Scary Cabin

With 3 days and 4 people (and 4 dogs), a lot of cabin renovation labor was done over Labor Day weekend. Sometimes it’s hard for me, personally, to see how much was really accomplished. I focus on the details of what I was working on and it doesn’t seem like much. But with everyone working on something and moving around to help each other out the transformation over 3 days was quite significant.

When we started there were large areas that still needed insulation and only a few bits had drywall. When we left all insulation was finished, all the drywall (but one piece) was hung, a fair amount of drywall tape happened and a lot of sub-floor was installed. Given that a lot of this required, measuring, cutting, fitting, trimming, and hauling it was not a vacation at the beach.

I had underestimated the amount of drywall needed and we were 4 sheets short. So some time was spent hooking up the trailer and making the 20+ minute drive to the nearest hardware/lumber store for drywall.

We started off with insulation and drywall. We decided to insulate the bathroom walls just because we could. Larry and Barbara started off cutting and fitting the insulation in the bathroom walls. Genny and I followed behind cutting and hanging the drywall. At least until we ran out. While the drywall hanging continued, Larry moved on to taping and mudding the bathroom walls. Once that was done, Larry also cut and installed the sub-floor and cement board in the bathroom. Then there was the clean up. With the drywall hung we had a big mess of drywall scraps, sub-floor scraps, cement board scraps and other junk that needed to be cleared out.

Now even with all the scrap cleared out, it doesn’t mean we have a nice big, open area to work. The back bedroom is the storage area. It has all the remaining laminate flooring, all of the sub-flooring, a toilet, a vanity, a couple of drawer units, a pile of tools and hardware. So basically, it’s full of stuff. We had to work around that and move what we could. The boxes of laminate are the reason there’s still one piece of drywall to hang. We can’t get to that corner until we move those boxes. We did manage to get everything out of the front bedroom.

With the front bedroom cleared out, we were able to make pretty quick work of installing the sub-floor. The only tricky bit was all the cuts needed for the hallway where the one piece flows into 4 openings (think jigsaw puzzle piece).

We’ve started on the wall with some joints taped and most screw holes covered. Holes are patched and most of the paneling glue has been scraped off.

Stay tuned next time for drywall mudding and sanding, sanding and mudding …..

And the four dogs? Well, they were well fed with bacon and egg scraps and lots of cuddling.

Closets can be scary places and the one closet on the second floor is no exception. But not because there are scary creatures living there. The closet walls are filled with many tentacles also known as electric wiring. For such a small room, the amount of wire surrounding it is amazing. The closet is located to your right as enter the front bedroom. It shares it’s back wall with the stairway. So lets start there. The stairway has two light switches and two lights in a 3-way configuration. So all of the wiring for this runs through the back wall of the closet. Then in the closet (on the back wall) is a switch and outlet. The switch controls the outlet which has the closet light plugged into it. So yes, you have to go into the closet and fumble around on the back wall to turn on the light. Convenient. There is another switch and outlet on the outside walls of the closet. Again, the switch controls the outlet which is used for the ceiling fan/light. The switch is located as you enter the bedroom. All this wiring basically means that there are wires running through all four walls of the closet. To make it even more interesting the switches appear to be switching neutral instead of hot.

The “plan” at a high level was to:

1) Move the closet light switch so it’s outside the closet by the closet door.
2) Install a real light in the closet (controlled by the above switch, of course).
3) Remove the switch on the back wall of the closet.
4) Either remove or convert the outlet in the closet to non-switched
5) Convert the outlet that the ceiling fan is plugged into to non-switched
6) Make the switch by the bedroom entry a double gang switch.
7) Move the wire that cuts through the middle of the closet space.

A bit more about 5, 6 and 7. When we replace the ceiling fans, we’re going to use Lutron Maestro MA-LFQHW-WH fan/light controllers. These have a nice switch that controls both the fan speed and light level remotely. So no need to run a wire from the switch to the fan. Also, it would be nice to have a simple switch that controls a normal light in the room, hence the double gang box. The Closet actually runs all the way to the edge of the house and it had it’s own knee wall that blocked off some of that very low ceiling space. That knee wall also had the wire to the outlet running through the middle of it. We removed the wall and though that it would be good to open that space up and use if for storage.

It took about 6 hours to make all those changes. Nine holes were cut in the sheetrock to gain access to the wires. Everything is wired according to plan and the holes have been patched.

While Bob did most of the re-wire, Genny was out in the yard cleaning some of the overgrown path and clearing spiderwebs from around the house.

Once we came out of the closet, we hung some more sheetrock getting us a bit closer to finishing the upstairs.

One of the issues with having an A-frame cabin is that there’s no attic and thus, little to no insulation between the upstairs ceiling and the roof. This makes it a challenge to heat/cool as it is always hot up there in the summer and cold in the winter. In terms of night-time comfort, summers are worse as it’s more difficult to remove the hot air as it naturally want to be there. Having a way to expel the hot air and pull in cool air from outside would be ideal and that’s exactly what a whole house fan does. However, pretty much every whole house fan you can find is designed to be installed in an attic. Because of that, the part of the fan assembly that would be in the attic is not pretty and not designed to be exposed to the elements. We have no attic. Tamarack Technologies to the rescue. They make one whole house fan that is designed to be roof or wall mounted. The TC1000-H. And it is even available in brown so it blends in with the building exterior. The one downside is that it’s expensive. Like 2 to 3 times more expensive than your run of the mill whole house fan. This weekend we installed the TC1000-H in the front wall of the upstairs bedroom. It fits nicely in the triangle area above the balcony door. The installation wasn’t difficult, just a bit time consuming. Build some framing, cut a hole in the wall, mount the fan. Previously, there was a light up there so just replacing the switch and wiring make simple work of the electrical.

Everything seems to be working as designed, but is it effective? It probably is helping to pull hot air that is trapped in the peak of that room, but it really doesn’t pull much air from other parts of the house. In our main home we have a whole house fan and when it’s on, you can feel a nice strong breeze through the open windows. With the TC1000-H, there does not seem to be an additional breeze. Prior to this we were using a box fan in the window to force some of the cooler outside air in. But we’ve only tried this for one night and one day. With it running all day, the upstairs didn’t seem to get as warm and more closely tracked the outside temp. Previously, the upstairs seemed to get 4-5 degrees hotter than outside. We need some more data.

We started putting up sheetrock in the bathroom and bedroom. If you remember from previous entries, we can’t fit a full 4×8 sheet of sheetrock up the stairway. Thus, we had to measure, go down stairs (on the deck), cut to size, and then carry the cut pieces upstairs. So far we’ve got a lot of the inside bathroom walls done and a few pieces of the master bedroom walls. We’re a bit limited by lack of insulation. We need more for the outside walls and we want to insulate the bathroom for sound. But, getting the Roxul insulation has proved more challenging this year. It’s on-order and we might have it before Labor Day.

We also framed a niche in the bathroom to add some additional storage space and finished running the electrical to the bathroom.

Most of the upstairs demo is done. We tore out a bit more sheetrock from the closet and ripped up the remaining carpet. So we’re now carpet free. The trailer was loaded for another dump run. We removed about two full trailer loads of debris from the upstairs. We then loaded up the trailer with sheet goods, 21 sheets of OBS for the floors, 15 sheets of sheetrock and two sheets of cement board for the bathroom floors. Then we found out that the stairway is too narrow to carry a 4×8 sheet of anything up there. There’s just no way to make the corner. If we had a crane we could probably get them in through the window or balcony door, but we don’t. Time to get creative. We cut the OBS sheets in half, it’s just for additional subfloor so it won’t matter much. We were then able to lift each 4×4 sheet up to the second floor balcony, bypassing the stairs and getting in a good upper body workout. For the sheetrock, we’re just going to cut it to size outside (so we have smaller pieces) and haul it up as we need it. We’ll end up with more seams to tape and mud, but there’s probably not more than 2 or 3 places where we could actually use a full sheet anyway.

We replaced more of the old outlet/switch boxes with new boxes, new outlets, new wire. Also ran some of the wire for the bathroom electrical. This was held up a bit by the fact that I ordered the wrong type of box for junction boxes from Lowes. We also found a couple of wires with staples embedded in the wire (Yikes!). These were the staples that were used to hold in the insulation. Since we’re using Roxel rock wool, we don’t need no stinking staples to hold it in place.

With the downstairs in pretty good shape, it is time to start demolishing the upstairs. With a full crew, we parked the trailer below the upstairs balcony and started ripping out paneling, sheetrock, knee walls, carpet. Basically everything. Most of the interior walls are staying with the exception of the knee walls so we left those alone, but the exterior walls are now down to the studs. The nasty carpet was pulled out and what was left of the pad scrapped up. It took a little over a day to get almost everything out. By then we had a full trailer so it was off to the dump. All that’s left to do upstairs is the closet and half bath. Throwing the debris straight off the balcony into the trailer worked out pretty good. I think we’ll do this again for the rest of the upstairs. The upstairs looks brighter and larger with all that dark paneling removed. Demo always seems to go pretty fast.

As a reward for getting the upstairs torn out so quickly , we bought a new couch. The fact that it was on sale for 20% off didn’t hurt either. So we now have some real furniture in the living area. Next week we’ll haul up some of the other furniture we’ve been stockpiling. It’s going to be strange not eating meals on the cheap small patio table and camp chairs.