yard. This proved too
much of a strain on the weakened tongue.  It snapped, and there the old
procrastinator sat, temporarily victorious, half in and half out. We spent the
best part of an hour nudging the thing into place with 2x4s. 

The next day, I took stock of my new acquisition and made up a list of missing
parts, which I ordered.  The radiator was made to fit by improvising with odd
pieces of pipe.  It leaked only a little.  At length, the engine was put
together without benefit of overhaul, and we were ready to start it up.  With
high expectations, I cranked the engine.  Then my friend took over and cranked.
Not a sputter.  We tested, and tried everything that tinkering experience had
taught.  No luck.  It was dusk, and I walked back to the porch, while my
persistent friend gave it one last try.  He twirled the crank fiercly, and the
monster roared into full-throttled life, shooting lovely sparks of burning
carbon into the air.  My friend shouted, "It's running!  It's running!" as if
we were deaf.  Dr. Russell, who was circumcising baby Jeffrey on the kitchen
table at the time, exclaimed "There she blows!"  The neighbors all came out to
see.  It was an evening to rival the Fourth of July. 

Shortly therafter, we put the mixer to work.  We discovered that the clutches
were in poor shape.  The hopper refused to go up until we had shoveled out half
of what we had just shoveled in.  Sometimes it needed a little push to get it
off the ground.  Occasionally it came crashing back down.  The drum handled big
batches with difficulty and much slipping of the clutch.  The water tank
dribbled constantly, just like the radiator, which never needed draining on
frosty nights.  On cold mornings, startup required the liberal use of a
blowtorch before filling the cooling system. 

Whenever the engine broke down, it was invariably with a load in the mixer,
which would harden there in spite of all we could do, for our water supply was
limited.  Then there would be a concerted attack with sledges and chisels. 

To do a good cleaning job, it was necessary to climb inside the drum and bang
away at the encrusted steel.  One day, I was in the mixer using a hammer and
chisel.  We had tried cleaning the drum with acid, with some success, and a
small pool of diluted acid remained in the bottom of the mixer, along with
chunks of dislodged concrete.  The mixer engine was idling nicely.  Suddenly I
felt the drum turn a little.  The clutch had never willingly engaged before.  I
threw my weight against the side to try to overcome its steady creeping, but
the drum kept edging along.  Suddenly the clutch took hold with a jerk, the
drum turned, and up I went as in a ferris wheel.  There was no room for
scrambling around.  I shouted to my helpers and hoped they heard me.  With eyes
tightly shut, I held my breath, covered my head with my arms, and wedged myself
in place.  Around I went, over the top, and down headfirst, to be pelted with
chippings and dirty water as I reached bottom. 

THe clutch refused to disengage.  That stubborn machine had me in its power and
was bent on giving me a ride.  My helpers killed the engine, and helped me
crawl out. 

I suffered no ill effects from having been mixed, except to my dignity.  But
the affection I had had for that machine was gone.  We goaded the thing into
finishing the season's work, and in the spring, sold it (pity the poor buyer),
and bought a very small cement mixer, which has served us well for many years. 

re: .149
>	The only plywood in the place was on the roof and floors.  I did not
>	notice what thickness though.

     I just moved up tp New Hampshire from Virginia.  When living down there,
I purchased a new house in the Springfield area built by Ryan Homes.  Although
the house never gave us any real problems, it was not built to last.  The
flooring exceeded the county specifications (1/2" thick) by being 17/32.
The walls under the aluminum siding were 1/4 inch aouminum coated fiber board
followed by fiberglass insulation.  It kept us warm but it didn't give you
a secure feeling.  Especially when the bullets from the prison guard training
area were impacting the houses around me.

    
    Why did they ever leave a live wire just hanging above the basement
    ceiling?

    Why did they ever put 20 amp fuses on 15 amp wire?
    
    Why did they ever use 1/2 of an outlet with a paper over the "removed"
    half of the outlet?  They chipped away the plastic and left
    the metal contacts.  Outlets must have cost 25 cents back when they
    did it!

    These are just *some* stupid things I've found.  I'd strongly suggest
    that anybody who owns a house where any wiring was done by a previous
    owner, to check it out.  You too may find that the previous owners
    graduated from the Mickey Mouse School of Electricians.
    
    And my favorite...
    
    
    And why, WHY did they spray paint the cellar walls, chimney, support
    columns, beam, oil tank and air ducts with multi-color spray paint
    squiggles??!!!!
    
    Phil

    This one goes to the builders of the house.
    
    The furnace had a 6 inch double wall vent pipe which made a
    horizontal run to a chase, turned and went up through the chase(and house)
    into the attic and out through the roof.  The gas water heater is in
    the house in a closet and its SINGLE WALL vent pipe went up into the
    attic, made a 90 degree turn and then went into the 6 inch double
    wall pipe so that only one hole had to be cut in the roof.  Nice thought
    but very dangerous execution.
    
    To tie the 3 inch single wall pipe into the double wall 6 inch pipe,
    they took a pair of tin snips and cut a hole through both of the walls of
    the 6 inch double wall pipe, stuck in the 3 inch single wall and put a
    few pieces of PAPER duct tape around the joint. 
    
    Well, the single wall pipe from the water heater had a 7 foot
    horizontal. The exhaust gas overtime caused the pipe to rust and
    actually the entire "top" half of the pipe rusted and collapsed
    into the "bottom" of the pipe forming an "open trough".  Now the
    gas exhausts into the attic with the clogged passive roof vents.
    
    The most distressing part - the house passed inspection !!!

    I replaced the 6 inch double wall pipe and the entire run of the 3 inch
    with double wall and vented both separately to the outside. 

    As mentioned before, the water heater is stored in a closet in the
    house.  The water heater had a pressure relief value but no pipe to the
    outside.  The value was installed so that the pressure relief value
    that is on top of the water heater at EYE LEVEL points directly at the
    door one would open to check to see what is happening. 

    Needless to say I have since installed an approved pipe to the outside
    of the house.

	re: .146, Steve Jacobs

	Your note on the rotted board under the door threshold board and
	the brick steps could have been written by me!  The builder of my
	house did the exact same thing, except the front step was a block
	of concrete 6 feet wide, 3 feet front-to-back and 3 feet deep!
	The bottom 2+ feet was burried into the ground.  I had to rent
	a jack hammer to get rid of that monster, then replace the plywood,
	siding, and joist header.  It was discovered by the home inspector
	when he poked a screwdriver through the 2x8 (2x10?) joist header
	from the outside, right into the cellar.

	Sheesh!

	-- Jim

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 27 Jun/Jul 1985 

We woke up that morning early and happy, and lay in bed tasting the first sweet
fruits of leisure after a long job finally done.  The night before, we had
finished sanding and oiling the floors of the house we had spent every moment
and ounce of energy over the last seven months building.  After the bone-weary,
two-hour drive back to our old house in Portland for a bath, we collapsed into
bed and dreamed of the next morning's final trip with our belongings out to the
house.  The hard work was behind us.  The phone interrupted our pleasant
musings.  It was Kip.  Our house had burned down. 

No.  It can't be.  We were there just 12 hours ago.  It was fine.  It was
solid.  It was beautiful.  It couldn't just vanish.  The house has burned up.
All of it?  Some walls are still there, but it's a total loss.  What caused it?
 They don't know. 

What had gone haywire with our world?  First, our neighbor and dear friend on
the mountain dies suddenly.  Now, exactly a month later, our house burns down -
the morning after we finish it.  No reason, no cause, just gone.  now we know
how Sisyphus feels.  What next? 

How do you feel when you're bone-weary and just sitting down and someone kicks
the chair out from under you?  Cheated?  Bewildered?...Exhausted. Sometimes you
decide just to lie there a while until you can get the energy to get up. 

Numbness is a blessing.  It keeps the pain away until you can find the strength
to deal with it.  How do you feel?  Numb.  In a strange way, lighter and freer.
 You feel somehow the release of those bondages that each of your possessions
has on you.  You have the unexpected opportunity and responsibility to rethink
a lot of things and remake a lot of choices.  You really have to begin again. 
Seven-and-a-half months of our lives - gone - up in smoke.  Much later, we
realize it's no different from any other seven-and-a-half months of our lives,
which are equally as gone, yet with fewer satisfactions and rewards.  Maybe
it's the sense of having to repeat it that weighs most heavily.  We hope we can
find ways to turn rebuilding into a new and also rewarding experience. 

We follow a logging truck most of the long drive out to the coast.  On the way
we think of the things that were there, and say goodbye to each.  What things
we later pull from the ashes intact have become gifts, and will be greeted with
cheers as well as tears. 

We finally start up the last stretch of road and brace ourselves for what
floodgates the reality of the charred hulk will open.  It doesn't.  Still numb.
 Kip and Amy meet us.  They had to watch it burn - to see Kip's beautiful
shingling turn to smoke and be sucked up into the cloud capping the mountain. 
At least it burned well.  Where do you get the strength to pick around in the
ashes of a newborn child you brought into this world through long months of
loving labor?  Where do you get the strength to look at the left-behind body of
a dear friend?  Sometimes you don't have the strength, but those things don't
go away.  They just wait there until somehow or somewhere you do find the
strength.  You have to, somewhere. 

Death, tragedy and loss are all parts of life that our society does its best to
hide, cushion, mask or deny.  You read of tragedies every day in the papers,
but it's just the statistics, the outer carcass of what's happened.  No sense
of how people's lives were affected, no sense of what it meant or felt or
changed.  Those realities, though difficult, add some sort of completeness to
our lives, and knowing that we have the strength to deal with such things and
that we grow through the process is a strength in itself. 

We hear a truck racing up the road and turn to see a pickup charging in the
driveway.  They see us, slam on their brakes and back down the road as fast as
they came.  Looters.  My blood boils.  Kip says the fire crew warned him to
stay at the house just because of that.  There had been several others. 

It is strange walking through something so transformed, strange what you latch
onto, what brings laughter among the tears and pain.  Lightbulbs melted into
taffy.  A dozen now well-cooked eggs on the kitchen floor.  Beans starting to
sprout on the charred kitchen counter.  Broken glass by the bushel.  Blobs of
aluminum, melted off the foil-faced insulation.  Beautiful patterns of charred
wood.  The stench of a smouldering mattress.  The woodstove - proud, intact,
already rusting.  The detective games begin - what in the world was *this*? 

Lane finds the charred remnants of a jewelry box under a piece of now ghostly
white insulation.  Inside, her great grandmother's face stares up at her from a
locket.  We find a patch of golden, untouched floorboards only 2 ft. from the
center of the fire, and discover that the solder on a water pipe had melted,
pouring water right into the middle of the fire.  Poor house - it did its best
to save itself. 

Our new neighbors arrive and help us load what we could salvage into our truck.
 We joke because one of the things we went back to Portland for was a smoke
detector - but it wouldn't have helped, only burned up like everything else. 
We apologize for the sad state our our housewarming.  What else can you say? 
The neighbors are wonderful - arriving with pots of stew, offers of houses to
stay in, help in getting our property taxes adjusted - but mostly to share with
us and bring the knowledge that they are there for help if we need it. 

In a small town things are more tightly connected - for better or worse.  The
head of the fire crew had delivered the concrete for our foundations, and we
talk about the fire later while pouring the floor to finish the garage that
Fred was building when he died.  Somehow that helps.  The mayor, the owner of a
local lumberyard, the people who installed the water main, all helped put out
the fire.  People offer to help us clean up the debris. 

That night the more difficult learning begins.  With darkness our vulnerability
becomes more visible.  No longer can we consider ourselves immune -
unfathomable events are no longer something that happens to someone else.
Unanswered questions, the conjurings of battered and exhausted minds, keep us
awake.  We sleep with our clothes on, and as close to the ground as we can. 

Any sense that we understood what happened was shattered some weeks after the
fire while we were spending an evening with friends who had recently moved to
Oregon from Philadelphia.  Well into the evening Pauline hesitates, then
announces that she had a vision six months before that our house would burn -
on Feb. 8 - but that we would be all right.  She had written it down in her
journal. 

Sharing our experience with others really helped.  Their reactions, shared
fears, and past experiences all helped make more whole our own.  We discovered
that many of us have a common "homecoming fear" - that turning that last corner
we would discover our home burned, ransacked or recipient of some other
dreadful quirk of fate.  Our fear turned real, and we're okay.  That fear will
never have the same hold on us again.  We learn of cancer victims who have been
abandoned by all their friends who don't know how to deal with sickness and
death.  We remember the same feelings in ourselves, and know now that the best
thing is to plunge in, be honest that we don't know what to do or say, and a
good way will open.  There's no right way. 

Was losing our house as bad as our neighbor losing her husband?  The house was
only an object, and could be rebuilt.  Her life could be rebuilt, too.  We have
all been more able to let out our fears of death, of losing each other, and
that release seems to lessen them.  We are learning to appreciate and enjoy
what is part of our lives while it is there and not put off for tomorrow. We've
learned more forcefully of the impermanence of all things.  A house built to
last a lifetime lasts but a single night.  Will we build so carefully again? 
No.  More carefully.  We've learned that the best assets we have are the
capacities that we carry within us and the love we can share.  All else grows
out of that and pales beside it. 

We've discovered that we want only valued things around us - things that are
attachments, that attach us through associations, memories and love to the
people, places and events that give meaning to our lives. 

We've become more thoughtful about acquiring things.  Although we had some
insurance which will help us rebuild, we know that the *real* insurance -
friends, family, neighbors and community - is there if needed.  Although we
were taught to be self-reliant growing up, we've learned of true dependence,
and of being able to receive.  We feel stronger, older, and more humble. 

A week after the fire we began to plant trees.  Somehow, carrying those green,
fragile living things through the charred ashes began to make it all right.  We
tried to tear the hulk down this weeekend and begin again.  We couldn't do it
yet, but we will, soon. 


P.S.  We did rebuild - with friends and power tools instead of our hands - and
this nightmare has receded into the past.  Oiling the floors again, we put the
rags in an outside firepit.  Three hours later they burst into flames.
Spontaneous combustion is not always the slow thing of textbooks.  Treat
linseed oil with respect.  Burn your rags immediately after use. 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 28 Aug/Sep 1985 

Working with a 130-year old house can be a bit intimidating, but with an
architect and a physicist in residence along with two other able-bodied adults
(an artist and an editor), we thought we were up to the task.  Just a week
after moving in, we decided that one bathroom and five bedrooms was a lopsided
mix, so we drew up plans to move a wall between two second-floor bedrooms,
making one room a larger bedroom and the other a new bathroom. 

The two bedrooms were over the 13-ft. by 23-ft. living room, and the wall to be
moved was not supported underneath, so we didn't think it was load-bearing.  To
make sure, the physicist and the architect thumped walls, chipped holes in the
plaster to find the orientation of the lath, and crawled around in the attic a
lot.  They discussed floor beams and ceiling joists and convinced themselves
that the joists ran the width of the living-room ceiling, which in turn
convinced even the artist and the editor that the wall on top of those joists
was not structural.  After all, anyone could see, right through the century-old
plaster on the living room ceiling, that the lath ran the length of the room,
so we assumed it was perpendicular to the joists. 

All this calculation was done in an evening or two, and our second weekend in
residence was spent, with sledgehammer and crowbars, taking out the offending
wall.  When the lath and plaster were removed, we found that the wall was
bisected by a vertical 3/4-in. diameter iron pipe and was reinforced with two
opposing wood 4x4 diagonal braces joined at the top of the wall where the pipe
went into the ceiling. 

"Gas pipe," said the physicist. 

"Wow," said the architect.  "Look at all that shear bracing!" 

The architect knocked out the braces.  "These puppies are really in there," he
said between panting breaths.  The rest of us watched with growing concern. The
floor shook with each blow.  As the second brace came free, the artist said,
"The floor just dropped a couple of inches."  The editor moved toward the door,
and the others felt the floor tremble at each step.  The architect and the
physicist looked at each other, looked sheepish, looked askance.  A truss wall?
Holding the living room ceiling up?  But the joists run the width - we checked! 

The physicist sawed through the gas pipe, only to find that it wasn't hollow,
even if it was rather loose and seemed to lead to the ceiling fixture in the
living room below. 

Downstairs, more chipping away of plaster showed that the ceiling lath ran the
length of the room, but so did the joists.  The lath was hung on stringers. The
upstairs wall was a truss that supported the centers of those 24-ft. joists. 
And the 'gas pipe' was a 10-ft. hanger bolt joining floor and ceiling beams,
however loosely. 

The architect put a prop in the first floor under the beam, and the physicist
hung a plumb bob so that it swung just above the floor boards to monitor any
further movement.  They tapped the prop to raise the beam in inch or so, and
the chastened pair went to work designing a solution to the sagging structure.
The artist and the editor didn't help.  They were too busy bundling lath and
carrying 28 boxes of plaster to the curb for trash collection.  Physics and
architecture indeed! 

Designing the new wall went on for several evenings, getting noisier by the
hour.  The physicist thought a new beam in the attic was the answer.  He
thought we could pass short sections of 2x8 through the attic access hole,
where he would assemble them into a structural member.  The architect wanted to
start by reinforcing the side walls.  As their discussion got more vehement,
the editor thought maybe we could rip out the floor, too, and have a two-story
living room.  The artist suggested sealing up that end of the house, with the
architect and the physicist in it, and moving to the far end. 

The final plan, approved by a disinterested third party (who was also a
structural engineer in the architect's firm), was to build the new wall where
we wanted it, 2-ft. from the old wall, with a box beam inside the wall at the
ceiling and a 4x6 timber bolted to each floor joist at the base.  The wall
could then be sheathed in plywood and drywall, making a new truss that would
serve the same function as the old one. 

Drawing up the plans and elevations and the lumber order took a few more noisy
evenings, during which the physicist, an experimentalist, wanted to start
building right away, and the architect, who likes to see everything on paper
first, wanted to make drawings in more dimensions than the physicist thought
the laws of physics could account for.  The editor and the artist, cranky from
lack of sleep, asked only for quiet. 

The next weekend the new wall went up, and all went smoothly except once, long
after midnight, when the architexct called the physicist a stubborn goat and
the physiscist accused the architect of never sharpening his tools and the
artist and the editor said let's get this done and go to bed. 

When the new wall was in place and everything seemed solid, the prop was
ceremoniously removed from the living room.  The plumb bob still swung clear of
the floor.  Champagne was passed around, and the thing was done. 

The editor went off to California for a few weeks of blissfully quiet editing.
The artist and the architect bought a house of their own (and the only thing
they've done to their walls is paint them).  And the physicist occasionally
thumps the sturdy new wall or tries to bounce on the now solid floor.  "It's
all physics," he says. 

    When I bought an old Farm a few years ago - I just couldn't FIND
    anything !!! Now this was the third house I bought over the years and 
    felt reasonably knowledgable as a homeowner. Well anyway I wanted to 
    check out some basics before moving in. My first choice was running 
    water in the kitchen, there was good pressure but no hot and I let it 
    run for a few minutes to make sure. When I went to the basement to 
    check it I also decided to familiarize myself with the sink drainage;
    well I just couldn't find that sink-drain entering the basement. Now
    I am not the world's greatest Orienteer - only occasionally can I tell 
    North from South without a compass - but I couldn't locate that damn 
    sink-drain and ran upstairs and downstairs at least five times to orient
    its location. Finally my brain kicked in and said "Hey Dummy
    - open the door and look under the sink and see where the drain
    goes through the floor", and not being one to reject good advice,
    I looked under the sink. And much to my relief, there was the obvious
    answer, a self-contained device called "a 5-gallon bucket!!!" with
    at least 1/4 inch left to go from the top. Now I felt real good
    about that because I know I hadn't lost my ability to (sometimes)
    orient myself when I go from one floor to another.
    My wife is not-so-sure though - we bought a three-storey house.

    I used to work for a TV repairman many years ago who also owned several
    rental properties.  This guy didn't like to spend money unnecessarily,
    so he used to do his own repair work whenever possible, especially if
    it was electrical work.  
    
    He used to test for the presence of 120v by touching the wires with his
    hands.  Safety wasn't a real big concern with him, nor was code
    conformance.  One time he installed a new line for an air conditioner
    in one of the rentals.  To avoid work, he put two runs of 3 conductor 
    12 ga. into some metal conduit, which he then bent at the appropriate 
    places by putting it through the bumper of his car and leaning on it.  
    It had a lot of kinks in it afterward.
    
    The whole run of wire went around the outside of the house (easier than
    drilling through inside walls and floors).  After he got it all
    installed he applied the juice and found (with little surprise) that
    the fuse blew right away.  Eventually he was able to get one good
    working circuit out of the two runs of wire by using one of the white
    wires and the ground wire from the other run.  Everything else had had
    its insulation skinned off by the pulling and bending process and was
    shorted to the conduit.
    
    The best part though was the fuses.  When we got to the fuse panel - no
    fancy new circuit breakers for this guy - each fuse socket was full of
    aluminum foil all squashed tightly into place so it connected the two
    contacts.  I later found out that he used that method in all his rental
    houses, his own home, and his TV shop.  He swore by it - told me that
    aluminum foil was much cheaper than fuses, and all you had to do if it
    blew out was go pound on it with a hammer and it would usually come
    back on.  Kind of hard to say exactly what amperage it would blow at,
    but if it blew too easily he just added some more foil to make better
    contact.  Seemed to work OK, except for the time his shop basement
    filled up with smoke from the wiring going to a space heater.  The
    wires were pretty near as hot as the heater.
    
    He used to do some pretty wild things with people's TV's, too, but
    I suppose that belongs in another conference.

    Adding to my woes of .156, my old house yielded another puzzler;
    come October of the year I moved in and about 2 months after I couldn't
    find my kitchen sink drain, I decided it was time to make sure my
    oil furnace was OK for the coming cold months. Well, the furnace
    looked OK, and the next step was to check the oil level; I never
    did recall seeing the oil tank in the basement so for starters I
    looked outside for starters and it wasn't there either. I looked in 
    the basement again - this time real good - I mean how can you not find 
    a 200 gallon oil tank. Well, it wasn't there, so I looked outside again
    this time behind the shrubs around the entire periphery of the house
    and convinced myself that it was not outside the house - back to
    the basement again, this time in all of the confined areas and 
    crawl spaces with greater determination and still no oil tank.
    Then I had brilliant idea #1 - I would call the local Oil Co.
    and sure enough the driver had made regular deliveries to the 
    house but really didn't know where the tank was. Then I shifted
    gears and went to brilliant idea #1.1, which was if the guy made
    oil deliveries there must be filler pipes for the tank - outside 
    again but no filler pipes. At that point I put on my Sherlock hat, and
    one of those "NO S**T SHERLOCK" ideas hit me ...... I could follow
    the oil feeder pipe back from the burner to the oil tank - it worked,
    the mystery of the oil tank was solved - it was under the front
    porch empty, sealed off with no feeder pipes. How they got it there,
    and why I will probably never know.     
     

    
    My previous owner was a master hider. Don't fix when you can hide the
    problem.  Replace wood rot with wood putty, but do not fix the cause of
    the rot. Paint over rust. RTV leaky pipes.
    
    The latest hide job to rear it,s ugly face was during a resent wind and
    rain storm. My wife heard water dripping in the attic, so I went up to
    check. water was comming in aroud the vent from the furnance. When I
    replace the roof vent I saw this hide job. He had covered the rusted
    out vent with duck tape and auto putty. Then it was painted to look
    new. 
    
    It makes you wonder that these hide jobs were probably more work than a
    real fix would of been. Some also seem to have cost more than if it
    would of been fixed right.
    
    
    Owner of a 35 year old house in dallas
    John L. Anschutz
    

	Re .last
	
		Sounds a  lot  like  the guy my father bought his Florida 
	condo from.  When he bought it the seller said the reason for the 
	new section of sheet-rock in the bathroom was  because  the  roof 
	had  leaked at one time and damaged it.   The  problem  had  been 
	corrected with some roofing cement (flat roof design).
		
		Well about 2 months  latter the people he was renting the 
	place to call and say the ceiling in the bath  is leaking after 2 
	weeks  of heavy rain.  My father calls management company to  see 
	whats going on and they say "yup you got a leak somewhere".   The 
	next  month  my  father goes down to take a look and upon pulling 
	out  the new sheet-rock on the ceiling finds a series of 5 gallon 
	buckets and  pans  hidden  in the ceiling to catch water dripping 
	from the leaky  roof.  Under normal circumstances the water would 
	evaporate at a rate  faster  than  it  could fill the buckets but 
	after heavy prolonged rains the buckets would fill and overflow. 
		
		My father called a roofing  company to come and patch the 
	roof area and sicked a  lawyer  on  the seller for hiding a known 
	defect.  By the way, these  units are town house arrangements and 
	each owner is responsible for everything from  basement  to  roof 
	and outside patio/yard area.


				       ...Dave		
			

    Here is a good one. This happened to a friend (really). He and his
    wife were sanding and refinishing floors in their first home. They
    were painting the floors with polyurethane when they smelled gas.
    Rather than call the gas company, they figured they should call
    the fire department. Well, the fire department came flying in, sirens
    blaring, lights flashing, firemen in their little rubber coats and
    hats - the whole shot. It turns out that the "gas" odor they were
    getting was the smell of the polyurethane!.
    
    They are now afraid to show their faces outside of their home! 

I have a barn with a flat roof, which has the rolled asphalt type of roofing.

Apparently, a while ago, the roof started leaking, so the owners did the
logical thing:

They painted the roof.

-Mike

    RE: .160
    
    >>>	My father called a roofing  company to come and patch the
    >>>	roof area and sicked a  lawyer  on  the seller for hiding a known 
    >>>	defect.  By the way, these  units are town house arrangements and 
    >>>	each owner is responsible for everything from  basement  to  roof 
    >>>	and outside patio/yard area.
    
    Dave,  what is the progress on this situation?  I have a friend
    that is having a similar problem and would like to know what his
    chances are.
    
    Thanks.
    
    Patrick.
    

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 30 Dec 1985/Jan 1986 

Ten years ago I built my second fieldstone chimney.  I had already laid up many
block, brick and flue-tile affairs.  The year before, I'd built a small
Rumford-type fireplace and flue.  That chimney was full of the book learning,
the untried theories, the mistakes and quirks that grace a first novel and a
first chimney, too.  Now I was ready for my masterpiece - 20 tons of portland
cement, sand, gravel, stone, mortar, and tile; two stories tall and sunk 6 ft.
in the ground.  It would have a cantilevered hearth, an extra flue, warming
bins for gloves, deeply recessed joints - a testament to the days when my back
had not yet been put to pasture.  It would stand long after the house collapsed
around it, a chance for all the different kinds of rocks we grow in Vermont to
stand forth and let themselves be seen. 

Until you've built one, you can't possibly have any idea how many stones it
takes to build a rubble-masonry chimney.  The books tell you how to lay up a
facing of handsome rocks, filling in the space behind them and around your flue
tile with gravel, old bricks, and the like.  With rubble.  But rubble means
stone, and when you lay up stone, you must deal with sinewy randomness - not
the neat, hard edge of brick or block where a perfectly predictable marriage of
gravity and friction holds your work in place.  You are working instead with
creativity and balance, asking rocks to cradle each other in their hollows, on
their high places.  By and by you find you're fitting stones in a layer far
deeper than the course that will eventually show. 

To build a fieldstone chimney you must gather and sort hundreds of fine
specimens of gneiss, schist, basalt, granite, quartz and slate.  You need room,
and an understanding from your nearest neighbors that those stones will be
there that way for a while, threatening ankles and big toes.  Gathering all
this rock is labor intensive, the result of ten or twenty stone runs.  In my
chimney-building days a stone run only came in an hour freed from haying or
weeding, given the presence of a willing "volunteer" or two to go along, and a
gallon of gas in the can.  We'd pour it into the four-ton 1951 Ford
Massachusetts Department of Public Works dump truck we'd bought at auction for
$165, and head for the woods. 

I didn't want to take too many stones from within the earth - too hard to
clean, and water was scarce.  I plundered - I admit it - stone walls.  Let me
explain.  There are two kinds of stone wall that yield good chimney material.
The first is the kind on your own land.  The second is on someone else's.
Either way you have to get permission.  As a mason you will automatically
respect the work of the stone-wall builder two centuries dead.  You know a
curse will lodge in your pre-arthritic joints if you destroy a neat old sample
of the stonewright's craft.  But if you can drive your rig deep in the woods
where the most broken-down walls are, where the need for boundary-marking and
front-lawn dressing is gone forever, I see no reason not to claim some.  You
will find some beauties worth displaying: rescuing them from burial in leaves,
you will put them to better use.  Sometimes, doing just that, I have almost
heard the old wall-builders speaking to me across the years, forgiving me,
telling me: yes, they had yanked these very rocks from under their plow and
placed them there for some future use. 

Sone runs are where the work begins, and there you'll experience some of its
finest moments:  turning off your engine; feeling the peace of the woods, its
summertime quiet and cool; discovering a naturally squared-off junk of rosy
quartz you know will sparkle at eye level.  At times like these, you breathe
the forest.  Picture the winter fire that will crown all this work - flames not
trapped in metal but allowed to dance almost free, framed in stone, watched
with awe.  Pity the need for woodstoves; pity the land with no fine stones like
these to build on - "let him who is without stones among you cast the first
tin!" 

We began construction in the fall - the level lines, the big hole in the
ground, the footing poured.  We built the form for the cantilevered hearth, put
in the rebar and the wire mesh and poured that too.  There it sat until spring.
The pile of sand turned hard; the pipe from the water supply froze; the beaver
pond iced over.  Meanwhile the other workers completed the room around the
chimney - all but the finish floor and the nearest wall.  They framed an
appropriate hole in the cathedral ceiling. 

Beginning again in the spring, I remembered how slow fieldstone work can be.
You put in a nine-hour day and step back to find your three new random courses
have added only 16 in. to the chimney's height.  You've lifted stones and
lowered them, aiming at an aesthetic you can't put into words and playing with
equilibrium, friction, fancy, and mortar.  Why does choosing take so much time?
It's not that you are nit-picking; you are honestly looking for the stone that
fits a particular spot.  Maybe in you whole pile only one or two will do, and
it's a delicate fustion of color, size, and symmetry.  You are taking your time
because your labor is goiing to show off the stones, not bury their edges in
sloppy mortar work or hide their surface features under stucco. 

You chip away a pesty corner with your rock hammer and chisel.  Then you look
to see how many stones have disappeared into your work.  You check your
drawings - when is it time to put the smokeshelf in?  What's the right pitch to
angle back the firebrick?  What is the best place for the warming compartment? 
Don't forget that piece of rosy quartz. 

The work was hardest in high summer.  The mortar mix dried out too quickly. The
trickle quit in the hose coming down the hill.  We had to fetch our water from
the beaver pond - not an easy haul.  The work was higher, and we had to deal
with scaffolding, planks, ramps and ladders.  Hauling pails of mortar to the
roof, I felt the sub-roof asphalt soften and stick to my foot.  With cement on
my hands I wiped sweat from my eye.  In the dead-air stillness, sounds grew
magnified - a rock chip rolling down the roof, the slap-tail of a curious
beaver, the wheeling mixer, the scrape of hoe in pan, the trowel in mud, the
creak of stiffening bones, insects at work in the pines. 

Finally, the chimney was capped and flashed leakproof, and the roof was
shingled.  The best rock we had found then became the hearth - a thick slab of
slate as big as a coffee table.  My friend the beam-hewer made us a mantel, a
solid maple 6x10, almost heavy enough to bend its anchor bolts.  Then I swept
up four times, dust still everywhere. 

One night much later when the finish floor was in, we clamped a light high up,
accentuating every stone.  We drank some wine, watched the flames, admired the
chimney's draw.  You couldn't even see the cement, the shadows were so deep. 

All those rockes live in the house now.  They won't see the forest again. There
is the course of grey quartz at the 10-ft. mark.  There is the piece of gneiss
that looks almost like a fist.  One chunk of basalt makes me smell wild ginger.
In another I see the broken wall round the debtor's graveyard high above Green
River.  Building them this way, you remember every stone. 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 31 Feb/Mar 1986 

A couple of years ago my friend Ezra, a building contractor, had an unusual job
offer: finish off a house that had been started by a bunch of "carpenters." 
The house was located in a remote inlet on the British Columbia coast.  The
nearest road was ten miles away, so the client had flown Ezra to the site to
look it over.  Evidently Mr. X had fired the original crew because their work
was so rough.  Ezra declined giving a contract price.  "In fact," he told me,
"a lot of it is going to have to come apart.  But it is late in the season.  We
could live on your fishboat and use it for transporting materials. Mr. X says
the site is well protected from the weather and there is a good mooring."  So
we gave Mr. X a price per hour, which included a share for my boat, and we got
the job. 

It was on a grey autumn morning that I arrived with my boat.  Ezra was already
there with his speedboat.  The house was perched on a rocky point, with
impenetrable forest behind it, and by the time we had manhandled all of Ezra's
tools and his generator up into the house, a heavy rain was falling.  Because
the roof decking had been only half completed, we had to bulid a semi-permanent
shelter within the house to protect the tools from the elements.  In the rain
we made a survey of the deficiencies of the structure, growing more and more
appalled at the quality of the work. 

The structure had a hip roof, 40 ft. on a side, half of which was supported by
a plywood box beam.  The plywood was properly in place but had never been
nailed with more than two or three nails per sheet.  Then the T&G cedar floor
decking had been laid on top of it and nailed down.  Of course the beam sagged,
and some of that sag we were never able to eliminate.  At the other two corners
where the the hip rafters (tripled 2x10s) should have come into contact with
the upper plates of the frame walls, there were no studs, sheathing or plates. 
The walls had been partially built standing in place, and partially sheathed
and stuffed with sodden insulation, but for some reason the work had not been
completed at the corners.  The hip rafters were propped up by 1x6s that stood
vertically and unbraced on the rock outside the building.  These props were
bowed several inches by the weight.  I found it hard to believe my eyes.  I had
been walking on that roof. 

If the roof was bad, the foundation was worse.  The main posts were eight long
beach logs that stood on cement pads on the steeply sloping rock and supported
the roof beams 20 ft. up.  Three or more of the posts stood with barely
one-third of their end grain actually on the cement pad, while the rest of the
post hung in space.  Two of the posts had been partly rotten when they were
erected.  The floor of 3-in. tongue-and-groove was supported by 2x10 beams
bolted and notched into the posts, but in several places the beams had missed
the posts by an inch or so and a shim filled the gap.  One beam was so far off
the mark that it had been shimmed with two 2x4 scraps and nailed to the post
with a 12-in. spike. 

By the time we had finished our tour, the wind had come up, the tidal current
was running quite hard and a nasty chop was building in the bay.  It was clear
we could not leave our boats unattended in those conditions so we moved them to
the nearest sheltered water - a deserted bay more than a mile distant.  It was
a good thing that we did because all night long a gale blew. 

As we approached the house in Ezra's speedboat the next morning, I was uneasy.
A cursory inspection the previous day had shown Mr. X's mooring to be less than
secure.  My fears were well grounded.  The waves swept right into the little
bay, and the mooring dragged several yards as soon as the load of the speedboat
came onto it.  The breakers on the beach made it hard to land a boat there. 
When we attempted to go ashore, the speedboat swung sideways to the waves and
began to pound heavily on the rocks while surging masses of driftwood
threatened to break our bones.  After both of us had been thoroughly soaked, we
retreated from the beach and considered our options.  We needed a better way to
get to and from work in rough weather.  And rough weather is the norm on that
part of the coast from October to May. 

Luckily I had on board my prawn anchors, ropes and buoys for anchoring traps,
so I was able to install a reliable mooring just outside the little bay in
water that did not go dry with the tide.  There we tied the dinghy from my
boat.  In rough weather Ezra would bring the speedboat slowly upwind to the
mooring and I would make a grab for the dinghy while leaning out precariously
from the bow, and then I would tie up securely to the mooring.  Then all we had
to do was ride the surf to the beach in the dinghy, jump out and drag it over
the rocks to safety.  We tried the routine, but by then the weather had abated
so we had no problem. 

During the storm of the previous night, half the roof decking had blown off. At
first we thought that the 1 1/2" T&G cedar had not been nailed down, but we
were wrong - it had been nailed with 1 3/4" finish nails.  Luckily it was just
decking and had not been insulated and shingled.  Meanwhile, since the wind was
still fairly strong at the height of the exposed roof, and occasional 12-ft.
length of cedar decking came hurtling down from above. 

That night Ezra called Mr. X on the radio-telephone and suggested that the
house be torn down and started again.  Mr. X disagreed.  Ezra stressed that we
would give no guarantee but we would do our best.  Some of the house's problems
we could do nothing about.  Our job was to get the house sealed up and nailed
together before the weather really turned sour. 

Getting to work in rough weather proved to be an ordeal.  Several times I was
soaked by the swells while leaning out to grab the dinghy.  More than once the
waves were so high that all I could do was leap into the dinghy while holding a
rope that was tied to the speedboat.  Almost invariably at those times the
dinghy was swamped, and I would get wet to the waist al least.  One time a wave
put me completely under.  We never did get to work that morning,  I was so cold
and miserable after repeated attempts to go to work that we went back to the
fishboat for lunch and a change of clothes.  After lunch I got soaked again,
but by then I had no dry clothes left so I went to work anyway, feeling abused
and grouching, "If I'm going to get wet on the way to work, I'm charging Mr. X
an hour's pay for it."  He paid. 

We finally did get the house sealed up by working ten hours a day, seven days a
week.  There had even been a few beautiful days when the air was so clear it
sparkled.  Those days made up for a lot of the grief we suffered from the
weather.  It was on such a day that Mr. X showed up to inspect our progress. 
"I don't see what all the fuss is about," he said.  "After all, it is a
protected anchorage." 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 32 Apr/May 1986 

Working around animals is one of the occupational hazards of a residential
contractor in a rural area.  At least when Noah was building the Ark, he wasn't
working around the livestock; the animals came later after the job was done,
and then in an orderly procession two by two.  He didn't look up to see a goat
surveying him from the top of the new lumber delivery, lazily chewing a nail
belt, or reach around for a framing square and first have to dislodge a curious
chicken. 

A recent remodel my husband tackled promised much of the variety of fauna that
Noah witnessed, but they weren't at all orderly.  For a start, the owners liked
to graze their mule and six head of horses and ponies in the long driveway,
which made deliveries from the lumberyard and the comings and goings of the
construction crew interesting.  There was a pair of pole gates in the road end
of the driveway, and an electrified wire strung across the house end. As soon
as a truck driver began to open the pole gates, seven pairs of equine eyes
would immediately focus on the particularly green grass on the shoulders of the
road beyond.  In order to get through without losing the herd, someone had to
stand by the gate, arms waving, while the truck went through.  This meant that
no one could arrive or leave alone. 

The gate couldn't be seen from the job site, but the owner would help out by
speeding down on his motor bike to stand guard when someone was expected.  It
was only when someone would arrive unexpectedly, like the electrical inspector,
that there was trouble. 

Nevertheless, the herd never did escape into the road, and only occasionally
got past the hot wire into the garden and onto the construction site.  The crew
was highly entertained on such occasions, but not as much as when the owner
tried riding the mule one day, instead of the motor bike.  The mule bucked -
just like a rodeo bronco. 

Meanwhile, on the job itself, the crew got used to the cackle and squawk of the
barnyard.  The pet turkey and the puppies had free range over the site. Any
boards or tools put down for a second were likely to disappear, and reappear
somewhere else decorated with teeth marks.  The turkey left a trail of loose
droppings on lumber, concrete forms and vehicles.  Language became colorful
when unsuspecting carpenters reaching for a board received a sticky surprise. 

No one was much surprised, though, when they discovered that they had sealed a
kitten under the hot-tub deck, a sunken structure surrounded by concrete. So
they had to cut a carefully placed hole to let it out.  Of course, the kitten's
reaction to the noise of the saw was to squeeze through under the joists into
another space and mew pitifully.  The whole family came out and anguished over
the kitten, and the owner gave the go-ahead to sacrifice the deck if necessary
to save the cat.  So another hole was cut, the kitten disappeared into another
space and cried again.  The deck was looking more and more like lattice when at
last the kitten leapt out of the very first hole and was thus joyfully restored
to the owners. 

A neighbor of ours who is also a contractor had his own animal story to tell.
He had incorporated his cabinet shop into his horse barn, a classic American
barn with a gambrel roof and sheds off the side.  The horses lived in the shed
part, and two overhead garage doors side by side gave access to the shop from
the driveway. 

I went by there one day while he was working on a set of cabinets in the shop,
and his wife was saddling up one of their horses in the driveway so that their
guest, Mary, could take him out for a ride.  The horse's name was Cimmaron, a
big grey appaloosa with a knowing look in his eye, but he's gentle - their kids
ride him - and as I left he was being urged up the road by the guest.  It was
apparent that she was not an able rider, but a big old horse like that ought to
know his business. 

I should have stayed a while longer, for I missed what happened next and it was
only relayed to me the next day, and I've always loved the circus.  My
neighbor, busy over the table saw, with one of the overhead doors open to let
in some fresh air and sunshine, says the first thing he was aware of was the
sound of galloping hooves. 

"That's good," he remembers thinking, "I'm glad that Mary's having a good
time." 

Suddenly the great grey horse thundered into the shop.  As Cimarron galloped
through the doorway, Mary was screaming.  In a panic, she reached up and
grabbed at the handle of the overhead door, which then proceded to close behind
her with a crash.  The horse shied into the propane heater, the rider came off
and went sailing into the half-finished cabinets, and the loose horse careened
around the shop with no way out.  Tools, cabinets, saws and boxes of nails went
helter-skelter as four iron-clad feet clattered and skidded on the concrete
floor.  Will you believe me if I tell you that no one was hurt and no permanent
damage was done?  It's true. 

Cimmaron was caught and safely returned to his section of the building, and
Mary was suffering from no more than surprise.  Apparently Cimmaron had decided
to turn around and come home, Mary hadn't known how to stop him, and the open
shop door had looked enticing enough to him in spite of the machines inside. 

Meanwhile, back at my husband's remodel job, work was going pretty well.  A
coyote ate the pet turkey one night, and one of the dogs also went missing. 

"Have you seen Lucky?" asked the owner of every workman on the place, but no
one had. 

My husband was sorry - Lucky was a nice dog, and you hate to see a family
miserable over a lost pet. 

They probably hunted for that dog most of the night, but it wasn't until my
husband heard some muffled scrambling as he bent to take a measurement the
following morning that the mystery was solved.  Lucky was sheetrocked in under
the stairwell.  Oh well, at least sheetrock is easy to patch. 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 34 Aug/Sep 1986 

A century or so ago, barn raisings were still common enough that most school-
aged children had attended one or at least knew what one was.  Then, an
education was primarily practical information that one garnered from family and
neighbors.  Today education is one of the largest enterprises in our country,
but unfortunately many of our children never have the valuable hands-on
experiences of their 19th-century peers. 

For the past several years I have been an instructor at Houston's Outdoor
Education Center, a school located about 90 miles north of Houston in the East
Texas Piney Woods.  The children I work with are fifth-graders from Houston who
are bused to our school to participate in three-day programs in forest and pond
study, conservation, animal husbandry and other similar activities. Many of the
children I work with have never been in the forest at night or seen the stars
without the blur of big-city lights.  Few had ever hammered a nail, and none, I
am certain, had ever seen a barn raising. 

Last winter, the director of our program approached me with the idea of
constructing a timber-frame barn to house the goats, sheep, rabbits and
chickens at our pioneer farm.  Since I had recently raised my own timber-frame
house, I thought a barn would be a simple enough matter.  So after some
discussion, a few sketches and much coffee, the decision was made: we would
build a timber-frame barn. 

For the next month or so, two other staff members and I worked long hours on
some pretty raw days (yes, it does get cold in Texas!) to fashion the 200
timbers we would need for our 1,800-sq. ft. barn.  On some days, students would
come by and watch us for a short time.  They would stare in disbelief as I
explained how the joints would fit together and how wooden pegs would hold them
in place.  For these kids wood could only be held together with nails shot from
an air gun - that's what they knew from the tract houses they'd seen spring up
back home.  I couldn't help feeling they had missed something somewhere. 

Finally the timbers were ready, and we started talking about a raising.  Our
first inclination was to do it with our staff.  With the forty or so people at
the Center it would have been a simple matter to raise the frame in a day.
Then, in the years to come we could tell our students how the barn had been
raised and try to explain how exciting raising day had been.  But I felt we
would lose a great opportunity by doing it that way.  So I cautiously
approached the program director with the idea of raising the barn with our
students, Houston's children, city kids.  Naturally the first concern expressed
was that of safety.  I argued that with reasonable precautions it could be done
safely.  The second concern - why do it in the first place? - was more
difficult to deal with.  The only good reason I could come up with was that
this would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most, if not all, of these
kids.  It was a chance for them to live history and not just read about it, and
an opportunity for them to experience the sense of community accomplishment our
ancestors knew so well.  Permission was granted. 

April 10, 1984, was raising day.  I was up with the sun and headed for the barn
to make one final check on everything.  In just a few hours I would have a crew
of eleven-year-olds to raise six tons of timbers into place. 

The kids came by with their teachers at 9 o'clock sharp.  Their faces said it
all.  They were ready to work and learn. 

After some basic instructions on what was about to happen and how to lift heavy
weights safely and in unison, we were ready to begin.  The students gathered
around the first bent, a pre-assembled cross section of the frame.  I called
out the commands.  "On the count of three, lift it up to your shoulders.  One,
two, three!"  Up to the shoulders it went.  "On the count of three, lift it all
the way up.  One, two, three!"  Up it went, all the way.  A cheer went up as
the first bent stood in the morning sun (this bent was raised with no
equipment; subsequent bents were raised with the aid of ropes and pulleys).
There were only five more bents to go, and then the rafters. 

As the day progressed, the barn grew in stages, and so did our feeling of
accomplishment.  By lunch the center of the barn was raised, squared and
pegged.  No students worked on the second story; the staff raised the rafters
and did the pegging.  The broadsides - bents running the length of the building
and defining the sheds on either side of the central portion - and rafters were
raised that afternoon, and by 5 o'clock the raising was just about finished. 

All during the day, at breaks in the work, the children had been fixing their
own supper of beans, cornbread and apple crisp over an open fire.  They ate
their fare by the barn they'd raised that day.  As darkness fell we hung
lanterns from the beams and acted out the final scene - the folk dances were a
fitting end to an exhausting day.  The children stood beneath their barn and
celebrated their collective achievement.  They now knew what a barn raising
was, and even more important, what it meant. 

    After 10 yrs. working on our 65 yr. old house we are within a few
    monthes of "finishing". I finally have time to read the HOME_WORK
    notes! No matter, we were bound and determined to do it our way.
    We even had the help of contractors. And here's a story about my
    favorite, sincerly.
             I came home at lunch to check on the progress of our new roof.
    Three layers of asphalt had been removed and patches had been made
    where there was no underlayment. The contractor and his assistant were
    putting down a membrane that came in big sheets with one sticky side.
              It just happened to be a windy day and they wound up with
    a large wrinkle in the sheet. I'm standing in the back yard watching 
    two grown men with their asses hanging over the edge at the very peak
    of the roof trying to get this enormous flapping sheet of flypaper
    unstuck or stuck or whatever, and they've got a case of the giggles.
    Where is the butterfly net when you need it?
                

    I would like to know why the previous owners of my house used plywood/
    melamine faced kitchen counter top to build a shower stall? My
    husband and I had a great "Who's got the biggest pet mushroom contest"
    one summer. Finally he cried "Uncle" and with a putty knife sent them
    to the compost heap. I won, with a lovely velvety brown fungus about
    the size of your average hamburger (with buns). 
                   The whole stall was nice and mushy and easy to tear out!

>                 <<< Note 147.164 by VAXRT::HOLTORF >>>
    
>    I won, with a lovely velvety brown fungus about
>    the size of your average hamburger (with buns). 
 
    	REALLY???? I'm 6'2", but not usually described as a mushroom....(at 
least not to my face...) (no, no one else is allowed as shot at me for this 
reply!!!)

    	Vic H   

    
    Heres another bathroom story.
    
    During the big freese over Christmas in dallas. I had the clod water
    line break for the master bath.  As I am sweating a new pipe (through
    the 9"X9" door for the pipes), I notice there is a light up in the wall
    where there should not be one.  Realizing I caught the wall on fire, I
    rush inside and bust the shower wall down so I can throw water (from
    the tub) on it.  After the fire is out (and panic supsided) I find the
    PO had stuffed towels, shirts, pillows into the wall when he had
    retiled (he was very proud of this tile job).  I also find rotted sheet
    rock behind the tile.  He used transparent tape on the threads of the
    shower head elbow.  A slow leak caused the need to redo the WHOLE tile
    job.
    
    A simple leak = whole new bathroom
    
    John

    We're redoing the back hall off our kitchen, which contains the
    enclosure around the cellar stairs, which means I had to temporarily
    move the light switches for the cellar lights while construction
    is in progress.  There are (were) two switches: a simple on/off
    (2-way) switch for one part of the cellar, and a 3-way switch for another
    part of the cellar and the garage light.  Last evening I started
    to move the wiring so demolition could proceed, and found this:
    
    	+--------+	+--------+	
    	| box	 |	| box	 |	Line marked "A" is the 3rd
	| with	 |	| with	 |	wire of the 3-wire cable that
	| 2-way  |	| 3-way	 |	feeds the box on the left. 
	| switch |	| switch |	It went out through a knockout
	|	 |  	|	 |	in the box on the left, in
	|	 |--A---|	 |	through a knockout in the box
    	+--------+	+--------+	on the right, and connectd to
    	  | | |		   | |		one of the terminals on the
	  | | |		   | |		3-way switch.  The other two
	  | | |		   | |		wires in the 3-wire cable went
    	3-wire cable	2-wire cable	to the 2-way switch in the
    					box on the left, and the two
    					wires in the 2-wire cable went
    					to two of the 3 terminals of
    					the 3-way switch in the box
    					on the right.
    
    I never did figure out how this all worked (it did); when the
    time comes to put it back, I think I'll start from scratch.

re .167: 

Hmm...  If the two switches independently operated two separate sets of
lights, then I would guess that wire A didn't do anything, and the 3-way
switch could have been replaced with a 2-way switch that left wire A
unconnected.  That's of course, if the 2-wire cable leads to your lights.
If the 2-wire cable leads directly from the breaker, then it sure beats me.

Speaking of odd switches, I found something strange in my basement: two
switches controlling a pair of lights, with one of the lights connected
to one of the switch boxes using just a 2 wire cable.  The two lights
are of different wattages, and the 60W bulb glows brighter than the 100W
bulb.  I finally figured out that they wired the bulbs in series instead
of in parallel.  A little resistor theory explains why the lower wattage
bulb shines brighter in such an arrangement.

	Enjoy,
	Larry

    re: .168 re: .167
    No, the 3-way switch worked as a 3-way switch; there is (was) another
    3-way switch out in the garage to control the same light, and the
    switches worked properly.  Somehow.

re .167, .168:

Sounds like they just used the 2 wire cable and one of the wires in the other
cable as a set of 3 wires, instead of a proper 3 wire cable.  The other 2 wires
in the actual 3 wire cable were used as if it was a 2 wire cable.

The real question is, why didn't they simply swap the switches (or the cable
ends), rewire the other end of the 2 cables, and eliminate the stupid
wire between the boxes?

-Mike

	Hypothetical conversation between PO**n (PO**n = the n'th PO) and
	electrician:

	PO**n:	     Light-group X is on-off; light-group Y is 3-way.  I want
		     it the other way around.  Move the cables.
	Electrician: OK.  The cables are draped all over the house. Gimme $9000.
	PO**n:       Do not move the cables.  Fiddle something.
	Electrician: OK.  I'll yank the red wire from the 3-wire, and bridge
		     to the...  Never mind.  Gimme $400.
	PO**n:	     Here's your $400.

    re: .171
    
    Not an electrician; the boxes had Sears pricetags on them.  None
    of the cables (or the individual wire) had cable clamps, they just
    went through the knockouts.  It was the doing of one of the PO**n's.

          
                          -< Im still aliiiive ->
    
     Just the other day My wife decided she did not like the bathroom
     mirror w/lights.  So I go down to the basement and shut off the
     power to the bathroom and kitchen.  I then unscrew the mirror and
     see the wires connecting to the lights..  After a few minutes of
     trying to figure out how to remove the rusted screws that held
     the wires and bracket on, I decided to cut the wire and be done
     with it.. WELLL I cut into the wire with wire cutters and it looked
     liked the fourth of july.  Later after I wiped myself, I went down
     to the basement again, and saw that the wire had been connected
    
    directly.....       I never told my wife!!!!!

	Re: .24

	Glad to hear that you're still alive.

	Any time I'm working with electrical stuff like this, I turn on the
<whatever> (wall light, something plugged into the outlet, etc., etc.) and
make my wife stand there and confirm that it actually went out when I hit the
breaker.  If for no other reason, it confirms that my wife knows what I'm
working on and doesn't walk by a room and say "gee, why are these lights on?
Let me turn them off..." while I'm downstairs turning off the wrong breaker.
My paranoia drives her batty sometimes (especially if she is busy with the
kids at the time), so I think I'll tell her about your story.

							-craig

    Doesn't always help....
    
    I fired up a clothes dryer a year or so ago, flipped breakers till it
    stopped spinning, and tried to cut the hard-wired connection to it with
    slip-joint pliers while holding firmly to the sheath of the BX cable.
    
    Couldn't let go for a minute, and then had some choice words for the
    electrician who didn't use a 220V breaker (or bolt the handles
    together)  Of course, _I_ should have realized that tripping one
    breaker on a 220V appliance wasn't quite enough....
    
    Willie

  Every electrician apprentice knows that (1) you kill the breakers and
  switches, and then (2) you assume the circuit is still hot. I wonder
  if there are other interesting things that they know and we don't?

  Naahhhh.

    re: last few
    
    that's why I use a voltmeter before and after turning off breaker
    while it's on, to make sure the meter works
    while it's off, to make sure it's off!
    
    I have a HEALTHY respect for 'trons...
    
    Fred

    re: .28
    
    That doesn't always work either.  Last year I had to open up an
    outlet box, so I checked with a meter to see that 1) it was on
    and 2) the meter worked; I turned off the breaker and checked
    with the meter to be sure the outlet was now dead...but I got
    a bad connection with the meter probes and the outlet was NOT
    dead even though the meter said it was.  I got through nearly all the
    rewiring with no problem, until at the end I just happened to 
    touch the wrong set of wires....

    
    re.24
    
    My bathroom mirror/light was wired the same as yours.  I could not
    believe it.  I thought an amature wired it.  No fuse in the line,
    no GFI and right over a sink!  If anyone had completed the circuit
    (with their body) between the outlet and the sink it would be like
    the Frankinstein movie.  I'm just glad nothing happened.  I'm
    wondering if this was common wiring pratice 30 or 40 years ago or
    part of a zero population growth plan?  Anyway glad your OK.
    
    Mark

re:-1

>	No fuse in the line, no GFI and right over a sink!  

I know this is crazy, but the code doesn're require GFI on lights over a sink,
only over a tub/shower and then only if they're within a certain number of feet
(therefore real high ceilings are exempt).  

-mark

If it's just a light, no GFI is required.  But if there's an outlet, as
it seems there was, then it is required.

			Steve

>If it's just a light, no GFI is required.  But if there's an outlet, as
>it seems there was, then it is required.

true, though lights and outlets are usually on different circuits...

-mark

    re precautions for working on circuits:
    
    What about rubber gloves?
    
    Dick

    RE. 31
    You are correct on the code.  There was an outlet, which I forgot to 
    mention and they were not on seperate circuits.
    
    Mark 

Issue #38 of Fine Homebuilding was their first Special Houses issue, and did 
not contain a Great Moments in Building History section.

But since I've gone to the trouble to move these so the reply numbers match the
issue numbers, I'm putting a placeholder here to maintain that.

Paul

    We had a problem with the dishwasher at the house we just bought. First
    of all we noticed that whenever we turned the thing on water would come
    pulsing out from the lower right hand corner of the door. I checked out
    the seal and it looked fine. I noticed later that one of the tentacles
    (that's what I call the things that squirt water) had fallen off. This
    caused the water to be directed directly at the seal every time the
    hole would come around and meet the seal. I put the tentacle back on
    and thought I was the hero and fixed the dishwasher. Well we finally
    had to break down and call the repair man because of the problem with
    the dishes not drying properly. While he was fixing the dish dryer he
    checked the whole thing out for us. He found that not only had the
    tentacle fallen off but the whole assembly would not move at all. He
    took it apart and found it to be clogged with **HAIR**. How that hair
    got there was a mystery to me until someone told me that some people
    are in the habit of cleaning hairbrushes in their dishwashers (yuck!).
    What really bothers me is the we ate off the dishes that came out of
    that dishwasher before it got fixed (double yuck!). 
    
    Steve B.
     

    re: .173

>   are in the habit of cleaning hairbrushes in their dishwashers (yuck!).
>   What really bothers me is the we ate off the dishes that came out of
>   that dishwasher before it got fixed (double yuck!). 

    While I'll agree that it doesn't sound very appetizing, when one
    considers the amount of hot water and caustic automatic dish washing
    detergent that they had been bombarded with, those were VERY CLEAN
    hairs.

    -Bob

    P.S. Talk about LAZY!

>   are in the habit of cleaning hairbrushes in their dishwashers (yuck!).

Maybe they washed their dog in it! 8-)

It's not that unusual.  It's often the only way to make sure they get
really clean.  I've seen this done more with combs than with brushes, though.

			Steve

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 40 Jun/Jul 1987 

"Please leave me in silence so I can finish the house plans," I said to my wife. 
She bristled.  The dog growled at me.

"I just want you to know that I took all the credit cards, and I'm running away
with the garbage man," she huffed.

"Whatever," I said, "but take the dog too, will you?"

Nothing could stop me.  I was going to build my own Alaskan house, come hell or
high water.  I didn't have long to wait for the hell.

Back then, my only prior building experience was an A-frame cabin.  But a house
is nothing more than a big cabin, right?  So I designed an A-frame house with
28-ft. long 6x8 beams.  About 50 of them.

To save money, I ordered my material from Anchorage.  From there it would be
shipped the 135 miles to my site on a 40-ft flatbed truck.  And sure enough.  A
few days later, there it was, 200 ft. away, on the road in front of my building
site.

"Where's your forklift?" the driver asked.

"I don't have a forklift," I replied, feeling stupid.  I looked up at the huge
load, then climbed up and tried to lift one end of a beam.  "Are these things
spiked together for shipping?" I asked.

"I can't get this thing any closer, and I'm not supposed to help unload.  What
do you want to do?" the driver asked.

"What do most people do?" I asked.

"Well, most people don't try to build their own house."

There was only one thing to do: I had him take the load to the nearest town (12
miles away); and with money and the pledging of my first-born child, I procured
two 16-ft. flatbed trucks.  I then bribed a forklift operator to unload the
beams from the big truck onto the two smaller trucks, reasoning that the smaller
trucks would be able to back into my driveway.  By this time I was exhausted and
a nervous wreck, but the fun was just beginning.

Back at the site, one of the trucks, a tilt-bed, quickly unloaded and left.  The
other became mired in the mud while turning around, so we had to call for help. 
Another truck arrived and pulled.  No luck.  More help was called.  A tractor
arrived and pulled both trucks out.  I had the driver move the truck as close to
the building site as he could, since I didn't want to move those beams more than
once.  It was about then that I noticed this truck wasn't a tilt-bed and would
have to be unloaded by hand.

The drivers sensed my plight and helped me unload.  There is something about
being on double-time wages that has a dramatic effect on one's ability to sense
a plight.  They broke out a case of beer to celebrate their windfall.  "Where'd
you get the beams?" one driver asked, between grunts and groans.

"Got a good deal on 'em in Anchorage," I said, gloating a little.

"Anchorage?  That's funny.  They log and mill these spruce beams right here. 
Heck, there's a mill only three miles from here."

I mumbled something about getting a REALLY good deal and walked away so the
drivers wouldn't hear me sobbing.

A week later, when the soreness from moving the beams had just about gone away,
the excavator arrived.  I showed him my plan.  "Gee," he said, "You're going to
have to get these beams out of the way."

"Say it isn't so!" I cried.  It's amazing how the sight of tears can move some
people.  With his help, we moved the beams, again.

It was about this time I decided that, short of a miracle, I couldn't erect my
A-frames.  I had nowhere near enough friends - both were "unvailable" every time
I called - and I couldn't affort a crane.  There was only one solution.  I sat
down and designed a ranch-style box with a truss roof, in one night.  Without
the beams.  To soften the loss, I added a luxury - a garage - and found a
contractor to build it.

A few days later he arrived to start excavating.  Looking at the site, he said,
"Those beams are right where I need to dig."  This time we threw them in a heap,
back in the woods.

By this time I had invested so much time, money and effort in the beams that I
was determined to make them a part of the house.  I decided to build pockets
below the top plates and put them in as false beams, just for show, after the
ceiling paneling was installed.  At least the house would have the rustic look I
wanted.

All went well until the day my son and I were installing one of the beams, about
a 200-pounder, in a bedroom.  It was almost in position.  "Your way, just a
hair," I said.

He lifted and pushed "his way."  The beam came out of the pocket on my end,
dropped 2 ft. to the top of my head, drove me to my knees, then continued its
destructive path to the floor, by way of my shoulder.  Too stunned even to say
any of the words that had come into my vocabulary since I'd started building the
house, I just knelt there.

It's too painful to tell about the trip to the hospital or the yells for help
down the empty halls until a nurse arrived and said, "You can't be hurt too
badly - you walked in."  And I'd prefer not to dwell on the troubles I had
finding someone to rewire the house, or the terror I felt while walking trusses
along the wall tops in the wind and rain, or the fear I felt the day the banker
inspected the house.  I'd rather not mention the time my wife and son left me or
the time my dog left me, and I especially want to avoid talking about when
things got bad.

Eventually the house was more or less finished, a monument to owner-builders
everywhere.  And the beams are a part of it - a little twisted, cracked and
mellowed perhaps, like the poor fool who dreamed them up in the first place.  I
survived, although people who knew me before say I don't look as tall now.

What happened to the rest of the beams?  Well, I gave some to a friend, on the
condition that I didn't have to help him load them.  I used six others in a
woodshed I built a couople of years ago.  And I cut one up a while back when I
needed kindling.  The wild roses are growing up around them now.  Say - could
YOU use some nice weathered beams?

    Here's my favorite:
    
    When we bought our 20 year old two years ago, every thing done by
    the previous owner (an older widow, who had the house custom
    built) was done professionally and with great care.  
    
    Due to a design error, the gutter from the garage drained directly
    across the front walk and, I assume, created a dangerous icy
    situation in winter.  To eliminate this problem, she hired someone
    to dig out a trench along the edge of the driveway along side a
    stone wall, and to install a pipe underground from the downspout
    to a drywell, which was located further down the driveway, just
    off the pavement.  
    
    Instead of repaving the trench, which was cut out in a very straight
    line parallel to and up against the stone wall, two by fours were 
    run on either side of the pipe, tied accross at several points to 
    create a box frame that came to ground level.  Then a two by ten by 
    16 feet plank was screwed and anchored into the framing, carefully 
    notched out to exactly fit the contours of the stone wall.  The plank 
    was painted flat black to match the driveway and was a work of art in 
    terms of the construction and fit, not to mention the time it must 
    of taken (a neighbor told me it was a two day project).  In addition, 
    where the downspout went into the ground, a piece of plywood was 
    anchored into the driveway and a piece of sheet metal, also painted 
    flat black, was very nicely fabricated to cover the opening. 
    
    Now, after all these years, the whole thing began to show signs
    of rot, not to mention it looked just plain stupid.  I let this
    *thing* exist for two years, always wondering why such detail
    and workmanship was spent on something that seemed to be the
    wrong way to solve a driveway patch.  One Friday night last 
    August, I had finally had enough.  I unscrewed the plank, and
    removed the framing.  Using sand to cover the pipe, and crushed 
    stone from the local DPW yard to renew the drywell (which appears 
    to have worked perfectly for all these years) I patched the trench 
    with 4 inches of Sakrete cold patch, tamped tightly.  Cold patch
    works great in non-vehicular traffic areas, and with a little 
    "glue" (sealer) along the seam, in a total of three hours and $26.
    from start to finish, I solved my "why did they EVER do that". 
    
    
    Frank  

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 42 Oct/Nov 1987 

Like most great ideas, the concept of our building a hot tub was born over a
couple of beers.  Last summer, in the dim recesses of the Thunderbird Lounge,
while drinking Happy Hour beer by braille, I thought I heard my friend Sal say,
"I've been thinking it would be nice to have a hot tub under that tree behind
my house."  A more sober man would have ignored any comment that Sal began with
"I've been thinking..."  A less reckless man would only have grunted
noncommittally, hoping the hot-tub illusion would fade, like so many other
fragments of insanity.  But I cannot count temperance or caution among my
virtues, so I answered, over the twang of country music, "Why don't we build
one?"

At that point, we still could have been saved.  A disinterested third party, if
one had been there then, would have reminded us of our inauspicious past record
of working together, of all our other projects awaiting completion.  Hadn't we
learned our limitations on the infamous "Laundry-room shelf and ventilation
duct" project, which we had hastily abandoned halfway through when we
discovered that Sal's garage-sale level was anything but?  Unfortunately, no
one else was there in the dark to remind us of that ignominiously sloping 2X4
framework waiting for us behind closed closet doors, so we continued our newest
reckless daydream.

"You think we could BUILD one?"

"No problem."

And so the great hot-tub concept fermented in our minds and began to take form. 
In minutes, cocktail napkins became preliminary blueprints: a tub under the fir
tree near the corner of the house and connected by a long narrow deck running
the length of the house.  A summer porch, with deck chairs and margaritas,
waiting for the sounds of night frogs, steam rising from hot bubbly water into
the crisp Oregon darkness, inviting, inviting... Already we were soaking.

The reverie continued over the next few weeks of planning with only minor
lapses as we faced such trivial details as how to build the tub.  I favored a
traditional staved tub, a design steeped in the early (ca 1968) history of
California tubbers, while Sal perversely insisted on a fiberglassed plywood
tub.  I was skeptical.  I recalled a kayak-building episode of my college 
years - the craft leaked horribly and the sticky fiberglass gave me a
not-then-fashionable punk hairdo that lasted better than a month.  Sal was
undeterred, claiming extensive knowledge in fiberglass theory and practice. 
Apparently his kayak didn't leak very much.  So I prefabricated a plywood box
in my shop, trucked the pieces over to Sal's, and assembled the tub in his
carport.  At that point, the tub looked like a form for a giant concrete pier
block.  Two-by-four whalers ringed and supported the sloped plywood sides.

Next came the fiberglass, and we were prepared.  Like great warriors girding
for battle, we had assembled our weapons: gallons of resin, hardener, acetone,
rolls of mat, an array of mixing containers, rollers, brushes, several
different cutting instruments, old clothes, gloves, rags, and a month's worth
of newspapers.  We worked as a team, with a precision that surgeons would envy. 
I mixed batches of resin and passed them to Sal down below.  Then, while he
brushed on resin, I cut sheets of mat to size.  We exchanged mat panels for the
empty resin can, and the sequence repeated, with a natural rythm dictated by
the hardening rate of the resin.  Oh, there were setbacks.  I discovered how a
"hot" mix can melt a plastic mixing dish.  And we lost one or two brushes when
the resin turned to rubber in the container.  (Sal's disembodied voice, echoing
from the bottiom of the tub, suggested a tad les hardener in the next batch.)

Near the end, the action picked up a little.  Accumulated drippings of resin
had turned the newspapers to flypaper, so the trip across the carport became a
two-step shuffle that recalled painful hours of my youth spent in Arthur
Murray's Dance Studios.  Meanwhile, deep within the bowels of the tub, Sal
battled mat that stuck more tenaciously to clothes and skin than to plywood. 
His hand would shoot up: "Knife!" and I would pass the knife, surgeon style. 
Occasionally, he would surface, gasping for air, bits of mat dangling.  At the
last, he called for reinforcements, and I joined him in the pungent depths as
we fought back the seething white mass.

Then it was over.  We had tamed the mat and lined the inside with Mylar film to
give the surface a smooth finish.  We stood back and laughed, impressed if not
with our skill, with our ability to survive.  We closely resembled two leghorn
chickens, completely coated with white fibers that looked for all the world
like feathers.

Work on the deck was not as hectic as fiberglassing but took more time.  We
split the work into three-hour segments, an interval that neatly fills the time
between breakfast and brunch, brunch and lunch, lunch and dinner, and dinner
and beer.  Our first estimates of time to complete any phase of the work were
nototiously inaccurate and always on the low side.  Our first three-hour job
was to set the 17 pier blocks that supported the deck and tub.  Sal dug holes
while I mixed concrete.  I had planned to use a half-sack of mix to set each
block, but an entire sack disappeared into the first hole.  We glanced at each
other with looks that can be learned only in the Laurel and Hardy school of
carpentry.  Then we fudged with washed rocks, dug smaller holes, and split this
job into two three-hour segments.

To set the beams, we leveled from both ends and then split the difference, a
foolproof method that eliminates tedious arguments about the true meaning of
"level."  As we assailed the joists and finally the decking, we picked up a
speed and rhythm that comes with the strong desire to be done with it.

Finally we were finished, suddenly it seemed, and a garden hose was filling the
tub.  The mechanical parts were patiently waiting.  Sal had scavenged an
ancient industrial hot-water heater, an even older monster circulating pump and
an ingenious filter, of his own design, that looked suspiciously like a
recycled five-gallon ice-cream bucket.  These components we had assembled into
a tight, compact system of pipes and valves that would have given Escher a case
of crossed eyes.  So hoping for the best, we flipped the switch, but the result
was anticlimatic.  The pump hummed but didn't pump, the filter didn't filter
and the heater didn't heat.  Not only that, I had to call Sal around behind the
tub.  He had to see for himself.  I just could not tell him.  It leaked.

I took off my clothes and jumped in the tub anyway, as a matter of principle,
but I didn't stay long; Oregon well water just is not the right temperature for
an extended soak.

Since then, Sal has replaced (in this order) the pump, the filter, and the
water heater.  We have since had some long soaks, contemplating life's foibles. 
The tub still leaks, but we are talking about liquid rubber coatings and other
unlikely schemes.  We figure that to finish up we have about three hours more
work.

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 43 Dec 1987/Jan 1988

The San Francisco Peninsula Area, where I do most of my remodeling and
construction, is considered by many to be one of the major psychotherapy
centers in the Post-Modern world.  Consequently I do a lot of work for
psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.  I had just completed a
bathroomn remodeling job for Dr. Pete, a local psychologist, and as I was
walking out the door he asked if I would build a new gate for his driveway.  I
declined politely, telling him that I had commitments for the next three
months, with several more months of work pending.

"You need to hire some help," Dr. Pete said.

"I would, but good help is so hard to find.  Not only that, but I'm pretty
finicky about the quality of work that goes out under my name," I told him.

"That's no problem.  I'll make you a deal," Dr. Pete offered.  "You advertise
for some help, and I'll interview and psychologically test the people who
apply.  That way I'll make sure you end up hiring someone who we're sure can
do the job for you.  In return all you have to do is fit my gate into your
schedule."

The next week, my ad in the local paper for a carpenter's helper produced
close to 200 responses.  Since English is the only language I am even modestly
fluent in, I was immediately forced to cut the list of applicants by 75%.

"Send the remaining 50 a copy of this Skills Inventory," advised Dr. Pete. 
"From those who send it back we'll find you the perfect helper."

Only two sent the inventory back.  Of those two, Dr. Pete recommended that I
hire Dan.

"Dan is your man," the good doctor assured me.  "He's smart.  He's athletic. 
He's had experience.  The worst that will happen is that he may lose a few of
your tools.  When can you start on my gate?"

Well, it turned out that Dan actually was a good man.  We finished Dr. Pete's
gate, did several small additions and even reshingled a few roofs together.  A
small assoprtment of hand tools - tapes, pliers, screwdrivers and the like -
did frequently "wander off" into Lost-and-Never-Found Land, but on the whole, I
was quite pleased with Dan's work.

I'd meant to tell Dr. Pete just that when one day I decided to send Dan out on
his own to start a new roofing job while I finished up the one we were on.

"Here's the address of the house we're going to do next," I told him.  "I want
you to go over there and begin tearing off the old cedar shakes that are there
now.  Do you know where this house is?"

Dan assured me that he did, and that there was no problem.  As he drove off I
realized that of course Dan would know where the house was - it was right
across the street from Dr. Pete's gate, which he had helped me with as his
first job.

At precisely noon, Dan returned full of smiles.  I came down off the roof to
join him for lunch, and he proudly announced:

"You're not going to believe this, but I've got almost the whole back of that
roof torn off.  I'm not going to be able to work much longer, though.  Those
black asphalt shingles are just too hot, and they all stick together..."

That evening after dinner, I telephoned the good Doctor.

"Dr. Pete, remember that guy you tested and told me to hire?"

"Yep."

"And remember how you told me that the worst I could expect would be for him to
lose a few of my tools?"

"Yep, I remember."

"Well, Pete, Dan has lost a few of myu tools, it's true.  He's also been a
pretty good helper.  So good in fact that I sent him out alone to start the
tear-off on my next roofing job."

"And?"  Dr. Pete could feel the other dropping shoe on its way.

"And he tore the shingles off the wrong house, Pete!"

For some reason this statement struck Dr. Pete as uncontrollably funny.  After
guffawing for about five minutes he came back on the line.

"Well, what are you going to do?" he squeezed out between intermittent
chuckles.

"I'm not sure," I replied.  "We both agree that people have to be responsible
for their mistakes.  Builds character, cleans karma, et cetera, et cetera. 
Right?"

"Right," Dr. Pete affirmed, chuckling just a little bit less.

"Well then, the question we should ask, Pete, is not what I am going to do, but
what you are going to do.  The roof Dan tore the shingles off of is on top of
your house!" 

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 44 Feb/Mar 1988

Every carpenter know how difficult small jobs can be.  You spend half your time
getting started, and the other half finishing up.  And in between there are
sure to be some unexpected aggravations to add a little spice.

Just the same, I have been in the business more than 15 years, and I've done
enough small jobs here and there that I sometimes believe that I can whip right
through them.

The small job in question was an aluminum triple-track storm window
installation last spring.  There was just one window, in the back bedroom,
replacing a window that had been damaged beyond repair by rambunctious
teenagers.  I really HAD to do it as a favor to a regular client.  So I went
ahead and ordered the window, hoping against hope that the order would get lost
by the lumberyard and not arrive until some slow spell the following autumn.

Alas, as luck would have it, the window came in a week early.  So I rushed down
in the middle of another job to whip it in so I could get back to more
productive work.  I'm a pro, right?  I unloaded exactly the tools I would need
for the job - my 3/8-in. drill, an extension cord, drill bits and a screw-gun
tip, a hammer, a caulking gun and butyl caulk - and proceeded to the back yard.

I then discovered that the window was a little too high to reach from the
ground, and my stepladder was still at the other job.  But not to worry.  I
just dashed back over there to fetch it.  Then I unpacked the window, drilled
holes around the perimeter, rearranged the screen clips for a good square fit,
and dry-installed the window to make sure there weren't any problems before I
smeared on the butyl.  I'm a pro, right?  And I know from previous sad
experiences just how much of a mess butyl caulking can make if you have to
disassemble things after it has been applied.

No problem, the window was a perfect fit.  Like I said, I am a pro.  So I
smeared on the butyl caulking quite liberally, knowing how important it was to
make a good seal on an old wood frame that was slightly uneven.  I put the
screw-gun tip into my drill, climbed the ladder, and wiggled the window into
position.  I pulled the packet of screws out of my pocket, and was all set to
drive in the first screw when I found, to my dismay, that this batch of screws
was NOT Phillips head.  Construction hardware is always Phillips head.  Isn't
it?

Of course, there was nary a screwdriver in sight, and there I was, on the
ladder, with no place to go but down.  That window was not going to stay put on
its own, not without any screws in it.  And naturally there is really no place
on a pre-caulked triple-track storm window that is both solid to grab  onto and
not pretty heavily smeared.  I had little choice in the matter, unfortunately,
so I climbed back down with the window, trailing fine threads of sticky rubber
across the siding, onto the glass, over the ladder and into my shirt pockets.

I fetched a slot-head screwdriver, and wished I had brought along some paint
thinner to help clean up the mess.  I grabbed the window and climbed the ladder
a second time, this time with goo on my hands, goo on the screws and goo on the
screwdriver.

It took ballet-like maneuvers to keep from spreading butyl over every square
inch of window, and I dropped a couple of screws in the process.  Since most
manufacturers supply only the exact number required, I had to rummage through
the tall weeds beneath the window each time one went down.  Just the same, I'm
a pro, and after a few short minutes the frame was on solid and square, with no
more mess than you would expect, considering the circumstances.

As a last professional gesture, I rubbed my hands clean in the weeds beneath
the window and tried each of the sashes and the screen for proper sliding
motion.  Then I noticed it:  Somehow the little guide at the top of the screen
had broken during delivery or during my trips up and down the ladder.  With
nothing to keep it in the track, the screen flopped around and jammed quite
easily.

But of course I am a pro, so there was nothing to worry about.  I certainly
didn't want to go through the bother of replacing the whole frame, so I put the
drill bit back on the 3/8-in. drill (I figured I could always clean off the
butyl mess later), drilled a small hole at the edge of the window, rummaged in
the weeds for one last fallen screw, and screwed it into the edge of the screen
frame in such a way that it would ride in the proper track.  I had to modify
the head slightly with a file, but after a little fiddling I got the window to
slide just about like new.  Reinstallation was a piece of cake.  I even managed
to remove most of the excess caulking from the sash and siding with a razor
scraper, which I wiped clean from time to time using a wad of leaves from the
weeds beneath the window.

"Well, so much for that one," I thought, and accidentally bumped the
screwdriver off the ladder as I came down for the final time.  As I rummaged
around for it, I began to notice something that had previously escaped my
attention.  Some of the weeds had three leaves, kind of shiny.  Kind of viny. 
With a sinking feeling, I realized that they were poison ivy.  Not all the
weeds, of course, but enough to do the job a few days later.

I never found that tool, but it's just as well.  With that much butyl smeared
on it, it would have taken ages to clean.  And who needs dirty tools?

Issue 45 was the second annual special houses edition, and did not include the
"Great Moments in Building History" column.

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 46 Apr/May 1988

Years ago, when I was a young apprentice carpenter working on a huge apartment
complex, it was my privilege to listen to an informal series of safety seminars
known as the lunch hour.  All the trades would gather in the parking lot on
sunny days, and after five minutes of sandwich examination and thermos
deployment, someone would usually tell a story with a life-and-death lesson.

I had discovered a friend early on, a roofer's helper named Don, who shared my
interest in staying alive, whole, and ten-fingered.  We were fascinated by the
stories of near-disfigurement and almost-death, and resolved between us to add
to our survival skills by shutting up during the noon meal, and listening well. 
He assured me that his own boss, a weathered man of sixty years whose gentle
smile seemed a permanent feature of his face, was a master at staying alive.

"Man, this old guy's cheated death a hundred times," Don marveled.  "Wait'll he
tells some of his stories, you'll see."

One day, the topic of the seminar concerned falls from high places.  It was
harrowing to hear: falls from scaffolds onto concrete sidewalks (minor
abrasions), falls from twenty-foot extension ladders (broken bones), and what
seemed to be the topper, falls from high-rise buildings downtown - no
survivors.

During the lull caused by this last, the siding crew foreman casually asked
Don's boss; "Hey, Elmo, what's your record for distance?"

Don raised an eyebrow and nodded slightly.

"Down or up?" Elmo asked innocently, pouring another cup from his battered
steel bottle.  Sandwiches stopped in mid-air, and there were a few chuckles. 
Apparently some knew what was coming.

"Oh, up, I guess," said the sider. "Anyone can fall down, but I might have
known you'd do it different."

"Thirty feet," Elmo said, smiling as he sipped.  "Slid up a barn roof, over in
Blodgett."

No one said a thing.  He had our full attention.  And he began the tale:

"Had this coll-itch boy working with me - musta been summer '68 - out on the
Johnson place.  You know it?  That big old barn of his, sixty square, I think.

"Set up the scaffolds mostly by myself.  That boy was useless, when it came to
heights, and I could see he was thinking about the top end of that old gambrel. 
But I'll say this - he didn't quit on me.  Eager to please, too, but just
didn't think things through.

"I had him stocking the scaffold with a ladder, hauling up the felt and
shingles.  He got all shaky when he walked on the scaffold; we were only about
fifteen feet up, but he was just about duck-walking on those boards.  Made up
for lost time getting down the ladder, though, so it worked out.

"They'd back-ordered most of my felt, but I had enough to run my courses about
ten high, and they told me to come in at noon and pick up some more.  They'd
bring the rest out when it came in on the truck, they said.  I'd send the
youngster, so he could spend most if the first day on the ground.  He loved
that old terra firma, he did.  Geology major, I think he was.

"I set up the jacks, and he handed me up the boards, and that's when I made my
first mistake.  Almost my last one.  I threw my safety line over the top, and
had him run around to the other side and tie it off.  I thought he'd tie it to
the shingle pallet.

"He came back, and I had him get up on the scaffold and stock the jacks from
there.  I was working alone, the line tied to my workbelt, and this kid was
making the whole scaffold shake with his knees, so when he finished, I told him
to go in and get us some more felt.  He shot down the ladder, went around to
the other side, and got in the truck.  Wasn't sure I'd see him again.

"I heard him take off.  The line went tight and I started sliding up that roof. 
He'd tied the line to the bumper of the truck!  I tried to grab the shoulder of
the gambrel, but missed it.  I was scooting toward the peak at a real good
clip, and said to myself, 'Well Elmo, it's been fun.'

"Got within two feet of the top when the line went slack, so I grabbed on to
keep from rolling back down.  Nice view.  Good thing for me he'd remembered the
line, and I guess he was going to lower me back down to the jacks, because he
kept backing up.  He got out, looked up to see if he'd killed me.  And there I
was, straddling the peak like I was riding a big horse."

"Did you shoot him or fire him?" the sider asked.

"Naw, I reckon I would have fired him if he'd killed me, but since he didn't, I
just chewed him a little.  But he had spunk, and he was no quitter.  Came to
work the next day, and even got to where he could lay shingles out in the
field.  But I never did get him near the edges.  He wanted to live too bad."

He turned to Don.  "How's your brother doing these days?"

And Don finished the story.  "Just fine.  He's out in Montana, working in the
copper mines."

Reprinted without permission from "Great Moments in Building History", Fine
Homebuilding vol 47 Jun/Jul 1988

A while back I saw an advertisement in the classifieds that read, "For sale,
country cottage in a city setting."  I called the real estate salesman for
directions and was told that I could look, but not disturb the current owner as
he was an old man.  By the time I finally found the place it had gotten dark,
and all I could see was the silhouette of the three-room building and the old
fellow sitting inside, watching TV.  I was sure that the house would be just
right for me.  After all, I was in my first year of the union's Carpenter's
Apprenticeship Program and didn't want to take on more than I could handle.  I
called the salesman that evening and set up an appointment to see the house
during the light of the following day.  My father and I met with the salesman
at his office before going to see the house.  He explained that he wanted us to
deal directly with him because the old man wasn't as nimble as he used to be
and couldn't show us around the property.  He added that the house hadn't
changed much since he had delivered papers there as a boy, and the owner was
old even then.

The daylight visit was a sobering experience.  The advertisement had even taken
liberties with the euphemism, country cottage.  The house was "country" because
the property was landlocked and was well away from any paved road.  It was
dubbed "cottage" because that sounded so much better in print than "shack" or
"nightmare."  The place was out of level, out of plumb, out of square, full of
holes and had no central heat.  A bathroom had obviously appeared overnight
where the porch used to be, and the yard was plowed up where I figured the
septic system had just been installed to complete the newly acquired plumbing
arrangements.

After adding up the pluses and minuses, my father and I agreed that I would be
getting exactly what I was paying for and not a penny more, and we closed the
deal.

Winter came before we could do much more than discover how much less I had
gotten than I paid for.  Everything that was behind a wall, under a floor or
above a ceiling needed to be completely redone.  The totally unacceptable
bathroom-on-the-back-porch business would also have to go.

By spring, my plans were becoming more ambitious and a four-room addition was
in the works.  Since one of the new rooms was to be a bathroom, I attempted to
locate the septic tank.  I found the 4-in. waste line where it left the house
and followed it to an abrupt end somewhere between a grease trap and a couple
of buckets-full of gravel.  Thinking there must be some mistake, I dug up an
area 10 ft. in diameter to try to find the end of this pitiful arrangement.  I
figured that maybe I was digging in the wrong place, but before I further
riddled my yard with craters, I decided to check with the real estate man.

One evening later, my father and I were paid a visit by the real estate man and
his old pal.  The four of us stood around the hole in the ground I had dug as
though there were something to see.  I pointed out the definite lack of
underground equipment and demanded to know the whereabouts of the septic tank.
The real estate man listened, looked into the empty hole and said to the old
man, "Now Bobby, you told me that a new septic system had just been put in
here, and I relayed that information to this gentleman, but I can't see it
either.  What do you have to say for yourself?"  The old man leaned on his
cane, peered over the edge of the excavation and said, "I can't imagine who
would want to steal such a thing."

The extent of my efforts at reconstructing the country cottage had made me
aware of the old man's ways, but I sure felt it was hard to come up with an
argument against logic like that.

    Well the title almost fits the bill.  It could "qualify" for the
    dumbest but I've done worse...
    
    A couple weeks ago the circulator pump motor fried on my FHW system. 
    No problem, the thing was pretty old anyway.  Had Bob from "Chair City
    Oil" in Gardner, my town, come and replace the thing.  Could have
    easily done it myself but the system needed the air purged and I had
    some other questions while he was there.
    
    Anyway, after he replaced the motor I had said that the pressure and
    temp were pretty high (which was of course because no water was
    flowing but the burner was still kicking in and boiling the water) and 
    after Bob purged the system of air he adjusted the "aquastat" thingie to 
    lower the high and low limit of the boiler water.
    
    With this done he said I might have to adjust the domestic water to be
    a little hotter and to see how it felt (tankless system b.t.w.)
    Well I'd done this a couple times before and it's just a matter of
    turning this little valve to let more or less cold water to mix with
    the hot water and thus adjust the domestic hot water temp.
    
    Easy right?  Well I figured that the most effecient way to do it was to
    shut the cold off completely (or as much as possible) and re-adjust the
    aquastat myself.
    
    Thats where the fun started.
    
    See I forgot which way to turn that mixing valve.  So I turned it to
    the right until it stopped and had the wife check the hot water.  She 
    said after a while it seemed too cold so it must go completely locked
    the other way right?
    
    Well no one told me the valve had NO stop on the loosening direction and
    low and behold a matter of seconds later I was screeming for my wife,
    looking like the kid who put his finger in the dam to stop the leak, 
    and frantically looking for that damn small valve stem to put back into 
    the 30lbs of pressurized hot water valve that was proceding to flood my 
    immediate surroundings, looking like old faithfull, soaking the ceiling
    and all the while I'm trying to hold anything I can find on the
    opening.
    
    Well probably 20 gallons of water later, a half flooded basement, a
    wife with an attitude now (of course I tried to blame "some" part of
    this escapade on _her_ fault),  a now "in place" valve, and still no
    idea on how to have turned off the water from it's force the problem 
    was left with cleaning up the mess.
    
    Good thing I had a wet/dry Shopvac!
    
    (p.s.  Made up with the wife after I took a nice hot shower)
    ;-)
    
    Steve
    

    
    Your lucky you didn't get burned from the hot water.
    
    If I'm not mistaking my mixing valve does have stop(s) on it
    and can only turn 180 degrees counter clockwise or 180 degrees
    clockwise from the middle setting.
    

    The dumbest thing I ever did was this. I bought a used VW rabbit. This
    was a "new" car for us and my first foreign one. Well I wanted to give
    it the once over. Check brake fluid battery etc. I also wanted to top
    off the gear oil in the transmission. So I looked and looked and
    looked. I thought for sure I had found it. It must be this little thing
    with the plastic plug. Poor in a half a quart not really knowing much
    was enough (stupid foreign car doesn't use the spill out what doesn't
    fit technique). Get in the car and can't make it up a 1 degree incline.
    Ut oh did I do what I think I did. I poored the oil into the timing
    whole (which is where the clutch is !!!). Talk about a screaming wife !!!
    The dealer also had a funny grin on his face too.

    
    Mine happened last month.  In drywalling the basement I drywalled over
    the window.  Didn't notice until the Senior Supervising Drywaller (the
    Missus) came down to say that "lunch was ready and why has it gone so
    dim in here...."
    
    What I did was use a black poly vapour barrier over the whole wall,
    intending to cut out the window section once I'd cut the board to size.
    Of course, I forgot to do it.  Thank god for drywall screws.
    
    C.

    Not the dumbest thing I've ever done but about the dumbest thing I've
    ever heard.  My sister was telling me over the weekend about a friend
    of hers having new carpet put in.  Her friend ran an extention cord
    from one side of the room to the other and told the carpet installer
    she wanted him to carpet over the extention cord.  He refused and she
    was furious (still is even though many people explained why you can't
    do that!).  Better mad than to have your house burn to the ground.
    
    Marie

    So Marie, what about the time when you had that old green
    car and.......  :)
    
    JD
    

    GRRRrrrrrr.....JD.... this is no place to talk about my car(s).
    For those of you who don't know what he's talking about...I'm world
    renound for my "dumb" luck with cars...or should I say lack of luck.
    
    Marie

  Our garbage disposal stopped working last week and being marginally
handicapable around the house I whip out the trusty fix-it book...
  "If your disposal is humming but not running it's jammed. ..."
  Well, ya, it was humming for a while but then went silent. Neurons click and
off to the next problem topic.
  "If it's silent, reset the circuit breaker on the disposal."
  Done. But I'm expecting no success and am rewarded as the breaker trips
again. No big deal. On to the next section in the Mr. Clutz Homeowner book.
  "Your flywheel may be jammed, try freeing it with a broom handle."
  Okay. No sweat. I even have an official broom in the kitchen. But problem;
the cabinets are in the way and I can't get the broom into the disposal.
Doesn't almost everyone have cupboards over their sink? Glad to know these
books are well tested. Not to be deterred, I return with a foot-long 1/2-inch
ratchet extension and a hammer. Bang-bang-pound-pound-pound. No joy. Back to
the book to read the next section. This one I understand immediately:
  "Call someone who knows what they're doing."
  Well, it's Thursday night and I live in NH and work in Mass. Don't want to
waste a day at home if I don't have to. Have a Dr.'s appointment the following
Tuesday so I'll make the appointment then.... Day's pass and pieces of food
occassionally fall into the disposal. It starts to smell really bad in there.
I dip my hand in from time to time to pull stuff out. Yecch.
  Tuesday finally arrives. Mr. I-know-what-I'm-doing shows up right on time.
He heads to the kitchen and hits the switch. Nothing. I happily tell him the
flywheel's probably jammed and I couldn't free it (thus demonstrating I think I
know a little bit about what's going on). He says "yup". At this point I'm
wondering wether it'll end up being cheaper just getting a new disposal than
having him tear apart and fix this 10-year-old model.
  So he kneels down, reaches under the sink, grabs an Allen wrench that's been
sitting under there since the house was built in '83, sticks it in the matching
slot at the bottom of the disposal and truns it twice. Gurgle gurgle swoosh.
Hits the switch and the disposal cranks up like a charm. Total repair time was
about, oh, 10 seconds (might have been less but this makes the math easier).
Nothing like knowing that it was that easy and the tool I needed to do the job
had been sitting next to the disposal for a decade.
  Given the cost of having him come out to the house and the time it took him,
he's rate was $1800 an hour. At those prices I'm glad I only paid for 10
seconds work ;-).

Trace_who's_seriously_considering_a_better_Fix-It-For_Novitiates_book

Ya, but.......

You paid for 	1) the cost of the repair person driving out to and back from 
		   your house
			- Amortize the cost of the car, insurance, 
			  depreciation, gas, maintenence, etc

		2) the repair person's salary/income
			- Take YOUR salary and multiply by 3 for a rough 
			  guestimate of what he needs to charge to make a 
			  decent salary plus benefits.
	
and if that alone does not justify the cost, then look at it this way.  If you 
purchase a new disposal every time the one you have stops, that can be 
expensive.  You just paid for some education that you may be able to apply 
later.  I will willingly pay an "expert" to do something I have never before 
done; I watch and learn.

Personally, I hate labor saving appliances that can break down every 10 years 
or so.  We do not have a garbage disposal.  :-)

Dave

	It wasn't dumb. Just think how much you saved ME, when this
	eventually happens in my house!

	Roy

Or perhaps you'd have felt better if he gave you an itemized bill:

	For finding Allen wrench, fitting it in slot,
	and turning twice:  10 seconds @ $40/her:	$00.11

	For knowing to find Allen wrench, to fit it
	in slot, and to turn it twice:			$xx.xx
							------

	Total						$yy.yy

    
       Thanks for sharing this information. I'm sure it will help
    someone down the road.
    
             Mark

Always wondered what happened to the lint in washers that don't have a lint
filter. Pump got clogged and wouldn't drain. This time he was only $1000/hr
'cause he had to get the washer tipped on its edge before he spun the pump by
hand. That was my first $50 slice of humble pie. Same guy both times. At least
my dog doesn't bark at him any more. :-)

But man, I'm gonna be ready when the dryer goes. There just aren't that many
parts in it! In the mean time, sure wish the guy for the solar heating system
would return my calls...

						Trace

    Trace, try and locate all the owners manuals for those appliances.  It
    might save you a future call.

    >...sure wish the guy for the solar heating system would return my
    > calls...
    
    Carefull. If the sun comes out he could send you a BIG bill!
    
    "...well, I had to have it shipped 93,000,000 miles."
    
    Edd

    Trace
    Look at it as being a very cheep education..:)  The next
    time you Save $1800 bucks!!!!
    
    JD

Owner's manuals usually don't get more technical than "is it plugged in?"
I've done well with manufacturer's 800 numbers and with my friendly local
appliance parts place.

    re -.1
    Owner's manuals are only as useful as you know how to use them. Two
    cases in point:
    
    1. My house came with a whole-house fan. The fan stopped working, so I
    called Sears, the fan's mfr to see if there was a record by serial
    number for this unit. Since the fan had a 5-year warrantee, I wanted to
    take advantage of that. Of course, there was no record. I said to the
    parts/service person, what is the publication date of the microfice of
    the owner's manual. He told a date within 5 years. I said, "If the
    owner's manual publication date is within 5 years, the fan must also be
    within 5 years." I got a warrantee service call.
    
    2. Also Sears, I replaced some blades on my el-cheapo snow thrower. Of
    course, the assemby fell apart when I started  it up. Trip to the
    service center. I claimed the material was faulty or the instructions
    in the owner's manual were incorrect. They wanted to charge me $250 to
    fix it. I said, "Since the replacement procedure is in the owner's
    manual, not the service manual, this is a repair the owner is supposed
    to be able to do." We reached agreement on $100.
    
    Owner's manuals are useful for what they contain. The true trick is how
    to use them.
    
    

    
    re .43
    
    I had the same problem - about 25 times over the course of six months.
    I knew about the allen wrench solution and thought I had the 
    !#$!#$ thing beat :-)  However, if it keeps happening, it's a sure
    sign that it will eventually seize up.  If you plan on using it 
    until it dies and then replacing it, you're all set - just keep the
    allen wrench handy.  If you're like me and A) shouldn't be using it
    because I have a septic system and/or B) can't/won't spend the $$ for
    a new one, I wish I had known this would have been a degenerative
    problem.  Had I known, I would have only used the disposal to 
    clean out the drain when miscellaneous garbage fell in, rather than
    using it all the time until it croaked.  

           
    .55
    
    What's happened with mine (ISE Badger) is that the allen wrenches can't
    turn the rotor without bending or stripping.  However, inside the
    throat is a large nut that holds the rotor on the motor shaft. it's
    easy to reach this with a socket extension.  Just give it a turn in the
    direction of rotation (clockwise) and it will free up easily.  There's
    a risk of loosening the nut if you turn it anticlockwise, but not much
    of a risk with mine as the nut is corroded on to the shaft.  It's been
    like this for about 18 months now, and needs the "fix" every few
    months.
    
    The original noter didn't realise how close he was to a solution with
    that socket extension.....
    
    Colin
    

    
    Wow !  You mean I might be able to fake it into a few more 
    clean-out-the-miscellaneous-gunk runs!  Could you elaborate a bit
    as to just how you do this - i.e. what do you mean by 'throat'
    I know just enough home plumbing to be dangerous ;-)
    
    Adrienne
    

    Look down into the disposal.  You may need a flash light.  Most
    disposals have a large hex nut attaching the spinner assembly to the
    motor.  Go get a socket drive, an extension and an appropriately sized
    socket....... 
    
    Charlie

    .........And make sure the power is *OFF*.

    Turn it off at the breaker (or pull the fuse)!

        Reading the last two notes reminded me of something stupid I've done. 
    Just to give you a teaser, I have a BSEE - my first year out of school
    found me in a production facility - the electricians affectionately
    named me Sparky.  :-)

    
    We had a JC Penny microwave oven which had a single fuse inside its
    cabinet.  You had to pull 4 screws and pry the cabinet back a bit to
    reach it.  Apparently, the fuse was 15 amps and the microwave pulled
    about 13, every 6 months it would blow the fuse.  Hey, even an
    electrical engineer can change a fuse, right?

    This was the second time I had done it, that is, change the fuse, so I
    was careless.  Out came the 4 screws, pull the cover back, there it is.
    Reach in with the screw driver to flip it out....
    

    Pop! Flash! Sizzle!

    
    "Charles? What was that funny noise?"
    "Nothing Deb, I'll have it working shortly."

    Charles, red faced and shaking, pulls the plug from the wall and THEN
    removes the fuse.

    Charlie

    p.s. - I know God exists and He cares for me.  Its the only reason I
    can give that explains my continued existence.

Here's one I ran across - I think he'll win the award:

Article 3446 of alt.home.repair:
Newsgroups: alt.home.repair
Path: zk2nws.zko.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!depot.mro.dec.com!pa.dec.com!news1.digital.com!decwrl!genmagic!sgigate.sgi.com!spool.mu.edu!torn!nott!cunews!wabakimi!dprice
From: dprice@chat.carleton.ca (Dennis Price)
Subject: Getting around building code
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: wabakimi.carleton.ca
Message-ID: <DG7AC4.FrM@cunews.carleton.ca>
Sender: news@cunews.carleton.ca (News Administrator)
Organization: Carleton University
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Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 21:28:52 GMT
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	I own some land with an old, vacant house on it which I want
to demolish. I intend to build another house in its place within the
next two years. However, local building codes, etc. state that I would
have to pay for a survey and buy a slew of permits between the
demolition of the old house and putting the new house up. Therefore,
to get around this problem, I am thinking about "accidentally" blowing
my house up by severing a gas line.
	Does anybody have any clue about how far the rubble will
travel. This is safer than it sounds, as my nearest neighbour is 9
miles away (I own several thousand acres). I don't want to use
dynamite as it looks to obvious. Does anybody else have any
suggestions on better ways?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis Price
Carleton University
Email address: dprice@chat.carleton.ca

The dumbest thing we did was to not call in professionals to tackle this job!


The installation of the fiberglass tub surround this weekend was a nightmare.
Steve had a friend of his (Don) come over to help, he used to own a dry wall
business. He brought his brother with him who also does drywalling.  We had all
the tiles ripped down by the time they came, and the wall behind it was all wet
and mildewy and rotten. EWWWWWW!!!  They told us they could do the job that
afternoon, we had only planned on having Don *help* us, but we agreed to pay
his brother since it was more than we could handle. They did a good job on the
drywalling except they didn't strap the studs behind and that meant the wall 
was not out as far as it was before, where it meets the tub.  There was about
an inch gap!  Don's brother (Guy) says "Oh, you can fill it in with caulk".
Fill in an inch with caulk?  Then they go to put the fiberglass up, bending
it in mid air to cut it, crinkling it in the process.  They glue it up around 
the window without trying it first to see if it needs trimming.  It does, they
pull it back and try to trim it on the wall...ripping three corners as they go.
The next piece they put on they cut off 6" to make it fit, not checking the
remaining piece (which is smaller).  Naturally when it comes to putting the
last piece up they are short 2" because they used the wrong piece!  There
were big bubbles in the wall at this point, which cannot be smoothed out
because the fiberglass is a little too tight and won't lay flat.  Next day 
they buy two more pieces for the wall, at our expense of course because these
are only friends that are helping. They don't get fiberglass, they get
tileboard which is cheaper... I went to my sister's the second day and left
Steve in charge, so I wasn't there to tell them that's not what I want up.
They finish up and tell Steve it looks like a professional job.  There are gaps
around the window and nothing's square.  They didn't caulk before they put the
board up.  The window moulding is all chopped up and doesn't meet at the
corners, I'm talking 1/2"gaps...their solution??? Caulk!!!  The plumbing won't
fit through the holes they cut far enough to put the fixtures back on, the
holes are too small.  This is alot harder to cut after the fact.  They ruined
the ceiling and now we need to redo that.  They cut my new linoleum floor with
one of their saws... The corner moulding they put up is outside moulding
instead of inside moulding and the edges stick way out.  Back to Home Depot
to get more supplies, all new moulding...lots of work still be done.  The worst
part is I think I hear a little drip behind the wall every now and then.
ARGGGHHHH!!!!!!!


Laura

> afternoon, we had only planned on having Don *help* us, but we agreed to pay
> his brother since it was more than we could handle. They did a good job on the

    I hope you didn't actually *PAY* these butchers after all of this.
    In fact, I'd be looking into either small claims court and/or a
    lawyer at this point, SERIOUSLY!

    Charly

    I guess that's why they USED to own a drywall business. I empathize
    with your situation - having friends and relatives `help' you doesn't
    save you anything sometimes.

	Actually I did pay the brother...I wasn't worth what he charged us to
	lose a friendship over.  We won't/can't sue...we didn't really hire
	them, had no agreement or anything.  We'll just chalk it up to
	experience and swallow our losses.

	Laura

>     I guess that's why they USED to own a drywall business. I empathize
>     with your situation - having friends and relatives `help' you doesn't
>     save you anything sometimes.

	And drywallers only put up drywall.  They don't do the framing
	(the furring out of the wall that was needed would of been done
	by a carpenter).  Drywallers don't even mud/tape the joints,
	that's a different business (though some drywallers are in
	both bussiness)

	The tub surrond I believe is usually installed by the plumber??

	I figured basic principals such as measuring and cutting would
	be easy to relate from one skill to the next, I know I have no problem
	doing this when I do crafts!  Guess they figured the same thing, it just
	didn't work out that way!

> 	Actually I did pay the brother...I wasn't worth what he charged us to
>	lose a friendship over.  

    "Friendship" ? They ruin your new flooring, ruin your new tub
    surround, cause you to go out and buy addition materials that they
    damaged, hide leaking pipes behind the wall where they can cause
    additional and EXPEN$IVE damage to your house, do a POOR quality
    job, they don't offer to fix what they've done or reimburse you
    for the damage that they caused AND THEY STILL WANT TO BE PAID???

    And your worried about keeping him as a friend?

    I'm speechless.

    Charly

>    "Friendship" ? They ruin your new flooring, ruin your new tub
>    surround, cause you to go out and buy addition materials that they
>    damaged, hide leaking pipes behind the wall where they can cause
>    additional and EXPEN$IVE damage to your house, do a POOR quality
>    job, they don't offer to fix what they've done or reimburse you
>    for the damage that they caused AND THEY STILL WANT TO BE PAID???



The brother of the friend was the one that did most of the damage.  I feel it
was our fault that we didn't specifically ask if they had done the fiberglass
portion.  They really tried, and as I said they only came to help.  It was
just a comedy of errors.   We did not pay the friend anything, just his
brother.  He has been and is a good friend.

Laura
   

    When building my father garage I actualy did 2 of the dumbest things
    I ever did.  While putting the plywood on the roof I tide back the 
    blade guard open on my circular saw and set it down on the blade 
    when it was still turning. After picking up the pieces off the ground
    and buying a new one I went back to the roof job.  Instead of getting
    help to put more plywood up I took up a sheet by myself up the latter.
    As I go to the roof a gust of wind blew me and the latter over.  It  
    hurt.  My folks still ask me if I want to go back up on there roof,
    they need another good laugh.
    
    Gary

    	Gee, my list of dumb things is virtually endless! Hey, at least I
    try once in a while, but it's probably part of the reason my ex-wife
    used to call me Mr. Make-it-worse. When I would work on something and
    then, therefore, have to bring in a professional to fix whatever I did,
    even they would often be puzzled by the additional complexity I would
    have introduced. I guess that says something...but I don't know what.
    	Two stupid things immediately came to mind when I read .-1. I was
    remembering the time I was putting Christmas lights up on the house
    around the trim with a staple gun. I waited too late in the season, and
    there was a nice coat of snow and ice on the ground. Of course, I
    needed a ladder to do the work, and with all the shrubs out front, I
    had to put the ladder at a nice 45 degree angle to the house to get
    over the bushes....Yup, a 45 degree angle sitting firmly on the ice!
    So I'm at the top of the ladder with my lights and staple gun, working
    away, when I thought it peculiar how the house seemed to be whizzing
    right by me! Of course, I was only thinking this for a second or two
    until I crashed into the ground, landing on top of the ladder which had
    slid away from the house. I got banged up pretty good, but I survived.
    Now I just throw the lights on those damn bushes.
    	I was remembering a tree at my old house. It wasn't that big
    around..I could get my arms around it pretty easily, but it was very
    tall and partially dead. It sat next to my driveway and on the edge of
    my street which was pretty busy. Branches would fall on my car in the
    driveway sometimes. When it became clear the tree wasn't going to
    recover, I decided to take it down...myself...The first stupid thing I
    did was try to trim the tree a little first, up on a ladder with a
    chain saw in one hand. I think it was the horrified looks of passersby
    that clued me in that this wasn't such a great idea. So before I lopped
    off one of my own limbs, I decided to punt the limbing and just take
    the tree down. I had a little experience doing this, having taken down
    a few small trees before. So I was confident I could drop it where I
    wanted with virtually no room for error...But just in case, I decided
    to move the cars out of the driveway and park them on the street behind
    me and in front of the house. I proceeded to notch the tree and cut it
    from behind, but the tree had other ideas about where it wanted to
    fall, and it came back towards me, clamping down on the chain saw and
    leaning towards the street (and my cars), with lots of cars going by on
    the street. I let go of the chain saw and was trying to hold up the
    tree to prevent it from falling...Yeah..right! I spotted and neighbor
    and screamed for help. He ran over, and the two of us managed to push
    the tree in the direction I originally wanted it to fall.
    	I could go on, but I wouldn't want you all to think I'm some sort
    of idiot! Ah ha ha ha!

    Many years ago my wife and I lived in a middle apartment of a converted
    single family home.  The bathroom had a drip so I figuired what the
    heck I could change a simple gasket.  I got out my trusty tools and
    looked under the sink.  It had the strangest looking shut off valves,
    no handles just these big nuts.  I grabbed the right one with my pipe
    wrench, gave it a quick twist and ripped the pipe right of the sink. 
    Instant pandimonium.  Yelling to my wife to watch the squirting pipe I
    ran down the cellar.  Oh my word there were millions of cutoff valves. 
    I started turning them on and off, my wife yelling screaming how much
    water was flowing.  Finally I shut off the right one.  We call a
    plumber he shows up 1 hour later and starts fixing the pipe.  While we
    are sitting in our living room and my wife is sitting there snickering
    and laughing behind her hands, she suddenly sits straight up and points
    to the radiators.  Sure enough out of the steam valve water is
    squirting.  In fact all of the radiators are squirting.  The plumber
    comes out, takes one look and bolts down the celler.  He walks up to
    the one valve I did not close all the way and shuts it off.  He twists
    open a valve and water gushes out of the pipe.  He let it drain for 15
    minutes and after that calmly tells me it probably was squirting out
    the third floor radiators too.  Needless to say one gasket later and a
    bill that was quite ridiculous he left.  To this day, if my pipe wrench
    comes out of my tool box, my wife runs to the phone and calls a
    plumber.     
    
    I still hear about the time I fixed the gasket.  Sigh.....

    
    >	Gee, my list of dumb things is virtually endless! Hey, at least I
    >try once in a while, but it's probably part of the reason my ex-wife
    >used to call me Mr. Make-it-worse. When I would work on something and
    
    My mom bought my Grandpa a wonderful cap for Christmas last year.  It
    says, "If it ain't broke, I ain't worked on it yet."  I want one :-)
    
    Actually, I have managed to avoid doing really dumb stuff since I got
    married.  If I don't know exactly and precisely what I'm doing, I let
    my husband screw it up instead >;-}
    
    						/Rita
    
    

    The dumbest thing I've ever done is believe any of the woodworking 
    or home work advice (or any other advice) I've read in any of the
    Digital NOTES conferences.
    
    :-)

    
    You tried to buy an air shredder, didn't you, Will...
    
    JP

    No...he BOUGHT an air shredder and can't figure out how to set the
    automatic timer.  It keeps blinking... 12:00 ... 12:00 ... 12:00