Tom's Blog

I updated the commenting functionality on my blog for no particular reason.  It's all AJAX-ified so that comments are updated on the page in semi-real-time.  Unfortunately it's completely dependent on Javascript, but I have some ideas to fall back gracefully and still cut down on comment spam.

Several weeks ago we discovered we have rather significant water damage in our downstairs bathroom.   Pictures of this ongoing adventure can be found here:  Bathroom Repair For Programmers.

Tip #1:  Don't put off dealing with visible signs of water damage, even for a microsecond.

Tip #2:  Check behind plumbers to make sure they actually fix things.

Last year (I think?) we started to see water spots on the linoleum in the bathroom, and we got a plumber to look in the crawl space under the house.  He said he fixed some stuff around the bathtub drain, and then we figured it was all taken care of (at least I did).  Wrong.  New water spots on the floor appeared, and seemed to be spreading more than ever.  I actually thought it must be mold or something and not more water, because we had had a plumber under there and he fixed everything, right?  Wrong.  The floor started to noticably buckle and it became impossible to ignore the fact that something major was still wrong.  We finally looked under the house ourselves and found water leaking down around the toilet drain and what looked like pretty bad damage to the sub-floor.

Tip #3:  Turning off the toilet valve doesn't stop wax ring leaks.

We shut off the valve on the downstairs toilet immediately.  A few days later it dawned on me that shutting off the water wasn't enough -- the water in the tank and bowl would still be merrily leaking away.  So I drained all that water out to stop the source of the leak.

I figured it was probably the wax ring (what else could it be?), so I did some research (here) and decided to replace it myself so we could at least have the use of the bathroom again.  It sounded pretty straightforward:  Remove the two screws holding the toilet to the floor and tada, it comes right up.  It's actually a lot easier than it sounds.  Anyway, I bought a new wax ring for $3 and removed the toilet, thinking this would be a relatively quick and easy workaround until we could deal with repairing the floor later.  Then I started poking around on the floor under the toilet.  The more I poked, the more ghastly it became.

The entire floor under the linoleum was waterlogged and rotten.  It was like having a floor made out of a wet sponge.  There would be no workaround for this -- it would simply have to be fixed before the toilet could be re-installed.  In retrospect, it was pretty miraculous that the toilet (or one of us!) hadn't fallen straight through the floor.

How could this have happened?  There are really only two possibilities I can think of:  Either the wax seal just spontaneously developed a leak, or somebody broke it.  Our house originally had wood flooring everywhere, including the bathrooms.  At some point before we moved in (5 years ago), someone put linoleum over the wood floor in the bathrooms.  One of my theories is that the wax ring developed a leak when the toilet was put back in place over the new linoleum, and it's been leaking slowly ever since.  That is kind of a long shot, though, because our home inspection didn't indicate any damage like this before we bought the house.

At any rate, the damage is so extensive I figure it must have been happening for years:  The damage goes through the linoleum, a layer of masonite beneath that, a layer of wood flooring beneath that, and the sub-flooring beneath that, over a huge area of bathroom floor -- and the neighboring dining room.

At this point I figured that whoever eventually fixed this problem was going to have to tear up the old floor regardless, so I just started doing it myself.  As Spock would say, "It has always been easier to destroy than to create."   I was able to explore the full extent of problem, and, if nothing else, it might save us a few bucks if/when we hire somebody to repair it.  So far I've removed the short wall, the vanity, the tub/shower combo, and big chunks of floor in the bathroom and dining room.  (We probably didn't need to remove the tub to repair the floor, but we figured this was an opportune time to get rid of all the Harvest Gold in the bathroom.)

After tearing all this stuff out, I can't figure out why the original plumber did anything to the bathtub drain.  That area looked fine to me.

Tip #4:  Call your homeowner's insurance agent right away!

We tried to call in our insurance agent to see if they could help.  They can't.  They only cover "sudden" water damage; they don't cover "seapage" -- anything that has been happening over a long period of time, and the guy said it was pretty obvious our damage had been occurring for quite a while.  This news in particular led me to think of ways to save pennies on these repairs.

Tip #5:  The contracting industry has horrible customer service practices.

Now what?  I'm not an expert of course, but after tearing everything out, it's pretty clear to me that four main things need to happen during the repair process:

• Repair (or replace!) four or five damaged floor joists.
• Repair about 5-6 feet of damaged header joist.
• Repair about 5-6 feet of damaged sill plate.
• Repair about 4 feet of sole plate on the exterior wall.

Those things are a little out of my comfort zone, so we've been trying to call in several people to evaluate the damage and give us some estimates.  Unfortunately, so far the prospective contractors either don't show up or don't return our calls.  One outfit who shall remain nameless (*cough* James Poe *cough*) literally didn't bother to call or show up after I took off an hour of work to be there when they arrived.  Needless to say, they were crossed off the list.

So that's where we stand here on this Fourth of July weekend.  Let this be a lesson to you:  Don't mess around with water damage.  Unfortunately, I'm not so sure our situation would have been much better if we'd tore into the floor the moment we saw the first water spot on the linoleum.  I remain convinced there would have been significant damage even then.  Which would mean we had absolutely zero indication there was a problem until it was already too late.  Stupid wax rings.

On the plus side, we'd always wanted to replace the fixtures and linoleum in the bathroom anyway.

I've just updated the "skin" for Krehbiel's Korner.  As usual, I got completely sick of the old one and needed to make a change before I became physically ill.  I admit that the design is heavily influenced by Drupal.org, which I think is one of the better minimalist web designs I've seen recently.  Also, in an unprecedented move, I tested the design with IE6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3, Opera 9.5, and Safari... before uploading it!

Best movie adaptations of Stephen King works:

• The Dark Half
• Delores Claiborne
• Firestarter
• Misery
• The Mist
• Pet Sematary
• The Shining (the mini-series, not the Kubrick movie, which bore little resemblance to the novel)

Worst adaptations of Stephen King novels:

• Desperation
• It
• The Langoliers
• Salem's Lot (all versions)
• Tommyknockers

Note that I have not had an occasion to read Stand By Me or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which are popularly considered among the best adaptations, so I don't include them.

This past weekend I topped my first tree. I don't think I'll be quitting my day job anytime soon. (Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a lumberjack!) It wasn't a big tree, so at first I was just going to use a hand saw, but it didn't take long to realize that I didn't have the arm strength or the leverage to cut through a 6" trunk at a point way up over my head. I ended up hauling the chainsaw up and cutting it that way, secure in the knowledge that my life insurance was paid up. As it turned out, I didn't kill myself so I consider it a success. We're not so sure the tree is going to survive, though.

I turned off the daily Del.icio.us link posts. It's just too much noise, and it was mostly just an experiment to see if my blog platform was compatible.

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Don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but my site has been hammered over the last week by this Twiceler robot: "Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html)". Easily 15 times as many hits as from Googlebot. I guess they are trying to destroy whatever semblence of bandwidth is left on the Internet. Anyway, I added it to my robots.txt; we'll see if it actually heeds it.

• PRB: Read-Only Properties Cannot Be Exposed by XML Web Services What to do if you need to explose a read-only property in a Web Service. (tags: asp.net)

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It's happening. You know how HTML files always squish the two spaces after a period into one space? I've always hated that, since everyone knows there are supposed to be two spaces after a period. Anyway, I just realized in horror that since I write so much material for HTML now (for the blog), I've fallen out of the habit of putting two spaces after a period. I have to make a conscious effort to do so now.  What a nightmare!

• KCNN: Legal Risk Module In case you need a refresher course... how to avoid legal trouble in blogging. Basically, it boils down to: Don't make stuff up. (tags: blogging)
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