The Adventures of Buckaroo Drywall Across the 8th Dimension

March 29, 2022

Home renovation has a lot in common with pottery or glassblowing or any number of skills where the creation of interconnected parts is core to the final product. Often times you find yourself needing to clamp on a new piece of wood or screw in a new support bracket that in no way will be part of the final product, but is vital in the moment to ensure that a physical structure has the integrity to last long enough to reach finalization.

That brings me to drywall.

We've been putting a lot of holes in walls.

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For those of you that watch the videos, you know that we employed a guy named Barry (not to be confused with the man named Kevin) to do some emergency electrical work at the time of move-in to remediate some dangerous choices the previous owner had made including 1) Not having GFCI breakers tied to the kitchen (this allows electrical outlets in the kitchen to function safely even though it's a wet zone) and 2) safely replace an instance where two live wires were twisted together to complete a circuit dangling above the dining area. This should have been basic work.

I don't blame Barry.

The job was supposed to be a a simple replacement job and then we discovered that we couldn't shut off the electrics in the kitchen. None of the outlets or appliances seemed to be tied to the breakers. This is an impossibility. It would be like experiencing a blackout in a thunder storm, but your blender is still running like some sort of avenging Dervish. It was the actual, literal existence of warning lights.

So, Barry suddenly was in charge of a job far greater than the one we offered him and, to his credit, he performed some Root Cause Analysis and figured out the odd truth of it all: the previous owner, most likely during a minor renovation we're aware of in the 90s when the new breaker/junction box had been installed, had hardwired the entire kitchen not into breakers, but directly into The Main. This is not done. This is the work of a madman. By-passing the entire concept of a circuit breaker so that one of the most electricity intensive rooms in a house all funnels directly into the main switch of the electrical box. <<body emptying sigh>>

Barry was with us for much longer than we would have liked. The main issue was that an entirely new spate of wires needed to be run from the kitchen to the new breakers. This is very easy to do when one builds a house, just loop them through the open, framed walls. But later, after the house is built and the walls up and painted? Then you need to carve a path from one side of the house to the other.

The first 2 pictures are examples in the main hall and the bedroom. The 3rd picture is an 'after' image of the room behind the kitchen; note all the new drywall outside and above the closet (closet interior is due to something else. Keep reading for that.)

Noteworthy to me, and perhaps one other person, is that the vertical hole in the bedroom wall looks just like the Tom Hanks murder hole from this Junior Scientist Power Hour comic by Abby Howard's. All very soothing on the nerves.

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Now a brief detour to another floor.

***

Barry was gone, the wiring was fixed, and the walls in four different rooms were cracked open. These were not walls we intended to take down. These were not rooms that had needed immediate attention. We had not budgeted for these projects. We had lived in the house 11 days. Sic Transit Gloria.

Now one of the endemic qualities of day to day living in the house was dirt. The yard as previously documented is a mud pit and the dogs still needed to come in and out. This was on top of Brie and I coming and going with projects, and the movers, and and and. So it wasn't unusual to find a leaf in the back bedroom that Walt had unwittingly walked in or a flake of dried mud on the couch from Ramona.

About two weeks after the walls had been opened there was a very clear issue with heat loss (not a surprise) through these roof access points but also the dirt and leaf accumulation in the back hallway also had a noticeable uptick, which seemed not normal.

We more thoroughly investigated this now opened channel running through the middle of the house and discovered that it was an attic crawl space we were previously unaware of, with the appropriate vent openings to the outdoors (all attics should have vents so that's totally normal). But it's clear that when they had replaced the roof a few years ago they had just left all the leaves in the attic that had fallen and now they were blowing right into the main house through our new holes. This also gave very direct evidence that we were literally heating the outside. Had not a parental stereotype warned us of just such an eventuality?

This, my friends is how we came to be up on the roof one Saturday. We needed to verify that the leaves were in fact pre-existing and not due to a break in any of the mesh attic vents. I did not take any pictures or videos of this trip so here's an artist's recreation.

Yeah, the mesh needs replaced.

***

Back from the roof. In the below picture you will notice two slatted doors leading to a "pantry." In this case pantry is best defined as "the previous owner cut a fucking hole in the wall, bought a flat pack shelving unit from walmart, and jammed the shelving unit into the hole." Of course there's a room behind that wall with a closet in it (see above). So this genius put this pantry into the closet in the other room. It's a closet that when you opened the door was stuffed with the back of a shelving unit. Utter madness.

As a way of coping with the fact that Barry was coming every day to try and fix the wiring while cutting up the walls, Brie decided to tear out the pantry (leaving another giant hole for about two weeks) and then as soon as we jettisoned Barry she was determined to teach herself to drywall to fix everything herself...