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.
I had grand plans to get lots of long-standing house projects accomplished on Saturday, but was ony able to finish one of them. I’d finished hanging all of the under-cabinet lights last weekend but still had to do the four cans in our glassed cabinets on either side of the sink and the facing wall. I’d used plastic-friendly spray paint to paint them black and after a week of curing, the paint was ready to handle. With all the practice I’d had with the other lights this went pretty quickly, and within an hour or so the lights were in place.
Next up was the bathroom heater, which has been suffering from a faulty thermostat for years. I got the oscillating saw out and trimmed out the edges to make it easy to remove, then unboxed the replacement I’d gotten at Lowe’s only to realize it was 1″ smaller in each dimension (the measurements were for the cover, not for the box). After a trip to the internet I learned the original manufacturer isn’t carried by the big box stores anymore so I’d have to spend $180 plus shipping on a new one, or $80 for a replacement thermostat from Amazon. Wisely I chose the latter. It won’t be here until next week, which sucks.
Sunday we got dressed up and walked across the street to the church, which was hosting an Iftar dinner at the end of the Ramadan fast. This is the third Iftar dinner we’ve attended; they are organized by a local mosque and Turkish cultural organization who promote interfaith events. We met a nice woman during the opening remarks who sat on the pew next to us, and I invited her to sit with us at the table we’d staked out. She and her husband lived in China for 15 years before moving to the US; both have a PhD in linguistics. We were fascinated to hear of their time in China; her husband wrote the first Turkish to Chinese dictionary. I was seated across from a nice man who came to America and taught STEM in middle and high schools until COVID hit, and then pivoted to his own business laser-engraving headstones. It was lovely to meet new people and learn about their lives, as well as Muslim tradition, and it’s something I look forward to every year.
Meanwhile, my ribs are almost back to normal. I can walk stairs two at a time again, lift most objects, and get out of bed without feeling like I’ve been shocked with a car battery. I spent most of Sunday crawling through a couple of cars in a junkyard, and with the exception of yanking the dashboard cover out of a Nissan Versa with my hands, I didn’t feel it at all. Even standing up from under the car wasn’t hard—I felt it more in my knees than my ribs, which was a nice change.
In 2004, Jen and I had a choice to make. We were planning out our new kitchen, and we had to make the most of the space we had, as well as our money. I’d taken out a home equity loan to front the cash, so we were on a fixed budget, and that prevented us from doing the obvious thing, which was to blow out the wall between our dining room and the kitchen to open the space up. We worked with a kitchen planner and they helped us fit a set of cabinets into the space we’d inherited, but the critical choice we had to make was this: whether or not to sacrifice a cabinet for the radiator that was shoehorned under the existing rental-grade countertop. We decided, correctly, that storage was more important, and removed the radiator. But we’ve been living with the fallout of that decision ever since, and it’s never been more apparent than this past week of single-digit temperatures.
It sucks to be out there when it’s cold outside. To the point where Jen has turned the oven on just to stay warm while making food. Even when the radiator was there, it was never any great shakes; the kitchen is at the very end of the closed-circuit loop in our steam heating system, which means that it and the bedroom above get the least amount of heat last. But walking in there after just having gotten out of bed to get some coffee started is like walking through a snowbank; it sucks.
Contrast that with the Schluter radiant floor heat system we put in the master bath, which is like walking on a warm hug. In the morning, when the cats are freed from their prison (they sleep in the basement, otherwise they rattle the bedroom door and keep Jen up all night) they make a beeline for the bathroom and lay around up there all day. I can’t say I blame them; there have been days when I’ve wanted to shove them aside to take a nap.
Looking around the interwebs, I found a radiant floor retrofit kit for houses like ours, where the entire thing is essentially a roll-out mat sold in various lengths that are attached to a central 120V controller. You staple them to the joists under the floor with about 2″ of void space, and then tuck insulation up underneath. Something like this would go a long way to making things more livable out there, and we could move the big, bulky Edenpure heater my Mom gave us out of there for good.
Given that interest rates aren’t going down anytime again in my lifetime, and we’re going to need to make this dump more livable for the future, $2K in materials + electrician visit to hook it up wouldn’t be disagreeable.