In the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a bunch of people in to look at the house in order to estimate some repair costs. As with everything else, it’s all more expensive than I was hoping for. But I knew my hopes were completely unreasonable, so the prices are actually pretty good considering the amount of work to be done.

The first thing I wanted to check out were the basement windows, which offer as much security as a sheet of saran wrap, and half the thermal protection. And, of course, they aren’t standard size, so every replacement needs to be custom made. I had a guy give us quotes for four vinyl windows around the perimeter of the basement, and while each one is pretty cheap, the total price adds up quickly. While he was here, we had him estimate the cost of replacements for the dining room windows as well, and it turns out they are much cheaper than I’d feared, but still expensive in the grand scheme of things.

Secondly, I had a strange little man come in to estimate repair and cleaning of the gutters on the south side of the house, which are about half a story too high for me to reach. (Also, the main power and phone lines run off the back side of the house, making three-story ladderwork very dangerous). This guy reminded me of a nervous ferret on valium—jacked up but super-mellow at the same time; I could hear his record playing at 45rpm but the words coming out of his mouth were at 33. Again, the price was higher than I’d hoped, but when I broke it down, it seemed reasonable. My next step is to have a larger company come out and price out total replacement of my existing gutter with a single-piece covered dripless version, because I got kind of a hinky vibe from ferret-man, and I wasn’t all that impressed with his gutter guard choice.

Meanwhile, the driver’s window in the Jeep decided to go down but not come back up last weekend on the way back from the airshow. Dreading the worst, I pulled the panel off the door and dug around in the guts to diagnose the problem: It wasn’t the window motor, and it wasn’t the mechanical linkage; it was the worm screw that connects the motor to the linkage. More specifically, it was a $.50 piece of plastic that keeps the worm screw in place to provide consistent upwards pressure. Calling around last week, I was quoted $500 for parts and labor, which was about what I figured. If I had more time to fool with it, and another couple of weeks of warm weather, I’d buy a used part and attempt the repair myself—I’ve spent some time cutting my skin on the innards of door panels before—but this is one I’m going to have to suck up and pay for, I think.

I have dreams of getting this basic stuff accomplished, but it seems like every time I get the cash together to tackle something, another need comes along and knocks it right back out of the realm of possibility. The most annoying part is that I’m in repair limbo: I could do all of this stuff—I’ve replaced windows, cleaned gutters, and repaired window assemblies—but I don’t have the time to do it, yet I don’t have the money to hire it out.

Jen and I have an agreement that covers any work undertaken in the house. I’m not allowed to start up any major new projects without first finishing all the niggling little things left to do on the rooms we’ve started, and she lets me keep breathing. Because of the schizophrenic order in which we’ve worked on the place (and my own obsessive-compulsive behavior), every room needs that extra push to get it over the hill so that we might actually call it “done”. We have a page in a notebook called the Punch List, and it details stuff like touchup paint, cutting little bits of wood, fixing holes, and other room-specific stuff that takes lots of time to do for little immediate impact.

This weekend I decided to take a whack at the list and see how much of it I could knock out before Sunday evening. First up was toe molding, that essential, expensive little strip of wood that goes at the base of the kickplate around the perimeter of the room, and which keeps uneven 80-year-old flooring gaps hidden and cold drafts away from naked toes. This stuff is $.59 a foot, which sounds cheap, but gets expensive when there are two 12’x’12 rooms to be fitted out. It’s also a pain in the ass to install when there’s furniture in the way. Having the miter saw all the way down in the basement means careful measurements and allowances for dyslexia and stupidity must also be made. I usually wear running shoes for this, because I average about 50 flights of stairs before the job is complete.

Paint touch-ups take three seconds, but the process of running to the basement, washing and drying the brush, and returning to the same floor to touch up a different color all take much longer. Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Next up was the closet door in the Blue room, which has never closed properly since we’ve been in this house. I’ve always meant to get to it, but never have. The doorjamb is as crooked as a politician, a victim of drunken carpentry practiced as the moldings were installed in 1925, so I popped the hinges off and trimmed the top of the door with a circular saw. That process took all of fifteen minutes, but locating, installing, and adjusting an original striker plate so that the door would close took a half-hour.

As I was swearing at adjusting the plate, I looked around and thought about the work that the Doctor did in this house, and how all of it was absolute shit. Not one thing in this house was done professionally, competently, or with any concern for the future; things like the “electrical work” in the living room come to mind, where his handimen wrapped two crumbling live wires with inches of electrical tape, stuffed the switchbox with newspaper, and then plastered over it. Or the hallway “plumbing repair”, which involved a handmade rubber gasket and a plaster wall patched with cement. I could also go on for hours about the stuff that was ignored—separating plaster, substandard insulation, cheap replacement windows, nonexistant water drainage, etc., etc.

At first this thought made me mad. But then I realized the house got exactly what it needed when we moved in, and I felt better that we’re taking the time to go through and undo as much of the damage as possible. I just wish we were independently wealthy so we could hurry the process up a few years.

This afternoon, we’ve got two nice fellows down in the basement wrestling part of our heating situation back into submission, which will increase the standard of living at the Lockardugan Compound. When the good Doctor expanded his waiting room outwards to the enclosed front porch, he moved the radiator from the dining room out there so that his patients wouldn’t freeze while thumbing through Reader’s Digests. Because the whole porch is so poorly insulated, any heat released out there immediately gets sucked outside, requiring the boiler to be run at dangerously expensive temperatures. Our first year here, I turned the valves out there down to 0 and waited until we could afford to make changes, but it always annoyed me to know we were heating the front yard.

Additionally, when we gutted the kitchen, we made a decision to remove the radiator there to make room for more cabinetry. The upshot of this decision was that there was no heat on the west side of the first floor last winter, which made entertaining (and cooking) a chilly prospect.

This is the first of many steps to reclaim the front porch for a habitable space within the house—we have dreams of using the reception room and office for another usable living space, as well as the exam room for a TV room/den. Having the radiator moved back inside will not be cheap, but I think that in the long run it will make the first floor a better place to live, and it’s great to make a little forward movement.

This sunday we prevailed upon Jen’s sister and her boyfriend to help us with a little outdoor project. I’ve been wanting to get our woodpile up off the ground and split ever since we felled the tree, and we finally rented a hydraulic splitter to take care of it all this weekend.

The first thing we needed was a new cradle to store it in, so I built one out of pressure-treated lumber.

Meanwhile, Jen disassembled the old pile and got it ready for splitting.

With four people, we made pretty short work of the job. All the huge stump-sized hulks are now fireplace-sized bits, we have a full stack stored six inches off the ground, another pile stored under the porch, and we gave some to our neighbor as a show of goodwill. Addendum: According to this site, a cord of wood is 8′ x 4′ x 4′, or 128 cubic feet. The cradle I built is 12′ x 4′ x 2′, or about 96 cubic feet. Adding the pile under the porch, I’d say we split a cord of wood yesterday.

Of course, it’s hard to get manual labor without some kind of bribe, and in this case it was beer and a homemade dinner of brisket, fresh corn, mashed potatoes, cornbread, and stuffed jalapeno peppers from our garden, in front of a roaring fire. MMMM, home cooking and woodsmoke.

Last night we finished up our washer comparison shopping at Sears, after temporarily raising the hopes of the floor salesman at Lowes. They all get the same look on their faces when they see us comparing models—it’s a predatory look, masked with the “I’m here to answer your questions” smile, and it’s a little comical to see how quickly it fades when they realize we’re carrying a fistful of Consumer Reports articles with notes scribbled in the margins.

I react pretty poorly to hovering salesmen, I’m sad to say. Jen compares my tone of voice to an old-school running back, where I’m carrying the ball with my arm straight out, aimed directly at the forehead of the oncoming rushers. I’m the type of person who does not care for the hard sell. I don’t need the expensive accessories, and I’ve most likely already made up my mind what I want, just please tell me if you have the stupid thing in stock and in white, mmmkay? Sears, unfortunately, tries to push the extended warranty thing, which is always a comical bit of salesmanship—you’re selling me a $700 metal cube and now you’re trying to sell me an insurance policy with scare tactics? I understand that appliance margins are tight, but I’m not stupid enough to buy that line of crap. Also, if I say I’m not interested, I’m not interested. Take a hint.

Knowing we’re looking at adding to the herd this year, we bought a front-loading washer in preparation for mountains of baby clothes, and I imagine we’ll be down there with shovels, constantly feeding it, like coalmen on the Queen Mary. We found a Kenmore model next to lots of little red bubbles in the Consumer Reports chart, and within about three minutes had it set up for delivery on Friday. Which means I need to build a platform for it by tomorrow night (the metal platform sold as an accessory is $199—HA) and clean up the last of the flood debris so that they can haul away the 3-year-old GE unit that crapped out on us.

The back porch of our house has been smelling like grape Bubblicious for the last week, something that takes me back to grade school and Krauzer’s (New Jersey representing!) and chewing three pieces at one time to keep the flavor going. We inherited a grape vine next to the stairs with the purchase of the house, and one of the many dreams we’ve shared is to be able to do something cool with the grapes. However, in years past we’ve been robbed of our fruit by bad weather, critter infestation, and bad luck.

This is the first year we’ve enjoyed a bumper crop of grapes, due in part to the dry weather and also to the netting I purchased early in the season to keep the birds from eating the entire vine clean. Jen did a whole lot of reading online and found several ideas for what we could do with the bounty, settling on an Epicurious recipe for jam that sounded good.

After helping her pick five pounds of grapes off the arbor yesterday, she got to work peeling, cooking, milling and canning, and the result is five jars of grape goodness waiting for a taste test. (We need another 12 hours or so.)

At some point last week, Jen looked at me after I’d finished wrestling my hair into some sort of shape, and compared the results to Art Garfunkel. When she starts doing that, I usually start considering making an appointment to see my stylist. It’s taken years of patience and painful jabs with a cattle prod to get me to drop the idea of a $6 barber and move to a $60 salon, one in a long list of notions she’s had to wean me from. After several unsuccessful relationships with stylists across town (Candace, my last favorite, left her affordable digs to move up into Timonium to some sort of sports bar/hair salon hybrid, an idea lost on the sorry fools like me who are blind without their glasses and therefore unable to appreciate HD-quality basketball while getting our hair cut), she put me in touch with my new stylist, who has the kind of hair I wish I had—somewhere between Greek god and hipster nonchalance. You know, the hair you leave the salon with but can never re-create in your own laboratory.

He has shown me wonderful and amazing things I can do with my hair, even if I can’t master his hair-fu, so I go back to him in the hopes that I might learn by osmosis. And, I’ve fallen in love with the idea (and practice of) the shampoo/scalp massage. Oh, Holy Mary, Mother of God, there are fewer finer legal ways I can think of having someone else who is not my wife touch my body for an affordable fee.

After getting my hair shorn, I met up with a friend to grab a cup of coffee and catch up, which was a great change of pace. Sitting in a coffee bar and talking with him, as well as discussing the Bathroom Senator affair with the grandmothers sitting next to us,reminded me why I work for myself in the first place, something that’s been lost on me in the last two weeks or so: flexible coffee scheduling. About the time we were considering a bite to eat, I got a call from Jen, who asked me where I was with a voice that registered unease. She told me that our washer had somehow decided to quit draining itself and had then pissed two hundred gallons of water all over the floor of the basement, and that I’d better get home to help in the recovery effort she’d started.

After some initial panic, I calmed down when I saw the extent of the disaster, and silently cursed the original builders of this house. I have two separate curses, one for the builders and one for the Doctor, for all the ass-backwards stuff that’s been done with this house since they broke ground. A dirt floored garage? A pox on your children. A staircase designed in a way that ruins any chance of adding a convenient entryway to the third floor? May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits. A kitchen built with four (and at one point, five) doors? May the flatulence of twenty elephants descend upon your buttocks. And a basement with no sump, not even a simple gravity drain? May your bladder loosen and soak your bed every time you fall asleep.

So, with nothing left but good humor and a nasty smell, we folded up our sleeves and got to work with a mop and a shop-vac. I’d have pictures here to share the horror with you, but the local government did not allow press access to the devastation, and it’s probably for the best anyway. Suffice it to say the levees around the cat litter held, barely, and the lumberyard got its feet wet. Thankfully though, the water level didn’t reach either pilot light on the furnace or the boiler, and the tools remain high and dry.

We have fared better than the survivors in the south, and for that we are thankful; we have three dry floors, a heavy-duty dehumidifier, and a weekend of low humidity ahead. We also have a 2hp. shop-vac that drained the lagoon in under an hour, in case the rains come again. But that consarned washing machine is getting sent up the river as soon as we can get the scratch together for a quality replacement.

I rented a 40′ ladder to finish painting the siding on the house this weekend. I painted the house blue three years ago, and the west peak (the highest point on the house, at nearly four stories) was still grayish-white because my 28′ ladder won’t reach. It’s nice to not have that hanging over my head anymore—literally.

The photos are shit because the light meter in my D70 is messed up somehow…more on that later.