Thank you, everyone! It’s been an adventure, but the chaos and medical issues are in my past, and life is better now. The big change for me is the move north.
Laurie and I decided that a single-family home was best for us. Laurie’s sister lives with us, and we had to make sure that any place we chose had to accommodate her needs, which included single-floor living for her and the space and power needed for a rather large oxygen concentrator and backup bottles.
We originally were looking at single-floor home plans, but they were either pretty expensive or very far from needed facilities. I was insisting on a home with grocery shopping in walking range, medical facilities and hospitals not too distant, and preferably other shopping and services nearby. There was one neighborhood that Laurie called Middle-Earth, because many of the street names were places in Tolkien’s classic books. We hoped to find something there.
A single-story place that was almost perfect came on the market, and we bid on it, offering full list. Nope. We were outbid by a huge margin, and the place went for about 20% over market! That was disappointing. We kept looking, checking out other neighborhoods.
About a month later, another place came on the market in Middle-Earth, and we checked it out. The place was being sold as-is, an estate sale, and was one of those two-story places with bedrooms and full bath upstairs, living, dining, kitchen and family room downstairs. On the east end of the house there was a family room at the back, a laundry room next to a half-bath, and on the front a den/office with double doors just off the entry. Stairs were also just off the entry and the previous owner had a chair lift installed.
Out comes the tape measure. If we closed off the existing bath entry from the family room, opened the bath onto the den, and extended the bath rear wall into the laundry rooom we could have a downstairs bedroom and a full bath with walk-in shower and some disability accommodations. Knowing this, we put in a bid for the home at the very reasonable asking price, which would leave us with enough in our budget to do the needed renovations. Two days later the bid was accepted, and in late July 2020 we became the proud owners of a fixer-upper in Middle Earth.
The home was built in 1978, and the interior was completely original but in excellent condition. It has a high-end 1978 kitchen, with a Jenn-aire grill, built-in 1978 vintage oven (ain’t NOTHING digital!), cabinets and countertop. It also had a low water flow problem we would want to correct before moving in. Next steps would be to line up a contractor to rebuild that downstairs bath and laundry room so we could use the den space as a bedroom suite for Laurie’s sister.
We worked with a few contractors until we found one that had the same mindset as we did, the skills on hand to do all the work, and the willingness to see the project through. We would live in Laurie’s apartment which still had several months on the lease while the contractor essentially had the run of the house.
Our contractor had a plumber in for the bathroom work, who we asked to look at our low water flow problem. Throughout the entire house, we had a water flow problem. With no flow, the pressure was quite high, 80 PSI, but when any tap was opened the pressure dropped to something like 15-20 PSI, and the flow was maybe 2 gallons per minute. Running the kitchen faucet while someone was in the shower upstairs pretty much turned the shower into a dribble. This wasn’t really a livable situation yet.
We knew that the shutoff gate valve just outside the house didn’t fully close, and there was a fair chance that it had failed to fully open as well. The plumber replaced that, which let us finish the interior plumbing work with the water fully shut off. It didn’t improve the flow problem, though.
The plumber had mentioned that many homes had pressure regulator “bell valves” on the water line, often buried. If one of these had failed, essentially stuck slightly open, it could cause this problem. We started a hunt for the valve. It would be either by the shutoff at the house, or by the meter at the street. After a good bit of digging we found it at the meter, about 18” down, buried in the dirt, in the midst of a zig-zag of PVC pipe.
We had that replaced, but again, there was no improvement. By then the contractor was done with the remodel, so we thanked and paid him. Laurie decided to excavate the line herself to see if we could find some clue as to the problem. As she dug out from the house, she found the copper pipe transition to old PVC plastic line about 5’ out. Additional digging uncovered a 90 degree bend straight down, and about 3 feet down, another elbow and the line headed more or less toward the meter. With the mess of pipe elbows at the street, we had a pretty twisty water line, although not enough to explain the whole low flow problem. With another 30 feet of three foot trench to dig, we thought it was time to call in the pros.
Cornel’s Plumbing agreed to come out and take a look. Alex, the plumber, suggested starting at the meter, opening up the line and checking the flow capacity, and then moving to the house and checking other points until the area with the restriction was found. He rigged a fitting onto the end of the meter, attaching a 50 foot hose. Opening up the meter valve, we had well over 10 gallons per minute out of the hose. Now we knew the problem was on our side of the meter, and not on the city side.
We knew at this point that the flow was poor at the connection to the house, and Alex the plumber had an idea. He took the other end of the hose up to the house, and screwed it onto the hose bib just past the house shutoff valve. Opening the hose valve and street shutoff valve, we had great water flow in the house’s plumbing. He said this lash up with the hose was how they normally supplied water while running a new water line in, but this was only the second time he had seen a home water line blocked in 7 years as a journeyman plumber. The hose lash up told us the water line from the street to the house was where the clog was.
The cost to dig up the old PVC line and find where it was plugged would be high, labor intensive as hand digging was needed to avoid destroying the pipe. It would be much cheaper to put in a new line, better materials, using modern boring technology. We concurred, and he gave us a quote that was much lower than I had expected from doing a little shopping around. So, we bought the replacement installation project.
The crew showed up on time, and went to work. They dove into the crawl space through the hatch in our pantry, scoped out what they needed to do, and started prep. The driller showed up around 11 AM, and set up by the water meter at the street. They started drilling into the gentle slope there, at about the depth of the water line, aiming to miss the other utility lines and tunnel under the house. The plan was to surface the drill head near the pantry crawl space hatch, and install the house shutoff and reducer there, rather than in a vault outside. This would be both more convenient, and avoid any possible frozen pipe issues in the winter. One worker walked along with a special instrument that read out the drill head position, and called out steering instructions to the drill operator. They ran the line over 3 feet deep, past the perimeter foundation, and hit their target. The plumbing crew attached a long length of extremely heavy-duty modern PEX line, and a grounding wire (per code), and this was pulled back through with the drill head. By noon the drill crew was packing up and leaving, and by 2 PM we had a completed new water line in service.
We were ready to move in. With some assistance from a medical supplier, we set up everything for Laurie’s sister, and got her room ready. We would be sleeping in the guest room with my furniture until we got Laurie’s stuff moved from her apartment. We spent a few weeks shifting accommodations, moving boxes and such, and settling in. We thought we had everything in great shape, what with the new roof, new floors, plumbing overhauled, lights working, and a new washer and dryer on the way. We would have a great Christmas in our new home.
Woman plans, Goddess laughs...
The 42 year old Jen-Aire cooktop had other plans. The grill and one burner control failed, and I had the choice of repair or replace in front of me. Replace? There are two downdraft 30” cooktops on the market, and both needed 40 Amp service. We had 30 Amp service installed, which meant that we would have to pull a larger line and install larger breakers. But, the power panel was a Federal Electric, which has it’s own issues. Local code would require us to replace the entire panel. The cost of replacing the cooktop was going to be well over $5,000, which wasn’t in the budget.
So, repair. Naturally, the original parts were discontinued about 35 years ago, but there was a suggested replacement. DIscontinued about 20 years ago... The parts are something called an “infinite switch”, the heat regulator for an electric range element. There are so-called “universal” replacements, but they didn’t consider the “unique” wiring of this old cooktop. The cooktop circuitry assumed that the switch internals worked in a certain way, which no modern switch actually does any more, for good reasons. They used their assumption to power up the vent fan whenever the grill was on, bypassing the fan switch. The new switches were wired differently, and resulted in the fan power momentarily being interrupted every few seconds while the grill was on. Even better, if the fan were switched on directly the grill ran at full power, with no temperature control!
Chasing down the internal design of the switches and the wiring of the grill I determined that I needed to disconnect one wire between the fan and the grill proper, and replace the fan switch with a proper double-pole single throw switch, along with the previous replacement of the “infinite switches.” It’s all working now, and the cooktop now largely uses standard parts I can get off the shelf. The fixed cost about $110. While Christmas dinner was cooked entirely in the oven, for New Years Eve we had our cooktop and grill, suitable for some T-bone steaks. Yay!
For 2021, we continued the yard work, and came up with new projects for ourselves. There was an attic space over the garage, an empty space with a large usable area, solid subfloor installed, and a door that opened into one of the upstairs bedrooms that we used as a den. This had been used as a huge (2 car garage sized) storage space. Big drawbacks were the single 40 watt lightbulb, and the completely uninsulated nature of the space. Oh, but it had possibilities…
With our home nice and livable already, we could play around with a few changes. I decided to push ahead and turn the uninsulated storage space into an insulated one, finished as a room and more suitable for.. storage. Yeah, storage, that’s they ticket! It obviously couldn’t be classified as a habitable space as the ceiling when finished would be two inches lower than code for habitable spaces. Might make a dandy storage space and workshop, though.
I added soffit vents, an upper exhaust plenum, and cold-roof ventilation chutes between the rafters. R-21 insulation went between the chutes and the room. A shiplap sloping ceiling was installed, along with short walls as part of the wind handling requirements for the roof. Wiring was run into the walls, a new 20 amp outlet circuit should I want to plug something in. Wallboard went on the ends and short walls, with access hatches into the eave spaces. Skylight-style LED panels went along the uppermost part of the ceiling on a 16 inch wide horizontal piece, at the 7 foot ‘peak’ of the ceiling. This looks a lot like a Cape Code style upstairs room, and I trimmed and painted it as such. A moderately light oak laminate floor and pad went over the subfloor.
Now I’m building a pair of built-in desks that will sit along the sides where the shiplap ceiling slopes down to that short wall. One of the desk areas already has the antenna lines for my amateur radio equipment installed and ready, and the othe desk area has all the home networking and router connections at it, ready for Laurie to play with.
We should be able to store our hobby equipment very comfortably in this space.
And people wonder what a retiree would possibly do all day…
You were missed. At least, I thought about you now and then and hoped for the best for you. I'm sure others did too.
