This Damn House

I wish all the work on this project was photo-worthy, because those are the tasks I find satisfying and motivational: tasks involving the completion of something physical, where at the end I can look at it and say to myself: yes, nice job.

Today's task(s) is/are phone calls and emails: to handymen, plumbers, landscapers, glaziers and masons. Following up on prior calls, scheduling appointments, getting quotes and estimates, etc. Important to do, perhaps even more important than installing a light or pulling down a shelf.

But at the end of the day, I have nothing concrete (heh) to show for the effort, and I'm left feeling frustrated and dissatisfied.

Apparently the genius who installed the tile in our bathroom didn't have Teh Intarweb or he (no doubt) would have known that you never grout the joint between tiling and bathtub.

Since Teh Intarweb wasn't invented in 500 BC when this tub was installed, Genius Boy (the kindest of the names I muttered as I was sitting in the bathtub with a chisel and mallet for 2 hours this morning) in his innocence grouted the joint. Which means every time someone steps into the tub, or leans against the wall, or changes the temperature of the area (like when you, y'know, take a shower) the grout (which is really a form of cement, which is, as you know if you've ever stubbed your toe on the stoop, rather rigid) cracks. No, seriously, did you know? Grout cracks!

So this morning's relaxing task of scraping out some caulk (which I am now an expert in) turns out to be a blister-raising hair-pulling screwdriver-dulling Sisyphean nightmare.

Nonetheless, I seem to have made some geological headway. A good solid scrub leaves the bathtub looking downright lovely.

Hmm, okay, maybe not so much. Still, I will give it the rest of today to dry, and tomorrow...The Caulking!

Mr. TDH took the sundry offspring to visit some friends for the weekend while I was to be working. And work I did! I haven't gotten a work-out like this in ages!

It is totally depressing that about 1/3 of the work turns out to be irrelevant. (Well, not totally...truth is the grout was leaking and making a mess in the basement. Nice to put a stop to that, making the re-glaze project less urgent.) So here I cheer myself with a list of useful accomplishments for the weekend:

• Cleaned the kids' room top to bottom, and made some headway in organizing it. Also threw away tons of stuff I'm hoping they won't miss. Shhhh, don't tell.
• Three loads of dishes and four loads of laundry, washed, dried and put away.
• Freecycled several items, including giving about a ton of old bricks to a guy who is building a re-used brick walk to save energy. Rock on.
• Stripped off the ugliest pink wallpaper you ever did see in preparation for the continuation of Project Re-do The bathroom:

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Who the heck wallpapers a bathroom?!? What were they thinking? "You know hon, we should do our bit against the global mold shortage by dedicating our bathroom as a mold nursery and preserve"? Or maybe "The 'distressed' look is so in style in clothing and furniture, don't you think it would be totally hip to have a room done in peeling pink paper?"

I've had contractors and workmen fail to return my calls, return my calls but fail to show up for appointments, show up for estimates but never call me back, tell me my job was too big or too small or they were too busy, etc. But in all my years of being a home owner, I have never actually been rejected.

Until last week.

Based on a recommendation from a friend, we asked a handyman to do some work for us. He came out to the house and spent about a half hour, clipboard in hand, going through the house with us, as we pointed out areas we wanted his help with -- doors that needed adjusting, windows that needed insulating, mechanical items that needed fixing -- and he made some suggestions and comments about it, took some notes. He seemed to know his stuff. At the end of the visit he told us his rate ($60 an hour), which we agreed to, and he said he'd call with some estimates and to schedule time to do the work in a few weeks when he had time. Fine.

A week goes by with no word from Mr. Ferris. (Workmen who come out and never get back to us at all is not atypical, and is a whole separate rant.) So I called and left a message: "Hey, you were out last week, we'd still like to get an estimate for the work, give us a call back."

Later in the day he calls back and the conversation went like this:

He: "Yeah, so...you asked for an estimate. I'm sorry but the kind of work you are looking for doesn't really lend itself to estimation. I won't really know how long it takes until I start."

Me: "Okay, I understand that, it's just odd jobs. Perhaps we can just go hourly and see how much we can get done in some set number of hours. I'm sure we have several days worth of work."

He: "Well...*awkward pause*...the thing is, I'm really busy and it may be quite some time before I can get out there, so if the work's urgent, I might not be a good person to do the work."

Me: "Ah. Well, some of the work is more urgent than the rest. Perhaps we could find someone else to do some of the more urgent jobs, but we'd really like your help with tasks x, y and z because you sounded particularly skilled and knowledgeable on those areas."

He: "Well...er...the thing is...um....there would be no way I could get to it until October, maybe later."

Me: "I understand, that's okay. Can we schedule it for November then?"

He: "Well, ah, sorry, I have to wash my hair that night maybe you should find someone else to do the work."

Me: "Uh..."

He: "Tell you what, how about I give you a call next month if I have some free time, okay? Bye."

Whoa! Denied! Shot down by handyman! I am slain!

There's a small hardware store in our town (an Ace franchise, technically) which is very convenient, but has nowhere near the prices or selection of a mega-store like Home Depot (the nearest of which is a 20 minute drive from our house). In general, we've gone to Home Depot for those several-hundred-dollar shopping trips for lumber and the like, but we do try to patronize the smaller local business, just on principle...but also on the theory that small, local hardware stores can offer quality personal service and advice that soulless big box stores cannot.

I put this theory to the test recently.

The issue was that I was installing a light fixture that didn't quite fit how it needed to. To make it work, I needed to to find a bolt that was longer than the one included in the kit, but that still fit the Fancy Decorative Nut provided. I brought both the bolt and the Fancy Decorative Nut to the hardware store, but was stymied by row upon row upon stack upon stack of tiny drawers of fasteners, whose obscure labeling and numbering scheme was Greek to me. What the heck is a 1/2x13x3 Flange Bolt Grade 8? Or would I rather have a 5/16x1-1/2 Hex Lag Bolt Coarse Zinc? Uhhhhh....

I helplessly bring my nut and my bolt to the nearest store employee, a kindly seeming older gent who looks like a veritable archetype of the Helpful Hardware Guy.

"Helpful Hardware Guy," says I, "I need this bolt here (*points*) but about a half inch longer. Can you help me?"

HHG: "Fasteners are in aisle 5."
Me: "Yes, I've been to aisle 5, but I'm kind of lost. Could you help me?"

HHG accompanies me to aisle 5. "What size bolt do you need?" he asks. Unable to meet his eyes, I admit my shameful ignorance of nuts and bolts and lack of knowledge of the specific characteristics of the bolt I need. "Like this one, but a little longer," I repeat. "Is it metric or standard?" he asks. Again, I shrug my shoulders helplessly. My face is flushed with shame.

He starts rummaging around amongst the nuts. He tries several onto my bolt and eventually finds one that goes on. "Here you go," he says, satisfied, handing me the nut. "Well, no" I say uncertainly, "it doesn't really fit. It goes on, yes, but it isn't a snug fit. See how it wiggles about? And really, it isn't the nut I need, it's a bolt that fits this Fancy Decorative Nut."

Adopting a tone generally reserved for mentally challenged 4 year olds, he says "If you want to find a bolt of a matching size, you have to go through all the nuts, trying them on until one fits; once it does, read the drawer and you'll know what size bolt you have."

Time for a different tack, I can see. So I take from a drawer a new bolt, that matches the nut he says is the right one, and try my Fancy Decorative Nut on it. My Fancy Decorative Nut falls right off. I gesture gently at the situation, and offer HHG my fancy nut.

HHG glares at my offering without taking it. "Well what size nut is that? Is it metric?" I repeat, again, that I know nothing about sizes, and that I would like his help in determining the answer to that very question.

Now I admit to a gross and startling ignorance of hardware. I can understand that HHG was probably struggling to cope with being faced with such a shocking paucity of knowledge. I attempt to mitigate the trauma but sharing what small wisdom I had gleaned. "I noticed," I say tentatively, "that all the nuts labeled something-something-6 were slightly too small, and all the ones something-something-8 were slightly too large. I know that I am but a humble disciple next to your mastery of Ancient Hardware Lore, but I'm wondering if there might be a something-something-7 bolt that would fit."

"Maybe it's metric," he says in a dry, dismissive tone. "Just try all the bolts until you find one that fits. Make sure you get the right pitch." And with that, he turns on his heel. "What's 'pitch?'" I start to say, but before I can utter the words, he's disappeared.

I resign myself to trying every bolt in every drawer, and I begin. Shortly before giving up in despair I discover, sitting on a small shelf between two racks of fasteners, a green plastic card with holes and notches. A bolt sizing gauge! An authentic Rosetta Stone of Fasteners! With this sacred text, I am able to identify and locate the correct bolt in a matter of seconds.

With a song in my heart, I proceed to the cashier and pay the $.89 for my purchase. As I am leaving the store, I encounter HHG, who asks if I ever found what I was looking for. Freed from the necessity of groveling for help and filled with the glow of my success, I respond with a flippant "Yes, even without your help."

"I was trying to help", HHG response snippily, "if you would have just stopped arguing with me."

"Arguing?! I...you.... *sputter*" was all I could manage.

I turned away, and then thought of something and turned back. "For future reference, if you had directed me to the sizing gauge on the shelf, it could have saved us both a lot of time."

"You just have to try things out until you find a fit."

"But I would have known where to start if I'd used the guage."

He gives me that the customer is always right even when she's a raving idiot condescending smile that only works when accompanied by a British accent from guys named Jeeves or Alfred. "Sure. Have a nice day."

Next time, I'm going to Home Depot.

Is it possible for a house to hate its owners? Or to not want to be fixed? I'm not usually prone to anthropomorphization or mysticism, but it's hard to come to any other conclusion to explain the fact that every single project in this house is about 10 times harder than it would be for a "normal" house!

Take, for instance, a simple plumbing repair: fixing a leaky bath tub fixture. There are a zillion pages on the web that show you how to do it. It's fairly straightforward.

Until the handle that's supposed to slide off...doesn't, and the only way to get it off is yank it with vice grips which shears the bolt that attaches to the inner workings of the valve necessitating replacing the entire damn thing, because the bolt had fused itself to the handle.

Okay, well that's just one thing, right? Except...the exact same thing happens to the other bathroom's faucet.

(Knowing this house's history, I wisely went ahead and ordered the whole valve set ahead of time at over $100 rather than the "repair kit" for $7 because I just knew it wouldn't be that easy. Unfortunately I just ordered one, figuring surely the "repair kit" would work on at least ONE of our tubs! Ha. ha. um, no.)

There's the fiasco with the light fixture....of course our house couldn't easily accept a standard sized light fixture!

Yesterday we accepted delivery of a new refrigerator (YAY) which, of course, couldn't be easily installed -- we needed to take a crow bar to an odd wooden shelf thingie someone had once thought should be be a good idea to place under the fridge, and the ice maker won't work until we get an adapter to connect it to our non-standard plumbing!

This is the story of this house since the day we moved in -- every step of the way, our house resists whatever we try to do. It's very discouraging.

(If I ever think I can stand the trauma, I will tell the tale of installing our washing machine! I think I need more therapy first, though.)

Why? Why would someone do this to poor innocent walls?

Why did these walls ever do to Previous Owner that he felt compelled to cover them with scratchy, knobby texture that looks like someone dropped a bag of sand in the paint bucket? Our best guess is: to cover up bad walls -- bumping taping, holes, or who knows what other remodeling sins.

We lived with this for years because we can't figure out an easy way to get rid of it. Now we have to figure out just how much of a liability walls that cause minor personal injury when you bang against them really is. And if a huge liability -- how to fix? And if not...do you think knobbies look good in the soft yellow we were planning on re-doing the living room in?

[Edit: I posted these questions over on DoItYourself.com...we'll see what they have to say.]

3:55PM: Okay, finished my work project and don't want to start a new one; I'll sign off a little early and do some house work.

4:00PM: How about a bit of plumbing? Finally got all the new bits to repair our other Temptrol shower faucet. Looks like the same job as last time; the handle is fused to the spindle. We gots a new handle, we gots a new spindle, we gots some washers, we gots the Nut Buster Wrench...we golden. I'll be in and out in half an hour.

4:25PM: Ahhh, piece o' cake. Tighten up the last bolt and turn the water to the house back on and.... *** A FOUNTAIN ERUPTS IN OUR BATHROOM *** %!)$*"!@#!!!

4:35PM: Frantic disassembly. Dammit, the hot seat (yes. hot seat. I'm not making that up) isn't seated. Maybe the cold seat, too. Probably corroded. Fortunately (anticipating this!) I had new hot and cold seats. Unfortunately, I've run out of time...

4:42PM: Hand tools and seats to Mr. TDH, browbeat Thing 1 and Thing 2 into baseball uniforms and head to practice. Relax and watch practice, confident in the knowledge that Mr. TDH is installing the new seats and all will be well soon.

4:57PM: Surprise call from doctor: that sleep study you are scheduled to do next month, involving spending the night in the hospital? We have an opening for, um, tonight. Can you be here at 8:30? "Oh sure," I respond, blithely.

5:01PM: Annoyed call from Mr. TDH: We don't have a hot seat removal tool (not making that up either) which it turns out is required to put a hot seat in, too. "Plus," he adds, "we have no water. I can't make dinner for Thing 3. I guess we'll go out for dinner and stop by the hardware store on the way."

5:06PM: Super annoyed call from Mr. TDH: "I can't take Thing 3 to dinner OR go to the hardware store. I have no car; remember? We took it to the shop yesterday and it isn't back yet." %!)$*"!@#!!! (Notice Thing 3 screaming like a banshee in the background, clearly about to die from hunger.)

6:00:01PM: When practice is over, drive like bat exiting hell to McDonald's (*shudder*) to acquire food nourishment caloric intake for family.

6:30PM: Arrive home with bag o' calories.

6:31:09: Finish consuming my portion of bag o' calories and jump on the computer looking for a local source for hot (and cold) seat removal tools.

6:39PM: Find a hardware store 20 minutes away that carries Temptrol parts. Note that it closes at 7. Shovel Mr. TDH into car.

6:41 PM: Call hardware store to check availability; find out it is out of stock. "We can special order it for you; have it here by, hmmm, Monday or so"

6:42 PM: Call Mr. TDH (now magically halfway there) to come back.

6:49 PM: Discover there's a distant Home Depot open late that may have the parts. Get ready to jump in the car and then remember: wait, I have a sleep study tonight! %!)$*"!@#!!!

7:30 PM: Turn on house water and watch the beautiful bathroom fountain flow while Things 1, 2 and 3 brush their teeth and pee (and flush! what a luxury. You just don't know how much you depend on running water until you don't have it.)

8:00PM: Finally identify a likely source for parts, just 15 minutes from our home. Note that they open at 9AM. Bookmark location.

8:01PM: Frantically pack stuff and head to hospital.

[Ellided: 13 exceptionally unpleasant hours involving 137 electrodes, a fast broken by a barium milkshake and an amount of radiation Ms. Curie would have found scary]

9:00AM: Arrive home, check bookmark, and dash out to plumbing supply store.

9:30AM: Arrive BACK home, hot seat removal tool, cold seat removal tool and a new cap assembly, costing about what it would have cost to replace the entire control online.

9:37AM: Discover that amidst our struggles with the hot seat yesterday, we managed to damage the shiny new spindle

9:38AM: Send Mr. TDH back to hardware store (too embarassed to show my own face)

10:20AM: Mr. TDH arrives home with new spindle.

10:30AM: PROJECT COMPLETE

Elapsed time: 18.5 hours to repair a leaky faucet

Surely this is some kind of record.

You know those tasks that terrify you?  The ones you've known were coming for months or years, and fill your days with dread and your nights with terror because you just know they are going to be hellishly hard?

Yeah.  My personal bugaboo was the beams holding the windows in the kids' bedroom.  They were stained and streaked and looked terrible.  but they are 15 feet high.    And over a newish carpet.  And before re-staining, they would need to have the existing stain somehow removed. 

So much was my dread of this project that 1) I procrastinated on it for years, and 2) I was so deeply in denial I failed to take any good "before" pictures.

But at last, the time arrived, and the time was this last weekend.  Saturday morning at the crack of dawn, we relocated the children and their furniture, laid down embarassing amounts of plastic on the floor, and began the long, tedious process of removing the stain.

The 72 hours following were too horrible to detail here until I process it in therapy and the Xanax kicks in to stop the panic attacks.  It was every bit as awful as I thought it would be and moreso.

So let me just present an "after" picture.

And here's a handy "how not to" tip for you:

No matter how much you object to using nasty stripper chemicals that release toxic VOCs into the environment, do not buy the eco-friendly non-toxic biodegradable citrus based stripping gel / floor wax / dessert topping.  Otherwise you will find, after spending 2 hours applying the gel, 4 hours letting it eat your wood, 4 hours trying to remove it with sponges, scrapers and steel wool, and 2 hours trying unsuccessfully to apply the stain over the remaining dessert topping residue, you will eventually declare defeat and buying different nasty VOC-releasing chemicals just to get the damn stuff off.   So, your choice: nasty toxic chemicals and a quick, easy job; or nasty toxic chemicals and a long, horrible, stinky job.

As if the sod we laid last year wasn't bad enough.

What price my conscience?

Mulch is good. Mulch keeps the soil moist and your plants' delicate roots warm in the winter. It prevents weeds and reduces erosion. And if it's organic mulch (rather than, say, gravel) it composts itself right there in your flower bed, adding its life force back into the system.

Here in New England we have an abundance of nature's own mulch: leaves. In our case, pounds and bushels and heaps of oak leaves. year after year, I raked leaves into the flower beds, spreading them around and patting them down to ensure an even coat. On top, a crisp, crunchy brown layer, reminiscent of bread crumb topping on a casserole. On the bottom, the moist fecund layer of decomposition.

Except that piles of leaves don't look like mulch / compost to your neighbors and potential buyers...they look like trash. They say "someone lives here who doesn't take care of her flower beds."

So this weekend I hauled out a metric buttload of oak leaves, both crispy brown and soft fertile black, and replaced them with shredded bark from some pine trees from who knows where, which had to be delivered by truck and then distributed by shovel and elbow grease. They too are breadcrumbs atop an eventual layer of composting ambrosia, but with a much higher carbon footprint and wear and tear on my back.

What's the point?

This evening I painted the hallway.

Normally I find painting a very satisfying task: once the job is done, it makes everything look so good!

But this is the second time I've painted this hallway in 4 months. The first time I turned 10 years of horror grey-once-was-white into pristine sunny yellow. This time I turned 4 months of horror brown-once-was-sunny-yellow into...pristine sunny yellow.

Actually it was still pristine sunny yellow except for a strip from 2 to 4 feet high the length of the hallway on both sides, which was filled with hand and finger prints the color of mud, grape jelly and Cheetos.

This painting task was decidedly less satisfying than the last time.

I had been hoping that this task on the to-do list would never rise to top priority but today my realtor, reporting on the open house, said "Comments were about 95% positive, which is great. Several people did comment on the hallway paint, though."

So much for escaping that one, eh?