Our first real complaint about the Skunk House was the state of disrepair suffered by the furnishings and interior décor. There were bicycle tracks up the wall behind the living room door. No two sheets of wallpaper met with an even seam. Water damage remained unpainted. The carpet was stained and shredded. Remnants of thousands of dart games and even some buckshot remained in doors and walls. And the living room furniture had been reshaped, apparently with a sledgehammer. But we'd all resigned ourselves to 9 months here, and we took it with good humor.

Then somebody pointed out how unsecure the banister was. And later that week I found the asbestos in the basement. And the doors were falling off the kitchen cabinets. And the fire escape was a joke. After that, it seemed like we were always discovering new problems. So what follows is the list, in no particular order.

• The Banister was not secure when we moved in, wobbling up all three flights. Ed came around at one point and tried to repair it with drywall screws. Unfortunately, he missed a fair number of the spindles, and drywall screws were never meant to be used on a wood and glue structure. Baring the two screws that secure the first four feet on the third floor, it shakes all the way down.
• Speaking of the Stairs, it's worth noting that they aren't that secure themselves. There are a couple of inches of vertical movement when anyone walks from the second to the third floor, and the stairs have a definite lean to towards the open center. Note the date and line in the photo below. This mark was made in 1989 to track the movement of the staircase relative to the second floor.

• The Stairs were a concern for the Fire Marshal too. He noted that the open stair to the third floor would act as a chimney for any fire that broke out lower in the house. He recommended building a stairway enclosure or providing the house with a sprinkler system.
• Plaster also falls from below the upper staircase. Since the floors it is attached to are fairly stable, its movement has created cracks at the joints. Carole insisted to us that "This is horsehair plaster, and it just doesn't fall down on it's own." I may not be an structural engineer, but I'm guessing that 120+ year old plaster falls away from moving wood all the time.
• In fact, Plaster falling down is a fairly common sight in the house. Between the water damage resulting from the third floor shower and the never repaired water damage from leaky radiators and a leaky roof have provided a supply of falling plaster on every floor. Note the panel screwed into the ceiling in the second photo. This constitutes Carol's initial "repair" for the plaster damage below the third floor shower.

• Plaster isn't the only thing falling down around our house. The Garage is also rushing fairly rapidly towards the ground. Structural rot is causing the garage to twist on several axes, pulling it away from the back room on the ground floor.
• Because the garage is pulling away from the back room, Kevin has trouble with a Leaky Roof. Water flows down the back wall of this room in several places during heavy storms.
• The stress exerted on the house by the garage pulling away has lead to several points where the Wind Blows through Kevin's room. Even after Carole finally fixed the heater in the room, it was still difficult to heat the room to a livable temperature.
• The crawlspace under Kevin's room also hosted our house Skunk. It's one thing to have a large rabid nocturnal carnivore living under your house, it's another thing entirely when it packs it's own chemical weapons. Probably the most disturbing part of this was the two weeks when the house still reeked of skunk indoors, even though the smell outside was gone. Carole told us that she'd close up the crawlspace so the skunk couldn't get in. To date there is still a small tree and a large hole there. See the Code Enforcement? page to see what Animal Control's response was.

• The skunk isn't the only problem under the house. This is also where all the Freezing Pipes are located. None of the water pipes are insulated, and the unheated basement has numerous cracks in the foundation for the wind to blow through. In eight days we had the pipes freeze five times. Finally it snowed, and we could plow enough snow around the foundation to keep the wind from blowing in. It's disturbing to use a wilderness survival technique to keep your pipes from bursting.
• The freezing pipes problem is closely correlated to the Unheated Bathroom problem. The first floor bathroom is completely unheated, and has a poorly framed window that takes up the majority of one wall. The wind blows through here too, and we had ice in the toilet bowl a number of times last winter. Carole told us that we had to leave the bathroom door open to keep it from freezing. As this blocks the radiator in the kitchen, it's a non-starter plan.
• Most of the house's Windows Don't Fit Right. Since being installed over 120 years ago, the house has shifted and the wood has shrunk. The end result is that the wind blows into the house through nearly every window. The leaks are significant enough that if you seal a window in plastic you have to tear a bleed hole in it. If there isn't some release for the pressure the plastic will tear down several times a week.
• The poor fit of the windows is a major issue, given the firetrap nature of the house. With only one staircase, the Mickey Mouse Fire Escape takes on increasing importance. To get out of the house in a fire would require opening a sticky window, then trying to back down a ladder someone welded out of steel pipe and wrapped up the side of the building. The general consensus is that you'd be better off to wrap your head and arms in something that won't burn easily and charge down the flaming staircase.
• Although the unheated rooms are a problem, the Heat is a problem too. The Skunk House eats about 500 gallons of diesel oil and $400 of electricity a month during the height of winter. This results in a charge per resident of about $100 a month to avoid freezing.
• The third floor rooms are heated with electric heat. Most of the first and second floors are heated with steam radiators that Blast Steam with disturbing frequency. This is a problem that took several visits from the heating guys to solve, but in the mean time several walls and bulletin boards worth of house notices were reduced to rust stained wrinkles.

• The heat leads us to a problem near and dear to my heart. After working for five years with Asbestos issues, I recognized the fabric wrapped pipe insulation with metal bands as air cell insulation. Together with the suspicious fuzzy gray mudded elbows and the cement asbestos board around the furnace, there was a lot of suspect material in the basement. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but all of this material was damaged, and there was a fair amount of debris on the floor. In fact, if this was the University of Washington I'd put a sticker on the door and no workers would go in there until everything had been tested. Instead we had to pay for our own testing.

Air Cell Insulation Debris.	Damaged Pipe Elbow (50% Chrysotile).

All text Copyright Brendan Impson 1999 unless otherwise noted. Images are copyrighted by either myself or Bill. If you want to use any of this junk, please contact me at brendan@bit-net.com