One Sixty: Partly Cloudy Means Mostly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy Means Mostly Cloudy

What a blah weekend. I had so much I wanted to get accomplished and barely any of it got done. This was supposed to be the anti-stink fix weekend. You see - the first stinky problem is upstairs in the bedroom - and I don't mean stinky as in, this sux or this is stupid or what the deuce? This is an actual smell. A smelly smell. A smelly smell that smells, smelly. (Ah, the philosophy of Mr. Krabs.)

What is this stink that, well, stinks? You'll love this - the poop pipe, you know, the vent for the septic, is right outside the bedroom window. Whoever did our Title5 plumbing was such a nincompoop. That pipe normally runs up above the roof line, but ours ends just about the bathroom roof, which, conveniently, is located right outside the master bedroom window. My side of the bed too! And so, as you can imagine, it constantly smells, and you can hear the water flowing from the toilet or shower to the septic, echoing out the pipe - such an attactive sound right?

This same plumber also devised a fantastic poop pipe design in the basement. The pipe that runs water and waste to the septic looks like this: L It's an L shape! There's barely any angle. Why is this a concern? Well, stuff... shiznit to be discustingly specific, could get stuck in the corner and clog the whole thing. Hopefully this issue will be resolved when we re-plumb after the house is up.

Anyway, we were going to run a length of pvc from the current vent up the roofline to where it's supposed to be. However - when we got back from the home depot on Saturday, we realized we forgot the brackets. Seeing as how we had already spent $75, I wasn't about to go back. Grrrr!

But that $75 wasn't just spent on pipe - our roof's not that high for crepe's sake! So we move on to our second stinky smelly problem, located conveniently under the poop pipe problem and therefore also underneath the bedroom - the trash cans. I'm sure many of you have had this problem this summer - animals knock over your trash cans, littering your trash everywhere and eating what's left of it, and you don't want to clean it up and procrastinate for a day or so, then the wind takes whatever it can carry and deposits it all over your yard, and you get mad because you didn't clean it up on day one, and if you're like me you're a girly girl and you don't want to touch that gross-ness, so you get a shovel and a pitch fork and you're braving swarms of killer flies, defending their feast to the last - in your work clothes no less - shovelling and pitch forking stuff back into the cans and dirt is flying and you dig up half the yard trying to get every last used tissue and apple core before you're late to work. It's just an aweful situation that no one should have to deal with unless they get paid a lot of money.

So Mike had a streak of motivation - motivated by not wanting to clean up the trash, which I understand - and we bought some plywood at the home depot to make a little trash can house. At least he got that completed - a small job that's worth it's weight in gold for the messy smelly job it saves us from. Plus it looks nicer that all that trash can/stuff that can't fit in trash can stuff in back of the house. And, right away we noticed that fresh air smell... at least from down on the ground. The bedroom still smells poopy.

Blog Story

My now husband Mike and I purchased this quaint home back in spring of 2004 - our first home - and, being the handy folks we are, expected to have the entire thing renovated in about a year or so.

And here we still are... renovating away.

This house needed a complete overhaul. Its plaster walls were uninsulated, its attic floor covered in 2" of bat guano, its basement - dirt and snakes, its exterior - asbestos siding, and lead paint windows in every room. The electric had not been updated and light sockets hung bare from the ceiling. Plumbing featured cast iron radiators - and only one for the entire upstairs.

We began by gutting almost the entire house from top to bottom. (sans bathroom - we needed to pee) We rebuilt the entire upstairs, with a new floor (not new carpet or wood - the once unstable framing underneath) and turned 3 small rooms into two. We reinvented the downstairs by turning a closet into a hallway and eliminating interior exterior windows and doors from old half-assed additions.

New insulation, windows, electrical wiring (including phone and CAT-5 internet), plumbing and baseboards, and drywall were all added.

We purchased kitchen cabinets from a yard sale. (None existed previously.) Our families helped us replace and purchase new appliances including the once also missing washer & dryer.

Then we had the entire house lifted - straight into the air - dug out the dirt, and had a real basement foundation poured. We updated our oil tank and burner and created heating zones.

Outside, we took down trees and planted grass. We dug out an awkward hill to create a 2nd part to the driveway and used the rocks our house once sat on as a retaining wall. We electrified and repainted the garage.

And of course, we spent many an hour on finish work like paint, trim, closet doors, lighting fixtures, hardwood floors, curtain rods, dimmer switches, and many other things everyone else takes for granted. We are still working to complete all this final finishing, but happy to report that we are FINALLY nearing completion of all little things in all rooms!

In 2008 we began overhauling the exterior by creating a new french door entryway and building a farmer's porch and garage addition. We replaced our roof and then stripped off our siding and replaced with new clapboards. We then planted two new flowering trees and a maple in the front yard - our first major landscape purchases. I'm happy to report that here in 2011, the porch is nearing completion and the back yard is on the road to recovery with some new loam and grass. More plantings soon to come!

In 2012 we plan to attack the last MAJOR (emphasis on major) job in the house - the dreaded BATHROOM! We plan to first add a second bathroom in the basement. Then, demolish our current bathroom and rebuild it, adding a second bathroom on top for the upstairs.

And that pretty much brings you up to date. The battle continues day to day as we try and complete everything.