Geek in progress

Found the problem, originally uploaded by Itkovian.

When we arrived home yesterday, it was pouring cats and dogs. I ran inside, fearing the cellar might have been flooded, but everything was ok there. I slowly made my way upstairs, to fetch a dry t-shirt. Passing the bathroom, I noticed a puddle of water in the middle of the floor, unconnected to any wall. Fear gripped me, as I remembered the water that once poured through the ceiling into the office space, wrecking the laminate on the floor. I figured the roof was leaking again.

Checking upstairs, I saw a large puddle, growing rapidly. I never raced that fast down the stairs to fetch some buckets and some towels. I yelled to Veerle and her dad to come up and help, getting a very fast response. After we managed to stop the puddle from growing larger and reaching the vent shaft of the bathroom ventilator, we looked for the problem in between two periods of heavy rainfall. Clearly, the plumber who put in the drainpipe from the roofs frontside to the back, made a slight error. Not only was the output hole of the pipe partially covered, the plate attached to said output hole was much too small to withstand any backfiring water, causing the pressure to spout the water back into the attic.

We managed to fix it by leveraging the stone covering the hole, and by climbing onto the neighbouring roof once the thunderstorm had passed on. Sadly, the water had made it through a crack in the floor to the bathroom (hence the puddle I noticed), filling up the space on top of our new shiny gyroc ceiling. Luckily, we used green gyproc, which is supposed to be able to withstand a lot of humidity.

We’ll see what the insurance guy says when he comes by. In any case, we need this fixed soon. So far, we didn’t notice any permamanent damage, but this might change as the ceiling dries out. Luckily the new bathroom furniture was not affected.

I managed to do at least some work around the house during the past few weeks. We’ve had the MetalStud delivered to construct the fake ceiling framework in the living room.

First task was getting the edges put up, in a decent and horizontal fashion. Because we’ve got a lot of things to mind when planning the final height of the ceiling (audio connections, other electrical boxes hanging near the (real) ceiling on the wall, concrete slabs bridging the gap between the dining and slouching rooms, …) I decided not to fiddle around with a XXX, but I went out and bought a nifty laser equipped tool that calibrates itself horizontally and draws a 360 degreee laser arc on the walls. It went flawlessly. The only drawback was the fact that the device came with a tripod that could raise it to about 1m50. Whereas we needed it raised to at least 2m60. I know that once you have a horizontal line drawn on the wall, you can easily add height, but that would mean walking around, trying not to miss anything and measuring repeatedly to get the final height right – the exact problem we wanted to avoid by purchasing the laser in the first place. Two tables stacked on top of each other neatly circumvented that particular drawback. So we ended up with a red line, we coved with pencil markings. Took us 15 minutes, costing €180.

The edges went up pretty fast, after I went out and bought the rings to prevent the screws from bending the metal too much. That was the end of afternoon one.

The second afternoon, we cut the crossing bars and put them in place. The cutting went slowly, until a friend brought his electrical saw, equipped with a nifty metal cutting blade, that went through the MetalStud like it was (almost) nothing (which, of course, it is). We did the bars in the slouching room and the first half of the dining place. So far, so good.

Then came the toughest part: bridging the gap between the kitchen and living room. We ordered a few plates cut in a local store, and lo! swiftly the wood went up, producing a nice frame. the idea is that the frame is strong enough to attach a few open cupboards underneath it, to store our glasses.

Finally, we put up the remaining edge against the frame, and cut the crossing bars and put them up.

The kitchen remains undone for now, because I suspect the store not having delivered the correct MetalStud bars. We have one edge (4m) and eleven crossing sections (4m each). We need to cover a place of 2m by 2m80. The crossing bars should be places 30 cm apart. So do the math and discover that either we miss one edge, or that we have three crossing bars too much.