I wish I was a brick man…

Bady-Bady-Bady-Bady-Bady-Bady-Bady-Boom-Bady-Boom. 

Because then I could fix my own chimney, instead of dealing with masons and a subject I know nothing about. Bady-Boom-Bady-Boom.

Seriously. How is it that four different masons can look at a chimney, tell you three different things and charge you four different prices ranging from $300 to $6,000?One thinks I need a liner and a total chimney rebuild. One thinks I just need the rebuild. One think I just need a few bricks replaced and some new mortar. One thinks I just need tuck-pointing. The worst part is that I have NO idea who’s right, and no one I can trust to advise me on the matter. 

What a racket. I am in the WRONG business.

The house roughed me up.

It’s amazing how little one has to show for one’s self after 3 hours of hand sanding one’s woodwork. Well, that is, unless you count a sore neck and an arm that feels like it’s going to fall off. I ripped through two sanding sponges and all I roughed up was a door frame and short stretch of baseboard. Ugh. How many sponges will it take to do the whole room?! Seriously. I think The Home Depot or Lowes should sponsor my “journey through home ownership”. I mean, clearly I’ll be sponsoring their existence at $3 a pop for a sanding sponge.

Good God, my neck hurts.

Adventures in gas self-hook-up.

Picture this: He has the new-used dryer pulled away from the wall. We’re PRETTY sure (but not totally) that we have the right threads doped. We’re PRETTY sure we have the gas back on and we don’t smell any leaks. We’ve sprayed the connections with soap water and watched for bubbles. Nothing. And then M says to me, go duck behind that wall. When I start the dryer, I’m going to leave the door open and hold down the door-close latch. While I do this, peek out from behind that wall and tell me if you see a flame.

Home repair and improvement is nerve-wracking enough. Then add an element of danger. That’s an adventure in gas self-hook-up. And trust me, it’s an entirely different experience. We didn’t blow ourselves up, as I’m here to blog the tale. M’s a super smart engineering cookie. I had complete confidence in him–even as I hid behind the wall. 

Quentin Tarantino-style plot flashback: My 20-year-old Maytag dryer (First Weber’s idea of a “special feature”) crapped out. It’s not the first time, but it was the last time. Being a writer who specializes in energy efficiency, and truly believing in the cause, it was KILLING me to have to run my clothes through three cycles to get them MOSTLY dry. But, as I said, I’m a writer, which should tell you that I don’t exactly have a ton of “Maytag money” sitting around. And so, the triple-drying continued until I never had dry jeans to wear. 

M and I talked about fixing it, but the whole is worth less than the sum of its parts. So, I did what any slightly pinched homeowner would do. I started combing Craigslist. 

And I found an awesome guy selling a one-year-old dryer for half its retail price. A classic case of “moving in with girlfriend, duplicate appliances”. The clincher was when he offered to help us transport it to the house AND carry it down 13 basement stairs. Rock on. 

And then, we had to hook it up. I’d like to thank Glen, the sweet and knowledgeable working senior at the Ace National Hardware who’s know-how was the only buffer between us and certain death.

I’m telling you, this house is going to kill me, yet.

Lesson: Use ONLY the yellow package of pipe dope when dealing with gas. The white package is for water pipes. Also, you probably shouldn’t install your own gas dryer unless you really know what you’re doing.

Land of the $200 heating bill.

I knew it was coming. It didn’t take me by surprise; it just hit me harder than I expected it to. It was the arrival of my Nov/Dec energy bill. And it was over $200. 

I know fuel costs are up, but I was still shocked. Shocked, because I’ve taken just about every affordable precaution to avoid this. I’ve caulked inside and out, enduring hand cramps for days. I’ve donned a Tyvek suit, safety glasses and respirator to insulate my attic. I’ve balanced on the back of my couch and other oddly shaped and rickety pieces to put plastic over my aging, single-pane wooden windows. I have a programmable thermostat, which I keep at a frigid 58 degrees when asleep or away. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve turned my heat to 68 or higher this season. I’m burning candles…many candles…for the warmth of the fire. And I continue to burn them, even though one of my two cats has burned his eyebrows off, several times. (We’re all making sacrifices, here.) I’ve officially reached the four-blanket level on my bed. I invested in my first set of honest-to-goodness long underwear and I layer my clothing to the point where it restricts my movement. I keep my 1/2 story closed off and the vents shut. And my basement isn’t heated. 

Yet, my heating bill is $200…and the four rooms I’m officially heating STILL aren’t a consistent or comfortable temperature. 

My new efficiency plan? Keep the thermostat at 58, 24/7 and hide out at my boyfriend’s tropical, 80-degree, radiant-heated apartment until spring. You think I’m kidding.

Another day, another suspicious scratching sound.

Maybe I’m a house-pocondriac, but I’m almost certain I have mice. With all the snow and the frigid temps, I wouldn’t be surprised. Thing is, this possibility wouldn’t have even occurred to me if it hadn’t been for my brother. He recently informed me that he’s seen mice in his dining room, and has captured others via glue traps (ick) in his basement. I never thought I’d be afraid of mice, but this idea sends shivers. I’ve been obsessing ever since.

Then, a couple of days ago, when I went to the basement to transfer loads of laundry, I heard this dripping sound near my dryer vent to the outside. Curiously, the dripping stopped while I shuffled things around. So I stopped moving. The “dripping” started up. I plopped a detergent bottle down. The “dripping” stopped.  I’m officially on mouse watch. 

Once upon a time, when I lived in Chicago, I had a friend who had mice in his studio. He obsessed about it. Researched it. Told me all sorts of things I didn’t want to know. How they can flatten their bodies to fit under doors. How they can jump an entire counter height to reach food. They’re amazingly athletic little creatures. And they’re probably in my house.

I’ve never loved jack-in-the-boxes, and now, every trip to the dryer is terror-filled. Shaking out all of my linens. Running the dryer for an extra couple of minutes on every load. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to accomplish with that, but I’m doin’ it. Mind you, I haven’t actually SEEN a mouse. Or signs of mice. But I’m sure the day will come when I go to retrieve a load of towels, I reach for the lint trap, and I receive a furry little surprise. A cute, dead, furry little surprise.

What kills me is, this past summer, I intended to re-engineer my dryer vent. The metal, external vent guide used to have a piece of chicken wire ingeniously crumpled around it. When I noticed it had become caked with lint (a fire hazard, I’m sure), the responsible homeowner I’m trying to be, I attempted to clean it out. It fell off and I was never able to get it back on. Okay, well, I didn’t try that hard. But I thought that was my first and only line of defense against critters, so I was ready to replace it, but upon further inspection, there was a cap inside the metal, external vent. So, did I really need that piece of chicken wire? Neh. 

Lesson: If your dryer or other vents are near the ground, you need screens over them. The screen holes need to be big enough so they don’t trap lint, but small enough to effectively keep out the critters.

I actually used to like snow.

See that? Up there. In the header. That’s actually the walkway between my garage and house. It’s hard to tell, for all that snow. 

I intended to start this (what will no doubt be) infrequently updated stream of alarmingly useful and painfully harvested information one week ago. However, it was only today that the phantom vibrations from snow blowing for literally hours have finally subsided. The lack of which tends to make typing much easier. The good news: our state is on track for another record snowfall this year. Don’t we all feel better knowing that? I know I do. Especially since I live on a corner, which offers the advantage of double the snow-removal responsibilities. Mind you, when I was house hunting, back during the height of the housing boom, we hadn’t experienced snowfalls like this in twenty-some years. Not since I was a kid. What were the chances that this would ever happen again? What with global warming and such. I’d seen An Inconvenient Truth. I realized the course we were on. And it seemed to be working in my favor, weather-wise. So I bought the fixer upper on the corner lot in the safe neighborhood. And all hell broke loose.

I’m no blog expert, but I think this is the stuff that truly frightening and eye-opening blogs are made of. Let’s see what happens here.