Extreme Cold in Maine

Over the weekend, it got pretty darn chilly here in Maine. How chilly? On Friday night, the temperature dropped to 21 below 0F, with a windchill of 50 below. The high never got above 0 during the day, and the wind was vicious the whole time. I love me some winter, but I can pass on the temps that cold.

This was the first bout of really cold weather we’ve dealt with since the kitchen renovation. Back before we renovated, we knew where there were potential trouble spots, and we would take measures to avoid frozen pipes there. (“Measures” really boils down to a couple of approaches: open the cabinet doors so the pipes get more heat and/or leave the sinks dripping. Moving water doesn’t freeze.) But I didn’t really know where we might have trouble with the newly remodeled kitchen. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have had any. The pipes were all well away from exterior walls, so all should be fine. And throughout the day, it was.

Then at 11:30pm, Denisa went to check the kitchen sink, and the hot and cold were both frozen. No water at all. The problem with this is that I wasn’t sure where the pipes might have frozen. Back when we first moved into the house and our pipes froze, we paid to have a plumber come fix it. He used a hairdryer for fifteen minutes, and we paid $100+ for the privilege. Ever since then, I’ve done it myself. (I had no idea professional hair drying was so lucrative!) But if you don’t know where to point the hair dryer, it makes things more complicated.

For the first while, I pointed it at the pipes underneath the sink cabinet. My best theory was there was a draft where the kitchen wall meets the floor down there, but after a half hour, nothing was moving, and I was beginning to wonder what we might do. That spot is completely boxed in, so it’s not like I could rip it open to get to it. So instead, I took a loooong extension cord and headed into the crawl space.

The clearance there is less than two feet, so I army crawled my way down and got everything set up, then started hair drying bends in the pipe. (Bends freeze before straight spots, or at least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.) It took a while, but slow and steady wins the race. By 12:40 or so, we had water moving again. Enough to discover the pipes to the dishwasher (off that sink) had also frozen.

Once again, it was trial and error to see where I needed to warm the thing up, but by 1:30, everything was thawed, I was showered (that crawlspace is tres nasty) and back in bed. Not the funnest way to spend an evening, but I’m grateful we found the freeze before anything could get really damaged. The sink shouldn’t be a problem now that I know it might freeze. We’ll just let it drip as well. The dishwasher’s a bit more problematic, but we’ve had temps down to -9F and it’s been fine. It seems it was just the extreme cold and the wind that did the damage.

Other people in the area were not as lucky. Burst pipes and power outages. Also house fires, because any time you’re trying to take extreme measures to keep your house warm, things might go awry. It was very cold.

And now today it’s going to be 41F. Go figure.

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Places You Don’t Want to Hear Water

I was excited for Friday last week, as I had the day off work, and I was looking forward to getting closer to having the house all ready to go for Thanksgiving. I got up and got some chores out of the way, and I was just getting ready to get down to some cleaning when I heard it.

Trickling.

Not just trickling, really. More of a “constant flow of water falling.” That’s a beautiful noise out in nature. Calm. Peaceful. But in your house, where you don’t have any water features installed? It’s not exactly a noise that brings a spring to your step. MC had been having a bath in our new tub, so I thought perhaps there was just something strange about the way it drained. A new noise I wasn’t familiar with.

I followed the sound all the way to the basement, where I discovered a steady flow of water coming out from my crawlspace into the main part of my basement. Thankfully I have a sump pump there, so the water wasn’t accumulating too much, but it definitely wasn’t designed to be coming from the crawlspace. I took out my phone (for its flashlight) and clambered down into the depths of the area below my kitchen and bathroom.

It didn’t take long to discover the problem. The drain pipe from the kitchen sink to the main drain had come unattached. And the drain from the tub to the main drain wasn’t venting the right way, which made it so all the water from the tub was flowing up through the pipes (instead of down through them) and out that detached pipe and into my crawlspace. It must have been doing that for a while. I have no idea how long.

This is why doing your own plumbing can come with some . . . risks.

On the plus side, I knew how to fix this, more or less. It involved a trip to the hardware store for some more PVC glue, as well as some PVC supports to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again. (I had failed to properly support that pipe, and I think it came detached at some point when I was monkeying around with everything down there.)

Of course, once I had that glued together properly, I discovered that the drain area of the tub was also leaking. I had helpfully put a bunch of spray foam around there, so I had to scrape all of that out, which ended up being the problem: the spray foam was pushing up against the tub and loosening the seal that was supposed to be there.

In any case, the leaks are fixed, and this evening I’m going to tackle the venting issue to make sure the drains all do what they’re supposed to do. And all it’s taken is 4 hours or so of my life. Kind of like The Machine in the Princess Bride, except dirtier.

Here’s hoping the venting goes more smoothly . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Bathroom Begins!

And here we are. September and another home renovation project. This time, we’re working on the downstairs bathroom. (The only bathroom we had, back in the day.) As we’ve renovated the rest of the house, bit by bit rooms that were just fine have become rooms that need renovation to keep up with the upgrades we’ve been making elsewhere. (Which makes sense. Those rooms are now at least 15 years old, if they were renovated right before we moved in.)

Up until now, the downstairs bathroom has been more and more neglected, to the point that none of the kids even wanted to use it to shower. It’s always also served as the laundry room, and it’s right off the kitchen, and we’d really love a bit of separation of the bathroom from the kitchen. That bathroom is quite spacious–more than what we need out of the room, now that there’s a second bathroom.

So what’s the plan? We’re going to turn that one big bathroom into two smaller rooms. Coming in from the kitchen, you’ll first come to a laundry room (we’re going to stack our washer and dryer) that has a sink and storage cabinets. Beyond that will be a small bathroom with a tub and sink. It’ll be a much smaller bathroom, but it’s a bathroom, not a gymnasium.

Honestly, I think I’m still quite traumatized from our infamous kitchen renovation last year. But this one is going to be different for a number of reasons:

• Tomas is going to be the main helper. He doesn’t leave on his mission for two whole weeks, and it’s not like he’s got anything else going on. It’ll also be great experience for him. I wish I’d known more about construction before I bought this house, that’s for sure.
• It’s a much smaller room. Like an eighth the size of the kitchen. Smaller = easier, if for nothing other than the amount of time it takes to do things to the whole room. (Like painting, for example.)
• We already have (almost) all of the stuff to do the renovation. I imagine there are some things we’ll still have to pick up. But the toilet, sinks, tub, vanity, and the like are all in my garage. (It’ll be lovely to be done with the project, since we’ll also be cleaning out the garage at the same time. Bonus!)
• We did most of the legwork on the tricky stuff when we did the kitchen. The water and electrical are mostly good to go. (Knock on wood.)

I anticipate surprises. But this has been a long time coming, and once we’re through with it, I’m through with renovation for at least a year. Yesterday Tomas and I cleaned out the old bathroom, putting all the stuff into our living room, right next to the stuff that’s still there from the kitchen redo. Once our house is renovated, we’re going to have to spend some serious time on getting that room together.

Always something . . .

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this DON’T GO TO SLEEP Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Once More into the Decluttering Fray

When it came time for our kitchen renovation to begin, we had a number of items in the current kitchen that needed to be rehoused while the construction happened. And in true Bryce fashion, I handled that by . . . throwing all of those items into the family room next door. They remained there throughout the long reconstruction process, but when that was all over, I put them right back where they belonged, because I’m awesome.

Ha. No.

I left them there, untouched, because I had lots of other things to do. And they’ve stayed there and stayed there and stayed there, and every time I thought about cleaning the room out, I wilted in the face of just how bad it was. I didn’t know where to begin. Everything was coated in construction dust, and there were a ton of things in there that I didn’t know what to do with. This would be a job that Denisa and I would have to do together.

It probably would have stayed that way indefinitely, except I was asked to play the piano in church on Sunday. The regular pianist would be away, and I needed to pinch hit for a single song. That’s all fine and good, except I hadn’t touched a piano key in years. And where was my piano? In the middle of the mess that was my family room. So in the end, my desire to practice (so I didn’t look like too big of an idiot in public) overcame my reluctance to start on that decluttering job.

Saturday, Denisa and I spent most of the day cleaning. We threw out three big trash bags of stuff, and made a huge pile of other stuff to be given away. We swept and wiped and mopped and scrubbed (and practiced the piano). And the room went from a place where you literally couldn’t sit down to a place that’s close to what it was like before. There are still some piles that need to be gone through, but it was a huge improvement.

I kept that momentum going the next two days, working on the kitchen itself. Since we’d just been putting stuff anywhere into it as we went, there’s a lot of efficiency lost in terms of storage. And it was also easier just to put something somewhere instead of actually decide if we needed it or not. I’ve been making a lot of those decisions, as well.

In the end, it was a very helpful reminder that no matter how hard the job, starting it is often the hardest part. Once you’ve got even a smidge of momentum, things begin to get easier. I took photo and video to track the progress, but Denisa made me swear never to share it publicly, since the room looked as bad as it did. Sorry, folks.

(As for playing the piano, I did well enough. Made some flubs right at the beginning, since I was nervous and it had been so long since I’d played in public, but it went fine after that.)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Kitchen Update: March 2022

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting, wondering if my kitchen might possibly be finished, now that I’ve taken a break from blogging and am back. Surely this project that’s been going on since the Hoover administration is finally complete, right? Right?

Well . . . not quite. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we’ve made real progress. (Today, MC was home sick, so I was home “sick.” But that meant I was here to help out in the kitchen some more. So we got the backsplash set, and it’s now ready to be grouted tomorrow.) Last week, the countertops actually arrived. Getting them in the house was a bit of an ordeal, since the island was one solid piece, 4.5′ by 9′ of granite. It weighed a ton.

We’ve had some backtracking. We redid the cabinets around the fridge, since they hadn’t turned out quite straight, and we swapped a couple of other cabinets around to improve the layout of the kitchen. Some of the painting needs to be redone where a few other repairs went in, and the flooring that we’d already gotten done needed to be taken out and redone.

However, we’ve made a lot of progress as well. Now we’re really just looking at what needs to be done, which is a rapidly dwindling list:

• Grout the backsplash
• Finish the floor under the oven and dishwasher, and then attach the dishwasher to the cabinets.
• Tweak the door to the bathroom, which ended up being a bit too narrow for the opening, since the barn door hardware leaves it too far out from the frame.
• Put in the trim around the corners and edges of the ceiling and cabinets.
• Put on the back piece and corner pieces for the island.
• Paint the sunroom.
• Make seat cushions for the seats in the sunroom.
• Finish the trim to the family room.
• Finish the trim around the outside of the door to the garage.

While that may seem like a lot, many of those jobs are a half hour or less, and none of them should be longer than a few hours to complete. (Well, other than the painting. Sigh.) But as far as construction goes, we are really close.

Which is great, since as soon as that’s done, we can actually clean the rest of the house.

And start on the main bathroom. Bathrooms are much simpler renovations though, right?

Riiiiiiight.

Have no fear: I will be posting pictures once the kitchen is up to it.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.