Improbable Things

When do you pick a fight?

Due to some gas infrastructure need, the local gas utility has been working very hard to replace the pipes from the main line all the way to the meters. In our case, that means to our meter, inside our house, in the basement. I've mentioned before that I have a very solid old house - masonry with plaster for exterior walls. Wires and pipes that were not put in place when the house was built, well, they don't get added in later without some creativity.

This was NOT a creative solution.

 

The photo is a crappy photo from my crappy phone, but it tells the tale well and imbues this with a sense of the crappiness. They drilled through the exterior wall and then spiraled around in the corner before dropping to the meter below.

I could live with the new steam-punk gas lines on the front of the house. Those are almost cute, in a pipe-fitters fantasy sort of way.

But this is just obnoxious. This is in my dining room, in the corner where we used to have my great-grand-father's grandfather clock. For a sense of size:

That's the drink I'm having before I ponder if I need to pick a fight about this. Resale value and all that. We've worked hard to put this place together, been creative with our upgrades, found ingenious ways to install A/C, learned new skills to keep our original windows. On the other hand, this is a "free" improvement, given to me by my benevolent utility provider, likely underwritten by gov't support. "Free" perhaps, but half-assed and done for reasons still unclear to me.

So, what would you do? The gas workers are likely still on the block tomorrow... I still think they could have run this through existing holes for the radiator and water supply, but they obviously decided to route that f'er right into my dining room. If you were looking a this house to buy (not that I am selling, but it's a good rubric) would this skeeze you out? What on earth are my options?!

The Painting is Done...

We discussed the green option here. And Front Door option here. I spent several days tinkering in photoshop with various colors. And in the end, we went with Blue. Ben Moore Van deusen Blue (HC-156) on the trim and Lancaster Whitewash (HC-174) on the stucco, if you are the kind of person who obsesses on these things.

It was a rough week here, but we are glad this is done. The painters were good, the end product is excellent, but there was a huge disconnect on clean-up and paint chip containment. I can't emphasize enough that you have to spell out your expectations VERY precisely. And then you have to be here the whole time to ensure that practices match promises. Nothing new in that assessment, but this was yet another reminder.

Here is the lovely new house. And no, I don't want your honest opinion. It is blue and I love it. You love it too. Yes you do. Thank you very much.

Many pictures after the break...

Rodent sagas cont'd

2:30 am the baby and I are woken up because some pest drop a decorative bar of SOAP on the hardwood in the hall. SOAP?! I don't even know where it came from; never seen the lil shell shaped thing before. It looks like soap lifted from a nice hotel.

When sitting in the living room, we can hear they are in my office. Walk into the office and nothing is there. When I stand upstairs, I can hear thumps and scurries ambient downstairs. Walk down the steps and they are vanished. Get insomnia, and I can hear chewing and moving about in the walls. At first it was only the wet wall, a lovely rodent highway through a house, especially when it has a cute door for access. But last night, I heard them in the gabled ceilings of my room, which is a room away. Proverbially it's the sticks from where the action used to be. Hundchen finally noticed something up where one of the beasties was trying to cut their way through the floor of the library MIDDAY. As I type this, I can hear them in the kitchen ceiling.

This is not the first night I've been awake, listening, as though by pin-pointing the noise I could do anything. It's officially driving me mad. We have an infestation of SOMETHING! But I've never caught anything and I've never SEEN anything!

Back when I had the trapping service, we determined this was no longer plain mice. I've had some mice for ages and we co-existed in a fairly benign way. A half a box of dog biscuits hoarded onto an upper shelf confirmed that this was not mice, since mice aren't big or strong enough to carry off medium sized biscuits. But is it rats? He's fairly certain it is. If it is rats, is it one or a family. When I saw one jump from the top of the cabinet, after I removed the biscuits, I reported that it was larger than a mouse, but smaller than a rat. He suspected a juvenile rat, which would mean a family, which officially icked me the hell out.

But we have no proof. I've been putting the fruit up in the metal breadbox and trying to leave less mess out. They've ignored eggplant so I thought the massive green tomatoes were ok on the counter for one night. (I still don't like refrigerating tomatoes.) Yesterday morning something had gotten into the tomatoes. Now that I know that they will steal an old bar of SOAP, I guess I am not surprised, but...

Do rats steal soap? Could I have both rats and the squirrels? I haven't seen any mice in ages so I'm thinking they got gentrified right out of the neighborhood with these new fancier critters.

We plugged some exterior holes of concern already. Somehow though I don't feel that made any difference. I know folks say to look for holes in your kitchen, but you have not seen my kitchen or you'd laugh. When we designed and installed it, we learned that there is nothing resembling a straight line in this whole house. Some of the cabinets stand a solid 3/4" from the nearest crooked masonry wall. Then there is the 3' square hole in the sink cabinet where the plumbing comes in, because we lost the piece to put back in there and never cut a plywood replacement. Although some quarter-round might do some filling of holes, at the moment the kitchen is a crazy warren of hidey holes.

And did I mention that they were in the upstairs bath stealing SOAP?! If they are willing to go after soap, what about baby bottles full of formula?

I did some research on poison yesterday, because, well isn't that what you do? I've held off because of the two curious little kids and two dogs. I saw the faces of the vet techs when the older lady brought in her little dog for rat poisoning and it made clear that this is not a good thing to make mistakes with. 

If anyone can lend some moral support, I could use it. This is a big stresser (among several) and I feel undone by it. My house, my home, is infested. That means unclean, that means unsafe for WeeC to crawl the floors, that means a moral failure on my part. It means being surrounded by this failure, hearing it scratching behind me all the time. It means feeling helpless as things get worse. 

Random Wednesday

... where I don't at all chronicle the start of school, my birthday or the new tattoo. I'm capricious like that.

Reading on American secularism is making me want to shout from the rooftops, "No, it's MY America I want back."

I'm trying to pack lunches and plan meals better. Bill is my guinea pig and I just don't know if I have it in me to become a bento box mom. But I could start packing more creative tupperwares of food that might help keep us all healthy and wealthy a bit longer. 

I'm researching house painters and fighting a losing battle with ROUSes in the kitchen. One jumped from the top of a cabinet last night, igniting a murderous rage in me. So I set mousetraps before bed... and ended up catching a 3 year old this morning. I feel completely undone by the mouse infestation.

No one in the house has managed an uninterrupted 6 hours of sleep in memory. Weeks. Maybe months. This has become the new normal, such that when folks ask if we are sleeping better, I say a grateful yes and I mean it. If they assume that means we get full nights of sleep and are well-rested and clearheaded...I can only laugh. I've ceased having that expectation. Increasingly, I'm convinced that a full night of sleep is a luxury only a teeny tiny sliver of the population of the planet is rewarded with. The rest of us deal with night terrors, snoring, midnight feedings, random insomnia, sirens, alarms going off, smoke alarm batteries failing, bedwetting, night shifts, insurgent attacks, natural disasters, ... really, who on the planet gets to sleep soundly, safely, quietly all night long? It's a tiny minority of the 8+ billion on the planet. So I'm not sure why I expect to be among them.

Listening to an interview with the directer of OPM sent me exploring on USAJOBS which somehow ended me up on an aupair website. Daydreams ensued. An office. A desk. A task and a sense of accomplishment. Friendly co-workers. Coffee run at 10 am. Thoughtful conversations. A paycheck. The memories I have of working full-time have become as inaccurate as memories we have of idyllic childhoods. I've edited out everything that would make a good episode of The Office and just kept the sparkly unicorns and magic rainbows. 

Stay-at-home life has been.... ooky.

Using Flickr to diagnose plumbing issues

For the first time since the "finish" of the basement, we have house-guests. So, we've taken the plumbing for a real test run - and discovered some of the hazards you can get with a basement bathroom. It's low - there's no distance between it and any plumbing issues you might have in the depths of your house. Remember Cthulu? - you can cut him out, but the eldritch horror will live on!

First, the tub didn't drain. Hmmm... I assumed it was because of some clog, some bit of debris from the construction. So I decided to watch it, treat it as I could. Then, a few days later, the toilet stopped flushing. It seemed like the plumbing was not venting, not getting any air. At this point I started to panic that we had issues with the plumbing being installed incorrectly. It seemed the panic was well founded when the toilet backed up into the tub. Ew. 

So I called the contractors and I worried. And I worried and called them again.

Before they called back, I talked it over with my dad, who has had to become savvy in old house traumas over a lifetime of holding our homes together by sheer force of will. As we talked it over, he too wondered about adequate venting. Finally, I remembered that I'd taken tons of photos, so I went shopping for the money shot.

It's not pretty, but it shows the venting. Lots of it. With the help of Flickr notes, my dad and I walked through the connections. After a long talk, I was less panicky that it was a plumbing design flaw and more convinced that it was a big ol clog.Then the contractor came over, very promptly upon getting my messages. He is understandably adamant that he built the bathroom correctly and he too thinks we are back to dealing with Cthulu.

Here's the issue: My sewage drains into the municipal system. When digging up the pipes, we all expected the pipes to tie in heading towards the street, sloping downward as they went. Weirdly, the pipes and slope went towards the BACK of the house, AWAY from the street. Consternation. Did our pipes tie in back in the alley? Given the slope and the house between us and the alley, that is impossible. So where did the pipes go?

Cthulu. The pipes travel to the furthest back corner of my house (under the former "murder bathroom") and then it drops and curves, makes a rollercoaster-like U-turn before making its final descent and exit. The pipes you see in the picture are above and beside the actual exit pipe.

If there is any sludge build-up in this 70-plus year old drain pipe, the resulting back-up will choke the basement shower first, then the basement toilet. When the back-up subsides, we are functional again. We probably should have really snaked the whole system while it was open. Ah hindsight. Now we are lining up the old house equivalent of a colonoscopy, a plumber with a camera will take a magical voyage into the heart of my Cthulu plumbing dilemma. Hopefully the clog is easily moved on, Chtulu evicted again, and I won't have to worry about chronic basement drainage issues.

"Scary" renovation

I'm long overdue on the basement progress. There has been a lot of progress, but the guys are about a week behind. They'd intended to be in and out by this weekend and they put in some very long days to meet their goal.

 
The new plumbing was laid and the concrete replaced. This took about 2 days longer then they intended because of the unexpected Cthulu beast of pipes they found and had to remove.

From there, the framing was put in. We opted not to frame part of the laundry room, to give it 6" more space and open access to all the plumbing/utilities that live in there.

The outlets and switches are run and the old scary wiring has been simplified. This cleaned up the ceiling so we could paint it black. We are not putting in ceiling board but instead painting the beams matte black. I have mixed feelings about the choice to paint. The wood is forever altered from its original state and I don't take that lightly, but this option allows us access to the wiring and pipes in the floorboard space and it 'lifts' the otherwise very low ceiling. I can still 'read' the history in the 2X12 beams while using the space for my family's needs. I'm sure this is one of those decisions that a future owner will wonder at. May it be the least of the things I leave them to wonder at.

The wall board has been going up for a few days. Immediately, the space changed. The skeleton frames disappeared and the spaces became defined. My first thought was, dang, that's pretty small! It's not though. The space is the same as our living space upstairs, meaning this is adding a third more living space onto the house. We are adding the 2nd largest closet in the house, the largest bathroom in the house, and the playroom is as big as our living room. Bill has been measuring for furniture and apparently we could (if we wanted to) fit a (he reports, very manly) huge L-shaped couch along the one corner.

The exterior windows and door are done. We have 7 interior doors to hang still but they are waiting for the tiling and wall-boarding to finish.

The last part is the bathroom, which still needs pretty much everything. The huge heavy cast iron tub is in, but the rest is waiting. The subway tile, the ogtogonal floor tile, the inset cabinet... I'm most excited about this room and impatient to see how it comes togeher.

And so, there you have an update.

Impatient Progress

This week felt eternal.

Nothing seemed to move in the basement... Oh, things were happening. Doors and windows were ordered, new frames put up, a lot of electrical line was run and a little plumbing was set. Friday I finally got my jackhammering, which I've been wanting to hear all week. Nothing transformative though and I crave transformation. I'm not big on patience right now.

Where the basement felt like it moved slowly, the shed popped up right up. Even with two days of massive rains, the guys put it together just over 2.5 days. It still needs either stain or paint and a new lock on the door (because the current one almost resulted in a WeeE locking both of us in the shed). The neighbors don't seem annoyed and, in fact, got the builder's card for themselves. Now we can shuffle the last of our stuff out of the basement...

{click photo for the whole construction set}

Come the summer, this will be a great garden shed/play house. Woot! I have a shed. I feel so grown up!

Please stare at the walls

The old framing is gone and the new footings are in place. Before they frame it all up again, Chuck asked me to sit and stare at it for a few hours, make sure, do a pretend load of laundry (still disconnected) and just be very very sure.

That's my homework tonight... to be very sure of something. It's an interesting mental exercise.

Cthulu lives in my basement

    ... but not for much longer.

The basement reno is proceeding. With some not-minor hiccups.

Monday tools were dropped off.

Tuesday they started ripping out paneling and walls. The first delay in Chuck's ambitious timeline came when he realized that the Murder Bathroom was built to double as a concrete bunker. Every piece of tile was set in concrete. What he expected to be a one hour demo took four hours of sweat and some cursing. The bathroom is now gone.

Wednesday they started to hammer out the new lines for the new plumbing. And to remove a poorly placed lally column, that I paid good money to have put where it was and am now paying good money to remove. So it goes. Dust, dust dust... In the process, Chuck found Cthulu, a demon pipe that defies adequate description. It would appear, from the initial glimpses, that we have a custom cast iron pipe, many armed/tentacled, bringing together all the dread drains of the house. The actual beast can't be seen yet, still locked in its concrete lair, but I got a sketch.

What this means practically is that they can't just tie another drain to it because the fittings are custom and they can't cut and cap the old drain because there isn't room before the next tentacle branches off. Cthulu rejects my toilet. It apparently means jack-hammering the whole thing out and re-piping all the drains in the house. The guys don't seem phased... but I personally think this explains why that bathroom was so very very cursed.

Thursday nothing happened except the start of a new year, hanging out with friends, and doing laundry at two different locations.

Friday, the lally column finally came out, lubricated by a stream of four letter words and some frustration. They cut it lose from its foundation with a saw that I am sure would make any man feel more manly. The house still has a faint molten iron smell to it. Friday, the guys also put up the studs for the new rooms... and a problem we had seen on paper came to life in 3-D.

In short, the doors to the bathroom and the laundry would have to be sized for midgets in order to clear under the boiler pipes. The guys gambled that once it was framed in, the problem would solve itself, but amazingly enough, it didn't. It looked worse.

(click on the image for mouse-overs in Flickr)

Everything wrong here we'd already gone over before the framing but they were optimistic that the gamble of framing it out would pay off. The maximum clearance there would be 73.5 inches before we allowed for 3/4" of tile on the floor. (The door to my office is a cushy 80 inches and it's not unusually tall.) Out-swinging doors were one solution, but we all hated the idea of losing space in the family room to doors. Pocket doors were bandied about, but that would still require changing the framing and they are also not ideal. Neither solved the problem of the looming pipe over the vanity mirror.

Friday night, I sat looking at this. I'm pregnant and I have insomnia a lot, so I spent HOURS actually sitting on a compressor in the basement last night wondering what the hell to do now that this problem was framed in. And worrying that the contractors were going to go ape-shit when I called them Saturday morning to tell them that this did not work, at all, and had to be re-done. But first, I needed a solution...

I didn't have a solution until Saturday morning, when Bill and I walked and talked it together. What will work is if we turn the bathroom on its side (8X5, instead of 5X8) and reconfigure the laundry. Once this is done, the doors can all avoid the pipes, can all be nice pre-hung jobbies, and I think everything still fits. My nice spacious laundry room is now long and narrow, but I'm willing to sacrifice the laundry area for a nice bathroom.

I drew it all out, typed it all up, worried a good deal, and then left a VM for the guys. Then, because I really needed a change of scenery, we all went to Union Station to walk about and see the Norwegian Trains.

The guys came over this afternoon and I walked them through the issues. I waited for the fight or the push-back, some 'tude or defensiveness. This is the part where they blow up that this is so late in the game, the framing is already up, the drain for the toilet already hammered out... but they nodded in agreement, saw my points, and totally accepted the necessary changes. Pause and consider that. They have to rip out the framing for half the project and re-route the plumbing they have already jack-hammered but they didn't seem bothered in the least. I'd like to imagine it is because of my charm and persuasion, but it never works that well for me generally.

Here is the new plan.

I'm pretty sure everything will go more smoothly once Cthulu is evicted. I'm sure it was his malign influences all along. Yup. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Taking a leap of faith

In another life, I would be the DIY queen. I love knowing how to do things and I love the sense of accomplishment from doing them myself. But I have not found in life the time or opportunity to really hone my DIY skills. I don't know why - I'm sure I could learn to tile or to hang drywall, but I have not. I can use a circular saw, build my own raised beds, paint, caulk trim, and wire an electrical socket. My crowning achievement is having taught myself the basics of old window repair, from stripping to glazing in new panes. I think that project worked out in part because it was small, discreet, one window at a time and there was no pressure if I then didn't tackle another for a year... or more. Small stuff, I am getting better at.

Part of me concedes that any home improvement is just a collection of small stuff. Take it step-by-step and eventually you get to the desired outcome. The variables are time and cost. Bill likes the mantra, "Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two." In the DIY arena, I would never win a race, so the only reason to tackle a project myself would be if it would result in exceptionally good or cheap results.

I can not finish our basement. Not well, not cheaply, not quickly. Someone else has to. Tonight I signed a contract to that someone else and so begins the next chapter of our home renovation work. Of the three options, the only two remaining are good and fast. There is a moment when you hold your breathe and hope that the decision you just made was the right one. Signing a contract and putting down a deposit is always a little breathe-taking.

In the hour and a half negotiations tonight, I introduced my contractor to Community Forklift. We will be trying to recycle some materials and I wanted his buy-in. He's intrigued and that's good, because there is a cast iron tub sitting over there with my name written on it waiting for him to pick it up.

I'll start taking some photos, since this will be a pretty impressive transformation. In the end, we plan to carve a bathroom, laundry, bedroom, and family room out of the open space downstairs.

And who am I really kidding. I got lost assembling an Ikea stool this weekend. This is definitely a job for professionals.