For the past three months I have been trying to fix a leak in the roof of my house. Well it is really much bigger than that because I can't just fix the leak, I have to fix all the problems that the leak caused as well as all the things I decided to fix(upgrade) while I had the opportunity. It turns out that what had happened was when the roof on the house that I am now occupying was last replaced the roofer was not well versed in the art of flashing. Now I believe that once someone learns about roofing and what it entails they see that flashing is the most important part. Flashing is really the art of roofing. I think most anyone, in an afternoon, could get asphalt shingles up on a roof, but figuring out the flashing is where the money is. So now that you know my stance on flashing and the flashing arts I will continue.
When water runs into your house through a hole in the roof, the water has to go somewhere. It turns out if you get a ring on your ceiling you are lucky because you know your roof is leaking. I received no such indicator from my leaking roof. The flashing around the sewer vent stacks was letting water run down into the attic and it would continue to run down the pipe into the walls. I had not one but two of these leaks on separate pipes in the same room. What tipped me off was one day I walked through the back room of my house and stepped on a wet spot. I figured I had just spilled some water and forgotten. Many hours later when I stepped on the same wet spot I figured something more serious was happening.
Into the attic I went, my gloves on and flashlight in hand. I suspected the vent pipe and had a look around the pipe. Pulling back the blown insulation I saw the top plate of the wall seemed in poor condition. When I pushed on the blackened wood and my finger went through it like paper I knew it had to come out. Back downstairs I got my crowbar and a hammer and began taking down the lovely wood paneling that was installed in the house in the 1970s. With the wall sans panelling I knew what I had to do. The top plate of the wall was rotten through both 2x4s as well as the 2x6 at the top used to fasten the ceiling to. It would all have to be replaced. What was going to really make this interesting is this is the wall that holds half of my kitchen cabinets up on the other side. That meant out with all the dishes, I did not want the wall to somehow fall over when I ripped the top plate off of the wall.
Another problem is the electrical wiring that was running down to my kitchen outlets and light switches would have to be removed and re-installed. I figured "Hey, I not completely stupid I should be able to pull these wires out and put them back no problem." To help with this task I also labeled all the wires and then drew some diagrams of the layout, this helped but not as much as I would have liked. With the wires out the top plate could be pried off. The top 2x6 was actually many small 2 foot sections and those came off easy. The top most 2x4 also pried off fairly easily using a crowbar positioned between it and the lower top plate. The final 2x4 was a little harder. The board was toenailed in and I couldn't just hit it up and off of the studs with a hammer. I ended up using a sawzall to cut the sections of the top plate out between the studs. I then was able to get the last pieces off the tops of the studs by smacking it with a hammer from the sides. This is also a good place to mention that to keep the studs from moving side to side I temporarily nailed in a 2x4 across the length of the wall horizontally.
Moving on I installed some new studs and attached the new wood 2x4s for the top plate and a new 2x6. I drilled the holes for the electrical wiring and brought the wires back down. I thought this would be the time to install some new white switches and GFCI outlets in the kitchen since I had to wire the switches and outlets back up anyway. This proved to be a decent pain in the ass. I spent the better part of an evening figuring out the wiring in my wall, "What is the line? What is the load?" It was a mess and no two boxes had the same wiring style. This is how I made my diagram useless and possibly more of a hinderance than an asset. I would try to use my diagram but since it wasn't drawn using GFCI outlets which would wire up different it would just confuse me. The new light switches also were slightly different. I had to step back and figure out where the wires were coming from and where they needed to go before I could get the whole circuit to work. The lesson here was understand the circuit, a cheat sheet won't help. I also found out that a switch in the kitchen that has never done anything was supposed to be wired to a garbage disposal that was never installed. The wire was laying bare ended in the wall. So what could I do, I had to install that garbage disposal.
New top plate, studs and wires in place, it was time to pull down all the trim, window casing, crown molding and paneling left in the room. This started early one morning, what sucked is when I got to the wall opposite the one I had fixed previously I FOUND THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM. Two of the vent stacks in the house had leaked around the flashing. The rotten wood around this pipe seemed even worse. What was really bad was I was planning to hand drywall the next day. I had all the supplies, or so I thought, now I needed more 2x4's. So I had to knock this out much faster. I figured since I had already done this once before I could do it much faster. I would have to anyway because it took a week to do it last time, off and on. I won't bore you with the details but needless to say it was the same story. I did get to use a Paslode portable framing nailer this time though instead of doing all the nailing by hand. This worked out well as there were some spots in the attic where I couldn't have swung a hammer to get the top plate nailed in. A note about the Paslode gas cartridges is that they only have about a one year shelf life. They are sold in packs of no less than two so you need to use them. I had to make a hardware store run when I found the old cartridges were old and would not fire, at least not every time.
Just to make this project last even longer and really push the possibility of my wife leaving me I decided to take down the popcorn ceiling that existed on the adjoining ceilings connected to the one in this room. I have taken down popcorn ceiling already in four rooms in our house so I am getting pretty good but it is still very hard messy work. Your entire house will be a disgusting dusty mess and you stand the chance of getting mesothelioma. The popcorn ceiling may possibly contain asbestos if the house was built prior to 1975-1980 or somewhere in there. I put up plastic sheeting and taped around it on all walls in the rooms where I was working and on all openings to other rooms. If you don't want it covered in slop and dust cover it up. In the end the plastic on the floor will be covered in a thick layer of popcorn sheets and dust. I Use the two inch wide blue masking tape run horizontally to hold the sheeting up against the walls in the areas where I will be working. This keeps the water also from getting behind the plastic. Water? Did I forget to mention water? This is going to get messy. I use a garden sprayer to spray water all over the popcorn ceiling to loosen it up and to keep the dust down. Keeping the dust down is very important, especially in older homes where there can be asbestos in this stuff. What you do is spray up a good amount of water onto the ceiling let it soak in and then use a wide taping knife to scrape it all down. It is very gross and very messy. Wear goggles and a respirator. I took a random orbit sander to the ceiling when it was dry to clean up any remaining ceiling bits. This is very dusty, the respirator is a must.
Finally, I could hang the drywall, or really I had the opportunity to hang said drywall, my abilities are still in question. I had a friend come over to help, this makes much faster work and it is much less aggravating. I used Georgia-Pacific made drywall so not name brand Sheetrock, though I did use Sheetrock joint compound. I bought the smaller one - two gallon size bucket, I should have bought the larger five gallon bucket, because before the job was done that is about how much I used. I also bought a Bosch drywall philips head screw sinking bit. My friend helping me and I both decided we did not like this bit and just used standard philips drivers on our cordless drills. Extra batteries for your drill are a necessity unless you want to spend most of the day waiting for the battery to charge and look at bare walls. Having a drywall square also made quick work of measuring and cutting the drywall, though we quickly learned that while the cut sections of drywall were square, a lot of the walls in my house were not.
One problem we hit was at the second plumbing vent stack that I had to repair the wall around. This is the main vent stack for the house so it is a bigger pipe than the rest in the house. Well it turns out that the fitting used to mate two sections of this pipe is just a little bit wider than a stud. When we put the drywall over this pipe and started screwing it down the drywall just started cracking up. We just screwed it down hard and figured I could mud over it later, remember how much mud I said to buy? I had measured how much drywall I would need fairly well, the only problem was the last few sections above a door and window were made of smaller pieces, which would require more taping and mud. I would avoid all such superfluous mudding and taping in the future. For tape instead of the old standard paper tape I went with the new self-sticking plastic mesh tape. This mesh tape works great because you don't have to apply the joint compound to the joint first, you apply the tape, it sticks and you mud over that. I am not sure if it is as strong as paper tape but it was easier.
When it comes to mudding what I learned was for one, I am completely terrible at it, and two, if you are going to contract a part of the job I would make it this part. This is the make it or break it of the whole job. Since the mudding fixes all the little things you messed up you have to do a good job on the mud. I did a ok job, but I will have to fix it when I go to paint again.
What I am not telling you here is that this did not occur overnight or even over a weekend, much less over a few weekends. I drug this thing out for months. The corner of our room sat with no wall cover for probably three months. Women love coming home and to find the backside of the insides of their walls fully exposed. Needless to say my wife was ready for this project to be over. She was ready for the paneling to just go back up. In the end though it does look much better and I was able to go ahead and but in some low-voltage boxes and make provisions for one day finishing my home network installation by pulling phone/network/cabletv into this room. I can't say this was the most fun I ever had and, I am not entirely sure I would do all this again though. In the end I would say the hardest part was mudding and sanding the drywall. If I contracted this it would not have been so bad and especially not so if I didn't have to live in the mess while the work was taking place.
