More houses in Hungary

A half-hour search on ingatlan.com for houses requiring renovation with 5 rooms or more turned up about ten houses I consider "interesting", in parts of town with decent infrastructure, and all really quite affordable. The most expensive is about $80K.

Maybe it's going to be cool, having to go to Europe.

OK, house in Hungary

Still haven't found a really rockin house in Budapest, but this one is close to Kecskemét, so I'm getting closer. Built in 1907. Has a freaking name, a name that is written on it. So history-wise it wins. I give you the Juliána-lak: price, a mere 5.8 million forint, something like $30K.

Do want!

(Update: the town it's in, Nagykörõs, is where my wife's maternal grandfather was from - I knew I'd heard of it somehow, but had no idea how. Anyway, she's got some cousins there. She's not sure whether that's good or bad, but does clearly remember the place being a dump when she visited as a child - but then she's from Budapest, so nearly everything in the world is a dump.)

House in Germany

I think I have a house problem. This house is currently available for a mere 14.2 million Hungarian forint (about $70K), in Jöhstadt, Germany. It's 12 rooms, needs work, 5000 square feet or thereabouts, and I freaking want it so bad.

But no, I gotta look for stuff in Budapest. All the good stuff is taken there. (Not entirely true; prices are way down this year. I'm hoping we can find something interesting - if nothing else, we may be able to buy my wife's old family home if we can persuade the current owner to do a deal.)

Wiremold on-wall wire channel

Wiremold makes a nice, attractive line of surface-mount channels and boxes for adding wire to existing masonry structure, and so in preparation for a couple of different projects of this nature, I bought some.

Let me just state for the record that Wiremold's documentation is some of the worst I have ever seen in my life, and their Website was obviously built by moderately-trained monkeys in the 1990s. Their online catalog plays paper noises when you turn pages. No, seriously. And there's no entry at all on their site for the "On-Wall" line, even though they went to the trouble of registering the trademark. In fact, their entire site consists of an undifferentiated bucket of PDFs with some kind of AJAX-y search-ish functionality in a side bar, and the results it returns are essentially useless.

I finally found the only published instructions for how to use their channel system on page 11 of 17 of a sales brochure for home products, consisting of a single 2x3" box with four blurry pictures. It's like living in a Douglas Adams book.

So anyway, lousy documentation, pretty nifty series of products. I'm going to use them in a couple of places, like the lights I'm putting on the back staircase in the big house. (Yes, I actually started doing something in the big house this year. Amazing, ain't it?)

Aromatic hydrocarbon outgassing

OK, so as you may know, the Midwest has basically been baked for about a month now under a heat wave like few others in history. Here's the unexpected consequence: even though the carriage house is air conditioned (with four small window air conditioners, which do a surprisingly fantastic job for only about $100 a month), the heat and humidity is still steaming out all manner of aromatic hydrocarbons.

That apartment was built in 1945/1946, so the only aromatic hydrocarbon worth talking about is the redolent odor of sixty years of stale tobacco smoke.

Now, I have to tell you, tobacco smoke only adsorbs to a certain range of surfaces, and the plaster walls are not among those surfaces - except inside the interior walls, which are an early form of plasterboard on wooden studs, with plaster on top. So there was a certain amount of stench wafting from all the outlets, particularly the old-construction boxes I installed myself (because they had more gap around them). Caulk, some ozone treatment, and a judicious amount of urethane foam and a free hand with the Zinsser 1-2-3 primer (which, I believe I have stated before, I love like life itself) solved most of that, although the effort is still ongoing. Which is good, because, for example, painting the bathroom cabinet was on my mighty list for the carriage house [a brief aside here: some items on that list are checked off! But I've been too busy to write.].

Once the outlets were solved, we noticed that all the cracks behind trim around the windows and doors stank (bare wood inside). The shelves in the hall closet stank.

But the place that only started outgassing yesterday (that I noticed) is the fridge nook.

So - and this is really disgusting - I'm sitting here working, and the ice cubes in my Coke taste like cigarettes.

Local history blog

I've been careful never to mention where The House actually is, but this local history blog by Dan Tate is too fine not to post. We're in Richmond, Indiana. So there.

Gentlemen, start your engines

It's 204 miles to Chicago, I got eight days, no cigarettes, the sun just came up, and I can't find my sunglasses.

Hit it.

(I like jet lag because it makes me a morning person for a few weeks. I got up at a lazy 3:30 AM this morning and felt well-rested and refreshed. I should just keep moving westwards by a couple of time zones every couple of weeks and I'd be the most productive person in the world.)