FMLsicles!
So last week the insulation was to happen Tuesday and Wednesday, which means that Tuesday night was to be very busy getting some drywall up. The good news is that we ended up having more time than anticipated. Now for the bad news….
On Day 1, the contractor showed up, circled around looking for parking, (all agreements to secure spaces for me were null and void after it snowed, and the contractor couldn’t maneuver the truck into tight South Philly Spaces – Fail!) so they ended up working for a bit, but then got called in because of the snow. So they came back Thursday and finished. Unfortunately, they missed a few spots. Here I am, not too happy, fixing them with DIY grade canned foam.
Also, they never even did the exterior walls in the kitchen and bathroom. But even worse than this was… wait for it… the downspout!
What do you see here? The downspout is covered in ice. There’s ice running down the wall. There’s dirty ice coming out from the tar paper on the bay. And if you remember what the framing of that bay looks like, you know exactly how that water got so dirty. It was even dripping off the interior surface of the spray foam. It was because of this that we added that strip of wood holding the tar paper in. The bay was to be sided by this time, but now I’m not too interested in doing it until it gets warmer. My roofer also came out because he is awesome and put in a new, larger downspout, and took the gutter deicing cable (which you see in that photo) and ran it through the new pipe. Well, I didn’t go to the house today, but that’s what I asked him to do. We’ll see tomorrow. I know he was there at least.
So, the next phase of the insulation project is to restart this Thursday, including finishing the spray foam that they missed or didn’t get enough the last time. A bit more good news, they’re being very, very nice about coming back to fix what wasn’t done right and working around this small last minute crisis. So my return to (relative) freedom gets pushed back a week, but it looks like in the end, all will be well! Stay tuned next week to see how this all turns out.
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Oh, no! You certainly do not look happy. But let’s hope they come back and fix what is wrong. Did you pay for the whole job yet?
No the contract includes 3 windows and a chimney, and is financed with a (very attractively subsidized) loan. I haven’t approved anything yet and haven’t started making payments. They are great about hearing my concerns, though I was a lazy load all weekend and didn’t go to the house so I haven’t seen it with the work finished.
better a lazy load than caught in the effects of the polar vortex!
[…] also really important anyway. It’s been covered with tar paper for too long, even though it usually did the job of keeping water out. It’s been entirely too long now and we’ll need to […]
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[…] cantilevered was the first order of finish work. Why? Because not having it sided gave me a small water infiltration problem that forced me to push off the insulation job after I rigged a temporary fix onto the downspout. […]