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Blistex posted:/\ Yah, I'm getting semi-flexible tiles, but thought that the method you described would be the way to go. Good to know I wasn't barking up the wrong tree. If my experience with frozen plumbing is anything to go on, if you have such a problem in that room, you'll be replacing all the drywall in there anyways.
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Apr 6, 2014 15:06
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DNova posted:If my experience with frozen plumbing is anything to go on, if you have such a problem in that room, you'll be replacing all the drywall in there anyways. Probably right, but it has never been a problem yet, and that was even before I got the furnace and was trying to heat the whole house with an airtight wood stove in the living room. Now that there is a furnace (and that back room is properly insulated) and a heat vent and cold air exchange in that room I don't imagine there will be any issue. Even so, I picked up a 1250 watt convection baseboard heater for emergencies and when I am away during the winter. I'll have it set to 5 degrees and that will be my "last line of defence". Even before I discovered that one of the walls and most of the ceiling wasn't insulated properly I was still getting that room up to 19 degrees in Jan/February when the furnace was going, but it would cool down in the morning to 12-14 if I didn't get up in the middle of the night to throw another log on. Picture to (hopefully) clarify my insulation endeavours.  There was no vapour barrier anywhere, and I could feel cold air coming in around the outlets, corners, and a number of other places. I installed the vapour barrier, and covered all the walls with drywall and use spray-foam insulation in trouble spots under the room, and in the corners and other places I couldn't fit pink insulation. Add to that the drop ceiling which probably has a 0.05 R value, and I think this room will actually be liveable to people who are not 1/4 Husky (my dog). When I get the chance I'm going to wrap the round ductwork (heat and cold air exchange) with bubble-wrap insulation and that should make it ever warmer in there. Eventually when I get the cash the entire outside of the house is going to have its panelling ripped off and replaced with 1" of foil-covered polystyrene insulation and new (not crap) vinyl siding. Blistex fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Apr 6, 2014 |
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Apr 6, 2014 15:46
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Why not just paint the plumbing or run a drywall tube around it, and have the extra headspace? (Says the 6'7" guy, but hey it's still a reasonable question.  )Some of the nicest living rooms I've seen up in New England were exposed-rafter rooms with cast iron plumbing and nice-on-top-and-bottom heat gratings in the first-floor ceilings where hallways intersected above. Probably leaves the first floor a little colder than a house with thick ceilings, but on the other hand your bedroom and upstairs bathroom floor/tile won't cause frostbite in the wee hours.
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Apr 6, 2014 15:52
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Splizwarf posted:Why not just paint the plumbing or run a drywall tube around it, and have the extra headspace? (Says the 6'7" guy, but hey it's still a reasonable question. *stares at the old cracked rafters that had been notched to death, the new rough spruce rafters I installed, the pink fibreglass insulation, the spray-foam insulation, the electrical wires, the mix of copper piping and ABS drains. . . * Yah, I don't want to have to look at that mess any longer than I have to. Also 11" of clearance (7'6" ceiling) is good enough for you, should you ever visit.
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Apr 6, 2014 16:01
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Blistex posted:/\ Yah, I'm getting semi-flexible tiles, but thought that the method you described would be the way to go. Good to know I wasn't barking up the wrong tree. Do yourself a favor and just tape/zapstrap pipe heat tapes to all those pipes (and the greywater traps that are in the unheated space, ask me how I know) and then insulate them before you put the ceiling up. It's worth the 30 bucks in materials it will cost you.
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Apr 7, 2014 00:04
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There are actually no pipes in any unheated areas, I don't know if the diagram was a little confusing, but the pipes run through the ceiling of the room I'm renovating and into the house proper. So all the piping is sandwiched between two heated rooms (bathroom and downstairs).
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Apr 7, 2014 01:25
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OK so here's my weekend tale of woe: Basically over a year ago my dad got me this new hood to go over my stove. The existing fan in the ceiling was greasy and horrible and also the lighting over the stove is terrible. So, my brilliant plan was to run new venting up through the cabinet above the stove, and use the existing vent hole to install a light. Easy peasy, right? Alright so first off, access to the attic is in the opposite corner of the house. My attic is unfinished, it's just joists and blown in insulation, and maximum headroom at the peak of the roof is maybe 5 feet. The stove is almost against the outside wall, where the roof slopes down, so headroom above the stove is more like two and a half feet, with various roofing nails and support beams and poo poo all in the way. The blown in insulation is super old, too, and dusty as gently caress, and I had to climb over the HVAC ducting which is round 8" wrapped with bare fiberglass wrapping. And of course by 3pm it's like 110+ in the attic. Second part of my brilliant plan is that I'm going to run the new ducting to the old hole in the roof, so I don't have to replace the rooftop vent thingy or do anything on the roof at all. The existing vent is 8" immediately adapted down to 7" round, and as it turned out, all of that duct stack was simply sitting on top of the cieling fan - no supports or strapping or anything. So when I removed the fan and shroud, the ducting just loving fell out. Is that up to code? Anyway the good news was, none of the ceiling joists interfered with the placement of the new ducting, so I used the square ducts and also just dropped a hole straight down to the top of the vent for the wiring. Several trips to OSH and Home Depot ensued, as I got the wrong size nipple to thread into the top of the stove for the conduit, and then later got the wrong size conduit for the nipple. I couldn't get the rectangular duct up through the cabinet so I had to drop it from above, but the roof interfered, so I had to cut it a bit shorter than I wanted and then jam it through at an angle and bend the gently caress out of the top of it and then bend it back. Thank god my brother was able to come over and help. I had to cut some wooden blocks for the hood to screw to, and after I put them in I discovered the cabinet is not level. The solution someone in the past came up with was to install the doors on the cabinet level... so one door is like half an inch above the other door, and also they don't close all the way because they've been repainted twice without stripping the paint. Anyway there's not much I can do, if I install the hood level it'll have a gap between it and the cabinet on the right side, so gently caress it, it goes flush with the cabinet. We'll remodel this kitchen eventually anyway, right? Right. OK wiring. There's a switch against the back wall which controlled the old fan. The kitchen lights and that switch and the fan share a 15 amp circuit with all three bedrooms, the lighting (but not the outlets) in the bathrooms, the dining room light, and the loving porch light. WHYYYY does this one circuit literally make a circuit around the entire floorplan of the whole house? Who knows. But I want the switch to control the new ceiling light and have the hood on the always-on circuit of course. Up in the attic I find both runs of wire, naturally it's the original 1958 sheathed stuff (not knob and tube, thank god, actual sheathed wire). But inside is only black & white, even though the fan was grounded... ohhh, okay, there's a bare copper wire, attached to another bare copper wire by twisting them a bunch, and that just runs under a joist and disappears. I guess it's probably grounded, right? I mean, that would make sense? Fine that's my ground wire. So I cut that circuit and spliced in my ROMEX in a new junction box, and that's the point where I discovered that my 5' of 1/2" conduit is about 2" less than I really wanted. Ugh. I made do. I figured this out at 9pm last night and I really wanted to finish the job. So the junction box is right up against the other circuit, not quite where I wanted to place it, but it's reasonably safe and it's a drat sight better than the several unprotected, electrical-tape-wrapped splices I found in the attic while crawling over hand-placed boards laid across the insulation and joists to get to my cramped sweltering work spot. OK finally got the ducting in, had to cut some 7" and use two universal corners and a new 8 to 7 reducer, and fabricate some strapping to support the ductwork since I was now not going in a straight line and no way would it hold itself up. Time to put the nice big round ceiling light I found into place. Right? NO. Because the lowest-profile round light that's at least 10" in diameter they have at Home Depot is still just a bit too thick for the cabinet doors to clear. I returned that earlier in the day and bought a pocket light: 4" bracket, which I installed (it jams down between the joists and then you can slide it on rails to center it over your existing hole, kinda neat), and then I bought a 10" ceiling medallion that you're supposed to use for like chandeliers and ceiling fans to fancy them up. And that's when I discovered that the hole in the ceiling drywall is actually in several places just a wee bit more than 10"... and also even though the package says this medallion is 10", it's actually 9 7/8" at best. Here's where we're at now:   Obviously the "right" thing to do is buy a drywall patch and patch most of the hole. But I need to finish this by Friday because I'm leaving Saturday to go drive to Colorado and pick up my wife, and I wanted to bring her home and surprise her with this job all done. And the ceiling in the kitchen and dining room (all one room really) has the original paint, so I'd have to re-paint the whole loving thing because there's no way I am going to manage to color-match "slightly grease-stained kind of off-white with 15+ years of sunlight fading etc." color. And I really don't want to repaint the ceiling because I'd have to mask off all the cabinets, take down the hanging pot rack, put paper over everything, wash the grease off the ceiling so the new paint will adhere, it's a drat big job and all I have left is evenings after work before I go. So my new plan is to grab some wood veneer offcuts I have in the garage and just cut a big circle out of one, paint it, and use it as a replacement medallion. All the medallions I'm finding online are either stupidly expensive (I'm not paying $50 for a loving plastic circle), will take too long to ship to me, or are too small (won't cover the hole) or too big (will interfere with the edge of the cabinet). This was supposed to be an easy 5-hour job and it consumed my whole weekend. I've discovered several unsafe wiring conditions in my attic, an unsafe ducting condition above the kitchen, my whole body is sore from curling into a cramped ball balancing on joists doing duct work and electrical work all day yesterday, and my brother isn't free to help any more. Oh and I am now the proud owner of a third ladder, because my 4' ladder was too short and my 10' ladder was too tall. Every homeowner needs three ladders, right?
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Apr 7, 2014 20:06
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Hoo hoo, wow. Sounds a lot like my bathroom fan and ceiling fan experiences, but x3. Hope all the renters are listening!
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Apr 7, 2014 20:29
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Trying to figure out a way to put a nice pot rack up there.
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Apr 7, 2014 20:31
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Well, I'm 90% done the drop ceiling, and will never go down that road again. I spend an hour trying to get things level and finally decided that the drop-ceiling wire was too stiff and impeding my work. I went to the hardware store and got a roll of thinner stuff that will actually bend and twist. HOLY poo poo! I levelled the entire room in the same amount of time it took to do one run of T-Rail with the other wire. I had no idea that I would be anywhere near ready to start installing tiles by lunch, let alone finished by 3:00pm. I'm really loving the colour the wife picked out and the white of the windows, trim around the door and ceiling tiles make it look even better. The colour is actually much brighter, but the camera was having issues with the sun reflecting off the snow outside. Looking towards the wall that started it all.  Looking away from that wall that started it all.  What started it all....  Still can't imagine what the place will look like with the door painted, and some actual flooring and trim and cabinets. I'm going to start installing the baseboard heater after a light snack and drink. It's going to the left of the exterior door, right under that window. I'm thinking of putting it about 3-4" off the floor so the vacuum can go under it and I don't have to custom-fit trim to start and stop at each side. Going to test fit it first and see what I think before doing something I can't undo.
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Apr 7, 2014 21:11
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slap me silly posted:Sounds a lot like my bathroom fan and ceiling fan experiences, but x3. Hope all the renters are listening! Uh oh, the bathroom fan in my master bath went wonky last week. I wasn't that worried, but now..
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Apr 7, 2014 21:21
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Remulak posted:Trying to figure out a way to put a nice pot rack up there. I've got a big rack hanging in the middle of the kitchen (another reason I don't want to paint the ceiling right now). There's a shelf that goes in the middle of that cabinet, I'll obviously have to cut a big notch out of it but I'm not sure how to get it back in there since I had to tilt it up at an angle to get it out. I'll rig something up. That cabinet is too high for my wife to reach anyway, so we store stuff up there like the old coffee maker and the canning supplies and a couple of insulated soft lunchboxes and poo poo like that. It'll be OK. The reality that I am going to have to face though is that at some point my whole house needs to be re-wired in a sane manner, including replacing the panel, 90% of the in-wall wiring, and probably several fixtures too. It's just another big item on the "poo poo we can't afford to do yet" home repair List of Woe. Do Never Buy
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Apr 7, 2014 22:04
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slap me silly posted:Hoo hoo, wow. Sounds a lot like my bathroom fan and ceiling fan experiences, but x3. Hope all the renters are listening! I had a mold problem in my attic that I finally traced to my master bathroom fan exhaust. The run appeared to be connected to a soffit vent, which is not a great idea to begin with. It turns out the run was only pointed at the soffit vent because the moron builders installed the run after they had installed the ceilings. The pitch against the roof was too steep to maneuver in and and actually attach the run so they just aimed it in in the general direction of the vent from half a foot away. loving idiots. I ended up having a roofer cut and install a roof vent directly over the bathroom and re-run the exhaust.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:17
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Neither of my bathrooms have fans at all. Just windows. Too steamy in there? Open the window. One of my plans for the future is to remodel both bathrooms. They abut each other so I'm hoping we can make a single exhaust vent in the roof and run both bathrooms into it.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:19
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Leperflesh posted:Neither of my bathrooms have fans at all. Just windows. Too steamy in there? Open the window. My bathroom had no exhaust fan either. There was a window, but it was in the shower/bath and I'm not an exhibitionist. Had a fan installed after I moved out (it's rented now) because I absolutely wrecked the ceiling and walls with the humidity of my tank-draining hot-rear end showers.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:24
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The bathroom fan in our building is so powerful that when it's on there is a whistle of air from under the door and anything on the floor will zip around in a little tornado. It's awesome.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:26
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Dillbag posted:I had a mold problem in my attic that I finally traced to my master bathroom fan exhaust. The run appeared to be connected to a soffit vent, which is not a great idea to begin with. It turns out the run was only pointed at the soffit vent because the moron builders installed the run after they had installed the ceilings. The pitch against the roof was too steep to maneuver in and and actually attach the run so they just aimed it in in the general direction of the vent from half a foot away. loving idiots. I ended up having a roofer cut and install a roof vent directly over the bathroom and re-run the exhaust. My other bathroom doesn't have a fan. There's a kickass low-noise fan in a box in the attic waiting for me to install it. It's been waiting 4 years now.
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Apr 7, 2014 23:18
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Leperflesh posted:Neither of my bathrooms have fans at all. Just windows. Too steamy in there? Open the window. Not everyone lives in a climate where this makes sense. Just a few posts up from yours is a guy who has snow on the ground in April. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are places where it's so hot out during the summer that the soap will melt. Also, not all bathrooms have windows.
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Apr 7, 2014 23:25
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Also, not all bathrooms have windows. One of my bathrooms has a window into the other bathroom! Why? Who knows! It's all the way at the top of the wall, so you can't even really see through it.
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Apr 7, 2014 23:34
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Not everyone lives in a climate where this makes sense. Just a few posts up from yours is a guy who has snow on the ground in April. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are places where it's so hot out during the summer that the soap will melt. Yeah that's the point. I am really not happy with my "just open a window" option which apparently in 1958 was normal. It doesn't even help that much, you still get all kinds of condensation on the ceiling. Plus I don't really need my neighbors listening to me shower at 1 AM, like I did last night after working on my vents till 12:30. My post wasn't intended as "you idiots just open a window," it was "this was the dumb thing my house's architect said in the mid-50s while he was doodling on his classic post-war steel 1950s desk with his fancy protractor and his slide rule and his unfiltered cigarettes, while his sexually repressed secretary stood by taking notes on her steno pad." Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Apr 7, 2014 |
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Apr 7, 2014 23:56
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The Human Cow posted:One of my bathrooms has a window into the other bathroom! Why? Who knows! It's all the way at the top of the wall, so you can't even really see through it.
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Apr 8, 2014 00:11
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i like nice words
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Leperflesh posted:... Heh, sorry, I've been reading DIY forums where people say exactly this. I went trawling through them for my home repair horrors fix but it turns out the kind of idiot who does that poo poo for the most part takes lovely pictures and tells lovely stories. 
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Apr 8, 2014 01:19
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In a long line of bad DIY decisions, one of the dumbest ones I ever made was to replace a dying bathroom fan with an expensive, whisper-quiet model. Let me tell you, fans do more than just move bad air and the makers of loud fans really need to advertise that fact front and center. I want a fan that sounds like someone just started a diesel truck outside the bathroom window. I want a fan that moves air like I'm living in a space station and a hatch just blew open. Telling someone smugly to open a window is like saying not to bother with lighting your house because just use candles and the sun, you pampered princess. Forget insulation and heating, just wear thick sweaters. Why do you need walls and a ceiling anyway when tents exist? Why bathe and shave when the funk and hair just comes back? Why read a book, why learn anything, why ever love someone when you're just going to forget it all and then die and in 100 years nobody will ever know you even existed? Why even try? Bathroom fans are the first domino of modern civilized society.
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Apr 8, 2014 01:53
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My landlord is having the outside of the building repainted. Is it me, or does this seem spectacularly unsafe? Yes, that's the electric supply. It would probably hit me around the shoulders if I stood next to it.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:02
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Anne Whateley posted:How old is your house and what's on the walls under the window? Might have been a transom. 1962, I think. The shower in one room and the bathtub in the other is under the window.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:02
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Meatwave posted:In a long line of bad DIY decisions, one of the dumbest ones I ever made was to replace a dying bathroom fan with an expensive, whisper-quiet model. Meatwave sounds like a foghorn when he shits.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:28
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you ate my cat posted:My landlord is having the outside of the building repainted. Is it me, or does this seem spectacularly unsafe? This reminds me of a video I would rather not have seen in the first place. If they are insulated, there is a good chance touching them with the scaffold or your shoulder would be uneventful. Now if they were not insulated or had a split in the casing, things could be very bad for whatever made contact.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:34
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Meatwave posted:I want a fan that sounds like someone just started a diesel truck outside the bathroom window 
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Apr 8, 2014 02:44
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Meatwave posted:In a long line of bad DIY decisions, one of the dumbest ones I ever made was to replace a dying bathroom fan with an expensive, whisper-quiet model. I will add kitchens with no fans to this list. My old house had an old as hell and loud as hell one that at BEST moved the volume of air my quiet bathroom fan did, and even that is better than my current house that does not have a fan. I want to make a 2 stage over stove vent fan that in it's normal setting sucks out whatever the quiet fans volume of air for normal cooking smells and a "hosed poo poo UP!" button that powers the in-line attic exhaust fan (I think it's ~750-1200 cuf/min) that just sucks up everything the poor little vent can't in case I burn something or am cooking with onions. Is it possible/not idiotic to do this without 2 ducts? I haven't decided yet. My current method for getting rid of smoke is to take an old 2500cuf/min attic fan and shove it in a window in the back of the house (and block the gaps with tape/cardboard) and just suck the air out of the house. Interesting fact: Said fan will suck small bugs straight through the screen and bigger ones such as moths get held onto the screen. Not that I would argue with having a turbofan engine for an exhaust fan. It would probably have a tendency to suck in/off the walls though. EDIT: I fail at math Fire Storm fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 04:38
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Kitchens without hoods that vent outside and pull a decent CFM should be illegal.
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Apr 8, 2014 15:09
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When I was looking at condos in the LA area I came across a place that stank like a cross between a greasy griddle and a BBQ. When I looked in the crawl space I saw no pipe to the outside but a vent with a screen over it in the corner over where the stove should be. It was rather sticky looking around that vent and I ran away.
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Apr 8, 2014 16:02
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Not everyone lives in a climate where this makes sense. Just a few posts up from yours is a guy who has snow on the ground in April. Cracking the window when it's -10 degrees out is quite effective at controlling bathroom humidity, actually. I've barely used my fan all winter.
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Apr 8, 2014 16:10
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The instructions for my hood specifically said venting into the attic space is dangerous because grease can accumulate and then ignite. I'm pretty sure it isn't up to code to do that, and maybe never has been.
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Apr 8, 2014 16:16
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Liquid Communism posted:Kitchens without hoods that vent outside and pull a decent CFM should be illegal. YES. I've never even been in an apartment that vents outside and it ought to be a goddamn crime. Why have a hood if it doesn't vent outside? I'm convinced apartment builders are the lowest form of life, below algae and the fungus that causes vaginal yeast infections.
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Apr 8, 2014 16:52
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This is quite a derail, but, vaginal yeast infections surely are caused by yeast, not fungus?
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Apr 8, 2014 17:01
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I'm pretty sure my apartment hood doesn't vent outside unless there's something tiny behind it, but it seems to work pretty good for smells. It's just got a million filters inside and scoops everything up.
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Apr 8, 2014 17:01
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NancyPants posted:YES. I've never even been in an apartment that vents outside and it ought to be a goddamn crime. Why have a hood if it doesn't vent outside? I'm convinced apartment builders are the lowest form of life, below algae and the fungus that causes vaginal yeast infections. My apartment actually has a hood that vents outside (or I assume it does, there's a duct going through my cabinet up to somewhere above) but it's not very strong and if anything gets burnt I end up having to open all the doors and windows anyway 
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Apr 8, 2014 17:09
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Leperflesh posted:This is quite a derail, but, vaginal yeast infections surely are caused by yeast, not fungus? Yeast is a fungus
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Apr 8, 2014 17:12
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Leperflesh posted:This is quite a derail, but, vaginal yeast infections surely are caused by yeast, not fungus? Wikipedia posted:Candidiasis or thrush is a fungal infection (mycosis) of any species from the genus Candida (one genus of yeasts).
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Apr 8, 2014 17:18
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Leperflesh posted:The instructions for my hood specifically said venting into the attic space is dangerous because grease can accumulate and then ignite. I'm pretty sure it isn't up to code to do that, and maybe never has been. Some hoods are designed to be vented outside. These may NEVER be vented inside as it's against code to install something against it's certified labeling and instructions, and for exactly the reason you mention. Some hoods are recirculating hoods. These were typically pretty crappy, but some have been getting better as of late. They attempt to work through filtration, which needs to be changed and cleaned much more often than most any homeowner is going to do. If you want the hood to work well, you need a real vent to the outside hood and sufficient makeup air. In most houses this will work fine without anything additional, but in very modern construction you may have problems. Or in very old homes when it very hot/cold out (you'll be dragging in outside air........that's the point). In commercial hoods this is handled by actual ducting for makeup air so the hood works as intended/designed. If you've got some cash to burn you can get the makeup air heated so that you don't end up getting cold air down your back all winter (commercial hoods are huge).
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Apr 8, 2014 17:27
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