Shoddy Work Hall of Shame

I’m having a problem in WordPress – most of my pages are all fine when I edit them but don’t show up when I publish and I can’t figure out why. The house tour can stay broken for now, but the h.

Studs too short? Cut blocks of wood and/or stack up scraps of plywood to fill the gaps!

Don’t even try to understand this one

Time to frame a wall. New wood or old? Let’s alternate them! (These studs are not the same size, but they didn’t screw the drywall into the studs anyway so it doesn’t matter)

I guess it looks cool get size, color, and texture variety with your studs

Woodwork coming loose?  Don’t push it into place and re-nail it, just caulk! Cracked plaster? Just find a scrap of drywall to cover most of the cracks, and some of your woodwork! Just line it up between/on the surrounding trim, drive screws in wherever the spirit moves you, and you’re done! Radiators are totally solid so no one will ever notice.

And then there’s the caulk. So much caulk. I wasn’t strong enough to pull apart the caulk on the living room radiator covers; had to cut it.

Radiator cover removal

Normally how do you handle finishing floors around the radiator? You’d use special sanders to get around the low clearance. How did the previous owner do it? His… people just skipped it. And when they dropped globs of joint compound, dirt, pennies, and other odds and ends under it, they just polyurethaned right over them. This is what it looked like after I gave it a thorough cleaning.

It looks like someone kicked in the door to the front bedroom at some point. The jamb was all busted out around the strike plate. To fix this, long screws were driven through the destroyed wood into nothing. And there’s a lot of caulk on it, of course.

Then there are the front bedroom windows:

So what exactly are we looking at here? Lots of holes, obviously, and gorilla glue! Inside that, we have a very cheap window installed so crookedly (in a wall that’s actually square!) that it doesn’t even close. There are scraps of who knows what stacked up to reduce the size of the opening, and there are 1×3′s, that’s framing grade lumber, not what you’d ever have for decorative purposes, attached right to the tops of the window sills. I know this woodwork won’t survive being taken down, but I’ll be able to replicate it. Not just yet though because the front windows are staying until the brick is restored. And until I can afford the windows I want. And when I feel like doing another project. That could be a while.

Then there are the radiators. More bad paint. More joint compound gloop.

And I don’t have the steadiest hand, but look at this job cutting in with the paint around the stairs.

And, when you install stucco, install the flashing to take water out and over it, not as corner molding to drive it into the wall.

Back 3

Siding Post 4: Paint Color choices… and I suck at caulking

That’s right, I started off with talking about pretty things, but I’m gonna go through the back story before we talk about paint colors. Skip to the bottom if you want.

Making the back pretty (for real) is my next step! The bay on the back of the house is also the part of the house that I care the absolute least about having pretty, but once you’re dealing with uglies like water infiltration you’ve gotta do it all.

So the siding is done! I called my roofer and told him I’m ready for him to redo the fascia and silver coat the roof. I want the second part of this done, but doing all of it would be nice. He said he’d come by and see what the place looks like and hear what I want him to do (I guess because it’s been so long he’s forgotten what I paid for). And then that evening I saw him going into my neighbor’s house. He said he was just getting a cup of tea. So I waited for him. Later I knocked next door and found out that he forgot about me and went home. Whoops! Anyways, he should remember me soon, I hope. He’s a good roofer. But aside from that pretty fun little fail, I failed at caulking, and left lumpy goop all over my siding, which I then had to take off with a window scraper. Arg. Here it is, scraped clean. Sorta clean.

And I’ve tried to conquer the caulk but it’s still winning.