basement floor setback

We're displaced again, staying at my parents' again. The concrete contractor we hired used an exterior-only sealer on our basement floor (claimed it would be an "epoxy topcoat" but it was, like, driveway sealant) and the house smells poisonous. Can't go in w/o gagging. It's many VOCs so hopefully they'll all evaporate and float away soon.

Crazy miserable. And very very tired.

heating the neighboorhood

We got our first gas bill last week. The only thing we currently use gas for is the furnace. It was the most insane gas bill I have ever seen or heard of. It was big. Like really big. godzilla big.

Ever since we got it I have been looking at our external lathe and plaster walls in a much different light. All of them need to be demoed, and insulation added. So last night I was able to demo the wall surrounding the french doors, and I added insulation to that wall, and to the downstairs bathroom walls. I think I understand why people will demo a house down to the studs, as it would have meant a much smaller first gas bill, and less long term dust. And the wiring and plumbing would have been way easier for the GC.

next house I guess.

2,000 lbs of porch

This past week 2,000 lbs of back porch went to the dump. We should have done a neighborhood lottery: Guess the weight of our porch! Win forty feet of broken clay sewer pipe! You haul!


The (late) porch was enclosed and had housed the washer and dryer. It had a strange rotting-fish smell that the dryer seemed to concentrate into our laundry, so we were happy to see it go. There was one day, though, where it was just half-gone, and it looked a lot like what it had originally been, an open porch, and it was actually quite lovely.



But to reach the basement door you had to limbo under the edge of the porch. So, it went. Maybe our fond memories of that one day of loveliness will inspire us to create another porch outside the new french doors off the mudroom-to-be.

Formerly known as the "refrigerator room," the mudroom is the space between the kitchen, dining room, and downstairs bathroom. Most of the linoleum has been removed; Matt has found a pretty nice hardwood floor underneath. French doors are in and look great. Some walls seem to be missing. We need to insulate and drywall the bathroom, put in a sink and toilet, and figure out what finish is needed on a wood floor in a bathroom.



Meanwhile our nice new water-saving washer and energy-saving dryer live in our tiny little square of basement, buried under tools and gear (ours and theirs). Laundry, we bring to my parents' house on the weekend, like the teenagers we are.

Audrey's room is mostly done. Walls are patched and painted a color called Raffia (a warm pale beige-green), floor washed, curtains half up. There's some touching up to do on the walls and the closet still needs painting. Can't quite figure out our ancient lath and plaster walls: the drywall screws we had around didn't quite stay in. Walls too crumbly. Maybe longer drywall screws? Please advise.



In one spot the just-painted old wallpaper peeled off, revealing the official seal of the U.S. Department of Wallpaper:



Matt rented the backhoe again and filled in the front yard section of trench; the rest, who knows. Maybe rain and wind and gravity will do the trick, over time. We wash our hands of it. Peh.

3 updates.

I stayed home from work yesterday and enjoyed some quality work time with the GC. Kwaku asked if Heather had gotten any gifts for MLK day. So most of the day I had visions of Dr. King in a Santa suit. He would have made a nice Santa, I think.

Kwaku and I finished off the re-piping of the sewer. It was mostly Kwaku, while I cheered him on, got him tools, and made fun of how dirty he got in the sewer pit. The final piece we took out was a 4" to 6" clay pipe that had a number of cracks and large roots going into it. This was another area that the city and most of the plumbers were hitting. It did look like a potted plant, beacuse in essence it was; clay pots, plant roots, plenty of "dirt". Ill try and get a picture of it some time this week.

Also they demoed the back porch (I took out a couple of windows and some drywall. The roof is still there along with the suport posts, and frankly, at some point in time, it was a truly beautiful little porch. Its a little sad to have to remove it now. I'm going to try and keep the good wood for building a ilttle shed in the back this summer.

Lastly, the drywall is hung and taped in the basement, and it looks totally awesome.

I'm thinking we should live there.

just standing in my room

Here it is, well into January, and we're still writing about the sewer. It appears that people with sewer problems need a place to (vent? wallow? All of these words seem to have sewer connotations to me) and I guess this is the place. Sorry about that.

One new and great thing is that the house is now plumbed with brand-spankin-new copper pipes. Previously, we could eke hot water out of only one faucet at a time, and wait a good long time for it, too. Now, hot water on demand. A modern convenience! We're liking it a lot.

What else we're liking: the nearly finished corner bedroom. I painted the walls a warm gray (Benjamin Moore Copley Gray) and the ceiling a cream color (Devine Whip). While I was painting I realized that "Copley Gray" might also be called "drywall gray" because that is basically what it is, the color of the drywall I was painting over. Which is just fine by me, because it is nearly done, and that is a totally new thing for us, not to mention very pleasant to have a little corner of the house that looks habitable, and inhabited. And doesn't smell very much. All that's left in this room is a ceiling fixture en route from Schoolhouse Electric, and we're waiting for our painter to come back and finish the job already.

(I am also proud to say that I installed a ceiling fixture the other day, and with much less cursing than Matt.)

Priorities in an old house are always shifting, and screaming for attention, and it's hard to avoid ending up with a multitude of projects all up and spinning at once. However. Last week I walked into the dining room (which is filled with boxes rescued from the basement) and found Audrey just standing there, very still, doing nothing. Just standing. "What's up?" I asked. "I'm just standing here in my room," she said, and gestured up at the towering wall of Sterilite containers beside her—which were filled with toys from the old house.

It isn't that she doesn't have toys unpacked—she does. But there is no "Audrey's room" yet, and she has so quietly accepted this that I can't help but feel completely negligent for letting slip the interests of this little girl who is by far my greatest priority. She has adapted so amazingly well to this chaotic living arrangement, way better than I have. This weekend we've been scrambling to finish a second bedroom for her. So that she can just stand in her room.

more rain, less trench

Just yesterday I went out and took some picture of the whole trench. We are going to start replacing the sewer tommorrow and I thought it would be good to get a picture of it. Thats it on the top here.

Last night it started raining again. Very hard. I had a hard time sleeping, thinking that ever little bump or sound was the walls caving in and I would be back to square one. So the first things I do this morning is get up and go check the trench out. At first it looks pretty good, a little more water in the bottom but the walls are holding up. I figure now would be a good time to add some extra 2x4's, and really shore it up.

I jump into the trench and head towards the end (where the pictures are being taken). When I get down there I realize that at least 2 2x4's have broken through the particle board, scary #1. The next thing I notice is that as I am walking along the trench more dirt is falling out from undernesth the boards, scary #2. The last thing I notice before I yell "Fuck!", and start running towards the ladder is that the particle boards are slowly moving inwards and making theses funning creaking sounds, scary #3.

New trench from same spot as of 8:30 this morning

Moral of the story. If you are going to dig a trench in Seattle, during the winter, and you shore it up with particle board, you should really get the sewer in as quickly as you possibly can.

Things I should have done differently:
1. Used thicker particle boards and put cross peices on the 2x4 where it was holding them up.
2. Done the sewer stuff as quickly as possible after digging the hole
3. made sure plastic totally covered evry bit of dirt and yard possible around the hole.
4. Waited until summer to dig the hole.

bug tracking

I think I am going to set up a bug/ issue tracker for the house. After 10 years of software dev my mind seems to have been trained to work better that way. If/When I get it up and running Ill publish a link so people can see how geeky I am.

How much fun would it be to get an email that looked like this.

Subject: Issue #30, Toilet doesnt flush.
Opened By: Heather
Assigned to: Matt

Notes:

Our toilets are broken, please fix!


ok not that much fun. Im still doing it though.

bathroom demo: white mold

This evening I demoed the downstairs bathroom. Not really because I wanted to (I didn't) but because Jason found a pretty wicked white mold infestation. Its like a parasite in my mind, actually the more I think about it, I'm tending to associate all molds with their AD&D Monster Manual descriptions. White mold ... hmm ... I wonder if my +2 dagger can hurt it before it freezes me. But instead of a +2 dagger I used the crowbar of doom and the Vacuum of ungodly sucking to demo the entire bathroom, evil White Mold and all.



Oh yeah, and just to add icing on the mold encrusted bathroom cake, Jason, when pulling down the ceiling, found another rats nest. It wasn't as big as the one I had found, but it was "fresher". Who knew rats were so good at finding human hair?

backhoe day 7: here comes the rain again

The machine has to go back tomorrow.

We got the week rate after the polite Handy Andy man, who I guess was maybe named Andy, told me that if I wanted them to stop calling every day I should just tell them how long it was going to be. The weekly rate has an upside: 7 days for the price of 4, so really the machine was 80 bucks a day, making my soccer games cost only a measly 23 bucks a day to play.

Monday morning Seattle rings in the new year with rain. Real rain. Tropical monsoon rain. Except that it's not tropical. It's cold as fuck. It is as cold as it can get without the rain turning into a blizzard. When we start on Monday morning its about 37 degrees, and pouring rain. Oliver and I go out and take stock of the Trench. We notice a few things.

1. The walls are holding up quite well.
2. The plastic over the dirt mounds is doing great.
3. The drains are dumping water into the ditch.

Oliver and I had put up some drains on Sunday. They didn't hold. On Monday in the pouring rain we did a bunch of jerry-rigging to try and get them to hold. Drywall screws into the downspout through the plastic tubing, and a very hacked together structure to hold the tubing against the house in the wake of the 40 MPH wind gusts. So far they have held up with minimal leaking into the trench. I think we got them far enough away from the dirt piles also.

Trench digging goes great. There is very little left to do for Tuesday; the last couple of feet up to the sidewalk. Today we got all the way out to the hill of the front lawn (which is very precarious for the backhoe). I didn't want to dig on it, and Oliver mentioned that I should just dig from the sidewalk a place for the backhoe to sit level.

Genius.

I have always respected and admired Oliver. He's smart, funny, hardcore liberal, good natured, etc. But after working with him I am now in awe. After the physical setbacks digging the trench by myself, I had gotten very depressed about the house. Oliver came in and in 2 days significantly brightened my mood, offered fantastic advice, and made the trench size expand at an astounding rate.

We had a discussion in the car on the way to get diesel for the machine about the moves towards privatization of federal things, like the IRS. I know this is bad, mostly because when your main goal is money and not quality you tend to cut corners, and cutting corners with, say, health care gets people dead, and cutting corners with, say, the IRS computer systems gets a lot of money lost. However, Oliver can easily articulate why this is all bad, and give examples of its failures starting with Reagan in the 80's. So I feel like it's a bad thing and I can stumble around talking about it, and Oliver knows its a bad thing and could most likely write a Wikipedia article about it.

He is always also very upbeat and positive. Even negatives sound forward-thinking and positive coming out of his mouth. He can phrase critiques in such a way that you feel praised while being told you could do something different. And he is constantly interested in differing views of things, to expand his own, or to argue with, in a good natured get-your-learn-on sort of way.

From the excavator I watched Oliver jump in and out of our eight-foot-deep ditch yesterday, throwing dirt over the walls while explaining his shoveling technique (which of course is unstopable), for 8 hours. I watched him do the same thing today for another 8. Today I asked him how old he is. 75. I told him Kwaku is going around telling people he is 77. He is going to have words with Kwaku. Sorry Kwaku.

My grandfather died at age 75. He was pretty immobile the last couple of years, and I never saw him do that much physical labor. He had his first heart attack at 36. He is really the only gauge by which I have to measure Oliver. I do play soccer with at least one guy who may be in his 70's, and still has a wicked shot (and even more wicked elbows) but I can't visualize Finn in the trench. Without at least knocking down some more walls by swinging his elbows at them.

During the pouring rain on Tuesday, after talking about how nice it is to be in the trench protected form the wind and rain, Oliver offhandedly mentioned that he feels a lot better than he did on Monday morning and that he needs to remember that about doing a lot of physical labor. I am expecting I will need to help him dig a ditch just for fun this summer.