Category: Houseblog

We’re really starting off the week with a bang. The electricians we needed to come and do about six jobs for us arrived at 7:45 on the dot and got to work. Right now one of them is fishing a snake up from my shop, where he punched a small hole in the finished corner (plaster, naturally; why is nothing in old houses easy?), came up through the firebreak, and is working on getting wire run up to where we’ll be installing some wall sconces for light.

One other project is already finished: a utility outlet under the sink for the garbage disposal we want to install. The previous owner had run wire under there, but we didn’t know from where. As it turns out, mercifully it was run from the breaker box!

The electrician has poked a hole in the living room wall for the first sconce and run back downstairs to snake the wire for the second one. This of course gives me the opportunity to poke around. Surprise: the back wall of the living room is actually plaster over backing board, not plaster over lathe (though the back side is still lathe and plaster). Second surprise: the stud spacing, at least near the outside wall, is about 14 inches. Third: the wall near the arch (which connects the living room to the small hall that accesses the first-floor bedroom, back bathroom, and kitchen) is plaster over board on both sides; no lathe in sight when the electrician opens the wall to install a new switch.

And that’s just the first two projects. Can’t wait to see what happens with the bathroom and garage outlets and the phone wire.

The back pain from yesterday isn’t getting any better. It’s a good thing the gutters are done; I don’t think I could climb a ladder today, much less lift one.

It was at least a productive weekend. We now have:

• A working dehumidifier in the basement, keeping watch over my books
• A working garage door opener, thanks to the expedient of an extension cord (there are no outlets in the garage, at least not until the electrician gets here next week)
• A formerly flaking eave (singular of eaves?) that has been scraped and primed
• Clean gutters
• An official place to keep the dogs’ leashes and our mittens (I cannot emphasize how happy that makes me—less the mittens than the leashes. We found a back-of-the-door ClosetMaid shelf system at Lowe’s that I installed yesterday)
• Better light in the living room and the first-ever light in our so-far-only-used-for-storage third bedroom
• And a new discovery: growlers from John Harvard’s Brew Pub. In the fridge we currently have a Pale Ale, their pseudo-Belgian Shakespeare’s Wit, and their new Provision Ale. Reviews forthcoming.

Also new: waking up to the sound of the radiators hissing as they got up to temperature. I finally got around to programming the thermostat, and it was nice to wake up to a slightly warmer house. Now I just have to fix my back.

Last Thursday I installed a programmable thermostat to replace the old mercury-filled dial-down model. This turned out to be a pretty simple project, though once again the age of the house complicates any project where we try to rely on advice from on-line sources and books. To wit: the new thermostat manual and all the on-line advice said to label the wires coming from the wall according to the labels on the old thermostat’s terminals. Good idea, except there were no labels on the old terminals. I guessed based on the color of the insulating fabric wraps around the old wires, crossed my fingers, and hooked up the wires accordingly. I guessed right, as it turned out; after cutting the power back on, I turned the thermostat up to 90° and was rewarded a few minutes later with the telltale whistle of extra air blowing out the relief valves in the radiators. (This, by the way, appears to be designed to eliminate knocking and the need to bleed the radiators. Based on the one cold day we’ve had so far, it appears to be working, though it does make one want to turn off the teakettle.) Now I need to find a place to dispose of the old thermostat (this program in western Massachusetts gives me some hope).

Yesterday was mostly a shopping expedition. We picked up some glaze to mix with the paint we used for the bottom half of our dining room; we’re going to try to add a little sophistication to the top half, which in its current baby-blue color looks a little too little-kid for the room. And we picked up a replacement light fixture for the dining room so I’ll stop braining myself on the chandelier. And we bought a little more than 30 pounds of tomatoes—it’s sauce time.

This morning while Lisa started to make sauce I installed new weatherstripping on the bottom of the garage door—hopefully that will give us some relief from the water that floods in during heavy rains. This afternoon I’ll clean and reinstall some storm windows, blow the maple seed pods off the driveway, and mulch the existing leaves. My neighbor’s tree has already started to turn, so our big maples shouldn’t be too far behind.

The workload over the last two days:

• Remove and clean all the window screens
• Remove and clean all the first floor storm windows
• Figure out that a baking soda paste removes the years-old nasty dirt on the glass of the front windows (thanks, Lisa)
• Move the demolished kitchen cabinet to the floor of my storage room cum workshop for extra storage
• Install two pegboard panels on the exposed studs in the storage room
• Try to get our tub draining better. We must have the only tripwaste linkage unit around that can’t be removed by removing the overflow plate. (Ours appears to be permanently in residence in our tub, possibly because the drain has a sideways jog.)

Enough. Time to catch our breath. The Lucadamos are hitting the road tomorrow, so we’ll celebrate tonight with burgers and corn.

I did a small amount of housework this weekend. The most significant project was replacing a door handle and installing a lockset on our storm door, which actually turned out to be a pain in the ass. I had to work hard to get the spindle (which connects the thumb button on the outside to the latch on the inside) to the right length; had to enlarge a couple of existing holes on the the door to adjust for the size of the replacement handle, which is somewhat smaller than the existing hardware; and had to do endless test fittings to get all the pieces lined up and working smoothly. But it worked in the end. I need to do some work on the door on the three season porch next, but I think it will work out a little better now that I know what I’m in for.

Here’s a quick catch-up houseblog: Esta and I finished painting the dining room this week, covering the inside of the built-in corner cabinet with the same dark blue paint (Behr’s “Bayou,” in case anyone is curious) that Lisa and I used for the walls below the chair rail. The overall effect is striking, with the room looking much brighter in comparison to the cream and tan it was before. I loaded in the cabinet, using the plate rails and pulling our barware out of the kitchen cabinets (we now have a glasses shelf—I’m so pleased).

Yesterday’s trip to the Cape was just the ticket. It was also a merciful interregnum in an ongoing problem we’ve had with the dogs. Both of them have had awkward digestive difficulties over the last week, and it hasn’t gotten better. Fortunately a highly competent vet in Belmont found the problem—some kind of nasty bacterial infection—and aside from a few highly dramatic reactions to the medicine this afternoon they’ve responded well. Both are sleeping soundly on the couches; they didn’t even bat an eye when we ate dinner next to them.

This house continues to feel more and more like a home. I found our photos and another bunch of our cookbooks today; there hasn’t been anything requiring professional intervention, knock wood, going wrong with the house in more than a week; the changing weather has lowered the temperature here to something more than comfortable, in fact cold enough for me to take some concern about the HouseInProgress article about the radiators. Makes me think we ought to fire up the system just to see what happens.

In the meantime, I’m grateful that I can still grill. Garage door open, I sit on a folding chair gifted by my in-laws, keeping an eye on the smoke and flames creeping out from under the lid of Old Faithful, our cheapo Char-Broil gas grill, watching the chicken slowly come to perfection, with a beer bottle beside me sweating condensation into the evening and a book in my hand; I wait for the meat to get just tight enough under my prodding finger (since, without a light on the back of the house, I can’t actually see what I’m cooking even with the garage light on). I drop the chicken piece by piece into the ceramic dish filled with marinade, getting the smell of garlic, lime, cilantro, mint, and fish sauce wafting over me each time I raise the lid.

In no particular order, here is some of the pulse pounding excitement waiting for me over the next few weekends:

• Replacement F1 key for Powerbook keyboard
• Fixing storm doors
• Benjamin Moore color palettes and virtual room paint viewer
• Kitchen cabinet hardware
• Workbench lighting
• Laundry storage

Setting a land speed record in reverse, it took us two weeks and two days before we painted a room in the Arlington house. Our living room, previously an anonymous cream color, is now a nice yellow. (Compare this with our Kirkland house, where we painted the living room on my second day in the house.)

I also assembled a manual, “reel”-style lawn mower and mowed our grass for the first time. If possible, this house has even less grass than the Kirkland house.

Finally, I started to get the storage and workbench area into shape today. For one thing, there’s now power in the room, in the form of an extension cord.

If you’re getting the feeling that things are starting to get a little slow here…well, yeah, it was a slow weekend. But I can’t say I’m not glad to have a day go by without demolition or plumbing problems.

It is one of the undeniable, though bittersweet, joys of homeownership that the bad times make you remember how wonderful your life is when all the mundane things that you take for granted actually work. For instance, I remember a time when we could flush a toilet in our house and not have unmentionable muck bubble out of the storm drain in our driveway. Such an innocent time.

The plumber’s already been here and it’s not our inside pipes, so now the city guy is striding down our driveway to the back of the house (where the garage entrance is), a pickaxe over his shoulder. This is going to hurt, I can tell.

I think I’ll go sit in the local RMV office for the fourth time this week to see if they’ll accept my newly arrived checkbook or notarized deed of quitclaim as proof of residency, since they wouldn’t accept our duplicated unsigned mortgage papers or the mailer from the bank that had my debit card. Maybe I’ll have a Massachusetts drivers’ license by the end of the day.

Hey, it beats unpacking boxes, right? Right?

I’ve had a while to get accustomed to this Cape Cod and am starting to warm to it, now that I don’t trip over boxes everywhere I turn. I’m going to try to list balanced “like/dislike” lists, with the goal of starting to figure out what works for me in the house and what should be addressed with future projects.

For this week, we have:

Likes

1. Really solid original wood doors and fixtures (including door frame moldings!) throughout
2. The main floor seems to hold temperature really well. We’ve consistently kept well below the outside peak temperatures.
3. Dining room built-in. Nice corner cabinet (that unfortunately sits over the only place we’ve seen in the house where settling has occurred, with the result that there’s a crack in the plaster on the wall behind the cabinet).
4. Practical basement layout: garage to utility room to storage room/workshop.
5. The master bedroom. I love the Cape Cod slanting rooflines, which don’t pose too much of a problem with headroom thanks to a shed dormer in the rear that spans almost the entire width of the house), and the whole bedroom is spacious and feels bigger than it is thanks to the nook formed by the shed dormer where the bed resides.

Dislikes

1. Most of the outside doors, and all the ones in the basement, stick. Some are really tricky to open; the front door cannot be unlocked and opened one handed, which is a problem when you walk dogs a lot.
2. The second (bedroom) floor gets very hot and muggy on hot days. I think the uninsulated attic opening (not really a trap door, just a panel) and lack of attic fan are to blame. A couple of projects right there…
3. No fan in the upstairs bathroom, which means an opportunity for me to get very dusty installing one.
4. No easy access to the back where the garbage cans live. To get there, I have to go downstairs, through the media room and the utility room and out through the garage door. Which is heavy, and sticks. (Pattern?)
5. In general, there are far too few electrical outlets in the house. There are none in the full bathroom upstairs, for instance, and only one in the dining room.

Now that all the major appliances are in and working (we had a plumber out on Monday setting up new pipes for the washing machine and cutting a vent for the dryer), we’re turning our attention to finer points. Like printing.

In the Seattle house, we had cable running to our bedroom, and had a little network corner there. On one Ikea mini-bedside-table (really four two-by-two pieces of Ikea wood in a sort of box shape), we had:

• The cable modem, connected to:
• An old Asante ten-port Ethernet router (courtesy Glenn Fleishman’s office move and $5), connected to:
• Our SMC Barracuda 802.11B wireless router, and
• Our HP LaserJet 2100 with an Ethernet print server card
• A barely working HP DeskJet color inkjet printer (connected to the Barracuda)

With this setup, we could print to either printer wirelessly from anywhere in the house. Lisa could also jack into the router if she was working on sensitive stuff that she didn’t want to transmit wirelessly. I described the process of hooking up the SMC, and getting the printer to work, earlier.

Fast forward to the Arlington house. Here we have set up a bedroom that does not have cable as our office space. We’ve accordingly hooked up the cable modem and wireless router in the living room, where they’re more or less discreetly tucked in among the audiovisual equipment. This means we need a new solution to hook in the laser printer, since we do not want it sitting out in the living room. (We’ve all but given up on the DeskJet. We just don’t need color very often and the consumables are expensive, and tend to dry up if you don’t use them for long periods of time.)

I wanted to do an AirPort Express, but I’m not sure it would work to put the LaserJet on the network (if I have time, I’ll check this out at the Apple store). Also, at $130 it’s a little more than I wanted to spend just to get the printer back on line. So I’m looking at SMC’s 2671W EZ Connect 802.11b Wireless Ethernet Adapter. For a product with such an ungainly name, it only does one thing: get Ethernet only devices onto a wireless network. And it’s almost exactly half the price of the AirPort Express.

I should have an update in a few days about how the install worked.

(Incidentally, 802.11b is one reason that going all-out on structured wiring hasn’t made sense to me. But the fact that we still have Ethernet only devices is giving me cause to rethink that point, though buying an adapter is cheaper and easier than snaking cable up through walls that we’ve never opened. Maybe when we do a big remodel.)

The last time I left Seattle (after my summer internship), I wrote a post about things I would miss upon returning to Boston. This time I held off; everything moved too fast to pause for reflection, and I didn’t know what would show up on the “most missed” list.

Then tonight I was in the grocery store and I had a full-on Proustian moment. I was going to pick up a chicken to make one of our favorites, a fricassee with rosemary, garlic, and white wine, when I thought, “Guess I need to buy rosemary.” And just like that, it came to me in a rush: I miss my herb garden.

Obviously rosemary in particular is important to me. But I really miss that whole garden bed. Out of the six raised beds in the back, we only kept one going consistently. As I described when I dug it, I put in a full bouquet garni of herbs, and then some: a border of different thymes, of which the standard English and variegated lemon varieties did quite well; sage, which froze in the winter but bounced back and thrived after; marjoram and savory, which hung in quite well; basil and parsley, which needed seasonal replacement but some of which hung on for the next year; oregano, which may well have taken over the whole box by now. And what ended up being two rosemary bushes, one of which was three feet tall when we left. I never had to buy herbs, except cilantro and parsley (we consumed far more than we could grow). I could always walk out back and grab a handful of stuff and improvise.

This house has no established garden area. We’re going to have to work quite hard to carve one out of the back yard, which is shadowed by three overgrown maples and blanketed with weeds. So it will be a while before I get my herb-fu back.

As it turns out, I wasn’t quite ready to have our fridge would fit in our kitchen. When Lisa and I measured the fridge cubby in the kitchen, we forgot to take into account the width of the baseboard molding. So after ripping down the cabinet, and after the fridge was delivered, I had one last piece of demolition to do.

Ripping out floor trim can be tricky if it was put in before the most recent floor was laid. In our kitchen, there was a layer of linoleum and other flooring material that obscured the base of the trim. So instead of being able to get a prybar under the base of the trim, I had to work in stages—first splitting the trim in half along the line of the bottom trim nails, then removing the top half, then pulling the bottom trim nails, then levering the bottom half of the trim out.

After this last piece of demolition on the right hand side trim, the fridge fit back about three-quarters of the way into the nook. Maybe tomorrow while the remnants of Hurricane Charlie dump rain on us, I’ll remove a little trim on the left hand side so it can slide the rest of the way back.

In the meantime: we have a fridge!!!

There was one last piece of demolition to do before the fridge could fit in the kitchen. For some reason, the cabinet over the refrigerator cupboard was about two inches closer to the floor than needed for the fridge to fit. Solution? Rip that sucker down!

This turns out to be a stupid demolition to do by yourself. Most wooden kitchen wall cabinets are attached or otherwise connected to the wall by the following means:

1. screws
2. molding
3. paint

And that’s about it. So if you break the paint seal with a putty knife, pry the top molding loose, and then start removing screws, there’s a very good chance the thing is going to drop on your fool head. Or foot. Or make a big hole in the kitchen floor.

Fortunately for me, our cabinet was held in as well by d. friction. So when I removed the last screw, it still stayed wedged in place, even when I foolishly tugged on the front of the cabinet. I ended up bracing the front of the cabinet with one arm and using the prybar to lever the cabinet away from the back wall. It obligingly rotated itself around an axis formed by the topmost front contact points and the wall cavity, where I could get both hands under it and gently tug it free.

And what a wonderland of joy lay revealed! Unpainted walls, and big holes in the plaster ceiling where someone had done some quick work on the upstairs plumbing. Guess I need to learn to patch fist-sized holes (and bigger!) in plaster ceilings now. But hey, our fridge is going to fit! If it ever gets here (ETA: 12:45 to 2:45 PM today.)

Special bonus! By popular request following the original story, before, during and after pictures from the doorjamb removal.

Sitting in the Northeast, I probably shouldn’t complain about the 83° weather; after all, it’s 105 in Vegas. But right now it feels like I’ve been walking through soup for the last few hours. I note with grim irony that Georgia is actually cooler than Boston right now, though I’m sure that being in the middle of an approaching hurricane has something to do with it.

Productive afternoon anyway: unpacked my CDs, got bookshelves set up, found our china. Our refrigerator comes tomorrow and we’ll be paying a plumber approximately an arm and a leg to run new pipes in the utility room for our washing machine on Monday (we have a sink, but the house never had a washing machine so we have to have the hookups created from scratch).

One of these days I’ll have to take a vacation that doesn’t involve our move.