Recently in House Category

This post is just a little bit of weather trivia for my area of the world.  As Kelly said just minutes ago when she saw me looking at stuff for this "NERD" is the only way to describe this.  However I think it will have baring during the storm.

I will start with a pretty graphic that I borrowed (with attribution) from Weather Channel website.  The important detail here is the average monthly rainfall of about 4 inches a month.

The next bit of data comes from a weather station fairly close to our house.  I used this since this August there have been very localized thunderstorms in the area.  I have highlighted the precipitation for the month, which is 11.5 inches already.

For this month we are 7-8 inches above average already.  Now they are talking 6-12 inches more rain for the hurricane Irene timeline.  The house may just float away!

This post is a little bit the preparations Kelly and I did, some on accident and others on purpose.  There is a second post with some weather trivia which may have bearing during the storm as well.  I will probably follow-up with a third post sometime Sunday.  First, a bit of history on the last few months.  In mid-April as I was about a week away from (my since cancelled) spleen surgery I went down to the basement at about 11 PM on a Thursday night to find a squishy carpet in the theater room.

If the carpet was wet that meant that there was a few inches of water in the basement.  Sure enough the laundry room has 2-3 inches of water.  I found that the sump pump had failed to activate and run for an extended period of time and allowed the basement to fill.  This was really the first problem that had happened with the pump since my dad and I installed it five and a half years ago.  I got the pump running by tapping the float and it began emptying.  I then did as much as I could to clean up that night.

The next day Kelly and I began the ordeal of removing almost everything from laundry room and parts of theater.  Then we pulled up the padding / carpet in a third of the theater and dried the raised floor.  We spent the weekend throwing away and cleaning stuff up and putting things under porch outside to get out of the way.

Over the course of the rest of the spring and early summer we tried various things in working on the basement.  Cleaning floor with bleach and scrubbing the walls.  Then trying to put down some new flooring, which we later removed since it didn’t work well.  We threw out even more stuff, cut out some drywall and kept cleaning.

Eventually we just sort of called a truce with the problem for the summer it seemed.  Kelly left for Seattle and our new twin nephews.  When I went to visit her in early July the basement flooded (much less) again.  Our pet sitter did his best to deal with it thankfully.

Once we got back in mid-July  I looked at the pump again trying to figure out what was happening.  I figured out the float cable had slipped over the years allowing the float to get stuck against the side and not to activate either at all or at the right time.  This probably explained most of the issues of the last few months with it.  At least that is what I thought.

Last Friday night just as another 2 inch rain dropping thunderstorm rolled through the sump pump just died basically.  This time the float was working and everything, it just wouldn’t pump.  I could hear it attempt to activate when I moved the float but nothing would happen.  This was a problem as there had been 4 inches of rain in the last 24 hours alone.  I attempted to deal with the problem with the backup pump I bought 5 years ago (and had never tested) only to find to my dismay as it totally was insufficient.  The pump simply couldn’t get the water from well to the sink.  This meant filling buckets and carrying them to sink.  When draining an entire yard worth of water that isn’t going to work for long.

I left Kelly to bucket bail and went to the store to find a better short and long term solution.  When I went out I found that the power was out at stores nearby but luckily the closest Home Depot was still open.  I was able to get a new backup pump that is almost as powerful as the main pump and is able to keep up with the incoming water and get it to the sink.  The only downside to the pump is it just runs non-stop.  Which means you have to watch it to keep it from just sucking air and damaging itself.  However, it got us through the night so I could do a proper long term fix the next morning.

The next morning I went out and bought a whole new sump pump system.  This system includes both a primary and secondary pump.  The secondary pump can activate for one of three reasons.  First, the primary isn’t keeping up and I hope this doesn’t happen because that is a lot of water.  Second, if the primary pump just doesn’t work which again I hope doesn’t happen anytime soon.  Third, most importantly for the next 24-48 hours is it can run off a battery which I got and attached to the system in a power outage.

This new sump pump came all assembled with the dual pumps and everything so installation wasn’t too bad.  The hardest part of the installation was just mating the 1.5 inch pipe and rubber clamps by pushing them together.  I had to cut a 4 inch pipe to fit the height from old pipe to new pump but that was it.  I had the new one installed in under 2 hours and it would have taken me less time if water would have stopped pouring in as I worked.  I kept emptying the well to work in.

Since last Saturday the new pump has been humming along and hopefully will keep doing so.  The timing of its installation was more by luck and accident it now seems given current circumstances.  We also got just a plain old water sensor just in case, something many will probably ask why I didn’t buy 6 years ago?  That is a good question.

Now fast forward 72-96 hours to Thursday and the story of Irene starts ratcheting up.  Thursday night as it became apparent there was likely going to be high winds and large amounts of rain arrive over the weekend we decided we should finally get everything off of porch from April so it didn’t become projectiles or become any more ruined than it already was.  Mostly Kelly (since I wasn’t feeling well) brought in everything from outside.  Even bringing it in rushed and not putting it all away it isn’t filling the space which shows how much we have cleaned up since April.  However, we still need to organize a bit.

The last thing we did was to get stuff put away in shed in back and with that the back porch is pretty much as ready as it is going to be for Irene.  Now to see what it brings in the next 24-48 hours.

Another recent anniversary is the fact that as of Memorial Day I have lived in the same house for 6 years.  This is by far the longest consecutive time I have lived in one place in my life.  Next year I will match the record of 7 years in one house, but that was separate 3 + 4 year stints.  Then it will be quite a while to match the amount of time I spent in Northern Virginia in general which is about 13 years spread out between 1984 and 2005.

I started writing this in Late June, but then my blog broke.  It works again now (hopefully) so this is a little out of date but I will add more posts soon hopefully.  Also lots of pictures.

When I moved into this house I spent a great deal of time, effort and money upgrading the basement into a home theater as I document in my HT Blog.  After all the work in the basement I didn’t spend a great deal of time on other sections of the interior or exterior of the house.  About 2 years ago Kelly moved in and decided that some time needed to be spent on other parts of the house.  One of the first things she wanted to was get a new couch and fix up the living room.  She then moved on to the spare bedroom by re-painting and cleaning it up.  The next item on the list was the bathroom, which Kelly painted and we put in a new medicine cabinet and light fixture.  Kelly then moved on to the yard and exterior of house, this I have been involved with greatly as well.  One of major projects of this was building a new deck that was documented here.  The yard work continues with the taking down of a dead tree in the back yard and general cleanup of weeds and such.

One of Kelly’s other major pain points all along in this house has been the kitchen and its lack of storage.  The kitchen upgrades first started July of 2007 with a new range that actually worked as opposed to the one that was in the house when I moved which didn’t work much at all.  The second upgrade was a new dishwasher in February of 2008.  Now the most recent upgrade is a new refrigerator.  As a result of the new refrigerator we had to remove one of the cabinets due to height and width of the new cabinet.  This again brought of the issue of the kitchen and its design and lack of storage.  This began an odyssey of cabinet shopping, kitchen layouts and upgrades.  As a result we decided on some IKEA cabinets and a new layout of the kitchen / dinning room.  The first steps of this process have already begun.

Earlier in the week Kelly began laying new floor down on top of the existing many layers of historic flooring in the kitchen.  We went with a product that can easily be laid down without glue.  Many will ask why we didn’t do some type of hardwood floor or an engineered product that looks like it.  There are two reasons, first we have hardwood floor in other parts of the house and matching it would be very difficult and expensive.  Second, that would entail removing the multiple layers of subfloor and other flooring and possibly having to redo the subfloor totally.  This is beyond the scope of what we wanted to do and would require redoing the entire kitchen at once.  We are hoping to do the kitchen in sections rather than all at once.

As I said Kelly started the floor last week and worked on it yesterday as well.  She also primed one wall yesterday and will probably paint it today.  I ran a new water line for the water dispenser and ice maker for the new fridge location.  This entailed 50 ft of tubing that went from the basement up to the attic and then back down the wall in the kitchen.  The next stages are to remove the island / desk in kitchen in prep for the new cabinet in its location.  Along with that cabinet we will get the cabinets to surround the fridge in its new location.  Once we get those cabinets in we can move stuff into them to allow us to remove the old cabinets both top and bottom.

Here are some pictures of the layout, click on them for larger versions.

In July of 2007 Kelly and I got a new range from Best Buy that was a Maytag stainless steel model.  Then in February of 2008 we got a new dishwasher from Best Buy that was also a Maytag stainless steel model.  Ever since we have been looking at new refrigerators from Maytag in stainless steel to match the rest of the kitchen.  We kept looking at models and watching sales.  Today we decided to jump on a Best Buy Memorial Day sale.  I think we got a pretty good deal and I wanted to share in case anyone else was looking.  Upfront I will admit this isn’t a cheap refrigerator but it was cheaper than it could have been.

Maytag MFI2569VEM list price is $2399.99
Best Buy standard price is $2299.99
Best Buy sales price is $1954.99
I then pricematched the Home Depot sale price of $1798.20
Then when I checked out I got $100 Best Buy gift card
There is also a $100 Maytag mail in rebate
BGE (local power company) apparently has a $50 rebate for new refrigerators as well
Lastly I will get ((1798.20x1.25)/250)x5 = $45 worth of Best Buy certificates for using reward zone card

Final cost about $1503.20 or almost $900 off list.  Yay me!

Kelly got me a charging valet from Pottery Barn for Christmas.  For various reasons I was a little slow (ok a lot slow) in setting it up.  Today with some encouragement from Kelly I got it setup.  It is a neat cable hiding device.  Inside it has a power strip to plug in various devices.  Then a small cable pass through for the charging tip.  I ended up placing it on my TV rack in living room as it worked better there for power.  It looks nice as you can see in the below picture.  Even though it was intended to match that stand it does anyway.  I was even nice enough to let Kelly add her phone to the device to charge, can anyone guess which is hers?

One of the biggest problems with this house that existed when I moved in was the deck.  I knew this going in so it wasn't a surprise.  That being said I think anyone that stood on the old one would agree it was pretty scary.  It was a small deck of about 4'x10' and had a floor made of plywood and held together with some sort of carpet or astro-turf like stuff.  It took a long while but about 18 months after moving in I finally tore down the old one last fall.  It was almost too easy to pull down.  When we took the carpet of the stairs they literally disintegrated.  We threw out the deck in a dumpster I had at the time.  Since the old one was torn down it was about a 10' drop out the back door of the kitchen down to the back door of the basement.  Not really useful as an exit.

On Easter weekend my parents came down to help build a new deck.  My dad didn't have any direct experience building a deck and nor did I, but I that didn't stop us in the basement.  Kelly got several books from the library on deck building, I would recommend the Home Depot one as it was most up to date and very helpful.  My parents arrived Thursday afternoon.  My dad and I spent several hours going over my plans and doing some measuring.  The plan was to build a small exit deck of 4'x6' and stairs to get down.  We went out that night and bought all the supplies we would need to build everything except the stairs.  This included boards of such sizes as 4"x4"x10', 2"x6"x8', 5/4"x6"x8', some pre-built railing and lots of bolts.

Friday morning we got up and first attached some boards to the house to fill the gap left by the old deck in the siding.  Then we built the frame of the deck.  We put the frame in place with the posts.  After we had things in place for the most part we went back and used the bolts and some deck screws to firmly hold the frame in place.  The next step was to put the decking in place.  It was interesting doing while standing on un-secured boards.  We got them in place with a few screws and then went back and put in lots more.  The last step for the day was attaching the railings to the posts.  That night we went to get the pieces for the stairs.  This was some pre-made treads, stringers and the outer frame for the stairs.

Saturday morning we started on the stairs.  This was lots of measuring, little wood trimming, more measuring, angle checking and hoping it fits right.  One of the complications with the stairs was that the ground at the bottom of stairs is not what you would call level.  We ended up getting it almost perfect though with each stair fitting and being level.  After getting the stairs in place we added a railing for the steps and toped the railing around the rest of the deck.  The new deck while smaller is much sturdier than the old one.  I am sure it can hold the 3-4 people that could potentially fit on the deck.  Also now Narnia can go out the back door to the back yard with less concern of being distracted instead of the front yard.

Lots of pictures of the process and the finished project are available at this link.

Here is a picture of my dad and I on the finished product Saturday afternoon.

Oh and as an added bonus this is a picture of Kelly showing her amazement at the speed and skill of my dad and I as we build the deck.  Just bask in the joy she is exuding.

This morning I managed to break the dome on the existing light in our dining room.  I bumped the light with my head and the dome fell off.  It bounced off something on the table, rolled across the table, fell onto a chair and then bounced finally to the floor and broke.  This gave Kelly the excuse she had wanted to buy a new light.  She mounted the new one this afternoon.

I also took another picture showing the shelf we put up a few months ago to hold Kelly's cook books and cooking magazines.  Below it are some prints as well.

Our older dishwasher hasn't been working to well recently and I also wanted a quieter one.  I had been looking at the Maytag ones to match the range we got recently.  I narrowed it down to the MDB8951BWS after some research as the one to get.  Over President's day weekend Best Buy, Lowe's, Home Depot and Sears all had it on sale.  Best Buy was about $50 more than the other three that were all within $2-3 of each other.  We went to Best Buy on Monday and brought pricing from the other places.  We had them price match Sears as it was the cheapest and they had free delivery and take away (we found out on the receipt, they didn't tell us it was free up front).

One side note is Best Buy price matching for appliances is amazing, they just pull up a list of competitors and enter the price.  There is no calling to verify stock or any resistance at all, this is compared to price matching almost anything else at Best Buy where they have to check local price, stock and other issues before price matching.

On Thursday night after talking to my dad I took apart the old dishwasher.  I was very careful to remove anything I thought I might might be needed on the new one.  However I forgot to remove a key component.  The copper elbow to attach the water input to the dishwasher was left on the old one and taken with it.

Due to a snow day I was home on Friday for the delivery (Kelly was off as well and would have been there if I wasn't.)  It got delivered about 1:30 PM.  After getting it unboxed I checked the fit and checked how to set it in.  As I was doing the install I realized I was missing the elbow, oops.  After trimming the mounting strips and adjusting the feet I went on my first trip to Home Depot.  I got an elbow that fit properly into the dishwasher but did not fit in existing water copper pipe.  I found this out after getting the dishwasher in place.  I then took out the first elbow and again headed out to Home Depot for trip number two.  I got the second elbow and brought it back and it was wrong as well.  After not being to thrilled a second time I called my dad again.  After some discussion we figured out I was buying a flange elbow rather than the compression one that I needed.  I returned the first two elbows then tried to get a third one.  I first found what I was looking for on the rack but when I picked it up it looked wrong.  I stood there for 10 minutes trying to figure out what was wrong.  I then realized what the bag said and what was in it were two different things, the bag was cut open.  I found a sealed bag and decided with some encouragement from a Home Depot guy that it was the right one.

At this point it is 5:30 PM (4 hours down already) I got back with what was hopefully the right one.  It was the right one.  Then I came up against the problem of getting the old compression fitting off, which I couldn't do.  I luckily have a next door neighbor that has almost everything tool related.  I borrowed his pipe cutter so I could trim the 1-2" off the end and remove the old fitting.  I was then able to finish with the new fitting.  The first time I turned the water on there was a small leak put I was able to mostly resolve it.  About 7 PM I had the dishwasher in place and turned the power on.  After that we started a cycle.  I watched the input and output to make sure there weren't any more leaks and there didn't seem to be.  A little before 8 PM I mounted the final covers on the bottom to totally finish the install.

I did all of the above to save $100-150 for the Best Buy installation charge.  Was it worth it, not sure due to time and aggravation.  I am just glad I didn't start at 5 PM yesterday as that would have driven me insane.  Below you can see the new dishwasher next to the recently added range.

One of the final additions to the living room that Kelly wanted to make was getting an area rug.  She had been looking for almost a month and subjecting me to viewing her selections during that time.  We thought we liked some from Crate & Barrel but the stores close to us didn't carry the rugs.  When we went down to Leesburg for Jerry and Karri's wedding we were close to the store in Tyson's Corner and we went to look.  We finally decided on a rug at the store.  Yesterday I went to pick it up at the warehouse since delivery was a confusing option from what we could tell.  I placed it yesterday and then this morning Kelly and I moved it to its (hopefully) final position.  Some pictures below.  The first shows the overall color better but the second shows the multi-colored streaks and has our demo model cat who seems to be in living room pictures often.