the learning curve continues

We moved in last weekend and are getting the new place up and running.

Today's adventure involves the sprinkler system. Since the rains have mostly stopped, our landscape's been dying, which made getting the sprinklers working a high priority. One of the manifolds that controls one of the sprinkler stations is gushing: not merely leaking, but leaking a whole awful lot of water whenever it turns on. So one project for today was to fix or replace the manifold.

I made the mistake of taking the advice from one of the guys at Home Depot who recommended replacing it with a new one. I also learned that replacing one of these beasts involves shutting off the water, cutting the pipes that connect it to the system, and assembling and gluing in the new manifold. So I bought all the parts necessary to do that. The operation started smoothly enough: I assembled the new system, dug around the old one, and cut it off. Only then did I realize that the pipes on the old manifold are a different distance apart than the pipes the new manifold is designed to fit. So, lesson #1: be careful when taking advice from Home Depot.[1] Lesson #2: check the sizes before cutting any pipes.

That left me (us) in a quandary: I had to shut off the water to cut off the manifold, now the pipe's cut, and as long as there's no manifold I can't turn the water back on. At this point, I was in over my head. So we ran a quick web search looking for a plumber who could solve the problem. Lesson #3: plumbers don't necessarily do irrigation, even though both involve pipes. We eventually found an irrigation person, who may or may not be able to make it here before Tuesday morning. In the meantime, he recommended gluing a cap on the supply pipe. So I've done that, and now I'm waiting for the glue to set up before I turn the water back on. Hopefully it'll hold. I guess we'll find out around 3:30 or 4:00.

So much to learn.

Update: at 4:00, I turned on the water and the cap held, so the situation's stabilized until someone who knows what he or she is doing can fix the problem.

[1] The advice from the ex fireman who used to do plumbing work on his days off and now works in the plumbing section turned out to be very helpful for getting the washer and dryer working, so I'm not saying it's all bad, just that caution is necessary.

new thermostat

When installing a new Honeywell digital thermostat to replace an old Honeywell round thermostat, keep in mind that the wire labeled "H" on the old thermostat may, in fact, be the "R" wire. Especially if whatever machine printed the "H" on the thermostat just happened to miss ever so slightly and cut off the top of the letter. And you also have a "W" wire, and the instructions don't seem to account for having both a "W" and an "H."

OK, so pretty obvious. But if you don't figure it out, you can spend an hour puzzling over why the fan won't come on.

Trust me on this one.

worst painter evar

I am not a good painter. For some reason, no matter how hard I try, I end up with drips and runs. When it comes time to paint the airplane, my choices will likely boil down to sending it to a paint shop, paying the paint shop extra to teach me how to paint right, or giving up and going for the polished aluminum look.

Anyway, one of today's big jobs was to "do something" about the shower pan in the master bedroom. The shower pan was pretty beaten-up, with dark spots and a rough finish that was going to accumulate more dirt. I was able to clean it pretty well, using a concoction of household chemicals I'm not eager to face again, but the pan was past the point of looking good.

Since we intend to remodel that bathroom in a few years anyway, we opted to try one of those do-it-yourself refinishing kits, which is essentially a two-part epoxy paint, where you put on your goggles and respirator, play mad chemist mixing stuff from can A with stuff from can B, ventilate the hell out of whatever it is you're painting, and the paint fuses with the surface with chemical vice grips closely related to the glues Burt Rutan used to build Space Ship One.

Anyway, after attacking the shower pan with the barrage of household chemicals I mentioned earlier, I spent today sanding it with 400 grit sandpaper, vacuuming it, and then going over everything with a tack cloth. Shower pans, you see, are specifically made so stuff like dirt and soap scum won't stick to them. Which is why the paint has to use such fearsome chemistry. So you sand the pan to roughen up the surface, and then you make sure those little chemical vice grips end up grabbing onto the rough surface instead of bits of dust you accidentally left there.

Here's a picture of the work in progress:



Anyway, it came out looking a lot better than it had before I started, but there are still more drips and runs than I'd like. I'm debating whether I want to let it harden, sand them out, and put on another coat.

working on the master bath

We made more house progress today. The previous owner had removed the doors from the master bathroom, probably to make access easier. We discovered one of the doors in the garage and the other stored in the shelves built along the garage's ceiling. Coppertop cleaned both of them and we re-hung them today. I spent a good bit of time trying various miracle cleaning products on the stains in the shower (and occasionally releasing some really nasty fumes when two products that are never supposed to be used together accidentally came into contact.) After much scrubbing with Lime-Away, Soft Scrub, soap scum cleaner, and whatever else I could think of to try, the stains are somewhat better but still not great. We may decide to put down epoxy paint as a temporary measure until we can afford to do some serious work on the bathroom.

We also met the neighbor on one side of the house and briefly exchanged pleasantries.

Much progress, but much more remains to be done.

a weekend working on the house

We spent a lot of time this weekend working on the house. Right now there are a couple goals. One is to make it feel clean and cozy for when we move in; the other is to get some of the remodeling-type work done that'll be especially inconvenient if there's furniture and the two of us in the way.

Saturday morning, I met our general contractor and our decorator first thing in the morning. We're trying to figure out what the 5-year plan for the house is and prioritize the work that needs to be done. A bit later, my parents came to the house and were a tremendous help with cleaning and taking care of odd fix-it jobs. I replaced a second outdoor faucet that'd been leaking, something ever so much easier to do in the daylight. The master bathroom had both a curtain on a rod and an enclosure for shower doors, but the doors themselves have gone AWOL. My dad and I removed the enclosure. We also removed several grab bars that the previous owner had mounted around the house, changed the toilet seats in a couple bathrooms, and removed the washlet, which, all-in-all, seemed a better solution than trying to teach guests how to use the thing. (If you're interested, I can cut you a great deal on a washlet. Remember, Clean is Happy!) We measured the whole house to lay out a floorplan, which will feed into a master plan for remodeling and decorating over the next several years. My mom also cleaned the ovens (go mom!) and did a ton of clean-up around the kitchen.

Today, Coppertop and I were there again. I climbed up into the attic and discovered the gas to the furnace had been shut off, which is why the furnace wasn't working yesterday. I turned it back on and re-lit the pilot, leading to a much warmer day of housework. We changed the seat on the remaining toilet, re-caulked the shower pan in the master and the holes left by removing grab bars, got the shower somewhat cleaner where we'd removed the door enclosure, polished the chrome in the bathrooms, and tried but failed to clean the shower pan itself. I'm not sure yet how we're going to deal with that shower pan. We also put in new shower heads, replaced an outlet cover, cleaned and polished the outsides of several cabinets, and changed several more burned-out lightbulbs.

After cooking tonight's dinner and preparing the ingredients for tomorrow night's dinner[1], we're both pretty much pooped. But at least the house is coming along.

[1] Tommorw's dinner's homemade pizza. A busy schedule means we had to measure out the ingredients and prepared the toppings tonight.

adventures in plumbing

Today's big housing adventure was dealing with a leaking outdoor faucet.

One of the hose faucets has a worn-out washer that's leaking. To replace the washer, you need to turn off the water to the house. It turns out the new place has a quick shutoff valve (which I finally found in a cabinet in the garage), but after some experimentation it became clear that valve shuts off the supply to the house itself, not to the outside faucets. A call to Parental Tech Support (thanks, Dad!) turned up the right answer: shut off the main valve to the house, which is under the rectangular cover marked "water" (as opposed to being under either of the round covers also marked "water.")

The faucet itself is stuck behind the sort of over-sized geranium you only get in Southern climes. Trying to damage the plant as little as possible, I removed the nut at the top of the faucet and discovered I couldn't get access to the washer that way. That triggered another Parental Tech Support call, which resulted in my removing the entire faucet.

At that point, I could see the washer but couldn't figure out how to get it out of the faucet. So it became necessary to replace the entire faucet. Which meant I needed to buy a faucet. Which meant I needed to wash the crud off my hands from messing around with the plumbing. Which meant I needed to turn on the water again. Which meant I had to put the worn-out faucet back on the pipe or suffer a geyser as soon as the water came back on.

So, faucet back on and geranium looking a bit the worse for wear, Coppertop and I headed for a quick trip to Home Depot. Quick because it was getting dark and starting to rain. Long story short, we got back after it'd already gotten pretty dark and the rain was coming down pretty hard, but I wasn't going to put off replacing the faucet because removing the old one and putting it back on had left it leaking worse than before. So Coppertop, who hates rain, bravely volunteered to hold the flashlight while I installed the new faucet. It was a damp job, but the new faucet seems to be holding up well, I now know how to control the water to the house, and we were still able to clean up, change clothes, and make it to dinner on time.

the ambiance of a spa in your own private retreat

Oh, the things you learn.

In the new house, there is a funky electric toilet in the guest bath. After some research, we've determined that it's an older model of a Washlet, a device the Toto company created "to help you create the ambiance of a spa in your own private retreat." The "clean is happy" link (which is not cube-safe in many work environments in the U.S.A.) is most enlightening.

All of which is great, but if we want to keep this thing around we may have to put a laminated instruction sheet next to the remote (yes, the toilet seat has a remote) so guests know how to use it. And having an instruction sheet for your toilet seat strikes me as being right up there with putting instructions on a box of toothpicks.

how do you build a 500 year house?

We closed on the house and are now immersed in choosing a fridge and tiles for the kitchen and figuring out what work we can do on it with a very limited budget. All of which got me sidetracked thinking about building for the ages.

Suppose you wanted to build a house, in Southern California, that would last for 500 years. How would you do it? You can't use wood--the termites would eat it. Metal's likely to corrode. The materials that seem to stick around for 500 years are things like stone and maybe brick. (Nijo Castle is a brick structure that's around 500 years old.) But SoCal is an earthquake-prone area. Over a 500 year span a serious earthquake will occur, and stone and brick seem rather brittle. I wonder how durable flexible concrete is.

Also, how do you handle the mechanicals? For example, what do you use for plumbing? Clay pipes, maybe? And what about power? The grid might not even exist any more in 500 years. You could use solar, but then you're faced with power storage problems so the lights stay on at night, and batteries wear out pretty quickly.

Also, what about heat? Passive solar? Or fireplaces (and buy a whole lot of wood to keep yourself warm)? And for sewer, would it be septic, municipal, or some combination of both?

One approach might be to put most or all of the mechanical systems in a foundation and then build the rest of the house out of more flexible materials like wood. There are pagodas in Japan that have been around for 500 years, but they get rebuilt every 20 years to the same plans. Putting the complex stuff in the foundation might make the rest of the structure much less expensive to replace, to the point where you (and future generations) could afford to do it periodically.

Maybe the most successful approach would be to be famous enough that for the next 500 years people are interested in keeping your house around regardless of how you built it. That's kind of cheating, though, since if it's a museum it's no longer being used as a house.

Overall, a 500 year house is an interesting thought experiment.

the down payment

We've been house hunting for a few months now. We finally found one we really like, but buying it's a stretch. Not a dangerous stretch, but a stretch nonetheless. I just got a reminder of that fact this morning when I wired the down payment to escrow. We saved that money and built it up over something like ten years, and in the blink of a fax the vast majority of it's going to go poof.

That'll take some getting used to.

In any case, if all goes well, we close on the 26th, or the 27th at the latest. Wish us luck!