Jim Katen

Regarding what you're saying: I'm never in favor of recommending "further evaluation" when I know full well that the thing should be replaced. I figure I'm being hired for my opinion, not to defer to others for their opinion. Regarding how you say it: First sentence. You really don't need "in the condo." Isn't everything in your report in the condo? You could say: "The electric panel is a Zinsco type which has a bad history of circuit breaker failure." But then there's that missing comma after "type". Do you really need "which"? Is it important that the failures have to do with circuit breakers, or are there other failures at work? Also, is it a bad history of failures or a history of bad failures? Maybe tighten it up some more and make it more emphatic: "Zinsco electric panels have a notorious history of failure." The next two sentences could be merged and greatly shortened. They also don't make a lot of sense. What's an electrician going to see that you didn't see? Do you really want to say that you looked inside the panel and saw no problems, but if an electrician looks in it, he might see problems? Maybe just avoid contrasting your evaluation with an electrician's evaluation: "While I saw no signs of active failure inside the panel today, that might change tomorrow. Hire an electrician to replace it."

Are you looking for opinions about what your said or how you said it?

It looks like Celotex, a soft compressed fiber product. You can break off pieces with your hand. Firtex and Homasote are similar products but they have different textures and colors.

Yes, that's my experience too. But a heat pump water heater in one of those basements will work like an air conditioner. The 67-degree basement won't be 67 degrees after one hour, let alone one day.

Those basement's must be freezing cold. Where was the 67-degree air supposed to come from? I can see having them in the southern states, but they just don't seem to make any sense up here.

Is it just me, or are these things really stupid? Today's new-construction house had an AO Smith heat pump water heater in the garage. When I arrived on site, it was 42 degrees outside and about 39 degrees in the garage. The water heater was set to 120 degrees in the "hybrid" mode and its heat pump compressor was running non-stop while its indicator showed that it was also running one of the resistance heating elements. Even so, the hottest temperature that I could get *at the water heater's outlet pipe* was 110 degrees. By the time it got to the fixtures it was about 102 degrees. Even when I switched it over to pure resistance heating and checked back a few hours later, the best it could do was 114 degrees at the outlet pipe. Most of the ones that I see are set to 130 or 135 in order to get 120-degree water at the fixtures. In our climate, these are always installed in a garage because otherwise they'd be fighting with the heating system in the house. In the winter, the garage is always going to be close to 40 degrees and the heat pumps generally stop working and switch to resistance heat at 37 degrees. So are these just really stupid or am I missing something?

You must never have a dimmer controlling a receptacle outlet. Doing so could fry non-incandescent or non-resistant loads plugged into the outlet. Imagine how your computer would appreciate having its power supply "dimmed." The mere fact that you have a dimmer controlling a receptacle outlet means that people who had no idea what they were doing were messing with the wiring. As Tom said, call an electrician.

It really doesn't seem like much of a mystery. The TJIs flex a lot and the drywall finishing was crappy. You can order TJIs that can easily support a given span with regard to "bending" but be entirely inadequate with regard to "deflection." When I built my office, I purposely specified TJIs two notches up from the prescriptive size just to reduce deflection. Those suckers flex a lot. On the same job, I hired a great drywall finisher, who, unbeknown to me, sub contracted the work to Goofey & Pluto. They embedded all the tape in topping compound. For the life of them, they couldn't understand why I went ballistic. Scrape down the broken joints and re-tape them with hot mud.

I've watched lots of his videos. He's a little weak in electrical stuff, but otherwise he seems pretty good. He certainly has more patience that I do.

When was the drywall installed?

Never heard of it. Don't trust it.

I know I can google that stuff, but I thought it might make for an interesting discussion. I freely admit that I haven't attended to the study of telephone history as much as I should have, so I found this curious. The seller of today's 1912 house found the attached buisness cards inside the walls of an older structure on the property. He believes that the older structure was a cabin that the builder lived in while constructing the main house. It's his contention that the business cards pre-date 1912. This seems unlikely to me because I doubt that telephones were in widespread use at that time. Of course, given the gaping maw in my knowledge of this subject, I could be wrong. The middle card shows a graphic of a candlestick phone without a dial - that probably narrows the date range. I'm also curious about the phone numbers. When I was a kid I remember neighborhood telephone exhange numbers that begin with neighborhood names, but they always used the first two letters of the exhange name followed by a single numeral, then followed by a 4-digit number. The numbers on two of these cards seem to have just 6 digits. And what's with "Sunnyside Central Farmers 7 X"? Did you just pick up the phone and ask the operator for "Sunnyside Central Farmers 7 X"? If so, why not just ask for "A Osterback."? There couldn't have been that many A. Osterbacks. And while we're at it, what's up with "Wood Saw." Two different reps? Two different eras?

While I think it's hardcoat stucco, I otherwise agree with Mike. Like so many building defects, this is a failure where multiple trades don't properly resolve their work with each other. In this case, the gutter guy, the stucco guy, and the roofing guy didn't successfully integrate their jobs and the result is a leak right at the spot where they all come together. I suggest pulling the gutter, then having the roof guy come and remvoe a few tiles so that everyone can see what's going on in that corner. Bring a water bottle to pour some water on various suspect areas and you should find the leak pretty quickly. Once that happens, don't let anyone convince you to fix it with caulk.

The roofer can't fix it. You need a stucco contractor to fix it. They'll need to cut back the stucco to about a foot above the roof, install building paper, lath, & weep screed, and lay in new stuco. The roofer did the best he could with what he was given.

Any decent wood shop with a planer and shaper could manufacture it from scratch for you. If you're lucky, they might even be able to do it without the planer if they can find off-the-shelf clapboards with the right bevel and thickness. Finding the wood stock will be the trick. You really want vertical grain for a product like this - preferably old growth.