Dogs and Jen: Home Edition

My new washing machine arrived today. It’s red. It’s awesome. It’s doing my backed up laundry. w00t!

MOM AND DAD came to visit me this past weekend! In my preparations for their arrival, I did a lot of laundry. For the last load I threw in a load of red blankets and sheets, went for a bike ride, and when I got home the cycle was done but the blankets were soaking wet. Poor spinning has been an intermittent problem with my washing machine, so I put it on the spin cycle again to get rid of the extra water. Unfortunately, it made a weird grindy noise and didn’t spin.

We took the machine apart as a family today and determined it’s MESSED UP. Instead of screwing around with it, I bought a new washing machine.  I looked for excellent reviews on machines that weren’t ridiculously expensive. I went with a Whirlpool top-load washer. It has all good reviews, it was very affordable, and best of all, it’s red!

I had abandoned the idea of a red washer because of price, but this one just happened to be red. It was a very pleasant surprise. Yay! It will be delivered next Saturday and, in the meantime, I will try not to get too many clothes dirty. Good thing I did ALL my laundry before the big visit this weekend.

I’ve given up on even pretending to work on the house for a while. Maybe in January…

However, I did make a little step today. I’ve been looking for a desk for the basement. That’s set up as a guest space and right now my poor guests - who are all heavy computer users - have no place for their laptops. I’ve been eying this one at World Market since the summer. It’s finally on sale, in stock, and with a coupon code I got it for about $100.

I don’t have a chair for it yet, but that is a situation that can easily be fixed when the time comes.

I hope the house appreciates this little token of attention.

I don’t know if you can tell from this picture, but the POs did some crazy butchering on these doors. Apparently they were not the right size so they hand cut some of the doors off down the middle.

Notice the wavy gap.

This work is truly Cabinet Guy caliber.

To fix this, I got a couple pieces of half round and attached them to the edges of this door. It made me realize I need some clamps. For now, the vice grips worked ok. A coat of paint, and this looked quite a bit better.

This was a good project for a day that brought threatening weather.

There’s a nice closet in the basement that is impossible to open. The only way to get in there is to stick your fingers in the gap left by wavy trimming of the doors by the POs.

(pardon the mess on the floor - I’d just moved the treadmill to make room for my visitors and there was some fur under there).

When I ordered the box of 10 handles for the windows, I was surprised to receive 10 PAIRS of handles. They were cheap, but I have a lot of them. Thus, I decided to put some of those extras to use on this set of doors. I had to put on 4 handles - one pair in the middle folding part to open, and one pair on the end to close. They look nice and make it so much easier to get in there.

The very first project I ever planned to do on this house was to plug a hole. During the inspection, the inspector pointed out that  behind my air conditioner where the wires and things lead into the house was a hole:

He pointed out that mice or other creatures could get in there, and that I should be sure to plug it up. On my very first trip to Home Depot to buy things for this house, I bought a can of expanding foam to plug that hole with. However, when I got home, I found out that the can I’d picked up was missing the little nozzle tube thing you need to spray the foam. I never remembered to return it or even pick up a new can and so the hole has gone unplugged.

Last week, the cursed ants that invaded my house last summer were back. They were in my couch hunting for crumbs. LOTS of them. I didn’t even get to finish my cheerios before I was stripping off the slipcovers, throwing stuff in the washer, and spraying Ortho Home Defense in unsafe ways. After extensive treatment, the ants kept coming back to that corner of the living room where I work all day. It’s clean, but I probably kill a dozen of the stupid ants every day. Usually the Ortho works better than that.

This morning, the third day of particularly irritating ants, I decided they must be coming from somewhere because that corner of the house was full of ant death poison. The only likely place was from the basement. My laundry area is under this part of the living room. I’d never seen an ant down there before, but I don’t spend a ton of time there either.

I go down and find there are, in fact, LOTS of ants. There’s a line of dead ones along the base of the wall where I’d sprayed the Ortho a while ago. There’s a lot of live ones up by the ceiling, on the walls…basically everywhere other than the edges I sprayed. So I sprayed some more and admitted these ants were beating me.

I do not lose. I just know when to call in reinforcements. Orkin Guy is coming on Monday.

However, this afternoon I was puzzling over how the ants could be getting into the basement. There’s no water leaking in there, so it couldn’t be from a foundation crack. Then I remembered - the hole. Sure enough, I checked out the hole and there were ants crawling all over the tubes, wires, and inside of the hole. So, I gave that its own dose of Ortho. I’ll soon make a trip out to get some expanding foam, finishing that very first project that was left undone for 18 months.

Stupid ants.

Below is a picture of what my back stairwell looked like today when I got home from my Wed-Thurs trip to give a lecture. On Tuesday night, after everything with K, it did not look like this. It was full of raw sewage. As Blue Man Group says, Output flows in one direction - AWAY. It should not, under any circumstances, be coming to my little house. It hadn’t risen to the level where it was leaking into the basement, but it was nasty. NAS. TEE. It is also pretty much the opposite of what I needed that night.

Luckily, Contractor Sal came to the rescue. He and his team came to my house Wednesday while I was gone and took care of things. I’m very thankful that I have a contractor who I can tell “please fix it and I’ll pay what it costs” and know that he will do it right and not take advantage of me.

I haven’t talked to him since I got back, but I’m wondering if this is related to the plumbing problems I’ve been having. The toilet flushing issue is one I mentioned here. That recurred this week along with a very slow draining tub upstairs. It could be that it’s all coincidental with this sewage, but it would be nice if this rooting would fix everything.

I’ve ordered a bunch of rugs and they all showed up at once. Three are from Orvis. I got one for the front door, one for the back, and one for outside the back door. They are these great water trapper mats that look great. Plus, you clean them by just hosing them down. I already have a personalized one of these that goes under the girls dishes and the new ones for the door will be a big help. There are muddy paw prints all over this house.

In the basement,  I got a stripey cotton rug for by the washer and dryer.

I still need good lighting for down there, but I like how it looks with the rug. It’s starting to look acceptable.

The toilet in my basement has had issues for a long time. Sometimes it works fine. Sometimes, it acts clogged for no reason (e.g. I will clean it and flush to wash down the cleaner, and it won’t flush completely). It’s gotten worse lately. I’ve tried liquid plumber, I’ve plunged, and I’ve played plumber with my pipe snake getting it about 13 feet into the pipes, but nothing helps. I figure it’s time to call in a professional. I’ve never had to get a plumber before. Do any of you have experience and can you give me a rough ballpark of what I would expect to spend? I know it depends on what’s broken, but let’s say it’s just a blockage somewhere that they can clear out.

Thanks

EDIT: After writing this, of course, everything is working perfectly fine now. Perhaps the double dose of liquid plumber finally worked. Perhaps it’s just temporary. I’d appreciate the advice either way.

I planned to escape my crushing workload early today and work on the basement. It was not to be, alas, and I was pushed into working on things all day. I still made it out to pick up those painting masks, and I also stopped at Sherwin-Williams and got a gallon of Fun Yellow to replace the Road Stripe Yellow in the basement.

My sprayer had some issues getting back to work. It wasn’t priming. It would blow air, but couldn’t get even water up the spout. I ended up priming it by hand by pouring paint into the tube each time I refilled the jug. It was kind of a pain, but it worked.

I did another coat on the ceiling in places that needed it. If this were going to be a finished basement, I’d do a good second coat and maybe even a third. As it is, I think this looks good (and I’m out of motivation anyway). I also used the sprayer to apply the new yellow. Yellow #2 is still bright, but much much better.

I still have things to do by hand here. I’m going to leave the top level of bricks white as a kind of border, so I need to do that properly. I also have to get in to all those divits in the cinder block with the yellow. And there is a LOT of cleaning to do. I don’t really want to discuss how much paint I spilled or splattered in this project.

After that - lighting. I was thinking a globe light but I’m flexible. It has to have a pull string. Any suggestions?