plumbing accomplished

I was, for the most part, too buried in work to even take a breath this weekend, but Don and his dad managed to install the water line for the laundry room while I was glued to the computer. I took a break for five minutes this morning to risk life and limb holding things out of the way while Don completed the last few solders, and lo! It's ready. Don spent most of today on his back in the crawlspace wrapping the new pipes with heat tape so we won't have a repeat of last year's pipe-bursting disaster. Or... uh.. the one the year before that. See, progress! We learn from our mistakes! Or rather, other people's mistakes.

In any case, I am officially allowed to start shopping for a washer and dryer now, although we're waiting until at least the second paycheck from Don's new job to come in to actually buy anything. Not that it matters -- I've got five proposals due in four days next week, so washers and dryers will take a second-place to work for a while. Good thing I work from home in my pajamas -- don't have to do laundry nearly so often as I used to!

nothing to report

Family emergencies (on his side), work overload (on my side) and a bad cold (both of us) prevented anything getting done on the house this weekend. Figures. Scheduling is once again up in the air; we know what we'll be doing next but we just need to find the time to do it.

In the meantime, I'll be lying here in bed with a box of tissues and a vat of cough syrup, watching the cat ignore me because the new bay windows? With squirrels outside? SO much more fun than being petted or snuggled. Or so I've heard.

two weekends of progress in a row?!

This weekend was eventful all around. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Don's family for some fantastic food at Roy's. Saturday, Don was supposed to go to a fraternity golf tournament and I planned to go downtown to the Baltimore Book Festival, but weather forced us to find other, more indoor plans. I had a draft to work on for work for most of the day, but we were able to steal some time to head out and go shopping, because Don starts his new job today and was in desperate need of some pants. Sunday was our work on the house day. Don's dad showed up bright and early -- 8 AM -- and the two of them got an astonishing amount of work done upstairs before they called it quits at around two. They removed the wall which separates the master bedroom and the master bathroom and replaced it with a header, which means that we can rebuild the wall a few inches over, giving us room for the shower in the master bath. Then they got started ripping up the floor in the master bedroom. They finished tearing up the floor in both the bedroom and the bathroom, and will move on to the master closet and the middle bedroom and parts of the landing next time.

From what I understand, the current plan -- such as it is -- is to tear up the floors all the way back to the chimney, in the middle of the house, and then go ahead and level the joists and put in a subfloor in that area (long-time readers will remember the process from when we did it on the main floor -- but never you fear, newcomers, the pictures they are a-coming anyway). Then we'll move our bedroom from its current spot in the back guest bedroom into the master, and the office from the dining room to the living room underneath the master, and the same process will apply to the back half of the house. And then the floor will be done.

That said, however, I have been promised that before they get too involved in the upstairs work, they'll finally install a new water line to the laundry room and slap down a temporary subfloor in there (we're not finishing the space for real until we renovate the kitchen), which will mean, glory of glories, that I can FINALLY buy a washer and dryer and do laundry in my own home. Hallelujah! Tentative plans have that work being done this upcoming weekend, although as usual there are no guarantees. That doesn't stop me from drooling over appliance websites all week, though.

one giant step forward

Last week was pretty eventful. On Thursday, in particular, we had a veritable swarm of people running around the house: the window guys were working on the glorious dining room bay window you can see in the foreground of the picture below (and which I am sitting in front of right now, having moved my little work table over in front of it so I can watch the squirrels chase each other around the tree in the side yard); the lawn guy was mowing and also giving us an estimate for some yard cleanup; our new ADB representative was here getting some papers signed and getting the grand tour; and the HVAC guy was here (finally) fixing the upstairs air conditioning. Whew! Everybody said hi to each other -- the lawn guy took a card from the window guys -- and everything got done in good time.


And now, here we are. The huge hurdle we've been waiting to get over for months and months is rather anticlimactically past (okay, maybe it's only anticlimactic to me -- everyone who's come into the house so far and seen the new windows acts pretty darn climactic), and we're finally ready to move forward. We've been waiting and waiting for the windows and the HVAC for so long that it's hard to transition back into the mindset of DIY; it's been contractors this and financing that for most of the year, and now it's finally back to Don and his dad, working on the weekends and getting things done.

The next big step -- and really, the last of the overwhelmingly huge projects -- is the upstairs floor. We're doing the same thing we did downstairs, if you can remember -- tearing up the original, sadly unsalvageable floors, sistering or installing new joists to create a level plane, and then installing a level plywood subfloor.

A new dumpster got delivered on Friday, ending my brief period of dumpster-free bliss (although, amusingly, the HVAC guy told us that he drove right past our house on Thursday, totally missing us because there wasn't a dumpster in the driveway). It's ready and waiting, and Don plans to start ripping up the floors upstairs while he's home this week. Other things that'll go into this hopefully last dumpster (sorry, Benjer): the drop ceiling in the front screen porch and the one in the kitchen; the mudroom, in its entirety; the old desk in the basement and the platform it's on; and the vast majority of the things Don's grandfather seems to have crammed under the basement stairs.

And that's it. From then on, it's all construction, all the time. Once the floors are done, the plumber will come and install the plumbing for the two upstairs bathrooms, while Don and his dad create a wiring diagram and pull wires and install outlets. Then, insulation and drywall and a practically finished house.

Please try not to place your bets too high on when it'll all get done.

please buy some windows

I can't say enough about how fantastic our window people are. They're friendly, interested in our project, and most of all, they are both really good at what they do and totally communicative. Our windows are beautiful, well-built, and perfectly installed, and we've known exactly what was going on every step of the way. The installers have been able to rearrange their planned installation schedule according to some special requests from us, and have made sure that we know and are comfortable with every part of the process. They even let the cat sit in their tool bag. And here's the thing -- they're getting laid off tomorrow. The company doesn't have enough work to keep them on, because the current economic mess means nobody is buying windows these days. It really, really sucks.

So if you're local -- anywhere in the greater Baltimore area -- and you've been thinking about buying some windows, now would be a really great time to get it done. Call American Design and Build, tell them we sent you. They really, really want to keep their crews employed, and they'll do everything they can do get you a great price so that you can get your project done and they can keep their crews. (And yes, they do stuff besides windows -- they did our roof, too, and they also do siding, doors, and lots more.)

before and after

So yesterday, the front wall of the living room went from this:


To this:


It's all very exciting.

and then this happened

Every contractor should have one of these in his tool bag.

like a whole new house

This weekend marked another major change in our progress: we moved! The goal was to leave the office where it is (currently in the dining room) and clear out the living room (which was serving as our bedroom) so that the window guys could start the downstairs installation there. While we did manage to accomplish the goal, there was (as usual) a fairly major hitch in our plan. Originally, we were going to move the bedroom back upstairs, into what will become the guest bedroom. We'd leave the office downstairs, and keep the upstairs mostly clear except that one bedroom so that Don and his dad could rip up the floors up there. Well, we got most of the way through moving our racks of clothes and a dresser upstairs on Saturday when we realized that even though we'd turned the new air conditioning on up there it wasn't getting any cooler. Quite the opposite, actually. And if any of you are local, you know just how hot it was this weekend. I promptly got heatsick, of course (I thought we were done with that for the summer!), and we stopped moving and tried everything we could think of to make the air conditioning work. No such luck.

So now the bedroom is in the family room/library downstairs -- where, thank heavens, we had the foresight to have the window guys finish up the installation of two double-hung windows last week. The living room is clear, and they're in there sawing and banging as I type. Don got hold of the HVAC guy on the first try this morning, miraculously enough, and he has promised to come out to take a look either tomorrow or Wednesday. If he fixes it, we may move upstairs this weekend, although I have to confess that I like being downstairs better -- proximity to the only bathroom in the house right now gives this setup a whole lot of bonus points in my book.

In the meantime, we're enjoying the novelty of having two separate rooms to live in (how luxurious!). Don is home for the next two weeks before he starts his new job, and I work from home full-time now, so with both of us here all the time it's awfully nice to be able to put a wall in between us if we want to, even if it's just made of black plastic. Right now I'm working on a table in the bedroom, and he's at his desk in the office. And, of course, the window guys are in the living room. Pleasant company all around.

someone in this house has pinkeye

speaks for itself

But I'll talk about it anyway. This is the new bay window in the guest room -- if you come stay with us, you'll get to check out the great view it provides of the yard. It's still missing its little hip roof -- the wee roof that attaches to the main roof and eliminates that weird gap at the top. The framework for the roofs for both bay windows -- the front one is in, too (check out this view of the front one from inside the room) -- is sitting upstairs in the middle bedroom. I'm assured it will go in today.

I had to go in to the office yesterday, so Don got to stay home and take pictures for once. He called me with hilarious updates throughout the day, like when the army of window guys were all standing around cussing while they tried to figure out how to get the bay windows upstairs. Later, they told him that this was literally the first time they had ever been unable to get a window up by means of the regular stairwell -- ours has a lot of narrow turns. Eventually the windows went up by means of ladders to the kitchen roof and a lot of sweating.

The upstairs windows plus two in the downstairs family room are all supposed to get done this week; over the weekend we'll move our bedroom back upstairs and the office into the family room so that next week, the remainder of the downstairs windows can be installed (including the dining room bay, which may be the biggest one they've ever installed). Talk about progress!

the curse strikes again

The window guy called this morning -- he had some sort of unspecified emergency and won't be able to make it out today. But he promises that the windows in the family room AND both bay windows upstairs will be done tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

bombshell

Window guys are here. Right now. Installing windows!!

ready for freon

Don and his dad were busy this weekend. They spent Saturday at Chez Brinkley, ten blocks over, working on installing a trailer hitch on one of the vehicles over there. Then Sunday it was our turn, and the dangerous duo were over here at our place to wire up the last piece of the HVAC system.


The HVAC guy says he'll be here tomorrow or Friday. I don't have high hopes.

we had some heavy rain

And the gutters overflowed again.

keeping up appearances

Longtime readers of Ancestral Pile may know that we've been waging a long-term battle with our yard. Our particular area has extraordinarily fertile soil; I don't know enough about biology to know if it's because it was once a plantation or if it has more to do with our height above sea level and humidity and stuff. Whatever causes it, plants grow like gangbusters 'round here. Which was great for Pop-Pop Brinkley, when he had his lush vegetable garden on the back half of our property. Not so great for Pop-Pop's grandson, who's been battling the weeds back there since we moved in. No traces are left of the garden, sadly. We've been trying to control the yard since we bought the house two years ago; last year we lost the battle rather dramatically. This year, we've given in to reality and hired a lawn service. Our grass gets cut every two weeks and it's worth every penny.

The lawn service can't do anything about the huge weeds and shrubs, though -- we just pay them to cut the normal stuff. So Don was out this weekend, strapping on his Ghostbusters backpack and spraying the property with weedkiller. This is what we did after last year's drama, in the back half of the property, and the end result of that treatment is that the lawn service mows that area just like the rest of the lawn these days, because it's not a jungle anymore. So now we're on to the second stage; the new jungle: the front and side yards.


Isn't he cute with his little sprayer? The not-so-cute side of the situation is that Don is actually allergic to mosquitoes (I know, it sounds weird, but he's MORE allergic than regular people just like I am with poison ivy) and the vines growing along the fence and over the rosebushes at the side of the house have created a little shaded flooded area for standing water, which we didn't realize. The mosquitoes have been taking advantage of this little resort facility, and Don came back inside after finishing his spraying in a LOT of pain. His legs and arms were completely swollen and gross.

Hopefully when the sprayed vines die (they're wilting already, thank goodness) the area will dry up and the mosquito problem will be solved. If not, I see rubber bodysuits in our future.

the latest

What you see in the photo above is not, sadly, an old-school Dr. Who-style robot living in our attic. It's actually the tail end and some of the ductwork for the upstairs HVAC unit, which is almost all the way installed. We had our friendly neighborhood plumber come out and install a gas line to the attic, and then the HVAC guy got to work in a relatively timely fashion. This time around, the delays have been mostly our fault. There were delays in getting the attic ladder put in, delays in calling the plumber, and finally the most recent delay, which is actually not entirely our fault but still rests on our shoulders. After the unit itself was placed in the attic and the ductwork was run, Don and his dad had to install the electrical setup for the unit, running wire to it so that it would do important things like turn on. They eventually got together and did the work, but then they ran out of wire -- they were short by approximately seven feet of wire. So things got put on hold until Don could run out and buy some more wire. Well, it took us approximately three weeks and five stores to find the damn wire. NOBODY had it. Apparently everybody else is running wire, too, because the stores were all sold out. We finally found some a couple of weeks ago, and now it's on Don's shoulders again to get the wiring finished. Once that's done, the HVAC guy will come back out and put freon in the lines and fire the whole thing up and we'll be done, finally, with this ridiculous saga.

household duties

The cat likes to help me fold the laundry.

a ladder for the ages

This house, like many older homes (and, for all I know, lots of newer homes) has a big huge attic, accessible by one of those trapdoor ladder things. The original ladder was installed by Don's grandfather, and, like many of the things in this house, was both very clever and very frightening. It was held up by a terrifyingly visible pulley that involved steel cable and a screw eye sunk into the guest room floor. Folding the trapdoor back up into the ceiling was a two-person job; one person had to stand on their tiptoes and push the unit up into the ceiling and hold it there while the other one pulled with all their weight on the pulley cable to get the hook to slip over the edge of the screw eye.

In addition to all that, the ladder itself was... shall we say... nonstandard. It was approximately one foot wide, ensuring that nobody with hips could get up into the attic; it was constructed -- possibly by hand -- entirely out of wood; and, mysteriously, it was blue.

Our HVAC contractor, on his very first trip out here (something like TWO YEARS AGO ARGH), told us flat out that there was no way he could install our upstairs HVAC unit without a new ladder. Aside from the safety issues, which didn't concern him overly much although they terrified me (did I mention that there was a LIVE WIRE crossing the opening, for no good reason?), the hole in the ceiling was simply too small to fit the unit through. So one of the things that had to be accomplished before we could have the last of the HVAC installed was to replace the ladder.

Fortunately, it turns out that you can just run over to your local home improvement superstore and buy attic trapdoor ladders. In boxes!


The original ladder was in the middle of the three upstairs bedrooms. We decided that if we were going to replace the darn thing anyway, we might as well put it in a much more convenient location so that our use of that room would be unfettered. The upstairs landing, as most of you know, is absolutely gigantic, so we decided that the landing was the place for the new ladder.

So Don and his dad framed in an appropriately sized hole, and installed the new ladder over a weekend in April, with much swearing. Like everything around here, it took longer than they expected and involved a lot of shimming. But it's in, and it works, as you can see.


We haven't taken down the old blue ladder yet -- it's bolted into the joists, and we just haven't gotten around to dealing with that. Just ignore it and admire the shininess of the new one.

er... hi

Oh... hi, Internet. You're still here? Been here all along, you say? Waiting patiently? Thinking about leaving for greener pastures? Sorry about that. I don't really have an excuse. I've been unmotivated and lazy, plain and simple. Yes, there's been a lot going on -- a busy convention season for Anapurna, submission and eventual wins on several big proposals at work that I can't talk about, helping Lindley and Molly move into their respective new places, planning a vacation, writing chapters one, two, and four of a novel (yes, really!), and of course house stuff -- but I've posted through busy times before, so really it comes down to me just not feeling like it.

Sorry about that.

But all is not lost. I've finally broken out the camera again -- we won't talk about the layer of dust that was on the case -- and I'm going to try to get everybody up to speed with what's been accomplished during our blogging hiatus.

First up: more demolition. I know, it's the last thing you'd expect to read about on this site! Har. We're looking forward to the day when that 'demolition' tag in the tag cloud over on the right isn't the biggest thing on the page, believe me. But there are only a few more things to demolish, even though it feels like the dumpster is a permanent part of our driveway. One of them is the old deck that Don's grandfather built to connect the poolhouse to the now-absent pool. A little crowd of friends came over rather unexpectedly one day (quite a while ago, I admit it) and made a huge dent in the tear-out-the-deck project. There's still more to do, as you can see, but it was an unexpected and appreciated windfall of help.



Coming soon: HVAC drama (big shock), window drama, and a new attic ladder with refreshingly little drama.

true baltimorons

Am swamped at work and valiantly trying to recover from a bad cold that put me totally out of commission for several days. Only have time to post this positive proof that Don's family are in fact true Baltimore natives:


Because a house isn't a home without a Natty Boh sticker in the window.