Hooray! (uh, wait a minute…)

Technically, I’m still on vacation, although we had to check out yesterday morning. With the girlies off to the beauty shop to prep themselves for a wedding (and DD for a hotsy-totsy birthday party tonight), I was basically left to my own devices and decided this would be a good time to look at the weed-eater. It hasn’t been running for a while, and you can see why.

A quick motorcycle trip into town and back, plus $1.07 for the fuel line, plus a few minutes to put it all together (it took maybe as much time as the ride in and back), and the weed-eater is working again. Now I don’t have to listen to Mrs. Fetched making noises about buying a new one… although it does mean I have to find another excuse for not doing the weed-eating. On the other hand, I’ve been wanting to clear the path to the compost heap myself. Plus, I took a very windy back road home, and the bike was thrilled to whip through the curves.

I might tackle the trim next weekend, especially if the weather is as pleasant as it has been today. Mrs. Fetched suggested I borrow her mom’s pressure washer to knock the peeling paint off; if it won’t force water under the shingles or something similarly ugly, that would beat scraping it off by hand.

All I Want Is To Be In the Light

Those 300w halogen light-sticks really light up the driveway at night. Before I started TFM, and for a while afterward, the kids (ours and not-ours) used to play basketball at night (you can see where the goal used to be; Lobster tore it down in a drunken rampage that I neglected to write about at the time) and the light is quite handy for nighttime excursions to the detached garage or Studio FAR.

A couple of weeks ago, the bulb went the way of all bulbs… and since it’s about 15 feet off the ground, it’s not exactly a job one wants to tackle at night. But yesterday afternoon, I was sitting here by myself — me home from the yard sale, Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest doing the tax-free shopping day thing — and after catching up on a few blogs, I figured this was as good a time as any to take care of that business. So:

How do you change a light bulb at FAR Manor?

1) Get the extension ladder out of the cellar, clearing spider webs along the way.

2) Climb up and attempt to remove the glass.

3) Climb down, get a screwdriver, climb back up to (carefully!) pry the glass off the rubber seal. Remove glass and bulb, climb down.

4) Clean the haze off the glass.

5) Climb up with a new bulb (in a paper towel so you didn’t get skin oil on it) and install it.

6) Climb down, get the (now clean) glass, climb up, and snap the glass-holders into place.

7) Climb down & put the ladder away.

For those of you who were counting: yes, four trips up & down the ladder.

You might have noticed that the white trim needs to be scraped and painted. It’s pretty much the same all across the manor. But that can wait for cooler weather.

By the Numbers

Some random numerical thoughts…

Chance of rain today (forecast): 30%
Amount of dry pavement on the way home: 20%
Number of times I patted myself on the back for remembering the rain suit: 1
Cost to fill the motorcycle gas tank: $5.50
Chance of rain tomorrow: 30%
Hours The Boy’s girlfriend has spent at FAR Manor since Friday evening: 50
Hours on the road for Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest this weekend: 20
Days until The Boy gets rid of the ankle bracelet: 7
Days until The Boy gets an involuntary TB01: 8
Days it took to finish the floor: 18
Boxes of flooring left over: 2
Days before my vacation starts: 18
Days of vacation I wish I had: ∞

What’s got your number? or what numbers got you?

(Upper) Floored: The Final Frontier

After a nice afternoon at the resort, I stuck a couple of frozen pizzas in the oven and called it supper. As I didn’t have anything more pressing going on, I then decided to go ahead and finish up the floor. It took maybe an hour or so, and only hit one snag: I thought I would be able to slip the (thinned out) strips under the trim around the door, but it didn’t quite work that way. I ended up pulling the trim out at the bottom, and that gave me the necessary clearance. After feeding the last piece to the table saw, I put them back and got the camera.

Pictures? Ha. This occasion deserves a video! (10MB AVI) The bandwidth-challenged might prefer the thumbnail page instead.

I’ll leave it to the females to select (and preferably install) floor molding.

(Upper) Floored: Approaching the Finish Line

As it turns out, Nothing Happened yesterday. We ended up watching a couple of movies (Flushed Away and Syriana) and that was pretty much it. The glue supply was getting low; we called Big V since she was at Home Depot, but she was at a different store than the one we usually go to and they didn’t have it in stock. Oh well.

Daughter Dearest and I went up this afternoon and used up the rest of the glue, putting down one entire row and two pieces of another before the glue ran out completely. Looks like we’ll get some glue tonight (and Mrs. Fetched will look at floor molding while we’re there) and finish up tomorrow.

If you look at the picture (as usual, click to enlarge), you might notice that the strip on the left is shrinking a little more than perspective would account for. Due to the non-squareness of the room, we hit the gable a little crooked (it’s tapered too) and had to finagle the sides. That's what table saws are for.

(Upper) Floored: Laying it Down

Last time we went upstairs, the floor was ready for us to commence. And last night, Mrs. Fetched and I did just that, laying down two boxes worth.

Amazingly enough, Daughter Dearest didn’t see fit to come up and help us out in any possible way… I just can’t imagine her not wanting to make sure it got finished as quickly as possible.

Naturally, we have a few angles and corners, and that’s where the circular saw comes in. We had to slice about half an inch off the side of the board in that protruding corner in front of the closet door. I’m not really looking forward to the gable part; with our luck, we’ll have to slice off both sides. But if we can average two boxes a night, we should have it done in about a week.

UPDATE: I came home last night to find that Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest had been busy through the day. It’s almost halfway done now!

Upper Floored: Preparation (H)

In between me buying a new motorcycle and looking about 50 years into the future, we’ve been working on putting down wood flooring in Daughter Dearest’s bedroom. We’d done the hallway before — we know what to do now, it should be a breeze, right? Rip up the carpet and glue down the new floor….

Of course, any job at FAR Manor is going to turn into a complete hairball.

First, we found a mixture of plywood and particle board under the carpet. And that’s not all: I’m not sure exactly what those spots are, but they look like blood. It wouldn’t surprise me that FAR Manor was causing pain even while it was being built.

The instructions for the new flooring specially say that it can’t be put down over particle board. To make things even more “interesting,” there was a pretty significant sag in the middle of the floor, almost two inches (no, I’m not exaggerating). I looked at Mrs. Fetched and said, “I was right about this place.” (While she was going completely berserk, and driving me berserk wanting to buy this place, I saw its many flaws and described it as a pig in a poke. Like any data that doesn’t fit the previously-made decision, she ignored it. At the time.)

We got two opinions on what to do. Our carpenter friend, who advised us on the last floor job, said it would be fine to just glue (and possibly nail) the strips to the floor as it was. A second person, who would be the one to do the work, said it had to be straightened out — we could either jack it up from the ground floor (yeah right) or put some shims between the sub-floor and the plywood that would eventually be the substrate for the wood floor. Cosmic Rule of the Universe Number One: given two choices, Mrs. Fetched is always going to pick the most complicated option. If I don’t fall in line immediately, she’ll besiege me with whines, nags, dire predictions, until I throw my hands up and say some variation of “Do what you want — you’re going to anyway.” Of course it’s not an issue to her: she’s not the one doing the actual work.

In a vain attempt to get some peace, I had The Boy help me measure the sag and mark some spots. I figured I could partially even it out, enough to satisfy Mrs. Fetched’s mania for complicating things. I wasn’t having much luck, and she called in the people who caused all the commotion. Upon inspecting the floor, they informed us that there was a layer of plywood under the top layer, and if we could crowbar it out it would save them some time. Well… taking a crowbar to FAR Manor is a pleasure surpassed by very few things, and one of those is taking a crowbar to the chicken houses. J (the son of our carpenter friend) has been our extra resident for a couple of months now; he tends to be quiet and helpful so he doesn’t get quite the coverage of M.A.E. or Lobster. We spent a happy evening of echar la casa por la ventana (literally, not the Hispanic idiom for a wild party) because the particle board came up in pieces and we could toss the small- and medium-size pieces down to the front yard instead of carrying them. In fact, Mrs. Fetched caught me singing some happy 80s tune, and wondered why I wasn’t mad anymore. How quickly we forget. :-P

Somewhere in there, Mrs. Fetched got one of the farm trucks, and we finished up by loading up the fragged particle board. I got a perfect action shot of J tossing a big chunk on the first attempt.

That got us through the long weekend. Last night, Mrs. Fetched and I cut 1/4-inch plywood to lay down over the new floor (the guy who did the work said it would be best if we did). I was hoping to come home to find it already nailed down, but Cosmic Rule of the Universe Number Two says: if I don’t do it around here, it doesn’t get done. Taking a hammer to FAR Manor is less satisfying than a crowbar, but it’ll do in a pinch.

Tomorrow, we get to glue down the floor… since it’s Daughter Dearest’s room, she gets to help. A lot.

Home 0wn3rsh1p – a Thought Experiment

James Kunstler’s column today is the sort of thing that brings FAR Manor to mind. Not so much the state of architecture, nor even the shoddy build quality of most homes today.

My first thought upon reading it was that the real failure isn't architecture — or even construction — so much as people collectively have a “busted give-a-damn.” But then I thought about it a little further. Owning — or rather, being 0wn3d by — FAR Manor has taught me that two things are required to maintain a home: 1) money; 2) time (and improving a home requires the same, just more of it… lots more). Anyone who marketed any part of a house as “maintenance free” should have been summarily drawn and quartered, but that's another story. This tale is going to be a thought experiment that will perhaps illuminate the current situation.

Let’s look at Joe and Jane Average. They bought a tract house back when Joe had a decent manufacturing job and Jane was working part-time as a bookkeeper. Like most people these days, they bought something a little more expensive than they should have, but figured they could sell it in a few years for a tidy profit. Then comes the perfect storm: the decent job went to China, the local housing market cratered with the job market, and a birth-control failure led to a couple of unexpected kids. Joe’s “lucky” — he’s working a couple of so-called part-time jobs, six and a half days a week at crap wages, that bring in about 3/4 of what he used to make on a 40-hour shift. Jane still has her bookkeeping work, but she hasn’t had a raise in three years and is mostly tied up minding the kids.

Instead of owning the house, the house now 0wns them. They tried selling it, but the few offers they got for it weren’t enough to cover the mortgage, so they’re stuck. Fortunately, they were smart enough to nail down a decent fixed rate before things went to hell; most of their acquaintances with creative financing got foreclosed on last year, and most everyone else is looking at that reset and sighing in resignation. What Joe and Jane are bringing in would be enough, except for the credit cards. They ran up some plastic debt back when things were looking good; they bought a few luxury items and figured they’d have plenty of time to pay them off. Then the clock ran out and left them hanging — everything not going into living expenses is now barely keeping them abreast of the credit cards.

So the siding's starting to look a bit grungy, and it’s even coming loose in a couple of places. The fake-wood trim needs to be repainted, and the front door frame is dry-rotting at the bottom. The living room carpet is, to put it nicely, shot. Joe has little experience with construction or carpentry work, Jane none at all — they could do some maintenance, but neither one has much time or any energy to do so much as paint the trim.

They’re holding on by their fingernails, folks. They nearly got burned by a debt consolidation “service” that was saturating the radio with ads last year, which turned out to be little more than a scam — there may be legit ones out there, but they don’t trust any of them now. They looked into bankruptcy, but Bush-league made sure that door was slammed in their faces. Their few friends are in worse shape than themselves. The car is starting to make a weird noise (the second one got sold a few months ago, just before it went to pieces; they used the money to pay their property taxes). The bright spot is that they should be getting a few hundred bucks back on their taxes, which will go to fix the car.

Is it any wonder that people aren’t maintaining their houses?

Compared to Joe, I’m far better off. My job hasn’t been outsourced (yet), and I have (if Mrs. Fetched allows) a little time on weekends to fix steps or work on a wood floor. FAR Manor, as I’ve found by pulling up carpet, is far from quality construction (and I give Mrs. Fetched hell about buying this place every time, you betcha)… but it’s mostly maintainable. I can manage a few of the things that need to be fixed, and the few things I want to do.

The Averages might have a way out, though — now the thought experiment begets a thought experiment within itself. Jane’s bookkeeping skills have saved their bacon, so far; she set up a budget and has managed their money the way a skilled kayaker negotiates a Class V rapids. One mistake, or the submerged rock of an unexpected expense, could spell disaster; but so far so good. She made a little extra money this spring doing taxes — a local tax preparer was swamped with complex (i.e. expensive) returns, and farmed out many of the 1040A and EZ jobs to her. A little of the money treated the family to dinner at a cheap Mexican restaurant; the rest went to a credit card payment, opening up a little breathing room.

But I digress. One day, one of her neighbors sees Jane playing in the front yard with her kids. She just landed a job at a big-box store, nothing to brag about but it will help to supplement what her husband Frank makes doing odd jobs. Would Jane watch her kids (close to Jane’s in age) in the afternoon? She couldn’t pay anything right away, but —

“I have a better idea,” says Jane. That afternoon, Frank brings the kids over. While the kids get to know each other, he tacks up the loose siding and pressure washes the whole house. The next day, he paints over the trim. The house is looking better already. Joe gets home and silently picks up the trash in the yard before collapsing with a beer in front of a TV he suddenly can’t stand to watch.

That weekend, the two families get together and have a cookout during the few afternoon hours that Joe has free. Frank says he can replace the front door, frame and all, with a better one that he bought for a job (that fell through) some time back. Joe offers to trade the lumber he’d bought for a deck, back when he had a life, and the deal is struck on the spot. “I’ll keep an eye out for some carpet for your living room, too,” Frank says. “If there’s no hurry, I can probably get a roll-end for nothing or next to it.”

At his jobs, Joe gives Frank’s name to co-workers — there are always things that need to be done, and people willing to pay someone else to do them. Jane starts getting money instead of barter for the day care work, and takes in one more kid (all she feels comfortable handling). Slowly, almost reluctantly, the credit card debt gets whittled down. Jane manages to squirrel away a few hundred bucks for emergencies; the car will need new tires sooner or later and gas prices are only getting worse. Joe and a co-worker start car pooling to split the expenses.

The Averages are nowhere near out of the woods yet; a major sickness or accident could put them under in a heartbeat. They have put their house back on the market; it’s the nicest one on the street now. But as tempting as it is, I can’t in good conscious pull a deus ex machina and give them an offer that would pay off all their debts with enough left over for a deposit on an affordable apartment.

In the end, it’s not completely their fault that they bought the Endless Growth line; it seemed true for so long. But they are slowly bartering their way into (what they hope is) a better future.

Steppin’ Out

The steps leaving the porch out back have been in a state of disrepair for some time now. Daughter Dearest nearly hurt herself when the top step gave way on her one day, as she was carrying the litter box out to dump. Since then, she’s been taking the big step down to the second one, and recently told us that it was starting to get loose too. Mrs. Fetched suggested that I take care of it, since I had the supplies ready for some time, and so I did (after resting up from a bike ride).

This is the end of the second step. You can see it's a little rotted-out, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the top step and I deemed this one salvageable. I cut a new tread for the top step.


The support pieces on the top two steps were split pretty badly, so I replaced them. The original ones had been painted, but not until everything was put together. I went ahead and painted them first, using some leftover paint from the gable job. Here, the top support is still getting leveled up before nailing it in.


While trekking to and fro to grab tools and other necessities, I noticed that the blackberries are opening up. We have vines scattered around the yard; if we get a normal amount of rain we’ll have some goodies for 4th of July.


Of course, the newly-painted step was much brighter than the rest of the steps, so I brushed off the dirt and painted everything to match up.

The deck above is a postage stamp, but the railing needed to be scraped and re-painted as well. The deck itself had never been painted, so I guess I’ll tackle all that next.


More work than strictly necessary, but with any luck I’ll never have to do it again.

Cam This Thing

Coming in from work Tuesday, I hit the garage door opener, and saw the door twitch and stop. Figuring I just didn’t hold the button down long enough, I did it again and this time it worked.

Then it turned out to be the last time. After that, it would move an inch or so one way or the other, then stop.

Mrs. Fetched took it better than usual; inconvenience usually puts her in a foul mood. She seemed to enjoy the sight of Daughter Dearest and her boyfriend holding up the door as she backed Barge Vader in & out of the garage, though. But she told me (on several occasions) where to find the manual for the opener, and asked me to fix it (if possible) before they got back from Savannah.

With she, Daughter Dearest, and Barge Vader safely out of the way, I got the ladder and had a look while the boyfriend pushed the button. It quickly became apparent that a bumper (attached to the chain) was in the wrong place. The arm that connects the door to the mechanism was pushing alarmingly far, so I figured something had jumped the track somewhere. Getting out the manual, this is what I found:



The “down limit cam” (circled in the above drawing, in the position where it should have been) was instead all the way around the pulley, where the red X is. Figuring the “up limit cam” was similarly shifted, I had the boyfriend hoist the garage door so I could measure the amount of necessary travel. I moved the cams where I thought they should be and tried again.

This time, the door stopped going up about two feet short. That cam was in the right place to begin with, it seems. After a few iterations, I got the cams in the right place and drove my car back inside for the night.

If only paying off the mortgage were so easy.

Outdoor life

A brief quiz: if a gutter looks like this, is it time to replace it?

Top view:


Bottom view:

It's amazing how much crud can accumulate in a rain gutter over a year; this is what I found after cleaning it out.

We got to sleep late this morning — Mrs. Fetched has been doing a fair bit of that since the chickens went to the store, which is good because she needs some rest — but the rest of the day has been busy. I was blowing & raking leaves in the front yard (it's easier to use the blower to get them out from under the hedges, but faster to rake them once they're in the yard), boggling at how many there were, when I finally ran out of extension cord. I’d been planning to run the generator anyway, so I went to the detached garage to get it.

It wasn’t there.

I looked again — there’s a lot of debris in there and it could have been buried — but it still wasn’t there. Mrs. Fetched grabbed her smellphone and started calling numbers in her Received list until she found someone who was with The Boy. He tried telling us that we had helped him load it onto a truck and take it to the place he’d stayed the last two summers! WRONG — we wouldn’t have sent anything over there that we hoped to ever see again.

We jumped into Barge Vader and rode over there. The lady of the house was home, and we asked her about it. “Oh, it was here but it was stolen off the back of Tony’s truck.” Whoever Tony is, and why was it on the back of his truck in the first place, and why didn’t she report it stolen? More likely that she pawned it for drugs or defense attorneys.

So The Boy is toast around here. Mrs. Fetched was ready to confiscate his large guitar amp, but he’d gotten in the house (idiot me left the ladder out at the outbuilding, where I took the above pictures) and picked it up already. We did grab the one (best) guitar he left here though. But if he expects to set foot in this house (legally) again, he’s going to start doing things our way. More likely, he will live elsewhere until he ends up in jail.

Floored, Part II

Another non-relaxing weekend, but I was mentally prepared. This is the weekend, Mrs. Fetched said, that we would get the living room floor done. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but when I saw the sander in the back of Barge Vader I knew it was going to happen. Of course, it would have been better had we nothing else going on, but there’s always something going on. So The Boy and I got the last of the furniture out of the living room, then I grabbed the sander. “Here goes nothing,” I said, and I was right: I hit the switch, and the sander hummed and popped the breaker on the motor housing. Trying another outlet, and getting the same result, I called Home Despot and they told me to bring it back. Naturally, it worked there (we think something was stuck that came free on the ride back to the store) but they gave us another one and credited us the downtime on our rental. But by the time we got home, it was really too late to get started so we agreed it was on for Saturday. We did check the sander and it worked, so that was one thing out of the way.

And on it went. I began Saturday way too early by taking The Boy in for Part II of his GED exam. He’s not sure about the math, but everything else he thinks went well. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I came back home, determined to get at least one of the two things done that I wanted (cleaning out the gutter on the outbuilding and bottling my beer). Figuring the former would be quicker than the latter, I got a ladder and the leaf blower. The gutter was pretty well clogged, but the blower made quick work of it once I got on the roof and scooted over to each end.

With that out of the way, I headed back into the living room and got to work. A square-buff sander is a rather large piece of gear, about the size of an industrial floor polisher. But like a well-balanced motorcycle, the weight went away once it was in motion. Like a pipes-addict’s bike, it was also LOUD, so I got my earplugs and kept at it. The sander had a vacuum thing and a bag to catch the sawdust, but it was leaving 3–4 times as much on the floor as was going into the bag. At least it wasn’t getting in the air — maybe the sheet we put over the hallway entrance made Murphy cry.

I made a complete pass over the floor, then vacuumed, then made another pass. It was at this point that I realized that someone else had sanded and surfaced this floor in years past — and didn’t do a very good job of it. Talking to some people, I ascertained that the last people to do this had used a drum sander. A drum sander works much more quickly than the square-buff type, but quickly digs divots in the floor if you pause for even the briefest moment. Judging from the lines, whoever did it before was going back-and-forth with it — not the right way to do it.

After four passes, there was still a fair amount of stain left — not only the divots and uneven places, but in the grain itself. There was also a strip of unsanded floor along the walls. Since we needed a couple of other things from Home Despot, we also picked up a “palm sander” (first time I’ve ever heard that term for a hand-held electric sander, but whatever). This thing turned out to be a Little Cricket: small, noisy, and powerful. It was also quite happy to walk along the wall (or wherever) without me helping it.

At this point, I was ready to hit it with the 80-grit sandpaper, but Mrs. Fetched was officially In A Hurry. “Let’s just go with it like it is,” she said. Not by The Book, but I was feeling too tired & lazy to argue. We got some things to spend the night somewhere else, so we wouldn’t breathe fumes all night, and Mrs. Fetched took Daughter Dearest somewhere — leaving me to put down the clear-coat. This stuff smelled like model airplane glue, and stunk worse (seeing as we were dealing with it by the gallon). I had an open window and a fan to keep the fumes down, but I seriously don’t remember painting myself out the front door. All I remember is that I left the lid to the can on the fireplace lintel and had to walk across the slick floor to get it. Thank God I didn’t fall down. It also turned out there was some miscommunication; the females hadn’t got anything for the night and they were rather out of sorts about it. I blamed the fumes. They didn’t argue.

Sunday after church, it was time to continue. I put the 120-grit screen on the sander and went over the floor. “Are you sure it’s supposed to look like that?” Mrs. Fetched asked dubiously. Well… no, it’s not supposed to look like a 400 square foot scuff mark; you have to put the second coat on. I vacuumed it up, and Mrs. Fetched said “That should be good enough. Look,” and swiped the floor with her finger. When it came up white, she got the mop and went over it again. By this time, it was about 5 p.m. This time, I pointed the fan out the front door. This worked much better to keep the fumes tolerable; Mrs. Fetched (who gets a headache upon the merest whiff of most chemicals) was able to sit in the door to the kitchen and watch — and I remembered painting myself out this time.

With some time to kill, we took everything back to Home Despot and finally remembered to pick up some fluorescent lights for the kitchen. We also killed some time looking at area rugs (and boggling at the prices on some of them), took Daughter Dearest to meet some of her chorus friends for a “business” trip to a largish church, picked up some milk, and went down to her parents’ place. They had just returned from a week in Pensacola, so we killed some more time talking about that and everything else. We returned to FAR Manor at 9 p.m. to find the smell tolerable (especially behind the sheet in the hallway). I went to get Daughter Dearest from her outing and returned to find Mrs. Fetched sacked out.

By the way, she loves how it turned out. To me, it’s a rustic, kind of hunting-lodge look. I suggested we needed to hang some animal hides on the walls to go with the floor; she said “Yuck.”

Not bad — it cost us about $215 in rentals and materials, a dang sight less than what we’d been quoted to have it done. The biggest hassles were moving the furniture out and having to stay elsewhere for a night, which we would have had to do if we’d hired someone to do it. The actual sanding and coating was fairly easy. We have to move stuff back in, but we’re going to get a rug or three and some felt pads for the furniture first.

Oh… I did get my beer bottled up too. I was up past 11 with it, but the deed was done. I’m naming this batch, a dark ale, “Rosemary Wood Floor.”

Embarrassment of riches

Lots and lots of blog fodder has come by in the last few days — so much, I’m having a hard time writing it all down.

I recorded a long ramble from a guy waiting in line for a PS3 on Thursday night; The Boy was getting paid to hold a place for someone else & I had to take him some insulin. If I’d have known I would have been doing that in the morning, I would have had a warmer jacket and a video camera — as it is, I have to get some audio off a digital voice recorder before I return it (POS Sony won’t work with Macs), then I’ll edit it down and post a link.

We finished the living room floor. I have pictures, and will have a post up in a day or so. Also got the beer bottled and the crud cleaned out of the gutter on my outbuilding.

Right now, Daughter Dearest wants to borrow my computer; I can start writing drafts on the G3.

This stinks....

The septic tank, once again, got backed up. $350 to pump out 1000 gallons of $#¡+ (which will be bought on the open market by right-wing media wackjobs to fling at the next Congress, no doubt). Looks like the field lines are shot — probably a cool $3000 to get that fixed.

Just how the hell are we supposed to make improvements to this place when we can barely keep up with the freeking maintenance?

I told Mrs. Fetched we shouldn’t buy this place. Over and over I told her. She said, “You decide,” I said, “No,” and she totally ignored me.

Rodent Death

B1-66er has a rat problem, perhaps brought on by too many years of not cleaning up his apartment. He has, as part of his rat extermination project, decided to clean his place up. Cleaning up is a good idea, but sometimes it's easier to just take what you want with you and leave, burning the place down behind you. On that other hand, that’s probably not a good way to either endear B1 to his landlord or get his security deposit back.

Mice I've had to deal with. Large fields & woods mice, mind you, but still mice. Rats, not so often — they like to hang out at the chicken houses, since there's fresh meat on the hoof and it's an evil place anyway. I've killed the little SOBs with snap traps, well-thrown shoes, poison, water, (the Natural Way) cats & dogs, winter, and hand-to-hand combat — sticks, shovels, a hammer — whatever is hefty, swingable, and available.

Details follow. If you’re not the kind of person who enjoys stories about Chicken House Hell, you probably want to skip this entry.

• The latest one was when I was removing copper pipe from under the house, part of the old heating system, decommissioned under the previous owners. Except for the area where the water heater (and the old oil-based boiler for the registers) live, under the master bedroom, the rest of the basement is one big crawl space. The entire crawl space area is covered with plastic sheet to form a vapor barrier (which incidentally keeps water leaks from making musty smells). To make a long story short, as I was getting started, I put my hand down on the plastic and felt it squirming under my hand. I snatched my hand back, and could see a largish shadow crawling away under the plastic. Since a hammer was in reach, I grabbed it and started whacking. Hearing a satisfying squeal of pain, I whacked it once more and got to work.

• Before I moved to FAR Manor and became FARfetched, I was Dirt Road, living in an extended double-wide in the woods, nearly 1/2 mile from the nearest pavement. I caught plenty of large-ish mice with a pair of snap traps, those that got through the perimeter patrolled by two cats and a dog. The mice were a bit too big for regular mouse traps, but an out-and-out rat trap would have really made a mess. The bail would come down and hit the mouse, not cleanly across the neck, but along the back of the skull — still a fatal blow, but one that would make their nasty little eyes bug out somewhat. I often found the traps upside-down and/or moved up to a foot away. Often, the skull would pinch the bail, making it hard to shake the dead rodent loose without touching it.

So one night, Mrs. Fetched and I were wakened by a POP. “What was that?” she said.

“Rodent death. The mouse trap just went off.”

clacka-clacka-clacka

“And what’s that?”

“I think he’s flopping around in the trap.”

“Gross!” she cried. “Do something with it!”

We walked into the kitchen and flipped the light on. The mouse, whose size approached that fuzzy grey line separating “large mouse” from “small rat,” treated us to one final twitch and expired. A small pool of blood lay several inches from the trap; probably shot from its exploded eye. “YUCK!” opined Mrs. Fetched, and fled the scene while I cleaned off the floor and shook the mouse off the bail out back.

• Yes, I said “winter” was one of the tools I’ve used to deal Rodent Death. I learned that there can be worse things than a mouse inside: there can be a mouse under the house who scratches the floor joists under your bed while you’re trying to sleep at night. It stayed fairly warm under the double-wide all winter, probably helped by the occasional leak in the heating ductwork. This was January 2000, and the storm we called “Ice2K” knocked out power on a Monday and kept it knocked out for 5-1/2 days all told. Having learned a little something from the 1993 blizzard, we had a generator and I ran it for an hour or two every month to keep it from gumming up. The Boy and I hoisted it onto the back deck and we ran extension cords through the back door and into the house. We had lights, radio, and an electric space heater — but the furnace outlet we’d found some time back and noted for future use had disappeared. Fortunately, we had plenty of firewood (another thing we learned from ’93) and could keep the living room and kitchen warm. But not the space under the house.

Thursday brought two significant events: the joist-scratcher gave up the ghost and it occurred to me to have a look at the furnace control box. Finding a schematic conveniently printed on the back side of the control box cover, I chopped off the female end of a long extension cord and spliced the wires into the furnace. I plugged it into the gennie, and was immediately rewarded with the hisssss-whoomp of a live furnace. Hooray — warm house and no more mouse. That kept us going until Saturday morning, when the power came back on.

• Sometimes, you get lucky. One night, I heard a rustling noise come from a paper sack, along with a frustrated squeak. I quickly closed up the top of the sack and took it outside, shaking it a bit to disorient the prisoner and get Megabyte’s attention. Megabyte was my fat cat, a brown-mackerel and white pattern I learned to call it, and he watched with interest as I laid the sack on the ground and opened the top. Out shot the mouse, and Megabyte took it from there.

• At Chicken House Hell, there are real rats, albeit with short tails. Like B1’s new friend kind of rats. There are mice too, but rats make for easier targets for a swung stick or shovel. But most of the time, the in-laws’ myriad dogs are around to do the job. I missed this particular episode personally, but Mrs. Fetched told me all about it. Duke, the alpha dog, trapped a rat and it bit back — latching onto Duke’s lip and taking a wild ride, getting flung and spun every which way before Duke got his own teeth into the situation. That usually doesn’t happen; the dogs get the better of the rats much more quickly and cleanly on average.

Of course, deterrent is better than war. Mrs. Fetched hasn’t grasped that; either that or she would rather have mice in the house than cats. But there’s nothing like a cat (or a terrier, if you’re a dog person) for issuing a warning. Only the most desperate or foolish rodents hang around where they can smell something bred to hunt them.

Floored (or, the anti-weekend) [UPDATED]

I forgot to mention why there are 20kg weights on the floor, and slipped in another comment here & there.

We ended up checking out Friday. I had Mrs. Fetched agreeing to stay through the weekend, then The Boy started flaking out and generally becoming insufferable. The phone calls started coming with uncomfortable frequency (I now know what not to take next year… smellphones). Seems like our corner of the county just comes apart if we’re not there. Mrs. Fetched promised that we would take the entire week next year, and the chicken houses wouldn’t get in the way. I’ve had her reassurances, several related to buying FAR Manor not the least of them, not pan out far too often to put much stock in that. But we’ll see.

My boss called again on Friday morning, as we were packing up, with some more issues — if I’m so indispensable that I have to be online all through vacation, they should give me a title and salary to match. Either that, or hire me some help.

Home and unpacked, Mrs. Fetched got annoyed anew at the white carpet covering much of the house. With us both home, chicken houses not an issue for a little while, she decided that we should try putting down the hardwood floor in the hallway. We called our friends for advice — he did all kinds of construction work before he fell off a roof and broke his neck a while back. He can walk with support, and at least advise on construction projects, nowadays. Not only does he have the know-how, he has the tools. We spent much of Friday evening ripping up the mark of insanity (white carpet), gathering material and cutting the jambs in the hallway (six doors in 18 feet, GAFB) so the new flooring could be tucked under.


This morning, up dim & early to return the jamb saw to Home Despot and pick up the advisor. It took us a couple of hours to get as far as you see here. On a couple of occasions, he got down on the floor and helped — one of the few times since he had his accident that he’s done any construction work. I was concerned for him, but realized he needed to do it — he lasted about 10 minutes before he got to hurting too much though. Working through the day, me measuring and Mrs. Fetched cutting pieces, making sure they fit into place, laying down glue and finally pushing the pieces into each other and tapping them in. We got over halfway through before giving out.


Part of the slowdown is the nature of the flooring underneath. Check the first pic again: there’s plywood running up the center of the hallway, but that lighter stuff to the right of the hammer is crappy particle board. Not only is it particle board, it’s mostly higher than the plywood. I took a chisel to what you see there to even it up (the only good thing about particle board is that it chisels down well), but there’s a definite slope to the floor, left downhill, near the end of the hall. That’s why you see two 20kg weights there: it’s pushing the floorboards into the glue. As we toiled away, Mrs. Fetched said on several occasions that Leon (the guy who originally built the house that has become FAR Manor) was notorious for cutting corners. She knew this all along, and still wanted to buy this house?

Mrs. Fetched is confident that she can finish the job with a little help from The Boy. Good thing, because I’m off to Florida tomorrow morning.

Disaster Averted

Shortly after getting home from work on Wednesday, Mrs. Fetched told me a tale of… “whoa.”

A while back, some friends of ours moved out of a trailer and gave us their large-ish propane tank so we could replace the ones we were renting. (For those of you who don’t have one of these, most people rent their tank and are locked into a single supplier. If you own your own tank, you can get propane from the low bidder.) Wednesday was the day when the incumbent came to cart off their tanks and install ours. They’re happy to do this... for a price, of course.

In this case, the price included three or four hours of labor. The regulator on our tank was shot, and had to be replaced. Then there was the minor detail of the old system being two small tanks ganged together; that gave them some grief too. The real fun started when they did the leak test... and found (and fixed) two leaks. Under the house. Next to the furnace.

Mrs. Fetched told me all that to complain about the $420 bill. “We should have just paid the $51 tank rental.”

“Um,” I replied, “Not that I’m all that fond of this place, but I would prefer it didn’t catch fire some night in October.”

“It wouldn’t catch fire, it would probably blow up.”

All the more reason to not worry about the $420… especially since the furnace is under the downstairs bedrooms. Not that I care so much about the house, but I would prefer not to have to escape in the middle of the night and try to remember grabbing my wife, kids, M.A.E., and laptop on the way out.

We have network

I have to hand it to Alltel — the new DSL box came in today, the most optimistic end of the 3–5 days the support guy said it would take. The CD had been shoved into the box at an odd angle and came out warped, but it wasn’t difficult to locate the disk that came with the old DSL box and use that instead.

With the DSL working again, I quickly realized that the Airport hub had taken a hit in the Ethernet port as well. I had just enough time to get to Office Max before they closed and grabbed a D-Link router. It didn’t take long to set it up and get it talking to the DSL box, and it has a built-in 4-port Ethernet hub so I took the Netgear hub out.

Daughter Dearest is ecstatic, and I’m pretty happy too because I can work at home tomorrow.

It never registered

As the time for refinishing the wood floor in our living room draws ever closer (i.e. we’ll get it done someday), questions come up. One of the big ones is what we’re going to do about the baseboard heaters lining many of the walls.

The baseboards are the original heating system in the manor. There’s an oil-fired boiler in the basement that used water from the original well (a second well was drilled somewhere along the way, because of the taste of the water in the first); the system would simply send hot water (steam?) through the baseboards. If I remember correctly, the house I lived in through high school (in Moline, MI) had a similar system. You would hear an occasional gurgle, and that was about it.

Over the years, a couple of problems developed with the system: the chimney cap came off, and a water pipe broke somewhere upstairs. The previous owners threw up their hands, installed a gas furnace (actually one upstairs and one downstairs), and shut down the baseboard system. The chimney is blocked up with a piece of tin, with a couple of bricks to keep it there, to keep rain water from running in.

A friend of ours used to do construction work, until he fell off a roof a couple of years ago and broke his neck. He cruises around in a wheelchair most days, but on good days he manages with a walker or even a cane. He’s trying to get back into the saddle, as a designer & supervisor if nothing else. So when we told him we were planning to refinish our floor, he advised against it — he explained the process, and the many things to go wrong, irreversibly so. But when we got quoted $4200 to have it done (which would about cover a new floor entirely), we’ve pretty much decided to take our chances.

It was the process of getting the quote that led to the question of the baseboards. A floor sander can’t quite reach the corners, so normally you cover that up with some molding. The baseboards protrude nearly two inches from the wall, and are mounted about an inch above the floor, so they’ll have to come off (the quote included removing and discarding the baseboard). When I mentioned that to our friend, he got a funny look and asked us why we wanted to take them out — hey, they’re not working anyway.

“Some people use them for cooling,” he said. “You bury a water tank and pump water through the system. It works about as good as air conditioning.”

“That system pulls water out of its own well,” I pointed out. “What if we just ran a return line to the well instead of using a tank?”

He looked awestruck. “That would be cold water coming out of a well!”

So I need to find and fix a water line upstairs, locate the original well, and run a return pipe to it. If it doesn’t pan out, there’s not a lot of investment involved. Low risk, potential high return, what more could you ask? But now we’ll have to remove the baseboards to do the floor and replace them afterwards.

A bit stiff this morning...

Current music: John Eddie - Jungle Boy

Rule #1: It’s always going to take more effort than you think.

Facing the house, the yard to the left of the sidewalk has always been a bit raggy-looking compared to the other side, which is fairly lush Bermuda (and some kind of violet run wild out of the flower bed, but that’s another story). Looking a little closer, I found that it’s pretty well overrun with some kind of moss (it doesn’t get much sun).

I got the iron rake out and attacked. It worked better than I thought; the moss came up but the grass (and other weeds) stayed put. But it was a long, tedious process — the rake would get clogged up with moss and I’d tonk it out into the driveway. The pile behind the raked area got alarmingly large very quickly.

About halfway through, I called Daughter Dearest down, who was (to say the least) highly reluctant to leave her computer nest for fresh air and dubbayou oh arr kay. She protested the bugs would eat her; they weren’t bothering me but I got the repellant out for her anyway. After trying a couple of ways, we settled on me loosening the moss with the iron rake and her using the leaf rake (and later on, a blower) to get it into the driveway. Toward the end, I found the best way to do it was to push/pull the rake back and forth across the moss, instead of just pulling it. I hope I won’t need it for future reference, but at least I hit on that as I got to the most moss-infested quarter of the yard. That pile is almost all moss, from about 400 square feet of yard. Sheesh.

So we ended up with a huge pile of moss in the driveway. After trying to carry it off a rakeload at a time, I grabbed the tarp off the woodpile and we were able to cart it off in two loads. DD, at this point, said she was “whupped” and left. Not that seeding & feeding is all that difficult, although I ran out of daylight while spreading the straw across the area.

And so, as I was about to settle down last night, write this, then go to bed — Mrs. Fetched’s mom called to inform us of a wiring problem at one of the chicken houses. I was ready to fling the phone down the hall, needless to say. Her brother, Mr. Sunshine, did most of the work while I mostly held a flashlight. Splicing a 240-volt line doesn’t take too long, especially when the breaker is off and there’s plenty of slack in the line. Replacing a 50-amp breaker (it protects a sub-panel that runs the feedline motor among other things), especially when you don’t have a replacement at hand, takes a little longer. As usual, “only a few minutes” was an hour and a half. If we win one of those huge lotto jackpots, I swear I’ll pay the Air National Guard to use those chicken houses for live-ordinance target practice while I get video.