in which we attempt to clear drains

Attempts:

1. N's 25' auger - eventually worked its way into the drain, clearing some blockages. Intermittently added boiling water to see if it could dissolve some of the built up soap goo. Auger reached its limit with only slight improvement in flow. Not enough to take outflow from washing machine.
2. Power auger rented from Home Depot - would not even go around the bend, was not flexible enough.
3. 50' auger (bought from Home Depot) - eventually went 15' into the drain. Still no noticeable improvement.
4. Haul washing machine into kitchen, put pipe into sink, turn on long enough for it to drain, watch with concern as the sink fills up to the two thirds point before draining.
5. Hand three weeks worth of laundry to A, who volunteered to use their machine to wash it to spare me the three hours in the laundrette.
6. Purchase bacterial drain gunk eater to see if that'll work (without filling the house with noxious fumes from chemical drain clearer). Wait until morning to see if it's had any effect.
   
7. If that didn't help, hire plumber when we can afford it, (some time in August at the current expense rate), and hope that the (probably cast iron) pipe (which runs under the concrete slab foundation and is therefor inaccessible without cutting through said concrete) is not broken or corroded through.
   

Actual achievements for the day:

1. Sorted through three rubbish bins in the garage to make one and half bins of actual trash, and a pile of tools and other miscellaneous things that are actually usable, and a pile of kindling. Left tools and other things from the garage by curbside for people to take. (Half of the pile is already gone).
2. Filled four 30 gallon bin liners with rubbish from the attic. Placed a few of the not-trash items by the curb with the rest of the pile. Things found in this process: the other boot (the first one was found several weeks ago), an inflatable pink Easter egg, enough Christmas lights to go around the entire house (if any of them actually worked), broken tree decorations, the tree, a box of fake pumpkins, a truck bed liner...
3. S scraped paint of part of the dining room wall, and cleaned the back room somewhat.
4. Mowed the rear meadow. (It's not a lawn, or a garden, it's a patch of greenery, some of it actually grass (there's at least five different varieties on this property) with up to a foot of height variance, and not, of course, a nice slope there.
   

There's now actually a path from the ladder to the attic window that can be traversed without risking life and limb. This enables the window to actually be closed (the POs left it open) in the event of, say, rain, thus preventing further water ingress.

Stupid People Tricks

Don't do this:

• Get stung by wasp that's crawled into cleaning rags because you left the back door open in order to air out sewer odor eminating from laundry drain. (M)
• Spill globs of spackling on sheets and pillowcase while patching gash in bedroom ceiling while you do not have a working washing machine and all your extra sheets are being used as floors. (Me)
• Wait a week before emptying a wet/dry shop-vac that you have used to suck up soap-dirt-water-pure filth from floors. For future reference, doing this is probably the easiest way to get eau de pig farm without the pigs. And yes, I know what pig farms smell like, having spent two summers of my youth on one. I quite like pigs. I quite dislike the smell of pig lagoons wafting through warm, foggy morning air. (Me)
  

Belongings of POs currently sitting at curb:

• Training toilet
• Red beanbag chair
• Cat litter (they got rid of their cat a year previous to selling the house, according to the neighbor - the tub of unused cat litter is, at least, less disturbing than the litterbox full of dirty litter and poo that they also left behind)
• Box o'knives (I doubt the wisdom of leaving this at the curb, myself)
  
• Charcoal (we put the grill out previously and it was taken within an hour)
• Treadmill, minus control panel (that went in the dumpster long ago) Taken!
• Cat carrier Taken!
  

Slow going

Slow and sporadic... that's me this week. Other than Water! Water Everywhere!, it's been pretty dull around here. My mother came out in the beginning of the week (actually, I took the train out there and then drove us back - my first time doing long-distance, 75mph driving) to help. It was hot enough, though, that neither of us did much of anything while she was here. The air conditioner doesn't cool much of anything other than the living room which is currently too full of boxes and other stuff to work on.

We did strip some paint in the dining room, which led to the discovery that there's a 4x4 foot area where the plaster's been replaced entirely by drywall. It makes one wonder just what happened to the wall that the POs needed to replace that large a section of it.

I've been cleaning the baseboard heater (pipe and fins only - the surrounds have been taken out entirely due to the stench) in M's room. A number of fins had to be cut through and removed because they'd corroded to the point of not staying in place. This picture:



is not of that section. It is of the cleaner part of the heater. Ah, the scent of urine and corroded metal! mm.

I also primed some of the trim in my room, touched up the bits of ceiling I'd managed to paint purple while painting my walls, and stripped more paint from the trim in the wallway with the heat gun. It might have been the fact that I'd taken my muscle relaxer an hour previously, but I found there to be something strangely (and worryingly) somnorific about using the heat gun.

I've been frustrated about not being able to work on the houseblog (due to laptop death), almost as though getting it in the state I want somehow contributes to the state of the house itself. ...The saddest part in all this is that I do not have a single picture of the house that isn't so crummy that I'm unwilling to use it in a banner. The air conditioner in the front window just adds to the sad, gloomy look of things. (Actually I had a post in progress about the mood/air of the house due to its reject style roof, but, naturally, it was ON MY LAPTOP.) Ah, well...

in which we attempt to install a washing machine

The POs took their washing machine with them. A friend (N) gave us their old one as they were upgrading. Sounds great, until we enter the twilight zone that is this house.

Day 1 (Tuesday)

The washing machine is delivered by N.

The pipe from the previous machine was still attached to the drain hole - they'd just hacked it off part way down. The pipe removed easily enough, and the waste pipe for the machine fit into the rubber connector. All seemed well.

That is until we tried to actually use the machine. At which point the water just drained right out the bottom and down the drain hole rather than filling the machine. Not helpful, and inexplicable. Until you learn that the machines require the pipe to travel up above the top otherwise they do just this, and it's only recently that a few manufacturers have come out with machines that don't have this fundamental design flaw!

So I investigated what this was supposed to look like. Everything I could find said that there should be a 2" wide stand pipe (there wasn't), with a p-trap (basically a ubend) in it, and that it needed to be open ended (not sealed to the drain hole). Fixing this seems simple enough. I should know better by now.

The rubber connector was 1" wide, and connected to a 1.5" adapter to a 2" drain hole. The rubber connector removed easily enough, but left a bent metal connector on the 1.5" to 2" metal adapter, which was screwed into the actual drain hole.

Day 2 (Wednesday)

First trip to Home Depot provided pipe (helpfully pre-cut to the lengths I needed), along with a replacement seal for the bathroom toilet tank (a separate issue - that tank was running continuously).

This connector was, of course, a non-standard octagonal contraption that was thoroughly stuck and too large for any tools I had, something I'd neglected to check the night before.

The evening also gifted us with a thunderstorm, leaking back windows in the rear bedroom, a small lake in the "family room" (that's a whole other DIY disaster courtesy of the the POs), and a power outage to go with the 95F heat.



Day 3 (Thursday)

A second trip to Home Depot for tools did not solve this problem - the weird octagonal adapter did not quite fit in the "universal" plumbing tool (due to its octagonalness). A side trip to Lowe's for an energy efficient (or as much as there is) air conditioner (seeing as Home Depot doesn't stock such) was successful - both in acquiring said air conditioner and a sudden downpour dropping the temperature by 20F and making it less urgently needed.

Day 4 (Friday)

N to the rescue with tools that might defeat the octagonal monster. They do indeed fit, but the monster refuses to move in the slightest, even when doused with WD-40. The application of one of the pipe pieces to the tool handle provided enough leverage (simple tools win again), and the monster gradually yielded.

The pipes all fit snugly together (even without any form of glue they appeared to be water tight, and very hard to take apart again). So I connected them to the drain hole, connected up the washer and turned it on. All seemed to go well, at least until the machine started to empty out. Which is the point we discovered that the drain itself does not empty. Or at least not anywhere close to the speed required.

Day 5 (Saturday)

In which we attempt to clear drains.
(This is a scarier process than might be obviously apparent - I found popcorn, among other things, in the dryer vent when I cleaned the laundry room... -S.)

not so stubborn paint

Having exhausted the hi-tech options, we tried the low-tech ones...

It turns out that simply spraying the recalcitrant paint with plain water (not the water & vinegar mix that was left in the spray bottle - that reacts with the plaster), leaving it a minute then applying the scraper gets 90% of the paint off. Much of the rest is the "washable green" layer that wipes off with a damp cloth.

So the remaining part of the hallway took about four people-hours, as opposed to the 8-10 (with much dust) or 20 (with heat gun) it would have taken otherwise.

It still needs to be sanded I think, to level out the rough spots, and needs many little pock-mark holes filled in, but it could be painted once the holes are filled and look alright.

The main hallway looks like it could be done in a day using this method. :-)

Stubborn paint

Removing the residue of the paint on the plaster walls.

The walls are not flat (that's 50 year old plaster for you), so both scraping and sanding takes much longer than it would otherwise. The plaster absorbs the heat from the heat gun, which means the paint is much harder to remove than it is from wood.

With the heat gun, followed by washing the green residue off the wall.

This patch (below the line, which is about 5 feet up) took about four hours.

This was after fixing the toilets yesterday, and I learned some things that might make it go faster in future: the angle of the scraper makes a huge difference for example, and the heat gun gradually gets more effective the longer it's on - it doesn't reach its highest temperature for several minutes it seems.

A (small) section of this was done with a blowtorch rather than the heat gun. (See what happens when I'm away? Walls are SET AFIRE. - S.) This is somewhat faster - the heat is more focused and direct and the paint just blisters off, but it does leave faint scorch marks on the plaster itself.

This is the opposite wall of the hallway, after about 1:45 hours with a power sander.

The sanded wall is considerably smoother, with some of the unevenness of the wall reduced. It produces a lot of dust however, even with the dust catcher attachment.

The little bit above the line, on the left near the corner, that looks green was done with the heat gun and scraper, to do a compare, that's what it looks like before washing off the green.

Given the thickness of some of the remaining paint, a thicker primer is not going to help.

Adding a surface skim of plaster would solve both the residue, the unevenness and the remaining pockmarks.

Toilets

Well, having replace the wax seals on both toilets (due to their leaking whenever flushed and adding to the odors of the house), I discovered they were not bolted down.

The flanges the bolts connect to are either (a) buried so that you can't get a new bolt in, or (b) broken off entirely!

So at some point we need to take the floors up and replace the flanges.

At least the eau-de-toilet is no longer adding to the ambiance.

Motivation...or lack thereof

Here's a small section of wall in the entry way showing the stubborn remains of old paint that didn't come off with the latex layers. This section is mostly tan. There appear to be two layers - the tan layer (top) and a green layer (bottom). The green layer seems to be water soluble. When M was washing the walls, the sponge and wash water turned green...but there are still green bits on the walls, so it didn't all wash off.



This is what the walls in both hallways, the kitchen, the living room and the dining room (probably - we haven't stripped the latex paint off in there...YET) look like.

It's beginning to make sense why the POs put such an incredibly thick coating of paint over this and why some of it was 'artistically' (I use that word in the most generous way possible) mottled and textured. Because this old stuff? Does not come off unless you have superhuman patience, tenacity, and SKILLZ.

So we bought a heat gun (the cheapest one, erm), which is fantastic...on the trim. Not so the walls. I estimate the project to take months, if not years, using the heat gun (I can't tell if this is an exaggeration born of despair or not - it is truly that slow).

Other options are: chemicals, that heat thing that costs $400+ (given the large area that needs stripped, the latter might actually be cheaper), or slave labor.

...I opt for trying a thicker primer before exploring any of the above. (Ah, yes, contributing to the mess are the two layers of thin, low-VOC primer that I already put on one wall in the long hallway, which served no purpose except to prove that thin, low-VOC primer does no good in most of our house.)

We moved Storm and the rest of the stuff from the apartment in last night. Mostly plants, cat accoutrements, and cleaning items.

She seems to be adjusting well -- exploring all the rooms, jumping in the windows, and being frustrated about the high window in the bedroom that she can't reach (the sill is too small for her, anyway).



The screens in the living room windows are not cat proof... I tested them by pushing on them and one of them fell right out of the window into the rosebush. They're some sort of new fiberglass and plastic screens that don't have proper locks. While I hate wrestling with old metal screens, they, at least, do not fall out of windows with a little nudge. ...You know, there aren't even any storm windows on these things, so maybe you're not meant to wrestle with the screens to begin with. I bet the rain doesn't sound the same on them.

We still have to move Spook and my furniture from E-town...eventually.

Next on the task list is getting both my room and M's room (we have three bedrooms - we've each claimed one of the extras as 'personal space') done (to the extent that they can be 'done' with no floors) so that we can move stuff into those rooms in order to complete the living room and master bedroom.

My room only needs a few things. I need to finish scrubbing the old wallpaper glue out of the closet so I can prime and paint it, fix the holes M and I made in the drywall (one of the few odd spots of it) when trying to get a wood shelf-ish thing off the closet wall (of course, this involves actually getting the wood things off the walls), and painting the trim. I don't think I'll worry about the trim for now. Spook's going to stay in there for a bit, so I need to get the screen repaired in one window and obtain a screen for the other (if possible). I also need a new cat tree so that she can actually reach the windows. She will climb the wall, or attempt to, if she can't get to them.

M's room needs more work. The windows in there are moldier, the concrete still has carpet glue all over it, the walls still have a few bits of paint to be scraped and there are a lot of holes to fill. There's also the issue of the corroded heat pipe (baseboard hot water heat)...

This weekend is the toilet project. Yay.