This Old (Drafty) House, or Implements of Mass Destruction

Because I had the day off and because I've been trying to do some of the weatherizing our little house so desperately needs, I spent Tuesday putting insulation in our attic spaces. I use the plural because the kitchen was attached later and has an attic space that is a) only accessible through the rotting louvre on the outside, and b) is completely unconnected from the main attic space. I had spent little to no time exploring either prior - thanks to their relative inaccessibility and my not insubstantial claustrophobia - so I wasn't entirely certain what to expect.

The kitchen space was fairly straightforward. There were some lengths of R-11 fiberglass that had been tossed up there some years back but never laid in properly, and once I did put them all in place, there were still areas that were completely uninsulated. So I laid in some R-30 on top of that, and plan to go back and put in more to make sure that we have R-60 or better in that space. I'm still fairly certain that the walls (which are sided on the interior with hardboard - basically heavy duty cardboard) are completely uninsulated, but that will have to be a task for another day - likely when we can gut the entire room and sort it out properly.

The main attic space was a very different story, and I learned a bit about how the house must have been constructed. First of all, it's a crawlspace, in a very, very literal sense. And despite my attempts to get rid of the worst of the cobwebs, I found myself dragging myself around through them on my belly for much of the afternoon. Second of all, the access hatch is too small to push a roll of insulation through. It's barely enough to fit myself through, which caused no end of anxiety every time my arm or leg got wedged just the wrong way.

So to get the insulation in, I had to open each roll, begin feeding the batting up into the attic, then shove myself past it, climb in, and pull the rest of the roll up after me before feeding it to where it needed to go. And let me just say that, under those conditions, it does not matter if you're working in a space that is, at best, in the mid-50s F. You will get hot and very, very, very sweaty. That extra 88¢ I spent per roll for the "Comfort Touch" sheathing? So. Worth. It.

I had known that the roofline had been raised in the rear of the house at some point. What I didn't realize until I hauled myself up into the Cobweb Factory was that only the tiniest of access holes had been cut into the old roof. Not only that, it appears that the area over the bathroom was originally a shed dormer, with the roofline elevation extended over the remaining length at some later date.

So over one whole room upstairs, there is exactly zero access. Zilch. And while there had been an attempt at some point to blow in insulation over the rest of the attic space, there was no real effort, it seems, to make sure that it was evenly distributed. Or even moderately adequate. Which it very much is not, on either count.

Anyway, suffice to say that I didn't get everything insulated. Yet. But it did prompt me to do some looking around and to get the advice of a butch dyke friend who knows from power tools. And now I am the proud owner of this beauty:



And as much as it reminds me of the alien weaponry in the movie District 9, it's really a heavy duty 12 amp (contractor grade) Hitachi reciprocating saw. My friend suggested it because it has an award-winning anti-vibration feature, which gave me quite a laugh, seeing as Hitachi is also known for this.

So at some point in the next week, I intend to crawl back up in the attic and perform a bit of deconstruction so that I can get the rest of the house insulated properly. And then I think Hitachi (Does it need a proper name, do you think?) and I will target the laundry sink, which really needs to come out and become a garden prep sink.

Festival of Lights

It is now the second night of Hannukah, and in honor of the season, I thought I would offer up this...erm...gem?...from the batshit crazy unbelievably soused inimitable mind of Sandra Lee.



Um, are those marshmallows kosher?

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Last night forecast low was 17F/-8C, but when I went to bed the thermometer read 12.4F/-10.9C, and the power had gone out twice from the high winds. The second time it was out for about a half hour, which was a bit disconcerting. Although we have an oil furnace, the thermostat and ignition are electric. It will be a happy day when we have a masonry heater (Finnish style, rather than one of those Baroque ceramic numbers) and rely primarily on wood.

Today, the National Weather Service was calling for a high of 28F/-2C, but it barely managed to squeeze up to 18F/-8C before I left the house. And I set my mittens down to get something and then walked out of the house without them. Tonight, we're getting single digits. All of it is good incentive to work on the Japanese sweater, which I did for a while last night by candlelight.

Meantime, I am continuing to play around with SketchUp. Look what I've done with the upstairs!



Currently, the rooms on either side are divided up into two smaller rooms, so this plan will necessitate taking out a couple of walls which, IMO, have no good reason to be anymore. I suppose when the Tobey family were raising their eight kids (yes, eight kids, in a 1500 sq. ft. house), it gave them more of a sense of privacy, but for us, it just doesn't work so well. This also moves the east bathroom wall (this is standard N-is-up view) a further foot and a half eastward to allow some rearrangement there. And what is now our TV room/stash storage/retiring room, will, at least theoretically, become a combined office/crafting/retiring room. And the wall dividing off what we're currently using as a giant walk-in closet disappears for a more open bedroom floor plan.

Of course, the plan also requires raising the roofline to create a shed dormer, since the south face currently has only a half-wall and no windows. I hate this for several reasons, but the biggest are that it means we get less light in the winter time and we have poor airflow upstairs in the summer. Also, raising the roofline a bit on that side should open up a bit more attic space, and I really, really think we need to finish the attic to use it for storage. And insulate it a lot better.

Of course, it's much easier to sort it out in a freeware computer program than to come up with the money to execute the plans, but I figure it'll be another 25 years or so before we retire, so there's time. In the meantime, it's a fun exercise to think about how to make the best use of the space we have. David and I are fans of Sarah Susanka and her Not So Big series, and my ideas are largely informed by her ideas, though I'd say that, on some level, it's an aesthetic principle that I already understood intuitively.

In a nutshell, it's about using smaller spaces smartly (intelligent design?) - open floor plans, multi-use spaces, creating spatial divisions with fewer walls, creative approaches to storage, etc. Right now, as I've mentioned, our house suffers from some serious flow issues. Our nominal guest room is cramped and only accessible by navigating through David's very cluttered studio; the studio has no built-in storage; the kitchen is cold, poorly laid out, and only accessible through a very narrow doorway; and because the washer and dryer take up much of our side mud room, which is the main entry we use, the mud room has been essentially shifted into David's studio, which makes it even more cramped. Among other things.

So what I've tried to do is identify changes that will, again theoretically, rectify those problems and leave us with spaces that we actually use, instead of a lot of cluttered, cramped areas that aren't so fun to spend time in. Since it's a very old house that's had a lot done to it over the last 300 years, I'm sure we'll run up against all sorts of unexpected issues, and I'm anticipating needing to consult an engineer at some point to discuss the feasibility of some of our ideas. Still, it's a very intriguing project and one I'm enjoying the hell out of.

Home Sweet Home!

We closed on the house yesterday! I was a little afraid to blog any updates - worried I'd jinx the process - but it finally happened. No rest for the weary, though, as I had to hurry home and gather up my things to head to work. And now I need to get in a few hours' nap before taking Tuck to a dermatology appointment to see if we can work out some of his skin allergy issues.

There is a New York Times article right here that actually explains very well what made our process so difficult. I was prompted for a login (which is free) this morning trying to access it, and if I weren't so tired and badly in need of sleep I'd excerpt the pertinent part here(maybe later). Anyway, I've had a login with NYT for years and it's worth it for the read.

In the meantime, I think I'll just distract you with this clip I found on Fail Blog:



I laughed 'til I cried.

Setbacks

I spoke to the loan officer at the bank today, and the appraisal on the house came in below the purchase price. Way below. In fact, it appraised pretty close to what I had originally thought would be a reasonable market price for the house. The realtor The Ladies talked to thought differently, but then I don't know that he ever really got a look under the hood, so to speak.

This bit of news wouldn't be so bad if there were a chance on negotiating down somewhere close to the appraisal value. I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen, though. Which leaves us in a bit of a state of limbo until we can sort out the possibilities. The bank apparently told Wendy that there's some sort of process of appeal on the appraisal, but the discrepancy is so huge, that I don't expect a rethinking of the appraisal to come anywhere to The Ladies' comfort zone.

In other news, I decided I'd gone a little too fast on stepping up the new meds. So after several very dizzy and not terribly productive days, I decided to back off just a little until I've adjusted a bit better. In the meantime, I do like being able to sleep really deeply for a change.

How About an FO?

Since there's been a dearth of those around here lately (damned project monogamy), I offer you the following:


From down below


From up above (sort of)

This little made-it-up-as-I-went project has languished in a drawer at work for over a year now, so I finally got around to finishing it off. The yarn is Limbo Superwash from Halcyon Yarn. If you're thinking the bunny motif looks familiar, that's because it's the ASCII bunny from the Cute with Chris website (Rabbitch, no doubt, will insist that it's actually all about her, and I suppose that, too, is possible. That bunny is a little off kilter, after all.)

And a Bag of Chips

Quite a bit going on this week. I am currently working my second night in a row. Because I work 15-hour shifts, this is a rare occurrence, especially since it means not going home between shifts. With only 9 hours between them (or actually, a good bit less by the time all the paperwork and rounds and phone calls are done), I just can't afford to spend two of those hours on the road. As it is, I only got 6 hours of sleep here before I had to get up and get ready to do it all over again.

Ideally, the workload between the two nights would be divided up fairly evenly, particularly since it's midweek in what is still our "slow" season. At the very least, one would hope for it to be busier on the first night, when one is a bit fresher, than on the second. Apparently, though, that memo got lost, because my caseload tonight has been over twice what it was last night.

I will be glad to leave here.

And the reason I'm working back-to-back nights is that I am leaving today - for lovely Northern California. This will be the first time in nearly 14 years that I've visited that part of the country. I'm nominally off to a weekend symposium on veterinary hospice care at UC Davis. I figured that because I do the end of life talk so often (twice so far tonight), I might be able to take away some useful information from it. Mostly, though, it's an excuse and an opportunity for me to visit friends - some of whom I haven't seen for years, and some of whom I've only ever met online.

Stephen tells me that Monday night is knit night at the Three Dollar Bill Cafe, so I am definitely going be there. Monday is a play day for me before I come home, so I'm planning on heading down to the San Francisco Bay area for the day. I'm hoping I'll have time to visit the Muir Woods, and maybe visit the Scharffen Berger factory.

The wedding vest will be traveling with me, but rather than risk having it taken away by the TSA goons, it'll be going in my checked baggage. Since I'm looking at 10 hours of travel to get there and 11 back, I expect I'll be either sleeping (often not possible for me) or picking up the Hindi textbooks to catch up on those studies a bit.

I expect there'll also be a bit of fretting happening. When I spoke to David this evening, he told me he'd finally talked to Landlady Wendy about our proposed purchase of the house. After many, many months, she and Landlady Paula have finally settled on an asking price. The only problem is that it's about $50K more than I had figured we could easily afford, and they're not really inclined to negotiate.

I'm pretty sure we can do it. It's within what the bank pre-approved us for last month. And we do really love our little house and would rather be building equity than just paying rent. And they'd sell the entire parcel with an easement, so that whenever they decide to stop using the pasture behind the house, I could get myself a little flock of Shetland sheep. And we could eventually put up a wind turbine and go off the grid.

But it would mean coming up with an extra $400-500 per month over what we're currently paying for rent, which is just a little nerve-wracking to contemplate. Except that that amount is less than we've been setting aside each month for the wedding.

So maybe it won't be that difficult to manage, after all. But at the moment, thinking about it is making me want to puke.

Only 11 hours until I get to run away from it, though.

The Current Situation Chez Nous

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Thanks to Norma for this.

The Weekend Is Over

For me it is, anyway. Sunday evening sees me back at work after a few days off. It means, of course, that I won't be able to watch the Super Bowl, but you might imagine that I'm not terribly heartbroken at the prospect. I'd like for the Pats to win and all, seeing as they're the locals, but life will go on just fine if they don't.

There's been very little knitting this week, but it's been a productive one overall. On Friday, David and I sat down with someone at the bank and did a mortgage pre-approval. We've been in informal talks with Landladies Wendy & Paula to buy our little house for a while now, and the time has come for those talks to get a little more serious. I had sat down and crunched some numbers previously, and it turns out that the bank agrees that we can afford what I knew we could afford. This is a very good thing.

It also works in our favor, at least for purposes of negotiation, that the housing slump has hit our neighborhood (a nearby property on the waterfront with a separate rental-or-guest cottage has been listed for a couple years now and has dropped from $2.4M last I looked to $1.675M currently). There are no plans for this house to go on the market, but it does affect the appraisal. We live in a mostly high rent district, there is no doubt, but our humble little house is 300 or so years old and, as with many houses of a certain age, it has a fair number of quirks that make it a bit less attractive on the open market - like the non-accessible kitchen plumbing that runs along a poorly insulated outer wall. Or the somewhat leaky windows. Or the nonstandard everything. So hopefully we'll be able to work out a purchase price that is amenable to all parties and do so while interest rates are nice and low.

Aside from that, David & I did some reorganizing today to reduce the clutter in my little office space and to reclaim what has been a storage room for David's business as a guest room, so that visitors will have a bit more privacy. Since we're trying to have my 14-year-old niece visit more often to give her time away from her dad and brother and other uncle (They're all sharing a room at my parents' since my brother split from wife #2.), we felt it should be a priority. Doing so also meant moving a futon mattress out of its storage space under the daybed in our upstairs guest/TV room. This, in turn, meant that I was able to move almost all of my stash bins into that space and open up that room a bit more. This, as Martha would say, is a good thing.

And I don't really have time right now to properly acknowledge, but I've been given the You Make My Day blog award by both mollybeees and janel. Y'all make me blush, seriously. And then I really never properly acknowledged it when Mike nominated me for the Rockin' Guy Blogger thing way back when. I'm so bad with these things, really. And so, to seriously distract all of you, I am going to point out that Tuck is famous and then make my getaway.

Cobwebs (and I Don't Mean Lace)

We have a little problem with spiders in our house. Around this time of year, we're pretty well overrun with them. No black widows or brown recluses or anything like that - Maine's not big on poisonous critters - but enough of them to be rather a bit of a nuisance. Especially when a trip to the cellar is necessary.








Now, I am really rather fond of spiders and most people who know me have heard me say at some point, "Spiders are our friends". Sometimes, though, you need your friends to go away for a while. We'd put up with this situation for quite some time, but I decided that today was the day to armor up and do battle.



It was long and arduous, but I think I was ultimately successful. Because all the surfaces I had propped the camera against to snap the before photos were dripping with noxious chemicals, there are no after pics. And the respirator thing? I know that there are some folks who get turned on by such things. As a claustrophobe, I am not one of them. While I am very glad I had it for this project, it stayed on not one second longer than it had to.

Fun with Search Terms

Like a lot of folks, I like monitoring traffic to this little blog and seeing what search terms bring people here. My little tutorial on sherman short rows continues to be a popular search, as do "thistle tattoos", "tricot machine lyrics", and "fox poo". I know a lot of you probably have a hard time believing that last one, but apparently there are folks out there who can't get enough of it (and in case you've been wondering, the fox marked the mulch pile again just last week).

The other day, though, I had one that I had not seen before. Someone in or near Buffalo, NY, did a search for "liz vassey's legs". Liz happens to be my cousin. This is her IMDB photo:



If you watch CSI, then you may recognize her as the actor who plays Wendy Simms. Since we don't generally watch television and since we don't get any CBS station here, I've never seen her in this role. In fact, the thought of someone coming to this blog to find out about her is pretty funny, since I haven't seen her in 26 years, since the summer she turned 9. My father's family, unfortunately, is quite spread out, so there are a lot of relatives on that side that I rarely see.

Even funnier, though, is that when you do a Google search for "liz vassey's legs", the very first page returned is this one.

Lest You Think...

...I haven't been knitting, there has been a good bit of that going on around here, as well. I've been trying to sort out adapting Stephen's Brâncuşi stitch pattern to kilt hose. I think I've pretty well got it, so a few gauge calculations and I should be in business with that one for real. Also, work continues on the Diamond Fantasy shawl, but as it's unblocked lace and we all know what unblocked lace looks like, there won't be any progress photos for a while, I don't think. As for the wedding vest, I just need to order the yarn and get going on that one.