The Pond Rebuild Report

Every year I pick one or two projects to do around the house (and by "to do" I usually mean "pay someone else to do," although there are no end of things I do myself). This year it was the bedroom closet, which I posted about earlier, and the garden pond.

I actually built the pond myself, about 15 years ago when I first moved into the house. It was a pretty good job, if I say so myself, but it wasn't perfect, and man-made ponds don't last forever. It had already started going downhill in the last few years (the plastic liner was starting to crack, the water lilies had seriously taken over, and it was filled with sludge at the bottom) but last year's knee issue made it even harder to keep up with it, and pushed it passed the point of no return.

In theory, I could have rebuilt it myself, but A) the knee is still messed up, and not up to the task and B) OMG, those rocks are heavy! So I got a couple of stellar recommendations for a guy named Pat Ryan, a stone worker, and he spent five days taking the entire pond apart and putting it back together again. The end result was beyond my wildest dreams, and I consider it to be an investment in my mental health, because the sound of the waterfall is so lovely.

Here's a glimpse at the process.

This was what it looked like when we started. Not terrible, but clearly overgrown. That's Pat in the corner, planning what he's going to do.

What it looked like with the water and fish out. UGH.

 This was not a job for the weak of heart (or muscles). At this point, I was REALLY glad I'd decided to have someone else do it.

Emptying the last bits.

The few fish that were left were rescued and put into this big tub to wait for the pond to be done. The frogs evacuated on their own, and I'm still waiting for them to come back.

And so it begins.

 The old pond used a filter and fountain combo that sat inside the pond and were a pain to keep clean. Pat decided to build me a waterfall instead, to aerate the water better, with an external filter that will require a lot less maintenance.

Test fill to make sure it didn't leak.

Fountain in, plants back, almost done!

Pat was absolutely meticulous, even going so far as to build a surround to disguise the electrical post.

I treated myself to some new fish!

Here's the finished project. Isn't it amazing? I need to figure out how to upload a video, so you can hear the fountain. I love this so much. What do you think?

Ta da!!!!

Closet Construction Chaos

It has been a fun few days at Casa Deborah...

As some of you know, I live in an approximately 130 year old farmhouse. It's not large--only 1,200 square feet, and most of it has been added on to the original even smaller structure over the years. Usually by people whose ambitions clearly exceeded their skill sets. In short, there are lots of crooked walls, slanting floors, and odd bits and pieces.

Take my bedroom closet, for example. This is what it looked like Monday morning.

The outside

 It looks like a small closet, right? (And it is short, only about 68" high instead of the normal 80".) But in actuality, the closet runs the length of the wall to the left towards the dresser.

The inside

Of course, the problem was getting at anything shoved in that far side, since you kind of had to sidle in sideways and pray the giant spiders didn't get you. It was, in short, a pain in the patootie. The door was also sort of jury-rigged and only half attached. I put up with it for 15 years, since I moved in, and finally hit the wall this spring. Or maybe hit the closet. Anyway, I decided to have it redone. I also discovered that the overhead space was actually empty--a continuation of the cupboards on the bathroom wall on the other side, so I figured I'd get them cut out too, so I could actually access the whole space.

Easy, right? [Any of you who have ever had work done will be laughing at this point.]

So the Guys Who Do Stuff came in and did the work yesterday, and it was sort of right, with a lot of not so right mixed in. (Also, the cats were very indignant about having to be locked in the upstairs room so they wouldn't accidentally get out while the Guys were running in and out.)

This is what it looked like when I got home yesterday.

Two of the three Guys Who Do Stuff

The mess, to be expected

 Even Magic, when she got to come take a look at the "finished" project, was not impressed.

That's not right.

The doors didn't line up

Seriously? WTF is this?

Nails coming through on the inside of the door for me to get snagged on

I'm a pretty easy going person, in general (stop laughing, people who know me) but if I pay for a job, I expect it to be done right. Also, HELL NO.

So the Guys came back today and fixed it. It's not perfect, but that's at least in part because nothing in my house is straight, including the walls, ceiling, and floor in that room. But it is a lot better.

Much, much better!

 I still have to paint it (or maybe stain it, I haven't decided). Probably paint. But now I can actually access the whole closet, so I get to reorganize All the Things, and hopefully move some stuff from other closets into this one. I'll probably get a few organizer thingies to help with that. I love organizing messy things and making them neat. Even though I know it won't stay that way. I call it my "Organizational Neurosis." LOL.

Look, I can get to the whole closet now!!! (Don't look at how ugly it is in there. There are limits to what I can fix.)

Of course, now I have to take the original contents of the closet and put them back in. I'm pretty sure I have too many clothes. My plan is to look at each one as I get ready to put it back, and hope that about 20% of them will go to the Salvation Army. Do I really need 8 black sweaters? (The answer to that, of course, is YES. They're all different!)

I have too many clothes.

 Still, at least one of the things that has been bugging me since I moved in is finally fixed. Only 527 left to go...

What construction project have you ever lived through? Did they go well? Or did you want to kill the Guys and bury them in the back yard?

Faucets Ate My Wednesday

I had plans for my day off on Wednesday. Lists of things to do. Long lists. Including writing, plus a bunch of household chores. The list started out with: replace bathroom and kitchen faucets. This should have been a fairly easy task. (Really, just read the boxes the faucets come in.) I've done my own minor plumbing for years--I can fix a toilet like nobody's business. And the REALLY OLD pipes had been cleared away after I moved in (and, you know, broke them trying to replace the bathroom faucet the last time).

But NO.

The bathroom faucet took about 5 hours. FIVE HOURS, people. Most of that was trying to get the old faucet off. Things were stuck. There was copious use of WD40. I consulted the Interwebs (someone sent me a great link to This Old House, which said use a hammer...which actually worked). Wrestling, then walking away, then more wrestling. There might have been cursing. But in the end, there was this:

This was the old faucet. See that drain thingy lying there? Broken. Also, it was a crappy faucet.

Everything got taken out from under the sink. No, it didn't all fit back underneath after. I don't know why.

After four hours, the old faucet finally decided to give up. The hammer might have had something to do with that.

Bare naked sink. I almost left it that way.

Look--the new faucet is so pretty! (The sink however, is filthy. I'll clean it tomorrow.)

 Like a sensible person (okay, a sensible person would have called the plumber after hour two, but nevermind), I gave up on the idea of doing the kitchen sink on the same day. I was tired, dammit. And the kitchen faucet was only sorta broken (it was supposed to rotate, and it had stopped doing it a year ago, which was inconvenient over a double sink, but obviously not impossible, because A YEAR AGO).

And then my pal Glen (you remember him, he built my new desk for me) came by to rescue me from the bathroom sink. Which I'd literally finished five minutes before he got there. So he said, "Let me take a look at the kitchen sink. It doesn't look that bad..."

Really, I should have known better. It mostly came apart easier than the bathroom faucet (it helped that there were two of us, and you know, he had the right tools--note to self: buy more tools). But when we had it put together, the LAST connection kept leaking, and we couldn't figure out why. We tried everything. Silicon tape. Plumber's putty. Filing down a rough spot on one of the connections. Finally, Glen thought to try using a washer (those little black rubber thingies that usually go inside a faucet--thankfully, although I don't have all the right tools, I have a wiz-bang collection of washers in every size and shape imaginable). It shouldn't have worked, but it did. Which is good, because by then it was 6pm, and I'd started on the first faucet at 10 am. *headsink*

The spiffy new black faucet and soap dispenser. It's a crappy picture. I was tired. So sue me.

So that's what happened to MY Wednesday. What did you do on yours? Do any good household repairs lately?

Rolling with the Punches

Sometimes the universe just throws shit at you (kind of like the overexcited monkeys at the zoo, I guess). Life will be going along more or less steadily, you have "a plan" (always your first mistake), and then BAM: stuff happens. A bunch of stuff. Usually carrying a large price tag.

I'm not talking about the big whammies here--being diagnosed with a horrible illness, losing someone you love unexpectedly, having your home destroyed by fire or flood. That's a whole different category of cope. I'm just talking about when there is a series of everyday life bumps in the road, and you have to figure out how to roll with the punches.

As gracefully as possible, with a minimum of whining. (Yeah, I know. Where's the fun in that?)

I've had that kind of last few months. Not that it hasn't been a good year overall; I got that long-awaited book contract, after all. But there have been a few more thanks-universe-but-no-thanks punches than I expected.

 It started with the rats. You remember the Great Rat Invasion of 2013, right? Not only was that one kind of icky (rats! in my walls!), but it necessitated calling in the pest guy for help, plus the appliance guy (to repair the washer and dishwasher hoses they ate--TWICE...although I didn't realize it was rats the first time), plus the electrician/plumber to fix the wire from the water pump to the breaker box and rubber gasket they ate through. [I know...a rubber gasket doesn't sound that bad, right? It was on the huge pipe through the basement that led out to the septic tank. Think about that one for a minute. Ew. Thank goodness they didn't chew all the way through. Just sayin'.] If you add in having to replace the kitchen floor because of the first dishwasher flood, which was almost certainly caused by the first rat or rats in the invasion, that one cost me about $1,300. Thanks, rats. You suck. Too bad you're all dead now. Heh.

Still, it could have been worse.

For instance, once the rats were all dead (heh, take that, rats), I had to take a close look at the damage they'd done in the basement. Including paying my electrician to put in five more lights with brighter bulbs, so I could actually see in the basement. Oy. I kind of wished I'd left the lights dim. Anyway, in the process, I discovered that a small problem I'd noted a few years ago had become a major "must be dealt with now" problem. I've always had water in the basement--there's a sump pump in the floor, even, and the woman who owned the house before me had told me to expect it. It is an old farmhouse with a stone foundation, and it seeps and leaks a bit when it rains hard for days. Plus there is an outside metal hatch that leads down cement stairs, and it was rusted and ugly, and I'd been meaning to paint it this summer anyway.

Except it turns out that the hatch and the cement walls leading into the basement have been channeling water into the basement instead of keeping it out. One wall had been moved and shifted by freezing and thawing to the point where the cement was cracked and coming off in chunks (one of the places the rats came in). So I have to have my construction guy in to take out the old wall, pour a new one, patch the cement on the outside wall in the basement, and make a new wooden door to replace the one at the bottom of the stairs that is so swollen by water it no longer closes.

At the same time, we worked at coming up with a permanent fix so that the water wouldn't keep coming down the stairs (necessitating a repeat ten years down the line). We actually came up with a plan that will give me something nice and add value to the house once we're done (but of course, cost more money)--we're tearing out the ugly old raised hatch door, building a 6 X 10 patio with a trap door in it that will open to the stairs. Then we're putting a roof over that, so that the rain will run down and off, reaching the part of the yard that slopes down away from the house, instead of in towards the basement. I'll take pictures when we get to that. But, of course...this all costs money too. About $3,500 that I hadn't been expecting to spend, to be exact. Still, it is going to fix a long-standing problem that should have been dealt with years ago, so that's good.

Thank heavens that was it. Oh, but WAIT.

Then came this last couple of weeks, and the tooth saga. Warning: if dental stuff freaks you out, don't read this part. Seriously. (You can skip to below the next red bit.)

I'll try to keep this short, since this post is already running insanely long. Two years dealing with a probably cracked tooth. Lots of pain the last 3 months, leading me to finally give up and go back to the dentist, who said that "maybe" just a crown would fix it. Last Thursday, going to be fitted for the crown (which involves whittling the tooth down to a nub that the crown can fit over). After, MUCH worse pain. Chasing the dentist, until finally I sat in his office on Tuesday afternoon and just waited until he could fit me in. He told me, no surprise, that I was going to have to have a root canal. In the meanwhile, he would do a partial thingy which involved removing the pulp from inside the tooth to relieve some of the pressure and hopefully reduce the excruciating pain. Two shots of Novocain. They didn't work. Three more shots. They didn't work either. He went ahead and did the procedure anyway, since there really wasn't much choice. If any of you suddenly started hearing loud profanity in your heads on Tuesday afternoon, I'd like to apologize--that was probably me.

So--that hurt. A lot. About an hour of serious dental work without benefit of anesthesia. Afterwards, I said to my dentist (who all indications to the contrary, is not actually an evil sadist, but was in fact trying his best to help me), "Well, at least if I ever need to write a torture scene, I'll have some real-life experience to draw on." He replied, with a straight face, "You're welcome." Humor. Har.

The pain is a little better, although still there, and I am almost looking forward to the root canal on Monday, just to have this over with. And hey, I used to be freaked out about root canals, and after surviving the debacle on Thursday, it barely intimidates me at all. So, hey, bright side!

The total cost of all this, when the root canal and crown are done? Brace yourself: $2,814. In part because of the extra procedure, and in part because dentistry where I live is insanely expensive.

Okay, it's safe to come back.

So, what was my original plan, you ask? My original plan was not to have any big expensive house or other projects this year, because I need to buy a new (used) car. That noise you hear is the gods laughing.

But that's okay, because I'm rolling with the punches. For one thing, I got the first part of my advance for the BABA books. It's not much (especially once my lovely agent gets her well-deserved 15%, and I put 25% in the bank for taxes later), but it helps. Also, well, it's money. I'm not happy about it, but when you have a house (and teeth, apparently), you can pretty much figure you're going to have unplanned expenses. I'm not happy about it, but I'm not letting it upset me, either.

See, that's my theory on rolling with the punches. (You knew I had to be going somewhere with this rambling mess, right?) You can't prevent the universe from throwing shit at you. And sometimes you have to deal with things you'd really rather not. (Rats. Dentists. And did I mention a chunk fell off my car the other day? More about that some other time.) But you have two choices: you can deal with them well, or you can deal with them badly. Either way, the shit is still going to happen. You can't control that. (Dammit.) What you can control is how you cope.

I mostly make a lot of bad jokes, write a blog post, and then come up with a new plan. Because, hey, nobody died and my house is still standing. At least for this week. I call that a win, even with the torture.

I hope that life isn't lobbing too much crap in your direction. But if it is, here's hoping that you can manage it with as much grace as possible, and maybe learn a few things along the way. I learned that I was kind of tougher than I thought: I killed and disposed of 14 rats, and survived a really painful dental experience. Booyah, me.

But if you're listening, universe, feel free to take a break. Really. I'm good.
 

The New Kitchen Floor Saga

Still fighting the Cold from Hell, but I think it is on the wane... (PLEASE goddess, let it be on the wane. 11 days is really enough, thank you very much.)

In the meanwhile, I promised to post about The New Kitchen Floor Saga, part of which started as long ago as the end of December, and the last of which finished up as the cold was really hitting me last week.

You  may recall, she said in a storytelling kind of voice, the Great Appliance Meltdown of 2012. That was when the week after Christmas, the washer started spewing water all over the mudroom floor, followed the next day by the dryer making a *clunking grinding* kind of noise (never good) and dying on the spot. Followed, a week and a half later, by the dishwasher causing a major flood during the dinner party I held for my step-daughter Jenn's last night in town.

Was there cursing? you ask. Oh yes, I reply, there was cursing. But not a lot. These are the joys of home-ownership. You get used to them.

Anyway. Due to some major incompetence on the part of the Electrolux people (not the repair folks, who were great, but they didn't have the right part for the washer in stock, and when they ordered it from Frigidaire/Electrolux, the company didn't send it....and didn't send it...and didn't send it, until I finally went on Twitter and complained about them, and magically, the part appeared. Yay Twitter.) it took us three weeks to get the washer and dryer fixed and the dishwasher looked at. To discover that we needed a couple of hoses the repairman didn't have... So he had to order them and come back a week later.

All of which is important to our story because water kept coming up through the floorboards (which were laminate flooring that looked like wood--what they call a "floating floor"--a term which was becoming more ironic by the minute, I might add) and I kept thinking, "Man, that was one heck of a flood, that there is still water under there."

Until the lovely repairman pulled the dishwasher out, and before he replaced the bad hoses, went to wash his hands at the kitchen sink...and water came out of one of the broken hoses behind the dishwasher.

*headdesk* Yes, that's right. Even though I turned off the water to the dishwasher itself, I'd been adding more water under the floor every time I'd used the kitchen sink. FOR OVER A MONTH. The upshot of which was...the floor was now an ex-floor, and needed to be replaced. [The top of laminate flooring is like granite. The underneath is made of pressed stuff, and not meant to be soaking wet for a damned month. Some of the flooring might have been reusable, and I did give it away to someone for free, but frankly, I thought the chances of the thing developing serious mold issues was way too good, and I would have had to replace a bunch of pieces anyway. So--dead floor.]

This is what the floor looked like before, and what the piece right in front of the dishwasher looked like when I pulled up a bit. The greenish stuff is a plastic underlayment, which was holding the water in and also smelling like er...BAD.

This is the kitchen with the old flooring pulled up, and half the underlayment ripped out. You can see the Really Ugly Linoleum that was in the house when I bought it (I redid the entire kitchen when I moved in, because it was a nightmare of 4 white metal cabinets, no countertop at all, and an ancient stove with 4 electric burners and 2 wood ones). Luckily, the RUL was put in really well, so it seemed to have contained the water. And there is cement underneath, anyway.

This is my heroic friend John Carter (not the one from Mars) who I paid to help me put in the original flooring, and this time to pull it out and put down the new flooring. I was already really ill from this stupid cold, so he did the nasty job of  cleaning the smelly icky wet Linoleum. On his hands and knees with rags and a bucket full of bleach water. Like I said, heroic.

This is poor Minerva, who is terrified of loud noises and commotion. She spent most of the three day project either hiding behind the couch or under the bed. But she's better now. She just wanted me to tell you how traumatic the whole thing was. Poor baby.

 This is kind of cool. I'd forgotten I'd written this blessing on the old Linoleum before laying down the laminate floor. It's right by the door everyone comes into the house through. Covered up again, so you can't see it. But still cool. We also found a piece of the laminate that John had signed and dated on the underneath from the earlier job. History. Every house has it.

This is John putting down the new vinyl flooring squares. It took me multiple trips to the Home Depot to decide on the color (which almost exactly matches my countertop, and I thought might be Too Much) and a conversation with my sister Sarah the Kitchen Designer, during which she started laughing and said, "Go check your email" and when I did, saw a picture of her new kitchen floor...featuring these exact same tiles. So there you have it.

And here it is, the new kitchen floor. TA DA!

It's not perfect. The reason I originally used the floating laminate flooring (which costs a lot more than the vinyl tiles) is because the kitchen floor is quite uneven, and the floating flooring compensates for that, so you can't tell. With the tile, you can tell. Which is kind of a drag. But it sure looks pretty, and if there is ever another flood, there is no place for the water to go, and I'll just mop it up. So for the moment, I'm happy.

What do you think? 

Perty, isn't it?