This cOld House 2

I am grateful that we have the resources to take care of the mess into which we've gotten.

I got a call from my general contractor yesterday letting me know that he should have numbers in today, and he'll give me a shout or drop something off tomorrow so we can make some decisions about what gets done and when. The landscapers showed up yesterday and blew all our leaves, (2 guys for 3 1/2 hours,) and the clean up crew should be by by Friday to do all the weeding and dead head for winter. The irrigation guys showed up this morning to blow out the system, and imagine my surprise when I went downstairs to the pit to turn off the irrigation valve and discovered a small stream coming from the coal bin.

This was not the usual pond that accumulates after a rain. I can handle that. It seeps in under the concrete wall and collects in the old coal dip, and will be taken care of when we dig down next to there to add the new garage. This new creek was coming from the coal bin, but appeared to be more of the waterfall variety, cascading through the dropped ceiling, (which Dan wants to remove,) and running off the built up floor, underneath the wall and to the floor drain in the adjacent furnace room. I removed what we had left stored in there, (a garage box and the bar stools,) and set about going into a full panic. I called two handymans and the GC and couldn't get through to anyone and settled on the plumber who did our backflow re-cert on short notice in September. Sure enough they had a guy over here in 20 minutes. We ripped down the ceiling and found a plastic pressure sleeve DUCT-TAPED around an old galvanized pipe. Except for the expletives, I was speechless.

In shutting off the water to repair it, I discovered that the entire kitchen is plumbed off the outside line that runs through the deduct meter. (A deduct meter is a device added to count the 'outside' water that is used in the house. We don't get charged a sewer fee on the water we use in the pool, irrigation system or outside hose bibbs.) This was done by the former frugal owner and is very un-kosher.

Every time we do anything, we find something like this: The disposal plumbed incorrectly, with no trap attached; the 240 volt outlet in the laundry room... no-not for the dryer - it's just a regular outlet; the aluminum gutter straps used to hold on a whole section of roof; the 115,000 BTU piece of crap furnace that is only 2 years old but needs to be replaced because it's grossly over-sized for the space it heats (and by association, cools or in its case, doesn't cool because the blower is too grossly over-sized to run A/C.)

It just keeps getting better and better.

Good news! The carpenter is supposed to be by on Monday to start on the sunken/sinkin' living room. We may be able to get the stacks of books and boxes out of the foyer by the time our guests arrive for Thanksgiving. Wish us luck at the zoning approval meeting tonight for the garage. I hope no disgruntled neighbors show up. Dan's attending in his uniform, just in case. Bad form, to pick on the military these days.

More later, I'm going to go wash my dishes with illegally plumbed stolen water.

- R -