We can't believe we're doing this!
Yee Haw! 😀
As of yesterday afternoon, we finally have Internet access at the new house.
Many thanks to the Comcast tech that did the install. He did a very neat install exactly the way I asked him to.
Now I can listen to ad-free music 🎼 when I’m working 🔨 out there.
We removed some of the kitchen cupboards recently. Specifically, the cabinet in the laundry room area of the kitchen, the cupboards above the cook top, and the cupboards above the counter to the right of the sink.
It really opened up the whole upstairs.
Here is what it looked like before:
And now:
I can now see our spectacular view while standing at the cook top. I love it.
Of course there will be a big vent hood over the new cook top before we’re done, but still…
A huge concern when we were looking at this house was its utter lack of Internet connectivity. There is no cable to the house and the telephone company can’t provide DSL because the wires to the house are (probably) 45 years old.
Yikes! No Internet is a deal killer for us. We can’t work without high-speed Internet and we stream the vast majority of what we watch and listen to. Now what? Let’s look into getting cable installed.
Comcast, the local cable monopoly, does have cable on the poles on the street. In fact, there is a pole right next to the driveway. Great. Let’s talk to Comcast and see what it will take to get cable installed up to the house. $38k+ 😱 You have got to be kidding me!
Well, after numerous conversations with a couple of Comcast reps, we got the Comcast charge down to under $5k providing we install the conduit from the street up to the house. Okay. Let’s see what that’s going to take. To make a long story short, a lot more than we wanted to spend but a lot less than Comcast wanted if they put the conduit in. Since we plan on staying in this house permanently, amortizing the cost out over the long term, as it were, it’s worth it.
So, off we go!
(Laura adds: We were initially going to hire a trenching outfit to trench the entire route, but things… happened. In the end, I’m glad they did, as if the original guy had done the trenching, we would have had to buy lengths of conduit at the store, and glue them together, then have the trencher return to fill in the trench. Time consuming. In the winter. In Washington. Wet. Cold. Sounds awful, right? We thought so, too. Especially Dave, who’s the one who would have done most all of the work. In the rain and cold. And it probably would have taken weeks to complete.)
The company we hired to install the conduit has some pretty awesome machines.
The first bores underground, is steerable (up, down, left, right), and pulls the conduit back through the hole when it is retracted.
Look at that. Two conduits right under the driveway with no ditch or damage to the driveway. 🙂
The other is called a plow. It has a spool of conduit and a huge plow blade-shaped head through which the conduit is fed. The head is lowered into the ground and vibrates very fast. The result is that a narrow, two-foot deep cut is made in the ground, the conduit is placed within it, the ground falls back over the conduit, and then it’s all tamped back down. Minimal mess. Minimal damage to the landscape. Very cool. (Laura adds: And amazingly fast. All that, a quarter mile, took only 2.5 days!)
So we now have ¼-mile of 2-inch conduit running from the road up to next to the electric company’s transformer box and another 30 feet, or so, of 1-inch conduit running from there to the house.
Comcast has installed their cable in the conduit and installed “pedestals” along the way for their equipment and possible future customers on the adjoining lots.They are supposed to connect to the main cable on the pole today (Friday, 1/17/2020) and test it all next Monday.
Assuming all is good, we’ll then schedule installation to the house. 👍🏻
We’re doing an addition to the house for Laura’s office. It’s going to be off the southeast corner of the house with its door to the left of the bathroom that’s off the living room. Unfortunately, that bathroom has a shower right where the office door needs to go.
So out goes the shower. Don’t worry, there are three others. Besides, who needs a shower right off the living room, right?
So here is the bathroom as it was when we got the house:
As the shower was making its exit:
And all that’s left:
Still need to remove some of the flooring and cut and cap the drain pipe.
(And Laura notes that having a shower control and shower head in the middle of the door to her office will probably be slightly inconvenient, and so both of those should go as well. LOL)
As part of the remodel we’re moving the wall between the master bedroom and the master bath to make the master bath a little roomier. As it is, the door can’t be opened all the way because it hits the counter. We’re going to pull the wall back a bit and replace the swinging door with a pocket door (Laura would say Squee or some such at this point).
To do this we have to remove two of the existing closets and rebuild one of them in a slightly different location. This is how things started.
The closet to the left with the swinging door is the linen closet and will be moving to a larger space in the hall. The closet to right is Laura’s and the one that needs to be moved.
And this is how it looks now.
So, that’s two closets gone. What about the third? Ah, well. The future TV room has a closet (with a water heater in it that will be moving).
The library is on the other side of that closet and we need all the room we can get in the library. So we’re going to rebuild the TV room closet to be only 12 inches deep. That should be plenty for DVDs and the like.
Here are before and after shots.
So, that’s what I did Monday and Tuesday.
We knew there were issues with the septic system when we bought the house, the big thing being that the line from the tank to the drain field had to be replaced. Knowing that, we allocated money in our budget for that operation based on a local expert’s estimate.
Unfortunately, none of us thought about the line from the house to the tank and about a third of it also had to be replaced adding a bit more cost we hadn’t planned on. Drat! All in all, though, the vendors who did the work did a great job of keeping the costs down in addition to doing great work.
The problematic pipe from the house to the tank was of a type called Orangeburg (Wikipedia). Orangeburg was made of layers of wood pulp and pitch pressed together. So, essentially, a tube made of rolled up tar paper. Yeah. That’s a great idea. Well, actually not so much.
Over time the pipe is slowly crushed by the earth around it to the point where little or nothing can pass through any more. Ours had gotten to that point.
Oddly enough, the other two thirds of the pipe from the house is iron and in fine shape. You really have to wonder why they didn’t use iron all the way to the tank.
So they had to tear up our beautiful driveway and dig a trench to replace the Orangeburg. Bummer.
The line from the tank to the drain field was made of corrugated plastic pipe which had also slowly been crushed over the years.
The plan was to replace this with high-density polyethylene pipe using a pipe-bursting machine (Wikipedia). Basically, you feed a very thick cable (7/8″?), through the old pipe and then pull the new pipe through, shattering the old pipe in the process. This is really great since you only have to dig a couple of holes for the entry and exit instead of trenching. Or so goes the theory.
In this case we ran into a problem. It turns out that pipe bursting doesn’t work so well with corrugated pipe. Instead of bursting, it just condenses like an accordion. You can see it in a video further along in the post.
In the end they had to dig a trench for part of that replacement too. Not a big deal, though, since it’s just out in the field.
The pipe-bursting process is pretty interesting.
This is the head that attaches to the new pipe and the cable. That’s 4-inch pipe on the left.
The 20-foot sections of pipe are literally welded together. The two ends are clamped into a gadget that keeps them perfectly aligned. A special tool is then used to even up the ends so that they mate exactly. Finally, a heating iron is clamped between them until the ends begin to melt and finally, the iron is removed and the ends are clamped together until the joint cools. Voila! a single piece of pipe.
Here you can see the front of the new pipe being pulled through an intermediate hole that was required because of the length of the run. You can also see some of the compressed corrugated pipe.
So, seven weeks from closing to having a septic system we can actually use.
I had no idea how satisfying it could be to flush a toilet 😉
I took advantage of the nice weather last Thursday to take down the 12-foot satellite dish on the upper garage roof.
There was no realistic way to just remove it, especially by myself, so I disassembled it and took it down piece by piece.
Its construction was pretty straightforward. Nineteen supports bolted to a central hub bolted in turn to the support tripod. The 19 supports result in 18 metal mesh panels that create the semi-hemispherical shape of the dish.
Each panel was mounted to the supports with about a gazillion small, self-drilling, self-tapping screws. Most of them were rusty and not particularly willing to disengage. I used an impact driver to remove them and in the process destroyed a total of three sockets.
After a certain point I started removing the supports as well. These were mounted to the central hub with 9/16-inch bolts, most of which were pretty rusty. You can also see some of the mesh panels in the foreground.
The last two supports were a bit more difficult to remove. In addition to the two large bolts mounting them to the central hub, they were “captured” by some of the support hardware. That meant that I had to remove some very large, very rusty bolts.
I left the tripod because it is mounted to the garage roof and removing it would result in leaks into the garage. It can wait until we’re ready to pitch that roof.
Here is some of the hardware that held the thing together.
We went over to our house on Sunday to do a little tidying up. You know how it goes. Work is messy. Sometimes time needs to be taken to get control of the mess that had been made.
I started with the totally easy stuff, and cleaned up the pile in the master bedroom that had accumulated with the walls coming down.
Maybe about half (or so) of the flooring in the dining room has bothered to let go of the underlayment so far. Ask Dave about the amount of work he’s put in on that little chore, and how much he’s looking forward to doing the rest. LOL Oh my. That pile of flooring sitting there over by the window has been driving me a bit bonkers, so clearing that away was my next task. I decided to play with the settings on my phone, and created a little time-lapse video of this chore:
As Dave’s been tearing the paneling out of the bedrooms he’s been stacking the wood against the wall in the living room. While it’s a grand place to stage the planks, boards, moulding, trim, and miscellaneous bits of wood, it can’t all stay there. For one thing, he means to take down the walls in the living room, too, but can’t do it with all that other wood leaning there. We forgot that one of the reasons we wanted to take the truck over was that we wanted to move the paneling and other pieces of wood from the house down to the barn. So we took the BMW. Ha! Because 8-foot-tall paneling pieces won’t fit in the BMW, we staged it all in the second garage. First I had to clean out the garage a bit.
Apparently, when the previous owner decided to put this house on the market, the yard wasn’t the only thing that was over-filled with blackberries and ivy. Yes, the garage was, too. They cut the plant material off at the outside of the wall, and again a couple feet down from the top of the walls, and left it all in a pile in the middle of the floor. That was months ago, so it was nicely dried up, and easy to move. I rolled all that plant-mess up, and carried it down to the nearest burn pile. Ta da!
As I dealt with the plant material and sweeping up, Dave continued getting nails out of the boards and planks. When I announced that I had rolled up the dead plant bits, and gotten rid of them, he joined me in the garage to move some of the bigger things out of the way, you know, the things attached to the walls. There is this one shelving unit that’s basically okay just in the way, so it was detached from the wall and moved around a few times. I don’t know if you can really see it, but there’s part of a cupboard hanging on the wall toward the right side of the above photo. There wasn’t much left of it or its neighbor to the right. There’s nothing left of either of them now. The wood from those cabinets was in such bad shape that it wasn’t worth saving. More sweeping, more plant material cut down, more sweeping… Dave has a plan. We start moving the wood from the living room to the garage in a large, slightly wonky figure eight. I took a brief squirrel moment, and cut some ivy out of a small nearby tree. I’m going to need a heavy pair of loppers to get the rest. Finally, the wood is all moved! Here it is in the garage. The living room walls are visible again. Hooray!
Oh, and yes, there are two (three?) door frames still in the living room. There is a different plan for those that will be executed on a different day. Now it’s time to stop for the day. Because it’s time to stop, here’s my closing photo:
I meant to share this earlier, but only finally got around to figuring out how to get this file off of my phone today. This is our new driveway. The lower part, the part closest to the road, belongs to someone else. We have an easement. The upper part of the driveway is ours. The video is just over one minute in length. Oh, by the way, the road isn’t exactly smooth. Also, I took the video with my iPhone while Dave was driving the truck, so it’s, er, a bit bumpy.
Dave’s been super busy inside the house dismantling things. While he’s been doing that, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home paying bills, balancing checking accounts, sending and receiving house-related email… all sorts of things, but mostly those seemingly endless tasks that are never.quite.done.
The weather has been delightful (cool and sunny), and so I took my clippers and a large bucket over to our house, and attacked the roses. When we first saw the house, the rose hedge was still blooming cheerfully. The leaves were bright and shiny with no sign of either pests or mildew, but it was in serious need of deadheading.
That was in late August. The roses have continued to bloom all this time (in fact, they’re still blooming, and they’re still covered with new buds), so I’m sure you can imagine how many rose hips have been growing where the delicate blooms once were. Yeah.
I filled up my bucket with dead blooms and rose hips four times that first day. I also nipped quite a few long suckers out of the way. I didn’t bother trying to cut those up just to fit them into my bucket, instead carrying their long selves down to the burn pile more-or-less intact.
Saturday I was at it again. I filled my large yellow bucket four more times, and carried countless long suckers down to that burn pile. I also found this little guy. I don’t know if he’s a carrot-nosed ghost masquerading as a snowman, or a spooky snowman. Either way, he has taken up residence on the mantel with the other odd bits that we’ve been finding while working on our house.
Instead of leaving you with a photo of how awesome the rose hedge looks now, because I forgot to take a picture of it, I’ll leave you with a view of our pond. It’s rained quite a bit since August, and so it has actual water in it now. Part way through my pruning campaign I decided to take a little walk through part of our yard. Here I’m standing on the west side of the pond, looking back toward the house. That colorful tree over on the right is our baby willow. There are tons of weeds in the pond as well as around it, but the task of sorting that all out will have to wait.
