Category: House

Trials, tribulations and accomplishments as a home owner.

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Flood!

Eons ago I began a trench around the house so that I could reseal the block wall, and install a French drain to assure no water would ever come in the basement. Well, one thing led to another and I never finished. In the Fall, the leaves come off the trees, decompose a little and clog up the moat. So, on the night the grandparents are on their way over here and I’m supposed to be cleaning the upstairs, the basement floods. This one isn’t as neat as the last one but isn’t as horrible as the first. So what I do? Blog it.

Update: I think the flood is contained. Doesn’t look like we took any permanent damage. Everyone is going to be drying off after baths with hair dryers and paper towels. I think all bath towels were commandeered for the flood.

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Follow the bouncing ball part 2

So for nearly a decade, I have ignored the dripping faucet in the downstairs bath despite having a brand new faucet in a box beside the sink. On December 28th, I actually broke down, removed the old faucet, and put on a new one. Only, I didn’t reattach the drain or the hot and cold water feeds. So now, when the washing machine runs, it backs up into the cabinet under the sink. A one gallon bucket catches all the water from one wash load. Since this is getting old, today’s task was to replace the galvanized steel pipe with PVC pipe. Off to Home Depot!

Now, Home Depot and I have a love/hate relationship. I will actually swoon while walking its majestic aisles. Once I went to return something and ended up spending $100. For that matter, $100 is my magic number for Home Depot. See, I believe every store has a magic number. For instance, Kroger’s magic number is 50; I can’t go into Kroger without spending $50. Home Depot used to be 100. I couldn’t drive past Home Depot without a C-note blowing out the window. I love walking through Home Depot and imagining all the great things I could do if I only had the time, and the money, to spend on the materials.

Tommy made arrangements to be at a friend’s house at 2pm so that gave me an excuse to go get my PVC pipe. I walk into Home Depot and immediately see some pretty flowers that I think will make Cathy’s day if I plant them near the front door. Done. Remarkably, I find the plumbing aisle next and realize I didn’t collect enough information to make an informed purchase so after consulting with the expert employee, who this time actually knew his stuff, I was ready to replace all galvanized and wrought iron plumbing in the house; a total plumbing upgrade! Wisely, I decided that would require more planning. Next I explore the fire place supplies to see if they sell the wire brushes I need to clean the flue. Nay. I find myself in the insulation aisle pondering using solid foam on the cider block in the basement than losing living space by adding studs and R-13 or R-whatever. Skip. Finally I arrive at the dry wall aisle. Standing Home Depot rule: Don’t leave without drywall board if you are alone and have the van. That’s the nice thing about a Dodge Grand Caravan; it holds a 4×8 piece of board perfectly with the seats folded down and the driver’s seat slid all the way to the dashboard. Makes for interesting driving too. I head to the exact opposite end of the store and buy 25 pounds of grass seed, the plants, and the drywall and totally skip the reason I went there in the first place. I couldn’t leave the parking lot without buying 4 yellow LEDs from Radio Shack.

Got home and Evan and Amy helped me plant. I had some organic planting soil stored away and a bag of mulch from last season that was never opened and still in great shape. In 7 days, our muddy pit might actually have grass!

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It’s raining…in my basement

Just to keep things interesting the Fall leaves have filled the trench (that is supposed to become a French drain) outside the house and water is seeping through the wall into the basement. This means:

  1. I have to prevent damage to things in the basement by making sure the water has a clear escape path
  2. I have to clean out the shop vac and start sucking up water
  3. I have to don old nasty clothes that don’t fit, find a shovel, and start digging in the mud outside.

This has to happen between programming, preparing dinner, driving to 3 places to pay bills (no, I don’t own any stamps and I want receipts), and being home in time to let Cathy go see Sarah’s flag competition tonight, getting children bathed and into bed (and more programming). No. Calling someone in to deal with this is not an option right now.

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Weekend in Review

This was a working weekend. My current project needed to see some drastic visual improvements that have to look good in Internet Explorer 6. (I’m a semantic programmer that advocates CSS over tables for design.) This weekend was dedicated to those visual improvements. My reward as I made progress was to do some wiring and drywalling in the downstairs bedroom. The light switch used to hang, in an uncovered gangbox, dangling from the 12-2 wiring in the hallway. I was always afraid one of the kids was going to get a terrible shock from turning on the lights. Evan loved to get a step stool and turn on the lights himself. Now the switch is installed in the wall just inside the bedroom as it should and is covered with a face plate. It is also reachable by Evan without a step stool. I’ve had fun watching the children try to figure out how to turn on the lights. Evan is having a blast dimming the lights and turning them on and off.

If I continue to use fixing that bedroom as my milestone reward, we’ll have paint on the walls by the week’s end!

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Lessons of the night

In my plumbing exploits, which really should be documented on video, I’ve learned the following:

  • Brass fittings strip easily.
  • No matter how sure footed you think you are, when doing the splits between the top of a bar stool and a two by four bracing the hallway drywall suspended over a stack of paint cans and a mop bucket, applying torque to a monkey wrench that is above your head will cause you to fall down.
  • Swinging a two foot steel bar with your left hand against a drop forged pipe wrench (often mistaken for a monkey wrench) being held with your right hand is a mistake if you are not left handed.

Last time I did this, this plug came out much easier. Surely I’m doing something wrong.

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Milestone Rewards

How do you encourage yourself to reach a milestone? I know smoking programmers who give themselves a smoke break (7-15 minutes) when they accomplish a task. I don’t smoke, so I do a chore that doesn’t involve the computer. Today’s milestone breaks are brought to you by "Crack Plumbers, we’re just cheeky!" After Sarah did an art project involving rocks and the bathtub, our drain slower terribly. Now its stopped completely. This could be a coincidence. We have enough longhairs in this household to clog the public waste system so periodically I have to open the drain and pull out the alien creature that grows in there. It will be about 4 feet long, black, sluggy, and psuedo-intelligent. The most frightful thing I ever saw as a child was a Twilight Zone episode that involved a housewife vacuuming a dust ball out of her air ducts that turned out to be an alien creature that ate her. Since then I have never been fond of dust bunnies, air ducts, or alien looking snake-like gooey lengths of beyond description filth. However, I do want to bathe today…

So I just accomplished a very big deal on my current project involving combining functionality of two different parts of the application into a single page. It also involved altering the roles based security. Implementing roles based security on custom apps can be a time consuming pain in the neck. But fun! Time for my 7-15 minute break. Here creature creature!

Update: Pipes-1; Doug-0. Expect @cathymccaughan to report on my highly anticipated trip the emergency room during my next milestone break.

Update: Pipes-2; Doug-0. Done until Saturday.

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It’s not a yard; it’s a prairie.

John Deere RX95 in pieces

Why should we cut grass anyway? It’s grows naturally! I say let it go through its full life cycle. After much sweat and many words not appropriate for a Sunday, the nut holding the seat to the frame gave way. Most of it was cut away then after a thorough soaking of WD-40 (as I was too lazy to get my Liquid Wrench), a screw driver and hammer were violently applied until what little piece of aluminum was left began to turn. After that a wrench did quit work of removing the remainder of the nut leaving the bolt in good shape for the replacement nut. The fiberglass body lifted off after unplugging some wires and the fuel line (the tank is attached to the body being removed) but only after puzzling through the proper bizarre twists and turns required to life it off the varies levers. I only almost cracked it once. I am sore, sweaty, and blistered. Catastrophic failureThe starter motor remains attached to the engine and the rusted terminals under the key switch make me think it could be the switch (or the rusted terminals and not the starter itself. However I am done for the day.

As I was inspecting the mower, I thought about putting the belt back on. See, last trip out I was in an area that I had not thoroughly policed and I heard this god awful kerthunking noise and the blades quit spinning. I thought I hit a log and threw the belt. I no longer think I hit a log since I was being pretty careful. The mower had a catastrophic failure. The pulley that drives the blades which is turned by the belt connected in a serpentine fashion to the engine broke. I mean the metal of the pulley ripped from the shaft that spins the blades. I suppose I should still check on the starter. This could make a pretty cool go cart…

Melted componentUpdate: Looks like I have a melted fuse or other electrical component. So one mechanical and one electrical repair plus maybe the starter motor before I can get my lawn cut again. Ugh.

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Lawnmower man update

This is the nut that held the seat onThe computer tries to suck me in but I AM the Lawnmower Man! I have the body ready to be removed but the seat is in the way. The one bolt holding the seat on is so rusted that I think I need to cut it free.

Update: I opened my cordless Dremel and the battery and charger are missing! As a guy who used to have a very specific spot for everything I owned, you know, periodically I’d reorganize my CD collection either alphabetically or by genre and screwdrivers were sorted by type and size, missing tools and a parts drive me up a wall.

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Time out on politics

John Deere RX95There will be plenty of more opportunity for politics. If you haven’t had your fill, head over to Knoxviews.com. In the meantime, I am going to turn to describing how to get a riding lawn mower working again…the wrong way. The right ways is to roll it up onto a trailer and take it to the shop. But to do that I’d have to either get the Jeep running or install a hitch on the van. Both of those are just as much work as simply fixing the lawn mower myself. After searching the whole house, I found the key was left on the seat of the mower in the shed. So its now been rolled into the yard. To get to the starter, I have to take the entire body off the mower. That involves tools. So the next bit of searching is for the tools. Have I mentioned I really need a workshop/tool shed?

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Squirrels in the Attic – update

I put a live trap in the attic to catch the squirrels and move them to another part of town. After I feel sure that I have them out, I’m going to seal up the hole they are using to get into the attic. I have been warned that someone who sealed his attic prematurely ended up with $2000 in damages in one day. That person removed the adults but was unaware of the babies in the nest. Now I am a bit concerned about the same situation. When do squirrels make babies?

During LOST last night we heard rustling in the vicinity of the live trap. Bingo! I was certain we’d captured our first squirrel. Cathy, concerned for its well-being, encouraged me to go check on it (immediately after I had made a bowl of ice cream). I climb into the attic. You cannot stand in our attic. Every 16 inches, maybe 22 inches, there is another truss so you are hunched over awkwardly squeezing through these triangles while inhaling the asbestos fibers floating in the air from disturbing the insulation put up there decades ago. I usually go up with a breathing mask but its buried in the mess in the garage. I work my way down 9.144 meters* to where I have the trap. As I approach the thumbing of an irritated squirrel gets louder and louder as if to say, "My territory and your slow dumb indefensible butt came up here with nothing but flashlight!" I get about 3.6 meters* from the nest when I see th trap is empty and unsprung. And when I say empty, I mean no squirrel and no bait! All I did was feed it! I’m thinking it is time to install a squirrel cam in the attic and stream it over the Internet.

*Conversion courtesy of Onlineconversion.com.