My Home Among The Hills

We are always amazed as we repair and replace stuff in our old house.  Amazed and terrified in most cases.  Take, for example, the outside lights we replaced a few weeks ago.  They were junky looking lights and one had stopped working.  They looked ancient so we figured it wasn’t worth trying to fix them up.  Up I climb on my ladder and off comes the set screw holding it all together.  My jaw dropped as I lowered the light from the box holding the light in the wall.  Both lights were connected to regular 12 gauge wire by telephone wire (24 gauge).  In case you are not familiar, 12 gauge wire is a pretty typical size wire for running electricity through a house.  On the other hand, I used to play with 24 gauge telephone wire as a kid when I wanted to mess with flashlight batteries and tiny gizmos.  Twelve gauge wire is rated for a maximum of 25 Amps in free air, or 20 Amps as part of a 3 conductor cable (i.e. typical household usage).  Telephone wire is not rated at all for household current.

Ok, I know, I am going on and on.  I just can’t imagine what would make someone decide to connect an obviously very skinny wire (diameter of 0.0201 inches) to a very not-skinny wire (diameter of 0.0808 inches…4 times the diameter of the other).  Even if you know little about electricity, I would think one would at least pause for a moment upon seeing such a difference.  Check this out for a graphic

Fortunately my house didn’t burn down.  I don’t know how previous owners didn’t have problems aside from the fact that the lights were probably rarely used because of their location.  As we work through the issues in this money-pit adventure of home ownership, I shudder to think of what else lies in wait for us.

Anyone else see crazy stuff in your house and wonder how you survive?

I have been pretty lame about writing much lately.  It seems like life has taken over and left us without a life.  We have soccer two nights and one day a week, we have taekwondo two nights a week and we sometimes have to go buy groceries now and then.  I know our situation is not unique, but gee whiz, life can be draining.  I hope to have some news in the coming weeks about what we plan to do to remedy that, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, in the time I have on the weekends, I have been working on our house.  It’s mostly slow more so than steady, but I have to ponder my progress in between stopping points.  Emily wishes I pondered a little less I think, but I always have to work up the nerve to tear into the next portion of a project.  Once I start, I am usually fine…it’s just that starting part that’s tough.

Anyhow, I have been working on the basement bathroom for…uh…a year or more?  Yeah, I know.  Well, it’s because the shower had me scared.  Our basement shower has water pressure like a fire hose so that makes it potentially awesome.  The problem is that whoever installed it did so with absolutely no vapor barrier and with a drain profile that makes the floor so steep that it is hard to stand in.  It was really really ugly and poorly done too.  I decided to redo the whole mess and let it watery awesomeness be available for our usage once again!  Yeah, sounds good doesn’t it?  As I said above, I had to work up the nerve to do something about it.  Once I crack the first tile, all was well, but getting to that took a great deal of pondering.

I started banging on the floor with a sledge hammer and a chisel.  I needed to get access to the drain underneath so I could remedy that awful slope in the floor.  My house has a mixture of clay tile and cast iron drain pipes.  I originally thought that the shower drain was cast iron.  It had a cast iron top piece.  As I worked my way through the concrete, I discovered that the cast iron pipe was a decoy…it hung over a larger clay tile drain depending on gravity and good luck to let the water fall through the cast iron and into the clay…and it basically worked.  I was using an electric hammer to do a lot of the work (after an unfortunate finger/chisel/sledge hammer incident).  I worked without a care until I discovered the clay…holy cow I did not want to break that or replace it.  It was in great shape and under a lot more concrete so I decided to leave well enough alone.

The famed finger of the unfortunate finger/chisel/sledge hammer incident

Eventually I got it opened and in tact.  The clay tile is a trap so water was laying in the pipe.  I was able to feel through the trap and found that it was clear (yes, it is big enough for me to run my arm through it!).  The local plumbing supply place hooked me up with some pvc to join to the clay since my original plan to use a boot to cast iron was foiled.

I got the new drain in place and started the process of layering concrete and metal mesh and rubber liner on the floor to make a proper shower floor.  The original floor had a slope of 3 inches.  By code, the floor was supposed to have a slope of 3/4 of an inch.  

My shower is not yet finished, but at least I now have a vapor-barrier-enhanced-properly-sloped-much-nicer-looking-shower-in-progress!

And awesome fences are…well, what I built.  You probably remember that we got a dog a few months ago.  I honestly had no idea what sort of a pain dogs were, but alas, I have Ginny and she’s a good dog.  She loves being outside so I have no problem letting her stay outside during the day while we are at work.  The problem is that she has worn all the grass from her kennel and her outhouse is far too close to my house.

Like a good dog owner, I want to protect Ginny from neighborhood dogs as well as gypsies, tramps and thieves…and Cher.

Oh yeah, lets’ take a moment to listen to Cher when she still looked somewhat human:

Anyhow, our house didn’t have a fenced in area so my cheap-skate brain kicked in and I started digging fence post holes.  Actually, we first had to cut down a mess of a tree that was on the one corner of the property where the fence was to go.  The tree had grown up pretty badly into the power, phone and cable lines that run on the edge of our property.

I marked the lines

Camo AND a chainsaw!

Again, being cheap, I couldn’t see paying someone hundreds of dollars when I could crawl up on a conductive aluminum ladder near the power lines to cut the junk down.  Slowly but surely, I was able to pick away at the branches until I could safely drop the tree.  Once done, I commenced digging and have almost completed the fortress as Isaac likes to call it.

The tree used to be at that far corner

(we did chainlink on one side so Ginny would be able to see out)

So the fence will be great for keeping Ginny safe, but it also hides the mess that my neighbors leave about in their yard.  They collect animals and stuff and just seem to be unable to haul all their junk to the curb on trash day.  I won’t rant too long (but boy I could).

Our view (sometimes) of the neighbor's yard...before the fence. Yes, it is a chewed up couch cushion.

Let’s just say that the thousand bucks we spent on this fence has saved us many thousands in mental health bills.  Emily has found her zen place behind our new walls!