Fifteen Minutes of Delusion

When we first moved into our home back in 2006, we spent painfully large sums of time and money remodeling in order to remove and replace things Kara was allergic to - things like carpet, pine, and medium-density fiberboard. Once that work was done, we pretty much left everything alone, except when a major crisis forced our hand. (See the posts tagged  Home Improvement  for the complete saga.) Recently, however, we have been making a few small changes that we want  to make. A couple of months ago, we painted the living room a rich, milk-chocolate shade of brown and replaced the curtains. And yesterday, we finally hung some cut vinyl patterns that we made, based on traditional Hawaiian quilt patterns. Take a look at the result:

We have at our house and aerobic septic system. This means that the water gets separated and processed and purified and pumped out through sprinklers in the back yard, while the yucky stuff stays behind in the tank. It's an efficient system, and works pretty well. Except when it doesn't. We've noticed that while one of the sprinklers has been spraying correctly, the other one has been sporadic, and recently stopped working all together. This triggered an alarm condition on the system, and we called the maintenance guy to come take a look. He fixed a problem with the pump, and then went to look at the second sprinkler. Nothing was coming out, even though the pump was working and the first sprinkler was going great guns. So he took the sprinkler head off. Nothing. Assuming this must mean a rock or something was plugging the connection, he dug up the end of the pipe and cut it off. Still nothing. Since this fix-it guy charges big money per hour, and the problem was obviously i...

OK - I've got the tile hung and grouted, and pretty much cleaned up the mess. Granted, it's not the world's greatest tile and grout job, but it's on a short wall behind the dishwasher and under a counter. This means that 1) it was really, really hard to do, all squatted down, and 2) nobody but you lucky blog readers will ever see it. For reference, here is before: and after: It will be a little while before the dishwasher is sufficiently off-gassed enough to install. In the meantime, the towels are catching the water and the new tile is keeping the wall safe from mold.

I wanted to post the pictures of the repaired wall and newly installed dishwasher today, but unfortunately this is still a work in progress. What follows is an update. Here is our new dishwasher, as I unpacked it Monday on the back patio and prepared to spray down all of the plastic bits with vodka. I also hooked it up here on the patio using the garden hose and a half-dozen little brass adapter doo-dads. It only leaks a little. I am grateful that I am not a plumber. We picked a model with a stainless steel tub because we figured it would take a plastic tub a lot longer to off-gas. Unfortunately, I hadn't anticipated the asphalt-based insulation that covered the thing. One smell of that stuff during the wash cycle told us it had to go. Here I am scraping it off. Not fun. We'll have to come up with some other way to insulate the tub. On Monday, we also had a mold specialist come and do an assessment. He looked at the wet drywall and thought we probably caught the leak in time to...

Longtime readers of this blog will recall the love/hate relationship we have with our dishwasher. Well, actually it's more of a tolerate/hate kind of thing. We even named it Pawelu , which means "old, worn out, worthless." We've put up with weak wash cycles and noisy operation and a top rack that likes to fall out on a regular basis, but this week we discovered the last straw - incontinence. Pawelu is old, and now it is leaking. Fortunately, we have no cabinets to hide the water, or it may have been years before we found the problem. With Kara and our boarder Shari both very sensitive to mold, this is potentially a very serious problem. So yesterday, I went on a quest to find a new dishwasher - one with a stainless-steel tub that won't have to off-gas nearly as much as a plastic one. I found an LG model at Best Buy that fit the bill, and it will be delivered on Monday. Now, the tricky part will be trying to get it off-gassed quickly so we can install it without ca...

...The Boys make noise. And a mess. Today we get our new roof, to replace the one damaged in the hail storm this past April . My buddies at work say it's only fair that I have to suffer through some pounding and banging, as the main office has been under renovation for the past few weeks. So today, we get to join in the fun. I also made some scones this morning. This is part of a test kitchen project for my writerly buddy Josi Kilpack , who is writing a culinary mystery and needs bakers to help test the recipes. Since I was often mistaken for a Baker growing up, I decided to volunteer. This is the first recipe, and I think it turned out pretty good. In fact, the scones should be cool enough that I can go try one. Short post today - there's food in the kitchen! Update: The scones turned out good, if a little big and underdone. Second batch the next day turned out much better! The things are all bagged and frozen for weekend breakfasts so I don't gain back in a day the few p...

"Free" and "Dump" - two words that each represent compelling needs of our family. Together, they represent how I spent a chunk of my day. Today was free dump day, so I spent the morning loading the van with broken tile and moldy counter tops and disintegrated cabinets from our remodel two years ago. This large pile of trash in the back yard represented two of my great failings, and it was good to finally get the big stuff taken out. (The first great failing is just having a large pile of trash in the back yard. The trash was in the part of the yard that needs to be turned into our family vegetable garden - the other great failing.) I wasn't able to get everything to the dump, but I got everything that was small enough to fit in the van and too big to go in the garbage can. In theory, there's still time to do a fall/winter garden. I plan to recycle wood from the downed fence for raised beds. One problem we have, though, is that all of our water, including tha...

Just a few bullet points to keep you caught up: As a result of last months hail storm, the insurance adjuster is coming to look at our roof tomorrow. It looks fine to me, but then again my neighbors' roofs all look fine to me and they have all been totaled by the insurance companies. I am scheduled to host four more blog tour book stops this summer. Watch this space! We went to the Lyme doctor yesterday. He was quite impressed with Kara's new look. I started antibiotics today. Kara needs to wait and discuss this with her GI doc. Yesterday I grabbed a jar of spaghetti sauce in the fridge. The jar was lightly stuck to the shelf, and rather than come unstuck, it broke in half. Later a tub of sour cream jumped to the floor. It was apparently food suicide day, and the result was lots of wiping. School is almost over. The girls are excited. I am, too - mostly because 5:30 revile really sucks. Hopefully we can keep some semblance of routine going. That's all for now. Thanks for st...

I passed the girls off on one of Anna's friends for the day, so I could get a few things done. Let's see how I did: 1. Move the fridge into the kitchen (after 18 months, it's about time). Check 2. Install the bar on the kitchen counter. Check 3. Go to the storage unit and get the piano. 4. And the other piano. 5. And the big blue chair. Check, check, and check 6. Hang the "Wall-O-Mirrors" in the bathroom. Check - well, almost. That's half of them 7. Install the microwave vent hood combo over the range. Oh, well. I need something to do during the week, right?

With Kara coming home in a couple of weeks, there's work to be done. Almost more work than I care to think about. But it's all good. The first task I wanted to finish was the office door project , begun back in (gasp!) February. The reality is that the new door looks just like the old one, except that it is actually an entry door with weather stripping all around it. The new door does a great job at protecting the rest of the house from the odors of printing technology. What happens in the office, stays in the office. The office door has been so successful, in fact, that we've decided to replace the door to Kara's room so she can use it instead of sealing it off and climbing in and out through the window. And if the new door had glass in it, she wouldn't always feel like a prisoner in her room. Sounds like a good idea. The problem is that the bedroom door (like the office door) is 30" wide, and standard exterior doors come in either 32" or 36" widths....

I took the day off so I could replace the door to my office. No, it's not what you think. This was a preplanned, premeditated door replacing - no temper tantrums involved. Honestly. I have a number of laser printers in my office that I use for work - I write printer drivers, after all. As far as printer smells go, these things are relatively benign - nothing like a heavy solvent or UV curable inkjet printer. But they do have a smell, and the smell can cause problems. I bought an exterior door last fall in the hopes that it would do better at keeping the smells in the office. It's been sitting outside since Thanksgiving, getting rid of its own smells. Yeah, that's why I hadn't put it in yet. It is starting to look like Kara may need to come home in the near future, and I wanted to make sure and have the door in before she does. I didn't take before and after pictures, but the difference is kind of like this:

I got the wall grouted today. As the title suggests, it was, um, messy. Standard procedure when grouting a floor is to dump a whole bunch of the stuff out of the bucket and use a large, rubber float to push it into the space between the tiles. Gravity is your accomplice. Grouting a vertical surface is much different. In this case, gravity is your nemesis, and the trick is to try and dump as little as possible. I found that the best way make this work is to grab a handful and smear it around the wall like, um..., like..., well, let's skip the analogy. Once the grout has been shoved into all of the cracks, the fun ends and the work begins. And the mess continues. Excess grout is wiped off by using a bucket of water and a large sponge. The sponges get covered in grout very quickly and need to be rinsed often. The buckets fill up with grout quickly and need to be changed often. Smart tile people use several buckets of water and many large sponges, but I only had one of each. Years ago,...

So I had a little trouble the other night, resulting in a damaged wall and a tough predicament. The holes in the wall needed to be repaired, because if left open the chemicals in the attic insulation would come down into the house even more readily than they are now. Plus a wall with holes in it just looks bad. Patching the holes was easy - just cut out the damaged drywall and replace it with a new piece. However, finishing the patch to match the rest of the wall was out of the question. It took nearly a month for the "safe" VOC-free paint we used last year to off-gas enough that Kara could be in the house, even for a little bit. And things are in enough disarray here that I can't stand having yet another half-way finished project around. I pondered and prayed, and was inspired to hang ceramic tile on the wall. Most walls in the Dallas condos where Kara stays are floor to ceiling tile, and it works well. Installing tile is messy, but the materials are all chemically iner...

The results from the Air Quality Assessment we had done several weeks ago are in, and we have identified a likely suspect: Clorodifluoromethane, also known as Freon R22, has shown up at a whopping 960.2 µg/cu M. It looks like we have an air conditioner leak. Our "comfort specialist" is on his way to do a check of the equipment. Most likely, the cooling coils in our 12+ year old system have sprung a leak and something will need to be replaced. Maybe just the coils, maybe the whole shootin' match. We'll have to see. In the meantime, it should be plenty cool this week, so fortunately we can leave the system off. I see this as a positive thing. Answers are good. Update: The problem has been confirmed as a leak in the AC. All of the freon has been pulled from the system so it will no longer be able to leak into the house. A new air handler is now on the top of our shopping list. (sigh)

There's a guy in Oregon who is furnishing an old 727 to use as a house . I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I'll try it myself someday. In the meantime, we have the next best thing: a house that sounds like an airliner. The Boys finally finished up the ductwork today, and we turned on the A/C. Hooray! (I have a window unit in the office, but the rest of the house was getting pretty warm.) Anyway, with nearly empty rooms, all hard floor surfaces, and now solid metal ductwork, the air conditioner puts out a whooshing roar that sounds more than a little like cruising at 35,000 feet. Peanuts or pretzels?

BIAM Challenge - Day 3 40 minutes 1447 words 2967 words total Lots of copy and paste from a previous version. Way back this time last year (was it only a year ago!?!) we had two or three people helping us with the initial remodel of the house - putting in tile, painting, trying to make the cabinets work. Alyssa was always excited about the "boys" working at our house. She loved to watch them do their thing. It's been a while, but today there are more "boys" here. A kind benefactor is paying to have our flexible plastic duct work replaced with the hard metal kind, in the hopes of improving the indoor air quality. The ducts that were there previously were sending some pretty bad insulation smells into the house, and it was determined that this is a problem. Alyssa was excited when she got off the bus and saw the work trucks. Unfortunately, the four "boys" are all up clomping around in the attic, so she hasn't been able to watch them work. We hear the...

While it's clean, I thought I should take a quick picture of the bathroom. I really like the way this room turned out - especially the tile. This is the same tile we have in the girl's room - we had enough left over.

In honor of the fact that Kara took pictures of the kitchen last night, I thought I would post them, even though it is still a work in progress. It will continue to be a work in progress for a while, as most of the work still left to be done is cosmetic and therefore bumped in line behind some more essential tasks (like blogging). First, a look at the "before" kitchen. Really, not too bad, except for that hideous wallpaper. But the cabinets and counters are nice, and the pantry was functional. But for our needs, it had problems. The counter tops were laminate on pressboard, which doesn't work. The shelves in the pantry and trim were pine, to which Kara is very allergic. The oven was nice, but the stove top had open coils, which emit an odor when they run. And although we worked very hard to find a house with solid wood cabinets, and spent hour upon hour sealing them with a safe sealant, they just didn't work. So now they are in the garage . Bear in mind that the chang...

I took the day off from work yesterday. We still have three (ouch) storage units, and I needed to get moved out of one of them before we had to pay rent on it again. Actually, I need to get moved out of all of them, as they're eating us alive. The units are all inside a climate-controlled building, which we did for the sake of the pianos. And since we were only going to be in them for a couple of months, I figured we'd just put all our stuff in the same place, for convenience. I was so deluded back then. I thought that the stuff that we had in the house in Utah would work OK here. But now that we're in our new house, I'm starting to understand that this was faulty logic. We really, really, really should have sold everything and started over from scratch. At least with the furniture, which is what we're going to end up doing, anyway, I'm afraid. Before leaving, I caught up on a few chores left over from Monday, then I programmed our garage door opener to accept o...

It's taken a decent chunk of two Saturdays, and there's still a couple of hours to go, but the laundry room now has an exhaust fan that blows to the outside. We put this in because the room had no natural ventilation, and it was starting to smell moldy. Smelling moldy is bad. I had bought a light-and-fan combo a year ago to put in our Lehi laundry room, but hadn't gotten any further then measuring a support stud for the attic. The laundry room light in this house was already attached to a large ceiling joist, so I didn't need to add any extra support. But there were other challenges. The biggest was the large piece of press board that was covering the entire laundry room area and had to be taken up without destroying it, as it provides the main access to the HVAC unit. Getting the board up wouldn't have been too hard, except that a couple of phone lines and a heating duct both went through it. I cut the board so the duct now went through a notch instead of a hole, a...