At first I thought the Queen's Room was much better sealed than the rest of my house, especially compared with the old master bedroom (before remodeling). But now that cold weather has hit, it's clear that the new King's Room is tighter and warmer than ever before, thanks to the remodeling. And the Queen's Room has been a bit colder.
It was clear that the issue in the Queens room is the new closet. Standing in front of the closed closet door is the coldest place in the room (and it's even colder inside the closet). I measured temperatures as low as 20 degrees below house temperature on the closet floor.
Feeling around the closet itself, the primary source of coldness is the exterior wall side, which is less than two feet. There might have been air leakage from the garage sides, but the garage itself is under constant depressurization from the new exhaust fan, and it didn't feel cold along those two sides of the closet floor as it did on the exterior wall side. I could feel a draft from the gap under the shoe mold trim in the closet on the exterior wall side.
After discovering all this, my first plan had been to rip out the baseboard trim (which builder Rob nicely put around the inside of the closet floor) and then seal the drywall to subfloor gap with acoustical caulk (as was done in the King's room, and likely the reason it is so much improved). But this is "serious" work for an amateur builder like me. I was thinking of looking for videos and such pertaining to removing baseboard trim.
Then I was also thinking I might wait until I have Tom back to do some other work, and add this little project to that bill. This could be Jan-Feb. Meanwhile, I could use mortite or something to seal up the gap under the baseboards (in the close) as they are now.
I started looking at what I had on hand. Mortite, if I had any left, is out in Lyndhurst and I did not feel like going outside in the 35 degree temperature to get it. I did have some Blue Tack, but probably not enough to fill the gap and I'd like to see the MSDS for blue tack before using it as a sealant. I could use regular caulk to seal the gap, but it would be smelly and messy and would make a permanent mark on the closet flooring. Since the long term plan is to remove the baseboards and caulk behind them, a temporary fix would be better.
I tried using some wood door shims, thinking I could break them off piece by piece under the moulding. This worked for the first two pieces, but after that the thicker size of the shim required wasn't breaking off easily. I might well break the shoe mould trim.
THEN I found the solution: using the polyethylene door seals that came with the two acoustical doors. Those are top quality, ISO, made in Europe to high standards. I could squeeze pieces of door seal under the trim, and the polyethylene flaps of the sealing strip would push and seal just as if the trim were a door and the floor was the jamb.
So that's what I did, I cut several pieces of the door seal and pushed it under the shoe mold. I tried to get the pieces as close together as possible. In most cases, I had to trim the seal back differently in each piece to get it to fit in the gap available. Doing this, I was able to seal that entire side of the closet floor. The appearance is OK for a closet floor. I don't notice it at all when standing up, but when sitting down you can see some white plastic peeking out from underneath the shoe mold in parts. I did not remove the paper backing on the door seals, so they are not adhesively applied, but they are held in place very strongly by friction.
The difference is considerable. The feeling of draft on the floor has been eliminated. The cold floor of the closet is not as cold as it was. When you open the closet you no longer feel the cold air with your feet. There is considerably less cold in the corner when the closet door is closed, though that is still the coldest part of the room. I think the whole room is a bit warmer, though I could be fooling myself. Still, it was a worthwhile improvement considering the investment in time (about 30 minutes) and material (none).
*****
Still thinking about the Queen's room (and my friends suggestion she will sleep a bit there on Wednesday after work) I'd been bugged by the way the expensive Baldwin passage knobset sometimes sticks as if it were locked. This happens when the door latch button is pulled as far out as it can go in the strike plate, so the back of the latch is rubbing against the inside of the strike plate. That's unfortunately where it ends up because the pressure from the door seals pushes the door out as far as it can go. It also ends up that way when you stop pushing the door closed the instant the latch closes, rather than pushing it all the way into the door jamb (about another 1/8 inch), which is also a natural thing to do.
I examined the latch and the strike plate carefully, and noticed that there was some bent metal inside the strike plate on the top side. It could be this very metal which was sticking on the latch button. I pounded the metal up, first using a hammer and a big screwdriver, and ultimately using a big center punch.
Now this could be my imagination even more than the seal fix described above. But it seemed to me the door was sticking far less as soon as I started bending the excess metal (which probably resulted from a forced installation of the strike plate into the jamb) upwards, and continued to get just a little better with each further bend. Now one could also go to far with a hack like this. If I pounded too long or too hard I could break the strike plate off. Then I'd be in big trouble. So I didn't push it too far, but clearly the top of the inside of the strike plate is open up to the very edge of the strike plate, when it wasn't that way before.
So I think this is much better now. Usually I don't notice the knob sticking at all anymore. Even when I push against the door hard to simulate the problem, even though it does then stick a bit, I can still turn the knob with a reasonable amount of extra force. Previously it needed a bit more than a little extra force, it seemed as if it were actually locked, and the only way to get the door open was to push the door toward the outside first (which, in a panic, you might not think of doing).
So with these two quick fixes, I think I've made the room much more habitable.
*****
Last week I bought the lowest priced Craftsman 5 drawer tool cabinet ("standard duty") for an incredibly low $85. I set this up last weekend by clearing the work table in the Laboratory into a big plastic bin I also bought last week, and then moving the cabinet into place. This is a big practical piece, but not fancy. The sheet metal feels like thin sheet metal, but it works. I would not want this piece in a room where I play loud music, for fear of the sheet metal ringing with the music. Unfortunately it takes up about half of the working area on the table now. I think it should eventually go on top of a similar or higher grade tool cabinet bottom part in the corner of the room. But that corner of the room is now filled with "junk" which I'll have to clear out first. (Some of that junk is just stuff I don't use often, not that I necessarily want to move it out to storage, so there is some thinking to do.) I am only slowly moving tools from the old box on the floor up into the new cabinet. Redundant tools will eventually be put in the garage working area.
*****
I finally got around to labeling the switches in the Queen's Bath. The switches were in an old fashioned (I think it's from the '60's) layout, with a vertical light switch, and two horizontal switches, one for the fan and one for the "heat lamp." (Though they are falling out of fashion, I *like* heat lights, not the red kind (it makes little difference if heat lamp is red wrt the heat it emits) even a 100W white spot light provides noticeable warmth when you are getting out of the shower, and the extra light is nice too.)
The problem with this switch arrangement is that it's not intuitive. Even after living in the house for 20 years, I could not tell you whether than fan switch was on top or on bottom. Almost always I flip the wrong horizontal switch if I want only heat lamp or fan, and then have to switch the other.
So I got out my new Dymo labeler with the clear tapes (most attractive IMO) and made simple labels for all three switches, LIGHT, FAN, and HEAT. Actually, I first tried making the horizontal switches labeled like this:
"OFF FAN ON"
To make it clear which side of the switch is ON (even that is not entirely intuitive, as it tends to be with vertical switches in the country of your birth). But all that extra lettering looked clumsy. And the truth is, you can generally intuit which side of the switch is on or off pretty quickly. (I have never had any trouble with that, at least that I can remember.) What you really need to know is which switch is for the fan and which is for the heat lamp.
So after trying the more complicated labels I went back to the simpler ones. If you were very chic, you still might find it tacky. We'll see what my friend things about the new labels. While not as elegant as I might like, I still think I prefer the new labels to none.
It was clear that the issue in the Queens room is the new closet. Standing in front of the closed closet door is the coldest place in the room (and it's even colder inside the closet). I measured temperatures as low as 20 degrees below house temperature on the closet floor.
Feeling around the closet itself, the primary source of coldness is the exterior wall side, which is less than two feet. There might have been air leakage from the garage sides, but the garage itself is under constant depressurization from the new exhaust fan, and it didn't feel cold along those two sides of the closet floor as it did on the exterior wall side. I could feel a draft from the gap under the shoe mold trim in the closet on the exterior wall side.
After discovering all this, my first plan had been to rip out the baseboard trim (which builder Rob nicely put around the inside of the closet floor) and then seal the drywall to subfloor gap with acoustical caulk (as was done in the King's room, and likely the reason it is so much improved). But this is "serious" work for an amateur builder like me. I was thinking of looking for videos and such pertaining to removing baseboard trim.
Then I was also thinking I might wait until I have Tom back to do some other work, and add this little project to that bill. This could be Jan-Feb. Meanwhile, I could use mortite or something to seal up the gap under the baseboards (in the close) as they are now.
I started looking at what I had on hand. Mortite, if I had any left, is out in Lyndhurst and I did not feel like going outside in the 35 degree temperature to get it. I did have some Blue Tack, but probably not enough to fill the gap and I'd like to see the MSDS for blue tack before using it as a sealant. I could use regular caulk to seal the gap, but it would be smelly and messy and would make a permanent mark on the closet flooring. Since the long term plan is to remove the baseboards and caulk behind them, a temporary fix would be better.
I tried using some wood door shims, thinking I could break them off piece by piece under the moulding. This worked for the first two pieces, but after that the thicker size of the shim required wasn't breaking off easily. I might well break the shoe mould trim.
THEN I found the solution: using the polyethylene door seals that came with the two acoustical doors. Those are top quality, ISO, made in Europe to high standards. I could squeeze pieces of door seal under the trim, and the polyethylene flaps of the sealing strip would push and seal just as if the trim were a door and the floor was the jamb.
So that's what I did, I cut several pieces of the door seal and pushed it under the shoe mold. I tried to get the pieces as close together as possible. In most cases, I had to trim the seal back differently in each piece to get it to fit in the gap available. Doing this, I was able to seal that entire side of the closet floor. The appearance is OK for a closet floor. I don't notice it at all when standing up, but when sitting down you can see some white plastic peeking out from underneath the shoe mold in parts. I did not remove the paper backing on the door seals, so they are not adhesively applied, but they are held in place very strongly by friction.
The difference is considerable. The feeling of draft on the floor has been eliminated. The cold floor of the closet is not as cold as it was. When you open the closet you no longer feel the cold air with your feet. There is considerably less cold in the corner when the closet door is closed, though that is still the coldest part of the room. I think the whole room is a bit warmer, though I could be fooling myself. Still, it was a worthwhile improvement considering the investment in time (about 30 minutes) and material (none).
*****
Still thinking about the Queen's room (and my friends suggestion she will sleep a bit there on Wednesday after work) I'd been bugged by the way the expensive Baldwin passage knobset sometimes sticks as if it were locked. This happens when the door latch button is pulled as far out as it can go in the strike plate, so the back of the latch is rubbing against the inside of the strike plate. That's unfortunately where it ends up because the pressure from the door seals pushes the door out as far as it can go. It also ends up that way when you stop pushing the door closed the instant the latch closes, rather than pushing it all the way into the door jamb (about another 1/8 inch), which is also a natural thing to do.
I examined the latch and the strike plate carefully, and noticed that there was some bent metal inside the strike plate on the top side. It could be this very metal which was sticking on the latch button. I pounded the metal up, first using a hammer and a big screwdriver, and ultimately using a big center punch.
Now this could be my imagination even more than the seal fix described above. But it seemed to me the door was sticking far less as soon as I started bending the excess metal (which probably resulted from a forced installation of the strike plate into the jamb) upwards, and continued to get just a little better with each further bend. Now one could also go to far with a hack like this. If I pounded too long or too hard I could break the strike plate off. Then I'd be in big trouble. So I didn't push it too far, but clearly the top of the inside of the strike plate is open up to the very edge of the strike plate, when it wasn't that way before.
So I think this is much better now. Usually I don't notice the knob sticking at all anymore. Even when I push against the door hard to simulate the problem, even though it does then stick a bit, I can still turn the knob with a reasonable amount of extra force. Previously it needed a bit more than a little extra force, it seemed as if it were actually locked, and the only way to get the door open was to push the door toward the outside first (which, in a panic, you might not think of doing).
So with these two quick fixes, I think I've made the room much more habitable.
*****
Last week I bought the lowest priced Craftsman 5 drawer tool cabinet ("standard duty") for an incredibly low $85. I set this up last weekend by clearing the work table in the Laboratory into a big plastic bin I also bought last week, and then moving the cabinet into place. This is a big practical piece, but not fancy. The sheet metal feels like thin sheet metal, but it works. I would not want this piece in a room where I play loud music, for fear of the sheet metal ringing with the music. Unfortunately it takes up about half of the working area on the table now. I think it should eventually go on top of a similar or higher grade tool cabinet bottom part in the corner of the room. But that corner of the room is now filled with "junk" which I'll have to clear out first. (Some of that junk is just stuff I don't use often, not that I necessarily want to move it out to storage, so there is some thinking to do.) I am only slowly moving tools from the old box on the floor up into the new cabinet. Redundant tools will eventually be put in the garage working area.
*****
I finally got around to labeling the switches in the Queen's Bath. The switches were in an old fashioned (I think it's from the '60's) layout, with a vertical light switch, and two horizontal switches, one for the fan and one for the "heat lamp." (Though they are falling out of fashion, I *like* heat lights, not the red kind (it makes little difference if heat lamp is red wrt the heat it emits) even a 100W white spot light provides noticeable warmth when you are getting out of the shower, and the extra light is nice too.)
The problem with this switch arrangement is that it's not intuitive. Even after living in the house for 20 years, I could not tell you whether than fan switch was on top or on bottom. Almost always I flip the wrong horizontal switch if I want only heat lamp or fan, and then have to switch the other.
So I got out my new Dymo labeler with the clear tapes (most attractive IMO) and made simple labels for all three switches, LIGHT, FAN, and HEAT. Actually, I first tried making the horizontal switches labeled like this:
"OFF FAN ON"
To make it clear which side of the switch is ON (even that is not entirely intuitive, as it tends to be with vertical switches in the country of your birth). But all that extra lettering looked clumsy. And the truth is, you can generally intuit which side of the switch is on or off pretty quickly. (I have never had any trouble with that, at least that I can remember.) What you really need to know is which switch is for the fan and which is for the heat lamp.
So after trying the more complicated labels I went back to the simpler ones. If you were very chic, you still might find it tacky. We'll see what my friend things about the new labels. While not as elegant as I might like, I still think I prefer the new labels to none.
We are happy that your new Dymo label maker is helping you to make things much easier at home. Please if you do have any questions or experience difficulties with your label maker or the design of the labels do not hesitate to contact us sending an email to helpdesk@dymo.com or dialing 1-877-724-8324 . ^CP
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