We've been working. No, really, we have.

Ah, the joys of renovating an older house. It’s a non-stop, never-ending barrel of poo-flinging monkeys is what it is.

Last week wasn’t one of the more productive weeks we’ve had, sadly, which is why I haven’t exactly been burning up the intertubes with updates. Our lack of progress wasn’t for lack of trying, however, with my adventures on Thursday night providing a prime example of how to work hard and have nothing to show for it.

With the War Department off to a barbecue, I decided to start framing the other half of the Dread Wall of Pink^TM. Given my fancy new toy, I figured I could easily do the footer and top plate, and probably get a few studs in before Amy got home. Man, did I ever overestimate my own competence.

I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong or how I screwed up, but it took me two hours just to get the footer down. Once I did, the top plate was going in fine, until I saw how far away from the wall one end of it was. That is to say, farther away than the other end…Oops.

When Amy returned, I had just finished pulling up the footer plate so lovingly laid down. I was in the midst of trying to re-mark the line for the footer, and had been at it for three hours with nothing to show for my efforts save a few mostly straight smudges on the concrete. It was not a good time.

Friday and Saturday, thankfully, went a little better as I managed to get the wall up, studded, and braced while Amy installed a new dryer circuit (at great personal risk).




While my task might make the better picture, hers was much, much harder. You can kinda see the smudgy bit on the left where the old, frayed, piece-of-crap cable came down the wall. It's a much nicer set up, now.

Also on Saturday, we revamped the gutter system on the garage so that the rainwater off the roof would be diverted farther away from the walls. Now our little garage looks like some kind of grotesque alien life form has infected it and it’s preparing to walk away on spindly white legs:



Heh, that would be so cool...

By the way, the War Department once again did all the hard stuff. I just cut away the existing downspouts and attached the new pipes; Amy went up the ladder and cleaned and re-caulked all the seams and corners in the gutters.

We had been waiting rather anxiously all weekend for the drain cleaning guy to come and he finally showed up on Monday morning. It took him about three hours to snake all of the drains… well, almost all of the drains….

See, our foundation isn’t exactly square. It’s mostly square, but more like a square with a chunk missing out of the southwest corner, where our front porch sits. The porch (though it’s something of an overstatement to call it as such) is concrete, and has its own footer (I would hope). The problem this present for the drains, and the guy doing the cleaning in particular, is that it adds a couple of extra corners to the system, one of which is an “inside” 90-degree bend.

Well, the guy doing the snaking (heh, that sounds dirty) couldn’t quite work his way completely around those corners under the porch slab. Here, I made a picture:



The thick grey line is our foundation, and the black square is (roughly) the front porch. The burgundy (merlot?) circles indicate where we dug the holes below each of the downspouts (the circle at the top is the massive hole in the front yard), and the red lines represent all of the perimeter drains that the guy was able to clean. (He also cleared out the line that leads away from the house to the city storm drains, which was a huge relief.) The thick, nasty, mockingly obstinate blue line is the one portion of the drain that he just couldn’t reach.

Sigh.

We're not sure yet how we're going to deal with it. Digging down to the drain tile in that corner would be prohibitively difficult, what with the giant camilia there, not to mention the high voltage line that runs out from that corner on its way to the garage. At the moment, and acting on the advice of the drain snaker (hee hee), I think we're leaning towards leaving it as is - at least until next summer, anyway.

In the meantime, clean drains mean we can start installing cleanouts and new drain tile, so that's what we did. It only took two evenings!



(I'm always amazed by how shallow that hole looks in pictures. It certainly isn't that shallow when I'm trying to haul my fat ass out of it because I accidentally put the piece of pipe down out of reach again.)

The upward-pointing, gaping holes in the pipe are where we plan to install the cleanouts. We'll have a little family of cleanouts in the front flower bed; two for the perimeter drain in classic white, and one for the sewer in foreboding black. Lovely.

Anyway, I can't promise any progress (or updates) this weekend as I'm having my wisdom teeth out tomorrow, and plan on spending most of the next four days feeling sorry for myself and asking Amy to do even the simplest things in an increasingly annoying whine.

It's gonna be GREAT!