Eighteen Digit Number

There's an obvious irony in this - but all I can see right now is suckage.

Like the rest of the country - I seized upon the falling mortgage rates to refinance. I missed a historically low interest rate by a day - thank you very much - but I got a rate that should make a difference in our finances.

The refi guy at the bank was email only - so buried under applications that they only processed them via the web, and promised to call you within two weeks. I was happy to snag the low rate, so I did what they said.

So it's the day of the closing and I'm looking at the paperwork and I see a name that gives me the creeps.

MERS.

Yes, that MERS. The one who holds more than 60 million of the country's mortgages, yet ignores state laws on the registration and foreclosing of mortgages. The company that breaks chain of title and damages the property rights of adjacent property holders.

Those guys.

I asked the title insurance employee (who was the only one there) if MERS had any role on our loan. They were like "No, no - they're just there to save you money on filing the paperwork."

And they do this in what capacity, relative to my loan?

The title insurance employee gave an answer that established that they had no idea what role MERS played on our loan - but that they were "certain" that everything was fine.

Now, you're the consumer with a bad feeling about this - but you know that the MERS voodoo causes problems when other problems emerge. If I pay my loan, MERS, role does not matter. But then you wonder what happens when my loan gets sold and re-sold? Will I know where to send my payments? Will the servicer stay the same?

And because the alternative is to scrap your re-fi - the one with the sweet rate - you sign. Because, scrapping the deal means you lose a good chunk of your closing costs - and you honestly don't know if your chosen lender has any options that don't include MERS.

So... y'know. F$&#!

But in the back of your head, you're thinking. MERS is seriously in the news lately. Losing cases left and right. Telling its members to list MERS in an alternate role.

Maybe it won't be like that - and again - I pay my bill, things will be fine, right? 

Enter the Loan Servicer - a company called PHH. PHH?

Never heard of them.

Googling, I find:

David beats Goliath: Homeowner wins $21MILLION payout from mortgage firm in dispute over credit rating 

In which an Army NCO paid PHH by direct deposit every month - until PHH decided to ignore the fact they had his money and notified the credit agencies that he was a deadbeat.

This is the kind of thing that gets me all worked up. Not that my loan will go this route, but my state has two lawsuits this year against PHH where PHH botched the paperwork and asked the courts to let them take people's homes anyway.

I call PHH to make sure they have my first payment and they've never heard of me. Even though their name is on the paperwork, even though I give them my loan number and SSN - they have no idea who I am. Mind you, this is over a month after our loan closed.

Anybody ever had an argument with a bank where you were trying to convince them that you owed them money? Pretty freaking surreal.

PHH insist I call my previous lender, because they have no record of me.

My prior lender agrees that the paperwork is backed up, but that I should send my first payment and PHH will "hold onto it" until the loan gets set up in their system. Because, hey, what could go wrong, right?

Then I go poking around and find a search engine for MERS properties. And yes, my property is listed in it.

There's a note date, a listing of my prior lender and an long string of digits that make up my MIN: My  MERS Identification Number.

I have been assimilated.

My local customer-friendly bank has sold me to the corporate wolves.

Great.

Just great.

Big Pair of Brass Ones

It’s 7:20 on a weekend.

I’m coming home with the kids – about to reach the house door when I hear it:  
Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I’m like WTF is that?

I’m standing in the garage, the kids are coming up behind me and the noise is pulsing, but constant. Sounds like a machine that’s straining to do something and failing.

Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt! Bddddt!

I open the door thinking something’s wrong with the dishwasher, ’s the beater arm stuck?

No. Dishwasher’s off. Sounds coming from the right and-

-there’s water on the hall floor, right in front of the bathroom. Water flowing out of the bathroom.

Damn.

I scramble into the bathroom door and see a geyser of water shooting out of where the faucet’s cold water shutoff used to be. It’s spraying easily 7 feet into the air and the walls have water stains on them. There’s standing water on the bathroom’s tile floor and on my hardwood floor in the hallway.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

I fling open the vanity doors under the sink and go for the shutoff valves. I’m congratulating myself on having the valves installed a year ago (for reasons beyond my understanding all three bathrooms had no local shutoffs – I could not see that as a good thing long term, so we paid a plumber to put in shutoffs when he put in our new faucets).

Two cranks on the cold side’s valve and the water stops. We go from a thundering geyser to silence punctuated by steady dripping sounds.

Dripping down.

I go down the basement stairs and see water dripping through the ceiling tiles. The basement ceiling seems to be snakebit when it comes to water.  Remembering how I’d managed to spray water over them two years ago -  I’m like: here we go again.

I walk across the sponge-like carpeting and go into the finished half of the basement. Water is dripping through the light fixture nearest me and the floor is totally soaked.

I tell the kids to stay upstairs and I begin flinging the sodden mass of stuffed animals and pillows into the uncarpeted side of the basement.

Damn.

The downstairs ceiling is not merely wet, it’s soaked. The ceiling fixture is now an inverted fountain, and our laundry pile is now a sponge. I call E and ask her to come home with a shop vac (wondering for the thousandth time why I got rid of our shop vac when we moved), we’re going to have a long weekend cleaning this mess up.

As an afterthought, I call my insurance company. Their WATS line tells me they are closed, but I can report my claim online. I do. An hour later, they call me to tell me they are sending a water remediation expert to my house – that night.

I’m like Uh, okay. An hour later I have a guy in my house evaluating what I need to have done, and his team shows up with serious gear an go to town.  The remediation guy tells me they’re going to set up fans and dehumidifiers in my house. “It’s going to be loud. For days. It will also raise the temperature in your house by about 15 degrees. For days.”

Uh, okay.

The guy is right on both counts, we have big machines blaring in our house for four days. It's 80 degrees in the house and that's with windows wide open to pull in 60 degree air from the outside.

Bleah.

But enough of the what, let's cut to the why. The cold water shut off on my bathroom tap shot failed.

See it here in the picture?

Yeah, that handle is supposed to be attached. As in here:

Inside the cold water handle, still held in by its screw, are the valve and the valve nut. So the handle shot off because the valve somehow allowed water to get past it and propel it up and off the supply pipe.

I'm thinking I have two more faucets just like this. Was this just one bum faucet? or a failed design?

My faucet is the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series (no way to tell at this point and the documentation is identical for both). I bought three of these at Home Depot about a year ago.

I get my paperwork and head over to a local plumber. He's set up a storefront so you can walk in and get expert advice and good parts.

I plunk down my documentation and the part and ask him what the heck?

The plumber says "Well, if you buy a Ford anywhere - its a Ford. But if you buy American Standard, it matters where you get it from. These box stores lean on their suppliers to lower their prices - and the suppliers like American Standard are shipping a lower cost version that isn't as good as their regular stuff."

I checked the American Standard website, looks like my faucet (American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet. 8125 Series or 8124 Series) is only available through Home Depot. According to the plumber, they are total garbage.

He's like, "I'm betting there are going to be an awful lot of lawsuits when these things start failing all over the place. You should save your parts and give them to your insurer. They might be able to get your money back through subrogation."

I'm half listening, half thinking about the two ticking time bombs I left sitting in my upstairs bathrooms.

The plumber digs into his parts cabinet and pulls out a valve with a brass valve nut. "That's the part you need. The valve is basic, but the valve nut is the key piece. Brass isn't always brass. You'll see this bright yellow stuff they call brass but it's just a piece of crap that's waiting to fail on you."

I blow $78 on four valves and four valve nuts, about what I paid for two of my three (useless) American Standard faucets from Home Depot. Swapping them out turns out to be easy enough, but (oh hilarity!) one of the old valve nuts cracks in half while I'm taking it out. Could have had a second flood in my house.

Nice.

So here's the offending object:

On the left is the valve and valve nut in the American Standard Cadet Centerset Faucet (available from Home Depot). As you can see, the valve nut it is coated with calcium carbonate, which means the nut's been getting wet a lot. When the water evaporates, the calcium carbonate remains and crusts things up.

More important than that is the large crack you see in the middle of the valve nut.

For comparison, here's the valve and valve nut I bought to replace it:

New valve nut = good. Old valve nut = total piece of crap.

I don't have a engineering degree or industrial forensic tools, but my kitchen scale gave me a big indicator of how useless the original valve nut was.

Here's the original nut American Standard / Home Depot supplied:

It weighs 1 eighth of an ounce.

The new one I got from the plumber?

It weighs three times as much.

I'm insured, and we'll be re-doing the bathroom, but I'm out my $500 deductible and the major hassle of losing a bathroom for a few weeks while this all gets sorted.

Now, I know I was buying a faucet based on price, but I went with a known brand at a big store.

Which just goes to show you how utterly meaningless those pieces of information are when it comes to quality. Consumer reports doesn't do faucets (there are just too many models) and even if they did, the model numbers would turn over and rapidly make them obsolete.

I have to say I look at Home Depot merchandise very differently now. All the other parts on those faucets were none too solid - and when I see a boxed up toilet that says "Contains everything you need, no tools needed!" right below a giant "Sale!" sign - I'm thinking and what did you turkeys cheap out on to make this price, eh?

Like dad always said: Sometimes the cheapest is the most expensive.

Manna From Heaven

It's a truism of home ownership that the prior inhabitants of your home were wrong about a great many things. Our last home had lousy windows, bad attic ventilation and drainage issues that boggled my mind. Didn't these people have EYES?? I would exclaim. HOW could they let this go??

The answer of course is, easily. Selling the house is easier than fixing a great many problems. I solved our old houses drainage by band-aiding it until I could sell. Months after we sold, I ended up getting a tour of the old house from the new owner. The guy was in the process of completely renovating the kitchen and wanted me to see the new stairs he'd installed. As an aside he mentioned fixing the backyard drainage (by drilling through over six feet of clay - running two 4" pipes to the front and installing a french drain). He rattled off the numbers on how much water would pile up in the backyard after a typical deluge (something in the tens of thousands of gallons) and mentioned that after he finished, his neighbors no longer got water in their basements.

Then he showed me the table he was making out of the scrap wood of the old kitchen door and leftover stair parts.

I want to be that guy. The guy who leaves a house in a condition where the new owners say Wow, we SO lucked out! The last owners really fixed this place up."

Better than we found it. Just once.

So we've made some reasonable headway with our current place. Did the kitchen - got the landscaping/drainage out of the way - but there's been a looming issue we've been putting off because it's fabulously expensive.

The roof.

Much like our old place, we were told by our inspector that the roof would need to be replaced in the short term (3-5 years) and two winters have demonstrated beyond any doubt that we have inadequate ventillation.

In our heads, a re-roof job was going to cost us twelve grand or more. Not because we'd done any research, but because our experience has taught us that life sucks and twelve large seemed like the minimum number it would take to utterly suck.

We began getting bids. We called The Man (from our kitchen job) and a few others and the numbers were considerably better. Still expensive - but something we could dig deep to do. We joke to our friends how we're praying for a hailstorm before we get going, but we're going to have to get this done. Our roof is not merely old and badly ventilated, it leaks. A leak that was disclosed as a "fixed" issue by the prior owners - but clearly and obviously has been leaking for some time.

I keep picturing dad's disapproval for my having put in a kitchen without fixing the roof first. Roof! FIRST! You want your fancy kitchen to get wet? Somehow, this is the opposite of motivation. I put off scheduling the job until after the Norway trip. Now here we are in fall, and I'm yet to get something scheduled.

And then... magic:

That, my friends - is a hailstone. One of surely thousands that hurled themselves against my house a few weeks ago. Sounded like a freight train, woke us in the middle of the night. I was positively giddy at the thought that this could help defray the costs of a roof.

With our luck, it wouldn't be much (the roof is old) but anything is something, right?

In the morning, I eyeballed the roof and saw nothing out of order. Downer. The roof vents had serious dents, but I don't know if that means they'd pay for the vent replacement or what. Having never put in a claim for this sort of thing - ya kinda expect the worst.

The adjuster came last Saturday - I wasn't going to be home, but he was early so I was there when he started.

"Sir?" He was over on the side of my house.

I walked over thinking of the disastrous state of my side lawn - and waiting for him to tell me "you can't claim this."

Instead, he points to a length of vinyl rain gutter that looked like it had chunks bitten off of it.

"That's hail there. And this siding is totalled."

WTF?

At this point two thoughts run through my head:

1) I haven't been on this side of my house in three weeks?; and
2) Score!!!!!

I'm unsure what the proper decorum is for dealing with an adjuster. Will he be offended if I whoop with joy and ride horsey in a circle right there? Should I wait??

I opt to focus on reaction one: "Wow! If I'd have seen those holes - I would have called sooner!"

The Adjuster takes a piece of chalk and rubs it sideways across my siding. What should (on undamaged siding) look like a wide blue band looks like polka dots with a blue background.

Siding. Not even what I was calling about or hoping for. The back of my house is the same. Blue with polka dots, over and over.

He goes up on the roof and I have to get the boy ready for his soccer game. We're heading out and I call up "How's it look?"

He snorts at me, as if to say: You really need to ask?

"Totalled. Good time for new roof, too, this one's about done. Good thing you have a replacement policy, eh?"

I have a replacement policy? I am soOOOoooo resisting the urge to go all horsey in a circle.

He throws me a few pieces of the shingles to drive home the point that my roof is kaput and there's no better time to get a new one - especially one that my insurance will pay for.

I bite back euphoria and thank him for his time. "Wow," is the best I can do.

Incredibly, my slow rolling on this particular item has paid off. If we'd have done the roof first thing, we'd have been out of pocket and probably had to cut corners on the kitchen.

Instead, we're going to reroof, ventilate, fix the damn leak and reside with insulation.

Procrastination: Boo yah, baby!

Get off your ass

Every house has its share of projects. My house has its share and a few other houses' shares as well.

I've learned two things from my experience with Five Minute Jobs:

1. Simple jobs almost always get more complicated; and
2. Simple jobs that stay simple are merely bait to lure you into future disasters

You add that to my list of things I haven't done to the house - and you have a recipe for inaction.

I'll explain.

Back when we bought our house - the house inspection identified a number of things we needed to do to the place. I added my own items to it and turned it into a pretty hefty list.

Long lists are pretty intimidating by themselves, but long lists of home jobs are really lists of lists.

Any one item turns into countless more detail. A list of things to do before you start. Tools you will need to rent or purchase. Parts and supplies you will need to buy. Research you will need to do.

And then of course - the list of stuff you will need to do when you actually start the job and find out your initial plan just isn't going to work.

The knowledge that each and every item could balloon into a total nightmare is a powerful motivation to put stuff off.

But some jobs can't be ignored.

The patio project was a bit of a watershed moment. The patio was a must. It was a giant mud bog behind our house - and (to my mind) was going to be far too expensive to pay somebody to put in a brick patio for us.

Had to be done. Hiring somebody is out of bounds.

This is not to say I haven't ignored other jobs like that before, but the patio was a job was something else, too. It was accessible. It didn't have to be done in a hurry. And starting it didn’t require me to turn my entire house upside done.

So I took the plunge. And I accidentally learned something obvious about home jobs.

Yeah, I screwed up. And took too long. But after I put down the last brick, I got to go back to my list and write the words DONE after the patio job.

Hadn't done that in awhile. And having something on the list that was done was a big help.

I think of my dad's ability to fix damn near anything and I think I get it now. My dad was tenacious, sure - but his defining trait in this sphere was his total lack of inertia. It drove him crazy when stuff didn't work properly, or was done wrong. I have that trait - but I have inertia. Lots of it.

But I'm stubborn, too. And I know if I start a job - giving up will bug me beyond my ability to deal.

So: I get off my @ss, - stuff will get done. My list has helped prove that to me.

Now I keep a google doc with my list so I can access it anywhere. Everything on it is Active, Pending, or Done.

Active jobs have to-dos by them and dates when they were updated.
Pending jobs are supplemented with supporting data (needed parts, contact information for vendors)

and Done jobs? They're there so I can review them and see that stuff got done. Motivate myself to do more stuff.

Tenacity will get me out the other side if I just start. And I can always hire a pro if need be. But putting stuff off that affects quality of life - is robbing me and my family of quality of life.

And I'm done putting up with crap like that.

Slope

What now, smart guy?

Having started out auspiciously, I realized the patio project was me running against type. This promised to be a large project and let's face it, I am not meticulous.

I went and got another of those Ten Pound Books - y'know the ones that make everything easy?

Anyway here's what I was looking at:

Top down, here's the patio as the landscapers left it.

 

That'd be eight inch thick concrete footing walls  surrounding a big pile of sand.

This was an improvement over what was there to begin with. Here's the original cross-section:

That's bricks on top of a concrete slab. The level of the bricks was higher than the sill plate.

As the slope of the bricks was dead level, it trapped water next to the sill plate:

As I'd said before, water + wood = carpenter ant damage.

That'd be foam insulation over our sill plate, under the door to
the patio - or an ant farm, depending on how you look at it.

 So what I need to do is to get the level of the patio down - and correct the slope. Setting aside the concrete footings for a moment, I'd think all I need to do is slope the dirt away from the house and lay down some bricks.

But Ten Pound Books is telling me that this is not so. You need to lay down a base for the bricks to sit on. A base (the book helpfully tells me) consists of four inches of compacted gravel, topped by an inch of sand.

This means E and I spend a hour digging down half a foot and plopping all that dirt in a big heap. Then I go pricing gravel. Gravel comes in 50 pound bags and runs about $2.50 a bag.

How many bags to I need? My patio is 11'x14' and I need to fill it to a four inch depth. The bag gives me a helpful equation:

W x L x .666 = number of bags needed to make a 4" depth.

Er... that's 103 bags. Or two and a half tons.

The patio has three sides: 1 is blocked by our fence, 1 is blocked by two hastily moved pallets of bricks and (yes) the last is blocked by a hastily pitched pile of sand. And I have to move 100 bags of gravel through this mess.

Not meticulous? Check.

Lesson learned. I shell out $250 for gravel and get it delivered on two pallets in the garage. I ask the guy to put it as far into my garage as possible, because every foot closer is one less foot I have to haul 100 fifty pound bags.

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the base layer of dirt to slope away from the house. This is perhaps the most maddening part of the process. Trying to get a fix on true level is not as easy as it sounds.

I start with the concrete footing walls. They actually are level, but I spend a lot of time second guessing this fact. I pound wooden dowels into the sand, tie string between them and adjust them over and over until they are level.

Then my children trip over the string. And I adjust them. Then they move the sticks. And I replace them. Then they trip over them. Eventually, I use the string to mark out equal units of distance on a grid and measure down from them with a square. I plot the distance at five points across four parallel lines to make the slope.

If it sounds stupid, it is - and the only dignity I can salvage is to say that I knew my first efforts on slope would suck. So doing all this on the lowest level of dirt is pretty much just practice. I'm putting gravel on top of this, dirt on top of that and then I'll be doing the real slope on the bricks.

I expected this to be terrible - and I was right. I manage a grade of a 1.5" inch drop across the 11' width of the patio. Grade is a pretty grandiose term, it looks like a moonscape.

Enter the gravel.

I have an awesome wheelbarrel, so the plan is to put it on the other side of the back door of the garage. I'll lug the bags into it through the door, then wheel them over to the pit and dump them in. A few mishaps shows I can handle about 4 bags per trip.

The family's out helping spread the stuff - and the Boy loves the fact that he can stab the bags with a hand shovel to open them. It's actually a bit disturbing to watch him go all Norman Bates on them, but he's happy and the gravel is getting spread out.

It takes a few weekends, but between other obligations and errands, all the gravel gets laid out.

I then repeat and refine my slope-measuring technique. I snap chalklines on the insides of the footing walls and spray paint them so they'll stay. Then I take an eight-foot 2x4 to use in smoothing out the gravel.

It actually goes pretty well - about the time I'm finishing up I'm eyeballing the gravel and it just looks wrong. The sides are tracking to the slope lines I painted - but the middle of the gravel looks bad. I then realize something that any carpenter could tell you right off:

There is no such thing as a perfectly straight 2x4. I've been leveling my gravel with a particularly warped board - and depending on which side was down when I worked I was building a mound or digging a hole.

I go at it again using my metal level exclusively. It's four feet long and it takes more than twice as long as the board. And it still looks terrible. Having vowed to do this right, I'm starting to feel the familiar urge to say "Good enough."

I convince myself that the differences are sleight enough to be corrected with the next level: sand. It's not a cop out. Honest.

Then (sayeth the book) I need to get a plate compactor to smash down the gravel. Renting expensive, heavy pieces of machinery is not my favorite thing - but the book commands. I obey.

Running the compactor over gravel is surprisingly anti-climactic. It weighs a freaking ton - and since a full run over the patio takes ten minutes, I feel a bit let down when it's all over. Also, the compactor alternates between compacting the gravel and plowing deep furrows in it.

So much for my slope. I'll need to do a lot of patching with the sand.

SAND. Glorious sand. Last of the layers before I get to put down brick. Huzzah! Packing down the sand and getting slope has been something I've been looking forward to. The Book recommends laying down 1" diameter lengths of PVC pipe, then filling dirt up to just cover them.

This proves to be FAR easier than any of the insanity I'd tried before. Having two pipes 4' apart, I can set the slope on the pipes, shovel dirt between them - then use the metal level to scrape off the excess and presto! A level slope of dirt. No boards, no chalklines, and no goddamned string.

I doubt there was any need to seriously grade the previous levels now. Whatever.

So now - I start with the bricks. Remember, there are these footings around the outside of the patio - so I (in my infinite wisdom - decide that I will start on the far end, away from the house. AND I will make the bricks flush with the top of the concrete footings.

Like so:

 

The logic being - I don't have to move the concrete, and I certainly don't want people tripping over the footing every time they go to step off my patio.

This goes well for awhile. The Book has recommended that I use a rubber mallet to drive the bricks down into the sand. This is quite satisfying and soon I've got about 30 square feet of bricks down. I've been checking their slope like a demon. They are flat, they are even - they have the correct amount of slope.

I am pleased.

And then I have E out to look at them - and she points out what happens when I extend that perfect slope a bit:

Like the complete idiot I am - I'd forgotten that this slope will put the top of the bricks at the house higher than the sill plate. I will have done all this work - and I will have simply replicated the original problem. Oh, the bricks will have slope for a change - but I wasn't going to half ass this job.

-and that's right where I was headed.

So, I'll need to start with the bricks nearest the house, and slope down. This will put the top row farthest from the house below the level of the concrete footing.

Which will mean, I will have to take the top few inches off the concrete footings:

In cross section, that doesn't look so bad, but when you consider that the slope will be noticable over three feet or so - and that the footings surround the patio on three sides - you're talking about a lot of concrete.

That's the top three inches off a 14' length, and two more lengths of 8' each. Last time I used a jackhammer - I just about broke myself. Most people think jackhammer, they think of the noise. I think about the weight. Picking them up from the hole they just dug, setting them down. Doing it hundreds of times.

Hell.

E, naturally has the right idea though. A concrete saw.

That makes a lot of sense - make lengthwise cuts, then cross cut at regular intervals and bash off big chunks with a chisel. It'll be easy!

Renting a saw is a snap. MG puts us on to a great place to rent one. Their first question surprises me, though: "You want to rent a blade?"

Doesn't the saw come with one?

"No. The diamond edge blades for cutting concrete are a separate rental. We bill you for the weekend use, plus $2.50 per thousandth of an inch wear."

Uh... okay. Anything I should know to minimize the wear?

"Keep it out of the sand."

I think of the gouts of sand surrounding my footings - and resolve to do a lot of digging beforehand.

The patio

When we moved into our new digs, E and I made an unofficial vow that this house would be the house we did not phone it in on.

If there was an issue, it would get solved. The right way.

Sure, I got a laundry list of things that aren't done yet, but the gist is simple: You make a list, do it in any order - but anytime something gets crossed off - it isn't coming back for a loooong time.

With that in mind, we tackled the landscaping. This had been an issue in the previous house - we were the low spot and collected the neighborhood's surplus rainwater. It sucked.

This time around, we're in the middle of a hill - something I liked, but didn't fully appreciate. If you're on the side of a hill, you naturally have a hill taking away all the water from three sides of your house.

It's that fourth side you need to worry about. The uphill side. Done right, its water is diverted to either side and thence to the bottom of the hill. Done badly, you inherit all the rainwater landing between the side of your house and the top of the hill.

Our fourth side? Done badly.

So we called in the experts and had them re-grade 3/4ths of our lawn. It was expensive, annoying and took a long time. But we wanted it crossed off.

And so it was - except for one thing.

The patio.

The people who used to own the house (let's call them..ah - The Doofuses) they'd put in a brick patio right outside of the addition. Trouble is, they'd put it in dead level. And pretty high up - it stopped right below the level of the siding. Meaning, water easily sloped against the house and was trapped between the wooden sill plate and the brick/concrete of the patio.

If you were water and had the choice of going through concrete, or going through wood, which would you choose?

Hint: Not the concrete

First landscaping guy we had look at our yard told us we'd have to tear out the patio and put it in lower. "It's a Pandora's Box you got right there. No telling what you'll find when you start digging."

Yes, no telling.

Well, we paid the guys to dig it up - so I'm telling.

We found a concrete slab about 6" thick, resting atop 8" thick foundation walls that ran over four feet down into the ground. We also found carpenter ant damage. Lots and lots of carpenter ant damage. Luckily it wasn’t structural, so all we needed to do was seal it up and we’d be good, assuming we got the drainage issue solved.

Originally, we'd asked the landscaping guys to tear out the concrete, when they told me that would involve digging a canyon and cost thousands more I asked them what the structural threat was.

"Zero. You can put in your patio once we take off the top slab and you're good. All you'll need is a base to put the bricks on and we'll set that up for you."

(I have this ghost of a memory where they even offered to have their bobcat scrape off the top few inches of the remaining patio footing. But since that would be supremely ironic given what happened later, I’m going to presume I’m mistaken. For the record, we’re going to say they refused to help. Laughed at me and refused my money. It’s just simpler that way.)

Oh. Okay - I thought. I envisioned my landscaping done and a perfectly smooth, properly graded layer of sand awaiting an afternoon's work of replacing the patio bricks.

In the grand tradition of vendor-client relations, there was a bit of a miscommunication.

The vendor did remove the top slab completely, that was good.
But his version of "setting up a base" for my bricks was to put my 700 bricks on two pallets atop a heap of sand.

Meaning, not only would I have to level and grade my own sand - I would first have to move 700 bricks to one side. And then I could start.

Nice.

Pop quiz

Let's say you poked your head up in your attic and saw this:

What would you do?

Basketball homecoming

Nothing wears off faster than a vacation.

This past weekend was the basketball weekend (a three to four day man-fest of sports, vulgarity, and red meat), and it lived up to its reputation of being a sort of out of body experience. Go where you want, eat where you want, say what you want – all the things that parenthood denies you. G was our host and supplied the venue – his man-cave has been upgraded to a level that is downright civilized – and we supplied the sloth.

We ended the last night by eating our weight in roasted dead animals – and then watching Jack Nicholson terrorize Boston and DiCaprio on G’s massive TV.

Mobsters, headshots and food-induced comas… ah paradise.

The suspension of reality can only last so long, and the simple act of driving home is enough to bring it  crashing back down on top of you.

I'd been late arriving at G's house, and it was suggested that I use my still-warm car to drive everyone out to brunch and burgers.

Seemed like a good idea until I realized that I still had two kid seats in the back and I hadn't cleaned the car in (oh, I don't know) a decade.

G and B gamely piled into the back and sat on a half-inch deep layer of Cheerios and muffin crumbs.

It being the basketball weekend, this nominated me as official whipping boy anytime we started talking about cars.

Fair enough, but on the way home, I'd already planned a response. The two car  seats had been taken out and were just piled in a heap in the back. As long as they're out, and the weather cooperates, I'd just clean  out the car when I got home.

Hit the ground running, I'm thinking. Half hour out of town, I'm remembering that I still need to change the oil (by the helpful nag-meter telling me EXACTLY how many miles over my oil life I currently am.) and my wipers need replacing.

Three things I can get right on. Clean the car, buy some wipers, change the oil.

At home, I start off on cleaning the car - the boy's dying to help out. His version of "clean the car" entails using his favorite outdoor tool: the garden hose. No harm in letting him try, he can spray water all over it if he wants - so I'm like okay.

The boy's reminding me that the hose doesn't work - and I remember that'd I'd shut off the water line to the outside faucet a month ago. For pretty much the same reason - we had a warm spell and the boy wanted to use the hose.

Funny, I don't remember draining the line afterwards... ah, no biggie.

I duck down into the basement and open the valve to the outside tap-

-and immediately hear the rushing, splattering sound of water jetting out of something.

It takes about a half second to register.

What's that about..? That's louder than it usually is...

I turn the valve off - the sound stops. Unconsciously, I open the valve again - some part of my brain wants to see if it happens again. It does.


Oh sh!t.

I close the valve and start heading upstairs to see if the water is spraying out of the (non-weatherized) faucet that passes for a spigot. On the way there, I hear dripping water in my finished basement room.

Water is dripping from a half dozen places in the drop ceiling - and three of them are directly over a loaded bookshelf.

Double sh!t

The drop ceiling is stapled in place and I can't find a putty knife because (OF COURSE) I left them wherever I last used them last. I grab a carpenter's square and start punching holes in the ceiling. E's freaking out about the books and I ask her to let the water out of the hose upstairs. The valve to the outside line is working, so only the water between the valve and the outside spigot is what we have to worry about. We let out what we can, we might save on some hassle.

E goes up and tells me no water is coming out of the hose. Great.

We bring buckets, towels and eventually manage to save the books with only eight or nine ceiling tiles torn down and perhaps three of them irrevocably damaged.

The boy's mad. He won't get to use the hose.

I'm positively seething. I'd left some water in the pipe and forgot to drain the pipe - so the last cold snap probably did that. Nice.

So, no hose on the front of the house - and I'll need to replace the ceiling in the basement.

I've been home for less than an hour.

Still - this problem will not worsen (I think) so I get back to the orignal plan of cleaning out the car. The boy's majorly gung ho - so this gets done really fast. Less than an hour, I have a clean car.

That leaves two more things to do. Wipers and the oil change.

Skip it, I'll do them tomorrow.

Three way

My house is cold.

I blame Borders.

I'm sure they'd disagree, but following the causal chain back a mere 48 hours find me looking at a display in their store.

It was for a collection of Ten Pound Books.
Come to think of it, they're responsible as well. I was looking for a how-to on patios and got sucked in by their home improvement porn.

Page after page of idealized homeowners calmly bending homes to their will.
Tidy summaries of every imaginable problem – and how impossibly easy they are to solve. I buy a book on outdoor projects (patio) and one on indoor projects (because, then I'll have everything! ).

I'm thinking of all the awkward wiring in my house – when I see it: a programmable light switch. Yeah – a programmable light switch!!

I'll explain.

I have this thing where I like to have the porch light on at night. All night. Adds light to somebody's walk home, welcomes someone seeking help in the night, banishes my personal portion of darkness, etc. My one contribution to my neighborhood. I give you light.

Winter complicates this simple gesture by making darkness fall before E and I get home at night. Either I leave the light on all the time (which seems wasteful) or I flip it on when we get home (meaning we unlock our door in the dark). Lame and lamer.

Enter the Ten Pound Book. Ho-HO! it crows – have you heard of a programmable light switch?

I had not. Tell me more, oh wondrous enabler!
 
You swap your regular switch for a programmable one that can be set to go on and off at set times of the day.

It's that easy!

Well, I say (in the time honored manner of those destined to be humbled) even I can do that.

So the next day, I'm in the hardware store on some other thing and I go looking for one of these switches. I ask some young guy – in clear violation of rule one - He wastes my time for about five minutes before I find one at the other end of the store.

It's shiny. It has pre-programmed times for dusk and dawn that can be tailored to your time zone. Then you just say, On at dusk, off at dawn.

Cool! There's only one left and (though it seemed unimportant at the time) it was white.

I buy it.

Soon as I get home, I get cracking. This is a simple job. There's one switch to the porch lights. All I have to do is turn off the power, take out the old switch, and swap in the new switch. Five minutes.

Except there's one complication: the breakers in my house are not labeled. Well, they do have labels – it's just that the labels are completely inaccurate.

“Kitchen outlets” declares the breaker that (I know from experience) leads to the master bedroom. “Down lights” controls outlets on the second floor, and so on.

When we remodeled the kitchen a good number of these got mapped properly – and I have a Google spreadsheet that I've been updating when I learn something definite (two prior written attempts were “relocated” by small people).

Today, this ends! I turn on everything and begin mapping the breakers. In short order I have verified all but three switches #2 (the furnace), #22/24 (the A/C) and #5 (which does nothing as far as I can tell).

First hurdle cleared – and I have a (nearly) complete breaker map.

I'm so good.

Enter the next complication: the hall light switch.

The switch for the porch light is in the same box with the switch for the front hall. I work with the porch light; I have to work around the hall switch.

It's a three way. And it's on a different breaker. Breaker #1.

No problem, Turn off both breakers, swap out switch – done.

I pull out the old switch, and break out the new, programmable one. It's a massive cube. The electrical box I'm putting it into? Not so much.

Bonus: whoever put this box in didn't bother trimming the sheet rock around it, and even wallpapered over the screws for each switch. I'm an idiot, and even I know you don't do that. Also, the box is full of bits of broken sheetrock.

Nice.

I vacuum out the box, spent an inordinate amount time moving the bird's nest of wire aside to make room for the programmable, and ultimately get to a point where I'm ready to put the cover back on.

Now, I'd bought a cream colored switch cover (with two openings) under the assumption that I'd just deal with the programmable being a different color. All the old covers in my house are that way – I figured if the bulk of the color matches, I won't care.

One day, maybe I'll swap out the three way, get a new cover and make them all white.

I stand up to get my screwdriver.

SNAP!

I look down. My foot is on the switch cover – which has broken in three pieces. I had barely put any pressure on it, and it's flat! How did it…?

Directly under the switch plate is a small piece of sheet rock, fallen from the electrical box – and optimally positioned to stress and break the cover.

I look at the electrical box. It grins.

Well played…

Apparently – I'm going back to the hardware store to get a switch cover. If I'm going to do that – (and here is the critical mistake) I figure I might as well get a white three way switch and have uniformity.

Do it right. Dad would be proud.

I go and buy a white three way switch and switch cover. Last time, the clerk guessed the cover's price at $0.75, now he bills me the full $2.49.

It's an omen.

Back home, I read and re-read the Ten Pound Book's section on three way switches. I examine the pretty picture in minute detail. No surprises.

I pull out the hall light switch. It looks nothing like the pretty pictures.

And right here – I realize the fatal flaw of books that have tidy summaries and step by step photos: they tell you how to solve an idealized problem.
The electrical Frankenstein you find in your wall? They don't tell you jack.

No problem. I have three wires going to an old switch, and when I'm done I'll have three wires going to a new switch. Black goes to common, the other two go to the travelers. I'm good.

Breakers on. Test. The switch works, but it's not a three way anymore. The other hall switch now nullifies my new switch.

Oh, I'll just swap the red and black. The red was on the common before, and I'd put black on common out of caution.

Test? Nope.

I open the other hall switch. I diagram its wires.

Okay, I fire up the interweb and look at all the diagrams for three way switches I can find.

None of them resemble what I'm seeing.

I'd started in early afternoon, stopped for dinner and now it's dark. I'm working by flashlight, because (months ago) the boy broke my trouble light.

This is what I wanted to avoid – scope creep and working by flashlight. I can't figure out what the hell is wrong with my new switch, but I know that the old switch worked.

So, I put the old one back in. Breaker on, test – it works.

Good enough. Dad would spit on me, but I need to get this damn thing done. I leave the breaker on and start muscling the switches far enough apart to get the cover on. At some point I lever it with a screwdriver and-

*Pop*

Sparks , smoke – it's suddenly dark.

Dammit. The wires on the old switch had been stripped back a little too far and I'd managed to touch the hot wire and the metal of the box.

I tripped the god dammed breaker. Breaker #1 controls the hall light AND the garage lights but since it's the first breaker – it's on the top, so it's easy enough to find.

I pull the breaker towards me. Nothing happens.

Hmmm – you don't suppose I ruined something at the switch?

Back to the switch, I check with the flashlight – everything's still attached.

I bring the flashlight back into the garage and look at the breaker. It's kind of in the middle.

Didn't pull it enough.

Off again. On again. The hall light is back on. I re-check to see nothing's ruined/scorched/waiting to explode then turn the breaker off again.

Then I suck it up and ask E to hold the damn flashlight while I cut off the wire ends, strip them to a reasonable length and put the switch back in.

Switch back in, breaker on, lights on.

E points out I should cut the plaster to make the programmable fit better (*smack own head*) so I do. Then I vacuum out the debris (I'm SO better than that guy ).

Moment of truth…

The plate doesn't fit. The big opening is just a hair too small. Now, the last plate - the broken one? Totally fit.

This new one - the $2.49 one? Does not fit.

We're past pretty. I get my box cutter and scrape the opening wider. I tighten the screws and….?

The cover comes with four screws, two long, two short. The short ones are too short and don't reach the outlet.

I get some beige ones from another cover. I'm so over this.

Cover on. Programmable programmed (it even works!). Test the three way, and it works like it should. It's the old switch – beige behind a white cover – but it works.

I glare at the switch. Okay. You're done.

I go to bed.

Hah!

Morning.

E's waking me up. Telling me it's 60 degrees in the house.

I'm like… Whaaa?

I'd flipped the mystery breaker #5 off, maybe it was the… No! I'd turned it back on, because I was afraid that it would be something important.

So, how…?

I go to the thermostat. It has no power.

I go to the breaker box.

Breaker #2 (the furnace) is off.

Last night, after I'd tripped the hall light breaker, I'd reached into the dark towards the easy to find #1 and grabbed #2 (which is also at the top of the box). If # 2 was in the same column, pulling it towards me would have no effect. Happily #2 is in the opposite column – so pulling it towards me turned it off.

I turn the furnace on and get some coffee. Game, set, match – three way.

E wants to go to Borders today. Me too. I'm going to give those people a piece of my mind.

Emergency Pasta

The other day I did something I haven't done in about two months.

I cooked dinner in the kitchen:

The kitchen... she is done!!    Ahhhhhhhh...

Wasn't even much of a meal - but weeks of deprivation made it taste a lot better. E and the boy were the first ones to use the kitchen for real. They made pumpkin muffins, something the boy has been jonesing for for awhile.

They were pretty solid, too. Our new oven is a double oven - so you can just heat up this small oven to bake things. Seems to heat up faster. Slick.

For the first dinner, I went with what's at hand. I call this recipie Emergency Pasta, because the ingredients last damn near forever - so you can always have it ready to go in case, well - in case you need dinner in a hurry.

It's also a rolling recipie - meaning very little needs to be prepared en masse. Most stuff goes in in a series. So you put something in the pan and while it's cooking - you prep the next ingredient.

Emergency Pasta - Puttanesca

2 tablespoons of olive oil (I just pour until I coat the bottom of the pan)

2 oz anchovies, chopped (You can skip chopping these, they will just take a bit longer to dissolve in the oil)

2-3 garlic cloves, chopped

28 oz can of imported tomatoes. (There may be a good domestic brand, but I'm not willing to spend the money to find it. Buy Italian)

Splash of dry red wine

6 black olives, pitted and sliced

6 Kalamata olives, pitted and sliced

1 lb pasta (spaghetti, spaghetti rigatti, or linguine)

1-2 tablespoons of capers

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 cup grated Parmesan Reggiano cheese

1. Pour the olive oil into a saucepan on medium heat
2. Dump the anchovy oil into the pan and then chop up the anchovies and put them in as well.
3. After the anchovies have dissolved into the oil, add the garlic and be ready to add the tomatoes after 30 seconds.
4. Add the tomatoes, wine and let the pan simmer for at least 20 minutes (until the sauce reduces and thickens)
5. Salt and pepper the tomatoes (go easy on the salt, you put in some anchovies - remember?)
6. Chop the olives, measure out the capers and oregano and put them in a cup
7. Start the pasta water
8. Salt the water
9. About the time the pasta water's rolling, the sauce should be reducing nicely.
10. Boil the pasta, add the olives, capers and oregano to the saucepan
11. Grate the cheese
12. When the noodles are done, turn the sauce off.
13. Drain the pasta
14. Combine the pasta & sauce, mix well
15. Dump the Parmesan over the top 
16. Eat

No bells, no whistles - just a nice easy meal.

Ahhhhhh.

Late edit: I added garlic to the recipe. One of those things you throw in without thinking, but should probably write down.

The last goddamn inch

I've always believed that a huge part of customer service is managing customer expectation.

Take the following scenario:

The customer is eagerly awaiting delivery of a product, and the vendor knows the delivery date will be one of two days on the week of September 8th.

The vendor could tell their customer any number of things, but lets try just these two:

1) "Those items will arrive on September 10th or 11th. We will call you on the 8th to let you know."

2) "Those items will arrive the week of September 8th."

Which of these statements is more likely to tick off the customer?

I'll give you a hint - # 2 is what our vendor told us about our cabinet delivery.

Now, a statement like that - you know it's not going to be delivered on the 8th - but you've been waiting for this delivery for weeks. You're eager. That part of your brain that desperately wants your kitchen to be done is saying "The week of the 8th, could mean the 8th!"

The realist calls the vendor on the 6th and asks to know what's up. The realist is told "We won't have a firm date until the 8th." Logic kicks in and says well, if we won't know until the 8th - odds are it won't show up on the 8th.

Optimist pipes up again "Maybe the 9th!"

The 8th shows up and all of my numerous factions are pinging the vendor to find out when the hell our cabinets will show up.

"Well..." says the vendor, "the trucks run on Wednesday and Thursday" so the soonest it will be here is the 10th."

-----

Okay, stop right there. This is how you annoy a person like me. String me out with bare minimum information and then admit to me that you knew more than you'd let on.

Week of the 8th + Trucks run on Wednesday and Thursday = the 10th at the earliest.

So why not say that? Yes, it's a matter of 72 hours - but when your kitchen is missing in action, and your general contractor is headed to Florida on the 13th, every hour matters. Why make me wonder?

Fail.

(We did actually get our cabinets on the 10th - our general contractor installed them on the 11th and 12th and life went on. But I'm still ticked at the vendor for stringing me along.)

-----

A kitchen remodel goes in fits and starts. Our contractor (I'll just call him The Man) is a typhoon of action. Day one, he obliterated our old kitchen and we had new walls and plumbing in a week and a half. If we'd have had cabinets by then - he'd have been done in two weeks. The Man makes stuff happen.

Except that kitchens have parts that have to be ordered, or subbed out. The floor took a week and a half to set up, cabinets take four to five weeks to make.

At some point, The Man just has to wait until stuff shows up. We had weeks of a big empty room and little activity.

Then the appliances showed up - then the cabinets and suddenly, The Man is off on a tear again. Cabinets and appliances are in place in 48 hours.

Enter the next delay - the countertops.

Countertops need to be made to order, so once the cabinets are in - the Fabricators can show up, measure everything and then inform you of when they will be done. It'll be another week and a half.

Which sucks.

You have a kitchen that is practically done, but no countertops means no surfaces - and no surface means no sink - and not having a kitchen sink is perhaps the most annoying thing about a kitchen remodel.

I want my garbage disposal!!!

So you spend the next ten days walking through a room that is a kitchen in all but function. In your head, the kitchen remodel ends with one of those "reveals" from basic cable:

Wow! It's so great! Let's cook a meal and do dishes, hon!

Reality is - your microwave is the only working appliance - and there's no place to put anything.

For ten days.

Then the Fabricators show up and you're told that the day after they're done - the plumber will show up and connect everying.

Counters + working appliances = Done! At least in my head.

But it's like jumping forward by halves - you never really get to the destination. First, the Fabricators notify you late in the day that - Oops! - they've forgotten to fabricate part of your counter. It'll be another five days. The missing part is not something that will affect the plumber, so it's easy to shrug off. Function is the big deal and so long as the plumber can work, we're 24 hours from being able to cook and clean again.

Plumber day, yesterday. Heading out the door, I'm thinking there's any number of items that will go wrong, so I leave my cell number on the countertop right next to opening for the sink. i.e. call me if you need something.

Returning home from work - I'm eagerly looking forward to firing up the stove and doing some dishes.

Except - the plumber has put in the sink (with the disposal on the wrong side) and has done nothing else. He's read my note, because he's added his own note below it:

Had to leave, will be back in the morning to run gas line to stove. I called the electrician he will be here in the morning to wire the dishwasher, thanks.
     -Plumber

Okay - FAIL.

Not only did he not do all the items on the list - he didn't call to let us know. Customers who are given more time to believe things are fine are more irritated when they find out they're not.

True, it's all going to be sorted out tomorrow morning - but cripes! This close to the end, every delay is slow death.

--

It's tomorrow (today) I'm telecommuting, looking forward to talking with the plumber and electrician. I have a few questions and I need to talk with him about switching the disposal and running a gas line for our dryer.

I leave him a detailed note - in case he shows up while I'm dropping off the kids.

I get back to the house and he's not there. By 10am - I'm getting that familiar feeling of things going south.

I call the electrician - he's surprised I'm calling him. He clearly has no expectation of showing up today. "All I want," I say, "is somebody to hook up the dishwasher. I don't want another weekend of hand washing plates."

Electrician sounds like a person that's been caught stealing your newspaper. "Gosh, I don't know. I don't know if I can get anybody there today. I mean, we're going to have to get it inspected next week anyway..."

I'm like who cares about the inspection? I want a working dishwasher! Four days doesn't matter to you, but it sure does to me!

"Well, I'll call you back around 1 or 2, and let you know if I can get somebody there today. How's that sound?"


Truth? It sounds sh!tty. I get to wait in suspense all day for the possibility that you might help me?

I bite it back. "Well, if that's all you can do - I'll wait for your call."

Click.

Next up is the plumber. I call and leave a message. An hour later (11am) he calls me back. He's on his way, and he's okay with switching the disposal.

Good. But I'm still ticked off. I was told I'd have a plumber and electrician this morning. I'm going to get a plumber around noon - and probably won't get an electrician at all.

Plumber shows up and I lay it out for him. "I just want to use my kitchen. Hook up my stove, and I'm happy. My sink works, you can do the tune ups next week. I want to cook."

He gives me a can-do smile and says, "I'll get your stove set up right now."

Solid.

I go back to work, and his pounding and hammering is a satisfying soundtrack for the next two hours. The hammering stops and about the time I look up, the plumber leans into my room and asks, "Say, do you have a connecting hose for the stove?"

All right, then. Now I know how the stove hookup will go south.

I bought a new stove that arrived without a power cord (it's dual fuel) and a gas hookup line. The plumber has run the gas right up to the stove, but the last foot of the gas connection is something he doesn't have (and didn't think to bring).

He's one foot out the door at that point, has to pick up his kid and he leaves me a roll of teflon tape and says "it's really simple." He recommends testing for gas leaks using a match - and then leaves.

Great. No hookup unless I do it. I know nothing about hooking up a gas line - but I'll be damned if I go through another weekend without a stove. I look at the gas pipe, then head for the hardware store.

On the way to the hardware store, I remember that it's after 2, and there's no word from the electrician. I call him and get his voicemail. Figures.

At the hardware store, I find there are two sizes of hoses for gas connections, small and big. The valve was big - so I buy the big one. On the way home, I call the electrician again - and get through.

"Uh, yeah - I don't think we're going to be able to make it today. How's Monday look?"

EPIC FAIL. Fine.

Click.


Back at the house, I tear open the bag, pour out the connectors and start checking the connections. The hose is too big.


Back to the hardware store. I get the small hose, and I find the old guy. I ask him about how I can hook up my dishwasher. He give me a cord and some wirenuts and turns me loose.

Back at the house again. I get the small hose down to the connectors - I'm missing an adapter.

Fine.

Back to the hardware store. I get the adapter, grab the old guy again. Is there anything else I should have to connect a gas range? He gives me some teflon tape - the yellow kind for gas connections, not the white stuff the plumber left me - and I check out. The cashier smiles at me "Is this the third time today?"

I give him the kind of look that says: I need space today.

There's now no time to actually connect anything - I have to pick up the kids. No way we cook our own dinner now. Arrgh!

So, pick up the kids and E, back to the house. Stepping out of the car, I find - in my driveway - the exact adapter I need for the hose. It's not the one I just bought, it must have been in the bag and - IRONICALLY - fell out as I went into the house.

Fine.

I get the yellow teflon going - hook up the connectors, screw stuff together and start testing the connections with soapy water. No movement - no leaks. Hooray.

I peel the tape of the top of the stove - the burners and bits aren't on, but I want to see if the stove lights up.

It doesn't. Plenty of sparks, no flame. In the back of my head - I'm thinking, did the plumber turn the gas back on? Eventually, it occurs to me that there's an easy way to see if the gas is flowing. I turn the burner know past the lite and just pump out some gas. I hear it, I smell it - the gas is there, it's just not lighting.

Burner covers. I put the burner covers on, and it lights up on the first shot. Who knew?

We have a stove.

Now, the dishwasher.


The dishwasher is bolted under the counter, and there's a stripped piece of romex running out from under the front. Old guy told me to splice a plug onto those ends and put on wirenuts.

It'll be ugly, but I'll be washing dishes until the electrician decides to grace me with his presence.

I splice and plug - switch the breaker and.... nothing. The plug tester shows no lights at all - but the outlet is sending electricity because the disposal is working.

????

If the plug works and no lights are on- that means there's an open hot connection.WTH?

And then it hits me: the romex isn't coming from the dishwasher, it's going to the dishwasher. All I have to do is connect the three ends to the volt box on the front of the dishwasher and I'm good.

Three hookups later, I power up the dishwasher.
We're still missing part of our countertop - but the big three stove/dishwasher/sink are all online.

We're not done - but here and now - I'm calling it done.

Despite the best efforts of our subcontractors - we can cook.

Huzzah!

Open heart surgery

My kitchen is gone.

A nice man showed up at our door, sat down for a chat, then busted out some power tools and proceeded to beat our kitchen into small chunks.

Then he hauled them off to God knows where. Because we asked him to.

The kitchen remodel we've talked about for over six months is finally rolling and we've finally begun asking ourselves the hard questions:

What do we do with all the crap we keep in the kitchen?
How are we going to eat? Wash dishes?

More to the point, What the hell were we thinking?

I'd had the impression we weren't going to start until the second week of August, so the contractor calling last Friday got me flat footed.

You ready to start on Monday?

Uh…..

How's eight o' clock sound?

Uh…..

I check with E and call him back.

Monday's good.

Okay. See you then. I'll bring paperwork and start the demolition.

Uh….

That was the starting gun for our remodel. True to form I did absolutely nothing for the next six hours.

The word "demolition" stuck in my brain.

He means to break things. Like…our kitchen.

*ZZzzzT!*

Hey! We keep a lot of stuff in our kitchen….

Dramatic music

I like our stuff…

*Cue the camera zoom to my horrified face-*

We have to move our crap out of the kitchen!

AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAH!

---
So we get cracking. Kinda

Saturday, I'd convinced myself that I'd get space ready for storing all the stuff we'd have to move. No sense in moving it all ad hoc. We needed a place to go, then we'd start moving stuff for real.

Some half assed surface clearing later – it becomes evident that this is a very big deal.

Furniture must move. Demo will take place in two rooms, so two rooms will have to be emptied. Our new dining room table is right next to ground zero.

Appliances!  Crap, no dishwasher, no stove!

Calm, down – none of this is news, you just-

No dishwasher.

Oh, and all our dishes need to move – and our pots & pans. We have a lot of dishes.

-and pans. And cleaners, and spices, and oven mitts, and produce, and baby bottles and…

Holy crap.

We're gonna need a bigger house.

---

Sunday. We actually don't need a bigger house. We just need more hours in the day. Our house is big enough to absorb all our crap – we just don't have the shelving.

*Light bulb*

So, that's why kitchen have so many cabinets – to hold all that crap!

Lose all your cabinets – you have a massive shortage of surface area to hold things.

Our basement shelves are full to overflowing with kitchen stuff, we have tubs of pots & pans. We don’t go all the way to trash bags, but it’s a very near thing.

At the end of the day we have sore backs, a disaster of a house – and a blessedly empty kitchen.

Until today when the nice man showed up and blew it to kingdom come.

---
I'm still waiting to see what horrors were lurking behind our walls, but we have learned the following:

1) The wiring behind our stove was not up to code, and would never have passed inspection.
2) The trap in our kitchen sink had oxidized to the point where our contractor could (and did) poke a hole in it with his finger.
3) The upstairs tub trap has been leaking for some time and has damaged the drywall
4) The sofits above our kitchen sink contain pipes which will have to be moved to put in cabinets. It will cost extra.

Day one and we've already added $1,500 bucks to the final bill.

It beginning to dawn on me why people hate this kind of stuff.

Division of labor

I need to stop reading the New York Times:

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.
But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

I have a job that is about streamlining workflow. I take complex tasks and boil them down to preconditions and desired endstates and then streamline the task progression so that everybody's happy. Worker feels efficient, management gets accuracy, stuff gets done.

The more I think about this, the more I think how laughable this is.

At home, I have no workflow. Things get done in tantrums. Some days, I come home energized and attack some home task until it is dead, dead, dead. Other days, I sit on the couch - turn the TV on for the kids and veg out while E makes dinner.

This past week has been an pretty solid illustration of how the wheels are off the wagon. Stuff is not getting done - I'm annoyed by it, by the fact that I'm making it happen - and I still can't muster the energy to get up and do something as basic as laundry.

This makes no sense. I do not have a particularly exhausting schedule - but most days I get home and there's nothing I want to do more than just sit down.

Take dinner: I'm sure everyone has had the discussion about "we need to cook large meals on weekends and have leftovers for the week." This is a good goal - and sometimes we've even managed it. But more typically, the evening meal is a mad scramble by whoever happens to have an idea for supper.

There is no plan, there is no routine - and lately E has taken it upon herself to go home from work early to get cracking on dinner. This is a great idea, but means that now it's all on her for dinner most weeknights.

Our history has been one of us steps up and plays hero until they can't take it anymore. Then by unspoken agreement, its time to switch roles. No way this works out equitably and there will invariably be those weeks when neither of us feels like stepping up.

The NYT article describes people who have pink and blue post-its and all kinds of easy to seize on things - but I'm not sure there's any solution there. A schedule of some kind would seem to make the most sense - it's just so hard to catch up when you're as behind as I feel. The laundry situation is getting pretty sad - and I still have wiring to do - and the lawn - and the basement, and -

E's going out of town with the kids in about a week - and I plan on going ape on the house while they're away - but I've done that kind of thing before. Housework doesn't stop. The hardest things in life are the things we have to do every day.

Cheryl Mendelson wrote a book called Home Comforts that has been plaguing me. A list of things that ring true and accuse at the same time.

She has this bit on Broken Windows where she describes urban planners and police worrying about whether or not windows are broken in a neighborhood. They try to keep the windows fixed up - because as soon as people see a broken window that stays broken - they assume that the neighborhood is derelict. Broken window = anything goes. And then comes the graffiti, the dumped garbage, and everything else.

At our house, we have a host of broken windows - my son's room is a junk collection that is never put away. I half suspect he watches TV because he can't find toys to play with. The area between the coffee table and the couch is always covered in whatever junk was just set down for a moment until it stayed there.

And I know I do this. I just set something down because I'm working on something else - I'll get back to it, I'm sure. This morning I almost left a gallon of milk out on the counter all day because I'd set it aside to help baby E with a paper towel.

I'd decided that I would defend the living room against clutter - and told no one. So, when the inevitable clutter accumulated - I'd be all hacked off because you suddenly couldn't see the floor anymore. I keep telling people this at work, yet miss it myself: If you are the only one who knows about a system, it is not a system - it is a mental note.

Mendelson describes a regimen I aspire to, but looks to be so complete that I wonder if there is any room for enjoying the wonders you have wrought. Surely her extreme is more than we can expect, but its becoming abundantly clear that a schedule must be set.

Between saving the day and feeling put upon - to soaking up "me time" and feeling like a total heel - all signs point to an oppressive existence.

It has to get better. E's been the hero way too much lately - and the thought of airing out the things that have been bugging us both is a necessary evil. But, really - making a list of all that needs to get done and then - what? punch cards? More details for people who aren't exactly micromanagement material.

Uncle.

*Poof* goes the driveway fairy

Since moving into our new house - E and I have enjoyed a small amount of magic.

Every morning, our morning paper appeared on our front step.

Yes- that's hardly magic. But here's the thing: It's right up against our house. Getting the paper is as simple as open door, reach down, grab. Again, small thing - but it's every day. Rain or shine, I don't have to put a foot out the door to get my paper. It rocks.

Now, a paper carrier might have a practiced throwing arm, but Nolan Ryan couldn't be this precise every day.

Plus, there's this little bit:

I look around the street, and every other house has a newspaper in the driveway. Down by the sidewalk, no less.

Being me, I start to imagine reasons why this would be: the former residents were big tippers, or people of respect, or crime lords who killed the last delivery boy for hitting a window.
I start to wonder what's going to happen when the delivery person figures out that somebody new is in the house. Schmucks, no less.

How will they react? Paper in the gutter? The street?

I've been cursed with a wildly active imagination, so I entertain thoughts of calling the paper, asking our neighbors - eventually ending up with getting up early to spy on our front door, buy a webcam, or hire a PI.

Yeah, I know - wake up early... hah!

Insanity aside - I could just ...do nothing (I can do that!) and enjoy it.

Except there's this other thing: every week we put our garbage cans down on the curb in the morning and in the afternoon our garbage cans are up by our house. Tucked in where I usually leave them.

Okay, that's not the paper carrier. That's like... the Driveway Fairy.

So after yet another week of easy access newspapers, I change the location of where I put the garbage cans. No biggie - just move them off the driveway more and put the recycle can in back this time. Trash day comes, I put them out on the curb and -

Yeah, they're back next to the house, partly on the grass with the recyc bin in the back. Once again - I should just sit back and enjoy this. Somebody's doing something nice for us, two things actually. Before 7am each day, and after 9am on trash day.

Presto! Thank you, mysterious Driveway Fairy!

So, last weekend we're going out the door, and a neighbor lady is walking by and starts chatting up E while I'm loading baby E in the car. I miss most of the conversation - except I hear 'newspaper' and E saying 'Thanks!'

-And right then, I can feel the magic going away. I look up and this lady owns up to the whole thing and I know with absolute certainly that this is it. "Thank you," I say - but what I really want to do is rewind the morning about 5 minutes so we can never meet this person. She smiles and says her goodbyes - but she is now a known quantity.

And known quantities don't do magic.

The next day, I open the door, reach down and - nothing. I'm groggy, so I try again a few times before it dawns on me.

I have to stand up to look out the door's window - but there's absolutely no point. As sure as a sunrise - my paper is sitting in my driveway. By the sidewalk, no less.

Damn. I'm going to miss that.

Salt is salt

For over a week now, I'd been trying to get some rock salt to spread out on the sidewalks so people wouldn't break their necks.

Last week this was particularly important, since there was a sheet of ice across the only sidewalk leading from our apartment - on moving day.

Nobody had any salt. The city was spreading dirt on the roads instead of salt due to shortfalls in their supply. The gas stations were out - Target was out.

I hit four or five places and just gave up.

So, last night I'm at the hardware store looking for a flashlight and I'm about to ask for rock salt and I hear the cashier telling the lady in front of me "Nah, we haven't had any for weeks - I'd send you to Home Depot, but I think they're out, too."

The lady in front of me beat me to the question - but the cashier is suggesting play sand, and I'm about to take him up on it when a scruffy looking hardware employee says:

"Why not use the softener salt?"

Yeah, sure pal. I'll drop mothball sized bits of salt on my walk, and -

Scruffy guy seems to read my mind. "Not the big stuff!" He points to a pallet of white bags. "This stuff here is ground pretty fine. When I lived in Montana, this is all we ever used on the sidewalk."

I give the bag a look - the grains are about the same size as regular ice bite grains.

The lightbulb in my head stirs to life.

It's salt. B- b- bzzt!
It's granular. Bzzzt, Bzzzzzzzz!

I buy one bag (I'm cautious). The lady gets four.

I pour it out on the ice and - voila! Salt. With the expected results, too.

Duh.

Shoulda bought four bags