Week(end) #3 already! We had a full crew here again including the backyard gang! The weekend involved a little more painting and moving, demolishing, and making a fantastic roast dinner! Yes, a roast dinner in the middle of a move / fixer upper weekend, because that is how we do it at Sitka!
This weekend involved addressing our carpenter ant issues, demolishing our basement, moving out of our townhouse for good, and installing our office shelves in the new digs.
ANTS ANTS EVERYWHERE
While they aren’t really everywhere we did find a second ant nest in the garage this week. After last weekend we did a little research and learned a few things about these giant shiny evaders. We learned of a few tricks to find them…
- knock on the walls and listen for ‘rain’. Yes that’s right, they are soooooo big that when they are inhabiting your walls, if you disrupt them and cause them to stir you can actually hear them moving around. It sounds like faint rain in the wall..terrible!
- look for sawdust around crevasses and openings. These expert excavators will chew the wood in the structure (or tree) and then push it to the nearest opening to rid their nest of it. You will see scatterings of very fine sawdust, or piles of it in the case of our garage.
We (I) went around the entire garage looking for sawdust and knocking on walls only to hear very loud rain sounds coming from the back corner of our garage. ANTS! Frick!
We spoke with a professional in the pest control business and found out that we will need to be on high alert come spring when the ants re-nest, but that for now we need to protect the other buildings (the house!) with a perimeter of repellent and then open up the nest wall and kill kill kill. Sounds terrible…but so does our garage falling down from the structure being compromised by carpenter ants. We will kill in this instance.
We opened up the wall from the outside by removing the wood siding and exposed their nest. We then had to cut out all of the chewed up 2×4’s and replace them and seal it back up. We covered everything in things that I am sure would kill us if we inhaled it…good thing we had the right gear.
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- The dad’s deciding where to cut away the siding
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- Evidence…sawdust…and lots of it! That is from the ants, not our power tools!
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- Cutting away the siding so we can pry it off and have a chance of not wrecking it.
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- Taking off the siding. The ants are nesting between the siding and the sheathing.
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- You can’t see them very well but the ants we found in this wall were HUGE and WINGED! Ugh!
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- The first glance at the outer later of the nest.
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- The nest…from the outside. Looks terrible until you go inside and see the damage to the 2×4’s. Now that is terrible!
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- The nest from the inside. The 2×4 in the corner was a series of paper thin walls. Not doing much to support the garage!
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- The nest exposed and the shop vac in action
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- Look…a new window! (damn ants!)
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- The corner restructured with new 2×4’s ready to be sealed up again from the outside.
GENERAL FIXES
We had a bunch of little fixes and clean up to do around the house this weekend. The overgrown yard still needed attention, the gutters were full of gunk, and the back entry mudroom needed a little something to cover the wall temporarily since it was just tar paper and shiplap…no one bothered to finish the wall off when they enclosed that porch…shocking! We have come to learn that the intentions of pervious owners were great, their execution and handyman skills were NOT!
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- THIS IS A FIRE HAZARD! People, you can’t leave dryer vents clogged.
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- Back entry getting a temporary face lift
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- Cleaning out the overgrown chaos
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- More over grown chaos
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- Dad tending to the gutters and sooooo happy about it ;)
DEMOLITION TIME
The basement of this fixer upper is the first area that will be renovated, and thus it is the first area to be demolished. We wanted to reuse the plywood that is currently the subfloor so basement demo moved up a little in the schedule to this weekend so we could harvest materials. The subfloor was not doing a very good job as a floor…so why no make it garage walls instead?
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- Grinding away the nails that were left in the concrete
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- Framing how (not) to…do NOT glue drywall to the wall studs!
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- Harvesting some 2×4’s for the garage.
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- We have more gift with purchase…many many shiny black spiders nesting under the subfloor! Have I mentioned I hate spiders!
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- The first sheet of plywood comes off the floor.
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- Prying up the sleepers (the strips not he floor). Some where attached well…some not!
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- Pulling up the sleepers from the floor. Some where attached surprisingly well.
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- The air filter helped with the dust from grinding the nails off the floor.
OFFICE INSTALL
The office install began with the wall shelves…unfortunately that is all that really got installed! It is a good start.
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- He made a template from the other house…yay for thinking ahead!
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- Installing the float in shelf supports
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- So happy…all the shelves slid onto the blind supports with ease! Yay for templates!
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- Victory pose
FUN & GAMES
Roasts and dinner on the patio!
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- Dinner….OMG so good!
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- Carving the roast…a little more delicate than basement demo
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- The crew taking a little break to enjoy some awesome dinner on the patio
