Casa de las Ratas 3/9/2002

Casa de las Ratas Week 6

March 7-9, 2002

We got a ton accomplished this week. Above you can see the view from the roof of the side yard,
finally cleared of mountains of bush trimmings. How? You ask...

Chino has a super Nations Rent. You can rent anything there. In particular, you can rent a big mulching chomping machine for $150 bucks per day, which we did on Saturday morning. We fed that whole pile seen in front of this picture into this munching machine and made lots of mulch.

We fed all the trimmings, (remember 17 years worth) into the mulcher, branch by branch.

We kept feeding the beast. All of it from the front yard to the big heap in the back for six hours. The mulcher is very noisy. We communicated by sign language all day. Always wear earplugs when operating such noisy machinery.

Earplugs courtesy of the Grammy Awards swag bag (thanks George!) and Mercenary Audio. Thanks Fletch! HUH?

Inside I had Ozzy and Alfonso tearing out the rest of the plaster in the two back bedrooms. Electrical will be a pain to try to run with the old plaster in place. Insulation will be impossible to do and all around, the more I think about it, the easier it will be to just rip all this old stuff out and re-drywall everything fresh.

Like this.... another bonus is we can really see everything, including more dryrot and termite hideaways... but no more rats. They are disappearing fast... we haven't seen anymore in the house for awhile.

Although we chased out a small rat family out of the brush today. There was one baby rat casualty. Manny stomped him and then threw him against a wall. Mom and Pop ran off, probably to my house.

In preparation for the clay roof tiles, that nasty looking ridge beam was replaced before the tiles arrived. Here is Manny cutting out the old beam with my new Sawsall... what a cool tool!

This "fluffy" ridge beam is what was cut out. It sounded like a rain stick. "SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH as I tilted it up and down.

We thought only a six foot section was affected but when we made that 6' cut, we could see the termites were in even deeper.

Dang! Because this is old lumber that actually measures 2" wide, and because you cannot just rock up at Home Depot and buy more lumber this size, we had to look for another "old style" 2 x 6 to steal from the house somewhere. We had already stolen a bunch of the supporting wall between the kitchen and dining room to make replacement rafter tails out of last week, so I was not feeling good about having to steal some more. Even so, they were only 8' long and we now needed a 9 foot piece to replace all of the bad section of the ridge beam.

In the dining room was a 12 foot long 2 x 6 nailer for the ceiling. It was non-structural so we stole that piece.

Pictured here is the where the ridge beam was cut out. Dang! What is holding up the roof? Well the tiles are not on so the roof isn't too heavy and we have bunches of braces holding the joists up. Whew!

The new ridge beam was toe-nailed in and framing brackets were added at every joist for additional strength.

Actually, these little brackets are only about 18 cents each, so I bought 100 of 'em and we put them on every roof joist just to be sure, considering the weight of the clay roof tile on these old beams. Better to be safe than sorry.

It took Paco about an hour to install them all under both ridges.

And here come the clay roof tiles! I did not order a big roll-off dumpster this week knowing this huge truck would want plenty of room to maneuver into place.

The conveyor belt was put into position and a stack of tiles was loaded up, usually 3 at a time, by one guy while the other dude on the roof received 'em and placed them carefully into neat stacks.

See to the right, the best gizmo we have (besides foam knee pads): Special thanks go out to my sister who gave me a SOLAR POWERED radio last year for Christmas! Actually, if there is no sun, like, if you are indoors or if it is cloudy, you can alternatively wind it up to make it play for about an hour.

Thanks Spacey!
You keep us all sweating to the oldies all day!

Last minute preparations were made along the roof. Here Jose Luis is getting this rafter tail ready to paint so that once the rake tiles are up, no paint brushes need go near the roof tiles.

Also you can see the ridge tiles stacked up waiting to go on the ridge that runs along the perimeter of the flat roof. (That's why we also painted the stucco a foot down along the whole house.)

Here is the chimney flashing detail. New saddle metal, and tile pans. I had a can of BBQ high temp paint which looked pretty good on the visible flashing. Everyone should paint their soil stacks and chimney flashing all pretty every once in awhile. It looks great from the street.

Jose Martin and I had chalked all the lines before the tiles arrived (twice actually because it rained on Thursday night and washed all our chalk lines away.)

The tiles are stacked in a certain way following our lines as to not place too much load on any one point on the roof.

Also of course, the chalk lines are followed in laying out the roof.

What a difference... the neighbor's concrete tile roof will look like crap next to my new clay tile roof... too bad as his house has always looked like a million bucks next to Casa de las Ratas. But no more... that's going to change.

The neighbor will probably be really happy to see all the brush removed. He was away this weekend.

Jose Martin and Jose Luis got this half of the roof nearly done. The valley was a lot of work. Jose Martin brought his special saw blade to make all these angled cuts for the open valley. As we saw before, closed valleys are not a good idea.

Smaller cut pieces were attached with wire to the pieces above as you cannot be making holes in the valley "w" flashing.

Bird stops, or rather, Ratstops were installed under the exposed end tiles. Mortar was put just up the valley to also prohibit critters from making homes under the roof.

Go back to week 1 at Casa de las Ratas

Week 2: more cleanup and roof replacement.

Week 3: the big dumpster comes and the hot mop boys will show up.

Week 4: fixing the valleys, new kitchen subfloor

Week 5: prepping the roof, framing in the kitchen, ripping out more floors...

Coming next weekend at Casa de las Ratas:
Week 7: Let's get the roof finished! And destroy more stuff inside!

Week 8 & 9: Final touches on roof, removing all the old hard conduit/black pipe, filling yet another roll-off dumpster.

Week 10 & 11: Plumbing will be completed. More tools will be acquired.

Week 12: Kill that old rear bathroom, level the yard, cast some concrete.

Week 13: HVAC installation, reclaiming wasted space, start fixing windows

Week 19: Sanding windows, drywall blocking, paint the house exterior!

Week 22: Big Inspection goes well, stucco scratch coats, wiring beauty shots

Week 23: Is that The Rat House or Circus Vargas? Termite Tenting! Nuke 'em all. Insulation begins.