Problem Solving....

I was up until 12:30 last night. Edward and I were trying to figure out if something in the front room was causing our lights to flicker. It had gotten so bad that Edward's UPS was shutting down his computer to project it. We were getting drop outs in power and had lights dimming or flashing off and on. It would do this for 10 minutes or so then quit. Then start again. We'd had the power company out twice and they said the power was clean coming into the house.

We figured out what was going on this morning by accident. We started by changing out some sockets around house, thinking they might be shorting out. The first was outside by AC unit. It looked a little rusted and not sealed, so we bought a new cover for it and installed that. While we were doing that we noticed the power line from the house to the outside part of the AC was cracked and rusted. Aha! We thought, we've found our problem. So we called an electrician to come out and replace the line. Oh, and while he was out here, could he see if he could track down why the lights were flickering.

He got out here late morning and started with the junction box in the garage to see if he could figure out why the lights were flickering. He put his hand on the breakers... "Nothing's warm". The house was built in 1979, so it had an old junction box. It doesn't have a single main breakers that will shut down the whole house. That wasn't required by code in 1979. There are five big breakers that need to be thrown to bring the whole house down. One for the AC, one for the range. Those and two others are for 220V. The one labeled "main lighting" will take down all the 110V in the house. Below that there are more breakers that will take down regions in the house. He poked and tested for a few minutes, then ZZziiitt! "Well, we're making progress." He said cheerfully. Edward and I just started laughing. He worked the main lighting breaker out of the box. Yup, there was the problem. One of the contacts on the breaker looked scored and pitted. Not good. That would explain why all the lights in the house would flicker at the same time. Luckily for us, there was a spare breaker of the size he needed right there in the box. So he switched out the breakers, and reconnected everything. Then he disabled the bad one and stuck it back in the place the spare had been, so that there weren't any live contacts exposed, and closed up the box. The lights haven't flickered since.

Next he fixed the power line to the AC. Turns out that was fine and would have been so for quite a while. The outer casing was cracked but there was steel under that what wasn't even close to leaking. The wires themselves were fine. He replaced the casing, threading the same wires through the new casing and reconnected it to the AC.

The lights have been solid ever since. What a relief. Electricity makes me nervous. Electricians scare me. They have a reputation for using you to "make their next boat payment". This guy was nice. He didn't try to sell us a new junction box, or anything else. Our office uses this company to do work in the building, so I had a recommendation form the office operations manager before I called him. It'll be about $200, maybe a little more. He left saying they'd send us a bill. We're glad its done. Both of us were worried about the AC getting damaged, or the microwave, the TV, the stereo, never mind that we were afraid it would start a fire if we couldn't find it. Turns out that what we called them out for wasn't what was causing the lights to flicker at all. I guess that's the way it works sometimes, the problem that wasn't a problem, gets the problem solved...

The Joys of Home Ownership...

We've been dealing with a leaky side door to the garage, pretty much since we moved into the house. The first door frame and door itself, for us at least, pretty much rotted out a few years after we moved in. So, when we replaced the front door, we had the side door replaced at the same time. Several years after that we noticed the frame at the bottom of the door was soft. It, too, had rotted out. We had that repaired, and hoped we'd fixed the problem. In September of 2008, we had the door replaced again, not because of a problem, although it, too, had leaked, but to make it hurricane rated. Once again we struggled with a leaky door. We caulked it, we painted it, we sealed it to within an inch of it's life. To no avail. After all the rain we had last week, we noticed again that the door was leaking. So we started looking again for a cause. Again.

Let me back up about 10 months, to a day after another particularly heavy rain and standing water inside the door. We started inspecting it and we discovered that there is no caulking behind the hinges. The door opens out, so the hinges are on the outside, in the elements. It probably opens out because of some building code requiring it to do so. All the side garage doors in the neighborhood do. Being that the bottom hinge is only 18 inches off the ground and gets wet during heavy rain from the south, and water was running behind the hinge, and into the door frame. We caulked behind all the hinges, and hoped that we had caught it in time. All we probably did was seal in the moisture, and seal the fate of the door frame.

Thursday, Edward started looking at the door again, trying to find where it was leaking. Again the bottom of the frame was soft, so he got out the box cutter and started pealing old caulk, which pulled off the paint, and revealed wet, rotten wood. The bottom 12 inches of the door frame, on both sides, was completely rotted out. Again. It wasn't like we'd been ignoring the problem. We'd caulked, we'd sealed, we'd painted. Everything would seem to be fine. We'd even get that south rain again and it would be dry, but maybe it just wasn't leaking enough to show.

We called the handyman that had done the work for us. Could he please come out and have a look? It was going to need repair and fast. One, we had a break in the weather. After a week of rain, we weren't supposed to get any for a few days. Two, I'm supposed to go out of town next week. I like to be here when we have work done on the house. Edward and I tag team the people we hire to make sure they know we're watching and do the work right. That is the theory at least.

Our handyman came out the next morning and looked at the door frame. Yeah, it needed to be done and he thought he could do it that afternoon. Great. How about doing the work free of charge? He'd always said he stood by his work. OK, here's his chance to prove it. We told him that we'd found no caulk behind the hinges. He gave us a some an dance about needing a gutter to keep the rain from splashing onto the door. Or maybe, I thought, if the hinge had been sealed correctly, it wouldn't have leaked and rotted. None-the-less, if it had been done right, it wouldn't have rotted in less then 2 years. He agreed to do the work at no charge. I figure he thought the same thing.

He had another job that morning, but returned at about 4:00 to do the work. It took about 2 hours. He had to cut out the bad wood, high enough to reach wood that was still good. Then he had to fit in new door jam, a specific pre-made piece, add a 1x1 inch trim piece, caulk it in, and restall the weather striping. He did a passable job. We wanted to be sure the joints were flush. They were... for the most part. The door frame boards was primed already, but he covered the trim piece with caulk. "Painted" with caulk, he said, that'll seal it. Yeah, maybe.

After dinner we did a little extra work. We sanded the joined frame flush on the handle side and touched up the caulking a little bit. The hinge side was more of a problem, since we couldn't get the sander in the space. Oh, and when the handyman left, there was still no caulk behind the bottom hinge. There was before we finished with. His attention to detail does seem to be lacking a little bit. We learned that after the last work he did for us.

This morning I got up and primed the entire door frame. Four hours later, the first coat of paint, and five hours after that, a second coat of paint. We also sealed the door frame where the locks go in with an expanding foam that is supposed to be water tight. I can't imagine where this door would leak again. I've thought that before, only to have it leak again. Tomorrow morning we'll reinstall the weather stripping and cross our fingers.

We'd done all the things we were supposed to do when we hired him. We got recommendations, we checked his license, and we checked work he'd already done. The first work he did for us we were happy with. The second job, not as much. By the time this came up, we had already decided not to use him again. The only reason we did for this was because he agreed to do the work for free. He stood behind his work. I'll give him that. If he'd insisted on charging us, we would have hired someone else. Today he was next door, doing some work for our neighbor. She's been happy with him. That's OK with me. But we won't have him out again.

So now we wait for a strong southern rain. It might be next week, it might be next month. The door didn't leak every time it rained, nor every time it rain from the south. Who knows if we've got it this time. We caulked everything we could think of, short of caulking the door itself shut, or bricking the thing up entirely and putting in a window, which with our luck would leak as well. At least we caught it before it has gone any further. Or more importantly, before the carpenter ants or the termites found it. That only would have made a bad situation worse.

Maintenance is one of the many joys of home ownership. It requires constant vigilance. We'll keep our eyes on this door and in six months, leak or no leak, we'll probably caulk and paint it again.