Matt Cooper’s Blog

I’ve been chipping away at replacing this wall for the last 3 days. I’m taking tomorrow off but I’ll be back on it the next day to see if I can polish it off.

This is the before. Lots of termite damage from a long long time ago. I think the stucco was the only thing holding up the garage.

This is a close-up of how bad it was.

The other side of the garage. Everything is down to the studs now. Once I saw the damage I just decided to pull it all down and start over.

Darth Varder.

And the demo of the old studs begins with my new reciprocating saw I picked up at the pawn shop for 35 bucks!

So you have to saw the old ones out and trust me when I say this isn’t easy as they are nailed from behind to the stucco. It’s kinda hellish getting them out and in the trash heap.

Then you nail in the new stud and run around to the other side of the wall and screw in a washer from behind so the stucco is bonded to the wall. You wouldn’t want that to fall off in one big sheet during the next earthquake.

Since I’m going this far I decided to go all the way and replace the window, too. What the hell right?

Ok, ok, so I haven’t been posting these but I’m still keeping track.

I worked on adding some lights to the garage this weekend—added a new circuit and so on. No I don;t have a clue what I’m doing but I bought a book and it’s not that hard.

It was raining on Saturday and I noticed that my roof was leaking in one corner. I felt the wall and it was wet. I pulled off the drywall to find wet insulation, a million ants, and major termite damage. I’m going to have to replace 13 studs all along that one wall. It’s gonna be a bit of work. This is turning into a year long project.

On day Sheila is going to have a studio.

Trained Bougainvillea, originally uploaded by coografik.

12/5/2009