I *gulp* sawed through the waste line in the hallway ceiling last night and installed a neoprene coupler over the leaking joint and pipe (not the optimal solution, but when faced with the alternative—pulling half the wall down, replacing a three-way PVC joint and three or four runs of mixed-size copper pipe—the best solution) and had Jen run the water upstairs: there was not a drop of water to be found. This morning it was bone-dry after my shower, and hopefully after Jen’s as well. This means I’ll get started on re-hanging the ceiling this week. I was kind of hoping to have a snow day this morning, but Mother Nature decided to start the job after I got to work.
In response to the continual rusty water Baltimore County is delivering to us, I picked up a GE brand home filtration kit at Home Depot last night as well—installation involves shutting off the main house supply and putting in a splice; given that every “simple” project has a difficult twist where this house is concerned, it means I have a vertical run of about 4′ to work with. So I’ll have to *gulp* cut through the main house supply at some point in the next couple of days.
Saturday I got back underway with the hallway project, which has been lurching along slowly while the holidays and other events have worked themselves out. The walls have been (mostly) washed of all remaining wallpaper paste, and about 75% of the the holes and cracks have been smoothed out. The 4′ X 10′ bulge by the stairwell was pulled out and replaced, and the odd concrete fill job has been patched. During the cleanup on Saturday I asked Jen if she’d like me to pull the ceiling tile down to see what was underneath. Jen, having hated the tile since we looked at the house, gave her OK.
After about fifteen minutes of demolition, I realized why the drop ceiling had been installed. When the doctor had replaced the shower tub and bathroom plumbing directly above, the workmen had to contend with a poured concrete subfloor, which meant a shallow 4″ run for the piping. (All piping should have a slight angle running downward to let gravity help the water go where it should.) Thus, to avoid the concrete, the elbow drain for the shower extends about 2″ below the ceiling line in the hallway. I guess I wouldn’t be so upset if the work had been done well, but I’ve done better plumbing work on my first attempt. This looks like somebody’s bastard half-cousin used a cigarette lighter to sweat the joints in the copper and nearly set fire to the house in the process. Oh, and they sawed completely through one of the floor joists to put in the hot and cold lines.
So, there will be a few days of repair and remediation before we cover everything back up. As it turns out, there’s a slight leak in the PVC waste line that I have to fix, and I can also blow some fiber insulation in between the first few floor joists by the front of the house for added heat retention, as well as add some around the inside of the bathtub. Todd W. was good enough to answer his neighbor’s call and help me hustle five sheets of drywall from Home Depot the front porch, which means I can start hanging the ceiling anytime I need to. At some point this week, I’ll update the photos.
Saturday also marked the end of the Ghetto Driveway Tent; the seventeenth windstormof the season finally blew it all to hell and jammed everything up in between the garage and the side of the house, so I disassembled it and put it away. On the positive side, I took another look at the floor in the garage and I think I have a way to brace the wood subfloor up with enough strength to hold the Scout.
Efforts to get Apple Remote Desktop working have succeeded. Bring on my Mini!
*sigh.* I’m going to miss Dan Rather.
A view from the front door at the stairway. I’d already started pulling cieling tile off, and figured it would be smart to take pictures before the whole thing fell down.
This is from the opposite side, looking from the stairs at the fron door.
Several hours later, this is what we were left with. The plaster on the cieling didn’t look too bad on the stairway side…
But over on the doorway side, it was completely hosed. Water had leaked from lousy piping in the bathroom above and destroyed the plaster above. If you can believe it, there was a layer of trash bags holding loose plaster and lathe bits up there.
At some point in the history of PVC piping, the drains had been replaced poorly—there was a leak in the joint where the elbow met on the west wall that I had to patch.
We’ve moved into a new, spiffy building (yeah, I know, pictures to come, blah blah) and into very corporate-looking cubes. Todd has already been bitch-slapped for riding the Razor scooter, and we have a new “corporate identity”. Our little company has gone upmarket. Here are some other random thoughts:
- This place is still as cold as the old office (the thermostat is set on “Super Blast Chill” which means the register above my head is cheerfully blowing snow onto my shoulders), and I’m nowhere near a window anymore.
- There are whiteboards everywhere. I’m sitting next to one. Thus, if you ever hear me say, “Let’s whiteboard this,” I’m a half-mile down Corporate Bullshitspeak Lane, and you have permission to kick me in the groin.
- No more private bathrooms. (This is a blessing and a curse. I have bathroom privacy issues. There, I’ve said it.) Currently they are always occupied by assorted workmen washing brushes or taking coffee breaks. I’ll wait until I get home, thanks.
- There’s more space here. It’s kind of nice to spread my junk out instead of move piles of debris from one place to the next.
- I put up the iTunes server and almost immediately had five people on it. Time to rethink my bandwidth strategy.
As the veteran of many office moves—four with Skycache alone—I have to say this place is pretty nice, however.
Last night Todd W. rang us up and asked if I’d like to have the piles of leaves in our driveway hauled off to the dump. They’ve been sitting out in front of our house, adding to the ghetto mystique (the Scout sitting under a wind-blasted, drunken tent is the centerpiece) since November, right around the time things started getting crazy. This morning we got about half of them in the bed and dumped them with a few more boxes of plaster from the hallway, and I bought him some coffee at Starbuck’s, with a promise to finish the job tomorrow. We’ve got good friends.
This weekend, I…
- Sanded the shit out of the upstairs and downstairs hallway. I put at least four and a half gallons of drywall mud on the walls, and sanded at least half of that back off. It’s almost done.
- Found some more Christmas presents for certain people. The Target was packed full of holiday zombies, slowly circling the aisles and getting in the way. It took me 20 minutes to get out of the parking lot.
- Coordinated long distance with my wife over her father’s present, and put it on hold until she gives the OK.
- Staked the tent over the Scout down. Good timing, too—with last night’s snow and cold snap, we have gusts of 40mph today. (I still think that thing is going to blow away into the next county, though.)
- Began running new electrical wiring to the hallway—while I have the kickplates off, it’s an easy thing to cut a square and stick an outlet box in, and going through the floor plate is a zillion times easier. This will be so much easier than doing the upstairs…
- Did the laundry in our own washing machine; with the help of some Oxy-Clean and laundry bluing, the rust in the water hasn’t stained our clothes as far as I can tell. Which is good, because I hate the laundromat.
- Attended the Breakaway Christmas party, which was held at the Cloisters, a very pretty manor house-turned formal hall (not to be confused with the Cloisters in New York City, which is frickin’ amazing.) It was beautiful, catered by the same folks who did our wedding, and a mellow good time. It’s frightening how many people this company has hired in the last six months, and how much that reminds me of my first six months at Cidera.
- Cleaned up the house as much as possible for Jen’s return. She’s leaving Dysfunction Junction today to come back home, and the least I could do was make our place as peaceful and calm as possible.
- Missed my wife. This has not been an easy Christmas.
Jen’s Mom is now installed in the back room of their house in St. Mary’s county. The doctors have concluded that there’s nothing they can do besides manage the pain, so a hospice nurse stops by daily to administer the happy juice. Two of the three sisters are home and are helping take care of her. As of yesterday she still wasn’t able to hold anything down.
The 2004 Christmas Shopping Crusade is in full swing, and Jen and I have our marching orders. I’ve got my sister, ¾ of Jen, and my mom covered; My dad is in the works and I’ve got Jen’s brother partially done. Problem is, we’re picking up the slack for Jen’s parents while they attend to other matters, so there’s an extra five people to shop for this year. (I just got part 2 of Jen’s gift today—hee hee hee!)
Meanwhile I kicked up about a pound of dust last night in the first round of sanding in the stairwell. I had to pull about 32 square feet of plaster down and replace it with ¾” greenboard, which was lots of fun and involved much hammering. There’s still much to be done, but we’re making progress in there.
Christmas Hints. Model Kit. (While you’re at the hobby store, there’s this one as well…) Light summer reading. iPod accessory.
Changes. This page is now at least halfway coded with CSS instead of nested tables; I made a few changes to the column width for easier Powerbook editing and readability’s sake, reduced the size of the pictures and generally scraped another 20% of gunk out of the HTML. Next up is a redesign of the calendar nav to the left to further reduce the pageload. Let me know if you find anything ugly, and what browser you’re using on what platform.
RIP, Mrs. Betty. Jen and I got out of bed early on Saturday so that we could check out an estate sale in the neighborhood. We didn’t recognize the address, but when we followed the signs, we pulled up in front of the tidy house down the street from Jen’s old apartment building. (A little history: Jen’s old apartment building was one of the original estate mansions in Catonsville. The caretaker’s house, set off and to the east of the main building, later became a private residence, and the house in question.) Jen may write about this at some point, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but she knew the woman who owned the house, an elderly lady known as Mrs. Betty. A sweeter, kinder woman has never walked the earth (except, maybe, my two Grandmas). We looked through the house and picked out a mirror in an upstairs bedroom, then got to talking with Mrs. Betty’s son, who let us know that she passed a couple of days before our wedding. Having never taken her up on a standing invitation to stop by for tea, both Jen and I left feeling guilty and sad.
Busy Weekend:
- Haircut. I was reaching Art Garfunkel stage again—bad scene, man.
- Consulted with the Cauzzis about some home improvement projects. I’m going to give Todd a hand with some house upgrades.
- Raked and bagged leaves in the backyard. Good timing, because it’s raining this week.
- Laundry. Our water is stained with rust while the DPW replaces valves or some bullshit in the neighborhood. Memo to the Baltimore County folks in charge: next time, wait until the day after Thanksgiving before you poison my water. Washing a turkey with water from a Brita pitcher is a pain in the ass.
- Washed the walls in the downstairs hallway. The wierd concrete fill on the wall was covering a PVC pipe behind the lathe, most likely a new drain for the upstairs sink.
Emailing a bunch of designer friends for advice yesterday brought back an interesting (and unexpected) result: Looks like I’m steering towards the Epson instead of the Canon printer. This is a surprise to me, as my last experience with Epson printers had me at the teetering brink of suicide. However, the 1280 looks to be discontinued, and the 2200 is a bit pricey.
A nice man came to the house and crawled all over the roof at 7am yesterday morning; he claims to have fixed our current roof leak problems and to have replaced about 30 slates; he also mentioned that the roof is getting old, that there’s no easy repair for our ice guards, and that the fascia board along the back of the house is coming off, slowly taking the gutter with it. (Cue sound: buckets of money hurled out the window.)
As if the malware, pagefile, and general lousy computer issues I’m having weren’t enough, the breaker on my side of this building is tripping because there are too many computers on at one time. So until further notice, I’m taking my iTunes server offline and going home. Nyah, nyah.
Our visit to Pax River was good. We visited with Mrs. Lockard for the afternoon, and she was better off than I was hoping. She was mentally sharper than I’ve seen her in a long time, even if she’s physically weaker. We took her out for an early dinner, and hopefully brightened an otherwise dreary Saturday afternoon. I really hope we’re able to celebrate the holidays with her and show her a good time. Of course, the Ghost of Dysfunctional Christmas is standing between us and those plans, but we’ll have to deal with that when it comes.
Hard On My Toys. I’ve had a Delta table saw for about the past five years. I bought it at a time when I didn’t have outrageous amounts of money, but decided that using a handheld circular saw to rip 10′ boards lentghwise was getting to be tiresome. I went out to the Home Depot to browse, and after half an hour of looking through the field, I selected the best American-made unit I could find for under $150. Since then, I’ve ripped a couple miles of board-feet between two houses’ worth of projects. During that time I found that the saw had a number of shortcomings (cheap fittings, a very wobbly motor, few allowances for attachments, a small fence) and only a few pluses, but I was able to jury-rig it enough to get it to work for me.
This past week, I’ve hustled to finish a bunch of outstanding projects so that I could get to one that I was looking forward to: finish carpentry around the front window in the dining room. I bought some very clean, expensive wood for the trim (the good stuff is hard to find) and had just begin to rip the sill to size when the saw cut out. I unplugged it, applied Dugan’s Second Law Of Fixing Stuff (unbolted the motor, took it apart and put it back together) and got another five seconds of juice out of it before the whole thing died in a puff of ozone.
Add this to the Skilsaw circular I burned out milling the door down this spring and that makes two expensive tools I’ve killed this year. It’s not like I’ve been throwing these things off the roof or leaving them in the rain; this is everyday use we’re talking about. I think I’m going to have to stick with the brands I trust at this point—A DeWalt cordless that actually has fallen off a roof and continues to work flawlessly; a Makita circular that’s followed me through two years of High School setbuilding, four years of college, and two houses; a Porter Cable sander that’s touched every woodworking project I’ve done; and a Craftsman ¾” drill that’s older than I am and deserves a new set of bearings.
I always wanted to buy the best tools I could afford and have them for the rest of my life, and this is one of those times when a compromise burned me. And the killer is that I don’t have the cash to buy that beautiful DeWalt replacement I saw last month. I can’t say that the Delta owes me anything, but I’m probably going to have to buy another 5-year saw and kill it as well.
Jen and I marshalled all our strength this weekend and made a major push to finish up about thirty projects around the house. In no particular order, we got these accomplished:
- The linen closet is finished. The door is hung, shelves installed, trim painted, and towels, bedding and excess bathroom stuff is stored neatly inside. Still to finish: finding a new carriage bolt for the antique glass knob I found in my “from-the-old-house” drawer.
- The guest room is finished. The color is on the walls, the new roman shades are hung, there’s art on the walls, and with the exception of a small section of cap molding, it’s all ready for guests.
- The bathroom has been reconfigured, cleaned up, and looks twice as big. Jen’s next job is to strip the ugly border from around the cieling.
- The Summer Work Staging Area, AKA the huge pile of tools in the atrium, has been relocated to the basement, and
- All our outside plants are repotted and living happily in the atrium.
There’s a bunch of other crap we accomplished, but it’s too boring to list here. I’ll post pictures of each room after Thanksgiving, when we do the big reveal While-You-Were-Out style. Other weekend highlights: Dropping one of the new pictures on the radiator and exchanging it for a new one at Target (me), peering at Jen’s sinus cavity CAT scans on our very own X-ray light; trying out a Chipotle burrito for the first time (synopsis: decent food, lousy menu—burrito, burrito, or…burrito?); getting Penn the Medicated out of his little house and down into the living room, where he tried to EAT THE ENTIRE SCRATCHING PAD, which was covered in catnip; visiting Stellan Heazlett and giving him his Kong In a Thong (he was unimpressed); and visiting a nursery bankruptcy sale and finding two plastic potting tables for sale at $45/ea.
Shame On A Nuh. Our friend Dave, an old college buddy, once bought an album from the Wal-Mart, that wonderful retailer that considers it its civic duty to censor albums it deems offensive. This album was the mighty debut from the Wu-Tang Clan, and he would drive around Baltimore with the album in his car, rapping along with the lyrics. It was a few years later, with great surprise, he learned that the lyrics had been altered by the Megalo-Mart to remove the racial slur, replacing it with a more “palatable” nonsense word. For years, he’d been quoting the Middle-America approved alternative. R.I.P., Dirt McGurk.