Windemere

        Well actually I bought a house a while ago and have been meaning to get something like this up and running since early on. But for anyone out there who has also purchased an older home that "needs a little work" you'll appreciate how little extra time there is for frivolous things like blogging, sleeping, etc.

        So while this endeavour is starting out maybe a bit disingenuously with what will be in the following few days a series of postings recounting some of the disasters ehrm.... milestones that have occurred up to this point, going forward it will be more of a day to day or event to event rant about the cruel injustice and staggering economic burden associated with homeownership. Not that the upcoming posts won't also be along these same themes but they won't have quite the same intensity as what is likely to come up in the future as I've had time to calm down and collect my thoughts on what has passed but in the future will be sitting down while my eye is twitching in the middle of my blind rage and frustration at whatever further disaster or injustice has befallen me.

        Although I may whine and complain and wheedle and grouse a lot (because I stick to what I'm best at) I am truly happy to be in a place that is mine and to have escaped from the drab world of beige that is apartment living.

1/23/2007

        After a rather long and involved process of searching for and eventually finding a house I finally found something that I didn't hate, that was in a decentish neighborhood and was somewhat less catastrophically un-affordable than other things out there in housing land here in Baltimore. So my amazing Realtor, Agent Wayne and I sat down and I spent something like an eternity signing and initialing all the various pieces of the contract documents that he had had hauled in on a cart by a team of pack mule. At the completion of this ordeal I had officially put in an offer on the house.

        Now Wayne just had to drive the mule team back to the office and get everything over to the other agent so that the owner of the house could laugh with disdain at my offer much as Caesar would toward a not so mighty gladiator who was about to become lion food. But this did not happen. In fact over the course of the next week nothing at all happened. Well that isn't true mighty Agent Wayne was busy calling the other realtor and trying to get them to respond to my offer. And guess what, in the end THEY NEVER DID. Not one word back from the realtor or owners about the offer. Not "No I'm sorry we don't like the offer" or "Yes, your largess in this offer is only exceeded by your amazing charm and grace" and nothing in between.

        If you'd ever like to see a very calm real estate agent turn three shades of purple frustrated angry then I recommend putting in a reasonable offer on a house and having the other agent not bother to return a week's worth of phone calls and e-mails.

        So the house didn't work out and at the end I felt a little like I was back at square one. I had already mentally started planning on projects and moving and everything else. But Agent Wayne was still on the case and had a couple of properties for me to look at.

        So I did my usual night time drive by of the two properties. There's nothing more revealing than driving through random neighborhoods in Baltimore at 10 o'clock at night. The perfect little cottage on a cul-de-sac in a quiet neighborhood is revealed as the cut through for the addicts moving from your sketchy neighbor's meth lab to the methadone clinic around the corner. So these nighttime sojourns have proved most useful in weeding out what seem like perfectly nice homes in decent neighborhoods that really aren't.

        One of these two properties was Windemere. And if I had known then what I know now I may have opted to just cash out my life savings in small bills and invite my friends over for a massive bonfire of burning cash and just warmed ourselves in the glow of burning dead presidents and statesmen. Then I could just move on with my boring drab apartment living and be happy, Right?

        But that's not what happened. Instead I set up an appointment to walk through Windemere. Fully prepared to be devastated by the fact the the interior was either another tacky terrible renovation or a gutted crack den. Much to my astonishment it was neither. The original hardwood floors were still there and not covered with the bargain basement beige carpeting.

The house was actually pretty great, it had passed the night time test, looked pretty good from both the outside and inside and was in a good neighborhood close to work. I kept ducking as I walked outside for fear of lighting strikes. This isn't to say that it was perfect. The house definitely needed some TLC but there were no massive problems evident from the walkthrough.

        Once again into the breach. Agent Wayne was on the case and got the mule team hitched up (hopefully for the last time) for another contract signing session. Now the waiting game. This time the other Realtor actually responded to our proposal and we, hold on to your hats, negotiated on the price. So there was some back and forth and a bit of drama (one of parties in the contract had passed away) in the contract process but at least things were moving ahead.

So we now almost have a house. Next week on This Old House we'll be going through the home inspection and closing process. Stay tuned....

2/23/2007

        I had been warned that closing on a house wasn't necessarily the most pleasant experience in the world. But I have to admit that I wasn't fully prepared for the drama ultimately involved in the event. I'd gotten a guide for first time home buyers that was a couple steps up from the Idiot's guide to home buying. It was written by a real estate attorney who had flipped several homes through her career. The advice and background info about the process and everything involved was mostly review, but there were several good things that I took away. If I were more motivated I'd go look up the author and title and link to the book here but that book, along with hundreds of others, is in a box somewhere within the piles and piles of boxes still all over the house and I have no desire to go unearth it just to make your life easier. If it really really ruins your day not to know what the book was, or if you are searching for a home and feel the desperate need to read the same book I did, e-mail me and I'll consider putting forth some effort.

        If there is an image most unlike the process of closing this is probably close to it.

        Beauty, serenity, symmetry, color, nature, and balance. None of this has anything to do with the closing process. It is an agonizing soul draining experience full of paperwork, bureaucracy, delay, and stress. Perhaps the one best piece of advice that I had gleaned from my first time home buyers book was to take the full day of work off for closing. That and to have some reward for yourself for the completion of closing because there was bound to be anywhere from moderate to profound buyers remorse shortly after doing the deed. I did in fact take the full day off work. My closing was set for 3pm on a Friday afternoon and I spent most of the day getting last minute things faxed over to the mortgage broker's office and by about noon had gotten word that everything was good and that the mortgage was secured and that we were good for closing.

        I have to say that the best thing about the whole process of getting a home was the team of people that I had helping me. It's not that I'm all that important or wealthy and have teams of minions flitting about to do my bidding (much as I may desire it) but as a buyer and particularly a first time home buyer it is ridiculously easy and on the surface very much free (nothing is truly free, you do pay for it somewhere but just not out of pocket) to get help. I've already mentioned super Agent Wayne and through him I was led to a great mortgage broker, home inspector, and title agent.

        If I were to write an idiot's guide to home buying, and believe me anything I wrote would certainly be by an idiot home buyer even it weren't written for an idiot home buyer, I think my #1 tip for the process is to admit defeat right up front and know that unless you are already in the industry there is no way for you to reasonably raise your knowledge level much above idiot status in all the various aspects of home buying. There are just too many variables for one person that doesn't make it their life's work to master. Having Agent Wayne on the job and having him bring a network of trusted professionals that he'd worked with in the past made my job as a home buyer so much easier. And truly that is the Agent's job. To know more than you do about the market, take the time to get to know you enough as a person to find YOUR home, and draw upon their experience and contacts to make the process as straightforward as possible. This sounds fairly straightforward but it is a phenomenally difficult job.

        Based on the horror stories I've heard from other people's real-estate agent experiences I think most of the time the problem is with the home buyer. So my #2 tip is not to be an idiot. Of course if the book is titled "Idiot's guide..." this may alienate a lot of my readers but fuck'em they already bought the book, I got my dollar. ;-)

        In my mind, and eventually in chapter 4 if this ever becomes a book, the absolute most critical aspect is to find an agent that you can communicate clearly with. This ties directly in to tip #2 above. If you can't clearly explain what it is you want, need, desire, and despise about a home then all hope is lost. What I mean is that the agent must be able understand what you mean when you speak, not just hear the words that come from your mouth. This goes both ways. You must be cogent enough to explain yourself and your agent must be enough in tune with you to comprehend what you are asking for.

        There are some people who I suspect are just incompatible with any real estate agent because the real problem is that they themselves are lousy or confused communicators and can't even get their wishes clearly defined enough for the agent to work with. That and the delusional folks who can't get past reality. "Well I want 5 wooded acres and a 2,500 sq/ft home in a gated community within a 15 minute commute to work and there needs to be shopping within walking distance and my budget is $37. Oh, and a pony! If it had a pony that'd be great!"

        But I digress. Really we should be sticking to the tale of my closing. After all this whole thing is all about me and what I want to say. ;-)

        So on that fateful cold February Friday I made my way to RGS Fountainhead title in timonium prepared to spend the next few hours signing away my life. Their offices are very cozy and comfortable and considering the stress level what goes on in their office are some of the nicest and most relaxed people to work with. I met the seller for the first time and after a few minutes we all proceeded into a conference room to begin the process. The title agent must have made arrangements to borrow Agent Wayne's mule team because she had a pile of paper on the desk that could choke a medium sized termite colony.

        About ten minutes into the process someone came into the room and asked to see the title agent outside. My stomach made a slight lurch at this point as I knew whatever it was couldn't be good. They never come pull a title agent out of a closing to let them know that they just discovered that the buyer had won the lottery and wouldn't need this whole mortgage thing afterall. Only bad news is delivered privately and in hushed tones. We continued reading and signing things and she returned a few minutes later and now asked me to step out of the room with her. Ok so this is even worse my stomach now completed the double gainer back summersault that it had been contemplating with the first interruption.
. It is one thing for the title agent to be pulled out, it is another entirely for me to be called away. When it was just the title agent I was able to restrain my stomach with thoughts of other scenarios besides a disaster with my closing process. It could very well have been that her daughter had fallen on the playground and she had been called out to make arrangements to pick her up or something else that affected someone other than me. But now it had been confirmed that there was something not at all good happening and it was about to happen to me.

        What I found out was that the state had just called to say that "Ummm, oh by the way that mortgage loan that we approved and sent over to you for Mr. Moore, yeahhh, well uhh just kidding." Well that's maybe not exactly what they said but that was the gist. Basically the person at the state who had signed off on the loan and authorized the disbursement was not authorized to do so. Now of course we had already started the signing process and the title agent had a check in her hands ready to hand the seller. And as of that morning I'd been told all was well. It was now about 3:30p on a Friday afternoon. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a state bureacracy knows that there really isn't a worse time of the day or week to try to get anything to happen at the sate.

        My heart sank. I just knew that the one competent person at the state office office of loan approvals or whatever who's been there for 40 years and would be able to quickly resolve this problem and without whom the entire process just grinds to a halt had to be long gone and well on her way to the shore for the weekend. My mortgage broker's office jumped into action and began working things from their end. They needed some further documentation from my business partnership and after a couple of calls to the one woman in our office who can get this kind of thing done (who was in fact in the car on the way to the shore for the weekend) and some strings pulled by my broker to get someone at the state to stay late and take care of this etc we finally got word at 5:45pm that the state had moved things through and that it was ok to disburse the check. Whew.

        At this point, after spending nearly 3 hours on the precipice of disaster the "joy" of now owning a home was largely absent. It is hard to describe the feeling but it can basically be summed up as "Great I've just cashed in my life's savings, sold my soul, and mortgaged my very existence for the next 30 years all for a small brass key on an "Everything's bigger in Texas" keychain. Woot." No victory or achievement in my life has ever felt as empty or worthless as I felt after going through all this to get a house.

        The reward I had gotten for myself was a really nice bottle of champage to celebrate this first night of home ownership. I still have that unopened bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge today. After the closing process I don't think I even bothered to go down to the new house. I'm pretty sure I just went home and sat on the couch and watched TV. Pretty much shell shocked from the whole ordeal.

2/24/2007

        This whole home ownership thing is already over-rated. It is day one and frigid cold here in lovely b-more. And guess what. My house has no heat. Yesterday when this wasn't my house it had lots of heat, very comfortable nice warm heat, and now today that the house is mine. No heat. Nothing. Just lots of coldness. I'm not sure what I've done or threatened to do to this house that would have it behave so badly on it's first day as my house but I can tell that this is going to be a difficult relationship.

        Luckily I have this great home warranty for the house so this no heat thing should be no big deal. The only problem being that when I called the warranty company they had no record of my home or anything. Going to closing at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon seems like a great idea until the process takes 3 hours and all of the entities involved in the process are closed when the final deal is done. So I had to wait until Monday to see if the paperwork had gone through in order to get my name into their system.

        Luckily for me one of my co-workers at the BMA had been a residential HVAC repairman in a previous life and after a brief description from me of the boiler and the problem he was able to diagnose it and walk me through the process of getting it back up and running. I ventured back to the frozen tundra of my house that night and after a little cursing and fidgeting was able to get the boiler back up and running. Voila... heat returns to Windemere. The problem wasn't very serious, just a stuck flue damper (correctly diagnosed sight unseen by my co-worker I might add), but it was enough to stop the whole works.

2/24/2007

        This whole home ownership thing is already over-rated. It is day one and frigid cold here in lovely b-more. And guess what. My house has no heat. Yesterday when this wasn't my house it had lots of heat, very comfortable nice warm heat, and now today that the house is mine. No heat. Nothing. Just lots of coldness. I'm not sure what I've done or threatened to do to this house that would have it behave so badly on it's first day as my house but I can tell that this is going to be a difficult relationship.

        Luckily I have this great home warranty for the house so this no heat thing should be no big deal. The only problem being that when I called the warranty company they had no record of my home or anything. Going to closing at 3 o'clock on a Friday afternoon seems like a great idea until the process takes 3 hours and all of the entities involved in the process are closed when the final deal is done. So I had to wait until Monday to see if the paperwork had gone through in order to get my name into their system.

        Luckily for me one of my co-workers at the BMA had been a residential HVAC repairman in a previous life and after a brief description from me of the boiler and the problem he was able to diagnose it and walk me through the process of getting it back up and running. I ventured back to the frozen tundra of my house that night and after a little cursing and fidgeting was able to get the boiler back up and running. Voila... heat returns to Windemere. The problem wasn't very serious, just a stuck flue damper (correctly diagnosed sight unseen by my co-worker I might add), but it was enough to stop the whole works.

6/29/2007

     So this week's drama of home ownership is the plumbing backing up. It is always lovely to go downstairs to see a couple of inches of water on the floor. It is even better to realize that it insn't rainwater or groundwater that has seeped in during a recent thunderstorm or localized flooding but that it has in fact come up out of the toilet.

     I guess it is good that the basement is sort of only quasi finished. It is carpeted and does have wall partitions but it is really tacky and kinda needs to go away anyway. I mean there is only so much fake walnut paneling that one can have in their life before they reach a saturation level. It is sort of like lead poisioning. It won't kill you the first time you lick a wall. But you do it enough times and the lead can build up in your system over time and make you just a little slower. I'm pretty sure that fake wood paneling has the same detrimental effects.

     Now the fact that the basement is sort of un-finished / poorly finished is a bit of a double edged sword in this latest adventure. On the one hand there is very little down there to get ruined by the overflow but on the other hand, being as there isn't much to do down in the basement I rarely go down there. This doesn't sound all that bad until I did go down there to discover the couple of inches of water in the corner of the basement and quickly came to the realization that I have no idea how long things have been ehrm... shitty down there. So the latter part of this week and this weekend I will be dividing my time between working on the sounds of summer events at Towson mucking out and drying out the basement. Then of course removing and bagging all the stuff that has been soaked and is starting to mold and mildew. Do you have any idea how many fun colors mold comes in? I didn't until this week.

     For those that don't know, the drywall in your home is composed of basically a layer of compressed chalk or gypsum sandwiched between two layers of paper. None of this is particularly water resistant. In fact, it is kind of spelled out pretty clearly in the name "dry-wall" that it is, in fact, a product not really meant for damp or wet environments. As we alll learned in our high school science classes, water is the universal solvent. And nowhere is this really more apparent than when you soak a product called dry-wall in several inches of not very dry at all water (well more than just water but we won't get into that). Basically bad things happen and the drywall turns back into a mushy pile of it's base component parts. In other words, a pile of loose chalk and paper pulp.

     Being mostly paper and chalk the drywall works as a fairly decent wick so any water around the base of the wall is quickly wicked up to help soak down and destroy and stain the rest of the wall, not just the bottom two inches that are actually submerged. In my case, thanks to not often venturing into the basement, it might have had a day or so of soaking time to thoroughly work it's way into the wallboard and now the bottom 2 ft or so of the walls in that corner of the basement are a crumbly mess. Oh, and not just a crumbly mess but a wet moldy, mildewed, crumbly mess. As luck would have it mold spores is one of the few things I'm alergic to so it has definitely been good times cleaning this all up.

    I'm pretty sure I can remember, quite vividly actually, sitting down Tuesday night and thinking to myself. "Self, you know what would rock this weekend.... That's right mucking poo out of the basement, that would be frigging awesome. I wonder where I can go to do that. I'm not sure that's something that is bound to be found in the weekend section of the City Paper or an entry on Craig's list or anything. I doubt there are very many basement mucking venues out there. I'm sure there's some sort of weird coprophagous fetish associated with cleaning up plumbing disasters but I kind of doubt it has the popularity to have been turned into a commercial venture and is more likely to be the kind of thing practiced in the privacy of one's home. Or within the privacy of someone else's home who happens to be out of town and you broke in to practice your craft (as it were). Little did I know at the time but as fortune would have it I would not even need to venture outside of the house to fulfill this wildest of fantasies.

     But that is all really besides the point that I now have several large 50 gallon trash bags full of what used to be the walls in the basement. And a couple more bags to fill this weekend with the carpeting that got soaked. OHHH, and guess what else isn't very waterproof at all. Bathroom vanities made out of low density fiberboard. Basically when they sit in a puddle of standing water guess what they turn back into. You got it, Elmer's glue and wood chips. So the bathroom vanity is now a couple of inches shorter and even more structurally unsound than it was when new.

     So if a full bathroom has a toilet, a vanity, and a tub/shower and a half bath has a toilet and a vanity.... What do you call a room with just a toilet and no vanity? I'm thinking that my downstairs bathroom has either been "converted" into a Port-O-Pot or an outhouse. Since it isn't really portable, the former doesn't seem particularly accurate so I think I'm going to go with outhouse. Now I do realize that this is also not a very outdoor space either. But it does have a window to the outside. I guess I just need to get the jigsaw out and get a crescent moon carved in the door to make things complete.

8-12-2007

        Now that nearly a month has passed from the great "poo" incident of ought eight I figured it was about time for an update on happenings here at Windemere. To be frank, there really there hasn't been a whole lot of new progress, or much in the way of news. Given the nature of the general news bulletins I've been posting here to date I'm actually pretty thankful that there really isn't much to report.

        It has been nearly a month with nothing breaking, blowing up, leaking, flooding, disappearing, blowing over, or otherwise catastrophically failing. Despite some of these trials, I don't think i would give them up. I have come to realize that it is important for life to be hard sometimes. Too often we seek to make life easy all the time. I think that it is important, in some regards, that life be difficult. To be challenged and to rise to the challenge, to push ourselves to overcome. This is not to say that home ownership is any sort of heroic endeavour. It does seem to require a heroic level of patience and a heroic level of funds at times. But that doesn't mean home ownership is only for heros. It just means it is a lot of hard work for anyone, and those of us without a fortress of solitude and an aversion to glowing green minerals will really struggle. Strength of character can only be proven in the face of adversity not through scarcity of it.

        It is far more comfortable to set about to take on a task that you know can be accomplished. Or to complain about some inconvenience or injustice. But it is far more difficult to do something about it. I have to admit that had I known what adventures lay ahead in the land of home ownership I might still be living comfortably in my drab ecru/almond/white/beige apartment. Sometimes it is the blind dumb luck of ignorance of the struggle ahead that shelters us from the unknown and terrible things ahead and allows us to make the choice to move ahead. It isn't always bravery but quite often stupidity that allows us to do amazing things.

        Without challenges and hard choices and well fought and hard won battles there is little joy, pride, accomplishment, or learning to be gained from a task. While I may grouse and complain a bit about the cruel injustice of life as a homeowner I must also be thankful for the fact that life has not been dull and that I am stronger now than when I started. If the strength it has taken to get through the first 3 months are any indication of the road ahead I will be Hercules by the end of the journey. Well that's a little disingenuous. Anyone who has seen me knows that I have far more in common with Justin Long than Kevin Sorbo. Perhaps Sisyphus would be a more fitting tragic hero. As soon as one thing is fixed another will break and I will be pushing that boulder back up the mountain. But at least I have a mountain and I have a boulder and I am able to push my boulder up my mountain and for that I am grateful.

     In the waning days of Summer as temperatures have been dropping back down into the realm of reasonable I've been spending a bit more time outside working on cleaning up the landscaping here.

     Those of you out there who are obsessed with musical theatre or have an unnatural affinity for the many works of Rick Moranis may understand the reference above to Audrey (the oversized man-eating venus-fly-trap from Little Shop of Horrors). Having spent the last several weekends working on cleaning up some of the overgrowth in the various beds throughout the yard I have come to hate english ivy with a burning passion. Everywhere I turn there is more ivy. It is climbing up things, across things, through things and generally choking out and obliterating everything in its path. It is this indescriminant unstoppable devouring growth that brings to mind the 6 ft tall burping flytrap keening "feed me".

     After several days of fighting my way through the dense and humid jungles of my back yard with a machete and my trusty native guide I discovered that I had a small detached garage in my backyard. Had I not had the native guide I'm sure I would still be lost in the teeming jungle of ivy as it slowly shot tendrils forth around my legs and engulfed me in a blanket of green. (eventually to form a rather startling topiary no doubt)

     When I bought the house I knew there was a sort of outbuilding but with the amount of ivy covering nearly every surface of the exterior of the garage it looked far more like the gaping maw of some mutated ivy creature than any sort of place that I would want to store gardening equipment or a car. I had visions of kneeling before the garage opening and raising my hands above my head with a rake held horizontally as an offering to the mighty ivy monster as the sound of distant rhythmic tribal drums and chanting drifted across the alleyway. Only after the correct incantations had been recited and the proper sacrifices to the beast had been made would the villagers be safe from the mighty ivy beast.

     The villagers were in luck. The correspondence course in ivy whispering that I had taken in college was about to pay off in a big way. Several hours of pruning chopping, cutting, mowing, piling, and hauling later and the mighty foe had been defeated and tamed.

        It finally feels like Autumn is here. There is a crisp chill to the air. Trees are changing color. Leaves are falling. And once again I have no heat.

        Well that's a bit of an exaggeration. I do have heat, it just hasn't really been working in the sort of automated fashion that so many people are so familiar with these days. Normally you set the temperature at the thermostat, walk away and the magic of technology takes over and keeps things ticking along at the correct temp. Not so at Windemere. As temperatures have begun to dip at night it was finally time to fire up the old boiler and begin to think about heating the house. I've been putting this off as long as possible. Mostly because heat seems like such an expensive endeavour and blankets and shivering are so cheap. But my will was finally worn down and I decided to turn the thermostat up from sub-zero to a reasonably comfortable temperature range normally associated with "room temperature".

        But nothing happened. So I turned the thermostat up a bit further. Nothing. 75 degrees. Nothing. 85 degrees. Nothing. Siiiggghh.... Cursing and grumbling I headed down to the basement to threaten the boiler. The last time I went through this the problem was with the automatic flue damper not opening as it should. But this time the damper was open. So I poked and prodded and shivered and eventually found a combination of connections that I could jump together to get the boiler to fire up. And with a resounding and satisfying woomp and thud the boiler fired to life. Yay, heat.

        In my smug naiveté I went to bed knowing that I would soon be basking in the glowing warmth of a nice warm home. You know the saying be careful what you wish for? Yeah, life has a way of coming and biting you on the ass hard when you start "basking" overmuch.

        This particular adventure started with me walking into the house to find it was only about 55 degrees. By about 5am the temperature in the house had skyrocketd up to over 80 degrees. Evidently the magic electrical solution I had cobbled together in the basement permanently wired the boiler to ON. Ignoring any prudent advice it might have been receiving from the thermostat, the boiler pressed on throwing caution to the wind and continuing to boil away. In fact, by the time I woke up bathed in sweat from the heatwave and stumbled downstairs to get things turned off, the boiler had managed to get the water up to well over 200 degrees. Oops.

        But all is now well. Another water cooler session with the HVAC guy at work and I've now got the faulty flue damper out of the loop and the heat here is working as it should.

        For now...

        Prior to dealing with the whole no heat trauma I'd actually managed to find the time to work on another project around the house. Painting another room. Although not exactly a color from nature, the bold colors of fall are kind of inspiring.

        Today's drama unfolded in multiple parts. First was waking up shivering to realize that the heat had once again gone out. Then there was the call to the home warranty company to get someone to come fix the heat. Lots of hold music. Lots of waiting. Eureka a live person, arrangements made for service. Ta Da. Hours pass. Still cold. No word from the plumber. Then calling the plumber to see if they were actually coming out. They weren't. Not until Monday. Then more shivering and being cold. Aha but I could light a fire in the fireplace. Then there were the bodies. Sooo many bodies.

        I guess I should elaborate a bit on this last point. After sitting around the house for most of the afternoon shivering and being generally cold and watching the temperature continue to drop I had the sudden realization that I had this amazing fireplace contraption thing in my living room in which you could put flammable combustible materials and with the right combination of heat and air could create wonderful glorious heat and light. I shall call it Fire.

        But I had frittered my summer away doing meaningless pointless things like stripping wallpaper and taming ivy rather than preparing for the hard winter ahead. If only I had listened to the Ant. He is surely ready for the winter. But wait, all is not lost. Legend tells of a grand magic castle not far from here. A Depot of all things Home (if you will). So we will embark on a quest, nay a great pilgrimage to the mighty Depot of Home to gather together the various components of "Fire".

        But first we must inspect this magic rectangular box that will contain the fire. I opened the flue and was showered with an accumulation of dirt and soot. After getting the flue damper out of the way and getting a flashlight up into the chimney I found that the chimney itself didn't look that dirty, there was just an accumulation of stuff on the ledge behind the flue. Not to fear, I'll just break out the trust shop-vac and we'll be all set and ready to begin our quest for "Fire".

        At first, things went fine with the whole cleaning process. The shop-vac sucked mightily, pulling up all sorts of accumulated stuff. And then there was a thump and the motor on the shop vac groaned under the load of having something clogging the inlet. This is a rather unique sound and almost never is the pre-cursor of something good. You never wave the vacuum wand under the couch and have it bog down on a random fat wad of cash you've been looking for. It either fully ingests whatever expensive or rare item that you didn't want to fish out of the belly of the vacuum or else pulls up something gross. It never really seems to want to pull in and consume the gross stuff though that just gets stuck to the end of the nozzle for you to deal with. In this instance I could tell it had suctioned something to the front of the hose but had refused to ingest it. This as I have just described does not bode well. I pulled the hose back into view to find the carcass of a squirrel blocking the end. This was, to say the least, a little creepy. I now had a long-dead squirrel to deal with.

        Now that my task had changed from just a quick cleaning to having to deal with a body I soldiered on an moved ahead. THWUNK- eeaaahhhhhh. Another victim. With the discovery of a second body I decided to re-equip myself for full crime scene investigation rather than just light duty dusting and cleaning. With the proper gear in place I ventured a hand up into the chimney and felt around. There were more bodies.

        In the end, the body count totaled six. I don't know if I just live in a neighborhood filled with especially dissatisfied and depressed squirrels or if my chimney top is to squirrels what a venus-fly-trap is to bugs. Either way, it is really really freaking creepy to discover 6 dead bodies in your house. It doesn't really matter what kind of bodies they are. I guess, to be fair, that if they had been human bodies it probably would have been a bit more creepy and probably would have involved the police department and an action news team or two instead of a trash bag and some rubber gloves.

        With the chimney cleaned out, the bodies unceremoniously put out at the curb, and ordered restored I was finally able to continue my quest. As you can see above the fire did work out quite nicely. I finally sat on the couch and enjoyed a few minutes of hard won quiet and warmth. It is really beautiful to sit and watch the flames dance and leap; the light dappling the room as if it were dancing with the shadows. Although the fireplace really puts far more heat up the chimney than into the room, there is still some primal response wired deep into our brains that is calmed and soothed by the fire. Fire is the bringer of light and warmth and safety from the dark and cold of the night. It even managed to keep the squirrels at bay.

        For once I've had a weekend of drudge, toil, and home improvement that has ended with significant gains. All too often I've toiled and toiled and worked and worked to have little or nothing to show at the end. Lots of work got done, but it might all get covered up. Or it was replacing or updating something that existed. Like replacing electrical wiring. It is not a very uplifting feeling to take an entire weekend to go from "Cool the hall light works" to "Hey the hall light works again but I'm a couple of hundred bucks poorer, my back hurts, my knuckles are scraped and I don't know where my weekend went."

        During the pre-Thanksgiving sales extravaganza, Best Buy had an amazing deal on a washer and dryer. Those who have followed the progress of things to date know that the existing washer and dryer were only functional long enough to satisfy the home inspection and then promptly died. Months and months of dragging all my clothing over to the laundromat each week is not at all my idea of a good time. Laundry is, in fact, one of my least favorite chores around the house. But that is all about to change. Actually it won't change a whole lot. I will still hate doing laundry. But I will have a really nice washer and dryer to help take the edge off the hate.

        Of course, one can not merely buy a new washer and dryer. No not here at Windemere. There must be much preparation. The existing washer and dryer were totally awful. And their connections to the electrical, gas, and water systems were equally horrific. I disconnected the washer to find that both the hot and cold water shutoff valves were totally shot. After a few minutes with the vice grips I was able to stem the flow of water from niagra down to merely a small drip. The dryer had no direct shutoff valve for the gas line. This is frowned upon by current code. No big deal, I'll just shut down the main gas valve at the meter. The only problem there was that the valve seemed to be frozen. Alright, no biggie just check in with BGE.

        BGE actually has a pretty decent website and there are specific links and instructions to the effect of "If you have one of the following 3 deadly situations SHUT OFF THE COMPUTER AND CALL US NOW" My situation didn't seem to warrant running out of the house in a blind panic and calling in the cavalry so I filled out the online e-ticket and went merrily on my way. I got a call and an e-mail back the very next day that indicated that I probably should have just called the emergency line. For some strange reason BGE takes the maintenance and distribution of a highly flammable and explosive gas very seriously. But the frustrating part is that they will not schedule the work. Someone needs to be home between 6am and midnight. We'll be there sometime in that ballpark. Oh, and it might not be today, it could be tomorrow if we get another emergency call.

        The very idea of this leaves me perplexed. Who has the kind of job they can just randomly sit around the house one day with no notice. I'm trying to figure out what customers of BGE, that actually pay their bills, can afford to sit around the house all day waiting for the gas guy. If you know of someone and she's cute and single please leave me a comment below with some contact info because I'd sure like to meet this person. I clearly do not have this mythical occupation that allows me to drop my world and sit around the house waiting for someone who may or may not show up. But then the weekend came and I was actually planning on being home and working on the house on Saturday.

        It is amazing to me how motivated to provide good customer service an agency can be when there are serious consequences (like death, property damage, and explosions) to leaving someone on hold for most of their adult life or randomly canceling or not showing up for service appointments. A quick call to BGE's emergency line on Saturday and within 15 minutes someone was knocking on my door. When I called in and got through the couple of menu choices for "gas emergencies" I was connected to real person in less than one ring. They collected my information and said someone would be out sometime that afternoon. And by jove, they were. And as I said, not even fifteen minutes later. The service guy was great. Basically he just told me to use a bigger wrench to open the valve. Not having had to deal with gas service much, and being rather intimidated by the prospect that an error on my part is likely to cause spontaneous combustion and, more than likely, annihilation of my entire home I had resisted the urge to wail like a maniac upon the gas valve with a large wrench. Ron from BGE had no such compunctions. Now that I had the green light to beat the bejesus out of the gas valve I was good to go.

        Things that have been held up for months in Catch-22 links of dependent tasks all of the sudden fell into place and I was able to make serious progress on a number of things that had been held up by this one silly valve. First was disconnecting the dryer and getting it out of the way. Then I finally was able to get rid of the little stub of a gas line sticking up through the middle of the kitchen floor. A trip to the hardware store for some new pipe, fittings, and valves and I had plumbed in new gas service for the dryer and for the stove above in the kitchen.

        This is not to say that all of this went flawlessly and without effort. There were some water lines and drain lines that had to be re-located. Gas pipe fitting does take some time and patience. It did take a second trip to the hardware store to get more stuff. There are still some maddening sequence of tasks that have yet to be resolved. Foam wall insulation needs to go against the foundation before anything else. But the wall insulation will catch fire when I go to do the plumbing that is in front of the insulation. So the plumbing has to be done first and then I can go back and try to jam the insulation behind the plumbing. Not impossible, just still a lot of work.

        But the best thing was that at the end of this weekend, unlike so many other weekends of labor I had something to show for my efforts. There is now a regulation gas connection all set and ready for when the dryer gets here. At long last the one reasonably functional appliance that came with the home, the stove, is connected and functional. I have been limping along for months with a kitchen that would be considered under equipped by a team of rabid outdoorsmen who were planning to summit everest with just what they could carry on their backs. There are certain things that you just need a stove for. You just cannot do pasta in a microwave or on the George Foreman grill, despite my best efforts.

        Pasta has always been one of my staple easy to throw together at the end of a long-day dishes. I have missed pasta like a fat kid on Atkins. And for the first time in months I will be able to go home tonight, fire up my stove, boil up a pot of fettuccine, simmer some Alfredo sauce, and sear a chicken breast with lemon pepper and olive oil. I may even fire up the oven and warm some bread or something just because I can. And I will raise my glass of red wine and dig into my pasta and remember why it was worth all that effort.

        Usually starting an enty is pretty easy for me. Some recent event has made my eyball twitch and my hands can barely keep up with the torrent of frustration poring through my mind. But this week, there have been so many things that I am virtually at a loss for where to start.

        To give a quick overview, no heat, another tree fell, then there was snow, still no heat, laundry room in progress, still no heat.

        Ok, we'll start this alphabetically by order of pissoffitudiness. No heat. This has been an ongoing drama and does not seem to want to end. A couple of weeks ago I called the home warranty company and had them come out to repair the boiler (details of that adventure are here) The poked some things and made heat happen. All was good. Then the heat stopped working. I poked the boiler and got heat to work again.... for about 12 hours. Then I poked again in a different spot and got the heat to work agin.... for about 12 hours. As of last night I poked it in the last reasonably pokable place and only got a few hours of heat before it cut out again. My plan was to call the warranty company today to get someone schedule to come out and make things right. When lo and behold they called me this morning instead. But they weren't calling because they've got Miss Cleo working for them. No they were calling to inform me that the flue damper they changed out last week wasn't actually going to be covered by my warranty because they don't cover "electronic energy management systems" To which I replied. Umm... Bullshit.

        First off the damper is part of the boiler system. The boiler is designed so that if there is a flue damper connected it will not work without it or if the damper is malfunctioning. Secondly the boiler is just a tank of hot water, and you know what makes that water actually get hot. AN ELECTRICAL CONTROL SYSTEM that turns the gas on and off to make hot water. So I very elegantly explained this to the warranty company. And backed it up with the fact that the service guy they sent out called back into his office to have the warranty company confirm that the flue damper was a covered item. And they confirmed for him that it was indeed covered. At this point she had the good sense to tell me that she'd look into it and call me back. She could probably hear the eye twitching over the phone. About 15 minutes later she did in fact call back to let me know that they'd cover the part "this time". As if I were trying to pull a fast one on them. Their contractor checked in with them and said this thing was covered. NOT MY PROBLEM.

        Now that we had the first service call resolved it was time to once again poke the bear. Now you're never supposed to poke the bear. Because the bear is big and poking the bear makes it mad. But that's the fun. I called again this afternoon and reported that I once again had no heat. They decided to re-open the existing ticket. Which is good for me because I've already paid the deductible. Despite my grousing at the idiosyncrasies of navigating through the warranty process everyone has been pretty pleasant and helpful. I may have spent half a day on hold to get through to someone, but that person did actually make things happen. Although things are not yet resolved and it has taken longer than I'd like. They are actually working in earnest to make things right and have been good about scheduling and following up etc.

        The service contractor called me this afternoon and we talked through a couple of things. Yup, checked that. Yup, checked that. Yup, checked that. In the end, the service guy and I came to the same conclusion. The boiler is busted and needs some new control parts. Electrical control parts. I can't wait to see what they say about this item when he submits it. These boiler control things are of course only made by left handed aboriginal midgets in the heartland of Sudan on alternate Tuesdays when it isn't the rainy season. Which means they won't be able to get parts until at least Monday. So I will be stuck without heat for the weekend. Stay tuned for more news on this developing story.

        The second drama of the week was the major wind storms we had at the beginning of the week. I came home one evening to find a 20' tall tree lying sprawled along the curb and my front sidewalk. Just as I was about to start making calls to friends and family for chainsaws and pickup trucks it dawned on me. Wait a minute that's not really my tree.

        The tree is right in front of my house. And technically may-be on my property. But it was planted in the narrow band of grass between the curb and the sidewalk. Here is where the magic begins. For those who may not know, the land directly at the edge of your property really isn't yours. Most any municipality reserves these border spaces as rights of way for whatever they'd like to do. Be it a sidewalk, gas line, sewer pipe, utility pole, whatever. This first 5 or 10 foot strip technically belongs to the city, and is generally it is referred to as a setback. As a homeowner you're not really allowed to do much in this right of way zone, but you are required to maintain it. But you aren't required to maintain what the city puts there. If they put in a gas line, it isn't your problem to take care of it. It is their gas line. In this case, the tree was planted directly in what I will deem the "not my problem" zone.

        Since I had so cleverly determined that this was not, as it might at first appear, my problem and was in fact "somebody else's problem". All that remained was to find out who's problem it was and let them know that they should come take care of their fallen tree. To the Web!!

        Baltimore City has a really decent online presence and a top notch city services site. The best part is they have an online work ticket submission system called CitiTrack. Plain old ordinary city dwellers like myself can go online and pick from a menu of different things that the various city public works departments take care of and submit a work request. As luck would have it, right there in bold shiny Verdana text was the listing for "Forestry Tree Road Hazard" and "Forestry Tree Removal" Huzzah! A couple of quick clicks later and my request was submitted.

        One of the things I like most about the CityTrack system is that I don't have to wait on hold for someone. I don't have to talk to any disgruntled city employees. I can get my requests in in the middle of the night instead of having to deal with this stuff during the two hour window on alternate Thursdays when their people actually answer phones. The other great thing? The system works beautifully. The very next day I arrived home to find 90% of the tree had been cut up and hauled away. The remaining large trunk of the tree was laid neatly at the curb and marked with a cone. And the following day they came and dealt with the trunk. I never saw anyone. I never talked to anyone. And within 48 hours they completely dealt with the problem. As long as I don't see a bill for this I will gleefully pay my tax bill.

        This is not the first time I've dealt with CityTrack with similarly amazing results. During my sewage issue I also used CitiTrack to get the dept of sanitation out to check out their lines. And similarly I was able to submit a request at 10pm on a Sunday night while sitting on my couch and bright and early Monday morning they were out taking care of things. I don't care very much which city administration made this happen but I am exceedingly greatful for the service and can happily report that at least one thing the city government is doing is great and is very well done. I just wish they had some mechanism on their site to allow me to let them know how much I like their system.

        Our last tale of drama for the week is the snow. There actually wasn't much in the way of drama associated specifically with the snow event, except that it happened right in the middle of having no heat and the tree falling so it somewhat complicated the process for the other dramas. But it did make everything look nice. A nice blanket of snow really makes it feel like winter. It also really helps with the whole holiday spirit. Christmas just isn't quite the same without some snow.

        Since I had no heat at home I took advantage of the heater and heated seats in the car to warm up and go drive over to Hampden to see the Miracle on 34th St. Every year this one-block section of Hampden goes completely over the top with oudoor lighting. It is both the the tackiest, most overwhelmingly ostentatious display of Christmas lighting exuberance and a truly heartwarmingly beautiful and inspiring sight.

        I am one step closer to fully embracing what it means to live in the 20th century. No longer will I have to drag my clothing down to the side of a stream bed and roll up my pants and wade out into the frigid water to beat my clothing against the rocks to get them clean. Nor will I have to pack up a trunk load of clothing and make the crosstown trek to the laundromat to plug quarter after quarter into the machines and then haul it all home again to fold, sort and put away.

        Alright, I'll be honest there really hasn't been much of any folding sorting etc. Everything has just been coming home in the laundry basket and I've been living out of the laundry basket. If you have seen my closets you'll know that a couple of laundry baskets basically hold way more clothing than even the double closets in my room. This is definetly on the list of things to address at some point in the future. But up until this point since I had to make a weekly pilgrimage to either the stream bank or the the laundromat it didn't really seem to matter a whole lot that the clothes didn't have a more permanent place to live in between their weekly travel adventures. I like to think of it as sort of a nomadic existence for my wardrobe.
        As with all things though, every era must come to an end. While my clothing has been treated to weekly (alright not always exactly weekly) trips to exotic and foreign locales, they are getting of an age when settling down into a routine that involves less travel has become appealing. As we transition from our wild mis-spent youth into settling into early and middle age so too does our wardrobe need to settle down and embrace the stability of knowing that a short trip to the basement will soon be as fulfilling and refreshing as the wild adventures of the past.

        Now all I need to do is figure out if the odd socks that don't match up coming out of the dryer are the offspring of wild youthful sock exuberance while on travel, or the result of the passing of an honored and respected member of the sock community. Only time will tell.

        Just in time for the festive holiday season, the Friday before Christmas, my heat once again went out. This time I did not go downstairs with a large wrench and a mean look on my face. I did not pull out the ohm meter and attempt to figure out what had gone wrong this time. I did not pass go, nor did I collect $200. I packed a bag and called my warranty company.

        The past three or four times that I've lost heat it has taken a few days for the warranty company to send someone out to check things out. In each case I have lost at the waiting game and have been unable to wait out the cold. Each time I have sworn that I will not touch things, I will leave them broken so that things can be fixed correctly. Each time the overwhelming coldness has won out and I have broken down and worked on the boiler and made it work again before the plumber came out. In each case I didn't really fix anything or replace anything. I just poked and prodded at things enough to solve whatever minor part of the puzzle involved in firing up the boiler that had been stopping things that particular day. The unfortunate part of this was that neither the plumber or I were then able to make things stop working when the plumber showed up. So they'd have to scratch their head and claim that all was well.

        This time they told me it would be the following Wednesday before they could send someone out. That was 4+ days away. I packed a bag and told my parents that I'd be coming to visit for the x-mas holidays.

        The plumber came on the 26th and pronounced the bolier broken. They needed a part. In fact the very same part that I told them they would need when I called and told them it was broken back on the 22nd. Of course they didn't actually have this part and they were going to have to order it. But in the meantime if I jumped these two wires together I would have heat. Great. The only problem with jumping these two wires together is that it doesn't stop making heat. These two wires just turns the burner on to full and it will sit there merrily boiling away forever until the boiler explodes and or the house is well over 100 degrees.

        While coaxing the plumber to come to the same conclusion I had days before, nursing a mild hangover from a particularly good Christmas party the night before , and shivering I discovered that one of the new GFCI outlets I had installed in the kitchen was tripped. I reset it. It tripped. I unplugged everything, reset the outlet and everything was good. Then I began plugging things back in to see what was tripping out the outlet. It was the mini-fridge that I've been living with until I could afford to replace it with a real full-sized fridge. Siigggh.

        I now found myself in the market for a refrigerator. This was probably one of the last things on my list of "things to spend money on this week". So it was off to the interweb to do some research. After thoroughly looking around I found something I thought I would like at Best Buy in Owings Mills. So I trekked over there and ended up deciding it wasn't really what I wanted. So back to the interweb and more looking and searching and this time the only Best Buy that had the fridge I was looking for was all the way out in Gaithersburg.

        As the crow flies, Gaithersburg isn't all that far away from Baltimore. But as the roads go you can't really get from here to there without trekking across half the state. So I grabbed a van and began the long pilgrimage around the beltways of Maryland and out to Gaithersburg. I checked out the floor model fridge and it seemed like just what I was looking for. Huzzah. But of course our tale does not end here. The only fridge Best Buy had was the floor model. Unfortunately for me, the floor model had some scratches and dents that I wasn't willing to live with. So I had trekked all the way across the state because the interweb had said that this store had this fridge in stock. But there must have been a clogged tube somewhere on the net tha prevented the info from getting to me about the store not actually having the fridge.

        But all was not lost. Best Buy was able to get me this fridge from their warehouse and schedule it for free delivery this Sunday. I just wasn't able to walk home with a fridge.

        My beer is still warm and my house is still cold. but on Sunday I will have this lovely new fridge to keep my beer cool.

And hopefully sometime early next week the new part for my boiler will make it in and I will once again be able to enjoy a cold beer inside my warm house.

        As luck would have it I finally got my heating issue fully resolved this morning. Of course my house is never one to let me have a moment of respite and before the HVAC guy even showed up this morning my plumbing had backed up into the basement again over the weekend. I had at first hoped that this would end up being a minor revist of the same issue I had back in June.

        A quick call to the warranty company (ok these calls are never really quick) and I was able to schedule a plumber to come out today to deal with the backup. Luckily I'd already talked to my boss and pretty much wrote off making it into the office.

        After some prodding, poking, head scratching etc the plumber got down to business and brought in the big drain cleaning machine and fired it up. Basically it was the same exact machine I'd dragged home from work over the summer when last I had this problem. After an hour of running it back and forth through the main line and cursing, he declared that things were bad. This wasn't just a clogged pipe but was most likely a broken/collapsed line.

        As he said this and then started explaining things I stopped really hearing his words and what he was explaining sort of faded out to the waugh waugh sounds that Charlie Brown's teacher makes. Instead all I could hear was "Man you are fucked. But on the positive side I'm totally going to be able to make my boat payment this month."

        After snapping back to reality I caught the last bit of "We can bring back a camera tomorrow and we'll camera the line to confirm and see if the line is broken and where the break is. Of course cameraing the line isn't covered by the home warranty so that's going to have to come out of pocket.

        Stay tuned for more on this breaking news story.

        There is nothing more exciting that dropping a camera down your sewer drain to get a first hand look at things. Actually that's not true. There is very little exciting about it. Mostly it is expensive.

        Today's cameraing went as well as could be expected. The camera went down the line, and slowly foot by foot we examined the pipe from the inside. Good, another foot, good, another foot, good. This continued on until a blockaged could be seen. And it was definitely dirt. And the best part was that it was just oustide the foundation of the house in the front yard.

        At this point my fears were confirmed and the plumber turned to me and once again I heard "Yup, I'm definitely going to be able to make my boat payment this month, and with the way things are looking I'm probably going to be able to make next month's payment too."

        This is the point at which my faith in civilization starts to crack. The front yard is no-mans land. If the plumbing problem were within the house my home warranty and or home owners insurance would leap to the rescue to pay for the work. If the problem were out at the street the city would leap into action to save one of their precious tax paying citizens from the evils of backed up sewage. But the 50' from the foundation wall of my house out to the street? No-one covers this. That's solely my responsibility. And this sucks. Alot. Mostly because it is horifically horifically expensive to dig up a trench that is 50' long 8' deep and most likely swampy and sewage laden in order to replace the sewer line. To further complicate things and increase expenses the gas service and water service lines are also run directly above the sewer line. This means that instead of brining out a big backhoe and taking a few minutes to dig down to the line that the plumber will have to use the big backhoe to dig down the first 2 feet and then they'll have to hand dig around the water and gas lines most of the rest of the way. This sucks for them, and in a world where suck rolls down hill they pass the suck on to me in the way of a staggering bill.

        So this Thursday I'll be at home watching buckets full of my front yard being dug up while the plumbing foreman browses through the BassPro catalog to see what's new in the way of outboard motors for 08.

        When last we checked in with our hero he was looking into the magic orb of prognostication and the mighty power of the oracle was predicting a very expensive future.

        This sounds a lot better than saying that I nearly burst into tears when I looked at the 13" monitor attached to the sewer cam and was told that that vague blob on the upper left of the screen meant that I would need to have my sewer line replaced and that the plumber would be heading over to the marina to check out the yacht market while I decided what to do.

        When presented with the question: Do you want the stuff you flush down your toilet and rinse down your drains to A) Collect in a pool in your basement or B) Flow merrily down a pipe to the east river treatment plant it doesn't take a very bright person to come to the conclusion that B is probably the better choice.

        So bright and early last Thursday morning the crew showed up at my house to mark lines, dig holes, repair sewer lines, and generally make a really large mess in my front yard. Which I have to say is preferable to the really large mess in the basement that I've been dealing with. If you'd like to see the before, during, and after photos check out the photo gallery here

        While it may look like my home has been invaded by a particularly virulent and aggressive pack of badgers I can now take great pride in flushing a toilet and knowing that everything will be safely carried down the drain and out into the great wild yonder of the city municipal sewer system. So many thanks to our ancient Roman & Babylonian ancestors for coming up with the idea of using underground pipes and water to get poo out of the house.

        The mental image of being held down and having water poured over you to the point that you feel as if you are drowning only to be given a moment's respite to gasp for breath before once again being plunged beneath the water is truly awful and terrifying. It also seems to very much akin to the experience of owning a home. Well in particular very much like owning my home.

        Homeownership seems to be at best a zero sum game. At worst, i.e. at present, it is far far below coming even close to balancing out. After every trial, after every tribulation, after every problem, after every new expense there is always another. With barely a moment's respite to regain your breath between each saga before being once again plunged into the despair of the latest project/disaster/flood etc.

        Last night I ended up having a rare evening of being at home rather than out working and also not feeling so beat down by the world that I actually felt like getting some things done instead of making the committed effort to vegitate into a barnacle like growth on my couch. I made dinner, did a backlog of dishes, vacuumed, cleaned up, took out the trash, etc etc etc. In all, a remarkably productive evening for me. So at around 11pm at the end of my whirlwind of effort I headed downstairs to throw a load of clothes into my new modern state of the art laundry center. And as I came to the bottom of the basement stairs I stepped onto the basement carpet and felt and heard a "squish".

        Having just signed away my life, first and second born children, and a kidney or two to pay for repairs to the sewer system; the worst most tortuous awful thing I could possibly have heard was the sound of more water in my basement. The feeling goes beyond rational or even irrational emotions. Dumbfounded and flabbergasted only begin to crack the surface of defining the feeling. Waterboarding comes perhaps only slightly closer.

        There is no emotional outporing that can come close to expressing this feeling of utter and abject despair. No amount of yelling, crying, pounding fists, screaming or anything else seems to provide any relief whatsoever.

        After spending a few stunned seconds squishing around at the foot of the stairs letting the weight of things settle in, I began to search out the source of this water. It turns out that it is at least not directly related to the recent sewer work. That all seems fine. Turns out the crack-addicted, half blind, mostly retarded, idiot plumber that the former owners must have hired to have plumbing work done around the house had... we'll call it "botched" (in a fairly large way) the connection from the washing machine drain connection to the rest of the plumbing system. As best I can figure most of the water that went into the washer to do a load of laundry ended up leaking out around the pvc connection they failed to glue and thusly ended up on the floor.

        At this point the emotions shift back to the realm of expressable. Cursing, yelling, throwing things and punching walls are well suited means of expressing the grief, anger and contempt for the work of this former plumber.

        With hacksaw and pvc glue in hand I crawled behind the washer and made a temporary repair to the affected drain. Tonight, or at some point this weekend I'll go head over to my good friend Homer's for some plumbing parts to complete repairs and once again restore order and some semblance of dryness to my basement.

        Of course at this point I'm torn. If I move forward on reparing this problem and once again fix things I would then once again at a point of contented stasis. This state of well-being and contentment seems to be heavily frowned upon by my home. Maybe by leaving this alone and dealing with water water everywhere will appease my home and we will be able to agree to disagree.

        It hasn't even been a full 24 hours since my last wet basement problem and already I have another. This time instead of coming down the stairs to a squish squish it was splash splash.

        It seems the new water line that was run into the basement where they had to drill a big hole didn't exactly get quite as tightly sealed as one might have liked. Therefore it was like having a water tap on the wall. Tappa-kegga-all-the-freaking-rain we're having right into my basement.

        Of course when there's a steady stream of water flowing through an orifice into your basement it is hard to stop this because so many products require setup time, drying time, and or dry calm conditions to work. few things are able to set up and work under a deluge of water. So instead of waiting for the weekend I'm bailing out of work to go visit my friend homer to see what sort of finger in the dam products they offer. Wish me luck.

        I'm not sure I ever expected to start off a conversation with that phrase. Or to be more accurate to have a conversation started with me using that phrase. I have spent the past week running audio for a show so I really have been home almost not at all. 9-5 at the day job and then scooting down to Columbia for 6p-11p show calls.

        Durning intermission of the second show on Saturday night. You really gotta love those double headers. If there's anything better than sitting through 3 hours of a high school musical it is A) sitting through a week of 3hr shows (that's right folks your truly has seen Thoroughly Modern Millie 9 times in the last 7 days) or B) Sitting through 2 shows in a single day. But I digress.

        During intermission Saturday night I get a call from my neighbor. Immediately I know this can't be a good call. Don't get me wrong, my neighbors are great. They are very kind, but generally we don't talk a whole lot except once and a while over the fence if we happen to be coming and going at the same time or the occasional phone call to check to see if I'm still alive because they have seen no evidence that I live there. Mostly because there are weeks when I'm leaving the house well before they're up and returning well after they've gone to bed and they assume that I've abandoned my home or am rotting in the basement or something.

        After the show on Saturday night I swung by my parents to pick up a chainsaw and headed home. Sunday morning I awoke bright and early (much to my chagrin) to go play lumberjack in my neighbor's yard. I cut a 6ft section out of the middle of the felled tree to at least give them access from their front door to the street and then headed off to run another show. There's nothing quite like showing up for work having the lingering scent of pine and gasoline about you. I don't know if people assumed that I was moonlighting as a lumberjack. (unlikely given my distaste for checkered flannel) or moonlighting as a gas station attendant who didn't have time for a shower before work so grabbed the evergreen car freshener off of the rack and gave a quick dab behind the ears before heading off to the next gig. Either way I'm sure there were some odd looks and wrinkled noses.

        I was finally able to get back to things last night and finished cutting up the tree and stacking it in my front yard. I'll get some pictures up here in the next couple of days. So now instead of a 30ft long tree sprawled across my neighbor's front yard I have a 10ft x 10ft x 10ft pile of tree stacked in my front yard. All that remains is for me to figure out how to get rid of this pile.

        You have no idea how tempting it is to just dump some gas and a lit match on the whole thing and make the problem disappear in a puff of smoke. Somehow I don't think any of my neighbors would be as accepting of a 20ft searing bonfire as they would be to a couple of days of staring at a pile of tree parts. But a guy can dream can't he?

        It has been a while since I posted an update here and just thought I'd share a more mundane home happening rather than the normal grand disaster posting that have been all too frequent in the past year.

        The other day I finally broke down and bought a silly Swiffer wet jet to aid in keeping all the hardwood floors here clean. I even went to the trouble of getting their special wood floor formula so that I could enjoy all the extra wood cleaning goodliness that was sure to come from this specially formulated cleaning fluid. I brought it home, loaded it up with batteries and the special swiffer wetjet for wood floors special sauce and began to scrub away.

        Admittedly I don't clean up as often as maybe I should, but generally clutter and dust bunnies trigger my OCD pretty quickly so I typically vacuum on a weekly basis. After reading all of the instructions (both of them) I went to work on my living room floor. After a few minutes I noticed how dirty the cleaning pad on the swiffer was. This is great, I thought, all that dirt that had been hiding right beneath my nose is now forever trapped in this handy cleaning pad. So I ripped out a new pad and dosed the floor with some more swiffer juice and continued mopping away.

        After letting everything dry I was dismayed to see how cloudy and dull the floor looked. I re-read the troubleshooting section of the Swiffer manual and discovered that if this was a problem the most likely cause was that you hadn't used enough magic juice. I am thoroughly convinced this is a ploy by their marketing department to sell more refills.
I can just envision a typical conversation on their support line:

Customer: "Hey this thing didn't clean my floor!"
Swiffy:"Oh, did you use a whole friggin $12 bottle of cleaning stuff on it?"
Cust:"Well no of course not"
Swiffy: "Well see that's your problem right there buddy. You should have read the directions where it says that if your floor is all messed up and cloudy you need to use more stuff."
Cust:"But that's ridiculous"
Swiffy:"What'd you expect from a lousy $20 magic mop from the grocery store."

        So heeding their advice I grabbed another mopping pad and re-mopped the entire floor, liberally applying the magic juice until it made my eyes water from the overwhelming scent of CLEAN. As an aside, why do we insist on adding cloying perfumes, fragrances etc to everything to make things seem like they're CLEAN. Why can't we just have products that actually get things CLEAN so they just won't smell in the first place. The floor was probably even worse than before. It just looked dull and flat and terrible. I was pretty sure that I hadn't permanently ruined my nice hardwood floors but that it was definitely going to take some work to get things right again.

        I grabbed a bottle of some sort of Orange essence based wood cleaner and turned my Swiffer wet-jet into a Swiffer floor mop for Orange cleaner. A liberal application of Orange juice to the swiffer pad and several minutes of vigorous mopping and scrubbing and voila I now had a nice shiny clean beautiful hardwood floor again. Of course I have now mopped the floor 6 times in the past two days trying to get from a little dusty to clean. The result though is a floor so clean and well tended that my shoes squeak from the cleanliness. And the mild scent of Orange was far more pleasant that whatever chemical "CLEAN" scent the Swiffer stuff had.

        I heartily recommend that anyone out there who has thought about getting the Swiffer wet-jet not even bother . Stick with the regular Swiffer or probably better yet a plain old fashioned cotton string mop and bucket and just use your favorite household cleaner in place of their horrible stuff. The actual Swiffer mop and pad are pretty great though. Sans the lousy fluid the dry mop part does pick up an amazing amount of stuff and does do a great job trapping it in the pad

        BTW I did try their standard fluid as well on the bathroom tile floor and had pretty much the same cloudy bad results there too. Not sure if it is just me but I'm pretty much convinced that this wet-jet thing sucks and that I've wasted $20.

        Over the weekend, last night, and this morning we've gotten quite a good dose of rain here in Baltimore. Most of it has been in short intense thudershowers, but overnight seems to have been a pretty steady soaking rain. The reason I bring this up and that it seems such a novelty to me is that for once it seems that all of this rain has remained on the outside of my house.

        I woke up this morning to the light pattering sound of rain tapping against the bedroom window. I very nearly did not get out of bed. I summoned the courage from deep within and forced myself to get out of bed. It took, what I would like to believe is, a heroic level of courage to then venture down into the basement.

        I closed my eyes as I got to the top of my basement stairs and took a deep cleansing breath in anticipation of what may lie before me at the foot of the stairs. I opened my eyes and slowly, but with great apprehension, descended the stairs and turned on the light at the foot of the stairs.

       Lo, and behold the floor was dry.

       I know that for most people, waking up on a rainy day and finding the interior of your home to be dry really isn't that much of a life affirming or miraculous thing. But given my recent track record with internal moisture problems of various origins, my expectations have been set very low. Very very low. So this morning's dread and loathing of what may have been down there turned into near elation at the fact that things were ok.

        It is somewhat akin to what it must be like in an abusive relationship or to be a mis-treated animal. The days that you are kicked are so frequent and common that the simple act of just not being kicked makes it a better day. That's sort of where I am with my house.

        Alright not so much a forest removal as finally getting the great big pile of tree out of my front yard. Last weekend I finally had the opportunity to do something about getting rid of the roughly 8ft x 8ft x 8ft pile of tree that used to be a tree in my front yard, had a brief stint as a tree in my neighbors front yard, and then became a large brush pile in my front yard.

       A good friend of mine sent out a mass e-mail a few weeks ago wanting to coordinate a dump run for anyone with some stuff lying around their house they wanted to get rid of. I say good friend because when I reported back to him that I did in fact have some stuff and oh by the way it was a pile of tree parts roughly the size of a modest second bedroom he didn't immediately hang up the phone.

        Last weekend amidst the rain, intermittent hail, and drizzle he showed up at my house with our 26' box truck and we tossed the whole mess in the back and carted it off to the office to fill the dumpster. In fact, we looked like such professional drowning rats that we were asked by a random passerby if we did stump removal too. If there were any two people in this world who looked less like rugged lumberjacks ready to put in a hard days work at the mill hauling timber Sam & I are probably in a three way split with Justin Long for the trophy.

        Luckily for us it only poured rain for half of the time that we were loading and unloading the truck. But it was totally and completely worth every ounce of soaking wetness to have this pile of stuff gone and forgotten.

        Now I just need to work on remedying the fact that my front yard still looks like a large subterranian boring machine surfaced for air before continuing on it's journey to the center of the earth.

        Over the weekend I finally had a couple of hours that I wasn't working and had caught up enough on things around the house to take on a new project. Getting the grill up and running. The grill was given to me last year from someone who'd bought a shiny new stainless grill and didn't have anything to do with the old dirty greasy one. With all of the other drama and business of the past year I never did get a chance to do anything with the grill last summer. I finally had both the time and energy to get this grill ready and at long last break out my barbecue tools.

        One of the big wind storms over the winter that toppled a tree in my yard also toppled the grill. This caused much internal mayhem within the inner workings of the grill. After getting things mostly cleaned up and taking an inventory I headed off to my friend Homer's for parts and pieces. In short, they had pretty much everything I needed and with an armful of grill repair stuff and a new propane tank I was ready to get started on the process of readying the grill to begin the journey of starting to grill. By the time I had everything together and cleaned up and ready to go it was too late in the day to start grilling. And secondly I really had nothing around worth grilling. Cheerios are pretty much still Cheerios no matter how you cook them.

        With the grill now ready to go, all that remained was to get something to grill and to dust off my grill tools. Despite the fact that I have only owned a grill since last summer and have not in fact actually had a chance to grill on it yet I have owned a set of barbecue tools for longer than I have owned my house or a grill to use them on. I have always been a proponent of having the best tools for a given job. I see no point in getting cheap or chincy tools to do work. Invariably any savings over having gone for the good tool is quickly erased and negated by the frustration and extra time it takes to do the job with the wrong equipment. I would always rather buy one expensive tool than to buy the same crappy 1/2 price items 3 times over.

        To this end, several years ago I found what is probably the finest set of grill tools I had ever seen. Most all barbecue and grilling stuff is absolute garbage. The handles are almost never long enough. Who wants to singe off arm hair reaching for the brats on the back of the grill? Invariably if they are long enough they are so flimsily made as to immediately bend or distort. Cheap plastic and chromium plating have no business whatsoever anywhere near a barbecue. Neither does sheet metal, rivets, spot welds or any other annoying shortcuts taken by nearly all of the barbecue tool sets available. The tool set I found was at Williams Sonoma and they were everything that good tools should be and nothing at all like the other crap I had seen previously.

        These tools are magnificent in every thoughtful detail. They are about 18" long and crafted of solid stainless steel with teakwood handles. Each piece weighs easily a pound and they are well balanced and solid. They feel absolutely solid and "right". The handles are generously sized and are unadorned. At the same time they are not clunky or overly large. They are nicely machined and gracefully curved. The grill cleaning tool has a replaceable brass brush and stainless brillo pad. They came in their own storage case with small velcro closures to hold the tools in place. There is no crappy molded plastic tray for these. The best part of all of this was perhaps the fact that these tools were on sale when I bought them. At the time I was living in an apartment that forbade grills of any kind, but I knew immediately that if ever I did have a house or a grill or became a champion traveling grill master that these would be my tools. W&S has since changed their grill tools slightly to a stainless and black composite plastic. While this is no doubt still a very fine set of tools I am even more pleased that I bought my set when I did and got the real wood handles (and a better price)

        While $70-100 is probably a lot to pay for a set of grilling tools that you'll use maybe a dozen times a year, how much would you be willing to pay not to have second degree burns or to not have your grill tongs fold dropping $30 worth of steak on the ground. How much would your guests be willing to pay not to have to taste charred arm hair and singed fingers in their flank steaks.

        I rest my case. Here's to many years to come of happy grilling here at Windemere.

        Last Tuesday I actually got home from work at a reasonable hour and still had the energy to do something other than flop down on the couch and become a zombie. I spent a productive couple of hours outside mowing the lawn, pruning some bushes, removing more of the ever invasive Ivy from the garage. Generally enjoying the fact that the weather was completely beautiful and that I was actually outside enjoying it. The sense of accomplishment of also having gotten some things cleaned up so that my back yard actually looks less like the wild kingdom and more like a city/suburban yard was nice too.

        On this rare and miraculous occasion the sun set before I had run out of energy for projects. I must have had an extra cup or three of coffee that day or something. I cleaned up and went inside to start on one of the many many many inside projects I still have on my list. I decided to finally put up a light fixture on the upper landing of the basement stairs. I've had the fixture for quite some time but just hadn't gotten around to getting things wired up etc. I did a quick inventory of what I had lying around and decided I needed a quick trip to my buddy Homer's for some supplies.

        No trip to home depot is ever quick and short. There are always exciting new things to see and often I'm standing in an aisle puzzling out how to solve some home improvement woe so these trips often take 45 mins to an hour. This particular trip was pretty quick. About 45 minutes later I pulled into the alley behind the house. As the headlights washed across the garage I noticed something odd. There was something in the garage that hadn't been there previously. After pulling into the driveway I got out and checked the garage and there was a huge pile of branches in my garage.

        There are few things as despicable as dumping your trash in someone elses house/garage/yard. The worst thing is how powerless you are once this crap has been dumped in your house/garage/yard. Whether it is branches, or tires, or toxic waste, or a dead hooker. It really doesn't matter. It is now your problem to deal with, clean up, dispose of, and or explain to the cops. I guess I could have picked up the branches and "paid it forward" and dumped them in one of my neighbors' back yards or something but that's even shittier than having stuff dumped in your yard.

        I have countless projects on my to do list at the house. Painting, cleaning, flooring, walls, counters, cabinets, the list goes on pretty much forever. One of the minor items on the list that has stayed pretty near the bottom of the list was to install some doors on my garage so that I can lock up some of the outdoor tools and things outside and I can stop dragging my lawnmower up and down the basement stairs every week to mow the grass. This project has been low on the list because it hasn't been that big a deal. Now that I have once again had to deal with a whole load of crap appearing in my garage thought this project became a top priority and I vowed to spend my memorial day weekend putting in some doors.

        Of course with my tendancies towards being a big dork I planned the whole thing out and drafted out every detail of the doors, took detailed measurements and did everything just shy of creating a 3-d rendered model of the whole thing in software before beginning my door project. Of course even with this anal retentive level of planning, all projects of this nature require at least 3 trips to the hardware store before they can be done.

        After coming up with the plans I knew I'd need some help to get this done so I prevailed upon poor old dad to come slave away in the hot hot sun for a day to help me haul away the trash and then fabricate my grand vision for new doors.

        Things went pretty smoothly with the whole construction process. Only one unplanned trip for some more 2x4s for framing out the doors and after many hours and only a few Advil later.

This is the part where the chorus of trumpets plays the regal fanfare. Ta Ta Ta Ta Tum De Dum Te De Dum etc etc.

Behold there were doors.

        For more photos of the process and the final results with paint etc check out the gallery here. Special thanks go out to my Dad for helping me out with this project. I'm sure it took far longer and was way more involved than he had planned for but he stuck it out to the end and was invaluable in helping me plan things out, fabricate the doors, and providing wheels for hauling around the trash and plywood plus a few key tools to get things cut and measured and built.

        I'm pretty thrilled at how everything turned out. I think the doors look great and will both help to keep people from dumping crap in my garage and will give me some much needed storage space for all the outdoor maintenance stuff I've accumulated in the past year.

        If these doors aren't a deterrant to the random acts of dumping all your unwanted crap at my house squad then my next step will be to build a moat and fill it with piranha, crocodile, alligators, or friggin' sharks with laser beams. Stay tuned for more on this developing story.

        This weekend I have discovered that I have not only english ivy but several other varieties of ivy around the house. I wish that I could tell you that I found out about the various varieties of ivy through photos and research and things like that but my research and discovery was of a much more 'hands-on" variety.

        On Friday I did a bunch of pruning of the bushes and shrubs along one side of the property. Unbeknownst to me I apparently have both English ivy, pyracantha bushes, privet hedge, and poison ivy all mixed together along the fence where I was working. You know how I know there was poison ivy there. No it wasn't because i recognized the three shiny leaves. It wasn't that I noticed the hairy tendrils on the vine. Nope it was when I woke up this morning with my right eye severely itchy and swollen.

        Poison ivy has never been my friend. Getting it pretty much anywhere on your body sucks. But getting it in your eye is terrible. Of course it isn't limited to just my eye. It is all over my left arm, in-between my fingers on both hands, along the side of my jaw and neck, and of course on my legs. But I think the eye is probably the worst. There aren't a whole lot of topical itch creams that work so well around the eye. And you just can't scratch to relieve anything. And the stupid blinking means it is constantly stretching and moving around. Plus the fact that my eyelid is all swelled up makes life grand.

        Now that the house has resorted to chemical warfare I feel that it is only fair for me to escalate things from my side to assure a balance of power. Two can play this game. Rotterdam convention or not, I'm sure that a little 2,4-D and maybe a splash of 2,4,5-T will have ivy of all varieties singing a different tune around here.

        A typical summer thunderstorm blew through this evening as the sun was setting. The cool breeze and lightning show were a welcome change to the still muggy heat of the day.

        Not only did I get a great shot of the lightning, but the best part is that nothing blew down on the house and the basement is still dry.

        While most people who get time off for national holidays take some time off and rest and relax or go to the beach or visit friends etc I stay home and work on my house.

        After months and months of settling and compacting, the trench that is my front yard had finally gotten to the point that there was at least some chance of turning the great big pile of dirt back into a lawn.

        Naturally I waited until the hottest part of the afternoon to go outside and do physically demanding labor in the hot sun to finish leveling out the front yard and raking it smooth.

        Pictures of the progress so far are here. More to come as we check on the progress of the grass growing.

        I did also get a some time to do somehting other than working on the house and headed down to DC for fireworks on the mall.

       That's right folks the next few posts are likely to be as exciting as watching grass grow. Stay Tuned!

Update 7/9: Grass is growing!

        With a little help from mother nature in the form of one of the cooler and wetter summer's in recent memory the new grass has taken quite a strong hold in the front yard.

        This weekend it looked like the new grass had finally reached the point where it was ready for a little trimming. It is so nice to look out the door and see a field of mostly green rather than just a big pile of dirt. A little overseeding and some more watering this weekend. Along with the help of another series of summer storms this weekend, should get everything to fill in nicely over the next few weeks.

        Since this is the first weekend in a long time that I actually haven't had some sort of work or plans or other other jam packed social activities I actually took some time and did some other yard work in the back. Trimmed up some bushes and overseeded and fertilized the back yard a bit to fill in some of the bare spots in the grass back there.

        A couple of bags of mulch and a few minutes of weeding and some other little outdoor maintenance items made for a very fulfilling afternoon of putting in a little bit of effort and finally feeling like there was a little bit of a payback. Things are moving towards looking less like and abandoned sand lot and more like a yard.

        Despite the tone of several recent posts I really don't have any problem with nature, plants, etc. I really do enjoy nature , I just dislike when nature doesn't like me back so much. Having gotten two horrible doses of poison ivy in the past couple of months with just the barest interface with the nature in my back yard I think I'm pretty justified.

        In an effort to help maintain the karmic balance of life I undertook two projects last week. The first of which was a concentrated kill every god-damned thing that even looked like it might be a vine or had anything even close to three leaves. Trusty sprayer in hand I unleashed gallons of chemical death upon the green things in my yard that may or may not have contributed to my weeks of tortured itchy/scratchiness. In doing so I discovered a truly amazing number and variety of invasive weed-like plants, trees,etc throughout the grounds of stately Windemere manor. I discovered, and promptly sprayed, american pokeweed, thistle, crabgrass, nutsedge, poison ivy, poison oak, english ivy, porcelainberry vine, and a very elm-like tree that will not die.

        The most ironic thing for me is that I have all of these various things in my yard that will not die or go away no matter what torture I impose upon them. I have a holly bush/tree and a crepe myrtle that I have cut back to just a stump only to have them rebound with a vengance. I am hardly a green thumb gardener by any stretch of the imagination but these things seem to be masochists and the more I work to eradicate them the stronger they become in their resitance and fortitude in coming back with renewed vigor.

        After all this death and suffering I felt it only fair to work on restoring some nature to the back yard. So the second project, aimed at restoring the karmic balance, was to re-do one of the backyard flower beds with some new plantings that are less invasive, nicer to look at, and appropriate for being planted within 2 feet of the house. One of the things that frustrates me so much about the existing plantings at my house is how inappropriately scaled everything is. Holly will grow into a 20 ft tree and crepe myrtles easily get to be 9ft tall with a 9ft canopy. These two things were planted 4ft apart and 3ft away from the house. I'm sure that when the were bought from a nursery and planted they looked great cause they were the plant equivalent of a labrador puppy. But just like the small cute puppy these things grow into great big giant beasts. (to be fair there is far less drool associated with the crepe myrtle)

        I have been meaning to work up a comprehensive landscaping plan for the whole property so that as time and resources are available I can tear things out and start over with new plantings that are appropriate for the climate, reasonably low maintenance, and are scaled to fit the spaces they are planted in when they are full grown. Although I haven't even begun to work on the big plan I needed to at least do something with this flower bed to help keep all these invasive weeds at bay.

        Without a whole lot of forethought and planning I ran to Home Depot and browsed through their perennials and carefully read all the tags on sunlight, water requirements, plant spacings, and dimensions on full grown sizes. It is baffling to me that people screw up plantings so badly when the nursery and growers provide so much great info right on the tags on the plants. This really isn't all that difficult. Within a few minutes I had picked out some nice grasses and a few colorful perennials.

        With plants, mulch, potting soil, and a keen desire to clean things up I headed home to get things under way. The first step was to dig up about 4-6" of the existing bed to remove the top layer that was just over run with all of the invasive things I've already mentioned above. Despite having treated things several times it seemed like nothing would keep the Ivy and weeds at bay. After whole-sale removal of the plants and the bulk of the root system I'm hoping to have an even chance of keeping things weed free for a while.

        Although weeds seem to grow with great abandon here I'm not sure how they do it. The soil here, and in most of baltimore, seems to be almost entirely clay. I'm pretty sure that with a good soaking and a really hot summer day I could pretty much turn my back yard into pottery. Which, in hindsight, might have been far easier than all this planting work. Just bake the backyard until it is pottery and then plant alfalfa and treat it like a chia pet. But I digress... With the ground having the consistency of earthenware I had grabbed a couple of bags of potting soil to give the new plants at least a gilmmer of hope of having some nutrients to get started and something other than concrete to push their roots into. Then came plants, then mulch, and then watering.

        Voila a new flower bed. Below are photos showing things as they were before I moved in and then the fabulous results. Click through either image to see a gallery of the work in progress.

Before:

After:

        Things may look a little sparse but that's the whole idea. I think that people read all the instructions on plant spacings etc but then see these tiny little plants spaced 2 ft apart and loose patience and just fill everything in so that it looks "full" on day 1. Planting doesn't usually work that way unless your prepared to spend outrageous amounts of money on mature plants. While things may look a little thin for now, after a few seasons everything will fill in nicely and I won't be continually fighting the creature that ate Cincinatti.

        For a rare change instead of getting home from work and plunking down in front of the TV and loosing myself for hours to the addictivness that is the boob tube I actually forced myself to do something slightly more productive.

        It all started this past weekend. With a solid day of rain on Saturday and scattered showers on Sunday I was actually fairly motivated to do some work around the house. Normally a weekend of beautiful weather is just too tempting for me to stick around the house and do projects. I'd much rather be out doing something. Even if that something invloves staying inside and not enjoying the beauty of the day. But this weekend was cloudy, stormy, and rainy. The perfect kind of weather to stay in the house and not feel like I was missing out on something more fun.

        This weekend's project was to scrape more paint and wallpaper off of the walls in the living room. I made a pretty substantial dent and pretty much finished up scraping two of the living room walls. Once the scraping is complete though there is still a long way to go before the wall is ready for paint. The scraping has been doing a great job of removing the paint and most of the backing of the multiple layers of wallpaper. But there is a bit of the wallpaper adhesive and stubborn pieces of wallpaper backing left behind. To remove this we move onto phase three of the removal process. Scrubbing with hot water.

        There doesn't seem any really good way to shortcut this whole process. I've tried it several different ways with varying degrees of success. The best thing I've come up with so far is to start with a paint scraper / putty knife and get the many many layers of paint off of the wallpaper. Then follow behind with a serious tungsten bladed paint scraper to remove the multiple layers of wallpaper and backing from the walls. The final step is to use hot water and a scotch scrubber sponge to soften and remove the remaining stubborn pieces of paper and the wallpaper glue.

        Tonight's project was to complete Step 3 of the process above for the walls that I had stripped clean this weekend. I didn't feel like words alone could convey the mind numbing tedium and work involved in the process so I put together a short video. Enjoy!