timber!

Just a brief update between chopping up the tree that came down last week.  While I'm more than a bit disgruntled to be wasting the time when there are so many other things to be working on, I should be grateful.  What came down was directly in between the schoolhouse and the fire pit, and nearly on top of our stored roof slate.  Other than an impaled plastic chair and a cracked cinder block, nothing was harmed, not even the antique iron lantern that was still standing after the tree fell AROUND it.  Mind boggling....

                 

Another plus?  The new chainsaw we had bought and given up on as hopelessly broken three years ago (and forgotten to return) was able to be coaxed back to life now that we know considerably more about repairing tools.  It's nice to know the chainsaw is back in our arsenal.

As far as work on the house itself, we decided the now fully walled and insulated third floor can wait till cooler weather for floor finishing and painting.  Instead, we've turned our attention to the future master bath which adjoins our bedroom.  As I've mentioned before, it was the largest and most beautiful bedroom in the house when it was built.  When we bought the house it was saturated with cat urine (badly enough that we thought it was a mystery leak and almost walked away from the deal), chopped up with walls going across the fireplace tile and had a dropped ceiling -all this on top of the issues every room in the house had with water damage and abuse.

 For now it's just storage, and aside from partitioning the room with the laundry and walk-in closet, and a quick pass on the floors, nothing's been done.  We're many years from affording the bathroom, so for now the room needs some additional plaster repair, a temporary box built over the exposed laundry room plumping, trim and paint stripping.  All of these are in progress - finished is boxing in and blue boarding the plumbing (plastering will happen in the next couple of weeks.  Not exciting unless it's your house I suppose, but I guess that's the case with most things I do and write.  Boxing in the plumbing actually turned into a monumental task after a tiny leak was discovered coming from the washer plumbing.  We thought we were going to have to rerun the pipes, only to discover the leak was coming from the hook-up box in the wall.  Trying to repair that leak lead to the Watts Intelliflow emergency shut off malfunctioning, i.e. no laundry right before having house guests, and a few weeks of back and forth with them to figure out exactly which part was broken.  Thankfully, all fixed now.

As part of the work, we stuffed all the exposed cavities with Roxul Safe and Sound to mitigate the noise from the laundry and bathroom - the difference is amazing, even with the door to the bathroom open and the broken stained glass window on the laundry wall.  Well worth the $50 we spent on the bag, and I'm glad local stores have starting carrying it.

With all this rain we've been having, the yard isn't the only thing growing like a weed, Maugrim is 9 months old and around 90 pounds.  He finally met a dog bigger than him the other day, and wasn't quite sure what to make of him.  

let there be heat

No posts last week, I know.  But I was too busy finishing up what I needed to for our radiators to go back in.  Then, I sort of got sucked into just lounging about in the warmth.  Having heat is just so very decadent....

In our defense, it had gotten pretty damn chilly around here...

We pulled these two radiators about a month ago under the pretense of accessing the floors and trim.  Having them out of the way also meant that we could reinforce the floors underneath them and caulk all the gaps, as they had begun to weaken and deteriorate with the water moving through the walls before we bought the house.  Thankfully, the wood, though black from the water, didn't need replacement.  Even though it doesn't look the greatest, it'll never be seen again now that the rads are back.

terrible before pic, but you get the idea
that's brick on the right where the plaster had failed

Since our plumbing company (Chuba for the locals) had given us a quote we couldn't refuse, we let them do the heavy lifting (the radiators are 4 feet long and 2 1/2 feet tall).  Price-wise, removing and re-installing two radiators as well as installing a new pressure relief valve on the boiler ran us two hundred dollars.  Although we could have done it ourselves, for that price I was happy to hand over the money.  We put some plywood down to reinforce our rotten porch so the radiators didn't fall though, and decided to paint them while we were at it (they looked terrible, peeling silver on one side and substantial surface rust on the other (sooo much water in this house!))....  They got pressure washed, the worst spots wire brushed, and painted with many, many coats of Rustoleum's antique brass spray paint.  I even remembered to tape off the threading and bleeders.

And now they're in, the boiler's working, and I can worry about finishing up the woodwork.

I'd like to pretend I don't have any more deadlines, but there's only one reason Luke would be this cute...

I think he may have overheard that we're getting a puppy come Thanksgiving....

F*** Gillece

I didn't mean to let it be so quiet around here these past couple of weeks.  Things have certainly been happening, but have been totally overshadowed by rage-inciting nonsense, and I though it best to let the cortisol levels wane before attempting to write a post, lest it end up being rather more colorful than my dear readers' ears (eyes?) are accustomed to.

That said, let me present a quote....

And now the back story...

A couple of weeks ago one of the floor drains in the basement backed up, flooding one room of our basement.  Annoying, but not really a big deal.  We had thought it was from the bad pressure valve on the boiler draining and clogging the floor drain with crap from the basement floor.  Once we realized that wasn't the case we figured it was that combined with the food scraps from the newly added garbage disposal (the first the house has ever had) overwhelming the ancient, and likely grease filled, drain.  No big deal right?

When a bit of Draino and our pipe snake failed, we called Gillece, a local plumbing company that offers a same day drain cleaning special of $100.  The first guy came out, tried snaking the drain only through one of the floor drains, hit the tee a couple of feet in, pulled the snake out with black goo on it, and claimed the pipe was broken because he could not get the snake in any further.  He said a supervisor would come out with a camera later that day, then backed into our neighbor's tree on the way out, leaving some tail light embedded in it (and nary an acknowledgement or apology).

The supervisor then came out, this time running the camera through one floor drain, hit the tee, and then tried the vent, this time making it to the clog and showing us a black screen as proof there was a broken pipe, then pulling out the camera and showing the black goo on it that he thought was further proof.  When we pointed out that the line was only getting as far as the tee he said that "lines weren't run that way."  When we asked him to run the camera backwards from the next floor drain down the line he refused, saying there was no point, since it wouldn't show anything since the pipes were broken.  In addition to a lot of old house nonsense he spouted (we're neither ignorant nor naive around here if you haven't noticed), he made a point of questioning why we'd even bother fixing up an old house, and talked about how the pipes should have failed a long time ago - because "cast iron and terracotta only last a few decades."  Now while I'm the first to acknowledge our 1886 pipes are a bit of a ticking time bomb, the idea that they would only last 20 years is laughable!  Not only that, but our basement floor is nicely poured (older) concrete, with all of the drain lines neatly traced in the floor - either due to past work or VERY clever workers in the past who wanted to make future work as straightforward as possible.

One written quote later, we were both infuriated and terrified that there was actually something wrong (panic mode is debilitating for me).  That night I had the presence of mind to look up professional pipe snake rentals, and discovered two things.  First off, the black goo was good, a sign of a clog - broken pipes would have left brown mud on the snake and camera.  Secondly, snakes aren't a good choice for old pipes - instead you should use a sewer jet (in our case an Electric Eel lol), which is basically a pressure washer for your pipes, they're much more gentle on the old terracotta and brittle cast iron.  Our local Sunbelt Rentals rented them for $49 dollars, so that's where we headed the next morning.  Picked it up, brought it home, screwed it onto our hose and plugged it in, and 30 seconds later.... CLEAN FUCKING PIPE!!!!!!!

While we're both obviously overjoyed in our victory, the Angry Monkey is beyond furious, and already has a complaint in with the Better Business Bureau.  The first response from Gillece about the complaint?  That they're happy we found an unconventional way of fixing the pipe.  Unconventional?  Gillece offers pipe jetting!  Not to mention they didn't say it was a clog they couldn't fix, they said our pipes had collapsed and that it would cost over $8000 to fix if we paid cash (and over $9000 if we didn't), while pressing us to rip out all of the sewer lines to replace our "failing" pipes all at once...

and lets just laugh at their code of ethics for a bit eh?

So that was our week, and I didn't even mention the concussion (it was the cat's fault, I swear, at least for the first head bashing incident - I'll take the blame for the second)...

waterworks

I haven't taken much in the way of photos over the past week, so I'll dig back a month into the archives for today's offering. I've mentioned my affliction/affection for antique plumbing before, and this sink was my most recent acquisition.

The sink that came with the house was an early, but somewhat plain pedestal sink that was badly rusted out.

Although I had intended to restore it, the truth is I can replace it with another antique sink much more cheaply - if it were original I'll shell out the cash, but I doubt it is. To fulfill our 203k obligations we had to make this bathroom operational, so we picked up another vintage pedestal sink with working taps on Freecycle to serve in the interim. Those taps had started to fail, and the bad refinishing job on the sink (not our doing) was only getting worse, so when I saw this sink for $50 on craigslist I jumped on it. Of course it wasn't the sink I was interested in, it was those lovely nickel taps...

The sink is an antique barber's sink, that upper middle nozzle is for a hand sprayer attachment which we don't have. Thankfully, tightening those threads shut off the water flow, although it still makes an awful whistling noise we have yet to remedy. Although the sink itself is rather plain Jane (and will likely get replaced when we decide to have the faucet replated), the soap dish is supremely awesome in that it has an integral drain that connects to the main drain. Very cool... Of course simply hooking it up would have been too simple, naturally it leaked from every conceivable spot - I almost wish I had a picture of the waterworks, but you'll just have to imagine the mess on your own. Since there is really no good tutorial on repairing these (let alone picture of the process), I'll bite the bullet and do my best to describe what we did. The article that guided us initially can be found in this Old House Journal Article - it provides the terminology that you'll need to tell your friends what you did with your weekend, you're welcome.

Remove the handle by unscrewing the screw on the end of it (yours may have a cap that needs to be popped off), then use a wrapped wrench to remove the nut.

Take pictures of what you find, usually a decayed washer and/or packing if there have been previous repair attempts.

Put the handle back on and gently wiggle/unscrew as though you were turning on the faucet to loosen the stem. Once it is able to go past the normal on position it should come out easily - this was the hardest part - looking at it you'd have sworn this was all one piece. We used pb blaster and a needle to break up and remove the grime.

Once we got the stem out we cleaned everything, and tracked down the appropriate washers/screws. Skip the big box stores and go directly to a plumbing supply if you have a truly old faucet like we did.

Place the new washer after thoroughly cleaning off the old gunk (tweezers, q-tips, whatever it takes)

Screw in either the original screw if it was in good condition, or a new brass screw

Coat the stem and threads in the lube, this will make the handle easy to turn.

Use the handle to screw the stem back into the seat

Neatly wrap the packing

Use thread dope and carefully place the nut over the packing, then fully tighten.

After the last nut has been tightened, reinstall the handle, making sure it's positioned in it's desired off positioned before screwing it back in.

If there are any other leaking connections unscrew and pack/use thread dope as necessary.

Smile, you're done. Take an "after" picture that doesn't show the item in question...

of syrup and cisterns

Things have been somewhat quiet around here the past couple of weeks, as family visits and a last minute Halloween get together here have not only kept us busy, but the cleaning required has prevented us from working on much of anything with risking undoing all our hard work. In the almost three years we've been here I think we've only sat in our dining room a half dozen times, so it was somewhat thrilling to sit and enjoy a Halloween dinner with friends, finally putting our big old house to good use (Guinness Beef Pie, Bourbon Slushies and Mulled Wine helped, I'm sure, as did a Nightmare before Christmas and Rocky Horror Picture Show double header projected on the wall)!

We've always taken Halloween quite seriously - for us it is The Holiday, so not being able to decorate (our bins are buried in the disaster that is the 3rd floor, not to mention it's a bit hard to work around decorations) has caused us more than a little grief. At least our house is more than terrifying enough on it's own, even with minimal decorating our neighbors told us that the majority of trick-or-treaters took one look at our house and kept walking. Guess that just means I get to keep the Costco bag of candy all to myself.

I'll also go ahead and blame our neighbor and good friend for the slow down in progress. We mentioned our cistern to him a few weeks ago, and his curiosity got the best of him.

We've looked in it before, but couldn't make too much out as it was filled with water. We were hoping to find out where the overflow was located, as well as which gutters still fed into it. As it turns out, he used to work for a pool company, and now that it's fall they were happy to loan him a monster pump that got it drained in just a few hours. What we learned is that it's a somewhat circular vaulted brick cistern, about 10 feet in diameter and 12 feet deep. The water was crystal clear (although there's a few inches of silt in the bottom), and it looks like three downspouts still feed into it, all of which are partially clogged with small roots which may explain some of the moisture in the basement.

We also learned that our hips are bigger than they seem - it's lucky that we brought out a tape measure before trying to climb in or else we'd have had a real Augustus Gloop situation on our hands... Luckily we have a very tiny cousin, but I'm still inordinately disappointed that I won't be able to get down there myself (it may be the perfect excuse for a diet).

The rain we've had the past few days will make borrowing the pump again necessary before anyone gets down there though... Judging by the fact that it's in excellent condition I doubt there's any cool stuff to find, but I'd like to take a pruner to those roots and get a better idea about an overflow. We were able to see the pipe in the bottom of the cistern that went into the house. For those not familiar with how cisterns work (or at least not familiar with how "we think" ours worked) - the copper gutters and downspouts flowed into the cistern, which connected to a pipe that flowed to a pump in the basement. This hand pump pumped water into a smaller cast iron cistern in the attic, from which our plumbing was fed via gravity. Thus an 1886 house that seems to have always had indoor plumbing.

that's the cistern on the left, you can see the disconnected pipe

None of this is particularly interesting I know, but look, we're starting to plan the front porch! The syrup made for a great gazebo stand in . . .