Bezabor: Termite damage repair, Herc-U-Lift...

Saturday, 3 December-

I’m still under the weather and coughing quite a lot but we decided to go shopping at Home Depot and Lowe’s. We’ve long thought the house under-insulated in the basement and with everything out of the way now, it’s a good time to fix that problem too. We bought ten rolls of 3-1/2 inch insulation. That will enable us to double up the insulation on the basement ceiling and to replace a few sections of missing insulation from the exterior walls.

I also bought a ‘Herc-U-Lift’, which is a framework and set of casters for my radial arm saw. I had found these with a google search using the model number of my radial arm saw. It’s a very interesting arrangement--- it has a pedal in the middle that you step on to raise the saw off it’s feet. Then after rolling the saw to its new spot, you just step on a pedal and it’s lowered back to its feet. This will be perfect for our new strategy of keeping the radial arm saw in a shed and rolling it out of the shed to cut longer stock. The unit is made by Ridgid and is sold on their web site but also by Home Depot.

And here starts another tale of good luck. Both the Ridgid web site and the Home Depot web site list the unit for $49. But when we found them at our local Home Depot, the sign above them said $29 but one box in the pile had a $49 sticker on it. I asked a clerk to zap the bar-code on one and it came up $29. Another stroke of good luck!

Friday, 2 December-

I’m still having problems with my cold/flu so decided today to go to the doctor. Apparently I originally had a cold but that turned into a sinus infection and that’s why it has been hanging around so long. The nurse-practitioner prescribed Amoxycillin and advised that Mucinex would help with the drainage.

I didn’t feel like working in the basement today so spent most of it googling on the internet. I’ve been looking at water treatment options, particularly ultraviolet light. I reviewed our most recent water sample analyses and tried to compare with the requirements in the owner’s manual for the ultraviolet treatment unit I’m considering.

Unfortunately, the limits of the unit are described in a slightly different set of terms than the water analysis reports. The principle in this case is that ultraviolet units aren’t effective on water with a lot of suspended matter. So I ended up sending the factory an email with the results of the water analyses and asking for help.

Thursday, 1 December-

I was able to work in the basement today, repairing termite damage to a sill plate on the west wall. By ‘damage’, I mean the 2 x 4 was so far gone that all that was there was a paper-thin shell. I could push through it with my fingers and break it up with ease. Much of it was so crumbled it had to be vacuumed up with the dry-vac. That means the studs in that six foot section of wall are sitting on nothing but the nails originally driven in from the bottom of the sill. Interestingly, the sill itself is absolutely destroyed but the studs are untouched. And in this section of wall the studs and sill are doubled; the outer studding was the original wall and the inner was added when the basement was finished off. Those inner studs and sill are also untouched.

The termite problem originated when the builder didn’t build the block portion of the wall high enough. He apparently underestimated the grading level required outside the wall and the house ended up with dirt covering the lowest row of siding--- a virtual guarantee that the house would have termite damage at some point. If he had only added one more row of block, there would have been no problem. So while the immediate challenge is to restore the structural integrity of the wall, next Spring I’ll have to somehow get the dirt away from the outside of the wall.

I used the Sawzall to cut off the nails in the end of the studs but because the Sawzall was too big for the space available, it left two quarter-inch projections of nail from each stud that I had to manually cut off with a mini-hacksaw. Then I was able to put a four-to-six inch piece of 2 x 4 under the end of each stud. That leaves some open space in the sill between the studs but now each stud is fully supported by good, solid wood rather than a thin shell of wood around a lot of termite tunnels.