Phone, and cleaning

The landline was turned on today (to the carriage house) and, of course, the wire needed a little work. And it turned out that:

• Two wires had come loose in the inside terminal box
• The terminal box itself predated the new wiring, and so its cover could not be removed until I unstapled the arm-thick 50A-rated 6-3 cable to the stove and moved it out of the way
• Where the phone line (and an old cable wire) enter the carriage house, there is an inch-wide gaping hole to the outside with no attempt to insulate or seal.

So it was par for the course. I moved the inside terminal box (shown in the photo in its new position), restripped and fastened the phone wires, restapled the stove cable, and vowed to visit that wire entry on my Big Sealing Project later this month.

Cleaning: the last of the major carriage house cleaning is now complete, after today's marathon push to finish the mopping of the ceiling and walls in the front room. I still don't really want to know what process could have scattered organic material so thoroughly and with such even distribution onto the walls and ceilings here; I am merely grateful that it comes off this excellent enamel paint so easily.

So. Progress today, however slight.

Bathroom's clean

Which is good, because the family will be at the airport tomorrow. Or, actually, today at this point. The "overall thorough mopping" is also complete. Which leaves oh so much to do.

Fridge in place

I love it when a plan comes together.

I gave up and took out the grimy linoleum in the fridge nook, leaving the plywood under it. The plywood needs to be replaced, really, because a two-inch strip to the right has rotted; I'm guessing the refrigerator in there leaked, or didn't have a drip pan, or the drip pan was never emptied. (On seeing this, I promptly emptied the drip pan on this one, which had three-quarters of an inch of water in it.)

Anyway, I'm still working on the floors and cabinets, but... the kitchen is basically done. I was going to clean it, then make breakfast, but it's already afternoon and I'm just too hungry, so I guess I'll cook breakfast tomorrow. I have some fresh eggs from my dad's chickens; an omelette sounds pretty good.

Cleaning

It rained last night, so I don't want to paint the window frame, so that thread is blocked.

Instead, in honor of the stove I bought this morning for $50, I'm cleaning the kitchen. Here's a before-and-after shot in the same picture; scrub brushes work wonders, and this paint, while worn, is pretty good paint.

Remember in The Color Purple, before the lead grows up and turns into Whoopi Goldberg, how she looks at the kitchen in the household she's just been given to, and she draws some water, and gets a cloth, and gets down to work exposing a really rather nice kitchen under the grime? That's how I feel in this carriage house, but especially today in the kitchen.

Anyway, with a sink, and a stove, and a fridge, plus all the Truck 'o' Stuff, I have a kitchen, as soon as it's all clean. It'll be nice to start eating decent food again. I like restaurant food, but there's a limit. I may just make a vat of chili to start with.

Carriage house water heater - change in plans

I talked to the plumber about installing the tankless water heater. Turns out (logically) that a tankless water heater needs a more robust flue than a regular water heater, because when it's in use it really cranks through the heat. So I realized that I don't really want to get into a long, drawn-out project with updating the flue, just to get moved into the carriage house.

Long story short: I bought a replacement water heater, a regular tank heater, and my dad and I installed it this morning. Here it is, all shiny and fresh. Note that it has a separate cutoff - which is useful, because of course I haven't replumbed the hot water yet.

I tested the hot water, and yeah, got kind of soaked. There's at least a fitting blown under the bathtub; the rest look like they might be OK, but it's hard to tell when all that water is spraying around.

But - as soon as I have that fixed, and call the gas company to get my gas turned on, I've got hot water!

In other news, I've made a lot of progress in mopping ceilings and walls. It's looking a lot better in here. Still smells like bleach, but that's a real improvement on what it smelled like two weeks ago. Ha.

And in other other news, I measured the bedroom window, just to get an idea of what it might cost to replace windows. It measures 36" x 54" - meaning it's a lot bigger window than it really looks in place - and wonder of wonders, that seems to be a quasi-standard size. I have a wooden option at Menard's for $250, and Lowe's has a vinyl insert for $150 or so. In total, there are six windows in the carriage house, and frankly, they're nothing special, so I don't feel bad about replacing them with something more modern. So I could do it with halfway decent wooden windows for $1500, or cheaper-looking vinyl for $900.

Dirty carriage house ceilings

Just as a point of reference, here's the dirt on the ceiling of the carriage house. The thumbnail here doesn't really show much, so click through for a higher-resolution version. When I first saw this, I thought it was mold. Imagine my relief to find it was a mixture of food and cigarette smoke. The paint is a super-durable double coat of enamel, so the dirt comes off easily with a bleachy mop and a little scrubbing, but I find it surprisingly tiring to hold the mop up for that long.

Anyway, nearly caught up with Job #1, after which I will be catching up with Job #2, after which, the theory is, I will be back to more frequent House work. I was cleaning here in the carriage house until I ran out of bleach. But yesterday, I bought more bleach, so ... progress. Yes.

One clean room

The front room in the carriage house is now officially clean enough that I can put my office in it for daytime use. The walls and ceiling appear to have small flecks of (presumably thrown) food. The carriage house apartment's previous occupant suffered from Huntingon's Disease, the hereditary neural degenerative disease that killed Woody Guthry. It doesn't make for easy cleanup, but it's all possible.

I also got another window open in the carriage house bedroom. That room still smells fairly vile, so it needs another few passes, clearly. The open window will help. It doesn't have glass in it, but it does have a storm window on it. It had been stuffed with R-13 fiberglass insulation and covered with Visqueen.

That was the sum total of today's progress. I'm busy with paying work this week; don't expect much.

Carriage house cleaning phase I complete

By which I mean, the entire apartment has now been thoroughly mopped once with copious bleach. Each bucket of water dumped had turned black (and perhaps it was black in the technical sense, too: I didn't analyze the encrustations on the floor). There were perhaps thirty such buckets.

It's still not clean enough to kneel on the floor to do serious cleaning. But it's getting there.

In other news: I walked into the big house tonight for the first time without being hit by a musty basement miasma. I bought the biggest dehumidifier Lowe's sells about four days ago, but for a while the actual dehumidification rate was limited by how often I visited the house to empty the bucket. So I bought a condensate pump for the drain hose. But I didn't have a wrench, so the drain hose didn't drain very well, and the bucket still filled up and stopped the dehumidifier, just more slowly than without the drain hose.

I obstinately refused to buy a pair of pliers when I already have four perfectly good ones. They arrived last night, along with the rest of the Truck 'o' Stuff, and since then, the dehumidifier has run continuously for about 22 hours. And it works. Not only does the basement smell great, the walls are drying out. The entire house smells far, far better.

It's just a stopgap, of course, until I can get proper gutters in place and make sure the window wells are draining someplace other than into the basement. But it's an effective one.

The carriage house

So this is the carriage house. It's 20 by 40 feet and has an apartment upstairs which I only learned about after we closed. (Buying blind is kind of fun.) I've been calling it my "spare house" and, now that it has water, I can clean it and -- soon -- move into it so I'll be on-site and can switch back and forth between manual labor and paying work. Also, the dog will learn to think of it as home, which will be a plus.

It turns out the linoleum in the carriage house kitchen is pretty decent. I mean, long-term, I'd like a classier floor, but this is more than serviceable for now!

The floor of the entire apartment is just as dirty. It already smells better, though -- I started with the bathroom, of course. Bleach and Lysol are our friends.

The water heater is capped, so I thought it had also been drained before freezing. No such luck -- or possibly it had already frozen earlier. It's leaking, copiously. So I need a new water heater. I'm seriously considering going with on-demand here, too. Or as they call them now, "tankless" water heaters. Way cheaper to run, plus there's a tax credit to offset their higher cost of procurement.

So that was today's progress. I may head back over there later and mop some more, and maybe Lysol-wipe the walls and cabinets. It won't take that much to make it livable for one guy and a dog.  And all our stuff is due to arrive tomorrow, so hey -- it'll be like not traveling again!

Here's a view of the front room, from the hallway. Note the boarded-up window, which you can see in the outside picture above, too. My dad and I were downstairs in the garage area, removing the 2x4 frames that the previous owner had started installing (to make the downstairs a habitable area as well -- but of course I want the garage area). The window being open, a guy walking his dog in the alley asked us whether we were fixing the place up. I allowed as how that was indeed the plan, and he asked, "Upstairs, too?" I said especially upstairs, and he said, "You know who used to live there, don't you?" I shook my head (I knew the person living there had been mentally disabled). He said, "Crazy Cabot, that's who," and told me how he would break the windows out when he was angry. So I guess that's why so many windows are missing. Or maybe that's just gossip, who can say?

This is a neighborhood with some bite to it. I suspect Garrison Keillor has taken the scriptwriter's job for my life. But suburbia it ain't.