hausdok

Or the ex-boyfriend stuffed in the trunk that she told everyone had left her in the lurch. Probably a little bit of decomp odor up there. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Unless it's physically impossible to do so, I won't look at the surface of the cover unless I also look at the roof decking from the underside. It's too easy for the cover to look great and then find something under the cover that reveals signs of either leaks that promped replacement or signs of active leaks. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'd still like to know what spore counts we're talking about here. Has anyone read anything about this case that reveals that data? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

All they really needed there would have been three small stainless steel washers between the head flashing and the bottom of that trim and they would have been good to go. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Go here and read up on open cell versus closed cell experiences of many contractors: http://forums.jlconline.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=2 ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

No I haven't. I've never used any function keys. Don't really know what they do. I'll give it a shot. Thanks. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hello Sooz, I'd suggest that you take a short walk around the outside perimeter of your home and look for a red aluminum tag attached to the exterior wall somewhere, with a number on it. If it's a double wide, there will be one tag for each of the two sections that came together. If you see these tags, it's a HUD Code manufactured home and my answer to you is 'no'. If you do not see these tags, then it's likely a modular manufactured home and it is just as sturdy and as good as a site built (or stick built) home. Click to Enlarge 54.86 KB Marc Oh, I dunno if I agree with that. Sure, I agree with Jim; that they're built out of very cheap materials but they do, as Greg says, fill a certain housing need. There were a fair number of them in my hometown back in New York State and they served pretty well as starter homes for young folks there. I've seen folks live in these and be able to save enough in ten years to put down huge down payments on stick-built homes; so huge that they're payments on the stick-built homes were pretty small and that allowed them to pay off their stick-built homes far sooner than someone who'd bought their stick-built homes years before they'd bought their manufactured home. The guy that buys a Yugo isn't under any misapprehension that he's buying a Lexus; and, if he takes care of it well enough, it will serve him just fine until he finally gets around to buying that Lexus he wants. As far as converting them to stick-builts and Marc's response that you can't do anything like that, I guess he's never been to Florida, 'cuz in the 55 and over manufactured home park my mother lives in most of those homes have been built up and out. Apparently, there's a whole industry in Florida built around framing up and installing storm-resistant truss roofs on top of manufactured homes and some of them in her park don't even look like manufactured homes anymore. There's a 55 and over manufactured home park here in Kenmore. It's about a mile as the crow flies from my place. Many of the homes in there have had very expensive landscaping done around them, have had truss roofs, breezeways and two-car garages added and have had their kitchens and baths torn out and redone with conventional materials. When you are in some of those, even though you know in your mind that they are manufactured homes, it feels like you are in a conventionally-framed and stick-built home. The prices reflect it as well - the average price on homes in there was up to about $175K the last time I inspected one in there. I think it's all a matter of perspective. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'll never understand the fascination people have with asbestos in old buildings. The amount of asbestos one is probably exposed to during one's lifetime in old buildings is probably a tiny tiny percentage of the asbestos one gets exposed to over one's lifetime driving down the interstate, walking through the park or spending a couple of hours having dinner with some friends in a house with fraying asbestos containing tape sealing the ducts to their boots. It takes about a quarter of a century for it to metasticize and does anyone really think he or she hasn't already been exposed to it someplace in one's lifetime? Hell, I can understand the concern if one has a newborn; but, unless you put a hepa filter mask on that kid and he grows up breathing nothing but filtered air for his entire life, he'll probably be exposed to asbestos in the air within two miles of home the first time he or she is strapped into that kiddy seat and the parents drive down the street with the windows of the car open. The horse has already bolted folks; closing the barn door now isn't going to keep him in. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, It must be up-to-date, I just downloaded it from Googles site. When I look at the print on the screen in IE it looks exactly like it looks when I print it out on a white piece of paper - very clear and easy to read. When I look at it in Chrome, it looks sort of washed out and it's harder to read. That's what I'm talking about. It does seem to load faster, but if it's going to give me a headache and eye strain trying to read it, I can wait the extra half second for it to load in IE. Kurt, I've never had much of a problem with anything MS. Unless it was something I dinked up myself or a virus had sneaked in via someone's email, it's always been pretty dependable. Since I dumped McAfee and started working with those Cyber Defender folks, it's been running really smooth and fast. Can't speak to the "hairballs and inelegent engineering" though - I don't know enough about anything on computers to know what elegant engineering is. I'm still trying to figure out all of the functionality and things that Chrome can do; but until I can get it so I can read script without getting eye strain, that's hard to do. It doesn't seem to matter which site I go to; they are all the same. I thought it might be some kind of a setting that I had to tweak in Chrome but there aren't any browser tools to tweak stuff like IE has - at least none that I see. That's why I'm asking you folks that use it all the time. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Flawed OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, I've been toying with this Chrome browser since I read about Kurt dinking about with it the other day. Not sure if I see the advantage of it over IE and I never really saw the advantage of Firefox over IE because of the way it displayed. I do like that fact that it makes TIJ stuff display pretty normally but the print looks washed out and thin in whatever website I display with it and I can't seem to find a way to adjust it so that the print looks solid and is easy to read. Is that normal for Chrome? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Clams have butts? Yes, and they're very tight because it has to keep out the whole ocean. I think Mike O. and my father are of the same generation. Yer damned tootin' they have butts. The problem is that the number of folks that have actually seen one is as scarce as hen's teeth. [] ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I have no doubt about that. As a teenager, I learned that the ceiling fan in the upstairs bath wasn't good enough to remove all of the moisture that would accumulate in the bath during a shower. I learned to use a large towel as an exhaust fan; I would stand off to one side and swing that towel like a fan really fast on a vertical axis between the floor and ceiling and it would pull in fresh air under the door (or through the window in warmer weather) and push more air out of the ceiling fan and dry the bath out really fast. 40+ years later, I still find myself assisting the ceiling fan with the same technique. When my wife walks into the bath when I'm done with it, it's dry in there. When I walk into the bath when she'd done with it, there's condensation all over everything and I have to grab the towel and do the fan thing. Panasonic makes some really powerful and quiet ceiling fans. You have to mount them to the attic framing and run a duct down to a collector box at the ceiling of the bath, but they're kind of awsome. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

It looks like the intake and exhausts on Cat IV furnaces that I see around here. Was there a furnace in the area below there? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

What others have said. Also: 1. Take a look at how that drip edge flashing - that piece of metal that covers the top of the fascia - has been installed. The underlayment - felt - under the roof deck should extend over the top of the drip edge so that any water that blows through the shingles and drains down the roof drains over the op of the drip edge and not beneath it where it will soak into the unfinished upper edge of the fascia and into the soffit, saturate the fascia, soffit and siding and cause the paint to peel off (Sound familiar?). If there is no underlayment, was the upper leg of the drip edge sealed to the roof deck with something to force water up and over it? 2. Make sure that you are ventilating the house properly. If you close that house up tighter than a clam's butt and never change the air, the humidity in that home will force its way out through the sides, saturate the back of the exterior sheathing and siding and cause the paint to fail in addition to causing mold to form in those exterior walls. 3. Is the crawlspace vented? If not, get it ventilated. 4. Is there a vapor barrier on the soil under the home in the crawlspace - I'm talking real barrier, not that woven stuff permeable stuff that looks like landscaping fabric. If not, get a barrier over that soil 'cuz it's dumping about 11 gallons into the air of that crawlspace every 24 hours and that moisture is migrating up into the home and then outward. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I don't get it. On Stargate, they always predict solar flares down to the millisecond and use them to open worm holes for time travel. How is it that the Syfy channel can have better technology than the government? This is all back asswards. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Suit yourself, I prefer my news to be entertaining so that it keeps my attention; otherwise I doze off and have no idea what's happening in the world beyond the funny pages in the local paper. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi David, Thanks for the tip. I actually got a telephone message from the Fluke people the same day I requested their free guide to thermal imaging. I just never got back to them. Today's the day I'm going to check it out. What training in Olympia are you referring to? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Had another situation today where it would have been nice to have an IR camera. I'd inspected a foreclosure for a guy a couple of years ago. The cover shot is below. The deal went through without a hitch. At the time of the inspection, I'd pointed out to him that the tiles at the tub surround at the edge of a bathtub were loose and he needed to bring in a grout/tile guy and get them taken care of. Apparently, he hadn't because they'd been planning to replace the tub with one of those large two-person showers. Now, two years later, he finally gets around to starting the project and he yanks the tub, only to find some mold and rot in the sub-flooring next to the tub and a whole lot of carpenter ants in the wall behind the tub under the windows (Yeah, I know, windows in shower are a dumb idea. I'd told him and I've always been of the same mind.). Anyhoo, he starts demolishing the tub surround to see where the carpenter ants are nesting and finds them in the OSB sheathing up under the windows. In the photo, the tub is in the left 2/3 of that bumpout over the porch and the toilet in that bath is in the right 1/3. Click to Enlarge 24.81 KB He called me and asked me to come out to take a look and help him figure out what was going on. I got there and he thought that the tiled inside window ledges had been leaking into the wall. I pointed out to him that the water stains started a foot higher between the two windows above the level of where the bituthene has been adhered to the bottom of the rough openings. From there, the stains and rot go downward and outward under both windows. It was obvious that water was coming through the wall between those two windows and into the wall sheathing above that point. We went outside. The only thing covering the gap between the two windows is a 1 by 10 (Look between the left and center window of that dumb-looking bumpout) and the typical two-foot-deep overhang is not there. In this case, it's only about a foot. I asked whether they get rain from that side in that neighborhood. He told me that the wind and rain funnel right down through the middle of the neighborhood and hit the front of the house so hard that he'd had to remove the screens. He even pointed out a dent in one of the windows where a limb or something had hit it. My theory; wind-driven rain is draining behind that trim and finding it's way in around the building paper behind that 1 by 10 (You can bet money that around here they didn't use the bituthene at the sides and simply lapped paper over the flanges at the sides and head and then caulked the joint. I think there's a 10 year structural warranty in effect for new homes here. The builder has a huge project going on at the other end of that community. I told him to press the builder to fix this despite the fact that the home is six years old. I doubt that the builder wants anyone in that community talking about how they'd screwed the pooch on something like this. Me, I've just stacked up one more reason why an IR camera would have come in handy. Today it was raining and windy. I probably could have seen the intrusion taking place; two years ago I might have seen it and been able to warn him about it. I just got some literature from Fluke last week. I'll be calling them in the a.m. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I love it when a plan comes together. OT - OF!!! M.

Hi All, Did an attached town home the other day that had a rain screen siding system on it. Unlike most of the homes with these systems that I've seen, this one looked more or less "normal" until I got up close and could see that the trim around the windows was spaced out from the sheathing and there were gaps at the top and bottom of the cladding. I've attached a couple of diagrams of the system that this builder is using. You'll see two setups - one for vinyl siding and the other for hard claddings. Click to Enlarge 46.68 KB Click to Enlarge 32.66 KB Something else happened that I'd never expected. The builder actually thanked me for being critical for a change. I climbed up onto the roof and was suitably impressed with the fact that the roofer had used drip edge flashings - which almost no roofer uses around here. Then I noticed that where two adjacent gable roof planes come together they'd configured a sort of flat bottomed valley that empties into a tiny little gutter and downspout at the center of the front of the building. Normally, when I see setups like that, they've used modbit to line the valley and they overlap the asphalt shingles onto the modbit. This wasn't the case. Here, the architectural grade shingles went from about a 6:12 down to a less than 1/2:12 before they reached the edge of that valley above that gutter. They were all tightly adhered to one another and went down the valley on one side, across the bottom and up the other side but the coursing didn't deviate at all. It was one of those WTF moments we all get way too often. I climbed down, concerned about that valley and I was explaining it to the client, whose first language isn't English, when the Project Manager walked up to see how the inspection was going. I asked him about the valley and whether IWS had been used under the cover in those valleys. He told me that they'd used a doubled-up layer of roofing underlayment under that valley per their "Building Envelope Consultant's" site specifications. I pointed out that a double layer of underlayment is the requirement for roof pitches between 2:12 and 4:12 but that at a pitch like they were using I suspected that most roofing manufacturers and experts would agree that at a minimum IWS should have been used. He seemed unimpressed; said that they'd spent a lot of money to have their consultant design a system that works, they'd never had an issue and he was confident it wouldn't leak. I finished up. They had indeed spent a lot of time detailing the cladding but I was still bothered by the roof and told the client I'd be writing it up in the report. The PM called me the next morning at about 6:45 a.m. to tell me that he'd double-checked their specs and that their specs did in fact require a doubled-up layer of ordinary roof underlayment. He said that he'd then called the roofer to ask about the valley and the roofer had told him that IWS had been used under that valley and it was the roofer's policy that IWS be used under all valleys. The PM thanked me for pointing it out to him and said that after talking to the roofer he was going to make a change to their spec book to ensure that IWS was always used in that kind of a situation from that point on. Sometimes this thing we do works. Any thoughts on this rain screen system? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Saw a news short the other day about a company that's building huge underground bunkers out in Death Valley or someplace like that, which are going to be like whole self-contained underground towns stocked with about six months worth of water and supplies. People are signing up for them and paying cash I guess, 'cuz folks are having a bad feeling about "what's" coming but really don't know what the "what" is. They're going to be exclusively for those that can afford them; so the average Snuffy will be left outside banging on the door while they are underground living in what will be the equivalent of a luxurious underground hotel that they can't leave for about six months that will be complete with every kind of convenience and comfort one can imagine. I'll probably build a ring out of conexes and get a bunch of ragged Aussies and one guy with a limp and a squinty eye, a sawed-off shotgun and a booby-trapped souped up black sedan to help me defend it. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Any kids missing in that area? Might want to get some ground penetrating radar and see what's been buried under that dirt. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Nolan, Contact the Plastic Pipe Institute. If there're any lawsuits involving PEX they'll know more about them than anyone else on the web. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

You're going to love this little ray of sunshine. Scroll down and click on the video. OT - OF!!! M.