Tag Archives: repair

Gutter related bullshit…

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I’ve been fighting with the gutters on this house since more or less the first weekend I moved in. One of the very first things that needed doing was clearing out a 10- or 12-foot segment that wasn’t so much a tool for draining water as it was a prelude to a roof garden. Living in a house surrounded on three sides by 80-foot oaks, you learn to accept keeping gutters clean is a never-ending bit of work. For me it has meant twice a year professional cleanings and periodic unclogging as needed in between.

The place came pre-installed with basic plastic gutter guards. By the time I took up residence, some were broken or missing or warped out of shape and making nuisances of themselves. At best they were a 50% solution, but I limped along with them, replacing individual pieces as needed. This year, during various high wind and heavy rain events, it seems whole sections of the rainwater management system have just given up the ghost. This past Sunday I had water pouring over the top of the gutters in at least three spots. That’s not ideal.

Hiring someone to, at a minimum, install a new set of metal leaf guards was near the top of next year’s home improvement list. Given that the existing gutters were clogged Sunday evening about 36 hours after I had cleaned them out and verified that they were running properly, getting resolution on this is now formally a “this year” problem. Getting through what’s left of the fall and then a long, cold winter with the current set up feels untenable.

So, instead of schlepping up the ladder and replacing another series of broken or mutilated bits of plastic, I’ve done what I do best – I hired a professional to rip it all down, give me brand spanking new larger gutters and cap them with perforated metal covers. It wasn’t a planned expense for this year, but getting it done right instead of applying another patch to patched patches is probably the better use of time and money. Sure, it’ll still need some periodic maintenance, but I’m cautiously optimistic that this could be the beginning of the end of seven years of gutter related bullshit.

I should file this solidly under “the joy of home ownership.”

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Mail in ballots. I printed out my general election ballot over the weekend. So far all it’s done is sit here on the corner of my desk like a lump. It hasn’t jumped up and subverted an election. It hasn’t even tried to multiply itself or throw itself into the trash so it couldn’t be counted. I’m highly disappointed that this mail in ballot doesn’t seem to have any of the magical qualities that Republicans have been warning me about for the last two years. In fact, it’s almost like they’re making up stories about evil mail in ballots on the spot and talking out their collective asses for their own devious purposes. 

2. The union. We’ve been paying attention to the Great Plague since about March 2020. That’s two and a half years the union that nominally represents most non-supervisory employees at my place of work has had to get their act together in negotiating what right looks like in terms of an updated policy for telework. Their failure to get it done has left us falling back on the policy that was in force in 2019 and bears little resemblance to the post-plague reality of information work. I don’t know what pie in the sky fuckery the executive board was demanding, but I know management’s proposal of two days per week in the office is miles ahead of where they wanted to be when the issue was discussed 18 months ago. From where I’m sitting, it looks like the union is all that’s standing between us and picking up an additional day of telework each week. I didn’t have much use for federal employee unions before this, but dragging out the process on this just adds insult to injury. I strongly encourage AFGE Local 1904 to unfuck themselves as soon as humanly possible because right now all they seem to be is an obstacle.

3. Vehicle repair. I’m driving a 12-year-old truck with nearly 140,000 miles on it. I’m all too aware that we’ve reached a point in our relationship when some repair work is just going to be unavoidable. More than the repairs themselves, it’s just the inconvenience of it that really gets to me. Getting it diagnosed, dropping it off for an unknown about of time to have the service done, arranging for alternate transportation from the shop to home and back again for pick up. It’s just filled with bits and bobs that conspire against my well worn in day-to-day habits.  So, you could say it’s more the inconvenience of it that the actual work that needs doing… and it’s all before whatever the absurd cost ends up being. Alas, that last bit is an inevitable consequence of my being a mechanical incompetent, so there’s no one to blame there but myself. 

The last project of 2022 (probably)…

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I started 2022 with a long list of projects that needed doing. Some were minor and I managed to knock them off one by one as the months crept past. Others – some electrical work, replacing the well filters, the gut and redo on my bathroom, and maintenance on the exterior trim work – were all things I opted to farm out to more competent hands.

The painters, at long last, were here yesterday. It wasn’t a particularly big project, but it involved a level of detailed effort and agility atop a ladder that I’m decidedly not able to deliver. Still, it was badly in need of doing. All the front windows needed recalked, the steel lentils above each window and the garage doors needed to be scraped, primed, and repainted, a deeply weathered wooden door frame needed a bit of patching and a fresh coat of paint, and lastly the iron pipe that keeps the generator fueled was beginning to wear through its original battleship gray.

I’m working from the assumption that all of those bits, except for the last one, probably haven’t been looked after since the house was built in 2000. The previous owners gave it good bones, but as they aged, it was obvious basic maintenance was let go. I’m told that’s something that tends to happen with older home owners. God preserve me from living through such a fate.

I’ve slowly worked through taking the multitude of deferred maintenance problems in hand. It was an impressively long list that included fixing the entire drainage scheme for the back yard, bricking up an undrained window well, replacing the furnace, clearing the shrubbery that at one time grew in the gutters, and a whole host of other smaller efforts. It’s taken the better part of eight years, but I’m pretty much done with the things that were on my original list. 

Aside from keeping up with the preventative maintenance now that it’s caught up, there’s the large and growing list of new projects that I want to take on. The air conditioning condenser unit is 22 years old. The carpet in the master bedroom and sunroom is warn and approaching tatty. The kitchen could use a bit of a refresh. Before long the roof will reach the end of its service life. Those are just the known projects. Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns are always lurking out there waiting to spring a surprise bit of home repair on me when they’re least expected or wanted.

I haven’t formally decided what’s next. If I can keep the air conditioner blowing through one more season, I’d like to take on some worrisome limbs that overhang the house and trees that have grown a bit too close. That’s probably the top of my wish list for 2023. Well, that, or really getting someone in here who can diagnose why my gutters suck and giving me a plan to fix them once and for all. 

As it turns out, the vast array of projects as a homeowner never actually ends, you just decide at some point to take a break. That’s absolutely where I am now.

Finally filtered…

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After weeks of screwing around with companies that apparently weren’t interested in doing business, the large regional plumbing operation I hired last week to put in the new well filter arrived as scheduled this afternoon and did, in fact, install the spin down filter I ordered. After testing, the consensus was that the only thing that needed taken out of the water here was the fine sand that’s endemic to wells in this area. Blame that on having built the homestead here high atop ancient sand and sediment washed down the primordial Susquehanna River when the last glaciers retreated and helped form the Eastern Shore and Chesapeake Bay.

Since they were here and had some time to kill, the two guys doing all the work also drained off the water heater, which has been a settling pond for sand laden water for the last two months. There was some add on fee for that, of course, but given how much sand has been caught in my poor simple Brita filter, getting most of that mess away from the heating element feels like money well spent. As they say, preventative maintenance is almost always more cost effective than emergency maintenance.

My new favorite plumbers weren’t the cheapest by a long shot. From start to finish they answered the phone when I called, arrived when they were scheduled, and did the work they said they were going to do. If that’s not service worth paying for, I guess I don’t know what is.

At the very least, it’s one more thing off my long and growing list of things that need doing around here. My fingers are firmly crossed in hopes this is the start of a trend.

A dream of spring…

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As the days lengthen, the household is beginning to shake itself loose from four months of winter inaction and beginning to lay out the list of things that need done as spring arrives.

This week, I’ve got a repair scheduled for a garage door that’s badly needed adjustment for months. I’ve also made calls to get the yearly generator service put on the books and to get a date for the spring mulching, two other annual expenses I’m perfectly happy to incur. Sure, I could do both of those things myself, but once I figure in the value of my own time (and half a dozen trips to Lowe’s), letting the professionals handle it in 1/3 of the time just makes sense.

Still to come projects are having the windows recalked and the angle iron lintels and a few other bits of trim scraped and repainted. I’ll farm those out too. I’m too old and too fat to fall off ladders. Heading out to pick up a new battery for the lawn tractor is at least one item on the list I’m competent to manage without direct supervision. Judging by how green some parts of the yard have started looking, we’re nearly to the time of year where being able to cut and trim is important. That also means “summarizing” the snowblower and de-winterizing my venerable Echo string trimmer. By the time that gets done and the garage is reset for warm weather operations, it’ll be time to clear off a winter’s worth of grime from the back porch and get the planters ready for a bit of color.

That leaves the wildcard… the master bathroom renovation that I expected to start around the end of January is still pending. There was a 16-week lead time just for the damned vanity, but now we’re past the half-year mark from the date I signed off on the final plan. With a third of the price already paid out to purchase supplies, I feel like I’ve been reasonably patient to this point, but now I just want to get things started so it might actually end someday… though I’ll admit the heated floor felt like a much more reasonable expense in the fall than it does with summer just over the horizon. 

I just made my bi-weekly call to the contractor to check in and remind them I’m still here. I’m not sure it does any good, but it makes me feel slightly better in hoping I won’t be marking a one-year anniversary of starting the design/build process before demo even starts… though I won’t pretend that it’s outside the realm of what’s possible at this point.

It turns out any house can be a money pit if you’re obsessive enough about things being just so.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Low bidder hard and software. About once a week my laptop does some kind of update that makes it functionally useless. Sometimes it takes fifteen minutes sometimes it takes three hours. There’s no way to tell in advance on which day it will happen or how long it will take. Each and every day I log in to my beloved low bidder piece of absolute trash laptop is like a game of low-stakes Russian roulette. I mean it begs the question of why these updates don’t run overnight, or during non-working hours when normal people are least likely to need to use their computer. Then again, the answer to that question would inevitably be stupid and unsatisfying so I won’t bother asking.

2. All the things. Somehow, all the things conspired to happen this week. Final approval of the new bathroom, diagnosing well problems, learning I needed a new washing machine, estimates coming in for a bit of driveway repair and maintenance, and wondering why the gutter people didn’t show up. There are many moving parts to keeping this household up and running and I suppose I let some of them slip a bit over the last few months – I’ll blame subconsciously trying to maximize the last bit of time I had with a sickly dog for that. Still. This week has been a lot.

3. Malaise. It’s the time of year. For most of my adult life I’ve found myself “enjoying” a minor funk as the days start getting shorter and fall comes on. It’s nowhere near debilitating and only lasts a couple of weeks before the keel evens out, but while I’m getting back to equilibrium, it’s a whole lot of demotivational… so I suppose if I seem a little more aggravated than usual, we’ll all know why.

Three days, three appointments…

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It’s going to be a busy and unavoidably expensive week.

Tuesday: Should be appliance repair day. Hopefully they can tell me why the washing machine is throwing periodic errors and if it’s reasonably economical to repair. Otherwise, I’ll have to add appliance shopping to the list of things to do that I don’t want to do.

Wednesday: The bank has, at long last, funded my bathroom renovation loan. All that’s left to do is sign the paper work and hand over a ponderously large down payment for the work… and then we can get properly started in approximately 3-4 months… assuming the backlog in materials doesn’t get any worse.

Thursday: The last estimate on repairing and resurfacing the driveway… and shortly thereafter cutting another unpleasantly large check.

It’s fun that no matter when I start planning for projects they all eventually seem to tend towards a bottleneck.

Perhaps the one true up side of the parade of home repair projects over the last 18 months has been that I’ve mostly been here. Whether it’s getting estimates or needing to let people in to do the actual work, it’s all been sorted with minimal time off required. I’m very much going to miss that part when we get back to the new, new, new normal.

It’s a deep subject…

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The saga of why my well has gone wonky and what’s to be done about it continues. 

I’ve learned a few new things over the last couple of days though. Or instance, the homestead sits on three distinct layers of sand/gravel, sand/clay, and sand. The well goes 195 feet down through them to the final sand layer. That’s not overly surprising. If I remember my long-ago undergraduate geography class, the whole of the Eastern Shore is a sand berm pushed up at the end of the last ice age by the proto-Susquehanna River as the ice melted.

Knowing that, having a bit of extra sediment coming through is fairly easily explained – by someone who knows more about hydraulics than I do. The most likely cause, according to the well company, is a slight shift in how water is flowing through the aquifer coupled with a 20-year buildup of sediment in the bottom of the well. The proposed solution: Raise the depth of the pump a bit. Sounds reasonable to me.

The bug and bug part intrusion, remains more of a mystery. They’re not exactly naturally occurring at depth in the water table. There’s no evidence of bugs making their way through the well cap, either. The tentative recommendation there is swapping out my current single-stage filter to a two- or three-stage set up that should capture everything down to the one-micron level. Not much should make it through that – certainly nothing large enough to identify definitively as a “bug part.”

The company I’m dealing with still wants to do a bit of homework and wait for the results of the water tests to come back, so we’re not at a point where we have a definitive plan of attack or a projected butcher’s bill for getting it done. Not that it matters all that much. It’s not like I’m going to opt to keep the bugs, regardless of the price put on making the fix.

I’m going to sleep on it…

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Six weeks ago, I was on a wild tear to get the master bathroom, at long last, updated to the point where it was a functional space for something beyond walking through to get to my closet and an out of the way corner to keep Hershel’s litter box. Getting proposals back that saw my own preliminary cost estimate bested by about 50% has given me a moment of pause… not because I want a real functioning master bathroom any less, but because it is only one item on my list of things to do.

The others, in no particular order of importance are: 1) Patch and reseal the asphalt driveway; 2) Repair or replace leaking gutters; 3) Replace 21 year old air conditioning condenser unit; 4) Replace kitchen counter tops; 5) Be prepared to replace all major kitchen and laundry appliances since every one of them is now well past the point of economical repair; 6) More bookcases (because we always need more bookcases here). There are, of course, other more minor items that need continuous repair and replacement as needed.

Before the cost run ups associated with the Great Plague, the price of a new bathroom would have been an all cash operation. Funding was saved and earmarked. Now, it would mean pulling a loan to cover the unanticipated increase in cost. Doing the bathroom now means sucking all the oxygen out of the room – and being unable to address any of the other projects without further borrowing or kicking them years into the future in order to reestablish a sufficient cash reserve.

I’m going to take the weekend to sleep on it. The most likely solution feels like taking on some of the smaller projects while stashing away more cash to get the bathroom done right. That’s all hoping, of course, that rampaging inflation doesn’t completely throttle the value of the dollar and that at some point the COVID premium on construction supplies and labor moderates back towards historical levels. Those are two significant “maybes’ that there is no way to control for other than sucking it up and paying the bill now.

So yeah, tell me more about this joy of home ownership, won’t you?

Revenge of the deferred maintenance…

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I’ve spent most of the last year deferring things that would bring people through the door. Part of that is just my natural disinclination to have people wandering around the house, but mostly it was part of my personal plague protection scheme. You can’t catch the bug if no one gets closer to you than the end of the driveway. 

It means now that I’ve had all my shots, it’s time to start working through the backlog. Sigh.

A few weeks ago, I anted up for the whole house power wash. The siding has never looked better and the moss colony that had taken root on the roof seems to (temporarily at least) be a thing of the past. It would have taken me a three-day weekend and probably resulted in me falling off the damned roof. It took them about three hours.

Today, Stanley Steemer crawled through the house finding every HVAC distribution and return vent to price out what the damage is going to be to get the whole system cleaned next week. After six years, it’s probably well past time for that regardless of what it ends up costing.

After that it’s a call to my go-to landscape company to schedule us in for spring mulching. That’s another project that takes me two days followed by weeks of nursing a sore back, but the professionals get finished in a handful of hours. 

There was a time I wanted to do all the work myself. I think it’s safe to say we’re well past that now and moving swiftly into an age where I’m perfectly happy hiring the work done and clawing back as much of my time as reasonably possible. 

We’ll see how I feel about that in a few weeks when I put out the call for bids on the long-delayed master bathroom renovation. Sure, there’s no way in hell I could do that work myself, but paying for it is going to be an agony.