The great clean-out continues

Well! I have decluttered the closets in the "was guest room/now sewing room", the third bedroom (husband's computer domain), the master bedroom, the coat closet, the linen closet, the cedar closet in the garage, and now the workshop in the garage. Whew! I've made three trips to the Goodwill drop-off and a trip to the womens' shelter with clothing. Oh, yes, and a trip to the library to donate books. I can't carry much at a time to Goodwill with my little car, so I've been back and forth. Got to go back again on Monday.

It's starting to look clean and uncluttered. Breathing room! I have opened up a huge area in the upper shelves in the workshop where my Christmas village stuff will be stored after dismantling this season. I wanted so badly to put all the boxes up there to see how it will fit but I would be taking it down in three weeks to assemble the village, so that would be silly. Just have to picture it in my mind. . .

Next will be taking down the shelves in the fabric stash closet and moving them to the closet in the new sewing room. I can't wait!

I have a funny story, but to understand you have to envision the shelves in the workshop. Imagine an area five feet wide, with three very deep wooden shelves, almost 2 feet deep. The shelves start about waist high and the upper one is above my head. They are supported by a wood framework screwed to the walls and ceiling made of 2x2's and 2x4's, fastened with metal plates. They're strong! They were here when we moved and I love the storage potential. Below the bottom shelf I installed a shallower one, much less robustly constructed with cleats on the wall to support the ends and center, that is used to store scrap lumber pieces (never know when you'll need a little piece of wood. . .).

Well. . .after I had finished reloading the shelves with multiple heavy boxes, I pushed the lawnmower back into position below the shelves. In doing this I must have bumped the stack of scrap lumber on the lower shelf and not known it. Suddenly, I start to hear this creaking, wood-rubbing-wood noise, very soft, but continuing. Oh - my - goodness. I'm standing in a 5ft x 10 ft workshop with a loaded set of wooden shelves looming over me and SOMETHING is starting to make creaking noises. I don't know whether to run for my life or look for where the shelves are coming apart. If they fall, it's going to be a catastrophe, and I would be on the bottom of a very large pile. I'm starting to panic, when I realize that the creaking is coming from the lower part of the shelves, in fact from my wood scrap pile on the bottom shelf, where the stack has slid slightly and is trying to tip over. Whew! Crisis averted!

Meanwhile, my husband is talking to his brother, who decides he wants the rolltop desk we are clearing out as well as an old surround sound amplifier, a center channel speaker and two back channel speakers. His TV room gain is our gain too, because now I don't have to figure out what to do with them. Don't you love it when a plan comes together?

Cleaning closets,. . .

. . .thinning out the bookshelves, gathering clothes to donate to the shelter, picking out new flooring for the master bath, ordering a new couch for my husband's computer room. Man, I've been busy. And, of course. . .

SETTING UP MY NEW SEWING ROOM! (Big cheer!)

The guest room is going to become my sewing room. Last weekend, my sister-in-law and her husband drove down from Kentucky and took back the bedroom suite from the guest room. It came from my mother-in-law's house to begin with, so that's fair. We ordered a sleeper sofa to go in the third bedroom, which my husband uses as his computer room, so we'll have the guest accommodations covered. And now I'm researching sewing and cutting tables. A bookcase from the other bedroom and two old cabinets have been relocated for sewing room storage, and the new floorplan has been drafted. I still need to move out an old rolltop desk, which is going to be donated to charity, and decide which brand tables I will buy. In the meantime, an antique oak table I have is standing in for a sewing table because Quiltville is starting a new mystery this month and I don't want to miss it.

Here's an idea how it's going to be laid out. There's one window (top) and two closets with bifold doors (left side). The sewing table under the window has a dropleaf to double the size if needed. I will install swingarm lamps on the wall on either side of the window. The brown item on the left wall between the closets is an old bookcase which will hold projects, thread and such. The cabinets flanking the sewing table are entertainment center components my father-in-law built. The one on the left has shelves behind door (used to hold stereo components) and will store tools, templates and rulers. The one the right is open and used to hold a TV; right now it's full of folded quilts. A design wall will be mounted on the right wall, above which will be a curtain rod with clip rings from which I can hang completed quilts for photographing. The cutting table will fold up and store in front of the design wall. It's shown unfolded and in place for work. The item on the bottom is another cherry bookcase which is in the room now and has to stay, but it holds my quilting books. Unfortunately, the treadmill stays too! It folds up so it doesn't take much room. You can see that there's space for my big ironing board to the left of my chair. This will be so handy. I can adjust the board height to be used while seated, and pivot in my chair between the sewing machine and iron. Now my fabric stash closet needs to be relocated from the third bedroom to the guest room. That entails a lot more than it sounds. All the stuff in the guest room closet needs to find a home. Some of it will go into the closet where the fabric is right now, and the Christmas village decorations will go in the workshop out in the closet. But, before that can happen, the workshop needs to be decluttered and room made for them. It's a mess! A moves to B which moves to A and C but C has to be cleared out before the whole daisy chain can be put into motion.

But, all the work aside, I am very, very happy about this!

Wrangling the remote controls

Home theater set-ups come with a lot of stuff. You have your front speakers, you have your back speakers, your center channel, your sub-woofer, your home theater amplifier, DVD/Blu-ray player - and of course you have a television and a cable box. How you accomodate all those speakers is a post for another day, but the subject at hand is all those remote controls. Every piece of electronics in the cabinet has one. And they take up room. If they're not handy, it becomes a nuisance to get them out and play a movie. If they're too handy, they tend to take up all the space on the end tables.

What to do? I made a remote control caddy. And I had the perfect place for it.

My husband is a pipe smoker and he's had an ashtray stand for thirty years or more. It was a Christmas present from me several houses ago because there wasn't a good place for his ashtray (pipe smokers tend to have large ashtrays to hold the pipes). It's still is use even though the finish is getting a little beat up. While contemplating one day what to do with the remotes after we got the small end tables, the space between the three turned legs on the ashtray stand caught my eye. A little sketching and voila! The perfect remote caddy. I made it today:
Here's a close-up:

It can not only hold all the remote controls but also the case for his reading glasses. I think it's kinda-sorta brilliant.

Take my money, please

Mom is still picking up the pieces from her recent burglary. She is supposed to have a dusk to dawn light installed in the back yard. She's got the 16 foot tall pole and the fixture, just not the electrician to install it. He keeps putting her off. Bad economy or no, I assume that work up there is so good it doesn't matter whom he ticks off. There will always be another job around the corner. Pitiful.

And now she's trying to have the siding replaced on an outbuilding. It's like standing in the middle of the street waving a big stack of bills that no one want to take. She's called three siding installers and can't get anyone to commit to do the work. The first guy quoted the job and now won't call her back. The second wouldn't even come out. The third was there today, came up with an outrageous figure and couldn't tell her when he could get to it. When she tried to negotiate, he just jumped in his truck and drove off. Another case of his figuring there's a sucker on every street corner waiting to be fleeced so he doesn't have to deal with the ones that actually expect work done well, for a reasonable rate, and on time.

My sister-in-law claims this is a peculiar trait of the area; there are fewer of all kinds of craftsmen in that little town, so they get used to calling the shots due to lack of competition. I'm not so sure. I live in a metropolitan area with half a million people. The phone book is full of every type of resource you'd want, and you can't get a job done here either. When I remodeled my kitchen six years ago I must have called twenty contractors. Only two even came out to give me an estimate, and one of those wouldn't call me back. I finally latched onto the father-in-law of a co-worker, who was sort of a pain but at least finished the kitchen. I took a grim enjoyment out of the fact that several of those nonresponsive contractors aren't in business anymore. Gee, wonder why?

The trim on the outside of the house needs painting this spring, and I'm already dreading the search. If it didn't involve ladders and painting over your head twelve feet off the ground, I would do it myself; unfortunately, I don't have a death wish. What I do have is the phone number of a painter at the business where I used to work. I think he moonlights.

Requiem for a really unlucky squirrel

I was sitting at my computer this morning, eating a bowl of Cheerios while reading my email when BAM! suddenly there was a loud explosive noise from the backyard and my desk light went out. The UPS on the desktop computer started beeping. Oh darn, power outage.

I took a look out the back door but didn't see anything awry except for something that looked vaguely different about the transformer on the power pole behind the house which I couldn't pinpoint. I couldn't tell how many houses the outage impacted either. So, I looked up the power company outage hotline number (for the second time this month - there was a power interruption on Easter Sunday too) and reported it.

It wasn't more than 45 minutes before an electric company truck pulled up in front of my house. By then I was outside working so I walked over and told him what I had heard. He headed for the power pole on the back property line where my house feed originates. One look told him what was wrong - and what had done it. There's a type of fuse on the transformer, and it was blown. It would be a quick fix. The dangling disconnected end was what I had seen without realizing what was different. Then he pointed to the yard behind me. "Squirrel."

Yes indeed, there the poor thing lay, stiff as a board. It had evidently gotten on the top of the transformer and shorted across the poles with its body, the result being it was electrocuted immediately. Probably never knew what hit it. The power company guy said he had 10 or 12 of these happen a day. Man, it's hard being a squirrel.

Lights up...lights down

It's always something when you own a home. I just didn't expect a light show in my living room.

For several months now, the living room lamps have been flickering. For no reason, the brightness will go dooooown, and then uuuuuup, taking several seconds to do each excursion. The pendant light in the kitchen was doing it too. Then, the overhead light in the den tried the maneuver. That isn't good. That's all I knew about it.

Electricity scares the whiz out of me. I once installed a mercury vapor light outside of my house on a pole, and the whole time I was up on the ladder I was begging my husband - "Just tell me the power is shut off again. Are you SURE?" That's kind of embarrassing for a retired engineer to admit, but hey, I was a mechanical engineer. I took electrical circuits classes in college, but having knowledge about something doesn't preclude having irrational fears about it!

So when the lights started doing that, I wanted to go to the professionals. I knew that my neighbor had just had some electrical problems right after the power company had gone through the neighborhood cutting vines off power poles and clearing vegetation near the wires. Her lights had been going on and off, too, and other strange things happening (a circuit breaker and a wall oven computer control damaged). There had been some sort of damage done to the connections on the pole where her service was taken off, and the power company had to do repairs - she didn't understand exactly what. Meanwhile, of course, they wouldn't accept responsibility for any of the electrical stuff and she had to buy a new oven and ask her son to replace the bad breaker.

The first thing I did was call the power company to check the line coming into the house. My husband (the electrical engineer) had said that a weak neutral on the transformer would cause voltage fluctuations that would make the lights dim. So, remarkably quickly, the power company people showed up. They tested the voltage and current coming into my house on their side and on my side of the meter. Not a problem was found. So, gulp, it was in my hands.

This was an excuse to do something that had never been done in the forty years my house has existed - map the circuits in the breaker box. Of course, I approached it like a retired engineer - I drew up a schematic of the house, locating every outlet and wired fixture and identifying them by a numbering scheme. Then, I made sure a lamp or something I could monitor was plugged into every single outlet in the house, turned them on, and then turned on every hardwired light fixture. My house looked like Las Vegas.

I warned my husband that his computer should probably be shut off, and then out to the garage I went. Then, for almost two hours, I did the following:

1. Turn off a breaker.
2. Wander the house, noting which outlets/lights/appliances were now shut off.
3. Annotate my schematic to show which of the above were attached to that breaker.
4. Turn on the breaker.

Repeat - 16 times. Blessedly, someone had the forethought to label the 220 volt circuits to the heat pump, the water heater, dryer, oven etc. So I only had to worry about the 110 volt lighting section. That was enough.

When I reached the third from last breaker (which controlled the living room lights) and turned it back on, I heard a sizzling sound coming from it, like someone was frying a pan of bacon. Oops. Think I found the problem. So I finished the last two quickly and told my husband about it. His response was to turn it off immediately. The contacts in the breaker were arcing - definitely not a good thing. We'd have to replace it. It's a simple job; there was only one problem. The service into my house does not have a main disconnect.

I kind of stood there with my mouth hanging open when I realized that. Heck, the electrical panel in my older former house that had fuses instead of breakers, for heaven's sake, had a main disconnect. What crazy electrical code was this place built to? So anyone who worked on the box would have to do it with the power live, or call the utility company to turn off the service and then reinstate it. My husband said he could replace the breaker anyway. Heck no, I said. So I ran an extension cord from the den to power the TV and a table lamp that night while I considered options. A quick canvass of my neighbor and friends revealed that no one had hired an electrician and had any recommendations.

The next day, husband said he was going to fix the breaker. It was ridiculous, he said, to pay $200 for such a simple job. But, I retorted, I wasn't emotionally attached to the electrician - he was expendable. Husband convinced me it would be OK. So, I gathered up my courage (and rubber gloves and a rubber door mat for him to stand on!) and thus outfitted, and hopefully insulated, he went into the garage and swapped out the breaker, me standing there the whole time holding my breath with one hand near the wooden handle of the broom, which I was going to use to pull him away from the panel when the sparks started flying. Of course, he did it without any problems at all (he's a professional!).

So now the issue is fixed and my lights don't look like the marquee of the Tivoli Theater. What a relief.

It's never the utility company's fault

Have you seen this news story? Some poor lady in Washington, who normally uses about 3000 gallons of water during a billing cycle, gets charged for 140,000 gallons of water for one month! The water company says there's nothing wrong with their meter and she must pay the $1181.00 bill. Of course, that's completely ridiculous. You could calculate the amount of water that the supply line to her house can discharge in a month at the local water pressure, running 24 hours a day, and it's probably not 140,000 gallons. But the water company will never admit they're wrong.

I had a little run-in with my local water company last year, nothing this dramatic, but it illustrates how stubborn the utilities can be. In one month, my water usage jumped from less than 2500 gallons to 28,500 gallons. I, of course, filed a protest, and the company replaced the meter and sent it off to be tested. You already know what the results of the testing were. Absolutely nothing wrong with the meter. But, coincidentally, the next month's bill after the meter was replaced was back in our normal range.

Like the lady in the news story, I had a plumber look around the house. No leaks were found. He commented that the crawlspace of my house would have looked like a swimming pool if there was a leak that bad. He was also sure that the line between the meter and the house wasn't leaking. It was during the drought last year, and as the plumber put it, if there were any leaks on the supply line, I would have had some grass growing in my yard, which I certainly didn't. As a visualization of just how much 28,500 gallons of water is, I used the water capacity of the jacuzzi I used to own. It was 6 feet square and the water was about 24 inches deep. It held 225 gallons of water. I would have had to completely fill that jacuzzi over 4 times a day, every day of the month, to use 28,500 gallons.

Let's apply the jacuzzi test to the Washington lady's bill. 140,000 gallons would fill that jacuzzi over 20 times a day, every day, for 30 days. Let's assume that the water pressure and supply line to her house aren't much different than my former home. I remember how long it took to refill the jacuzzi after cleaning it. It would have been impossible to run enough water to fill it 20 times in one 24 hour period.

Now, my erroneous bill was nowhere as high as the Washington lady's bill, but it's the principal of the thing. I wrote the check, grumbling all the time, because it was the only thing I could do. I hope the lady can fight it and win.

Shredding

No, not the cat. Me.

I'm a filer. I keep paper copies of everything - credit card statements, bills, bank statements, warranties, receipts, medical bills. Everything. I have a nicely set up filing system in the lateral file cabinet that matches my desk. It was heaven to finally get an actual filing cabinet and I use it.

Every year or so, I purge files, and keep just the past year's records. I like to be able to look back at the year's expenditures when I'm handling our financials. I have been a conscientious filer in the last two years, around the time my husband retired. Because of everything that's been going on in our live, however, I have not been a conscientious purger. Thus, the files were bulging and stuffing just one more piece of paper in each hanging folder had become more and more difficult.

It was time to purge and shred. The purging part didn't take long, but I was faced with a foot tall stack of paper. Oh, brother. So I pulled the Ativa shredder close to my comfy office chair and started feeding.

Two things you find out (or remember) when you're doing this. The shredder may say that it will take 12 sheets at a time, but don't do it. The poor machine sounds like a person trying to choke down a mouthful of saltines without a drink of water. Also, it gets hot a lot faster than you think, and you have to stop regularly for cooling off periods. That's actually what I'm doing right now.

The floor is covered with small snippets of paper dropped while emptying the shredder bin. There's a black trash bag full of 1/4" x 2" pieces of paper next to me just waiting to split and spill. I have shredder lubricating oil on my hands (and almost on my shirt - good save!). Oh boy, this is fun. Not.

Quiltville mystery part 6 redux, and a rain story

I'm joining the rows this morning (half are done) and I stopped to see if Bonnie has posted her border ideas. Rats! Nothing yet.

It has at least stopped raining. Intellicast.com says we got 3.4 inches in the last 24 hours. Add about 3/4 inch to that for Monday night and you see that in the last 36 hours we were about washed away! There was a river running down the slope in my back yard. Luckily, whoever did the final grade on this lot so many years ago understood water management and we never have a wet crawlspace.

I can't say that for the last house we owned. It was new construction in a hilly subdivision. I knew he had done the perimeter drains correctly, but it worried me that the lot to the right of the house was higher and would drain onto my foundation where the basement was the deepest. That of course was the half of the basement that was finished. There was a laundry room, hall and roughed-in bath, which we never completed. The rest of the basement was block walls and slab floors. We used it for storage of a few pieces of furniture, and boxes of books and other household goods that wouldn't fit upstairs.

After a wet start to the winter in January 1993, it started to rain heavily on the Friday night before Martin Luther King Day weekend. We had planned to to go Pigeon Forge on Saturday, and decided that the rain wouldn't deter us. I had to run down to the basement as we were getting dressed, to retrieve a shirt from the laundry. When I stepped off the last stair I hit water on the floor. "Oh, no", I thought at first, "the water heater is leaking." That, I had experience with. I headed down the hall to the laundry room. The water was getting worse. And it wasn't coming from the water heater. It was oozing out between the baseboard and the concrete slab on the far wall - the wall where the basement was completely underground. I went in the roughed-in bathroom next door. At the capped-off toilet flange, water was coming up around the hole in the slab. I knew then we had a major issue.

The ground had become so saturated that there was nowhere for the water to go and the water table was rising. Under my house. It had reached the deepest corner of the basement wall and had begun to infiltrate between the block walls sitting on the slab. It was also perking up wherever there was a gap, like the roughed-in plumbing. The opposite side of the basement, which was totally above ground on the back side, did not have a problem. Yet.

I started mopping. I laid towels along the baseboards and anywhere else the water was coming in, and every two hours, I spun the water out of them in the washer and replaced them. Every two hours. For 36 hours straight. Through the day, the night, the next day. By that time, the towels weren't catching the water at all, it was coming in faster than I could mop it up. When I checked the last time, there was over 1/2 inch of water in the laundry floor. At some time mid-Sunday afternoon, I sat down on the stairway landing and said "Forget it. I'm done." Whatever the water did, I couldn't stop it and would have to pick up the pieces later. Water was now coming in even around the partially buried front wall of the above-ground portion. I disconnected everything electrical downstairs, set all the boxes stored in the unfinished portion up on blocks near the ground level back door. I walked up to the living room and cried for about two hours.

It rained all Sunday and Monday, too, about 3 1/2 days nonstop, over a foot of rain, total. There was flooding everywhere in my town, but I didn't know it at the time. On Tuesday I called in to take a day off work for cleanup and found out that several people were in the same condition that we were. One guy lived in a house his parents had built 50 years before. It had never had water in the basement until then. His whole basement had flooded too.

The water reached 3/4 of the way up the bottom stair, 5 inches at least. I was too upset to measure it. As it drained out, I cleaned up and dried the basement out with a little submersible pump and the Shop Vac. I sorted out the stuff that had gotten wet and I couldn't save. I aired out the basement, dried out the walls and repainted in the next few weeks. Luckily, the water had receded and been removed so fast that the walls weren't damaged or molded.

During all this, the eternally leaking chimney had spotted the ceiling in my living room too.

This was the only house I was glad to sell. It was bought by the relocation program when I transferred jobs and stayed on the market for a year. I don't know who owns it now. I just checked the precipitation history map, and they got as much rain this week as we did. I bet their basement is damp.

Addendum: The rows are joined and the edge is trimmed and now it's begging for a border. I have no idea what to do. Come on, Bonnie, give us a hint!

War of the Chipmunks

Let me start off by saying that I like chipmunks. Of all God's little furry rodent creatures, they are the cutest. Having said that disclaimer, for all their cuteness, I don't want them living under my house. They're messy. They pull down the heating duct insulation to make beds. They sit on my water heater and poop. A lot. They tear up anything I try to store in the crawlspace.

So they had to go. Unfortunately, all my crawlspace vents look like this:

They're not the super high-techy ones with the bi-metal springs and self-closing louvers. They're 40 years old and I have to close them myself by pulling on the handle in the center; and, more importantly, all the screen wire has rusted and fallen out. So when these are open in the summer, it's a little chipmunk doorway. And, in the case of the vent where the cable TV and DSL wires enter, it's a doorway all year long because the cables obstruct the closure of the flap inside the vent. Even when the flap can close, it doesn't lock in place or anything so they have been able to push it open.

This is the year when I decided that the chipmunks have to spend their winter vacation somewhere else. They're highly adaptable little creatures who have made good use of the proximity of humans and their houses, but for untold eons they have gotten along just fine without access to the underside of a brick rancher. This year they're going to have to resurrect some of that native chipmunk-smarts and make a burrow or something. I know that they'll be fine. And I'll still have duct insulation.

After a trip to the Ace Hardware, I took my roll of hardware cloth (not cloth at all, but a heavy screen with 1/4" openings - but so apropos for a quilter!) and a roll of wire, and started attaching new screens on the outside of the vents. Especially the one that won't close all the way.

So listen little critters, the Calico Quilter Super-8 motel is closed for business!