why I need a new roof

During last big rain, at end of August.

what's 1/2 an inch

So, here we are, getting ready for Manic Renovations^TM and Roo gets the idea that he should measure the windows which were delivered as promised and are stacked neatly in our garage.

Oh dear.

One is not right. One is 1/2 an inch too tall.

Perhaps not an issue if it was going to be an only window, solitary on its own piece of wall, but this particular window is going to be 3 feet away from another window and the idea was that they would actually be the same height.

Here is where you insert some gnashing of teeth.

The whole windows thing is in.sane. Let me tell you, that installing the things is actually easy. I'm talking about replacing your old, single pane, metal frame things that sweat all over the sill, and are drafty and cold. It's easy to get the old ones out & slap the nice, new, energy star, double pane, vinyl frame ones in.

The hard part is ordering them.

I'm convinced now that this is a conspiracy between window manufacturers and the contractors who install them - to make the bleeding ordering process so convoluted that most homeowners will give up on doing it and will pay a contractor three to four times the actual cost of the window to do the job.

To order them you first have to have several insane conversations about rough openings & actual window size - conversations which meander back and forth so many times that you begin to seriously doubt that you know how to use a tape measure and you pull out your kids' math books to review the unit on measuring things, just to check that you have not actually lost your brain, but that you're speaking with nitwits.

Then. Then, the guy who takes the order has to take the order and enter it into a computer. I hope that when you read that you will do it with a reverent tone. Make it sound like, oh, I don't know, "and then world renowned Dr. Smith will remove the patient's brain, use the flexray laser to excise precisely .1 mm of tissue and replace it in the patient's skull".

Yeah. Like it's that hard.

Three weeks ago, when Roo placed the order for the windows at Home Depot, he had to go back to the store THREE times, on THREE different days. The first day, the guy flat out said he had no clue how to place the order.

The second day, the new guy said he knew how to do it. An hour later, Roo read through the print-out of the order form (which resembles lines of Cobol but fortunately Roo's old enough to remember Cobol) and discovered it was wrong.

On the third day, finally, someone with a clue showed up to work and finally the order went in.

And then - Jeldwen screwed up. The order form SAYS 47. They made it 47 and a half. Why? Why? WHY?

So we were faced with keeping it & hoping that the eye wouldn't notice the difference between the two windows, or sending it back and waiting 3 weeks for a replacement (oh & enjoying yet again the process of ordering).

Roo spent an unpleasant couple hours with several levels of management at Home Depot, looking for some semblance of customer service. In the end, we're getting a new window and we got some gift cards to ease our pain.

Manic Renovations^TM start tomorrow, with an amended plan which now takes into account a missing window. Can you say hole in the wall?

How can we study with this noise?

Ignore the abject quality of the video component, if you please. Just listen to this chatter. This is my backyard, filmed from my deck.

In which I gross you out

Would you like to see how how bad things can get if you don't vacuum the coils on your fridge regularly?

Regularly, btw, means twice a year if you don't have any pets and your home is not very dusty.

If you have pets and dust, it means every 2 months. At least.

Keep your fridge compressors running smoothly and efficiently by cleaning off the dust bunnies or puppies or kitties. You do not want your coils looking like this:

Eeeeeeeeeew. Bad, bad, bad.

Bad for the pocketbook as it causes the fridge to run inefficiently and use more electricity. Doubly bad for the pocketbook if it causes the fridge compressor to prematurely wear out.

So, if you haven't vacuumed your fridge coils recently, or if you're not even sure you have fridge coils, your assignment this week is to find them and clean them.

They're either at the back or on the bottom of the fridge. If they're at the back, you need to pull the fridge out. You can protect the floor with some cardboard from a cereal box & roll the fridge out. If the back of your fridge is completely smooth, the coils are on the bottom and you will need to pop off the decorative grill at the bottom to get at them. Some people say you should unplug the fridge before proceeding. If you do so, put the plug in your pocket so you don't forget to plug it back in. Use a powerful vacuum, preferably with a crevice nozzle. You may need some skinny stick things like rulers or your kids' paint brushes to poke around and loosen the stuff in areas where the vacuum can't quite reach and to give the vacuum a bit of help. If you keep the vacuum running and pointed in the right direction while you poke around, most of the dirt will just fly into the vacuum.

That's it. All that's left is to write down on the calendar when it's time to do it again - so your fridge doesn't suffer like mine!

is my garden an opium den?

Amidst the hostas, below the red maple, that is a poppy plant. And if you look closely, there's someone picking seeds.

I wish I knew how make the rain go away

because I'd quickly tell the people in the UK how to do it.

Unfortunately, I apparently only know the reverse: how to guarantee rain will come. The trick to that is to start painting the outside of your house.

Yup. Roo & I, assisted by my parents (put those elders to work! There was a Globe & Mail story recently which said "Older citizens – 60 and up – are not the drain on society that they are often made out to be, according to a report released Tuesday. Canadians between the ages of 60 and 79 contribute $2.2-billion in tax payments each year and $3.1-billion in volunteer work, HSBC Bank Canada said in issuing the results of a global survey conducted for the bank by Oxford University's Institute of Ageing." You can pay to buy the rest of the article here but that's pretty much it), decided to paint our house.

We got a quote for having it done and both Roo & I quickly came to the conclusion that the amount quoted would conveniently match the amount needed for something like an all inclusive holiday in Mexico (but it wouldn't go far enough to pay for the parental units so they'd get to dog sit in the beautifully painted house instead; seemed like a good plan to us). And the house is small, right? We kept looking at it and saying things like, 'yes, it's a small house. I mean I could do this side in a day on my own!' To be completely honest, Roo never said such stupid things, because he's sensible and also he can estimate volume and distance and space. That would have been me making those inane predictions. Because I can't find the correct size container for putting left over spaghetti in so certainly don't trust me to estimate how big a wall is and how long it would take to put 2 coats of paint on it.

Anyway, we started painting a while back - I can't even remember when exactly - but I know it was in the beginning of a huge record-breaking heatwave. It was so hot that paint was drying out on my paint tray before I could get it on the siding. We were eating an endless stream of popsicles, working mostly on the north side of the house. The south side could only be worked on from about 5:30 am to 9 or 10. Then the heat got too much. The east side went back into shade around 3. The west side is a story all of its own.

We liked so many things about this house when we bought it, but we both said, "the color has got to go." To be honest, it wasn't a totally unsuitable color for a lactation consultant. Our main house color was the color of breastfed baby poo - kind of a blah yellow. The trim was the color of a toddler poo, once the infant has started eating solids - yes, a truly ugly brown. I know people think LC's are all about boobs but actually mostly what I'd be concerned with is poo. How much? What color? What consistency? Because - here's a quick lesson in breastfeeding - breasts don't come with little calibrations to tell us how much a baby has eaten; but what goes in, must come out, and so the volume and consistency and color of baby's outputs is of great interest to LC's.

So there we were, living in a house the color of poo. If this is your house color now, and you're happy with it and think it looks smashing, then please don't let your feelings be hurt when I say I thought it was hideous.

The brown trim absolutely had to go, although we're swimming against the house color fashionista tide; there is a big revival in using very dark colors (charcoal, navy and black) for trim around here. I'm squarely in the light color trim camp. On most houses it looks better and I think it will also stand the test of time. The dark trim on the newer houses will date them & soon people will be saying, 'man, that's so 2007'.

So, light trim, and let me tell you, our garage now looks like a Zinsser outlet with the amount of primer cans we have lying around here, because of course, if you want to go dark to light, you have to prime first.

And then the housecolor itself - very very neutral, earthy greige. (Yes, that is a word.) It's a color that's sometimes beige, sometimes grey - hence, greige. Oh, feel free to groan about how b-o-r-i-n-g that is. But I love it. It's natural and calm and heaven knows, I need some calm in my life.

Here is the baby poo colored house we bought:


Here's the crew: my mom, my dad (he's the nudist), Amelia, Roo - the tall guy. Hugo was on strike.


And the finished product:


Not bad. Except it's like a movie facade - only the front is done (almost; Roo stil wants to trim the windows with some nice board. The fake shutter things are not going back on - yuck. Oh and the front door is actually going to be replaced one day but for now, it just got painted. And the little wrought iron fency things - we don't know what the heck we're doing with those. And if you click on the picture you'll read my rant on the plant that's eating my house. But generally, it's done.)

See how small and reasonable the house size is from this perspective?

But it's on a slope.

There's a full walk out basement in the back.

Which means it's much, much taller on the other side.

We got to about this point when two things happened: Roo needed to go back to work, and the rains came. Huge rains (well not as huge as the ones in the UK) but with rainfall and wind warnings and even a power outage for us.

And with the rains, came another little problem: we discovered a leak in the roof on the west side. Good thing we hadn't started to paint that side at all yet, because the water pouring all over it would have washed away all the paint.

So we got to take a break from painting the outside, ponder the roof and some other things that cropped up - because it's like the "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie" story - new things keep popping up and they all seem to involve money and time. Cookies and milk and paper and crayons I could handle. Downspouts, leaks, wiring, outdoor motion detector lights, and replacement fabric for rollout awnings are much less charming and considerably more painful on the bank account.

Gotta run - I have an inside painting project on the go (you didn't think I'd be sitting around reading HP 7, did you? I'm finished that.) and the weather is supposed to go back to sunny this week, which will mean hopping back on the ladders to cover up poo with greige.

doctor in the house

I spent the day with the Rug Doctor.

Cunning readers might link this with Nelly's arrival, and certainly Nelly has unfortunately proven to be somewhat dim about the differences between INside and OUTside. But our sweet Daisy is also partly to blame as she, poor girl, is a dribbler. Don't grimace. Odds are it will happen to you eventually, no matter how many Kegels you do.

Anyway, it's been a year since we moved in and did the carpets and it was time. I had done some spot cleaning before and then I was ignoring the carpet altogether because we're supposed to be putting floors in.... but then it became clear that these floors were not going to appear for some time and meanwhile the carpet was looking kind of dodgy and worse, smelling icky.

We used to have our carpets done professionally, once even by Coit who demanded an amount approaching my mortgage payment for their services. For the record, expensive as they are, they do a great, great job. The cheaper dudes were, well, cheaper, and not as good.

Lately we've been doing it ourselves. It's really not that bad & it saves a lot of money. And saving money is something I like a lot. (One day soon I'll tell you how I'm saving $5000.)

So here's how to have a great time with the doctor.

If you're in the Lower Mainland, try to pick the hottest day of the year to do your carpets. Life in a temperate rainforest unfortunately means mould is ever present. If you need to do your carpets more than once a year and can't wait for the summer heatwave, at least pick clear days with low humidity.

I got the machine last night so that I could start first thing in the morning. During the midweek, you can rent the machine for 48h for the same price as a 24h rental over the weekend. Having it longer lets you repeat rooms if necessary or do your car.....

Buy a good quality carpet shampoo. I like to use an additional carpet deodorizer, and due to my specific situation, I was adding Nature's Miracle to the water as well.

Vacuum thoroughly with the regular vacuum.

Pretreat high traffic areas. I used to buy the pretreatment spray but recently I've just been using the regular shampoo full strength in a spray bottle. Spray stains & spots at least 5-10 minutes before shampooing.

You can save money on defoamer if you just follow this simple instruction: fill the bucket with water first and then add the shampoo and deodorizer and gently swirl. Unless your carpets have a huge soapy residue from previous cleanings, this eliminates the excess foaming problem.

Wear clean runners.

Use the machine in straight lines and then go over the same area again, this time making your passes perpendicular to the first go.

The official instructions say to not go over the same spot repeatedly but I do. Bite me. It works for me. The big concern is if you oversoak the carpet and it starts getting mouldy. If you're doing this on the hottest day of the year, it's not an issue. That's why I spent my day here instead of at the beach - I could go over the icky Nelly spots over and over again.

When you're treating pet stain or leaky toddler spots, you must get down on your knees and sniff. If there's a strong icky smell, keep cleaning. If all you smell is shampoo, you're done in that area. If the smell of pee is pretty faint and you've already gone over as many times as you feel comfortable (& you worry that you're soaking not just through the underlay but also the subfloor & possibly the ceiling of the floor below you), do the following: mist the spot heavily with Nature's Miracle (or another enzyme pet stain cleaner) and put a damp facecloth on the area. You want that spot to stay damp long enough for the enzymes to work.

It's a tough balance. If it stays wet too long, you'll get mould & mildew smell. If it dries too fast, the enzymes won't have had time to do their job & you'll have pee smell. If you get it just right, the carpet will smell clean. You will kneel down, sniff, and come up smiling.

There's one more thing. It's THE SECRET. Much better than that other The Secret thing.... This Secret is really great. Not only makes carpet cleaning a snap, it also saves relationships, improves parenting, enhances marriages.



Just slip these on, and then the entire process becomes meditative and immensely satisfying. You make nice neat stripes on the carpet. You see ugly spots and dirt disappear right before your eyes. Dirt is gross. It's wrong. Here you are standing up for cleanliness and justice and all that is good. You can see that you're setting the world right again, and every time you empty that bucket of black water, your heart swells with satisfaction and you gaze with pride over the sea of saxony.

All you hear is a gentle quiet hum and the sound of your own breathing.

Fabulous invention. Crying baby? Whiny children? Long winded argumentative spouse? Incredibly loud carpet shampoo machine which would normally give you a migraine in 30 minutes? No problem. Just slip these on and stay serene.

pop tarts - not as good as we expected

Well, yes, navhelowife, I did want to run away from home. It wasn't all bad, but the fact that it was happening in December, a month which makes me incredibly squirrely at the best of times, was just a bit of a challenge.

Not only was there the overarching pressure of OMG, the children need Christmas presents, we need a tree, shouldn't we chuck some lights at the house, else not only will we be bad parents but bad neighbours, but Amelia's birthday falls on the 12th. (Let me just advise all parents to avoid birthing a child in any month which also has a major holiday in it. You can count to 9 and figure out quite clearly which months are taboo. I clearly wasn't thinking the first time around. Didn't too well the second either as Hugo's is awfully close to the ever wandering Easter.)

Then, this being the winter that Gaia decided to show Vancouver that wearing birkenstocks and buying coffee in your own mug rather than wasting a paper cup is not enough to save the earth, we had storm after storm after storm. Power outages were rampant - which is a bit of a problem once you've yanked out your gas cooktop and the kitchen consists of a coffee-maker, toaster, microwave, and electric kettle. When you have no power and the gas range is in the dumpster, your cooking options decrease dramatically.

Fortunately we have two camping stoves and, along with a CO detector at hand, we managed several meals that way. Including, in fact, Christmas Eve, when we hosted a traditional dinner.
That's me, cooking pierogies in the garage.

The kids were thrilled at the beginning of the reno as we went grocery shopping and bought all the foods we usually don't get. Frozen entrees, boil in a bag, just microwave, ready in 5 minutes! Food that was downright exotic for us. If I could cook it in a microwave or a toaster, I threw it in the cart.

Including PopTarts. We had never had PopTarts before. Our whole experience with the food was limited to an episode of Father Ted in which Ted and Dougal hire a nun to help them keep their lenten vows and she turns out to be from some masochistic sect devoted to mortifying the flesh. Sister Assumpta wakes them at 5 a.m. and gives them plain water for breakfast while Dougal dreamily recounts how he loves a PopTart in the morning. She then proceeds to give them ice baths, beat them with sticks and give them a jolly Catholic time. The entire episode is hilarious but somehow what stuck with Hugo was the line about Father Dougal loving his PopTarts in the morning.

Hugo chanted this through the entire shopping trip until we made it the correct aisle. He selected a large variety box.

Turned out we all hated them and it took over a month for them to finally be reluctantly consumed.

project creep

Project creep. Depending on context it might be the guy you've been assigned to work with, the 47 year old one who lives with his mom and collects celebritys' nail clippings.

However, in our case, it was the same sort of thinking that got us into cutting holes in outside walls in December. Hey, wouldn't it be good if......? And if we're doing this already, then isn't this the best time to do that? It would only slow us down a bit and it would only cost a bit.

Bit is a word that has a very fluid meaning, and its fluidity increases during the stress of a renovation.

How much more expensive is that one compared to this one?
How long will it take to order that part?
How much more time until the power in the entire living room stops shorting out every time we plug in the toaster?
Are you tired?
Do you want to eat?
Does that cut hurt?
Is it bleeding?

A bit, a bit, a bit.

OK, back to the creep. If look back at the photo in the Kitchen Before post, you'll see this thing which kind of looks like a box, and runs along the top of the window, and top of the left hand cupboards. For lack of a better word, we called it a box. Above it on the wall was cedar panelling (these people loved cedar panelling. Whole chunks of this house are covered in cedar. It's like a sweat lodge in here.)

We planned right from the beginning to rip the cedar panelling off and indeed, that was one of the first things we did, even before the kitchen reno got started. That was where we made holes in the wall to figure out where the loads went.

Taking off the box was kind of something that really became more and more important to us as we went along. We wanted to open up the room more, to really pump up the vaulting of the ceiling. We also figured that if we got rid of that box, we could use taller cabinets on the left side of the kitchen. The right side of the kitchen was not negotiable. There's a huge frigging beam there on that wall and so our top line was defined by the structure of the building.

But along the window, and on the left, that box was decorative and empty. Simple enough to take it down, put some drywall there, and presto. Easy, peasy.

Except that this house was apparently built by someone who was taking the cold war and living in an earthquake zone seriously. It is solid. The box was gyproc - but very heavy and thick; thicker than what we can buy now because we wanted to buy something the same thickness to make a patch and the people in the hardware store just looked blankly at us. "Umm, it doesn't come in that thickness. "

That's the ugly door to the deck. If we hadn't been totally wrung out by the damned box, we might have been seduced into project creep there. The door needs to be changed but we're not sure into what. A full slider or just a plain white & glass door, like half a french door? It stayed for now.

The dust was incredible. We tried to corrall it a bit by hanging a tarp up and using fans to send the dust outside but it was only partly successful.

This is the kids' felt pen box.

And then Roo had to go back to work.

Before we started, we had created a kitchen reno schedule, one which was all nicely written out and 'project planned' with actions/people/time all filled in in appropriate slots. Unfortunately, we didn't meet our schedule.

The demo took about as long as we had planned.

Wiring took longer.

Plumbing took longer.

Framing & installing the new window took longer.

Ripping off the fake ceiling box - was completely unplanned & pushed us way off schedule.

Roo had to go back to work for two weeks, and then he'd be home again during the Christmas holidays. He worked during the week while I laid siege to drywall. Tape, mud, watch it dry, sand, dust, repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

On the two weekends, Roo finished with the wiring and plumbing. We also started building the Ikea cabinets in the living room and garage.


If you look closely you'll see there still is a jog in the wall above the window. There is a large beam just above the window header and it sticks out a bit. We made the wall above the beam flush with it and just have a small jog in that wall. The exposed beam up by the ceiling will eventually be painted our white trim color. Looking good and we're happy with how it's turning out.

It's awfully close to Christmas though.

More demo and the window

A close up of the mess the tiles left on the wall. That's my hand chiseling at the crap stuck to it. After a while we tried power sanding instead.
When we were getting ready for the reno, we had this brilliant idea of enlarging the kitchen window. The windows in this house all need replacing anyway as they're single glazed so of course we would replace the window while doing the kitchen. But as we looked at our designs, we kept coming back to the fact that the backyard of this property, with the creek and slope and green belt, is really an amazing feature which should be showcased more. What better way to do it than to expand the windows? We decided we'd like to have the window extend over both the sink and the dishwasher.

There was a smallish snag in that we didn't actually know for sure how this house was constructed. We knew it wasn't quite standard framing, but we only had a hazy idea of how the loads were carried. We did some research, and some exploratory ripping off walls to look beneath, discovered it's mostly post and beam, and decided it was doable. All it needed was a new header.

Here is my very efficient carpenter. Roo is a jack of all trades, Mr. Handy, funny and gorgeous to boot. Office warrior by day, power tool wizard by night.

That's the new header. Gorgous, ain't it? Notice that it's daytime. After the header went in and a bunch of magic voodoo was done involving kings, studs, and cripples (that's window framing talk), Roo cut a huge freaking hole in the wall and got ready to install the new window.

Um, how did it get to be night? And if you look close it appears that Roo is breathing fire. It is bloody cold by this time. (It dawns on us that maybe cutting holes in walls in December is not such a great idea.) Roo's on the deck, getting the caulking in. The new window finally went in around 10 pm at night. You would not believe how many times we measured, re-measured, and measured again, to make sure this sucker would fit and that we wouldn't have some collossal gaps around it.

Hurray! It fits!
That's my mom - our handy assistant - outside in the watchman's cap.

~~~~~

To be continued.

Demo!

The morning of the demolition. Fridge moved off to the side, dishwasher still needs to be disconnected and safely hidden for the duration. Cupboards were emptied and the contents moved to temporary shelves in the living room. I had a microwave oven & a toaster set up by the table. I did the dishes in several large tupperare bins in the bathtub.
Hugo getting into the demolition. We rented a skip to haul away all the ugly stuff.
Confused dog. Hey! Where is the cupboard that has my food?!
When you pry tiles off a wall, the results are not pretty. Initially we thought we would either pry them off gently, without damaging the wall too much, or simply rip off the wall and put in fresh drywall. Ahem. Stay tuned for how that ended.
The previous people had apparently not heard of this invention called an ELECTRICAL BOX. We keep finding connections just left like that. Argh.

more icky kitchen

September 2006
This is what it looked like after few months of us living here. Your eye will inevitably be drawn to the gorgeous dishwasher Roo put in during the summer. That would be the second one he put in. If you recall, over the last few months, I made him take out the original dishwasher and put in a new one, take it out, replace the old clunker while we continued shopping, and then put in a second dishwasher. Each time there was much swearing and some blood loss because the floor was built in around the dishwasher so dishwashers doesn't actually really want to fit in through the opening. Yes, I am fun to live with.

I got rid of the window rags, the blinds, the dustcatcher crap on top of the cupboards, and the 'island' on wheels. Let me tell you, I hate kitchen islands. Almost all kitchens that have them are too SMALL for them. If you want an island, you need a really large kitchen. I need space!!!

The countertop made of tiles - one word: gross. Is that colored grout or dirt or grease? Bleh. Do not put tiles on a kitchen countertop. I think that can qualify as a life rule.

The cupboards are the original 1966 cupboards, but with 1980's laminate doors. Bleh. Double bleh when you consider the issue of little furry tenants.

The kitchen was just barely tolerable and originally we planned to do bathrooms first, and then the kitchen. But, this is an open living house. The kitchen is part of the living room, and hell, it was ugly. And then, in the fall, Ikea advertised a sale on their kitchen cabinets. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

You know where this is going, right?

Besides. The dishwasher looked lonely and sad in this dump. It wanted to be among its own kind. It called to its clan members, the matching fridge and stove.....

Kitchen before

March 2006
This is how the kitchen looked in the original realtor's listing photos.

Maybe this is a sign of the insanity of the market here because when you see this in a house priced over 500K, you think, hmmm, that's quite good! An 80's kitchen! Wow, it was updated in the last quarter century? It doesn't look like it was used as a grow op or a boarding house for 60 students from Guangzhou? Let's buy it.

Just another manic

Tuesday.

Let's see. Got children up early so Hugo could play tennis while Daisy frolicked in the field. The rain held off and everything was going swimmingly. Daisy looked smashing. Then she rolled - thoroughly and with attention to detail - in goose poop. Thing was, we didn't realize she was rollling in goose poop until she stood up. She rolls on grass out of the sheer joy of it all the time. But whammo - green stinky, very self-satisfied dog.


So, we brought the green stinky dog home and gave the dog a bath. Daisy is scared of water hoses and spray bottles (perhaps someone used them as aversives on her) so I have to do a bucket and sponge method. Daisy also doesn't understand why the wonderful perfume was removed. At the end of it, Daisy smelled less of goose and more of wet dog and went to sulk under the deck. She forgave me when I offered her some cod - that furry girl loves fish.


Lunch for kids. Caffeine for mom. Ready to tackle the afternoon. And then it was derailed by a crew of 3 workmen who arrived completely unexpectedly. We had been in touch with the company before and I had left a voice mail last week, asking for a call back so we could finalize arrangements. Heard nothing & was going to call a competitor this week but then, they just showed up and said they want to do the job now. They had given us a good quote and we just wanted to get this over with, so OK. Kind of exciting but they made WAY more mess than we had expected. The job is done but the clean-up will take a while. You get what you pay for. (don't worry darlings, the mystery will be revealed soon).

We ran to the library and to the grocery store for some dinner stuff. After dinner, Roo started on some of the clean-up, while I puttered with the kids. And then, just as Roo was coming up from the hot-tub, all groggy and tired and ready to crash...... he discovered a flood. Remember this leak? That one wasn't the pump. This one was the pump.

It's all kind of the workmen's fault. And my fault. But most of all the damned pump's fault. The pump has been giving us grief. It developed an annoying habit of turning on and then not turning off. Now all in all, that's better than the alternative of not turning on at all, right? So we've been kind of slow to deal with it - especially since 'dealing' with it is going to probably involve a fair bit of time and calling a 1-800 # in Quebec. But it has become increasingly annoying because the darned thing would start sucking air and you'd need to go downstairs and unplug it from the outlet and then plug it back in - that is the only way to get it stop. It's a difficult job for me as it involves sticking my arm in a tight gap and really reaching and putting a crick in my neck as it's just barely within reach for me. (Roo doesn't have this problem as his arms are waaaay longer than mine.) When the workmen arrived, I was just in the middle of doing that.

In fact, I hadn't heard them arrive or Daisy barking or anything. I had my head stuck between a washing machine filling with water and a pump sucking air and I was trying to not twist my neck off completely while reaching for a plug, when the children ran downstairs to announce breathlessly that 'those workmen guys' are here.

Which is how the plug got pulled but not put back in. I, on my way upstairs to see the workmen, turned the machine off, so it stopped filling and just sat there, forgotten for the rest of the day. Until Roo was walking by on the way to the hot tub and turned it back on. But as the pump was not on, the water subsequently went merrily all over the basement.

Later darlings. I've got an appointment with towels, flip flops, fans, and really ugly carpet which we're doing our best to thoroughly kill before we throw it out.

Tags: dog, house, flood, Hornblower

Hornblower's handy hints

I was just getting ready to post some pictures of the laundry room renovation - a very boring renovation, like most of our current renos. The thing is, we're not making anything great, we're just making things look normal. So, it's not really anything you can look at and say 'wow, you've done something really nice!'. It's more that you look at it and say 'what? That looks normal.' Yes, it's only because the previous state of affairs was so appallingly hideous that the work we do starts to look good.

Like the laundry, which previously resided in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Now, in the condo, we had our laundry facilities just off the kitchen and it was handy. But here's the thing - the space it was in, was actually meant for it. The space was adequate for the machines, and there was (and this is important) a door. Yes. A door.

Which, you may have guessed by the stress I'm placing on it now, is what the laundry facilities here lacked. Yup. They rammed a washer and dryer into a too small a place, and shrugged their shoulders about the fact that you couldn't put a door on it because they stick out 3 inches into the hallway. And they left it like that.

So that standing in my kitchen, leaning on the counter while chatting, you could look at my laundry center, including the knickers hanging to dry on a hook because when I put them in the dryer they get all staticy and then too friendly.

We considered what to do about this, pondered taking another foot out of Hugo's room to make the laundry center deep enough for a door, considered the general lack of closet space upstairs, and decided to move it downstairs.

A bit of a snag - the sewer outflow pipe is fairly high so putting in bathrooms/kitchens/laundry facilities in the basement is tricky. Eventually, when we put in a bathroom & rough-in a kitchen, we'll need a central pump to move the 'effluent' up to the pipe, but for the laundry, we can get by with a small pump. Roo investigated it all, planned it all, got all his gear and purchased an obscenely expensive amount of copper pipe (have you seen the price of copper these days?). Last weekend, it was all done. We've been watching this pump, making sure it's all working fine and everything seemed OK.

And then today, a small disaster - but not the pump. A completely unexpected leak from the cold water pipe. Argh. Much water. Much mess. Ick.

And now, Hornblower's hints:

-make sure you know where the main shut offs for water (and gas) are

-keep piles of old towels handy at all times

-don't panic

-cuff up your pants

-put on flip flops

-start mopping up: drop the towels on the carpets and dance on them

-even though you have no water and you can't wash anything, you can use the washing machine to spin the water out of the towels

-after you've done this a whole bunch of times, put about half the towels in the dryer & keep working with the damp towels

-when the dryer towels are done, use them to mop up the rest of the water, & now dry the damp towels

-take frequent breaks for chocolate or beverages of your choice (remember you have no water so you have to drink the stuff out of the bottles, even the ones in the liquor cabinet)

-when you go to the workroom, which you've left for last because it has a stone floor and a drain in it, and you figured it was less important than the carpeted areas, and you're mopping behind the furnace and the hot water tank and you sweep out a mouse trap with a mouse in it, then it's absolutely OK to just throw your mop down and swear and leave the room and refuse to come back

-just open up all the windows, turn on some fans, and hide upstairs

I have no water. I can't leave because all the windows and doors downstairs are open to try and prevent a mould infestation. I have a dead mouse lying in a puddle in the workroom.

And how is your Monday?

Tags: home renovations, plumbing leaks, Hornblower

The Doors

No, not the band, my doors. We have had no doors for over 2 weeks. Well, we left the exterior ones, but all the interior ones came off. Bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, the stairway to the scary downstairs - all had no doors. Open living to the max.

The doors were ugly and in typical mishmash timjob fashion, there was a variety of finishes. Some were painted (badly) on one side, some were painted (badly) on both sides, some were left in their original ugly finish. And the hardware - the expected assortment of chrome, brass and weird coppery stuff. One thing they had in common was that all the handles had so much 'give' in them, that they rattled. There was absolutely no way to close or open a door quietly because if you touched the handle, it rattled & the hollow doors acted like a drum to amplify the sound.

So Roo took off all the doors for priming, painting and new hardware. It, of course, took way longer than expected, and a couple of the doors needed 2 coats of primer because whatever was on them kept bleeding through.

A door! And this one LOCKS! Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean??

We may eventually change the doors altogether as these are shorter than doors made now. I don't notice it but Roo, who is 6'4" does. In the meantime though, paint and new hardware made all the difference.

As far as homeschooling, we are back in school mode for the next 2 weeks. Amelia has picked up her knitting again.

(notice how color co-ordinated she is)

We're listening to lots of audio books (while knitting, of course) - mostly the Amelia Peabody series read by Barbara Rosenblat (do not, do NOT get the audiobooks read by the other woman. I will come over to your house & rip them from your stereo & stomp on them.) We've been listening to the first 3 over and over again, while waiting for the library to track down the next one. I have read ahead of the kids & in fact, I have a hold placed on the newest one (The Tomb of the Golden Bird), which I think should arrive in the next few days. Oooooh - anticipation.

And, I'm having problems with the blog, specifically the orchid template; I usually use Firefox but yesterday I decided to check the layout in IE and discovered that it totally craps out! Whoa! Since when? How long has this been going on? And I really don't have the time to figure out what it is that IE doesn't like about it (I think a /div is messed up somewhere). It's been fine in Firefox but really, this is kind of embarassing. I told Roo I feel like I've come home from a meeting to discover that my slip has been showing. Not exactly as bad as having the back of your skirt tucked into your pantyhose but still..... And I don't have the time to fix it!!! So, I quickly grabbed an old template which as far as I can tell is working fine though it's not turning my crank in any great way.

The computer as a whole is giving me headaches because it needs a total hard drive wipe & reload. It's doing stuff like:

"What? Mail? Do I have a mail program? I dunno. I can't find it."

"Yes, we do have a mail program. Just go open it. Go on. Try it."

"Nope. Can't find it."

"Oh fine."

REBOOT

"Mail? Here you go m'am. Wasn't I good? What? Browser? Whasdad? Dunno. Gonna turn off now. So tired....."

"No, no! Don't do that! No, don't shut off. WTF do you mean you've experienced a fatal error? I'll show you a fatal error, you, you, you machine!"

And so on.

So it's time to just erase its little brain & start again. It would be nice if I could back things up but one of the things that's gone all wonky is the burner. Oh yes. Lovely.

Tags: DIY - Amelia Peabody - Elizabeth Peters - homeschooling - knitting - computers