We don’t have a belfry, nor is the title a reference to any nuttiness, but we do have an attic. Yesterday evening I was riding the exercise bike when there was a fluttering overhead and a bat flew past my head. It flew back and forth a few times before disappearing into the rafters at the other end of the attic from where I was riding. Bats are actually very tiny, so I was unable to locate it when I checked the rafters where it had disappeared. I got back on the bike and finished my workout.

When we first moved in the house 11 years ago, it was August and we didn’t have air conditioners other than our bedroom. There were two ventilation fans in the roof that are controlled by thermostats. We had the attic door open to pull air through the house and we were sitting in the living room watching television when something swooped overhead. Yes, it was a bat. It flew around a few times and headed back into the attic. I went up there, turned on the light, and opened the windows and screens, hoping that it would leave. Well, it didn’t, but unbeknownst to me, our cat, Nikki, decided to climb out onto the roof, but that’s another story. We found her on the roof the next day. I found that bat in the rafters and in my efforts to catch it for release outside, I ended up killing it – they are not only tiny, but also very fragile! I figured we were okay at that point. Later (I don’t recall if it was the same evening or not), Pennie was at her computer desk, which was in the room leading to the attic. I was downstairs in the kitchen. Another bat flew past her and downstairs. This time I didn’t end up catching or killing it, but we closed the attic door. The next day I picked up a screen door at Home Depot and installed it.

The bats managed to get in through the eaves. Where the rafters extend out over the edge of the floor is capped with fascia boards all around and beadboard on the underside, but there are gaps where you can see outside if you pull the crappy insulation aside. A project that I’ve been putting off for a really long time is to close up the ends of the rafters at the top of the wall and seal any cracks. All of the flimsy foil backed insulation that serves little to no purpose needs to be removed and some nice thick insulation needs to be installed throughout. That should stop the bats from getting inside, even if they still decide to take up residence in the eaves, which is where I expect the roost during the day.

I don’t mind bats and actually like that they fly around outside at night to catch bugs, but I draw the line with bats living inside our house! I guess its time to start thinking about sealing things up – to keep the bats out and to keep the heat inside. I’m sure that there’s a whole lot of heat escaping through the roof in the cold weather. So, even if I don’t build out the knee walls or actually finish the attic space, I need to get the first part of the project going soon!

Pennie called me early on Monday to let me know that out sewer was backing up again. The symptom that we’ve come to recognize as a tree root clogged main to the street is water coming out from under the cabinets in the basement. Depending on when it is caught, it can be quite a mess. Fortunately, it was Pennie’s quick shower, so there was a bit of water, but not a huge puddle under the couch. When it happens to me with my long morning shower, it is a much bigger puddle. She was going to be away all morning and then had an afternoon appointment at the doctor, so the problem would need to wait until evening to be resolved because I needed to remove the inside back wall of the cabinet after clearing it out. Since I was caught up at work, I figured I’d run home and give the sewer guys a call. I was home by 9 and the guy showed up at about 10:30. I hadn’t met this guy before, but he’s the one that Pennie had dealt with back in February. I would describe him as brusque – just short of being offensive. He complained about the fact that he couldn’t use the large cutter on his snake. He started to work and I headed upstairs. When I heard water running I went back down, figuring it was clear and he was verifying that. Well, it was clear, but there was water running out from under the cabinets. It wasn’t coming from the cleanout, though, which is where it would be coming from if the line wasn’t clear. We got the garden hose and shoved it into the line and confirmed that the line was indeed clear.

The problem was clearly that there was a hole in the pipe.

He packed up his snake and I paid him the $155 charge – the 3rd time within a year. He suggested that I rent a jackhammer and replace the pipe section myself. That wasn’t about to happen, though it would have been the less expensive solution. My fear, besides the fact that I wouldn’t be able to fix it, was that I would then be facing a bigger problem with no plumber available. So, after he left, I set to work trying to confirm where the leak was. I set up a bunch of old towels and ran the water, climbed into the cabinet and peered around with a light. I spotted running water near the joint of the pipe heading out through the wall. I put on a latex glove and poked around, but could not feel a hole. It sure looked and felt like the breach was in a 2 foot section of pipe between the cleanout and that first joint. This made sense, too, since the old cast iron pipe was being beaten by the huge sewer clearing snake and cutter as it made the bed from the cleanout and headed down the line.

I called a plumber that I knew would be able to come some time the same day, albeit at a premium. Little did I know how much that premium would be!

I hadn’t expected to be away from the office more than a few hours, so I had to go back and get the laptop and take care of anything that had come up in my absence. I told the plumbing company that I’d be home after 2 PM. The plumbers showed up at around 4 PM and assessed the situation. They were going to remove the section of cast iron pipe, cut the house vent above the trap, and cut the main line past the trap, replacing the cast with PVC pipe and two Tees, eliminating the trap which is no longer needed with traps at each fixture in this century. About two hours later, they were done. As an added bonus, the cleanout is now much more accessible for the next time. However, now I’m afraid that repeated snaking will compromise pipe further up the line. I’m very pleased with the results of the work.

Here is a photo of the old piping. It looks pretty gross following the sewer cleaning, but I assure you that I washed the whole business with disinfectant before the plumbers came to take the old piping out!

And the next photo shows the pipe heading out through the foundation and the section of pipe in the foreground that was apparently compromised and leaking.

Here we are almost $1400 later - $155 for the sewer snaking and $1139 for the repairs.

I had to remove the studs from behind the cabinet to give them better access. I spliced them back in last evening, but need to rework the area in the near future. There’s a removable back in the cabinet. What I want to do is frame the opening so that there are no studs in the space and add a large hinged access door so that the cleanout can be accesses without removing the entire back panel.

I love our old house, but unexpected maintenance is a killer!

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That’s our new neighbor above. The raccoon has apparently taken up residence in a squirrel nest in the tree right next to our screen porch. She/he showed up about a week or so back and startled me. I guess I startled back since I tried to take pictures a few times without success until last night. In the second photo, you can see that we have a corn feeder for squirrels there and the green box holds peanuts that the raccoon seems to adore. After I snapped the photo last night, the raccoon stuck around and continued reaching into the box to get another peanut. We were on the other side of the screen, just a few feet away. That was pretty cool. I imagine that our neighbor won’t stick around too much longer as they seem to move around a whole lot, making a new den every few weeks to months, taking over someone else’s abandoned home. Perhaps we’ll be neighbors for a while, though, as long as I keep the peanuts flowing!

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I took these two photos of the cactus blooms on our porch this past Sunday. The plant is literally bursting with blooms! Unfortunately, these flowers don’t last too long, but it is beautiful while they last. I enjoy looking at them each time I’m on the porch.

No, I’m not talking about being at work, though there are days that it could be considered torture, especially the days that include endless meetings. And it isn’t a torture garden – that’s two topics combined into one subject.

I’m referring to my ongoing exercise regimen. I actually enjoy it most of the time. I feel good about meeting the challenge to remain healthy and the fact that I’m in better overall physical shape that I have been in a very long time. On Sunday I did the hanging sit-ups again for the 3rd straight week. I also took pictures! I set the camera timer which gave me 10 seconds to get from the camera to the Soloflex. It took 3 tries to get the hanging sit-up shot, and I’m actually not fully in position to start the sit-ups, but I wasn’t about to try to get up on that bar any faster!

Here are the results of the workout and photo shoot.

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Earlier in the day I took the camera outside and snapped a load of photos around our garden. We have many flowers in bloom and the tomato plants are getting bigger and some are already bearing tomatoes.

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I posted a few photos today. I actually took them on two different days this month. The Azaleas and tulips are bloomed out, but the majority of the pictures are from yesterday or the day before (I forget!).

The dogs let me sleep until about 7 today, which was good. I headed out at about 9:30 for the usual Saturday routine, leaving them howling and barking in their kennels as I left. Razz is still whining when I’m not downstairs, but not all the time today. I spent a few hours with them yesterday evening in the basement. I played Peggle on the Xbox 360, getting through the Adventure mode. They were nicely relaxed while I played. Anyway, I took my father shopping and then mowed his lawn. I headed home and got the groceries put away before mowing our lawn. I also did my laundry and then I put the air conditioners in my office and in the dining room, though I haven’t plugged either in. it is finally cooling down from the heat of the past few days.

Before I fed the dogs their dinner I went on the front porch to move around the flower boxes. I knew that some were rotting out, and hoped to get 5 good ones out of the 7. Unfortunately, they were in bad shape – every one of them. So, they came down and the dirt went to the back garden. I can’t rebuild these, I’ll need to make some new ones. I’m considering making only two for the front railing. I should be able to reuse the molding piece on the front of two boxes and this time I’ll caulk and waterproof the interior of the boxes, plus I’ll use treated wood. I used plain pine and simply painted them with good primer/sealer. They held up well for a few years, but they’ve had it now. making two new boxes will be one of this week’s projects, I believe. I’ll also repaint the tops of the railing to freshen that up.

Happily, the heat wave finally broke overnight, though we didn’t get the promised showers. That means I’ll be sprinkling the new grass later today. Yes, I said, “grass.” There are lots of little grass shoots sprouting out back. Unfortunately, I also noticed that there are now lots of little dead patches in the part of the yard that we just opened up for the dogs the other week. I think that I need to work out a routine of sprinkling a bit of lime down, scratching the dead patch up and adding some seed to try to minimize the damage.

As mentioned on Friday, I planned to head to Lowe’s on Saturday rather than Friday after work to get the electric cultivator. I headed over in the middle of the afternoon with my 0% for 12 months financing coupon intent on getting the Troy-Bilt cultivator and also a new gas grill. I decided against getting bags of dirt for the yard, though. I had checked out the selection of grill on the Lowe’s web site and was pretty sure I was going to get this one. We don’t have a need for a side burner and this Char-Broil model is a bit smaller than some of the behemoths that I’ve been seeing. I found the cultivator and loaded it onto the cart and then headed to the grills. The one I wanted wasn’t on the floor, nor could I find it on the stock shelves. I went outside to look at the other assembled grills and it wasn’t there either. I headed back inside and looked at all of the other options. I really didn’t want to go for the 3 burner model as the two options from Char-Broil were much more expensive and larger. The infrared model was $399 and the regular one was $299. In addition, I’d need a grill cover, while the one I wanted included a cover and was listed at $269. I checked out the other brands and was about to give up completely when I took another look in the aisle at the boxes. On the very top of the shelves was one Char-Broil unit that had a different stock number than the others. It was clearly the one that I wanted. I searched for a stock person to get it down for me. It was the one I wanted, so I was a happy camper!

On Sunday afternoon I set out to assemble the grill. The instructions said 30 to 40 minutes for assembly, but one of the reviews said that it took 3 to 4 hours. The reviewer was correct. It probably took 30 minutes or more just to unpack the box and lay out the parts! It went together well, though. I brought it around to the side of the house and swapped the propane tank from our old grill and then fired it up. I should mention that the old grill is probably 5 or more years old and has been rebuilt at least twice. Two years ago I replaced the burner again, but the flame never did get adjusted very well. it was a challenge to cook on it. Pennie did an awesome job in using that thing, but I knew that it was time to replace it.

The old grill had been sitting on two planks with gravel between them. The new grill sits in the same spot, but it isn’t very level at the moment, so I’m going to need to get some patio pavers and a bag or two of gravel to make a small platform for the grill that is perfectly level. That sounds like a project for next Saturday.

It was looking like it was going to be a great Friday, despite the fact that it is Friday the 13th today. The day took a turn for the worse as my shower ended. Once again, there was water standing in the bottom of the shower and it was slowly draining away. Had I continued showering, the new water would have arrived faster than the water was draining. I dried off and stepped out into the basement to check on the situation by the cleanout for the sewer line. If there’s any water coming out from under the cabinet, the clog is outside of the house. If it is dry, the clog could be anywhere between the shower and the cleanout, about 20 feet along the drain line, just past the vertical pipe coming from the upstairs bathroom. You may recall that we had a clog on December 5th, which was not bad since the previous problem needing the sewer line cleaning service was 3 years prior. Well, 2 month and 7 days is a little too soon to be having a problem.

The day got worse when I stepped out of the bathroom and headed over to the other side of the basement where I was looking for a trickle of water like last time. There was a whole lot of water in front of the cabinets. And it had run downhill under the table and the couch on its way to Pennie’s desk and the far side of the basement. I grabbed a bucket and some old towels and began soaking up the water. Basically, I ended up filling a 2-1/2 gallon bucket with water from my just ended shower.

I am hoping that the sewer service will consider that they may not have done a good job 2 months ago, basically, leaving roots in the pipe out towards the street connection and this will be reflected in what they do or don’t charge us. The job costs about $160 and twice in just months is unacceptable when we don’t flush things that we’ve been advised can get stuck and never use the fluffy toilet paper that can also cause problems.

On the other hand, if this is a street clog, they will take care of it on my dime. I suspect that it is our pipe, though, and not in the street. This Spring I will get the line inspected with an in pipe camera so that we can decide on a solution for this problem that we’ve had since we moved into the house 10 years ago. Basically, the choices are to line the existing pipe or to dig up the pipe and replace it, with the latter choice being much more disruptive and is quite costly since you’re talking about a 4 foot deep trench from the house to the street, under a giant maple tree and the sidewalk. I think it is high time to find a solution, though. I also want to seal the cleanout as the current cap doesn’t do squat to keep the water from the basement. I’d rather that it backed up into the shower pan where we would notice the problem without water leaking on the basement floor. Of course, a major flood would be caught by the sump pump, but there would still be an inch or more of water in the low spots to deal with.

I hate plumbing.

With the dogs spending their waking hours downstairs in our lovely finished basement, our Roomba does a great job vacuuming the floor every night at 2 am. When I get up it is all finished and I just need to empty out the dust collection bins and clean off the brushes. What we generally can’t do, though, is mop and wax the floor. Even though the floor wax dries pretty quickly, it means getting the dogs outside or upstairs while applying the wax and letting it dry. Unless it is done while they are still in Pennie’s bedroom overnight! Well, this morning, after the Roomba did its thing, and before my shower, I mopped the floor quickly. Then after my shower I waxed the floor near the entrance, while keeping Penguin on the stairs. That area was dry when I came back down from getting dressed. I went outside to warm up the car and then spent the next 15 minutes applying a nice coat of wax throughout the basement and stashed the bucket and mop in the furnace enclosure before heading out to work. Nice!

It started out okay and it will surely get better, but the morning too a turn for the worse while I was finishing up my shower and the water in the shower pan was rising. Yes, once again the sewer line is clogged. I took a chance on plunging the toilet to see if the clog was perhaps local, but that did nothing to clear the line and brought the muck up into the shower pan. Lovely. I cleared out the cabinet and removed the back panel for access to the sewer cleanout and left a note for Pennie to call the sewer service. I guess we’ve actually been fortunate in that we haven’t had to call them for at least 2 years now. When we first moved in it seemed that we were calling them twice a year to snake the line. This will, however, be the first time that they will need to clean the line from within our new cabinet. I am hoping that the access is sufficient for them. I am sure that they have enough room to get the snake into the cleanout and can do so without damaging the cabinets, but it sure would be better if the cleanout were outside of the house. I may have to investigate having a cleanout installed out front. If it is less than $1K to do, it may be worth it.

The day just has to get better…

Another weekend with no construction. Besides a little raking (in a light rain) of the part of the back yard used by the dogs, I didn’t deal with leaves, either. Saturday started out with the usual shopping trip with my father. When we returned, and while he was making lunch, I filled up a shopping bag with much of his junk mail from the past week. Hopefully, I got it before he picked some to respond to. I didn’t do much on Saturday afternoon, other than the aforementioned raking of the back yard. In the evening I ground up the vegetables for the mutleys and spent the rest of the evening at the PC.

Sunday was cleaning day. Once I got caught up with computer stuff and scanned the Sunday papers (that is clipping coupons, reading the comics, leafing through a few sale fliers, and skimming a few other sections of the papers) I started cleaning the main floor and upstairs. I vacuumed pretty thoroughly on both floors. I also turned the area rug in the living room so that the corner chewed by Ruby over the summer was under the corner of the couch. Then I cleared the dining room, picking up everything other than the dining room table, which I slid to one side of the room. I used the Hoover floor cleaner to scrub the tiles and remove some of the built up wax. I wish that I had used a bit of amonia to remove all of the wax, but that would have meant I needed to get two coats of Future down and I only had time for one coat yesterday. Despite the fact that I didn’t strip the floor bare, it looks awesome right now. I also used the Pledge wood floor cleaner on the wood floors in the house, including Pennie’s bedroom.

It was a busy afternoon, but it feels good to have it taken care of.

I do want to get a new upright/convertible vacuum cleaner. Our Dyson just isn’t doing the job. Ever since it was in for repair and the shop lost our machine and gave us a different one, it has had issues. It doesn’t have the suction that I came to expect of the Dyson machine and the hose is in need of replacement again. The other week, I discovered that a hose on the bottom of the machine that connects the brush area with the back of the machine had come lose, rendering the machine mostly useless. When we first got the Dyson, I loved it. After a year it began to overheat and shut down randomly, hence the need to take it in for warranty repair. Needless to say I will never use that shop again, but now we’ve got a Dyson that doesn’t work very well.

The Roomba has been having issues with finding the way back to its dock almost daily for the past week, first with getting stuck and more recently with just running out of power before finding the dock. Last night I picked up the “lighthouses” which divide the room with an invisible wall restricting the Roomba to each are for 25 minute blocks of time. This morning it was back on the dock and had cleaned the whole basement, so I guess I’ll go without the barriers and see if it successfully docks after makings its rounds starting at 2 AM each day. It doesn’t fit under the sofa bed or the entertainment cabinet, so this morning I used the dust mop to sweep out underneath all of the lower furniture.

I programmed the Roomba to vacuum the basement every day at 2 am. It has been doing so each day since late last week and has generally done a good job. It can’t replace a full size vacuum, but in between full cleaning times, this thing is awesome. It can’t move Pennie’s desk chair, for example, so any dirt or fur that gathers under it from the dogs tracking everything in from the back yard won’t get picked up. Of course, it can’t change levels, so the step and landing at the back door, along with the bathroom which is up a step, are out of bounds to it. Our unit has two “lighthouses” which are placed to restrict Roomba to 3 different areas for 25 minute cycles before it heads back to the charging station and docks. Each morning I go downstairs and empty the dust, dirt, and fur out of the collection bins and clean of the brushes and sensors as needed.

This morning I arrived downstairs and Roomba was not in the dock and it wasn’t running. I turned on the lights to see it stuck under the end table next to the couch. Nothing has changed, so why it ended up trying to get under it sideways is beyond me. If it tried head-on, it wouldn’t have fit since there is a sensor protruding from the top of the Roomba. I picked it up and started it up again, figuring that it hadn’t gotten stuck before, so this was a fluke. Nope. I came back down for my shower and it was stuck again in the exact same place. So now I’ve placed felt pads under the legs to lift the table up 1/4 inch, which will allow Roomba to ride under the table just enough to bump the top sensor and head back out without getting stuck – I hope. In the meantime, I resorted to a quick manual cleaning by sweeping up the areas that the Roomba had not gotten to because of its stupidity.