Detailed Walk-thru and Ants!

I went by House #2 yesterday to start working on it. Actually, I just wanted to do a thorough reassessment of what all I need to do to bring it up to "For Rent" condition. I went through each room and took detailed notes of what all needed my attention. I actually found a couple of things I had overlooked in the other walk-thrus and inspection. First, there isn't just one place where the drywall was damaged (and sloppily repaired), but many. Most of the holes were in the garage wall, but I'm not too concerned with those. The "original" hole was in the master bedroom, where the door knob had hit the wall. There is actaully another patch job located on the opposite wall, too. It was done a little better, but still could use some attention. The person who did these patch jobs used one of those drywall repair screens - you can actually still see the screen, which makes it look terrible. The other place inside was in the entrance to the master bedroom - and it's huge. I knew something was wrong with the wall before, but the lighting was bad in the area, so I couldn't really tel what was wrong. When I was there yesterday, the light from outside made it possible to really see what was going on. It appears that an entire section of drywall was replaced. And, like the other two repair jobs, it was done poorly. Not bad for an amatuer, I guess, but not very good once you really look at it.

When I got home, I started combing the web for tips on drywall repair and found one on Yahoo! Answers. The best answer to the person's question on repairing dryall was something I hadn't thought about. The guy said to cut a peice of drywall a little bigger than the hole you are repairing. He said to go by a home improvement store and ask for peices of drywall that the store doesn't need (people cut drywall slabs and the store just throws the smaller peices away anyway). He said to find some wood lattice or 1x2's and glue, put carpenter's adhesive on them, and insert them into the hole to be used as a brace for the peice of drywall you'll install. Let it dry completely, then put glue on the peice of drywall and lightly tap it into the hole. Let it completely dry as well. Then put spackle/mud, paint, and you're done.

Another surprise I hadn't noticed before was in the master bathroom. I already knew about the repair work needed on the door frame near the bottom (peices of the frame were hacked off somehow and I would need to putty and repaint it). This time, I noticed that the bottoms of botht he bathroom door and the closet door inside the bathroom were frayed as well. I'm now guessing they put a dog in the bathroom and he had tried to scratch his way out. Great - two more doors needed.

Other than those things and a few other minor things that was all the surprises I found this go-around. As I was leaving, I noticed a mound next to the garage door on the outside. I noticed it before, too, but never thought to investigate further. Now I wish I had. I kicked the mound, figuring a few ants would emerge, but to my surprise a whole swarm of ants appeared - and they just kept coming and coming. They definately weren't termites, which was my initial fear, but they didn't look like fire ants, either. I figured they were carpenter ants. Since I didn't just want to leave the place like that, I hopped into my car, went to Home Depot (which, thankfully for this project, is only a mile away) and picked up some termite/carpenter ant spray. I went back to the house and started spraying the mound. The small sprayer attached just wasn't doing the trick, so I unscrewed the cap and started pouring the liquid right on the mound. Hundreds, if not thousands, of ants started coming out again. This time, though, they'd wiggle and succomb to the poison. I'm not sure how deep the mound went or if it extended inside the garage wall, but I doused the whole area with half the bottle. I'm going to go back tonight to see if it killed them all. If not, I'll unload the rest of the bottle on the mound. I have never seen so many ants before in my life, and that's a huge statement having lived in Texas for so long.