Attics

Gary and I never had an attic until we moved here. First we lived in apartments. Then the best parsonage in the whole district -- so roomy that we didn't need to store anything in an attic. (I don't even know whether there was one there.) The next parsonage had an attic that was entirely unusable for storage. But this house has nice, simple access to the attic, as well as part of the attic having a floor so that we can put baby toys and the artificial tree and Christmas decorations up there.

Today I was digging through boxes in the attic, looking for the Jesse tree.

Guess what?
Advent candles, stored with the Christmas decorations, do not survive summer well in an attic. And that's even with a cool summer this year.

Yuck! What a mess!

Philip's Place

Finally got over to see Philip's condo today. Here are Gary and Philip carrying in some spare counter-space that Paul built for his brother.

The living room --

The bedroom --

The kitchen --

The patio between the buildings. The entry to the locked garage is underneath this.

Big Day

Philip signs the papers and takes possession of his condo today. He found a nice wood dining room table and a credenza at Goodwill this week. (I always wondered what a "credenza" was. And when he brought this thing home, I wasn't sure what it was. Then I saw the word stamped on the back. Ah ha!) He called last night from the store, asking for advice on saucepans and cookware. He'll be taking my spare 3-qt Reverware until he can get to central Illinois and raid my sister's and brother-in-law's pre-wedding stuff.

After taking on his mortgage, he will be spending the rest of the day cleaning cupboards and shampooing carpet and such. I guess tomorrow is the day to haul stuff back and forth in the van.

I bet Paul will be glad to move upstairs to the bedroom, out of the depths of the basement.

I should spend the day in the garden, but I keep wondering if putting seeds in that cold soil is going to rot them. Hey, at least the grass we planted on Monday should be doing well, with the persistent gentle rains and drizzles we've had for three days straight. It's nearly June and we're still running highs in the 50s and low 60s. Global warming, my foot.

Running Around

Gary and I were discussing grocery shopping and schedules and run-around errand-days. I was commenting how much I like not having a regular shopping day in the weekly schedule. So much more free time for exciting activities like mopping and laundry! And yet, there's that pesky little problem of running out of groceries and then trying to fit in time (allotted to some other activity) to a grocery run.

He reminded me that my Mondays at the old house, though long and tiring as I did all the errands in Janesville, were also a chance to get away from the house. And then I remembered. I had forgotten. Yes, as tiring as Mondays were, there was that aspect of being away from the house. Away from the mildew. A break from the air that made my nose perpetually stuffy and my head perpetually achy. At the old house, a trip to visit family or friends out of town had the added attraction of being a break from my house, not just the joy of seeing loved ones.

Maybe that's why I'm finding it harder to do all the visiting that I used to do, why I'm more of a homebody in the last year. I still want to see friends. But I feel fine at home now, and that makes me all the more comfortable here, all the more "hunkered down" and less willing to go gallavanting.

Around the House

I finally got the computer put back together enough that I can download some pictures from the camera. Since Mom hasn't been to see the new house, here are some photos to give her (and some friends) an idea of what the place is like.

This one is taken from the driveway, looking north at the living room (with decorative huntress cat in the bay window) and two of the bedrooms:


This is the view from the front door, looking west, toward the entrance into the neighborhood:



This one, too, is the view from the front door, but faced south toward the end of our tiny little street:


This is taken from the deck, looking toward my clothesline and the neighbors across the street to the north:


This is the view from the kitchen window, looking east. You can see the neighbor's barn shed and the corner of the nursery that abuts the corner of our yard.


And this one is the view straight out the kitchen window in back, facing northeast. In both these last two shots, you can see deer tracks traipsing across the yard, right over the spot where we've dug up a garden-to-be. All those hoofprints is no good sign for the lettuces and tomatoes that I imagine could be growing right on Bambi-Highway.


I hope that gives a little bit of perspective for those of you who would've liked to have been able to visit, but so far haven't been able to.

Bathroom Vent

Breathing fiberglass dust makes me cough.

While dusting the hallway yesterday, I noticed this ugly mark on the ceiling. Gee, am I really that unobservant that I hadn't noticed that before? I thought so. I asked the kids; they didn't think they remembered that mark on the ceiling either. I made a note of it to mention to Gary when he got home. However, he was preaching on Monday night in Shorewood, so it would be a 30-hour wait until he got home to where he could do any checking or fixing for me.

So then I'm cleaning in the bathroom later. Dusting the door frame [yes, I know, this weird fit of cleaning-cleaning instead of just fudging along with a wiped sink or a mopped floor] I found a puddle. Right near the spot on the hallway ceiling. Hmmmm.

So I investigated in the attic. I discovered a new problem that I'd never heard of before. The steam being sucked out of the bathroom has been condensing in the vent-tubing as it passes through the attic on its way outside. And then it freezes. With the warmth yesterday, water was sloshing around in the vent-tubing and there were hunks of ice rattling around in there too. This is where the soppy drips had originated to mess up my hallway ceiling. Geeminy Christmas!

Okay, so I take a bucket upstairs into the attic, intending to separate the tubes where they had been spliced together, and dump the water into the bucket. Uhhhh... news-flash to Susan. Water goes DOWNHILL. So my plan worked hunky-dory for the water and ice in the half of the tube connected to the exhaust-vent in the roof. But the water and ice in the half of the tube connected to the bathroom ceiling.... ummm... it went flowing downhill and splashed through the vent-machine, all over the bathroom floor and toilet and counter and into the litter box.

And it was icky yuck nasty dirty water!

Well, good thing I hadn't gotten far in the bathroom cleaning.

After I removed the motor and the vent-fan from the bathroom ceiling, Andrew held the bucket underneath the hole and held open the flap on the tubing so that I could go upstairs and empty the rest of the water from the tubing. We ended up getting more than a gallon out of the tube.

It dried overnight. This morning I rearranged the tubes in the attic so that they no longer leave the bathroom ceiling-vent, dip down, do a 180° turn, travel relatively horizontally across the attic (with a few more mild roller-coaster ups-and-downs), and then make a 90° turn up to the exhaust spot. I cut a bunch of the tubing out, re-spliced it, and used string to hang the tube from the roof joists so that the vent-tube is much closer to being a straight shot from the bathroom vent to the exhaust-spot in the roof.

I'm a little worried about that. For one thing, some of the online advice said that having it be a straight shot leaves the possibility for condensed steam to run back toward the bathroom instead of making it all the way out of the house. Hmm. Could be. But would that be any worse than having the steam pile up and pile up in ice chunks all through the winter? The other problem is that I noticed it's colder in the bathroom now. That could be simply because somebody had opened the bathroom window earlier. But that was long enough before that it doesn't seem to be an adequate explanation for the chillier bathroom temps.

On the other hand, I took an intentionally long, hot, steamy shower after I got myself out of the fiberglassy attic. Just a scientific experiment, y'know. Not because I wanted a long, hot, steamy shower. Oh no! I kept peeking out at the mirror. It took longer to steam up than normal. When I got out of the shower, there didn't seem to be any steam swirling around in the air. Hmm. That's a good sign. So then we decided to play with matches and experiment with some nice visible air. We tested what happened to the smoke from the matches in the little bathroom where the vent was off, and what happened to the smoke near the vent in operation in the big bathroom. And you could tell that the vent was really drawing! So, I'm hoping that it's fixed. Wow. I fixed something!

(And if anybody knows that something I fixed is going to create a new problem, please let me know before I discover it the hard way.)

Jack It Up

Spent the weekend trying to accomplish projects that I've been procrastinating on. Gary and the boys worked on the deck.

When doing projects around the house, it seems good to take into account how your methods will affect the house in the long-term, as well as how repairs will need to be done later, or how the same job will be handled when it needs to be redone in a decade or two or three.

Gary's finding some frustrations with how things were fixed around here by previous owners. For example, when they put together (or repaired?) the deck in days past, they used a wide variety of screws: some deck screws and some that would rust, as well as several different varieties of screw-heads. Gary wants ONE kind of screw so that he won't have to keep hauling out different screw-drivers when he makes repairs someday.

Today's stunner was when they found that one of the posts/pylons holding up the deck wasn't attached to the joists that it was supposed to be attached to. When the deck was initially built, they just kinda sorta missed when they put in the bolts. So THAT's why the deck sagged there.

Philip's been digging out mud from underneath the deck. (Some previous owners put down non-porous plastic under the deck too. Then critters dug and threw dirt on top of the tarp. That stuff is muddddddY!) Today Gary and Paul did some more digging to clean up the wetness underneath the deck. And that's when the found the deck not attached to the supports.

So Gary and Paul came up with a plan. They would use the jack from the car to lift the deck back up to the height it was supposed to be. They dug down a little further, and then applied the jack near the place it had become detached. A little cranking, and it was in the right place, ready to be re-attached.

We are so proud of these resourceful guys! Like Gary said, he didn't expect to be able to fix this unless we paid somebody thousands of dollars to do it. We'd figured we'd just live with the deck being saggy. The guys sure are working hard and throwing a lot of physical labor into the spiffing-of-the-deck. But they're doing a better job of it than I'd expect of somebody who was just doing it for the money and didn't have to live with the long-term ramifications of how the repairs are accomplished.

House-Hunting

Last June we had reason to believe that there was a possibility Gary might get a call because his name was on two lists who were looking for a pastor like him. Neither congregation had a parsonage, so we started toying with the idea of home-ownership, and what it would take, and what it would cost, and what it would be like. But as time passed and things here changed, neither congregation called him.

In October it became clear that Gary was going to have to find a job. The congregation hadn't decided that yet, but it was obvious to us as well as the district president. Gary was having abysmal luck with the job-hunting.

When someone at Direct Supply requested that his resumé be looked at and not thrown directly into the trash, we knew that the commute would be unreasonable. We knew that, if he got that job, we'd want to consider moving. So we began studying house prices and looking for rentals and revisiting the possibility of home-ownership. Everybody told us that it was a great time to buy, with low prices and low interest rates. Nevertheless it's still overwhelming given the financial situation we've been in for the last decade.

So we found a very good deal on a house that had been in foreclosure. The bank was needing to get rid of it. It was a nicer house than we thought we could possibly find on our budget. We put an offer on it Wednesday. Our realtor had been told by the seller's realtor that there was another offer on the table, but the bank would be countering. Our realtor told them to hold off until they saw our offer later in the day, and that was welcomed. So we offered full price, knowing that even at the asking price we'd be getting a good deal. And the bank accepted the other offer. We were very disappointed. Our realtor still can't figure out what happened, but it sounds like the seller's realtor might not have even gotten our offer to the seller. Our realtor is going to talk to the bank and the other realtor today in hopes of figuring out what went wrong. But in the meantime, we go back to the drawing table and start searching again.

It's hard, though, to want to bother coming up with an offer after what happened last week. If an offer like last week's was rejected, then why should we think any other offer we make will be acceptable? I know that's not reasonable to think, but when you try something new for the first time, and it gets completely screwed up in a way that stuns even a very experienced person, things seem pointless.