Just in case you thought we were sitting around doing nothing

c/o City of Victoria
Public Works Dept.
Victoria,

October 21, 2009

Dear Mr. Guy In Charge

I am writing to request a refund for expenses incurred when a blocked sanitary sewer line on City property caused a backflow of sewage into my basement on three separate occasions.

On the first occasion, September 8, 2009, we noticed what appeared to be relatively clean water coming up from the drainage hole in the pan for our hot water heater. The water receded fairly quickly and, after cleaning up what remained, we called Roto-Rooter to come and clean out the sewer lines between our house and the City’s section. The visit cost $141.75, but thanks to a mostly empty concrete basement storage room, nothing was damaged.

One month later, on October 6, 2009, the sewage backed up again, this time coming up not only from under the hot water tank in the storage area, but also from beneath the toilet in our basement bathroom. There was a great deal more water on this occasion, and it was dirty, foul-smelling, and clearly sewage given the amount and nature of the particulates within it. We called Roto-Rooter again, and they came back on an after-hours emergency call. Once again, they cleaned the drains between our house and the street. Although their guarantee from the previous cleaning was in effect, we still had to pay the cost of the after-hours visit, which resulted in another bill for $141.75.

Early the next morning, the sewer backed up again, resulting in yet another flood of foul liquid throughout our basement storage area and the downstairs bathroom. Roto-Rooter came back immediately and cleaned all of the pipes and drains beneath the house, but found no blockages or obstructions that could account for the repeated backups. They returned for a fourth time that afternoon with a camera and scoped the entire length of our sewer line, eventually finding the cause of the problem.

Evidently, our sanitary sewer line connects with our neighbour’s sanitary sewer before joining the main city line. The Roto-Rooter camera found a collapsed portion of the City’s sewer line, which greatly reduced the flow of sewage into the main line, and effectively sent our neighbour’s sewage back up our pipes and into our basement.

Fortunately, we had removed most of our possessions from the basement storage room after the first incident, and thus none of our belongings (at least, nothing of any value) were damaged. Unfortunately, the sewage did permeate and completely ruin the floor of our bathroom, which we had just finished renovating less than a year ago. We have had to rip up the damaged planking, as well as the rotten subfloor, and reinstall the entire floor. We repaired the damage ourselves, so we are not seeking contractor’s labour costs, but we are seeking compensation for multiple Roto-Rooter visits, and the cost of the materials required to restore the bathroom floor.

We are therefore requesting reimbursement for the following expenses:
Roto-Rooter: $141.75
Roto-Rooter again: 141.75
Roto-Rooter again, of course: 325.50
RONA (plywood): 65.39
Finishing Store: 419.35

TOTAL: $1093.74


Sincerely,

Don and Amy


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So... wanna buy a house?

For sale: one recently renovated, 3-bedroom, two-bath house with detached garage, fully-fenced private yard, and eat-in kitchen. New gas furnace; all electrical upgraded and completely rewired; all new plumbing; and, a brand-new master bedroom with en suite. Won't last long - make an offer today!

"But wait, Don," you say. "What's that about a fully-fenced yard?"

Then, of course, you do a spit-take and shout, "What the jesus?! Why in the name of great Caesar's ghost are you SELLING?"

That, my friends, requires pictures.

Keep in mind, as you peruse the evidence before you, that once the house actually goes on the market, I might be taking down some of these pictures. Just in case, you know, someone out there actually reads this crap. Or does a Google search for "great Caesar's ghost" AND happens to be in the market for a 65-year old bungalow in Victoria.

What? It could happen!

Anyway, it was a few short weeks ago that I came home from work one fine Friday, and saw activity in the long-abandoned house next door (the green one, not the pink house with the neighbours that helped us build the fence). Turns out the landlord finally got off his lazy ass and went looking to rent it out again. He (finally) had the decency to come up to us as we puttered about and introduce himself (we've only been living here for five years), and we shot the breeze for a few minutes, mostly taking advantage of the situation to point out the holes in his soffits (where the squirrels, birds, and rats were getting in) the crack in his foundation, and the tree that overhangs the driveway that we desperately wanted to prune back so it wasn't in quite as much danger of falling on our house. He used the time to assure us that he was renting to a single mother of two daughters who was into gardening and "interested in working around the house and cleaning it up a bit". Once he had gone (and we'd cleaned up the trail of slime he left behind), we started talking and quickly came to the conclusion that we just weren't ready to deal with the whole shared driveway experience again, and that maybe it was time to take advantage of the recovering market and low interest rates to hie ourselves off to a better neighbourhood all together.

And that was before the people had even moved in.

The very next day, the new tenant showed up, and went absolutely apeshit on the flower beds and planting areas around the house. She was pulling dead branches out, and raking up the fallen leaves and dead flowers, and totally going to town. Of course, she left all of the stuff in a big pile in the middle of the driveway, and only when I looked rather askance at the mound of crap in the exact spot at which I wanted to leave my car did she bother to ask if I happened to know the next time the city was scheduled to come by and pick up the brush piles. (About the middle of next March, actually.) Not the most auspicious beginning, but we figured she was just excited about moving to a new house and eager to get the place set up before moving in.

We were wrong, of course, but then you probably already figured that out.

Our first task was to draw up a list of all the things we would have to do before we could put the house on the market. The list has about fifty tasks on it, but among the most prominent (read: most effort required) were to redo the drywall in the upstairs bathroom (that we'd screwed up while renovating back when we first bought the house and which Leonard the plumbing god had subsequently put a whopping great hole in), patch the bloody pit of death in the driveway (oh, boy, asphalt!), and put in another fence behind the garage (so we could put "fully-fenced" on the listing, and to complete the privacy of the backyard).

The bathroom will have to wait until we get back from a trip to Toronto in the middle of August, but in the meantime, we've been working hard at the rest of the list.

The first notable thing we did was to build a box out of left-over cedar fencing to cover the trio of pipes in the front flower bed:

We still intend to plant some flowers and whatnot around it, and top it with a potted plant or two, but it does a nice job of concealing the pipes while still allowing easy access:



As it turns out, one of the reasons I took that picture is because I wanted to get a few pictures of our new neighbours. You see, they had sort of started to move in while we were still puttering about making lists and meeting with mortgage brokers and real estate agents. What we'd seen so far did not exactly fill our hearts with joy, as you'll soon see...

This first picture is of the front of their house - yes, the view you see when driving down the street towards our place (sorry about the blurriness, I was trying to be inconspicuous):



At first, I thought they were just using it as a staging area for their furniture before they moved it all inside, and then I realized that no, that's their outdoor smoking area! Joy! Also, if you look carefully, you can see a broken (as in, shattered) mirrored closet door tucked under the fir tree on the left. That's been there ever since they first started moving in (almost three weeks now) and they have two small dogs (one of which they let run loose all over the place) and a very young toddler (who is walking).

I also took a couple of pictures of the stuff they had left in the driveway, as it had already been sitting out there for a couple of days (through one decent rainfall, actually) and I wanted to capture the essence before we left on our annual three-day baseball pilgrimage to Seattle. You know, just in case they cleaned it up while we were away. Ha!





(Barely visible on the right side is PART of the pile of branches she pulled out of the beds on the first day, and which I had to kick to the side in order to actually use our driveway.)

Turns out we need not have worried too much - when we came back three days later, they had only built on what was already there:



And kept building the next day:



Aaaand the next:





Lest you think we were just passive witnesses to this, rest assured that we had talked to them several times, and even mentioned that we were planning on putting the house on the market soon. I had even pointed out that we have an easement on both sides of the driveway, and that they were not actually allowed to store or build anything within that easement. Each time, we were assured that it was only temporary, she was cleaning it up, her daughter's boyfriend was coming to help, her ex-husband was going to drop by and pick it all up, etc, etc, etc.

All a load of shit, of course, but you knew that, right? We sure as hell did.

Not wanting to delay any further, we drafted my buddy Clamb into helping us wrestle the two-man auger again, and got started on the back fence. Here's what the spot looked like after two trips to Ellice with loads of brush, pruned branches, and old grass clippings from the "compost" heap we were uh.. storing there. Yeah.



And after a late night of raking and pruning, another load of brush to Ellice, and a couple of hours with the post-hole digger and some concrete mixing:



That was also the weekend the neighbours were busy... dropping off yet more shit:





Yeah. It was at this point that we kinda started to lose it about the whole situation. I mean, it's one thing to make a bit of a mess when you're busy moving, but she didn't do a damn thing about it all weekend except spread it around into the driveway and her back yard.

Anyway, we had to wait a day to get our fence panels (oh, there's a story there, but I want to get this posted tonight), so we picked up some asphalt patching and turned our attention to the hole in the driveway. We had already filled it with gravel before going to Seattle, and let it settle:



We took out the excess, tamped down what remained and covered it all up with four bags of asphalt repair:



It was pretty damn straightforward, actually, which makes me wonder why I had been dreading and postponing that particular chore for so long.

The next day (after tipping the delivery guy five bucks because he had to carry the panels down the driveway, thanks to the neighbour's crap all over the place) we put up the rest of the fence. We had to do a little surgery to the panel on the right to get it to fit, but it wasn't too hard:



And that was that. Looks pretty damn good, though the War Department put her back out again helping me jimmy the panels into place.

So, yeah. House for sale in Mayfair area of Victoria. Central location, with a lovely view of Langford.

MORNING UPDATE!
I was out washing the side of the house last night (in preparation for painting it), and she was out there smoking (of course), so I took the opportunity to remind her that we were putting the house on the market and that our real estate agent would be bringing some prospective buyers around to look at it. (Not exactly a lie - our mortgage broker wants some pictures to send to one of his clients who might be interested, but those folks MIGHT drive by, right?) Anyway, I said the buyers would be coming by sometime this week, and she said something about waiting for her ex to come by and pick up her daughter's stuff. (Man, I could do a whole post about the whacked out family history or whatever, but this IS a renovation blog, at least nominally, so I won't. But trust me - it's like a whole season's worth of Jerry Springer.)

Anyway, she spent the whole evening bustling around out there -- and accomplished sweet f-all. This is what I saw when I left the house for work this morning:





Seriously. This is what she thinks is "cleaning up all this crap".
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More fencing, more... sick

So, our more astute and observant readers may have noticed in the last post that our careful and awesome fencing job left something of a gap between the new fence and the house. (Visible here.)

Well, after a little consideration, we decided that the gap was a little too big, and allowed a little too much view of our back yard to any casual passers-by on the street. In short, anyone walking by our house could look right down the hedge, into the back yard, and even into the park beyond. That would just not do at all, and so we took it upon ourselves to head off to Rona to buy a couple of cedar 2x4's, a box of good quality coated screws, and a couple dozen cedar fence boards.

We's gonna build us another fence!

This one, fortunately, would not involve a power auger, or indeed, any digging at all. We simply attached a pressure-treated 2x4 to the house (yay! TapCons!), a couple of stacked cedar 2x4's to the fence panel, and built a simple frame. Then we attached the fence uprights with a few finishing nails and voila!





Okay, so it was a bit harder than that - it was actually a full day's worth of work for the two of us, but it looks pretty good, even up against the manufactured panels.

Anyway, that's all the pictures for this post, but as a special bonus, we have a long-overdue return of everyone's favorite feature,

The Injury Report

So, part of our restructuring and re-tooling the fence involved reworking the gate for the neighbors. You see, when we originally hung it, the two posts on either side weren't quite exactly plumb, so we had to use shims to space out the 2x4 we used as a door jamb. Well, the shims worked... sort of. Meaning they looked ugly, and the door didn't close very well at all.

The fix was to take the gate and jamb apart, and to trim down the 2x4 so we wouldn't need the shims. This would require some rather tricky free-handing on the table saw -- but don't worry, this isn't an Injury Report about the table saw... well, not about the blade anyway.

To cut a long story short, apparently when you cut or sand cedar, you should really wear a dust mask. The reason for this is that the dust can carry microbes or bacteria from within the wood into your airways, or just irritate your breathing passages enough that whatever bacteria is in the air is more likely to infect you.

I spent the last three days lying on the couch with a nasty, nasty head cold and brutal cough.

Yuck.



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Less basement, more garage and yard

I tried for, like, a half-hour to come up with a pun that covered blog post vs. fence post, but they all sucked, so I didn't.

You're welcome.

Anyway, there's not a lot of basement left to cover, to be honest. I know the War Department had said something about cutting down an existing closet door to cover up the closet under the stairs, but that thing just wasn't going to cut it, so we've contracted my mom to sew us a nice curtain, which I will post pictures of just as soon as we've got it up.

Other than that, the only things left to do downstairs are the thresholds for the doors, which will be somewhat complicated to make, and will require the use of a decent workshop. And that, of course, would require moving all that crap out of the garage, covering the walls, building work benches, finding storage, and all that other stuff.

As it just so happens, that's just what we've been working on...

We started the process of finishing the garage by moving the bare minimum (in case it started raining) of stuff out of the garage and into the driveway, so we could access the back wall:





And then... well, there are a few steps missing in terms of photographic evidence, but we hung 1/2-inch plywood on all the walls (that took two weekends) and built the first of two workbenches (that took another weekend), hung the old white cabinet from my office on the rear wall, and started work on the second bench... which is proving to be something of a bugbear as we need to mount the radial arm saw in it, and trying to figure out how to align the fence is driving us nuts. When I have a picture of that, I'll post it, but for now:



Anyway, seeing as how we were so close to finishing the garage, we figured it was a GREAT time to start a new project!

Er... no, wait a minute. That's not how it happened at all. See, we knew we had a long weekend coming up, and what better way to while away the May Two-Four than to spend the whole weekend busting our butts erecting a fence!

Okay, so the neighbours approached us, and offered to split the cost and labour of replacing the rotting piece of crap that passed for a fence between our backyards. It's hard to get a sense of the utter crapitude from just the one picture, but you can see the ramshackle old piece of shit here:



Anyway, we were quite happy to have a go at it, so our neighbour ordered the fence panels and materials last Friday. Of course, that meant that, bright and early Saturday morning, I headed down to the tool rental place to get a clamshell digger, an eight-inch auger bit, and this bad boy right here:



Oh, yeah. We doing this thing with POWER tools, baby.

Ahem.

Right, so, the first order of business, take down the old fence. Here's 360 kilos of the crappiest old fence that ever fit in the back of a pickup all ready for a trip down to Ellice:



Here's what it looked like when we stopped for lunch:







Once again, I didn't (or couldn't) document all the between stages and whatnot, but suffice to say that between the time I picked up the auger and about 7:30 on Sunday evening, we done erected a fence:







We couldn't have done it without our neighbour, Cory, who spent all day Saturday working his butt off while suffering from the mother of all hangovers, and the neighbour on the far side of Cory, who had put up his own fence not that long ago, and not only showed us how to properly plumb and set a fence post, but stuck around long enough to put up all nine posts. (And drink three of our beers, but that's why we bought them, after all...)

Phew. So, time to finish the second work bench, make some thresholds, design a bulkhead/drop ceiling solution for the laundry room, and we can call this damn thing DONE.













Heh, like that's EVER going to happen...


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Insert closet-related joke here

Well, I was trying to make it an even three months, but I just couldn't go another day without posting. No, really. My dad threatened me with actual, physical harm if I didn't post something. And given that he always used to be able to smack me in the head from the front seat, even when I was sitting in the very back of the Land Cruiser, I decided not to test the true length of his reach, and just post.

So, let's see, where did I leave off? Um. Wow. That long? Huh.

Well, how about we tackle the big question first, the one that everyone asks me when they notice I haven't updated the blog in ... gulp ... eighty-four freaking days:

"Are you guys done yet?"

And I'll give you the same answer I've given them for the last 84 days, "No, it's gonna be another two weeks."


First things first: we did manage to finish the floor in the laundry room, and let me tell you, those vinyl planks are great. They look good, they're easy to install, they're cheap, and they're easy to clean:



That looks pretty damn spiffy to me.

The next project was to rebuild the closet under the stairs. Actually, the next project was to add some structure to the stairs before they bent too much farther out of plumb, and THEN rebuild the closet.

So here's the first stage of the structure we added; a brace along the left side of the closet to hold everything steady - we had no illusions about being able to bring it back to plumb:



The next step was to add some bracing so I'd have something to hang the drywall on, and some extra supports for the landing:



Take a closer look at that one, especially the bracing on the left, if you want an idea of just how far out of plumb the stairs were. Oh hell, just check it out from the other side:



And here's the bracing (after some rather extensive modifications to the existing crap) on the side by the workshop:



And here it is with my solo contribution, the hanging of the drywall:



Before we get to the next picture, I feel obliged to point out that I had almost nothing to do with it. All I did was try not to make TOO much of a mess hanging the drywall. All of the mudding and sanding (and I do mean ALL of it) was done by the War Department. I tried like hell to talk her out of it and convince her to call Tony to come back and do it for us, but she wanted to do it herself, and damn me if she didn't do a hell of a good job:





I did help with the trim and painting, but the really good work there is all hers. It's also hard to see behind the cat boxes, but we also completely walled in the alcove under the stairs and painted it over to match the color in the stairwell.

Right, so that's where we stand. Next step is to figure out a door of some kind (we have an old closet door we were hoping to reuse, but once again, I failed to anticipate that, and didn't build the opening to suit it which means we'll have to either come up with a different solution, or do some nifty modifications to the door or frame).

We also need to do the ceiling in the laundry room, but that's more a long term thing. We've burned through the entirety of our renovation budget (and then some) and the ceiling isn't a high priority right now, unlike getting the garage sorted out, and repainting some of the outside trim before the summer gets here.

So, next time (and I promise it won't be long), I'll put up some pictures of the finished bathroom and office, but I did want to show one thing before I sign off.

We had some serious snow back in December, and it afforded us with a crystal clear illustration of what all our hard work has accomplished. Here, take a look at this, and then I'll explain what you're looking at:




That's the back wall of our house during the worst of the snow - we got about 25-30 centimeters, quite a lot for Victoria. Anyway, if you look closely at that picture you can tell where the wall of my office ends and the wall of the laundry room begins. You see, we haven't insulated the laundry room yet, so we're spending quite a bit of money and energy to heat the walls, which is dissipated out into the snow outside, melting it away from the brick. In my office, however, all that time and effort we put into framing and insulating the space is paying off: the heat is staying on the inside, where it belongs.
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