Along with getting work done on the trucks, I took care of some projects around the house, some of which were on the 2026 list.
First and foremost, Hazel got a bath. She has smelled like landfill dirt mixed with old socks in a bag of moldy Cheetos for the last two months, but I don’t like sending her out into 30˚ weather soaking wet after a bath. I took advantage of the warm weather to scrub the stink out of her fur and let her dry off in the warm sun on the back porch. I’m sure she quickly rolled around in the mud to spite me.
I pressure-washed the dirt and green algae off our front stairs, which has been bothering me since November.
I climbed out on the roof and replaced the section of aluminum siding that was blown off during the windstorms in December. The aluminum itself was AWOL until last week, when it magically appeared in the flower bed below the den, as if to say, it’s time to get me back up there, Chief.
Along with that, I pulled the rest of the fiber tiles off the attic ceiling down and stacked them by the stairs. I couldn’t bag them for removal, but that will be the next step in cleaning out that space.
The greenhouse has been straightened up for the first time in three years. My residual anger from the Caterpillar Massacre of 2022 seems to finally have subsided, and I was able to get in there and clean things out. I even put three of the bins out on the table in the center and considered buying a couple of bags of soil and some tomato seedlings just to have something growing in there again.
All of the neighbors’ leaves that have collected under our back porch are now bagged up and ready for the County to collect on Thursday morning. And there are three contractor bags full of garbage from the garage and greenhouse ready to go as well.
Monday morning: there’s about 2″ of very damp snow on the ground, and the outside temperatures are 34˚. We were supposed to have a boiler repairman come by sometime between 10 and 2 today, but as of 11:45 this morning I have heard nothing from the company. We’ve got space heaters working overtime to keep things warm, and it’s averaging about 65˚ inside, but I’d really like to have our heat back.
Update: they sent a nice plumber out to look at the system, who admitted sheepishly that he’s not an HVAC guy, and rescheduled for tomorrow morning. I don’t blame him in the least, but that’s an asshole move by the company.
I spent most of Sunday putting the final touches on a presentation I’m going to be giving at the Yale School of Management on Wednesday about data visualization for social good, an invitation I was very pleased to accept after helping teach a graduate course at MICA last semester. I’m still practicing my delivery, and after doing the talk for Jen on Sunday afternoon I wound up re-ordering a whole section. I’m hopping a train on Wednesday morning, doing the presentation that afternoon, and they’re taking me out to dinner in the evening. They put me up in a hotel overnight and I take a train back on Thursday morning. It should be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the experience.
[frantically returns to practice]
Thursday morning at about 4AM, Hazel and I awoke to the odd sound of water dripping somewhere in the bedroom. I got up and followed the noise to the radiator, which was leaking at the relief valve onto the floor. I threw some old T-shirts over it and on the floor, and crawled back into bed until the alarm rang. After making some coffee I checked the basement to find water running freely from the relief valve on the top of the boiler, and on further inspection found that the other radiators were leaking the same way.
After shutting the boiler and main water valve off, a very nice plumber named Youssef came out and between us we got the boiler separated from the water line, the major leaks stopped, and the remainder of the water drained out of the system. I got an estimate to repair the existing boiler and one to replace it, and after picking my chin up off the floor, we opted to repair the unit we’ve got. It’s about 40 years old and will need to be replaced at some point soon, but I wasn’t budgeting for that this year. I had been stockpiling cash to pay for some other stuff, and had just paid off my credit card, so we’ve got enough left over to pay for this out of pocket. But it seems like every time we get some cash assembled to do something we want to do, some other thing breaks and the money goes to that thing.
We hit a huge milestone last year that I neglected to celebrate: our house officially turned 100 years old. Erected sometime in 1925, it’s seen two world wars, 17 presidents, three families, and six color changes (that I can identify). For the last couple of months I’ve been keeping a list of things that need to be addressed. I haven’t really had to do much on it in the last few years, but as with every house, this one needs constant attention. Here are the things I want to take care of that I don’t need to call outside experts in for:
- The master bathroom punchlist. There are a number of small finishing touches that need to be done in the master bathroom,, and these are these should be relatively easy to knock out on a rainy day. The only thing that’s going to be a challenge is fixing a small area of grout on the floor, where the cats knocked over some PVC pipe primer that stained the grout. When I looked into it a few years ago, the grout was only available in a $70/5-gallon bucket—all I need is a half a cup.
- Scrape and paint the windows. I painted the house 5 years ago and did all the windows while I was up on the cherry picker, but it’s about that time when the paint starts to peel, and I’ve got to redo sections of it. Thankfully, I don’t think I need to do any of the eaves, it’s mostly the south-facing windows that need help.
- Replace the kitchen window. There are two rooms in the house that were updated before we moved in with vinyl windows: The original full bathroom and the kitchen. Both replacements were pieces of shit when we moved in. The locks are broken and they leak profusely, so they both need to be swapped out for new units. This will probably be the biggest undertaking.
- Fix the aluminum siding outside the attic window. During the last big windstorm, one section of our aluminum siding was torn off the side of the house. I’ve got a box of replacement siding in the eaves of the garage, so this should be relatively easy to do.
- Clear out the attic. Jen cleared out a bunch of stuff last year, but the fiber ceiling tiles the doctor put up in the 60’s have all fallen down. I had them tested for asbestos and they are free, which is a huge relief, but they all need to be bagged up and hauled out of there. I’m looking into what to put up in their place to keep heat in the house. And there’s a bunch of crap up there that I need to get rid of.
- Fix the greenhouse. I redid the plastic 7 years ago, but whatever I bought this last time didn’t hold up as well as the stuff I got in 2005. There are two places along the top spines where the plastic has split, so I need to redo those sections.
A week ago, the three of us sat on the couch and watched home movies from when Finn was a toddler. We have fun footage of her bundled up outside after the snowfalls of 2009 when the accumulation was taller than she was, and it was a hoot to watch her waddle down the front walk, faceplant into the side of the snowbank, and lick the snow off her chubby cheeks. We haven’t had a snowfall of that magnitude since.
The current forecast is for a large snowstorm coming our way—the latest projections are for 6-12″ and at least an inch of ice to cap things off. Of course, the weather-guessers are predicting power loss and calamity, so everyone is panicking. My procrastination over buying a snowblower has proven to be wise up until now—and I have a seventeen-year-old with a strong back who can shovel for me while I recover from my snowboarding injuries. I am going to bring about six loads of firewood up to the back porch, warm up the generator, stock up on gasoline, and bring the coolers up to the house just in case, but I do hope we make it through without losing power.
Here’s a cool site to check out over coffee on a Sunday: Historic Aerials is a Google Maps-style interface where you can look up your address and walk back in time as far as they’ve got aerial photos of it. They also have topographical maps which typically go back much further. For our house, the earliest photo is from 1957 but the topo maps go all the way back to 1894.
A long time ago, in my previous house, I had an ancient oil-burning furnace (converted to natural gas) ripped out of my basement along with all the assorted radiators and piping, and had a central air system installed. This was 1999 or so, and the house was only 1600 square feet in size. I paid somewhere around $5,000 for all of the demo and ducting work, and enclosed it all myself when they were gone. $5000 in 1999 equates to somewhere around $9500 today, factoring inflation.
We had a very nice man come to the house and give us an estimate for a ductless air system, where he spec’d out five wall units and one outside air handler. The total estimate came out to a hair over $25,000.
Guess I’m going to be humping window-shakers up and down the stairs for a while longer.
It’s pretty brutal across the Mid-Atlantic right now; we went from a month of wet but temperate weather straight into Sauna mode in one day. The girls and I disassembled and cleaned out all of our window units before installing them, and they’ve been rumbling away since Sunday evening. I’ve been curious to know exactly what it might cost to have ductless A/C installed in the house, so I called up a local company who’d come recommended to us by a neighbor and had the rep come out to walk through the house. He wasn’t scared by the layout, and is supposed to give us a quote for a couple of different options sometime today.
I’m prioritizing the bedrooms upstairs, knowing that the cold air will fall, and we talked about another unit in the office. It looks like the outside unit would most likely go on the west side under the dining room window, or possibly on the driveway side, but we’ll have to see how things shake out.
I don’t know that I’ve got the money for this immediately handy, but I want to know what we need to save up for to get it done. I’m sick and tired of humping window units up and down the stairs, having them block up the windows in each room, and having to store them on the porch or in one of the bedrooms all winter long. I was able to enjoy central A/C in my rowhome for a total of a year and a half before we moved; that was 22 years ago and it’s time to upgrade.
This morning I was elbow-deep in the hood of the Travelall, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and sunshine poking out from behind the clouds. I looked up and saw a car drive slowly past the house and then stop at the curb in front of the neighbors’ house. I returned to my work for a few moments and looked up to see a woman walking up the driveway. I waved and greeted her; she nervously introduced herself as one of the daughters of the doctor who owned our house, who we bought it from 22 years ago. My face broke out in a huge smile and I shook her hand, and that seemed to break the ice. We talked a bit about the tulip tree exploding in color over the driveway, and she explained that she wanted to drive by and see it bloom—her mother had planted it years ago and she couldn’t get over how big it was. I walked her up to the house to met Jen at the door, and we took her inside for a tour of the first floor.
She was very happy to see what we’d done with the house, and told us it looked great (but a lot smaller than she remembered!) We asked after her family and caught her up on some of the neighbors, and traded some stories about the house. She asked if she could bring some of her brothers and sisters back, and we told her that would be fine—as long as we had a little time to clean up first. While she talked with Jen, I ran out to the front to take the glass DR W.E. McGRATH sign from the box next to the door out and give it to her. We’ve been talking about sending it to the family for years but never got around to it, so it was great to be able to hand it off in person. We said our goodbyes out on the front lawn and I went back to work, feeling more upbeat about the day.
In the interest of making more room in the garage, I’ve been thinking about how I can set up a shelter out behind the structure where I can get steel parts and other things out of the rain and snow. The cheapest and easiest solution would be a lean-to or covered roof with open sides, so I started sketching out what something like that might look like.
The basic plan would be to build a basic frame from 2×4’s and extend it off a ledge below the existing roofline. I’m thinking 4′ deep by 16′ wide would offer me ~64 square feet of space. I’d cover it with clear corrugated plastic so there’s light underneath, and scrounge up a couple more pallets to get things up off the ground. That should be enough to cover the hood and tailgate that’s out there already, along with other bulky sheet metal taking up space on the floor. As of last count, I’ve got three C-series fenders and two C-series grille assemblies in the way, along with a Scout 80 windshield frame, a Scout tailgate, and a Scout hood that take up a ton of space. There’s also a spare tire I’d love to get out of there.
The first thing I have to do, however, is pull the ladders off the far and back walls, scrape any flaking white paint, and spray them the same blue as the house. Doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math, I figure this might cost around $250 all in, and perhaps a full day to install everything.