hausdok

That's my ultimate job fantasy. I'm fascinated by mechanical clocks and love to repair them. I'm jealous as hell. I think I hate that guy. [:-gnasher[:-irked][][:-weepn] OT - OF!!! M.

Good point, John. Kevin, you should check out Ellen Rohr's Q & A column on this site and see if she can't help you figure out what your net profit is on those. OT - OF!!! M.

First define flashings for me. Are you referring to the splines around the windows behind the siding (You won't generally see those except on new construction before the siding goes on.) or are you talking about the head flashings over the top of the window which extend from behind the underlayment to the outside of the window casing? OT - OF!!! M.

Jeez Kurt, You just scared the bejezzuz out of me and I've been doing this 11 years. Hmmm, I saw something in one of my military retiree newsletters the other day where the military is recruiting from the retiree ranks now. Think I'll go check it out. It sounds safer. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Mozilla has just released a new version of its Firefox browser with fixes for security vulnerabilities. To get hooked up click here

I'd accept it. Heck, I see so many with neither a high loop or an air gap that I sometimes wonder why half the folks on Puget Sound aren't standing in line outside of restrooms suffering from the runs. Anything is better than nothing. OT - OF!!! M.

Go here: http://www.apawood.org There's enough information there about T1-11 and other engineered wood materials to keep you occupied for the next decade. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Atlanta/May 30, 2007 - Six organizations related to the built environment are collaborating to provide advanced indoor air quality (IAQ) design guidance for the industry. The collaboration will develop a book and professional development course that will describe an integrated process for achieving improved IAQ in all elements of a building. Participating organizations are the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE, www.ashrae.org), the American Institute of Architects (AIA, www.aia.org), the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA, www.boma.org), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency(EPA, www.epa.gov), the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association (SMACNA, www.smacna.org), and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC, www.usgbc.org). The groups recently formalized the collaboration through a memorandum of understanding. “The book and course will give guidance to designers and builders so that buildings may be constructed, operated and maintained to improve IAQ without constraining the building function or the comfort and productivity of the occupants,â€

Hi Steve, Go to my Building Science forum over at the Journal of Light Construction Online and read through the archives there. The subject of insulation and how various types are installed and work is very common there and there are contractors there who've been using the stuff for several years and have talked about various brands and types. Here's the link: http://www.JLCOnline.com Click on 'forums' and then 'building science.' OT - OF!!! M.

The article is entitled 'Who's To Blame for a Rotten House' but really has little to do with rot. This consumer oriented article by Adam Wilson in the May 28th issue of The Olympian explores the lack of licensing among practicing home inspectors in Washington State and, perhaps, gives practicing inspectors in Washington State a peek into what the future holds. To read more click here

Hi All, Don't know if any of you noticed, but this thread became the basis for an article in this month's issue of Working RE which is put out by our sponsor OREP. For those of you who have member's access to their website, here 'tis! http://www.workingre.com/mms/writing-is-hard.asp Otherwise, you can read it in Working RE. Oh, and Bonnie, The Curious Case got mentioned too. OT - OF!!! M.

The May 13th 60 Minutes segment where Leslie Stahl featured Redfin's new real estate sales model set the real estate profession on its collective ear. The uproar had just about subsided when one of the traditional real estate agencies in Canada produced a spoof of the 60 Minutes piece entitled '16 Minutes'. For a good chuckle, click here.

State of Washingtonid="size5">id="green">Department of LicensingPO Box 9020 Olympia, Washington 98507 ALL WASHINGTON STATE HOME INSPECTORS !!!id="green">id="size5"> YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND PUBLIC HEARINGS The Department of Licensing (DOL) would like to invite you to attend public hearings being held pertaining to the Home Inspector profession. The purpose of these hearings will be to provide an opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide testimony regarding possible regulation of the profession. This hearing is being conducted per ESSB 5788, which requires public hearings to be hosted by DOL during a study of the Home Inspector profession. FIRST HEATINGThe first hearing will be for inspectors west of the Cascades. WHEREWashington State Criminal Justice Training Commission19010 First Ave SouthBurien, Washington 98148-2055Room # C151 (Click here to download and print a pdf map to the Burien hearing location.) WHENJune 13th, 20071:00 PM to 5 PM COMMENTS AND QUESTIONSWe welcome your comments or questions. If you have questions, please send them or attend the hearing. If you cannot attend the hearing and wish to provide comments on your position, please forward them to Bruce Chunn (address below). WHO IS INVITED?This is a public hearing and anyone wishing to attend is invited. We ask that you spread the word among your peers so that we can reach the greatest number of people who may wish to participate. SECOND MEETINGThere will also be a second public hearing held for inspectors east of the Cascades. WHEREWashington State Department of Transportation (DOT)Office Conference Room1551 North Wenatchee AvenueWenatchee, WA 98801(Click here to download and print a map to the Wenatchee hearing location.) WHENJuly 11th, 20071:00 PM to 5 PM WHO TO CONTACTBruce ChunnResearch and Planning OfficeDepartment of Licensing1125 Washington St. SEPO Box 9030Olympia, WA 98507-9030Mail Stop 48027Phone (360) 902-0119Email: bchunn@dol.wa.gov THANK YOU VERY MUCH WE HOPE TO SEE YOU AT THE HEARINGS

Hi, I believe that "cast stone" is the term that the industry uses to describe it. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, It's been a while, and I'm not sure that the same ladder is still available at Costco. The last time I was there, they were selling an overseas Costco-branded knock-off of the American made Little Giant, which is what I have now. (The 17' World's Greatest Ladder that I started this thread about was stolen out of my truck somewhere around 2003/2004. My 13ft. Little Giant knock-off is probably heavier than the 22ft. extension ladder I used to use. The 21ft. is easily 1-1/2 times the weight of the extension ladder I used to use and it's a bear to get opened to its full height because it's rated for 300lbs and is built heavier. I've never weighed it, but I'd guess that it probably weighs somewhere around 55lbs. Still, the stability of a ladder is important and these ladders are certainly a whole lot more stabile than either my extension ladder or the fiberglass step ladder I used to use. OT - OF!!! M.

Believe me, Steven, there isn't a lot that can be done for that morning house. It's priced at about what a lot goes for in the city. He wanted to gut it, rebuild it and turn it for a profit. If I were him, I'd bulldoze it, put in a foundation, bring in a modular shell with the plumbing and electric roughed in, and then I'd finish the interior myself and then sell the sucker. There'd probably be less profit but a whole lot less potential liability. OT - OF!!! M.

This guy charged them $3500 to clean out a couple of truckloads of debris, cut out all of the old galvanized pipe that was left in place, reinsulate the underside of the floors, insulate all the ducting and plumbing, seal all access points and get rid of all nesting rodents, install vent wells and new mesh on all vents and then install the barrier. I understand the barrier was only about $1300 of that. Compared to the cost of fixing rot and insect issues found in some of these holes, that's not that bad. Jeff Tooley has started a cottage industry and even franchised the process. I have no idea what he gets to do this back in N.C. OT - OF!!! M.

According to the realtor on the transaction, this morning's job was the cheapest house listed in the Seattle multiple. It showed, I saw the rot at the base of the exterior walls before I even walked onto the property. I stepped up onto the deck at the back and right there, next to the back entry, was a hole gnawed through the wall and sole plate that couldn't have been done by anything less than a rat. I poked my head in the door and there was black mold on the ceilings and the stench of cat urine. I made one pass around the exterior, during which I found carpenter ants trailing into the siding at one location, moisture ants at another and found the foundation skirt (It's a 1926 post on pier with a wood skirt around the perimeter) riddled with rot, termite galleries and frass (excrement) from both Pacific dampwood termites and subterranean termites. At one point, I reached through a gap in the skirt, grabbed a support post and broke off a wet chunk in my hand and wrung the water out of it. "Tell you what," I said to the client, "I'm going to make one pass through the interior with a moisture meter and then crawl through the crawlspace to see what's what down there. Let's see what I come up with and you stop me if you think you won't want me to finish." I found 22%+ moisture in the walls around most of the northern half of the east side, the north wall and part of the west wall. Lots of dank odor and clear signs that the place had been neglected for decades. As if that wasn't bad enough, it turned out that this 600sf gem started out as a 300sf 'cabin' built on post and piers. The "piers" were square blocks of concrete sitting directly on the ground. The "posts' were quartered logs with the bark stripped off and the center support girder was a Douglas fir log about 8 inches in diameter with the bark still on. On top of that, a floor platform of DF 2 by 8's on 36-inch centers sheathed with DF T & G. The DF girder and floor framing was the best thing about it. The skirt was half buried in dirt, as were the bottoms of more than half of the posts, and termites and annobiids are having a field day with everything except the DF. There were two subsequent additions - each worse than the first platform - until the foundation under the last was concrete blocks supporting 2 by 4 posts with several 2 by 4 cutoffs piled atop the posts as shims. The whole think looked like the vibration from a 16-wheeler going by was going to dislodge it any minute. Critter excrement everywhere - everything from rats, to opossum and raccoons and what could have been dog or coyote and a whole lot of cat crap. Water pipes dripping like an irrigation system and wiring going willy-nilly every which way. I probed a couple of those posts and, for the first time in about 10 years, said a little prayer, "Oh please don't f****ng collapse on my raggedy ass while I'm down here." Crawled back out to daylight. "How was it," the client asked. "Have you got any running shoes," I asked. "Yeah, why?" "Cuz you'd better run from this one as fast as you can," I said. "You can't even begin to think about doing anything with this house until you put it up on cribbing, demolish everything below floor level and put a new foundation, mudsill and rims under there, and that's only going to scratch the surface of this house. Do you want me to keep going?" "Hell no!" he said. I collected a check and left. On the way home, I stopped by a former client's house. His crawl had been a nightmare of unused galvanized pipe hanging down, rat-ruined insulation, trashed vapor barrier and all manner of other crap about two months ago. I'd recommended he clean out the crawlspace, seal it against rats and then do a good job putting down a new barrier. I'd even sent him a copy of one of Jeff Tooley's articles about sealing crawls from JLC - just to give him an idea of how a properly done crawl should look - but frankly hadn't expected that he'd ever do anything about it. Most don't. Well, about three weeks ago, I got a call from the proprietor of a pest control company. He'd been approached by the client to do the work in that crawl. He'd read my report and had been intrigued by the Jeff Tooley articles and was thinking of bidding on the job. I'd explained it to him and he'd hung up. About two weeks later, I got another call from him. He thanked me for explaining the process to him and said that he was going ahead with the job. If it worked out, he informed me, he intended to make it a side line of his pest control business. The other day, I got a call from the client. He'd hired the guy to clean out that crawl and put down a new barrier - would I mind stopping by to take a look at it before he cut the check? "Sure," I said, "Why not?" Well, it was a thing of beauty. I could look completely through it from one end to the other and see nothing but a nice flat barrier that resembled a black swimming pool liner, with my field of view broken up only by a few insulation wrapped heating ducts. He'd gone right up the walls with the barrier and had adhered it in place with latex mastic. He's also sealed the barrier to the base of every pier and at all overlaps. All of the nasty insulation had been removed, new insulation had been put in and he'd wrapped all of the pipes with insulation and had installed runners for the few cables that criss-crossed the space here and there. He'd put all new mesh on every vent, had installed galvanized vent wells to keep yard debris from blocking the vents and had closed any hole bigger than a dime - anywhere - with galvanized mesh, so critters couldn't get in. The hatch fit like a glove. In contrast to the 20 - 25 minutes it had taken me to struggle through that mess two months ago, this time it took me about 3 minutes. I just stretched out and rolled like a log to wherever I wanted to stop, looked around with my light and continued on. It was clean. So clean that the only dirt in there was probably what I dragged in on the soles of my shoes, and, in addition to the mastic, he'd used sod stakes to secure the barrier in place, so it didn't try to follow me around like they so often do, getting hung up on everything. I came out of there smiling. Man! If we could just get the danged builders to do that with all of them, this gig would be so much easier than it is. I told him he ought to charge admission for other homeowners to come and look at that, in order to get an idea of how things can look under a house when they're done correctly. It was kind of cool seeing one my past clients actually seriously follow up on a recommendation for a change, instead of nodding like a bobble-head doll, saying they understood and then not doing anything. I'm feeling kind of proud of that guy. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Anchoring is required in seismic zones 3 & 4 and I believe that Chris is in Zone 3. OT - OF!!! M.

I'd be willing to bet that more than half the housing stock in Seattle is 2-3 layers of comp on top of wood shingles. Wood shingles were the norm around here into the 60's and very few roofs were torn off before they started roofing them over with comp. The only thing that's really bad about them is that most of them haven't been rimmed with one-by and nobody used drip edging here. Consequently, those wood shingles tend to rot out over the gutters while the rest of the deck remains fine. I've never heard of tearing off down to the cedar deck. That just doesn't make sense. Around here, a tear-off is right down to the skip or to the sheathing. OT - OF!!! M.

Bowed earthquake strapping? Uh, wait a minute - it's illinois. Nevermind. OT - OF!!! M.

Back in 77, the first time I was stationed in Korea, I used to marvel at some of the stuff that the Koreans would cart around on bicycles. It wasn't unusual to see a roofing guy going down the street with a 15 foot ladder locked onto a rack over the back tire and leaning way out in front of the bike and there'd be about 200lbs of clay roof tiles stacked up on a small pallet behind the seat. Those guys would be straining at the peddles and one couldn't help but wonder how they kept the things upright. Those days are gone. Now everything over there is delivery trucks like here. Sometimes, though, you'll see an odd bike here or there, loaded up with furniture, or cases of soda stacked 15 ft. high, or... OT - OF!!! M.

Yep, They're talking total horizontal flue length vs. total vertical flue length. OT - OF!!! M.

Come on, Guys! Recess is over. Let's get signed up! (Let me see - did I spell check that? Hmmm.) OT - OF!!! M.

I just stopped on my way back from Whidbey Island to get gas. $3.67.9 a friggin' gallon! Jeez! Glad I don't have a big car. OT - OF!!! M.