Saturday morning, I let Finn talk quietly to herself in her crib while I snuck downstairs and got her breakfast together. Weekends are my days to wake with her while Jen sleeps, and she knows the routine well enough now that when I’m the one who opens the door, she’ll whisper, “Mama seepin” and stay quiet all the way down the stairs. While she ate her breakfast, I sipped coffee and planned out our route based on the yard sale signs that appeared Friday evening. After she’d finished and we changed her diaper, I dropped her in the backpack and we slipped out the door.
The first one was right around the corner, and it was the best of the day. For $11, I found a tricycle with a training handle, and three Melissa & Doug puzzles in fantastic shape. We ran them back home and then continued on into town for breakfast, stopping off at four more sales along the way. There were some interesting items and some total crap, but nothing we really needed, so we picked up food and turned for home. By the time we got back, an hour had passed and Mama was awake, so we sat together and enjoyed a quiet morning before the day got started.
Finn is getting more and more comfortable in the pool as the weeks go by. She tried jumping into my arms from the edge of the pool last week, and it’s now one of her favorite things to do. We try to stay in the water as much as possible, though, because they have the place chilled down to arctic temperatures for some unknown reason. Usually by the end of the session, she’s shivering even as she’s laughing, so we try to bundle her up into the locker room as quickly as possible. We’re actually going to look into switching facilities for that reason, because we don’t want to give up on swimming with her.
She passed out so completely on the car ride home that I had to scoop her up like a linguini noodle and pour her into bed without any lunch. While she slept, I joined Jen and we cleaned the house like a couple of tornadoes straightening up everything in sight for our dinner guests: S. and D., whom we haven’t seen in ages. They were kind enough to bring over a metric ton of awesome sushi, so we started pouring stoli & tonics and dug in. Finn stayed awake long enough to eat two full meals: a standard Finn dinner and an entire plateful of kid-safe sushi (cooked and vegetarian choices). After she went to sleep, we stayed up and almost killed the bottle. Thanks for a great evening, guys!
Sunday morning Finn and I repeated our quiet ritual and snuck out right at eight, hiking into town under a big umbrella to stay out of the drizzle. After picking up breakfast, we took the long way home, waiting for rainclouds to give way to blue skies. Finn chattered in my ear the whole way, making sure to say “seeyoulaterbyebye” to fire trucks, concrete trucks, pickup trucks, dogs, people, planes, flowers, and every person walking the other way. We took a new route and explored a whole area of the ‘Ville I’ve never really noticed, which was interesting.
At 11, after breakfast, we walked down to the center of Catonsville to take in the first day of the weekend Farmer’s Market with our friends J. and A., and we were pleasantly surprised by the amount of people who were there and the amount of people we knew. It was enough that for the first time, I actually felt like we were part of the community and not just people who owned a house in the neighborhood. The market itself was smaller than the weekday version, but with the turnout they had, I’m sure it’s going to grow quickly. We visited with friends, took in the stands, and picked up a wide assortment of sundries: A bison delmonico steak, six tomato seedlings (and one zucchini), a pound of organic strawberries, and one chocolate-on-chocolate gourmet cupcake.
With the new motor installed
In the afternoon, while Finn napped, we split up to attack different projects: Jen worked in the garden to plant seedlings and finish the back beds, and I started pulling the headliner out of the Saturn to get the sunroof closed. Following the directions I’d found online, I got the entire thing disassembled and down within about twenty minutes. Before I continued to page three, where it said pull eight bolts and remove the entire sunroof assembly, I decided, in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of intelligence, to plug the spare motor I’d pulled from the junkyard into the switch to see if it worked. To my surprise, it did—so I bolted it into place and closed the sunroof. At that point it was a simple matter to clip the headliner back up and bolt everything back into place.
After the tracks were down but before the glass went back in
Pleased with my success, I hurried to get everything cleaned up, then ran inside to give the newly-woken girl a snack, strapped her in the car, and hustled up 695 to the bike store to look at helmets and rear panniers before they closed for the evening. We wound up talking to the manager of the store, who was very helpful, and ordered a 1-3 y.o. helmet for the girl as well as a wicker and leather basket for the front of the tandem. We’ll have to return the pannier I bought—the whole point is that we got a free child’s bike seat at a yard sale that’s designed to snap onto a metal pannier, but the way this is constructed it won’t go on completely. So, back to the store I’ll go. (I found it hard not to be thinking about upgrades to my other two bikes while we were there, but we’ve got to get Mama something to ride first).
Dinner was quiet and delicious: leftover sushi and a garden salad, followed by our cupcake, split three ways. Finn has also learned how to clink glasses for a toast, drink a bit, then put her cup down and say, “Ahhh.”
When it was time to lay down, we wrassled on the bed in her room and made her giggle by kissing and tickling and zerberts, and then read a book until her eyes got heavy. She repeated, “Iluboo” as we closed the door and then quietly murmured herself off to sleep.
Early Saturday morning, Finn woke up from a bad dream and called to us from her crib. I went in (Mama has weekends off) and soothed her, laid her back down and tried to leave quietly, but she wasn’t having it. After I settled her down again and laid on the spare bed in her room, she snuffled her way back to sleep, leaving me to try and catch a few more Z’s before dawn broke. I’d just found my way back to REM sleep when it was time to get up for some breakfast, and we went downstairs to find Mama was already out the door on her mission for the morning: to check out the nearly new sale at the Howard County Fairgrounds. No sooner had I hit the bottom step when she called in to check on us; she’d seen a used red wagon that had been snatched from her grasp at the last second and wanted to know if we’d left the house yet. Finn and I wolfed down some breakfast, changed into dayclothes, and hit the road for our mission: picking over the community yard sale across the street.
In years past, we’ve found all sorts of useful things for sale in the surrounding area, from cameras to toys to cars. We were hoping to fill some of the small gaps in Finn’s wardrobe and maybe find some larger used items so that we weren’t paying full dealer price; the depreciation on little red wagons is atrocious as soon as you’ve driven them off the lot. Because we’d gotten a late start, she and I didn’t hit the bricks until 9:30, a full hour and a half after the official starting bell, so much of the good stuff was gone by the time we made the rounds.
This year’s sale seemed to favor fussy wingback chairs, Christmas decorations from the Reagan era, a metric ton of stupid glassware (always with the glassware, these people) and ramshackle pressboard furniture, but little or no interesting or useful stuff. There were some isolated deals on children’s books, and when Mama joined up with us, we scored a pair of $.50 Converse lowtops with room to grow in for the girl, but otherwise the local selection of kids items was thin. Perhaps the biggest surprise, then, was when Jen pointed out a sign at an otherwise uninteresting sale which mentioned radiator covers. Curious, we followed the seller back and peeped out a metal cover in excellent condition stored in the back of a garage; we hurried home with measurements and a phone number, and confirmed that it was perfect for our dining room.
After returning home, we bundled up the girl and headed out to her swim lesson. She’s doing really well with the stuff that scared her the first couple of weeks, like being underwater and floating on her back. She still has a look of confusion when she comes back out of the water, but she’s not as prone to crying about it like before. We played together until I could feel her shivering in my hands, and then it was time to go home. But not before checking out a fire engine in the parking lot! The local volunteer department brought it down for kids to check out, so Finn got to sit in the rear jumpseat and poke around the cabin while we chatted up one of the firemen.
Saturday afternoon I started working on cleaning up the clutter in our basement, first by hauling our old kitchen cabinets from of the center of the floor and hanging them on the back wall of the garage. At that point I realized the garage was in far worse shape than the basement, and commenced to organizing and cleaning as much as I could in there. Into the cabinets went the piles of debris from the workbench, a crate of motor oil, and a crateful of garden fertilizer and tools. I pulled the remainder of the rodent-chewed insulation off the walls and bagged it for disposal, reorganized the handtools, and put parts spares up into the attic. Nothing is going to make the floor any cleaner, but having the raised portion cleaned up is very nice. And when I’ve got a dumpster parked outside for the side porch, I’m going to find a way to disconnect the old gas stove and make that disappear as well.
One of the things I keep running into as I’m working on our cars is an unorganized toolbox filled with an explosion of wrenches. I’ve got two sets of SAE and one set of metric box-heads, and being able to find them quickly would be really helpful. After looking through the organizational section at the Home Depot and coming away unimpressed, I decided something simple would be the best solution—I’ll be happy to buy a couple of these when our budget allows. I’ve also got to find a way to organize sockets by size and type so that I’ll wind up with the correct handle for the right socket.
Sunday was just as busy. Finn’s friend Stella turned 2, so we stopped by her birthday party and sang, danced, painted, and played games with a group of other children the same age. By the time we left, she was pooped, and slept pretty much the whole way home.
While she was down I continued working outside, getting the back lawn mowed for the first time, then doing some battery swapping with the Slattern. It looks like the battery I bought last fall to replace the original is bad, but I’m not 100% sure; I replaced it with the Jeep battery and the car seemed to fire over a lot more happily. I also switched out the taillight wiring on the off chance there was a short in the original, but I’m going to try to see how well Pep Boys honors their 1 year replacement warranty this evening before I call this fixed.
So I have to back up to last Thursday and describe my birthday, which was very low-key and enjoyable. Mama woke me by bringing Finn in to lay on my chest, and she nestled up to my chin for a few minutes before we all got up for breakfast.
After work, Mr. Scout and I went to peek at a diesel Scout over in Lauraville, after being tipped off by the Toddfather. The truck was pretty beat, but the running gear was nice, and after I took it for a spin around the block (unintentionally winding up out on Harford Road in a balky diesel with sketchy brakes) we advised the seller on some pricing adjustments for parts he didn’t know he had.
Then, taking advantage of our proximity to The Big Bad Wolf, we ordered some tasty barbecue and brought it home to share with the family. After I helped put a sleepy girl to bed, we dug into dinner and discussed the developments on LOST before slicing into some delicious homemade blueberry pie. Mr. Scout surprised me with three boxes of Al’s Liner, an off-the-shelf bedliner product that’s hundreds of dollars cheaper than Herculiner or Line-X. Thanks guys!
Saturday morning we had Finn’s swimming lesson, which went a little less smoothly than weeks past. Mama was in the pool for the first time with us, and I think Finn saw that as an opportunity to complain and fuss for attention instead of focusing on having fun and relaxing. I felt awful for Jen because she wanted to be in the water with Finn, but I don’t think that’s going to happen next week.
After we got back, the girl went down for a nap and we got to work out in the yard, taking advantage of 70° and sunshine to clean up what four months of frozen inattention have left us. We cleaned up and pruned back the grape arbor, raked about a million leaves, and dumped 32 cubic yards of mulch on the front hedge. I chopped vine and hauled away dead growth around the stump in the rear of the yard while Jen cleaned out several flowerbeds and made a place for the daffodils to breathe. I also moved the final vestigal hedge from the backyard up to the front; here’s to hoping it will root as well as the two I put in last year did. In the evening, after having some grilled steak and potatoes and putting the girl to bed, we watched The Hurt Locker, which was as good, and as intense, as everyone said it was.
Sunday was full of sunshine, so we kept at the yard. More mulch, more raking, bagging leaves, and cleaning beds. I took a break at noon to go to a free class at Jen’s yoga studio, thinking that the stretching might help my shoulder problems (which have been getting slowly better). I was nervous, and as the class started it seemed to me like I was the only one who was unfamiliar with the poses, but I hung in there and made it through. The only thing I couldn’t do was one of the final sitting poses because my hamstrings were so tightly wound. I have to admit, I felt a little silly being one of only three men in the class, but I felt much better after one of the other guys fell asleep during the final relaxation period and began snoring loudly, prompting snorts of laughter from the rest of us.
(compare and contrast):
On my return, we continued cleaning the yard, getting the vegetable garden organized, and turning the mulch in each of the three piles. The humus in the end pile was ready to go, and after the three of us removed the roots, bark, and other large items, we wound up with a good-sized pile of rich, black soil to add to the garden. (Finn dove right into the pile, covering the front of her shirt and pants with dirt. I think we have a future gardener on our hands). Next we’ll pick up some manure and then till the whole thing up to get it ready for planting. After dinner and some books, Mama and I put Finn to bed and enjoyed a Berger’s cookie in front of The Order of the Phoenix. Then we laid down tired, happy, and content after a productive weekend together.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I spent a little time out in the side porch this weekend for the first time since Mr. Scout and I did insulation work. It was just too disheartening to be out there, really. I’ve wanted to get out there and clean up the mess we left behind for a couple of weeks now, and I took advantage of a little time while Finn was down for a late nap to organize my thoughts.
After I’d swept up the piles of leftover insulation, stacked the blankets we swapped out, and moved tools around, things looked a little better in the light. I made the decision to push ahead with the renovation this year, and now that Finn is considering potty training, it would be great to have a bathroom on the first floor again. What’s been holding us up is the complicated jigsaw-puzzle nature of renovations in our house, where one thing is usually precluded by five other things that need to happen first. In this case, we’ve been waiting for the money to have expensive plumbing work done. It goes something like this:
Buy a 4-door car.Insulate the front porch ceiling.Figure out why the porch isn’t retaining heat before closing it in.- Come up with a finalized plan for the second-floor master bathroom.
- Gut the atrium on the second floor.
- Pull up the floors in the atrium to expose the joists.
- Route plumbing supply and drains to the atrium (second floor) in prep for a new bathroom.
- Realign the toilet and sink waste and supply lines on the first floor (turn the toilet 90°, possibly move the sink back).
- Run a new vent pipe through the wall and out the roof (remove the old cast-iron on the side of the house).
- Sister new joists on the second floor to level and reinforce the floor.
- Install new windows in the first floor bathroom and den.
- Install a newer, wider porch door off the den.
- Run electric into the den and bathroom (plugs, can lights)
- Level the den floor?
- Sheetrock the den and bathroom.
- Put up kneewalls and insulate under the den in the coal cellar.
- Insulate the atrium in preparation for winter.
Admittedly, some of this stuff can happen out of order. The windows for the bathroom and den can be installed at pretty much any time up until sheetrock. I’ve waited on some things, like gutting the atrium, because I didn’t want to get things started, stall out, and let critical things like heating pipes freeze over the winter (and after this winter, I’m glad I showed some restraint). All of this will cost money, but the big-ticket item holding us back right now is the plumbing work. The ballpark I was given was in the $3500 range, which is cash we don’t have right now. And that doesn’t include the cost of a dumpster to gut the atrium, which is what has to happen before the plumbers can come in.
Some places I can save a little money and/or time are:
- Buy a set of windows at Second Chance, where there are overruns, returns, and other donated windows available at discount pricing
- Buy an exterior door from the same place
- Avoid gutting the entire atrium for now, and just doing the floor and section of the exterior wall in order to concentrate on the lower half
- Reuse some of the blanket insulation left over from the porch
- Obviously, do as much as I can by myself.
So I’m looking at an all-in scenario here, where a lot of things have to happen by the end of fall to avoid catastrophe (frozen pipes, higher energy bills, etc.) but I have to wait on any major demolition until after we have our taxes done to see if we’ve got to pay out or if we’re going to be keeping anything. And, of course, we have to wait for the snow to melt off before we can get a Dumpster in the driveway.
We got a letter from the State of Maryland a few weeks ago that I’m just following up on now. According to them, our home assessment (and thus our tax rate) has been reduced by $75,000 to a figure that’s still comfortably greater than the purchase price but still dramatically lower than the Zillow estimate online. From all I can gather, this means our house is still worth more in real-market value than we’re now going to be taxed for, even though we have a long way to go before it stands up to other houses in the area.
What you’re looking at is the top. it’s sitting out in the open in our side yard. There’s no telling exactly how much snow we got, but it’s a lot.
Here’s the view from the porch this morning. Our front walkway is completely covered and drifted in again. The wind picks up and howls to the point of zero visibility, then settles down again to show the drifts piling higher. Finn keeps walking to the window and saying, “Wow!” And yes, all four of those cars were cleared off and running yesterday.
Rumors of the Snowpocalypse were true; the End is Nigh. We’ve gotten three feet of snow, as far as we can tell from the drifts, with another 10″ or so to come. With help from our neighbor, his snowblower, and a 10AM can of Budweiser, I got the Jeep uncovered, warmed up, and through the 4′ drift sent up by the snowplows, but I don’t think we’re getting the Saturn out until April. When I came back inside, after being out for two hours, there was another 2″ of snow on the front steps. If the forecast is true, I’ll have to go back out tomorrow and do it all over again, but for now it’s a warm sandwich, some fresh salsa, and thick socks. And maybe another beer…
Mr. Scout drove over from the Eastern Shore this Sunday to help me with a two-part project: making the front porch/office warmer and habitable during 30° weather.
Recapping quickly, when the ceiling went in two years ago, I put R-19 insulation between the joists and another layer of R-19 on top of that for a theoretical insular total of R-38, which should have been good enough to seal up that space and impossible to view one’s own breath while sitting at a desk. In the basement room below, I sealed the cracks in the foundation with hydraulic cement, put in a kneewall with R-13 around the foundation, and installed a new window to replace the original 1925 equipment. All of that work had no effect. After some consultation and inspection, Mr. Scout theorized that the sill plates were uncovered and leaking massive amounts of air (which they were) and that the insulation above didn’t reach all the way out to the soffits, meaning cold air was leaking in through the ceiling.
Last week, I bought a package of Tiger Foam from the manufacturer, and Sunday morning he and I pulled all of the insulation away from the sill plates in the ice room. After he donned a Tyvek suit and fabric mask, I followed him around with the tanks as he shot expanding foam across all of the sill plates, exposed cavities, and dead spaces in order to stop the airflow under the floor.
The second step was to remove the top layer of insulation from the attic space and replace it with blown fiber, making sure we filled the soffits up front with as much insulation as we could. I’m quite sure the “carpenters” who built this porch were more than just drunk; I’d bet they were truck drivers or ditch diggers or college faculty by profession—meaning they had no fucking idea how to build a structure properly, based on how half-assed this whole thing actually is.
After we wrestled a big green washing machine into the side porch, I donned the paper suit and crawled into the attic while Mr. Scout opened bales of insulation and fed the hopper. I shoved the hose as far forward into the soffits as possible and we filled the spaces with as much insulation as we could before it choked the machine. Working backwards, I filled the soffits around the perimeter and then backfilled over the open areas, adding about 6″ to 8″ of coverage over the first layer. When I finally crawled out of the space, I looked like a snowman who’d survived a volcanic eruption; tiny fluffs of paper were everywhere, covering our clothes, the area around the machine, and everywhere we walked.
After returning the machine, Mama served the four of us a delicious dinner, and we tested the new insulation with anticipation—but there was no joy to be had. To our dismay, the room remains as cold as it ever was. The basement room below is (and has been) reasonably warm, which doesn’t explain why the floor in the office is ice-cold. The insulation in the attic is now thicker and covers much more than before, which doesn’t explain why the heat is escaping so quickly.
I guess the the next step, after a few more stiff drinks, will be to commission a home energy audit to see where we’re leaking and how we can stop the bleeding.
Finn has been standing up and getting around under her own power for a while now, and one of her favorite things in the world is to watch Melmo on the TV—to the point where she’ll bang on the picture tube with both hands. She quickly figured out how to turn all of the components on and enjoyed hitting the power button on the TV repeatedly so that it would turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off, until the day when the button broke and fell backwards into the plastic case, along with one of the volume buttons. No big deal, really; we have a remote, the TV is at least 15 years old, and we’ve been considering a replacement TV for a long time. Until that day, however, I had to find a way to halt any expensive damage before it’s broken beyond repair, and make sure she doesn’t electrocute herself sticking her finger into the case.
Along with the greenhouse, a comically dangerous electrical system, and a half a ton of anthracite coal, we inherited a sheet of 3/8″ plexiglas when we moved into the house, which I figured would be thick enough to stand up to little hands.
I measured and cut a sheet on my table saw after taping the bottom half with blue painter’s tape to prevent scratching, and then clamped it on the edge of my worktable on the shorter side (so that the long side hung out over space). Using a propane plumber’s torch, I heated the edge by moving the flame back and forth slowly and applying gentle pressure to the free edge. After some time, the plexiglas clouded (because of the direct exposure to flame) but became pliable, and I bent it down carefully to an angle a little more than 90°. I placed the back of a chair against it while it cooled, and after about 20 minutes I had a clear shield made for our stack of components.
The bottom is deep enough that the components sit on top securely, so that their weight (and they are heavy) holds the shield in place. I’ve since cut about 6″ from the top of the example shown above so that it’s just a little higher than the XBOX. Finn can’t get her hands around the edges to reach the buttons, and our remotes work flawlessly through the plexiglas.
I then made a second shield for the TV and this time used a heat gun to bend the plastic, which was much more successful—there was no clouding or discoloration at all, so I’m going to redo the first one to match. The final step will be to buy a smaller rounded router bit (I have a 1/4″ radius bit, but I need something like a 3/16″ to work correctly) and smooth and round the edges off so that Finn doesn’t cut her fingers.