Recently in House Category

Dear universe, please stop hatin' on me. Please?

Working at home today, oblivious under head phones when at 5 or so (just in time for me to not be interrupted from work thankyouverymuch) Firefly noticed a squooshing that wasn't supposed to be there. The old copper washer that was securing the connection from the copper pipe from the city water to our recently replaced plastic plumbing had decided to crack, and now water was draining out into the storage closet under the stairs, through it and into the office, and then under the newly put down laminate flooring in the hall and big room. :( So the evening has been pulling up the new floor, positioning fans and heaters, and generally being far more unpleasant than it should be (fantastic dinner though, yummy stew).

I was very lucky though.... it was caught before it go to do too much damage, such as making its way into the office where the computers are. I'm also lucky that I have all my photos in waterproof plastic tubs (though they were on the floor). My box of star trek memorabilia and "memories" box also escaped more than a splattering of water on them. Not so lucky was the box of models whose bottom disintegrated and fell out, letting the already perilously stacked lot basically smash all over the floor :( They are now all in a big plastic garbage bag (more for ease of getting them out of the closet so we could mop up water than an indication of their eventual destination), however I'm not sure what'll happen to them. There were a lot of airplane tires, cockpits, missiles and other small parts strewn around the floor, and I haven't bothered to even look at the things since they were put there two years ago. On the other hand though, those bits of painted plastic represent a large part of my childhood and a lot of time and effort put into them. I'll have to dig through and see if anything is recoverable at all I guess, then ditch the rest :(

Sucky to have a flood yes, but I'm very happy it happened now and not when the entire basement was under new flooring. Would have been nice to have it a couple of days ago before any flooring was down though :)

Crap, after midnight again, bed time now.

So while I thought today could be a rest-and-relaxation day, the FireflyFam arrived at 11 (got to sleep in at least!) armed with lots of supplies. Scary. Looks like today we're re-doing the plumbing! Of course, you can't just put in one or two pipes, but you have to do everything at once. Luckily not the whole house (at least they haven't told me that), but we're basically re-doing the basement plumbing which includes hot water tank (moving it) all and the pipes going from where it comes into the house up into the bathroom and kitchen.

Eeeek!

Update: Turns out it won't happen today after all.... so just more preparation and work. We have a bunch of cabinets and some drywall up in the back of the basement now, and a bunch more stuff out of the basement and into a storage trailer. Nice to see things finally happening! (and sucky to still be moving things from one place to the other over and over)/

I have to say that the amount of stuff that's been getting done around here (in my absence) is absolutely amazing. Below are some pics of what's been going on here the last while. Of course, since these were taken, a hedge has been put up along the right and the arrangement of the bricks along the driveway has changed (and been finished off). If anyone remembers my place when we first got it and how the front looked then (and up to about a week and a half ago for that matter) I hope you will be impressed. New planting areas, finishing off of the sides, a huge chunk of the front hedge is out to make the front feel less cramped, the driveway has been scraped to angle it nicer, the start of a nicer drainage system is going in in front of the carport (no more bottoming out when I drive in, yay!), new planters at the front of the house, the front concrete step to the front door has been raised and re-angled so rainwater now drains away from the house instead of towards it....

There's still stuff to do of course, asphalt is coming in and the drain needs to be finished and uhmm... well, probably lots of little cleanup stuff too, but the main bulk of the driveway is done as far as I see. I'll post a picture of the completed affair on the weekend when I see it for the first time (I honestly haven't seen it in the light since Sunday). I'm pretty sure it's still changed considerably from the pics here.

The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of work on the backyard and deck. Here's a quick pano (pardon the split ladder in the middle :) showing things. Note the barkmulch filled planting boxes around the perimeter, the almost fininished lower deck portion (center right) and now-we're-starting-to-put-on-deck-boards top section with Firefly and FireflyMom on top.

A couple of quick panoramas from the work that's been done over the last while. Things to note are the new fence (well, not that new), the planting beds, walkway, and collection of wood for use on the deck

A couple of months ago we got a house alarm... not sure if it was the proper financial decision, but I suppose it can't hurt as far as protecting my stuff (my precious computers.... my.... preeeecious...). Came home yesterday and didn't notice the house alarm was on, or maybe it didn't beep when I opened the door. Anyway, shucked off shoes and jacket and headed up stairs, and seconds later an earsplitting bell starts going off. I realized what I had done quickly enough and ran down to hit the code into the keypad. *beep*beep*beep* Didn't work. Shit, what't my code again. *beep*beep*beep* Shit! *beep*beep*beep* No, wait, that's it. *beep*beep*beep*. Nothing. *beep*beep*beep* again. Still nothing.

Here "nothing" is defined as "no response from the keypad and a million decible siren going off in my ears.

Ok, somethings up, I've done this before. Time to call the company to let them know not to send the marines in. So I hid in the basement where the noise was marginally less and called up the company. Talked to a help person who told me that no alarms had come through to them, and sympathized with me on my lack of ability to turn off the alarm, and sent me over to tech support. Of course, being I was in the basement the cell phone cut off. Before I called them back the alarm timed out and I breathed a sigh of relief, and headed upstairs to rescue the now traumatized cats and bird and get them relaxed again.

Ooops. As soon as I got upstairs I tripped the motion sensor again and the alarm went off. Aiiiiieeee!

Back downstairs, back on the phone (this time with a land line) to the alarm company. Got through to tech support and $dude walked me through some stuff on the keypad, hitting in various codes with no affect, and then disabling the alarm altogether. There'll be a repair guy coming by soon.

The experience was interesting, with the following things I am a bit disturbed by:

• Even with the alarm wailing and then timing out twice, no neighbors or passers by came by to see what was going on.
  
• The fact that I've had the alarm for a couple of months now and it hasn't been actively monitored is a bit disturbing. I'm not overly paranoid, and got the alarm for just extra piece of mind and all that, but if there wasn't any actual difference...
  

We'll see what happens when the installer/repair guy comes out.

Somehow going from faux-work (official first day is tomorrow, I went in today for a staff meeting), home and shopping then dinner, and getting pictures from my camera stitched and cleaned up (a bit) and resized, it took way longer than I expected, and somehow it's suddenly 11! I didn't even get a chance to watch Prison Break or 24 (my normal monday fare). Luckily I have the mythbox going so I can watch it tomorrow. Anyway, this last weekend was an outside weekend where it was all running around and working. FireflyMom and FireflyBro came out and we blitzed the backyard. Since I have no experience in fence or deck building or running an excavator I was relagated to doing things like moving things, carrying things, loading up the truck with garbage, and taking stuff to the dump. The end result was something along the lines of this...

No, the wonky fence line is not the result of a bad panorama stitch, it's the fact the fence is only leaning up against the posts :)

Click the read more link for more pictures of the chaos....

No, not a nasty sexy euphemism, we started some work in the back of the house in preparation for a mini-machine that Firefly will be getting in. A friend of ours who is a landscaper came by and basically wandered through the yard saying "that's gone, gone, out of there, get that stuff out, gone, gone, gone, that? that's gone..." and so on. Luckily this basically justified what my thoughts were, which was rip everything out and start from scratch. Get rid of the old hedge, forget moving the big overgrown plants around, just firebomb the whole yard and start from scratch. Course, that'll be a bit more costly than not doing a bunch of work, but it's like the house, a work in progress that we can do bit by bit as money becomes avaiable. So anyway, I started chopping up the bushes and stuff on saturday, results below (click for bigger).

Finally it was not raining long enough today for me to cut the grass. Gads what a job... it hasn't been cut since august of last year or so, so it was in rough shape. Even with the wheels on the mower set to their highest setting the bag still filled up in about two rows. Even after I was done my only comment to Firefly was "this backyard needs to be firebombed". Happily enough, I hear a rumor that FireflyBro is going to be bringing over a little machine that we can use to do all the "yard keeping" type duties that haven't been done. Getting rid of the hedge, moving the flowers and mini trees that have been slowly invading the backyard out and into a better place (perhaps sending them to wildflower-heaven), and happiest of all, getting rid of the plum tree stump that's been there since we removed the top half of the not-happy plum tree when we moved in almost 2 years ago.

Well not "new" I guess. We now have a dishwasher that works, where "works" is defined by "hooked up to both power and water, and not leaking the latter" and a new working washing machine (where "new working" is defined by "doesn't require all loads to be run through twice to convince the machine to spin, also doesn't shoot blue sparks when powered on"). Mucho good for all concerned (except my pocketbook that is). We had a furnace guy in last night to check out the spare furnaces that were pulled from a FireflyBro demolition job in the hopes they could be put into our place, but the guy basically said it's not worth it to put them in at all. He also gave us a (decent I think) quote on a new machine to install, which I just need to know find/create the cash to pay for that. When I got home yesterday Firefly and FireflyMom were working on the hallway steps, which was awesome. Being that's the first thing you see when you get in the house, it'll definately be nice to have that finished off nicely.