A second pickup truck load of debris and we haven’t even technically started demolition. Or have we?
Four for Friday
around the house
12 Hours of Thursday
The point of no return — the point after which there is no way but forward. In truth, we passed that point long, long ago — over a week ago. But the evidence as been piling up in the back of our neighbor’s truck.
This afternoon, we reached a point that we had to take the first load off to the dump. Something of a milestone, I guess. So now the truck sits almost empty, waiting for the next load of refuse.
It’ll have to wait for the sink, though. I took it around to the back of the house, threw together a pedestal, and using the adapter I got during my nightly Home Depot outings, attached the hose to the faucet and presented K with a cold water field sink. The outlet drops the water at the base of one of our three remaining Leyland Cypresses. Our neighbors probably think we’re insane.
The kitchen is looking less like a kitchen. All the decorative trim, both crown molding and baseboards, are gone, and a whole section of cabinets are now in the landfill. Tomorrow, the range, vent hood, oven, and dishwasher come out, as well as most of the upper cabinets and as much of the lower as I can work through. I’d like to have it all out for demolition day so we can focus on the chore of getting the floor up, but that might not be possible.
At any rate, we’ve moved the last of our necessary kitchen items to the basement. For the next eight weeks or so, it will be a kitchen, dining room, office, and pantry. The best part of the arrangement, though, is the ability to reach over to the refrigerator to get another handful of our quick-and-easy pickles that take only twenty-four hours to go from cucumbers to little slices of paradise.
The upshot of all this: real, visible progress now.
Progress
We sat down to dinner, and I had a feeling of progress. Which might have been a little odd to an outside observer because, truthfully, most everything looks the same as it did yesterday.
The only difference in the kitchen are missing ceiling fixtures. The only difference in the laundry room, where the load center is located and where most of our work has been concentrated, is only a few wires moved to more future-remodel-compliant locations.
Otherwise, it appears to be all the same.
Appearance will catch up Saturday, with demolition day — not to be confused with Demolition Man…
A Tale of Three Kitchens
“There is nothing more disruptive to your life than remodeling your kitchen,” explained a neighbor who is also a contractor. Were we hiring him to gut and rebuild our kitchen, it would take five weeks, he assured us. We’re saving several thousand dollars by doing a lot of it ourselves and doing our own subcontracting for the rest, so that means we’re looking at about eight weeks.
Eight weeks without a kitchen. How will we do it? “Eat out a lot,” an acquaintance at work suggested. Thanks, but that eats into the money we’re saving by doing it ourselves. We just have to be a little creative.
For example, after demolition day (this coming Saturday), we’ll be moving our sink down to the area just outside our lower entrance, running a connection via the hose pipe, and running the drain to the Leyland Cypresses that will be just behind our makeshift field sink. No hot water, that’s true, but water. As for cooking, we’re about to see what all a grill and slow cooker are capable of.
For other items, we’ve converted our basement office into a kitchen/dining area. The microwave sits on the workbench in the adjacent room, and the refrigerator squeeze in beside the desk on Friday, once we’ve installed an outlet on its own breaker ostensibly too keep the fridge from throwing the breaker but in reality for the sump pump. It’ll have to do dual duty for a while, though.
In the meantime, components for our new kitchen began arriving today. The flooring guy brought all the planks for our new hardwood floors in the kitchen so they’ll have time to acclimate to our home before installation on July 1. So counting what’s going on in the living room now, we have parts of three kitchens in our home.
The level of craziness in our lives is about to ramp up dramatically.
Tired
When we bought our house, I was adamant: “That kitchen has to go.”
K agreed, but time passed, money saved for this got shuffled to that, and now it’s nine years on and we still haven’t redone our kitchen. The up side? Now K agrees with my original plan — to gut it completely and start anew — because there’s no much sense in doing otherwise.
And so our lived-in kitchen will soon be a subfloor-and-wall-stud room with exposed wiring and plumbing.
Which means a completely new kitchen is only weeks away, and the setting of so many of our memories will disappear. The white fridge that has served for years now as our main art display will disappear, to be replaced with a stainless steel French door refrigerator upon which nothing can be stuck because no magnet will stick.
I’ve never liked endings, but this is one I’m eager for. But the irony: we’ve already spent several thousand dollars and the kitchen still looks awful.
In the meantime, though, E is very excited about the changes in the house. Since we’re doing hardwood in the kitchen, we’ll be refinishing the floor in the living room. This in turn means that everything from those two rooms must move.
The living room goes to E’s room. “I get that in my room too?!” was the constant refrain the other night. “I’m so happy!”
Rain and the Roof
They were already at work when I peeked out the front windows at eight this morning.
Our neighbors finalized the purchase of their home, and in doing so, got enough money from the bank to fix up a few things, including the roof. And so while the Boy and I worked on trimming the hedges in the front — well, while I worked on it and he helped, which, as is often (but not always) the case, makes more work for me — we heard the sounds of scraping and popping as the workers pulled up the old roof, accompanied occasionally by some song or another that the workers would sing. I wouldn’t recognize the songs; they were in Spanish.
I thought about the situation for a few moments and realized that had this been in the suburbs of Chicago, it might have been Polish a few years ago. It still might be, but the likelihood is smaller: with the opening of the EU to Poles some ten years ago, few people come here to work. It’s easier just to work in Austria.
At any rate, by the time we finished the hedges, they had pulled all the shingles and tar paper off. And it was then that the unlikely happened: rain. It hasn’t rained in a couple of weeks, but the roofers had no sooner gotten the first bit of tar paper down than it started raining.
The Boy and I by that time were working on improving the draining at the bottom of our driveway, and so we decided just to continue working.
I dumped the gravel; the Boy threw away the empty bags. One of the few but increasingly frequent times when his “I want to help!” was actually help.
“Teamwork!” he exclaimed. Indeed.
Spring Saturday
We feel this way every single spring, the relief that the winter is over, that the cold has passed, that bright sun is the norm. No matter the severity of the winter, we all feel this way, especially here in the South, where we’re not really sure what to do with cold weather anyway.
Today was the first warm — truly warm — Saturday we’ve had in the yard. Last weekend we had guests; next weekend is Palm Sunday. From here on out, weekends are not for working in the yard, so we made the most of this beautiful day.
We started with the shrubs in front of the house. The boxwoods are a distant memory, but some of the replacements have not fared well, especially the Indian Hawthorns. We did everything we could, even apparently resurrecting them one spring, but they are stubbornly fragile, so I pulled them out today. Literally — all it took was some rocking and tugging and out they came.
The Boy came out to help me, but the Girl was still in bed. E showed me how he walks in preschool when they have to be “super quiet.” I would imagine he has little trouble following those directions, though: he’s so concerned about following instructions that he gets upset now when he sees his schoolmates taking off their shoes. “It’s against fire code!” he fusses, echoing what his teachers told the class at the beginning of the year. Thinking of some of my own students’ disregard for rules and regulations, I was tempted when he first explained the fire code dilemma, to let him know that once he got to public school, it would become the ironic norm.
The Girl finally woke up, and it was straight to the driveway for racing. She never lets the Boy win, which frustrates him at times, but mostly he shrugs it off. It’s difficult to imagine her doing the same thing when faced with a seemingly-endless losing streak, but that’s one of the many differences that make them both precious to us.
Working in the Backyard
Those Leyland Cypresses have really been a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they provided a bit of privacy. On the other hand, they were a terrible nuisance to trim, and they were very very susceptible to disease and pests.
The last few months, though, one has given way to some kind of illness. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really care — it’s not a battle I was willing to fight. I knew I could never win that battle, so K and I decided to take down the entire tree. And the other two.
Second on the agenda: finish the sump pump system. The pit and pump have been installed for some time now, but the actual outlet was only a temporary fix. As of today, it’s a little more permanent. Still not the perfect solution, but it should work.
And finally, wings for dinner. A perfect Saturday.
Under Us, Around Us, In Us
I know nothing about mold other then the fact that it appears on bread. I’ve worked out this little personal equation that the purity of the bread is proportional to the speed with which it becomes covered in mold: the sooner, the better as it indicates few preservatives. But when it comes to mold in the house, I’m lost.
We have mold in the crawl space. A slow leak that went completely undiscovered for several weeks is all it took to create a wonderful little breeding ground for the stuff. Specifically, we have, according the the report we received, Cladasporium and “Pen./Asp”, which a quick search reveals as “Aspergillus and Penicillium.” A little more research was clearly in order.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, “common indoor molds” are
- Cladosporium
- Penicillium
- Alternaria
- Aspergillus
In other words, our three molds represent 75% of the most common molds. So it’s nothing rare, and it’s really not even anything that’s not already naturally present in the air to some degree or other.
The CDC further explains,
Generally, it is not necessary to identify the species of mold growing in a residence, and CDC does not recommend routine sampling for molds. Current evidence indicates that allergies are the type of diseases most often associated with molds. Since the susceptibility of individuals can vary greatly either because of the amount or type of mold, sampling and culturing are not reliable in determining your health risk. If you are susceptible to mold and mold is seen or smelled, there is a potential health risk; therefore, no matter what type of mold is present, you should arrange for its removal. Furthermore, reliable sampling for mold can be expensive, and standards for judging what is and what is not an acceptable or tolerable quantity of mold have not been established.
Of course, regardless of the mold type, the amount seems to be just as important if not more than the type. All the sites I used in the research spoke of mold counts, some of them absolute (“spores per cubic meter”) and some of them relative (“10 times the outside count”). Our report indicated “very low” levels of Cladosporium and “low” levels of Aspergillus and Penicillium. This seems even more useless than “x times the outside count,” which itself seems fairly useless. Worse still, the CDC states that “[s]tandards for judging what is an acceptable, tolerable, or normal quantity of mold have not been established.” In addition, the WHO suggests that the best way to test for mold is with a culture test, and our test is labeled “Direct Microscopic Examination Report,” which indicates someone put the stuff on a slide and looked at it under a microscope, which would mean the concentration was determined by counting or even estimating.
The first mold remediation company came out and tested our crawl space and gave us a quote for taking care of the problem: $2200. This included “basement encapsulation,” which promised to prevent the problem from happening again. The insulation, he assured us, wouldn’t need to be changed. After all, it’s glass. All told, two days’ work.
The second company came out and basically said the problem was even worse than the first company said. The whole kitchen floor and subfloor needs to be replaced, they explained. The insulation in the entire crawl space would need replacing, as would the heavy plastic vapor barrier. The gentleman looked at our mold report from the other contractor and felt it inadequate. It would be better to use their testing services, for a mere $500, to get a true picture of the problem. All told, eight days’ work, he said. The quote: $12,000. As with the $20,000 replacement window quote, I would have found it hard to keep a straight face were it not for the fact that the gentleman delivered the quote by phone to K about half an hour after he left.
And so where do we stand? A crawl space with some amount of mold that according to “experts” hovers gently between dangerous and deadly (judging from the quotes) filled with insulation that may or may not need to be replaced, and a vapor barrier that needs to be replaced to varying degrees.
Digging in the Dirt
In which Tata installs a sump pump.
Water
We can’t live without it, but for the past week, I can’t say that I’d be too unhappy to give it a shot. The evening before Wigilia preparation, several days of rain took control of our basement and my whole night: it became pouring, literally, up one of the formerly-thought-to-be-plugged termite treatment holes. At about midnight, I was shop-vac-ing sixteen gallons of water every eight minutes. The rain stopped at around one, and I finally stopped sucking up the water at around three.
And now, less than a week later, we’re in the same situation. Days of rain, and then this:
A line of storms that’s just moving northwest straight through our little state. And so I’m up at past one in the morning again, writing this (planning to back-date it for obvious reasons), waiting to see if the rain stops, wondering if my second third fourth who-knows-which attempt at patching the holes will at least hold for this deluge.
But I’m not complaining, though it sounds like it. I know it could be worse. I know others are experiencing worse — everyone on our street, in our neighborhood, is experiencing the same thing and then some. And then there are the tornadoes in Texas and the midwest. Still, chronicling and all…
Cooking over Fire
Except for organized, group events, I don’t remember really having any kind of bonfire growing up. It just wasn’t something we did. Part of it was likely where I grew up, for certainly kids who grew up in the country must have had bonfires. But for those of us who grew up in developments planned right down to the arrangement of identical-floor-plan houses, it probably never happened. At least it never happened in my universe.
For K, on the other hand, growing up in Poland, they were like baseball games or tailgating in the south: just something one did. Go for a walk in any of the woods that surround K’s home village and you’ll eventually find a spot where some group or other threw some rocks in a circle and lit a fire. And many houses have a fire pit somewhere on the property.
Since Nana and Papa gave us a fire ring that someone gave them — it’s Christmas all year round in our backyard — we’ve been having bonfires fairly reguarly as the weather permits, which means generally spring and fall. Open fires in 90 degree heat and pea-soup humidity are not very pleasant, but now that things have cooled down and the humidity has dropped to normal level, we try to have a little fire every now and then. The kids adore it, and we find it’s an almost magical family time. But there was always something missing: food. We roasted weenies on sticks sometimes and made s’mores every now and then, but that’s nothing compared to the feasts Poles prepare on their bonfires. This week, though, we bought a cheap kit to suspend a grill over the flames, and tonight, it was like being back in Lipnica again.
Autumn Tomatoes
Even though it’s nearly November, we still had tomatoes in the small raised beds we accuse of being a garden. For the last several weeks, though, the ripening process has all but stopped, and so ahead of tonight’s possible freeze, K sent the kids out to pick the remaining tomatoes.
They were to segregate them into red and green, with the plan being to eat some of the green later this week in the form of fried green tomatoes and putting the rest in paper bags to ripen slowly.
Given the color distinctions, everyone felt it was best if E just held the bowl.
Disaster Lurking
Saturday in the fall means a day in the yard more often than not. We have neglected our yard, however, and so we had quite a bit to get caught up. Rain for several Saturdays didn’t help much either, other than encourage growth of our lawn, which amounted to more work.
With a batch of pumpkins for fall decoration, the kids had a bit of work as well. They each got a small, personal pumpkin but had to share a large one. On his half, E elected for an all black pumpkin, then decided that he might like to have an entirely black pumpkin and began slowly taking over the whole pumpkin. Much to L’s frustration.
While they were painting, I was trimming all the hedges when I discovered the fourth nest of yellow jackets since we moved here. Or rather, they found me, with one giving me a welcome present just below my left eye.
Two catastrophes in one day. If only we could keep all catastrophes at this level.
Decorating
They run downstairs to find our few Halloween decorations and begin!
Back To Normal
“Well, now everything is back to normal,” I said just the other evening, when the kids were having an evening snack, and K and I were divvying up the evening responsibilities — who does the bathing and tooth-brushing, who does the reading/praying/tucking-in.
“Not quite, Daddy,” L corrected. “We’re still missing Bida.”
Our oldest cat had run off just before I’d left for Poland, and no one had seen her since. “She’ll come back” was K’s constant refrain, but I wasn’t so sure. How well could an arthritic, deaf, virtually-toothless old cat survive without human intervention?
Apparently, she could survive quite well, because this evening, she came trotting into the carport as if nothing had happened. Her long, gray hair was starting to mat after a month of neglect, and it was filled with little twigs, seeds, and dirt. She’d lost a fair amount of weight. But other than that, she was just like normal: the old grumpy lady who hisses at Elsa, our year-old-cat, for the slightest little thing, who trots up the stairs and hides under our bed whenever she’s offended (which doesn’t take much).
Elsa, for her part, was thrilled to see Bida, and eager to help. She gave up her food for Bida, backing away when the elder cat approached, and she stood watch as Bida ate slowly.
Elsa’s restraint has always impressed me: with her sharp teeth and sharper claws, she could tear Bida apart in a fight. Yet every time Bida hisses and swats ineffectually at Elsa, Elsa just backs down and submits.
So tonight, when we’re all divvying up responsibilities and snacks, I can try again: “Everything’s back to normal now.”
Basement
Step one: take almost everything from one side of the basement and put it on the other side. Cram everything in as much as possible — make it look like a complete wreck.
Step two: clean and paint the now-clean side of the basement with waterproofing paint to reduce eliminate the risk of future flooding. (This should be done in conjunction with a complete renovation of the gutters’ drainage system.)
Step three: move everything else out of the basement storage room into only other room in the basement. Pack it all as ridiculously tightly as possible.
Step five (the previous one counts as two steps): clean the other half of the basement storage room floor
Step six: dread reversing all the steps.
96 – 48
There was an almost fifty-degree temperature difference between Jabłonka and Greenville this third day of the 2015 summer. There, it was raining all day; here, the sun was merciless. That being said, we all had the same reaction: stay in as much as possible.
Aunty came by for a visit — she lives just about a mile away, so it’s convenient, and visiting is just what you do when it’s forty-eight degrees and raining in June.
K told me that she “couldn’t put enough layers on today.” But being trapped indoors leads to discoveries: “We played a couple of games of battleship, and then we discovered the Qwirkle game upstairs in the wooden room. It is a great game, I think we will play it a lot when the rest of the kids join.”
That will be next week, when Polish schools are done for the year and the cousins come to grandma’s.
On this side of the ocean, I spent the day cleaning out one half of the basement in preparation for a thick, heavy coat of water-sealing paint. “Withstands up to 15 PSI” proclaims the label. Sounds like you could submerge your house in that case. Still, it was a job that required a lot of work that doesn’t leave a lot to show for it. The before and after pictures look almost the same. A little less dirt on the floor, and some patches where I scraped up the old paint entirely.
In theory, this is unnecessary: I’ve discovered the source of our occasional flooding (poorly clogged drainage that leaves the downspouts to pour water along the house), and I’ve fixed the problem. In theory. But I’m not about to take a chance, so I have plans to paint both the basement walls and floor as well as the portion of the crawlspace where water was likely entering.
But it wasn’t all inside work today. I worked in our small garden, finishing pulling up the old peas, straightening some of the tomato stakes, and dreaming of the not-too-distant future when I’m overwhelmed with tomatoes.
Drain, Rain, and a Snail
Our crawl space flooded at least five times in the last couple of years, and our half-basement itself flooded once or twice as well. It quickly became clear what was the cause: two downspouts of our gutters were gushing water straight into the foundation, which meant that our drainage system (already redone twice) was insufficient, clogged with roots, dirt, and who knows what. So earlier this year, I replaced the system with a temporary fix. An ugly fix. But it solved the problem. I knew I’d have to do it for a second time (the first time was done by a contractor before we moved in, part of our closing deal), but I as in no hurry.
“Your number one priority while we’re in Poland,” K clarified, though, “is to redo the drains in the front.” So for the last few days, I’ve been digging, tugging, leveling, and getting everything ready for a final fix. I knew it’d be overkill, but I also figured I’d rather not do it another time, so the replacement system is with three-inch schedule 40 PVC pipe. But before I could get everything set, the sky began to gray, and I decided I might need to reattach the old temporary system, just in case.
What followed was a storm unlike anything I’d seen here. “It would have been the perfect test,” I muttered to myself.
Yesterday and today, though, I was able to get back out, finish up the leveling, and finish up the project, by and large. I decided to include two clean-outs in the plan just in case: I do not want to do this yet again. I reattached the hose to the spigot, rammed it down it not the newly constructed system, and turned it on. Perfection.
“Now if I could only get a real test,” I thought. Wish granted: another storm blew through this afternoon and everything worked like a charm. All that’s left is packing a bit more gravel around it and replacing the mulch.
Job one, done. More or less.
But who cares about drains and rain when across the ocean there are snails and soccer games?
K took the kids and Babcia to visit A, K’s sister-in-law, and their kids, who live just outside of Krakow. There was soccer and silliness until L discovered a snail — “na prawda duzy slimak!” K assured me (though probably with better grammar) before I’d had a chance to see the pictures — and that entertained them for a couple of hours.
L has fallen back into Polish with no problem, K tells me. In fact, she’s eager to accompany her cousin S for a two-week camp up at the coast. The Boy, though, is a different story. Though K speaks almost exclusively in Polish, he’s still not really speaking that much Polish. I would imagine he feels a little left out as a result. “I translate for him a lot,” L explained today during our Skype time, but there’s something about this picture, his hands held in front of him as he watches, that makes me just want to hug him and assure him that he’ll be able to jabber away in no time as long as he makes a real effort. Or maybe there’s something else entirely going on with that picture. Maybe he’s just hungry, ready to head to the kitchen for some chicken and potatoes.
Or maybe not.
Break
K informs me that I work probably fifty to sixty hours a week during the school year. Grading, planning, grading, planning in the evenings, on the weekends, in the evenings, on the weekends. It adds up, she tells me. I never keep track, but I’ll go with her assessment. That’s why, when summer break comes around, it’s an absolute relief, at least for the first couple of weeks.
And it allows me to do things like cleaning up a trampoline we got for free from a family whose boys have long outgrown it and doing it in the early afternoon of a Tuesday.
Which is also good, because as L helps, she gets tired, which bodes well for a restful night’s sleep.
So we all get breaks.