The Basement Ceiling

I've been muttering to myself about how the POs (or perhaps the PPOs) finished the basement ceiling when they finished the basement. Oops. I was wrong. Last night, I was looking at the ceiling and the plumbing, trying to figure out how to gain access.

The ceiling, it seems, is composed of some sort of material on metal lath. I'm inclined to say that it is mortar or concrete of some sort - it feels harder and more rough than plaster.

I've never seen anything like this. I'm not familiar enough with the style of the work to say whether it was original or later. Whatever the case, it won't make working on the plumbing or utilities hidden underneath it easy.

My New Computer!

Yesterday, I went to Pittsburgh, to pick up my new computer, a Power Macintosh G4/450 DP that I found, with a 17 inch Apple Studio Display, on Craigslist for a mere $135. I managed to get 2 gigs of ram pulled from another working G4 on eBay for $30. The hard drive that will go in it, to supplement the current one, is a 1TB Western Digital. I'd considered Seagate's 1.5TB drive, but there were too many negative reviews, and the price per byte was pretty close.

It's a lot of computer for $300 - although it only met that budget because I haven't purchased a DVD burner for it yet. I'll be buying that as soon as I sell off some of the parts from my dead PowerBook G3 and A's dead PowerBook G4.

Thinking Warm Thoughts

Over the holidays, I talked with my father-in-law, an HVAC tech, about my current boiler and possible future options. Our system is hot water, which lends us to greater efficiency potential than is possible with a steam heat system. He had just installed a Burnham Alpine boiler in the church across the street, and had primarily good things to say about the company. As a tech, he appreciates that it is still easy to get parts, quickly, for 35+ year old systems, while some other manufacturers discontinue parts after 10 years.

Although he wasn't able to give specific numbers, he thought, given our usage, that a new boiler would probably pay for itself in 5 or so years. The problem becomes then one of determining how we will pay the $5000-7000 that it will probably cost for the purchase and installation of the system.

The issue that this brings to mind for me, however, is one of venting. The Burnham Alpine uses PVC pipes for ventilation. High efficiency boilers and hot water heaters have special ventilation requirements to meet and as a result of their higher efficiency. They draw air in from outside because it is cleaner, and therefore burns more efficently than, say, sawdust or humidity laden air. They must exhaust outside, rather than into the chimney because their exhaust is cooler, more humid, and more dense, and would lead quickly to the collapse of the chimney in just a few years.

The normal installation would be to just run the vent pipes through the wall of the house. I find the idea of two bright white PVC pipes poking through the wall of my house rather unattractive. Yes, they could be painted to match the brick, but I'm still not completely comfortable with that solution.

One alternative that my father-in-law suggested was to run the vent pipes up the existing chimney. Our boiler and hot water heater use one chimney, while our fireplaces use another, so this wouldn't be a problem. He thought it wouldn't be too difficult to run things that way - just a matter of dropping two or three lengths of PVC pipe down the chimney. While this would cost more, I think the result is worthwhile.

This all leads me to thinking about the hot water heater and its eventual replacement with a tankless model. Tankless hot water heaters have their own special ventilation requirements, which seem to tend toward stainless steel, but which could probably be fit into the chimney if necessary. If I could settle on one system, it seems that it might be reasonable to drop in the vent pipe for the water heater at the same time as the vent pipe is being installed for the boiler.

Of course, I'd love to hear other ideas, including less ugly ways to conceal vents run through walls.

Random thoughts

A. is spending a few more days with her family before returning to Cleveland. Theoretically, this will provide me with an opportunity to get some stuff done, but in reality, it just leaves me lonely.

She'd like me to get the ceiling completed in the master bath shower, as would I, but I'm having trouble making everything fit properly. Sigh. She also wants me to get the hall cleaned up and vacuumed, a task which should be somewhat easier.

Tonight, after work, I'm going to help my dad move some art, but I should have at least a little free time - enough to move the mattress out of our bedroom and into the guest bedroom (new mattress tomorrow!) and maybe clean the hallway.

I can't wait until I can take some vacation time and use it to work on the house. Wow - what does it say that I want vacation time for housework?

Should this worry me?

Last night, I finished the rip out for the light fixture in the shower ceiling. It was a beautiful chunk of porcelain, but unfortunately, a bare bulb in such an environment is no longer up to code, and the city chose this as one of the few violations (of the many many that we posess) to write up. The fixture is curious in that it mounts without any visible screws - the screws that hold it to the backing plate are in the socket itself. I'll have to post a photo of this at some future time.

Since this photograph, I've sistered in some 2x3s to hold the drywall flush with the edge of the tile - the plaster and fiberboard combined were about 7/8" thick. But before getting to that point, I took some photographs from the vantage point afforded me.

The following two images are of the same location.



The stud in the foreground at the bottom of the picture is one edge of the shower enclosure.



This is a close up. Note the cracked joist, the tube with a nail resting in it, the wiring joined outside a box, the knob and tube wiring just resting on the ceiling, the beautiful notching and drilling...

The strange part of all this is that I can't figure out the purpose of the copper pipe that necessitated all of this. This pipe, I assume, would be servicing something on the third floor - yet there's nothing there or anywhere near where this pipe appears to run. If it were a radiator pipe, there should be another one accompanying it.

It's just a small crack, right? I really don't want to pull up the floor up there, not yet.

Art installation in the airlock

We'd been trying to figure out where we'd install this work by Northern Ohio ceramic artist Eva Kwong. None of the other walls seemed suited to it, until we found this one, in the airlock, between the front hall and the front door.

This photo should provide a better idea of how it fits in the space.

Plaster and Fiberboard walls

Not so long ago, I wrote about my walls, which I identified as plaster and lath. I had torn out one of the walls, on the stairs going down to the basement, because they were so badly bowed that the city had written them up as a violation it its point of sale inspection. I assumed that the fiberboard material used for the walls was a replacement, used when part of the tile was ripped out to install the cabinets in the 1950s.

Then, this weekend, I ripped out the ceiling in the shower in the master bath. The bare bulb attached to it in a lovely porcelain fixture was, unfortunately, another code violation that the city said we had to deal with, in favor of a recessed fixture. The ceiling was made from the same fiberboard as the wall on the basement stairs, covered with a thick layer of plaster. It seems that this material was used throughout the house.

While this fiberboard and plaster combination may not be as durable as lath and plaster, it seems to have been good enough, surviving for 80 years in one of the more difficult environments for plaster, the shower stall.



It seems, if you look at the above photograph, that these fiberboard panels were only nailed at the edges. I'm seriously considering the use of a countersink bit and some drywall screws to help even out the panels and make for a smoother wall.

Has anyone ever encountered these walls or know of anyone who has dealt with them? Is there some basic reason why drywall screws shouldn't work to hold them in place? Is there anything else I should know?