The first order of business was to find the source of the major leak in the house. Craig and Jim determined that it was from where the spiral staircase was nailed in and a few pieces of rotting siding. Here is the area that was soaked again:
That is around the old window on the landing that had the massive air conditioner
Here is the spiral staircase, which is now a free standing structure:
We may have to put a "warning: do not use" sign on that for now (that is definitely the only place where you would be injured at our house ;-) )
Basically, they rigged up something so that the leak should stop for now and then will permanently fix it next week after it dries out. Peters also came out and put on downspout extensions that should fix some of the basement leaks.
In order to find the source of the leak, they used a power washer. Craig showed me how he sprayed this near the house and paint just flew off of it. Being that our painters so far are telling us that painting our house will be about as much as the roof because of all the power washing/paint scraping, I had an idea.
Here is the house before:
Here is the house after some major power washing:
I literally power washed until we ran out of gas.
Nothing like having a blast watching the paint fly off of the house (and being coated in house paint). It really was fun and Craig and Jim left us their two power washers so we can do this over the weekend. The interesting thing is that if you spray a rotted board, they basically splinter/break in half. It's not like we have too many of those (ha!). Those have to be replaced anyway prior to painting. The deck is the worst shape of all. Most of the boards just flew apart if they were even lightly sprayed.
The deck afterwards:
I tried to pull up that lovely carpet, but it is glued to the porch.
After this, I was feeling destructive and told Alok that maybe we should just rip down everything (like the walls, ceiling, etc) and start over. He didn't like this idea very much..... hmmmm....
Jessica
Wow overall you guys have taken apart alot. Powerwashing sounds like fun :) When will you start to rebuild the walls?
ReplyDeleteHi Purvi!
ReplyDeleteGood question. We are waiting for a few things. We need to insulate the outside walls and we need new plumbing and electrical done. So, we're waiting to start fixing things until those 3 things are finished so that we don't have to destroy things we repaired. We are also making sure that there are absolutely no leaks before we close things up.