The most dramatic of weekends
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This past long weekend we spent with everyone over at the house, including our supervisor-in-chief, Suki. Here's a great photo of her enjoying a sunbeam in the master bedroom. She's pleased with our progress, but still thinks we can do more. We keep telling her that we're doing our best. And throwing her some rawhide bones.
This weekend also proved to be VERY DRAMATIC, and there's a lot of stories to share, so buckle up! It's gonna be a long, wild ride. If you came for the crime drama, that's at the end, otherwise, enjoy our story time.
So, last week in DC (for those who don't know) was a surprise monsoon season. It rained an incredible amount for over a week straight, with some really impressive storms. This was great for some of the plants (the ones that didn't get flooded/drowned), less great for houses with leaky roofs whose contractors couldn't pull permits in time to get work started before the rains began.
Morris came back to the house and discovered leaks down into the kitchen. Awesome. The leaks were basically coming through the roof to the attic, the back bedroom, and into the kitchen, and one managed to drip down to the basement. Friday when we came in for the weekend, it was a game of try to figure out where the leak is coming most reliably and stick one of the buckets underneath. After running from offices to the apartment to pack up, to the storage unit (hooray for an actual bed to sleep on in the house instead of the inflatable mattress!), Target, and Home Depot, we got in pretty late so we put in our buckets, ate some quick food on an actual table and actual chairs in the dining room, then went to grab a few hours of sleep.
Saturday started the real excitement. While Morris was working on all sorts of things - counters, floors, electrics, oh my! - I was in charge of clearing out the nasty, sopping wet carpet and drywall in the back bedroom upstairs. So nasty.
Starting out, I had my strategically placed buckets - that dark spot of the carpet in front of the bucket below was ABSOLUTELY SOAKED. I'm so glad my boots are waterproof, because it was so gross. So gross. I actually ended up poking a hole in the drywall in the center that was clearly weighed down by a pool of water above and drained most of a gallon from it into that front bucket.
There was another big leak coming into the closet and there the drywall in the ceiling was already coming down. For drywall to fall apart like that over such a short distance between walls, it had to be entirely soaked for a while. And it was.
I managed to pull out the trim and all the carpet in sections. The trick was to get it out to the dumpster in the driveway quickly so that it didn't pee all the way down the hallway and stairs. For anyone who has held a naked, peeing toddler running to a toilet, yep, that. Perhaps a bit less squirmy.
Once the carpet came up, we could start airing out the room and let the floor dry. Mops, towels, etc. all helped, but the leaks kept coming.
All the buckets in use meant some improvising from painting supplies as well. The next step was so exciting that I forgot to take pictures until it was done. I got up on the ladder to start taking down the soaking wet drywall from the ceiling, taking little handfuls at a time. (BTW - soggy drywall is a nauseating texture, very gross, but less dusty than regular drywall) It worked great in the closet as I pulled down soggy bits of drywall into yet another bucket for disposal in the dumpster. As I got out to the rest of the room, I tried the same thing again and successfully, calmly pulled down about 2 square feet that way. Then apparently I got a little overconfident and greedy and tried to pull down larger chunks. That's when pretty much the entire ceiling came down at once in one go. Along with some of the insulation that was just resting on the drywall. That was terrifying! It didn't fall on me, but it was very heavy, very large, and very loud! (I went to check on the dog after the first immediate bucket placements, and the poor thing was shaking, she was so scared from the noise. Some tender pets and words of reassurance, and a fresh rawhide chew helped her calm down.) So more carrying out soggy drywall chunks and soaking insulation with Morris's help out to the dumpster and suddenly we had a lovely, very modern open joist and open attic room.
The good news is that with the drywall and insulation out and not pooling water, there weren't any leaks while it didn't rain! So project for another day will be putting up a new ceiling and replacing that insulation, which is such a fun job. But that's for another day.
Morris's most glamorous accomplishment on Saturday was the completion of one portion of the custom hardwood countertops in the kitchen. It's really sad that the pictures don't do it justice!
Here he is proudly showing off the initial installation - with a faucet that he doesn't exactly love since we ended up going with the aged bronze fixtures for everything else, even I have to concede that it does stick out.
But oh, that counter!
Sunday was our first really dry day in a long time. We were finally able to run out and get more of the brick from Morris's Craigslist find - because what is better to do on a hot, muggy day than carry piles of brick from one place to another? It was also really amusing seeing every lawn in the neighborhood had grass that just kept growing with all the rain but folks weren't able to get out and mow. Some lawns had grass nearly 3 feet high! Here's Morris's first pass in the backyard where you can see the difference between normal height and how high it had grown. Everyone was putting out huge amounts of bags for yard waste cleanup by Monday morning. We went through about 8 Home Depot yard bags between the front and back yards, and 2 batteries on the mower!
Monday was a busy day - I had taken a vacation day from the office and Morris was managing projects between meetings and calls while he worked remotely. And I realize now that I didn't get photos of the lights that Morris managed to hang in the living room, but that was a saga - pretty much everything that could go wrong hanging track lighting did - tracks that didn't connect to the power source, extensions that didn't connect, tracks that didn't want to stay in the ceiling, trouble keeping the tracks straight and level, tracks jumping out and losing all connection, and just a few zaps to Morris to make his hair stand even more on end.... But they are up and they look great. We've got room to add a few more lights on each end as we start moving our things in and want to direct light to specific things.
How about we get back to that counter? Here it is with the under-mounted single basin gorgeous sink installed and the wood is getting its 3rd coat of sealant, and that color really does pop. IT IS SO PRETTY! The color is fantastically dramatic and I still have trouble believing the purple wood is that purple naturally.
This next is the crime drama portion that we hinted at on Facebook for those that caught it.
DUN DUN!
So Morris has had lots of plans to fix up the house as a smart home, so that if you're carrying an armload of groceries or just don't want to get up from the couch on a lazy day (what are those?), you can just tell the house to turn lights on or off and automate things like the heating/cooling. Part of that involved getting a bunch of wifi-enabled switches and outlets and light bulbs and whatnot. Awesome. Fancy. All that.
So he picked out a bunch of these switches to hook up the lights so that we can tell the house to turn them on and off, to dim them or brighten them.
Problem was, most of the boxes didn't actually contain those switches. Morris had actually gone through and installed few of the switches in the wall and wanted to test out how it would connect but couldn't get it to connect at all. They turned the lights on and off, but nothing "smart" about it. So, after some initial troubleshooting, he calls the nice people at Leviton about it to see why the instructions aren't helping at all. He waits out the hold music and all the "your call is important to us, please hold on the line or go to our website so you can buy more stuff from us" because he's more stubborn than a brick wall. (Love you, honey)
He learned a few interesting things from the guy on the phone. 1 - the product number on the actual switch in the box was for a $5 toggle switch. 2 - they have been hearing from a lot of people that they bought the $50 switch (just like we did) and opened it up to find it was actually just the $5 job.
So someone went through and actually did some work in a fairly brilliant way. They had access to both the expensive and the cheap options. They carefully opened the expensive boxes, removed the expensive switch, some of the boxes even had the sticker seen on the switch below that announced it was wifi enabled taken from the expensive switch and then reapplied to a $5 switch that was then put back in the box and re-sealed. Then it was either returned to a Home Depot or sold on by the supplier to Home Depot, who apparently is no longer stocking this item....
So here is what the switches should look like - notice the sticker and the 3 different screws on the side. Morris can explain it much better what each does, but I believe one yellow/white is the neutral, green is ground, and pink is the load wire. All the real switches have all 3 as part of their design for safety.
Here is one that Morris sent the nice man at Leviton when they were figuring things out. Notice that the box behind the switch is smaller, and there's only 2 connections on the side instead of 3.
Morris was more than a little angry because that was money and time that he lost. So he called the Home Depot corporate folks and talked to them, learned they could do a receipt look up (since our receipts are scattered between the house and the apartment and everywhere) and could refund us for the fake switches. We got to our local Capitol Heights Home Depot where we went through the whole story with them again, and actually Morris ran and grabbed the rest of the stock on the shelf for them and we opened them at the returns desk to discover that all 3 were also fakes. And a shout-out to Joanna, the assistant GM of that Home Depot who helped us getting the refund and helping us to find a replacement for at least some of the switches with a Wink unit below.
Now, how about some more pictures of that sexy counter as a reward for reading that whole long story!
MMHHMMM, that is a beautiful counter!
And best news - the contractor should be coming out tomorrow for the roof!
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