I ran down to the dump this morning after we made sure Finn got on the bus for school; I’d filled the back of the CR-V with construction debris yesterday and tried to drop it off, but everything was closed for the holiday.
All nine new replacement windows are installed, caulked (inside) and painted, and the window treatments are back in place. I’ve noticed a drastic difference in the amount of noise pollution they block out in all of the rooms upstairs. I began installing them at the tail end of the cold snap, and then the weather rocketed into the 50’s in the middle of the job so I can’t yet say they are keeping things warmer, but I notice the drafts have disappeared and the light coming in is brighter and clearer. It feels great to have that project complete.
Next up is one of Jen’s Christmas presents: she’s wanted a built-in bookcase in the living room for years, so I came up with a plan to put one in against the south wall around the main windows. It’s going to take some engineering and a lot of specialty carpentry, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. What we’re doing is a floor to cieling built-in with a small boxed section at the bottom to hide (and keep intact) the original kickplates. The biggest wrinkle is the radiator pipe on the left side going up to the back bedroom, which I’ll have to fit the shelving around.
The other thing we’re doing is leaving all of the original woodwork alone—I don’t want to chop the edges of the crown molding or the windowsill off like they did upstairs in the back bedroom. And the radiator cover isn’t exactly the width of the windowsill—it’s slightly larger. So there’ll be a tiny gap between the inner edges of the shelves and the window moulding.
A number of months ago, I placed a large order for replacement windows. We finally got the shipment in a week or two before Christmas, and I’ve been using the break to get them installed. Because there’s no better time to replace an entire floor of 100-year-old windows than during a historic cold snap.
Having done this for the downstairs I knew what I was getting into and I had a pretty good plan for how I was going to tackle each one. First, remove the inner stops with a prybar all the way around, and then pull out the metal guides for the lower sash. Cut the weight cords and pull the lower sash out. Then remove the metal guide for the top sash, wiggle those out, cut the cords and remove the top sash. Pull out any remaining stops, clean the frame up, and get out the big screwdriver. With this, hammer each weight pulley inward so that it falls backwards into the pocket. Fill each pocket with spray foam. Then pull the storm windows out, unscrew the storm window frames, and pull them off the outside of the house. Unwrap the new windows, hoist them into place, and set them level into the frame. Screw the sides in, shim it all, and then mill, cut and nail new stops around the inner edges. Simple, right?
It took me an afternoon to do the two front windows in Finley’s room on Monday, because I spent a lot of time gathering the tools I’d need, buying the supplies I needed, and getting the method down.
On Tuesday I did the side window in her room and the one on the stairway landing.
Today, having nailed the method down and starting earlier in the day, I got the two windows in the blue room up front done and the two in the southwest bedroom.
There’s one window left, in the southeast bedroom. I’ve still got to caulk and paint them all, but my caulk gun is in Lexington Park and I refuse to buy a new one when we’ll be down there on Friday to oversee a bathroom installation. With that final window installed, the only circa 1925 windows left in the house will be two in the basement—one with a dryer vent and one leading out to the crawlspace under the porch, and one in the pantry. I will look at replacements for the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen window in the spring; they were relatively new replacements when we moved into the house but they’re both cheap garbage and need to be replaced. But that’s for warmer weather.
Saturday was almost 70˚ here in Maryland, a rare treat for November, and the last warm day forecasted for a while. So I got outside and made the most of it. The first task of the day was to help move frozen turkeys from our church to another one down the street for their Thanksgiving food giveaway. I got the Scout gassed up, bought some coffee, and pulled up to the house behind the church just in time to throw 15 frozen birds in the back. The destination church was the one we volunteered at last year, spending the whole morning to help sort and organize meals in bags and then hand them out as cars drove through the parking lot. This year they’d presorted everything so I dropped the birds off and wished everyone a happy holiday; they had things well in hand without me getting in the way.
From there I stopped at home to see the girls, and then loaded the truck up with the girl, the dog, and a load of crap for the dump. After pitching a bunch of garbage, we stopped at the bakery up the street for donuts, then hit the Home Depot for a ceiling fan to be installed in the hallway upstairs.
I didn’t want to miss out on the weather, so I went out to the garage and started organizing. Years ago, when we were trying to insulate the front porch, I wound up with about thirty sheets of unfaced insulation that I couldn’t use elsewhere so I stored it up in the attic of the garage. I’ve been meaning to get up there and clean it out for years, but working with insulation is one of my least favorite jobs so I’ve been putting it off. I’m also at the point where my available space in the garage is at its lowest point ever, so something had to give. With mask and gloves I pulled all the bales down and bagged them up for disposal, then hauled both Scout windshields, the spare gas tank, and several other bulky items up and out of the way. I have to go up and organize things better, but it’s a good start and it frees up a lot of space on the floor.
Before the sun went down, I threw the breaker for the vestigial knob-and-tube wires on the second floor and disassembled the ceiling fan left over from the Doctor’s ownership. When I repainted the hallway up there last summer I hit it with the ladder and cracked one of the blades; no great loss there. The new fan is a three-blade unit with a remote control but the genius engineers didn’t build the remote circuitry inside the fan housing—it’s a separate box that gets wired in between the fan and the power line. Because this house is 100 years old and it’s all plaster and lathe, I have no way of stuffing the box up into the eaves without doing major surgery, something I’d like to avoid for now. So it’s hung and wired until I can get back up there in more daylight and cut a fucking hole in my ceiling to make it work properly.
We did a very unusual thing on Wednesday, and enjoyed ourselves immensely: we traveled to Virginia to meet up with Jen’s childhood friend Raquel and her family to tour Mount Vernon, George Washington’s family home. The weather was gray and gloomy for most of the morning, but as the day unfolded and as we walked the grounds the sky cleared up and we got to really soak in the beauty of the location. I’d never been there before, so it was a new experience for me, and I enjoyed being with Finn to see it with her. From there we headed into D.C. for dinner with their family; they are lovely people and we would definitely like to see them again when they’re in town.
Saturday we traveled down to Bob’s house to keep things moving forward for him; while Jen cleaned the kitchen cabinets I rebuilt the surround to his bedroom door, sorted out a pile of random keys, finished his Ring doorbell install, and made a bunch of other improvements around the house. Having the Ring hooked up is another way for us to keep track of what’s going on, and it’ll be good to be able to check in when we need to.
This morning the ladies got themselves cleaned up for church and I got dressed to take Hazel out for a long walk. Our first stop was at the farmer’s market, where I stocked up on empanadas and found Jen some fresh yellow peaches; while I was there I ran into an old friend from my gaming days and walked the neighborhood for an hour or so in the sunshine, catching up. From there I headed back home to catch up on some housework. I’ve spent all spring and summer hauling tools to Bob’s house to complete long-delayed work at his place, and each project is involved enough that I’m pretty worn out by Sunday morning. That means our house is suffering from neglect and there are projects around here that I haven’t tackled at all.
At some point in the last six months, one of our wood cradles had a little too much to drink and leaned over onto its neighbor for support. I looked out there last weekend and realized the whole thing had tipped over into the neighbor’s yard, so I knew I was going to have to do something before the snow started falling.
After putting the hardtop on the Scout, I wheeled a bunch of tools over and started throwing wood into a pile on the lawn. When the cradles were empty, I rebuilt one and attached them both to a long set of feet, then screwed braces into each of the endcaps so that they have lateral and vertical support. Finn arrived home just in time to help me reload each cradle with wood, and when that was complete we put the tarp back on top to keep things dry. It looks janky but I’m not interested in aesthetics; I just want dry wood for the winter.
Over the course of the last ten years, we’ve replaced a lot of windows in this house, by fits and starts. As we’ve worked on each room as a project, I’ve pulled the old out and put the new in, which means we’ve got a mix and match set of manufacturers, from Pella to Andersen to Mi depending on where you are. I don’t see it as a bad thing—Andersens are in the office, Pellas are in the den, and Mi is everywhere else. (Side note: the Pellas are garbage; their mullions are made of cardboard and the windows are sticky to close. The Andersens are better, easier to use and clean. The Mi windows aren’t as good looking as the first two, but are much more affordable and very sturdy).
I decided I needed to line up a project on the house for this fall, and priced out windows for the upstairs. What we’re talking about here is all of the bedrooms and the stairwell window—the master bathroom got new glass years ago. That’s nine windows in total, with the four front windows being 4″ taller than the rest. Back before ‘Rona I thought that $400 a window was a lot of money to spend, but when the price of everything went up because of “supply chain issues” I figured I’d wait it out until things settled back down. I’m now reading about inflation and recession and the End Times and figure the prices probably won’t return to where they were in 2020, so now was as good a time as any.
So today I placed an order for nine replacement windows with the remainder of our HELOC money, and in six to eight weeks we’ll have a stack of new glass waiting for me to swap out. I figure I’ll start in Finley’s room and work my way across the front of the house, then move around to the back side. I had a pretty good system going when I finished the living room windows, so hopefully I can perfect the process and make it go quickly.
Way back in early 2000’s I was playing around with home automation and had varying degrees of success. That system was pre-smartphone, so it ran on your computer and used a clever plug that transmitted signals through the wiring in the house to all the connected devices. I ran it off an old iMac I’d salvaged from somewhere and used the latest version of the software, but it was still glitchy (that was the last CRT computer I owned). It worked OK but I was never really able to build a solid case for investing hundreds of dollars into the gear and software, so I gave up on it.
These days Apple has HomeKit, which is an out of the box automation framework that hooks up to a whole fleet of (relatively inexpensive) peripheral gear. I spent $20 on two smart plugs last week and gave them a try. They are simple on/off switches, so they act as slightly smarter versions of the plug-in light timers we already own. They took all of a minute to register with HomeKit, and I quickly had a light in the living room hooked up to one. With one tap on my phone, the light turns on and off. But this kind of sucks, because I can’t just walk into the room and turn on that smart-connected light without a cellphone, and we don’t live the kind of regimented life where timer-controlled lights make sense. They’re great for when we travel, and I’ll probably swap out all of the old mechanical timers this year, but I can’t think of a use case for these plugs other than that. (I’m not buying an Alexa or HomePod to voice-activate anything, before you ask).
Now that I know it works, I’m going to explore some of the more expensive options for automation—maybe a system set up to control the door locks, for example, allowing us to open the door without a key. But what I’d really like is to replace the thermostat with something programmable from somewhere other than the keypad; our Honeywell unit is about 15 years old and takes three hours of button-mashing to program every time the batteries die. The trick is to avoid the larger monopoly ecosystems; Google bought Nest back in the day and Amazon just bought iRobot—so now Bezos knows how much lint is under our couch. A couple of years ago I picked up a cheap Wyze camera for the house to see what Hazel was doing in her spare time but recently found out their system had been hacked and wide open for several years. Glad I only used that camera for the weeklong demo period.
Meanwhile, we bought a Nest doorbell cam for Bob’s house to keep an eye on things remotely, which I installed on Sunday. The physical installation went fine but trying to set it up through his phone revealed that the Verizon rep completely fucked up his account setup, so that they were sending his bills to Pennsylvania and shut his phone off for nonpayment. We’re sorting that mess out now.
Going back in time, I realize that I’ve either partially or fully renovated five bathrooms in my life. I’ve done everything from demolition to plumbing to laying tile, and I’ve hit many pitfalls and unexpected setbacks with each one. The whore-pink tile in our house in New York was held in place with chicken wire and cement. The floor of the jacuzzi room in that same house collapsed under me while I was demoing it. The bathroom in my rowhome was built with cardboard scraps and kindergarten paste. Almost all of them have featured leaky plumbing, substandard wiring, or rotten wood. Bathrooms are great gaping maws of money and time, and it is never an easy decision to plow ahead with a remodel unless one is independently wealthy and able to live in one of one’s other mansions while the plaster dust flies. I’ve never had that luxury, so I’m used to shitting in a bucket and showering with a garden hose.
It was, then, with some trepidation that I agreed to help my father in law rehab his guest bathroom. His house was built in the late 70’s, with all of the positives and many negatives that implies. The bathroom hosted five teenagers and shows every battle scar—it’s a miracle it hasn’t fallen through the ceiling, frankly. At some point in the distant past he got in there and pulled the tub and vanity out, and then stalled on the project. It’s been like that for years. A few weeks ago he informed us that he’d agreed to have a company come in and quote on a new bathtub, so we were sure to be on hand when the salesman came to look at it. At first we balked on the quoted price, but then deciding it wasn’t a bad idea to have them do the hardest part (the tub and surround), we signed a contract and made a plan to handle the rest ourselves.
I’d already wrapped up a bunch of other smaller projects in the house, so it was easy to pivot to demolition last weekend. I brought a bunch of hammers and chisels and saws, and had chipped all of the tile out in about an hour. Underneath that was a poured slab of 1″ concrete directly on top of the wood subfloor, which was, predictably, rotting. I was able to chip out two sections that had already cracked, but my attempt to cut through the remainder with a fiber-based wheel only created clouds of noxious dust. I backed off and let things settle, then started spraying the walls with wallpaper stripper. By about 4:30 and one run to Lowe’s I had all but two small sections offf the wall and ready for scrubbing.
This coming weekend I’m returning with a steel cutting wheel and an angle grinder, and I hope to have all of the concrete out as well as the subfloor gone. It’s going to make a mess but there’s no other way to make progress, so there it is.
Sunday was a recovery day, for various reasons. The highlight was waking up slowly and taking the family down to the Farmer’s Market for some coffee, empañadas, fresh produce, and some delicious ginger-cardamom lemonade from the same guy who sold us smoked trout. The girls made a side salad and steamed corn and we had that for dinner on the front porch, under the breeze from the fan, and it was fantastic.
This is the first weekend in a long time where we’ve been home. Like, in our own house for two days. Jen has been socked in with work for several weeks, and a lot of it has come to a head, so we thought we’d take a break from driving south to Lexington Park and stay around the homestead. I’ve had a lot of things around the house piling up in our absence, so I took the opportunity to knock a couple of them out.
The first thing was replacing two basement windows that were original to the house. I’d ordered replacements back in March and they finally arrived about a month ago; I’ve been waiting for a solid weekend to tackle the project. Pulling the old windows was pretty quick work—they were only held in by two sets of ancient brass hinges and a hook and eye latch. I cleaned up the wooden surrounds, cut and installed baffles, and slotted them into place. With some careful carpentry the inside baffles got nailed into place, and they got caulked tight. Now we can have open windows and enjoy fresh air in the basement! A miracle.
The second project is one Jen has been asking about since last year: painting the garage to match the house. I started out by scraping the west side and got it ready for paint. After cleaning both my guns and consolidating the remaining paint, I filled the compressor and sprayed out the west side and half of the driveway side before running out. I’m going to have to repair some of the plywood on the front side and do a lot more scraping overall, but it looks pretty good so far.
Finn has been binging a new videogame for the past month, and has been asking me to play with her. It’s a survival/exploration game called Ark, where you land on an island teeming with dinosaurs and have to learn how to gather food, build tools and shelter, and tame those same dinosaurs to help you advance. She’s been playing on her iPad, but I can’t load it on my phone and squint at tiny menus. I saw that it was available for the Xbox so I ordered a used copy on Amazon and installed it on the console. From there it demanded a 100GB update, so we waited days for the console to choke that down (it puts itself to sleep after an hour, so I had to constantly keep it awake) and then two more updates before we could play.
Once that was done, we picked up our controllers and started a new world together. And found, very quickly, that it was almost impossible to navigate in 2-player mode. They split the screen horizontally, so the top half is one character view and the bottom half is another, but they didn’t change the menu system to fit that resolution. So when you go into the menu system (and half the game is spent here) it’s still the size and shape of an iPad and you have to squint at tiny little icons smushed into the narrow space given. It’s like looking at the menu bar of Word 97 through a peephole: impossible unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. I tried for several nights but found it almost unusable.
She then found a new game called Albion and started playing that. Seeing that it was available for the Mac, I downloaded a copy and tried it on my 8-year-old laptop, which slowed to a gelatinous crawl, cooling fans struggling to keep the processor from melting. I thought about it for a day or so and decided I’d pull the trigger and finally buy the iPad Pro I’ve been looking at since they were released. Playing games with Finn was a big part of the decision, but the other reason was that I want to work in Procreate with the Apple Pencil and learn how to illustrate with the system. I bought a new 11″ unit with the Pencil and picked it up at the local Apple Store this past week. The early review is very favorable: playing Albion on it is easy and fun! We spent a couple of hours on Friday getting me set up in the game and understanding how not to die. Now I have to catch up to her character level.
This is the first device I’ve owned with Face ID, and it’s very slick. The Pencil is fast and responsive. I bought Procreate and started fooling around in the program but it’s going to take a lot of time to sort out how I use it and get the most out of it. Getting used to the way the brushes and pressure work is an uphill battle, especially for someone as picky about the tactile feel and orientation of scratchboard tools as I am. I’m going to start out trying to mimic what I know and love, and then see where the app takes me.
I finally got around to updating the idiotking post count in an interactive visualization instead of a flat graphic. I’m going to see if I can find a way to overlay the category counts next.
I’ve been working on some sketching projects at work which required me to lower my desk chair, bust out the pencils, and get close to the drawings I was making. After a short while working without glasses, I put my progressive safety glasses on and used those to switch back and forth between the drawings and my computer monitor. Those glasses work OK, but I look like a total dork if I have to take a call wearing them.
Warby Parker made me new progressives and shipped them on February 22nd by USPS. When I check on it with their tracking service, it arrived at the Baltimore sorting station three days later and hasn’t moved since. No updates, no movement, no nothing. USPS offers an “extended tracking service” which I’m sure would provide me absolutely zero further detail; I’m going to call Warby Parker on Monday and see if there’s anything they can do—but I’m not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, a friend recommended me to her client for a quick linework illustration job that I knocked out in a couple of hours this afternoon. I like making extra money on the side.
I made a list of projects to tackle around the house this year in my notebook the other night before I went to bed, mainly as an excuse to collect them all and quell anxiety:
- New basement windows. I’ve been back and forth with my rep this week waiting for her to get the quote correct, but when that comes in I’ll sign off and get it paid for. I’m told it’ll be 4-6 weeks for delivery, just in time for some warmer weather.
- Find a fixed basement window with a dryer vent. I really don’t want to close off the window over the washing machine with glass block, but we may have no choice.
- Basement step rebuild. The concrete pad right outside our basement door has been tilted toward the house since we moved in, allowing for rainwater to spill over the edge of the stairwell and flood our basement doorwell. This pad needs to be broken up and removed, and the yard regraded away from the house. I’m going to mix a couple of bags of concrete and pour a higher threshold for the stairwell while I’m at it.
- Bust out the concrete walkway out back. Running over the walkway with an eight ton boom lift broke it up into lots of portable chunks, so it should be easy to lift and haul away.
- Clean up the treeline behind the greenhouse. This is a Sisyphean task that never seems to amount to much, but it’s got to get done. I think I need to nuke it all with Round-Up and then take the mattock to the earth. Or maybe rent a tiller…
- Repair and paint the garage. It’s never been painted since we’ve lived here, and the front “doors” make it look like we’re cooking meth inside. I’m going to pull the front off, reinforce the doorframes, and build new doors that look and work better. Then the whole thing will get sprayed to match the house.
- Pressure wash and paint both rear porches. This didn’t get done with the rest of the house last spring; both of them need a freshening up.
- Finish scraping the outside windows. There are a couple at ground level that need some attention, but everything on the second floor got painted properly with the boom lift.
- Polish the headlights on both Hondas. I did this for the CR-V three years ago and it made a huge difference, but the plastic has broken down again and fogged over. Time to buy another kit and have at it.