Day Eighteen

On Day Eighteen, Sue started work. So far so good. It sounds like her first rotation will be the lightest of the three with respect to workload... the second hardest... the third in the middle. She also heard from some "graduating" interns that they have lined up exciting jobs, which is encouraging for her.

Last week we filled out an online form to request that the street light out front of our house be fixed or to have the bulb replaced. We received word from the Providence City government today. What a name this kid has. I love it!

Hello Mr. [Bad Verb],

This is Billy Popwell, the intern at the Office of Neighborhood Services in City Hall. I just wanted to give you the work order number for the request to fix the street light that's out at [redacted] Road. It's: [redacted].

Have a great day,
Billy Popwell

Also we did more work in the basement. We removed the wooden platform beneath the washer/dryer/basin area (seen in the last picture in yesterday's post). Now it looks like this...


...and now there's all *this* to haul away at some point...


...a lot of which was moldy.

One thing we found under the platform are two exposed pieces of metal rebar. If you look closely at the first picture above, you can see them on the left.

It appears some sort of wax has been poured around them. I don't see why we can't cut them back -- flush with the floor. Does someone know better? Any idea why someone might keep those things around?



PS
Happy holiday week! Did you know Obama wears the flag on his lapel upside-down?

Smashola

After work on Friday, Sue and I jetted up to Lake Winnipesaukee for almost exactly 24 hours with the family. It was fun times, and I have other pics if anyone would like.


We left the lake after dinner (about 8PM) and got home at 11PM.

This morning, we met with Electrician #2. A nice guy, and instead of giving us a "T & M" (time and materials) estimate like our first guy, he's going to provide an all-inclusive number. He seems like he knows what he's talking about.

We also mowed and watered the lawn, replaced the light and fixed the fixture in the screened porch, got our first joint bank account, made another Home Depot run, and shopped for food. Sue also found time to run out and get a haircut (from a blue-haired stylist) in preparation for Day One at her internship tomorrow.

At 4:00, we met with Chris, the guy who was going to haul off our soapstone basin. As it turned out, Chris assisted us in two big ways. He is an elementary school teacher who installs solar panels on the side. He explained, the biggest bang-for-buck you can make with solar is via solar hot water heating. A couple panels on the roof could save a good portion of the 5,000 kilo-watts our electric heater will use in an average year, and the hot water heater's energy use represents a little less than half of the electricity our home will use in a year (estimating about 1,000 kilo-watts per month in the typical household).

He installs 120-gallon water tanks in basements, and he attaches them to conventional hot water tanks. When the sun heats the 120-gallon tank, the conventional hot water heater never has to turn on.

To install the panels, run the pipes and wires, and set-up the tank, it costs about $7,000, but between state and federal tax credits, you only pay 50% of that.

Anyway, since he'd worked so much with hot water tanks, he told and showed us how to dismantle our Sepco Hydrastone hot water heater, so we don't have to pay a salvage company to remove it. Pictures will follow in a later post.

Chris also immediately told us when he entered the basement, our basin was not soapstone. I was a bit embarrassed, but I explained, our real estate agent thought it was soapstone, but I had no idea.

He said, soapstone is cut into slabs and bolted together then epoxied. Concrete basins are made in a single mold. The interior corners of our basin were smooth and curved, betraying the basin's true identity.

So when he left, smashola...

Don't Forget...

Even though Nick hates on Pixar, don't forget...


WALL-E! WALL-E! WALL-E comes out today! Here's the NYT's raving review.

I freely admit, I am Playdo in Pixar's palm. I sit through their movies like a wide-eyed infant. Pixar + Rob = Love.

Bargain Basement Basin

This will only stay live for seven days, but here's a Craig's List ad to give away the old soapstone basin in our basement. It's so heavy, we can't move it! It's a bargain basement basin in the basement or a bargain basement basement basin.

Upcoming Fecal Explosion

What a title, eh? Admit it... it gotcha reading. Ha. It'll all make sense in a couple paragraphs.

As I reported, we met with the inspector Monday. Since then, we've also met with a roofer (Our skylight is leaking.) and a team of two plumbers on Tuesday, an electrician today, and if they show up, we'll be meeting another roofer and electrician tomorrow morning.

The electrician, David, who came to the house today kept looking at issues to resolve and commenting, "That's retahded." David seems like a straight arrow. One-hundred percent unrelated to his straight-arrow-ness, he kept his white Scotty, Murphy, in his big black truck while he walked through our house to develop an estimate.

Tony, the roofer, said he could fix our roof pretty easily. Our skylight is leaking and useless, so we're getting it removed, and we have to get that vent from the bathroom through the roof to the outside.

The plumbers have a lot of work to do. We have decided we are going to be redoing the fifteen-square-foot half-bath off the kitchen...


...in conjunction with the plumbers' reworking of the cast-iron below in the basement. They told us how, so after they left, we took the first step. We removed the toilet.


We also got some simple tile on clearance at Home Depot...


...that should complement the rest of the stark whiteness in the room. We're going to chronicle our efforts to uniquely cover the walls, and we have some secret plans to share at a later date.

About that sink, we wanted to remove it too, so we could rip up some of the flooring. Unfortunately, whoever installed the sink and cabinet did a pretty shabby job. This may be a little hard to explain, but because of how they did it, to remove the sink/cabinet, we'd either have to cut the cabinet or the wire to the light fixture over the sink. Have a looky inside the cabinet.


This is one of the things David called retahded. We agree. Since we have no main breaker, he recommended that we wait until he fixes it (runs the wire through the wall) to remove the cabinet.

Okay, so you probably want to know what the heck this entry's title means. Look back up there at the second picture. That wad of fabric (Sorry, Chevy Chasers and the Moscow contingent, Al's futon cover was ripped and had no zipper on it, so we sacrificed it to the demi-gods of home repair.) is stuffed into the toilet pipe.

Now, imagine the Jaws theme music again, and look back at the last picture in this post. That big curved pipe in the center with the brick under it... that's the same toilet pipe.

Our plumbers told us, to save money we could do some of the demolition ourselves. They suggested we buy a sledge hammer and hit that pipe because it was going to have to go away anyway. If we do it, they don't have to. Apparently it's going to shatter, and since it's a very old pipe from a toilet, we're talking about an... upcoming fecal explosion. The most disturbing part was, they were chuckling as they told us.

Sue's scared. Very scared. We promise we'll take pictures.

PS
Carrie and John, we counted it as a good sign that David had a dog named Murphy. We're heading to New Hampshire tomorrow after work for a whirlwind trip, so we probably won't be back to post until Sunday. Have a great weekend, everyone!

A Gloomy Article

Here's a gloomy article on RI real estate. We expect we're insulated to some extent as a function of being near the center of the capital city, but it's definitely interesting context. We have heard from our neighbors that our place was a rental property before the foreclosure.

PS
A cool photo from our weekend yard work...

Per Your Suggestion...

Today we got a home inspector named Chip to come and re-do our home inspection. He came at 6:30AM and was done at 8:30. What he really did was give us a clinic. As a result of some of his findings, we're going to be writing to the home inspector we used to purchase the place to ask for our money back. Maybe we'll include that letter as a blog post.

For those that hadn't heard this part of the story, we used the back-up, fill-in, secondary, auxiliary home inspector because the seller's agent initially pressured us to move very quickly with our due diligence. He was trying to accelerate the process... up until the point he had to undertake any part of that process himself. Chip's docket was full when we were trying to accommodate the seller, so we found the back-up inspector.

Some of the things Chip explained that the previous inspector did not:

A) We have no main breaker in our fuse box to turn off the juice in our house, which is dangerous.

B) Our upstairs bathroom vent exits four feet above, directly into our attic, and as a result, we have a mild but intensifying case of mildew and mold on the interior north wall of the attic.

C) The fact that our gable vents were covered from the inside with wood brings clarity to the heat I experienced during this weekend's brutal trip to the attic.

D) The original inspector said we had no trap (a bend in the pipe that has sitting water in it so as to keep sewer air from rising into the house) on our half-bathroom sink, but in fact, there is a trap in the tube in the basement.

From my perspective, this is all good news. We learned a ton that we did not know.

Also, the locksmith came and installed new locks in the back and side doors and on the garage. That allowed us to remove the lacerated screen door in the front, since we weren't fans, and we're planning to use the side entrance much more often.


In other news, we discussed the psychological underpinnings of tattoos over dinner, because, boy oh boy, there are a lot of tattoo parlors and folks all tatted up in Providence.

Sue starts work one week from today. The Dachshund, Othello, next door is barking almost non-stop. Ellen, Othello's owner, is away on summer vacation. That poor little wiener is going to have a sore throat that won't quit. The plumber returns tomorrow for a look-see, and Mr. Hackworth, per your suggestion...

Anything Suspicious

Sue was visited by a state trooper on Friday morning. The trooper asked if we had seen anything suspicious the night before. Then he explained what had happened.





We live next to the armory in town -- the headquarters of one division of the Rhode Island National Guard. Apparently, someone thought it would make a potent point if he or she spray-painted an anti-war message on the door. This person also stenciled two more farther down the wall, one of which is on brick. This one is right across the street from us.

Ironically, removing the vandalism is going to cost the federal government yet more money.

A Good Bit of Progress

The deck party up in Boston was a great time. Sasha was as well-behaved as the rest of the crowd. The sangria was a revelation. At about 11:30, Sue and I had to depart. We listened to loud music with the windows down to stay awake on the drive home, and we split driving duties.

I'm thinking, we've shared and will continue to share news of the house's challenges and growing to-do list, but in the nine days we've been here, we have made a good bit of progress.

I just stood up and took these pictures. (It feels like it's going to be a rainy day.) Here's how the house is looking, inside and out.


The dining room is currently sort of our work room. That's the box-spring that doesn't fit upstairs propped against the wall on the right.

The kitchen is being used for its express purpose at this stage, which is great.


Sue's surgical skill with the hedge clippers improved the appearance of the front yard by several notches...


...and the backyard is doing pretty well, considering it was three-feet-high two Fridays ago.


That's the garage on the left and the screened porch on the right. We guess those two big cast-iron posts were used to hang clothes lines.

I'm going to see if I can find that scanner, and if it's as rainy as the forecast is threatening, maybe I'll post some other stuff throughout the day.

Hydrastone

Sepco Hydrastone. Hydrastone. Hydrastone? Keep that in mind.

Today we did a bunch of stuff. We got the hot water heater replaced. The old can was leaking in two places. Hydrastone go bye bye.

Brett came over with a new one. He's a subcontractor for Home Depot, and he installed our new electric water heater in about an hour.


He also told us that our circuit breaker was not up to code. See all those wires behind him? I'd be surprised if most of the electric in the house was to code. Apparently, we need a 30 amp breaker, or else the warranty on the new heater will be void.

I told him it was all fine, since we had an electrician coming later in the morning. So when Brett left, we had a new hot water heater, but he had the breaker switched off, because we needed to upgrade it.

You can see it coming can't you? Wait for it. Wait for it. Our electrician never showed up. So we have this new hot water heater in the basement, but no hot water.

Sue spent most of the day setting up our living area -- unpacking boxes into the kitchen, getting the upstairs bathroom livable, and emptying boxes of clothes into the upstairs closets.

I moved stuff around in the downstairs so the dining room is free of boxes, disassembled the security system a previous tenant had installed in the house -- wires wires wires galore -- and worked up in the attic.

I mentioned the attic in an earlier post. This is sort of what it looks like...


...and it also has this big antenna thing in it...


...presumably the inside part of the 20-foot-long aerial we found in the backyard that must have protruded from the roof back in the days before dishes and fiber optics. (Up on the roof, there are four snapped metal cables that must have served to hold it upright.)

You may wonder why I ventured into the attic on an 80-degree day to mess around with fiberglass insulation and some weird antenna thingy. The attic was absolutely scorching.

As it turns out, the hot water heater we replaced is insulated with stone. Yes, stone. Ah... Hydrastone. So it weighs about 425 pounds according to Brett. Home Depot doesn't remove those heaters, because they're too heavy.

So we're in touch with a salvage company in Pawtucket, and they're going to come down and cut up the heater and haul it, along with the old washer and dryer. We want to get as much metal stuff ready for their visit to our house next week, hence my foray into the attic.

We also tag-teamed the backyard grass -- me with Julie's push mower and Sue with the hedge clippers -- listened the Red Sox lose badly on the radio, and bought a split box-spring, because our queen-sized box-spring won't fit up the stairs.

At some point, I drew some diagrams of the house. I realize you guys probably don't have a sense for the floor plans, and maybe some context would be helpful. I have yet to come across our scanner while unpacking, but when I do, I'll share the layout.

Time to run to Boston for the Lara-Linds-Nick-Sasha Inaugural Deck party. Happy Saturday, all!

Lock-box

As I wrote last week, on Friday, June 13th, we got the lock-box combination, and thus access to the house. So we were sort of squatting here last weekend.

We actually closed on the house on Tuesday, the 17th. There was some mix-up with the sewer bill which was caused by the seller's agent and which had delayed the process for about a week.

I suppose it's fitting after all the stops and starts and delays and such that the purchase was consummated on a plastic table outside a coffee shop on the East Side, and it should probably not have surprised us that the seller's agent didn't show up. Neither should we have been surprised that we did not get any of the other keys to the house or the garage, other than the one we already had from the lock-box.

(The odd part about buying a foreclosure in Providence is that we only signed six sheets of paper. Then it was over. The whole process took about ten minutes. I purchased a condo way back when, and when that was over my hand was fatigued from inking a four-inch stack of legal ease.)

In any event, we own the place, and that's exciting! We still have the For Sale sign in our backyard, and the seller's agent has not come to claim his lock-box.

As a result of not having keys to the back...


and side door...



...our house is sort of a lock-box. One of the problems is that the locks on those doors are double-key locks, meaning you can only open them with a key, even from the inside. Without a key, the doors are basically windows to us.

We are going to reinstall these double-key locks, because Providence is ranked fifth in the country in city property crime, and if we don't, someone could gain entry by simply breaking one pane of glass then reaching inside to twist the deadbolt knob.

There are two other qualities of these locks that tripped us up this week. First off, there were no exposed screws. Check this close-up. Where screws would typically be, there is only a sheet of metal.


We've been working with a very nice locksmith over the phone named Greg. He's been trying to help us over the phone so he doesn't have to send a technician and charge us their visit fee.

At Greg's suggestion, we successfully drilled through the metal sheet. Unfortunately, behind the metal sheet, the heads of several of the screws that hold the locks in place are stripped. We were able to remove and replace the front door lock. But the side and back door locks have stymied us. This is how the back door lock looks now...


Needless to say, somebody from Greg's shop is going to come out here on Monday.

PS
The East Side is what people call the nice part of town in Providence with Brown and RISD in it. East Providence, on the other hand, is across the Narragansett Bay, and that's not such a nice part of town. I've gotten those two mixed up, and it's confused people, but apparently we live in the coveted East Side ZIP code, 02906. Enter 02906 here, and enter your own. It's pretty fun!

Exactly Where to Begin

Sorry we haven't posted in a couple days. We got internet access today, so expect more frequent updates going forward. So much has happened since our last update, I'm not sure exactly where to begin.

I suppose it makes sense to close out Rain Rain No Go Away, and cover some additional plumbing issues. Then this weekend, I'll spend some time catching up with new developments.

Last we wrote, our drain-pipe was terribly stopped up. We had a plumber come (more to say about that later), and he suggested that since the four-inch PVC was packed in concrete, probably the pipe was fine. He told us to call RotoRooter to snake it out, because he didn't get involved with that sort of job.

So we did. RotoRooter-man spent longer than an hour working on the drain.


He inserted a full 50 feet of metal into the drain and finally... it's cleared!


He ran the hose full-blast into the pipe for quite a long time, and it didn't get backed up. This was a positive plumbing development! We bugged him to come into the house to look at some of our other plumbing issues, and he found this...


The master bedroom closet is adjacent to the upstairs bathroom. The closet has a couple small doors in it to allow access to the bathtub plumbing. The pic above shows the plumbing, but do you see that mug in there?! Hahahahaha! A wonderful solution for leaky pipes!

But unfortunately, that's not our biggest plumbing problem. Check our basement out. Imagine the Jaws theme now...


We are formulating a plan to rectify this mess which will probably involve re-doing the half-bath on the ground floor. One would think that these thick black pipes would last forever, but apparently PVC is much preferred.

The moonlighting plumber we brought in (a facilities guy at Brown in the daytime) explained that PVC is self-cleaning. Whereas these big steel pipes have water running always along their bottoms, PVC piping tends to have water that swirls. Maybe it's coated inside?

Anyway... time to hit that hay. Work is going well so far. Was thrilled to get the power on on Monday. Locksmith coming tomorrow. Water heater replacement Saturday.

Rain Rain No Go Away.

When we walked through the place initially, Dr. W, you noticed that there was standing water in the gutters above the screened porch in the back of the house.

This morning it rained a good bit. I took the opportunity to watch the gutters from upstairs as it came down, and over the course of the morning, the gutters filled up again like a bucket.

When the rain slowed down, I climbed up on our new Husky ladder and pulled a yucky, smelly fiesta out of the gutter. Mostly, it seems like Ellen's (our neighbor to the west) big Maple drops helicopters in there, and they decay and slush-up the gutter when one chooses not to remove them for several springs in succession.

Once I emptied the gutter, the water flowed freely, but I saw that the downspout was simply redirecting gutter water into our driveway. Uh oh. Rain rain no go away. Rain rain just stay and stay.

Two downspouts exit into a four-inch PVC pipe in the southeast corner of the house.


Presumably, the PVC pipe leads to the sewer under the house or under the driveway, but unfortunately, something was clogged or damaged.


That's standing, murky water in the drain-pipe.

I took apart as much as could be taken apart, and I stuck a few things down there. Okay, okay, not very manly things. First I tried a straightened-out coat hanger, then the plastic handle of a flyswatter I found in the house. When these miserable attempts failed to produce any noticeable change in the PVC's status, I rode my bike to Home Depot.

I caught the eye of a dude in an orange apron who looked like he had seen his share of mucked-up drain-pipes, and I explained to him my issue. Then I held up a "duty" snaking tool.

Dude shook his head as if to shame me, and he said, "No no no. If you're willing to use it, what you need is one of these." He led me around the corner, and he showed me this...


No, it's not a grenade. It's a bladder. Dude explained, you attach it to your hose, and you turn the water up slowly. As it fills up, it presses against the sides of the PVC. Quickly, the water pressure builds inside. Then from a tiny hole in the bottom, a laser-like penetrating blast of water shoots out and clears the clog.

He warned me though, make sure the bladder goes all the way into the pipe. If it does not, then when the water goes in, the bladder will press out the open top of the pipe, expanding freely until it dangerously explodes. The package corroborated the severity of this potential. Maybe it is sort like of a grenade.

Anyway, so after I ask him too many questions, I take this thing home. I connect it super-tight to the hose, and miraculously, it fits into the pipe, but just barely. I hold on to the hose just above the attached bladder. My hand is just inside the end of the drain-pipe.

I take a deep breath, and when I turn the water on, the bladder quickly swells up. There is a creaking sound as the bladder presses against the sides of the pipe, and the hose appears to rise threateningly toward the open end of the pipe. My heart skips a beat, and gripping the end of the hose, I press down hard to make sure it doesn't come out the top.

Then nothing! It got stuck. No laser-like penetration could come out the hole at the bottom, because this must be one heckuva clog. Phooey! After letting it sit for ten minutes, and turning the water on and off a few times. I actually had to stab the bladder with a screwdriver to release the pressure.

I have a plumber coming early in the week for some other stuff, and I'll ask him, but does anyone have any ideas?

PS
I start work tomorrow, one month to the day after leaving Red Cross. I have an orientation all day. The electric company, National Grid, should be coming by to turn on our juice, too. We're scheduled to close on Tuesday morning. The oil company's coming on Wednesday to fix up our boiler.

Heavy Duty

Let's have a look-see in the basement and a short tour of our quaint (ironically titled) wash-room.




I suppose that makes the point about the grime in the house. And the attic is even worse. Crystallized chaos -- in need of a controlled burn.

Then again, I suppose there are some charming parts of the house. Not five steps from the washer and drier in the basement, there is an old built-in bench where one day, Mr. Hackworth, you will sit, in between tries at the dartboard.


PS
What's the deal with heavy duty anyway? Without the heavy you've only got duty. Should we call second-rate tools duty tools?

Down and Dirty Cleaning

Mr. Hackworth, you commented a couple weeks back that you were jealous about the house. Upon closer inspection, I must confess, the pictures I took on our initial walk-through were factual, but they were not as informative as they could have been.

Today I spent some time doing some down and dirty cleaning. Let me cast illusions aside.

As an example, the smallest bedroom in the house is the nicest of the three. Painted a cheerful shade of yellow (hard to tell because iPhones have no flash), the floors are in pretty good shape. Whoever took the time to paint and tidy it, however, did not apparently have enough time to carefully clean beneath the radiator.


At some point, the bedrooms were carpeted. During that time, someone overflowed all the radiators in the house, probably ruining the carpeting and definitely damaging the hardwood floors. When the previous owner/tenant removed the carpeting, they did not lift or remove the radiators to get to the tacking beneath the radiator or the carpeting and padding beneath the radiator feet. The results...


...a bunch of old, crusty gunk that makes the house smell stale...


...the corroded ring that encircles the radiator pipe into the floor.


And if that is not enough proof, refer to the follow-on post, Heavy Duty.

Friday the 13th

The total trip to Providence of 416 miles takes seven hours. The tolls amount to about $25. I was a little worried about arriving in a new place on Friday the 13th, but things seem to be working out okay.

The weather was perfect, and there was no traffic. At about 9AM, we showed up at our hypothetical house. We looked in the windows to check if anyone had broken in over the past six weeks. Apparently, thefts of copper piping happen pretty regularly in Providence. We both hopped into the screen porch, which is missing a panel of screen, to look in the windows.

We noticed about forty or fifty tiny praying mantises, and we located a small white nest or egg which had apparently only that morning hatched them. I tried to take pictures, but the little suckers were too small and almost see-through.

We went over to Seven Stars Bakery which is about a half-mile from the house for some tea and a snack. While we were there, Bruce called to give us the lockbox number. This was sweet music to our ears, and he said, we would be able to move our things into the house!

I breathed a sigh of relief. Until that moment, there was a very real possibility that we'd have to have the moving guys deliver our things to a storage unit, only to have to move them again ourselves whenever we eventually closed.

Bruce also, however, suggested there were some additional problems with the closing. The seller’s agent was going to be in court all day for something related to his son. The deed the bank had overnighted the day before had errors in it. We still didn’t have a sewer bill.

The movers delivered everything at about noon. Most everything is going to stay in boxes until we close, because A) the house is absolutely filthy (pictures forthcoming), and B) if anyone in authority came to the house and wanted us to leave immediately, we want to be able to oblige.

Because the weather was splendid, in the afternoon we stopped at Home Depot and did some sorely needed yard work. While we were in the front yard, we met Julie our neighbor to the east. She was walking her big, black Poodle, Lila. (Here’s a couple pics, Ma, since everyone knows you’re a big Poodle fan. Lila seems super smart and very nice.) Julie said we could use all her garden tools and said her shed was always unlocked.



Jonathan, from two doors down (Noel and Avi are his wife and son, in that order), the gentleman who had helped to “sell” the house (see bottom of linked page), came by with beers to share. He offered to serve as our interior design consultant. Larlar, you can talk with him at some point. I think he’s teaching design locally and consulting as well.

When we told Ellen, our neighbor to the west, that we wouldn’t have electricity until Monday, she said she’d put an extension cord out the window we could use. Once we're up and running, Sue will reciprocate with beer bread.