Housewares.
I feel like I should start using this as a journal more.
We've been fussing with cleaning up the house for a month or so now, and we're moving all our furniture this coming Sunday. Problems have included a sudden ant invasion, tons of blackberries, a lack of air conditioning, slightly problematic plumbing, and 1960s-era popcorn ceiling that needs to be removed.
Ants. I'm not so good with them. They're just about my least favorite critters really, to the point where I've become very good friends with spiders over the years to help keep my places free of them. In the past I've tried to resolve the matter more carefully, with borax or the like, or approaches that are only really harmful to ants themselves. When buying the house we saw a couple in one of the indoors bathrooms but once we started moving in we had thick lines of them winding around the sinks (just for the water, no food in the house). With apologies we went for an exterminator and it solved things very, very fast. Within three days our only problem was how to vacuum up the hills of ant bodies so numerous that it looked like someone kicked dirt all over the windowsills and floors. The ants were not a problem we could have solved gently. Shouldn't be any long-term toxins kicking around; and it seems that the interior treatment is even okay around pets once it's dried. Becoming a homeowner has killed my idealism to an extent. This was definitely better than any alternative.
Air conditioning gives me similar feelings. It's the Pacific Northwest, it's almost unimaginable to use it more than three months out of the year, and there's only a couple weeks when it's really necessary. But Jen really, really suffers in the heat. She's unable to function once it gets above 90. For those couple weeks, it's worth it...a constant stream of ice packs is not enough. Things were absolutely miserable for a while.
Our house has a daylight basement. Upstairs gets hot, downstairs not so much. And while we already had some ducts in place for our heater, they were not sufficient for a large AC system. We compromised, and went with a cheap system that can handle the upper floor only. In ten years, when it's time to refurbish or replace the unit, we'll gut the ceilings and replace all the ducts (that really is what it will take, starting over from scratch) and get a new unit that can keep the whole house comfortably cool plus warm it more effectively as well. From what the AC tech said, the downstairs might be pretty miserable and hard to heat in the winter before we upgrade.
Installing the AC came with two extra challenges. First, the blackberries. The one place that can really fit the external AC unit was home to a ten foot high blackberry bush. Once I started hacking it down, a rhododendron revealed itself underneath, and chopping down (then digging up) a small tree became part of the fun. I discovered that blackberries sure can occupy a lot of space in a 96-gallon yard waste bin! This one bush has taken up two loads already. I think we'll keep two bins around for a while. This bush is about 1/6th of our blackberry problem, and I want to remove all of it. A less-sharp garden will take the place of the other bushes.
(The external AC unit is on a wall that's pretty close to our property line. We were going to get it surveyed just to be safe, even though I'm sure we're alright... but it looks like surveying will cost half as much as the AC unit itself. The cost/benefit tradeoff is not in favor of the survey.)
The other AC problem is that, even if we're not replacing all the ducts, we still need to add one duct to the side of the house with the external unit. That means ripping out a ceiling, and we all know what popcorn ceilings from the 1970s and earlier mean... Asbestos!
Happily, I just got the results back from the lab today, and none of the three samples from this particular room have any trace of it. Maybe it was a more recent addition? So I can forget the moon suit and HEPA mask, no need to order that hundred feet of plastic sheeting, throw away the Hazmat disposal permits... just a standard sanding mask and a scraper will do the trick. And yes, I was still going to strip the ceiling myself if it was hazardous (given sane percentages). Asbestos abatement services are unsurprisingly expensive, and trying to schedule one with about a week of notice is hard to do ("okay, you can put in our AC at the end of the month...wait, you need a duct WHERE?"). I'm convinced I could have done it safely, but I'm much happier knowing that I don't have to worry at all. We'll still test a sample from every other room before we gut the rest of the ceilings (when we do), though. No taking chances.
Plumbing. The dishwasher leaks...great. The new clothes washing machine is ready to hook up, but the water pipe has muddy brown water, so we're going to figure that out first. The bathtub has a busted diverter in the bath spout, so the shower doesn't work, and the associated pipes aren't secured to anything meaning that they all jangle around and you can pull the bath spigot about an inch from the wall... Next trip down I'm going to fix that all at the same time. I'm not quite willing to re-plumb the whole place back there just to replace the elbows with ones that can be screwed to studs, so I'm just going to use some u-shaped mounting thingys around the pipe to the stud to do the job. You can tell I really know what I'm doing (I don't). Kind of excited that pipe solder is a thing though; I now own a blowtorch for pipes.
55 hours 'til the moving truck gets here, and you couldn't tell we're planning to move at all from the state of our living room or kitchen or bedroom. It's pretty much just the library that's packed so far. Jen has the summer off from university, so at least she's been able to work during the weekdays, but she's been a bit sick today (and the heat KO'd her all last week). Still, it's been a heroic effort on her part. Not much actual packing from me yet, but I've been doing enough house-fixing and hardware-shopping that I can barely stand up anymore.
A better man than I would be in much better shape right now, but I've been far too sedentary over the last two years. Yard work should keep me in better shape from now on. That and no downstairs neighbors means I can finally set up Dance Dance Revolution again, plus I can actually hang up the punching bag I've had since forever (and figure out how to use it because I never have). DDR is what kept me healthy in college, may it do so again.
We've been fussing with cleaning up the house for a month or so now, and we're moving all our furniture this coming Sunday. Problems have included a sudden ant invasion, tons of blackberries, a lack of air conditioning, slightly problematic plumbing, and 1960s-era popcorn ceiling that needs to be removed.
Ants. I'm not so good with them. They're just about my least favorite critters really, to the point where I've become very good friends with spiders over the years to help keep my places free of them. In the past I've tried to resolve the matter more carefully, with borax or the like, or approaches that are only really harmful to ants themselves. When buying the house we saw a couple in one of the indoors bathrooms but once we started moving in we had thick lines of them winding around the sinks (just for the water, no food in the house). With apologies we went for an exterminator and it solved things very, very fast. Within three days our only problem was how to vacuum up the hills of ant bodies so numerous that it looked like someone kicked dirt all over the windowsills and floors. The ants were not a problem we could have solved gently. Shouldn't be any long-term toxins kicking around; and it seems that the interior treatment is even okay around pets once it's dried. Becoming a homeowner has killed my idealism to an extent. This was definitely better than any alternative.
Air conditioning gives me similar feelings. It's the Pacific Northwest, it's almost unimaginable to use it more than three months out of the year, and there's only a couple weeks when it's really necessary. But Jen really, really suffers in the heat. She's unable to function once it gets above 90. For those couple weeks, it's worth it...a constant stream of ice packs is not enough. Things were absolutely miserable for a while.
Our house has a daylight basement. Upstairs gets hot, downstairs not so much. And while we already had some ducts in place for our heater, they were not sufficient for a large AC system. We compromised, and went with a cheap system that can handle the upper floor only. In ten years, when it's time to refurbish or replace the unit, we'll gut the ceilings and replace all the ducts (that really is what it will take, starting over from scratch) and get a new unit that can keep the whole house comfortably cool plus warm it more effectively as well. From what the AC tech said, the downstairs might be pretty miserable and hard to heat in the winter before we upgrade.
Installing the AC came with two extra challenges. First, the blackberries. The one place that can really fit the external AC unit was home to a ten foot high blackberry bush. Once I started hacking it down, a rhododendron revealed itself underneath, and chopping down (then digging up) a small tree became part of the fun. I discovered that blackberries sure can occupy a lot of space in a 96-gallon yard waste bin! This one bush has taken up two loads already. I think we'll keep two bins around for a while. This bush is about 1/6th of our blackberry problem, and I want to remove all of it. A less-sharp garden will take the place of the other bushes.
(The external AC unit is on a wall that's pretty close to our property line. We were going to get it surveyed just to be safe, even though I'm sure we're alright... but it looks like surveying will cost half as much as the AC unit itself. The cost/benefit tradeoff is not in favor of the survey.)
The other AC problem is that, even if we're not replacing all the ducts, we still need to add one duct to the side of the house with the external unit. That means ripping out a ceiling, and we all know what popcorn ceilings from the 1970s and earlier mean... Asbestos!
Happily, I just got the results back from the lab today, and none of the three samples from this particular room have any trace of it. Maybe it was a more recent addition? So I can forget the moon suit and HEPA mask, no need to order that hundred feet of plastic sheeting, throw away the Hazmat disposal permits... just a standard sanding mask and a scraper will do the trick. And yes, I was still going to strip the ceiling myself if it was hazardous (given sane percentages). Asbestos abatement services are unsurprisingly expensive, and trying to schedule one with about a week of notice is hard to do ("okay, you can put in our AC at the end of the month...wait, you need a duct WHERE?"). I'm convinced I could have done it safely, but I'm much happier knowing that I don't have to worry at all. We'll still test a sample from every other room before we gut the rest of the ceilings (when we do), though. No taking chances.
Plumbing. The dishwasher leaks...great. The new clothes washing machine is ready to hook up, but the water pipe has muddy brown water, so we're going to figure that out first. The bathtub has a busted diverter in the bath spout, so the shower doesn't work, and the associated pipes aren't secured to anything meaning that they all jangle around and you can pull the bath spigot about an inch from the wall... Next trip down I'm going to fix that all at the same time. I'm not quite willing to re-plumb the whole place back there just to replace the elbows with ones that can be screwed to studs, so I'm just going to use some u-shaped mounting thingys around the pipe to the stud to do the job. You can tell I really know what I'm doing (I don't). Kind of excited that pipe solder is a thing though; I now own a blowtorch for pipes.
55 hours 'til the moving truck gets here, and you couldn't tell we're planning to move at all from the state of our living room or kitchen or bedroom. It's pretty much just the library that's packed so far. Jen has the summer off from university, so at least she's been able to work during the weekdays, but she's been a bit sick today (and the heat KO'd her all last week). Still, it's been a heroic effort on her part. Not much actual packing from me yet, but I've been doing enough house-fixing and hardware-shopping that I can barely stand up anymore.
A better man than I would be in much better shape right now, but I've been far too sedentary over the last two years. Yard work should keep me in better shape from now on. That and no downstairs neighbors means I can finally set up Dance Dance Revolution again, plus I can actually hang up the punching bag I've had since forever (and figure out how to use it because I never have). DDR is what kept me healthy in college, may it do so again.