sarahmichelef

Furnace estimates are both overwhelming and depressing.  Don't worry, it's not dead, we're not sitting here shivering.  It's just not a simple replacement job.  (Am I surprised?  Well, not really.  Nothing in this house is ever a simple job.)  The issue is that the new furnace will not be vented out the existing chimney and there is debate as to whether or not the existing water heater will create enough heat to burn off all the goo in its exhaust.  Suggestions for what to do about this range from hiring a separate company to rip out the existing (asbestos-insulated) pipe to nothing at all (with the middle ground being putting in a new, force-vented water heater or lining the existing chimney and pipe and that being sufficient to deal with those issues).

I think I need to call back the first estimator and get his opinion on the chimney issue, because he was the one who didn't even bat an eyelash at the pipe and chimney as they stand right now.  He made a comment about "Oh good, your chimney is already capped so that's not an issue" so I don't know what's up with that.  I wouldn't bother, but I think if I lay out the prices he's among the best.

Ugh.  Did I say that already?  Here, let me say it again.

Ugh.

Hilarous, though: one of the guys was about half an hour late.  Another of the guys was an hour early.  So they chatted in the driveway for a couple of minutes and early guy came back at his appointed time.

relentlesstoil suggests a "hap-den".
( blathering about reorganizing the sewing room )
And that's my story. It occurs to me that the only thing more pathetic than spending a Friday night cleaning and organizing is spending a Friday night cleaning and organizing and then blogging about it.

*Points to anyone who gets this reference.  And I suddenly think I've played that particular "guess the cultural reference" game before.  Oh well.

This morning (it was after TRex was up, so sometime between 6:40 and 8:15 AM) I had a dream that included the following features:

• Me hanging out in a hotel wearing no pants.  Along with a lot of UMass sociologists (many of whom were not identifiable as such).  They were all wearing pants, though.  There was no clear reason for my pantsless state.
  
• Two job offers I was trying to weight the benefits/drawbacks of:  being assistant chair of the UMass sociology department, or being Barak Obama's VP candidate.  I ended up deciding on the latter, but then I realized that I would not be 35 years old at the time of our inauguration.  I told the campaign this and they explained that he wouldn't be, either, but there was a loophole where if you were found to be competent, you didn't have to be 35.
• Somehow from this it morphed into something related to Sex and the City - Stanford was there.

I was all cozywarm because last night we put up thermal curtains in our bedroom - the window is pretty darn leaky AND our room effectively has 3 exterior walls (one truly exterior wall and then two that have crawlspace next to them.

Today we went and contributed mightily to the American economy.  See, my child flat out refuses to wear anything that isn't a dress.  She can occasionally be convinced to settle for a skirt, but she'd much prefer a dress.  So we trotted off to the outlets where we acquired a handful of dresses for her, some leggings and tights for underneath them (she's now allowed to wear tights to school because she can manage them by herself), and some stuff that was on superclearance for next year (size FIVE WTF???).  And I got a couple of shirts and new sportsbras.  So yay.

Remember our basement drain leaking fiasco? The one that left us with destroyed drywall in the laundry room?


We've finally acquired the stuff we need to REPAIR the drywall. Since they had to cut a portion of the stud away to get to the offending drain, we made a little frame of 1x4 that will substitute for stud. M was mister doubter about my measurements, but it fits beautifully, as I knew it would.  We'll anchor the frame to the existing drywall ABOVE where the repair will take place and then attach the new drywall to both the frame and the remaining stud at the top, and the frame and the corner stud at the bottom.  We're going to put in a removable panel in front of the cleanout that the plumber put in so that if things get mucked up again we can get in to at least that without requiring major reconstruction afterwards.

A couple of weeks ago we got a notice from the city that they would be taking out one of our trees due to storm-related damage.  We figured it would be one of the ones out front (as seen in this picture) - one of them looked, to our eyes, to fit the criterion of "half of the crown damaged" that the letter listed.

This morning when we left the house, there was a notice posted on the tree next to the driveway - "No Parking - Construction - Tree Removal".  This tree had lost probably 3/4 of the branches on the street side, but was still fully branched on the other side.  It's the tree on the right in this picture; the one in the center of the frame is coming down today, too.

I'm kinda sad about this - it was our biggest tree; who knows when they'll get around to replanting (and we can't - it's in the easement, so the city controls that kind of thing).  On the other hand. we'll be able to seed some grass down there and when I get around to putting in a vegetable garden on that side of the driveway, it will get more light.

In November, we discovered that the floor in the laundry room was damp, as was the drywall.  Our plumbers (who we love, but who we see ENTIRELY too much of) came out and determined that a plugged floor drain wasn't sealing properly.  They shored up the plug and it seemed to fix the problem.

Until last week, that is, when I noticed that the carpet was wet again.  They came out last Friday and determined that it was probably the same floor drain and said they'd come back this week to get the old drain out and replace it.  Today, they have determined that there's a plug in the line somewhere between that set of pipes (which carries the wastewater from the kitchen and the laundry closet) and the main sewage pipe out of the house.  So they're clearing it out, putting in a new drain plug, and putting in an access point so that if something similar happens again, we won't have to rip out and replace the walls just to get to the drain.

We were planning to replace the mildewed drywall anyway.  I haven't been downstairs to see how much of it they've already taken out for us.  :^/

Just mopped the bathrooms & the kitchen.  I mopped last Monday, too.  And today, the mop water was  BLACK.  Black like a fifteen-year-old goth chick's soul.  Black like good coffee.  BLACK.

I guess that (1) the old mop really did suck that much and (2) the new mop works pretty well.

And may I say, just for the record, EWWWWWWWWWW.

It took me approximately 30 seconds to disassemble the Ugly Brown Thing.  It wasn't held together by anything other than notches in the legs and shelves.  Didn't even require any tools.  The shelves are now duct-taped together and it will be our piece of Large Trash for this week.

I'm still going to do my big rant about the FlyLady system and the gendered division of labor, but not yet.

Or maybe I will, just a little bit.OK, rant over.  Today I cleaned up two major hotspots: the mail stand and the pile on the counter by the fridge.  Now we have to keep them from becoming hotspots again.  And after dinner, we did a really good cleaning of the kitchen counters (the  microwave was DISGUSTING), and agreed on a list of things that will be done to the kitchen as part of the after-dinner routine every evening.

There are three dumping grounds in our house: behind the bar, the sewing room, and the dining room. (These are, of course, the places that are completely off limits to TRex.)

I had gotten sick of the sewing room being a total disaster. (And I needed to clear floorspace to cut out my new dress, since I don't have a cutting table.) So I unearthed the sewing room. All of the fabric is back in its rightful place, the string is confined to a tub, the end table is cleared of junk in order to receive a TV as soon as we get around to swapping out the (newer) one that's sitting on the floor in there for the (older) one that's currently in our bedroom. Small SCA-related items are confined to a tub (a tub that's even IN THE CLOSET), mending to another tub, and fabric scraps to yet another tub. (Are we noticing a theme here?) I even managed to get the sewing machine box into the closet, along with TRex's birthday presents (the ones that aren't in the trunk of M's car).

I also was reminded that I have a problem. I hoard fabric scraps. "But it might be useful for something!" What, I ask, will a 3' long, 2" wide strip of white linen be good for? I don't know, but I clearly should keep it in case the day comes up when it is useful. *headdesk* I threw out a lot of miscellaneous small pieces of fabric and half-filled a large Target bag with larger but still technically small scraps.

I did a bit of final "unpacking" of the room, too - all of my various SCA-related tokens had just been in a pile - so I untangled them and hung them up on the unused curtain hardware. One bunch of Pennsic site tokens, one bunch of Northern Lights and St. Elegius medals, and one of personal tokens from various people (including, I discovered, one from mermaidlady - I think from Pennsic when I showed my green linen cyclas, but I'm not sure). Also the site token from EK Crown, Fall 2003 (the one that M & I stewarded), strung on thread dyed by ellid. One of my Manche scrolls is hanging up, and there's another nail right next to it that I'm going to put the other one on. I'll have to see what other scrolls we want to hang in there (we actually haven't hung ANY yet). And my apprentice agreement (written by the lovely parsedgarnish) is hanging on the door.

And then I read over the directions for my new dress, established that I'm going to have to go back to JoAnn's for ballpoint needles (no, I don't work with knits all that much, why do you ask?) and seam binding. I should check on my interfacing supply while I"m at it; I might need more of that as well. I got some 1.5" red grosgrain ribbon to make a sash with, but I'm not going to do it the way the pattern says to.

*Bonus points for anyone who can guess the provenance of this quote.