Board Batten

Found in the wall cavity along with a t-shirt

The truth is that everything that isn't adobe/stucco on this house was, originally, board and batten. The years passed since this roof was built along with the enclosed porch, maybe on Feb 19th 1955, and eventually someone just didn't want to spend any money to replace the rotting battens. So they tore off the battens and covered it all with the cardboard siding. I wondered what I would find when I went to replace the cardboard siding with truwood siding. And I found the boards are in OK shape. Just needed a few spilts glued back together and new battens from the mixed-width material I had laying around. I can always replace the siding if this leaks but I think it is as weatherproof as the cardboard was.

Cardboard siding...I knew I wanted to replace it but decided that the original hidden boards were good enough to keep.

You can see the orange original color and the original roof line covered by the boards...along with the unpainted area that was under the original battens.

The current status. Not pictured is the insulated wall cavity of the porch around the door. If I'm going to put an A/C unit then there must be insulation in the walls and the ceiling. The gable is going to look unfinished until I can figure out a solution for the left end. See, originally the whole porch on the left was sided with board and batten, so the upper fake gable that is the second roof blended with the siding of the porch. But since I replaced the siding of the porch with truwood instead of board and batten, it looks mis-matched. 

I'm not looking to do anything radical to this house. New siding. New paint. New windows. New Roof. New electrical. I want it to be functional. I'm not changing the profile. I want no leaks.

So, I have moved to the south side where there is new Truwood siding that was also screwed to the original boards after the battens were removed. The south side wood is in worse condition but after 65 years it's all very serviceable considering it is an uninsulated porch that wasn't maintained. I plan to remove all the siding, all the boards, and insulate it, replace what electrical wiring is exposed...cover it with tar paper...and then flip the boards around and put the boards back to either act as sheathing or, depending on their condition, put the battens back and paint it. 

I replaced some board and batten in the last national park I worked in and the boards tend to curl and if they are hung too close to the dirt then they rot. I wasn't in love with the functionality of it but I don't have a better solution.

My neighbor shared this photo of this house in perhaps 1955. This is before the fake roof was built over the original adobe part but after the porch was enclosed and roofed. I'd say it's no more than a year or two old. 

I like the look of 3x3 double hung windows but the view from the inside actually makes sense to leave them single slider windows with exterior screens. My neighbor likes to weed eat her lawn in such a ways as to cast pebbles into my window and break them so fancy windows are not logical.

I think because the roof was built over the original roof it will be very hard to make this look like an authentic adobe house. The porch isn't authentic and the double roof isn't authentic. Even if I stucco the porch it will look odd with big windows. The plan is to insulate and replace the board and batten.

Orangeburg: The Pipe That Won The War

Who needs a pandemic when you have a collapsed sewer line?

This strange saga is complicated and ran parallel with the global virus pandemic so it's been a month of juggling jobs and financial crisis.

It all started when the gas company decided to replace the 6 feet of branch line to my gas meter. Great. Thanks!

You might wonder why there is a pit full of raw sewage in the pit they dug for the gas line. Well, I will tell you why. When they dug the trench for the gas line they discovered my sewage line directly after my toilet was completely backed up with raw sewage. They knew this because there was a 3 inch hole in the top of the pipe through which they could see the sewage that had been building up for the year I've lived here. 

 The gas company discovered the hole and called the city public works to fix the hole...which they tried to accomplish by putting a hose of water in the pipe and pushing out the blockage. This only caused the pipe to overflow with shit into the hole dug for the gas pipe because 120 feet down the alley the sewer pipe had completely collapsed...and didn't exist for about 10 feet.

Conspicuously absent is the pipe that leads to the sewer line.

A separate project to replace the siding of the house...and uncovered 40 inch on/center studs??? and no insulation and lots of weeds and scorpions.

So, the sewer crew got busy vacuuming the pit of sewage....and accidentally tagged the gas line...RUPTURED THE HIGH PRESSURE GAS LINE...which immediately required a COMPLETE NEIGHBORHOOD EVACUATION.

This was extremely dicey because my gas line was being fed by a temporary tank so my pilot lights could stay on...while a gas leak a few feet from my house basically filled my house with gas...while the pilot lights were on. You see where I'm going with this?

new sewer cleanout 

But Oggy acted fast as the evacuation order was given and he shut off all the pilot lights and shut all the valves off. This was significant because there was only one window open in the house and it was filled with gas, and the stove and water heater pilot lights could easily have ignited the concentrated gas fumes in the kitchen.

additional pipe connected to orangeburg pipe by fernco clamp fittings

After the gas company sorted out the gas leak, they tried to fix the sewage that was now bubbling up from the alley. But they determined the sewage line is private and my responsibility so knocked on my door and walked away from a broken sewage line leaving me with no plumbing drain.

one day the whole place will look this clean

Everything with me turns out to be a crisis so this is no different. One day I have plumbing, the next day my neighborhood is evacuated and my sewage is bubbling up into the alley. But I feel this house will be like my van and throw problems at me only at the rate I can deal with them. All I need to do is enter a crisis mode that I perfected in El Conquistador for 10 years and attack the problem head on. Fortunately, I live in a town that is as lawless as myself because even though I technically needed permits to work in a right-of-way, I ignored all that and simply dug until I found some sound pipe and connected the rubber fernco to it.

the final product buried and protected by cones

The Reason I say Orangeburg pipe 'won the war' is because the iron usually reserved for sensible sewage pipe went to tank and bomb factories in 1942 and left engineers with the task of finding an alternative. I'm sure they had huge warning signs in the manufacturing literature that said Orangeburg pipe had a lifespan of 10 years...and under no circumstances should it be paved over or driven over or even buried by more than 4 inches of dirt. I mean, the connections use no adhesive. the couplings are simply pushed on. Why would that last?

But it lasted probably 70 years until a decision to asphalt the end of the alley doomed the pipe to collapse from weight. Otherwise, it would probably still work good.

Is Orangeburg as deadly as lead paint and asbestos? No. It had a short lifespan and people basically wait for a problem to fix it. I'm not sure why no one mentioned this terrible product to me when I was hunting for a house since this area is littered with ruined sewage systems, but I found out in 1 year that I had a sewage pipe that is doomed. I fixed it for the immediate future but I forsee myself digging a trench 170 ft long to replace all of it along with the water line that is in the same trench. The good news is that I will have new water supply and new gas supply and new sewer drainage at some point.

a horse harness on a mule. the pedestal sink was barely affixed to the wall and my solution left a gap that I filled with subway tile. It almost looks like I planned it out, but believe me when I say that blocking water from hitting the wall is not a big priority for me.

Drainage

Here's a project that got out of control. The whole concrete slab in front of the door sank backwards, so rain puddles in front of the door and seeps under the frame into the living room, where it destroys the shopping bag floor cover.

I pondered this issue and decided the best thing would be to destroy the whole slab and re-pour it with a slop toward the lawn and not the door. But that sounded like a big project that could force me into other problems. So Plan B was to cut a channel and dig down and put a french drain and then drill some holes or use lattice pavers so water could drain down to the french drain. But that involved digging a trench a foot below a channel in concrete...

Plan C came when I discovered PVC micro-channel drain for sidewalks or in front of garages. Hey, this might work. So, I cut the channel with a freakin' circular saw and masonry blade, which was tool abuse, but it worked to cut a 3 inch deep slice. Unfortunately, I needed a 5 inch deep cut, so I had more work drilling and hammering the channel open.

 

The weird thing is that when I had only the thin cuts in the concrete we had a rain storm and all the water drained down the thin channels. There was no pond in front of the door. Everything was dry on the other side of the cuts. I think the cuts were enough to solve the draining issue since water always had a lower way out to the lawn. But I was not convinced it would work for a huge rain so I broke out the channel and agonized over getting the channel drain to angle slightly toward the lawn. This was agony because the slab had was pitched badly the opposite direction. So, this created a big lip/drop down when I had the drain slopping toward the lawn. It's a tripping hazard, but I had no choice and envisioned a grate over the drain...or a door mat.

I suspected that when I finally started to cement this in place my errors would become clear and that's what happened. As soon as I had committed to mixing cement I started to visualize what was happening with the water. I was thinking correctly, that I want a sloped drain toward the lawn like a roof gutter, but this is not totally a good comparison. A roof gutter is not water-proof and will leak at seams with standing water. Only a slope minimizes the leaks and maximizes drainage. But a ground level channel drain is UNDERGROUND, so who cares if it leaks? Furthermore, the channel drain is 3-1/4'' deep. So, if the channel drain was dead level, or even sloped in the wrong direction then it will STILL DRAIN as long as the yard end of the drain is not over 3-1/4'' above the grade of the opposite end of the drain. See? The drain would have to fill completely with water, with 3-1/4'' of water for the pond to return. But if the drain was dead level with the slopping slab, even slopping in the opposite direction of the lawn, it will simply fill up with water to the level required to start draining toward the lawn, which was probably 2'' of water, which is still below the top of the channel drain, so I would never see ponding. The water will be captured in the drain until it starts to drain. So, I don't think I needed to agonize about the slope of the drain since standing water inside the drain is not a big deal. It will evaporate in the heat of the sun. But I did agonize over the drain slope as I tried to ensure complete drainage, and thus caused there to be a depression where the slab and the drain do not match.



I think my instincts to get the drain to slope in such a way that there will be no standing water was correct, but I wanted to show how this was not the only way to skin the cat. The difference in slopes between the slab and dead level and a drain slope caused the offset depression that becomes a tripping hazard and another problem to fix.
Again, the solution is to tear all the concrete out and compact the area and slope the new pour in the direction of the lawn, but I have none of that equipment and am trying to solve these problems with what I can assemble myself. I can't justify a $1000 solution to the drainage problem, but I can justify a $40 solution that creates a tiny depression that can be covered with pea gravel or a door mat or a metal grate or something that eliminates the depression but still allows water to reach the drain.

The lesson here is to simplify everything. I do believe sloped cuts in the slab would've solved the problem with minimal effort. Water would've drained down the cuts into the lawn and there would've been no tripping hazard. Hell, make 3 cuts. As long as lawn end of the cut is below the opposite end then water will drain down the cut. The slab remains mostly unchanged. The only cost is the masonry blade. Maybe the cut channel fills with debris and stops draining but that could be solved by making it wider so it can be swept clean.


This solution will work, but it was a little complicated and I'm trying to keep things simple since the house is neglected in general so that any little project can quickly become big if I dig too deep into the problem. Pouring a new slab might be a solution but consider what insanity that would involve as soon as I exposed the area beneath the wall. It leads on and on and the project balloons out of control. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel but I do want to make some attempt to solve major issues like water entering the front door. It's a fine line between doing nothing, doing something that almost works, and doing something that works but creates other problems and creates.
Here's a mathematical graph to represent this.

Valley Drainage

I can't help feeling that the only solution is to tear the garage down and start again. But that seems too extreme, so I tried again to solve the drainage issue of these ridiculously designed roofs. This is Before...my latest work, but after my attempt to cover the earth in asphalt. The roof still leaked with this much asphalt because it didn't drain and the pond slowly penetrated a few nail holes.

Step one was skipped, when I struggled to make a 20 foot long evenly sloping wedge. It involved more math than I care to admit because it goes from a 30 inch wide piece to an 8 inch wide, and each of the three pieces of the wedge had to be centered. It sucks experimenting with money I don't have for these projects but financial stress is the homeowner's default status.

I tried to salvage some of the paper but it was easier to simply cut it so I could put some tar paper, then some ice and water guard (expensive stuff), and the final cap layer of rolled roofing...which I did not affix with nails because that caused the problem to begin with. I used adhesive sealant.

End result, The wedge of OSB, then tar paper, then ice and water guard, then the rolled roofing slipped under neath the older roofing (that sounds easier than it is to do) Then I buttered the seams with adhesive and weighed it down with some stones and bricks that you see on the roof. I knew that once the adhesive cured then the seams would be water tight, but this is no the ideal procedure since it's a clusterfuck of messing with old roofing and working alone on a 20 ft length of rolled roofing. I couldn't manhandle the long rolls of roofing so I ended up with two seams that required real attention since they are the critical aspects. You can also see my butcher job on the neighbor's roof, since I'm doing a patch job and slipping roofing under old roofing that was too delicate to touch and trying to limit the amount of damage.

I feel the lesson of the roof project is still an issue of my attempt to save money by struggling against the grain. The neighbor's roof needed to be torn off to make it easier to build back up again properly, but I did not want to go to that extreme because that would really force me to rebuild my whole roof with a better pitch, rather than this ridiculous mild arch? And I didn't want to do that either. I just want a few years out of this garage before I get extreme so I'm trying to keep the work and material at a minimum since it could be considered throwing good money after bad.

Here's a photo...two different sink drains. The one of the left is the one attached to the roof vent. I don't know the story behind what happened but someone abandoned the drain on the left and attached the sink waste to the drain on the right...or maybe they added the drain on the right through two walls because the left one was plugged. Either way, they didn't provide any venting for the drain on the right. Way to go! So, there was a loud gurgling from both the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink when the water was running because, I gather, the suction was siphoning the water out of the P-trap. Great! So, my demolition revealed what I suspected: no vent. The water just goes directly down into the house drain (which is another mystery that will be investigated one day)  It was a classic case of plumbing 101. Either tie the drain to a vent or... I purchased a basic air admittance valve, and rebuilt the drain to include the AAV.

This might look easy, but the critical thing is to build it with a slight slope down from the P-trap to the final drain pipe. I managed to build it close to perfectly level and the old slip joint connections all dripped, so I have to rebuild them with new pieces instead of being cheap and using the old stuff. Fine. Whatever. I will say that the AAV fixed the gurgling sound. Actually, I don't know how the water drained at all except it siphoned all the water from both traps to create air above it so it could drain. Then I realized the drain that had the vent is basically a direct vent into my sink cabinet, which reeks. So I'll cap it off.

Domestic Futility

Domestic Tranquility Futility:
Home ownership is all-consuming. The problems can't be ignored so my life has recently leaned in the direction of servant to a house. I waited for the rain to show me the leaks and it showed me 4 leaks that I attacked with asphalt cement and fabric tape.

I also finished the laundry room project that involved finding some kind of pipe about 1 inch below the surface of my lawn. I didn't hit this one with a pickaxe because I suspected it was there. I have no idea what this pipe contains or if it is obsolete. I was sure it was cast iron but it changes into some kind of yellow plastic. (EDIT TO ADD: This is FLEXIBLE YELLOW GAS LINE. Most definitely active. buried 1 inch deep, connected to black pipe. They flexed it under the alley)

Very practical solution to avoid dealing with black pipe. Can be connected to black pipe with a transition adapter. BUT CONSIDER BURYING IT DEEPER THAN 1 INCH!

The garage door wasn't too complicated. A box rail, hangers, some finesse with a drill and then a basic frame to hold the corrugated metal. I need some ideas for painting something on the door because it reflects the sun into my face and blinds me to the point I think it could start a fire.

I'm trying to win the award for ugliest roof but there are some very ugly roofs in this neighborhood so I won't even get a ribbon for participation. But in the race for worst conceived roof, I stand a chance. My neighbor's roof pitches down into my roof, which is a very slight arch. They meet like two bull Elks fighting for mating rights over a harem. But there is no slope horizontally so the water puddles on top of the seam and drains onto my motorcycles underneath it. This is going to be very interesting to solve but I have an idea for something called a "Hog Valley" Now I can call it an asphalt cement valley because I covered it in asphalt patch. Believe me, when I was roofing the area I stood on to that this picture I knew that valley would be a problem, but if I even breathed hard on the neighbor's roof, the material tore in shreds. But the house was vacant so I didn't know what to do, spend money fixing a neighbor's house, or fix my roof the best I could and deal with problems when the house next door was purchased and I could talk to the owner.

The worst decision was connecting the two garage roofs into one seam. With no horizontal slope so the water doesn't drain fast enough. Such is life.

My plan to solve the drainage issue with the roof is to build a false, upraised valley on top of this valley using roof decking. Then cover that with tar paper. I plan to use trapezoidal cut pieces of decking that will create an artificial slope in the direction of the yard. It's too complicated to explain and I'm sure any experienced carpenter would advise against it, but my mission with this house is to learn the hard way and possibly create new solutions to old problems. I want to know why something failed. For instance, I learned that any exposed nail head, even if it was obviously nailed down, will probably leak if the roof was installed using zero asphalt cement on the overlapped seams. That's how my roof was installed and all the nails leak. The asphalt cement on the seams at least gives a chance to seal around the nails, but there's a blind nail method that's even better. None of those effective methods were used so they basically laid a roof down and nailed it down, which doesn't last at all. I only want to limp this roof along until I can pay for the metal roof that I will install to the top. That's all.

Clear day between late fall storms.

A view of the man cave, metal door, illegal electrical subpanel, utility sink draining to god knows where, etc. etc. One day there will be a plaque....Oggy Bleacher Worked Here.

Why Doesn't The Roof Ever Leak Over a Bathtub?

Hoarder's Paradise

Fucking hell, the rain was predicted but I could not finish the laundry room modernization of this garage before it hit and forced me to bring my toys off the lawn. Bummer. The garage roof leaks terribly but I knew it would. I didn't know the floor would channel it everywhere and create a mess. The house leaks badly too and not in places I can find....due to there being two roofs.

Continued Progress

It took a battle to get this far. Wooden shutters, old plastic interior shutters, trenches, gas line collisions, pex, washing machine, sharkbites, sub-panels....on and on. It reads like a keyword seminar for home improvement. 

Oggy elected not to jackhammer into the foundation of the house, which is actually a wall since the house is 2 feet below the dirt. So, the PVC comes out at a 45 degree angle. I put a rock there in case someone gets careless.

Yep, a wired back-fed main breaker. And some branch circuits. You electrical geeks will say, "Where is the required retaining clip on the back-fed breaker??? That's a code violation!" Well, those things are hard to come by in ghost towns, so clam down. I ordered one and it's on the way and I'll install it asap.

Light! And a dryer that works. The last stage is the water for the washing machine.

Here's some photos of where I have water and how I have to get it to the garage.

conveniently placed water line is out of sight down an alley.

Any reservations about working around gas lines?