This Should Work

When we first moved into our house, the only full bathroom had a large shower stall that looked like this (click images for larger view):

Now with our new bathtub installed, it looks like this:

My wife loves the fact that we have a tub now, and both of us love the new shower head with it’s 12 different settings (even though we only use about 3).

In preparation for our new born, we are replacing our shower stall with a bathtub/shower combo. This is something we have been meaning to do for a while, and we thought we should get it done before the baby arrives.

A friend recommended a local contractor who has turned out to be awesome. When I first met him for the estimate I thought that this short, thin guy with glass and big hair looked more suited to programming computers than remodeling houses. After he reviewed the site, told what our options were, and gave us a quote, my wife and I asked him to come back this week and start working.

He started the demolition on Monday and discovered two very disturbing things behind walls:

1. He found what he thought was a large shiny object, but turn out to be something he described as “a primordial pool” underneath shower floor. Apparently a basin wasn’t placed correctly and a years of condensation created a small, smelly pool of liquid.
2. He also found, maybe six inches from the pool, an electrical junction box! I’m not a expert when if comes to electrical work, but I would guess that an electrical box should not be that close to any water supply.

My wife was afraid that we would need to call an electrician to fix this problem, but our contractor said he would take care of it and move the box further away from the bathroom. I feel fortunate that we hired such a person who will do such a thorough job as to go beyond what he was hired to do in order to make things safer for us.

Last night he stayed a little longer to ensure that we could at least take a bath and hopefully by the end of today we’ll have a new tub/shower.

We tried. We tried not to use the Murder, Death, Kill-type mouse traps. We went so far as to buy high-frequency mouse deterrents, but they wouldn’t stay away.

So we broke down and bought some killer traps- the old school mouse traps and some mouse bait. My wife did not like the idea of mice eating the bait, then “crawling back into the walls to die and rot” so we went old school.

After snapping the traps on my fingers a few times, I finally got two traps set (one on the counter, the other in a cabinet). By morning both traps had done their job.

When we first moved in to our house, we swore we would clean out the crawl space in the basement right away. Ten months later, we’re finally getting around to it- mainly because our electrician said we won’t pass inspection with all that crap.

Last weekend we pulled a boat load of stuff out of our crawl space; most of it was junk-broken dolls, old magazines from 70’s, license plates- but some of it was really cool! We found board games (Connect Four and Scrabble), small coffee cups, wooden cigar boxes and a manual typewriter. We also found what looks like a old manual printing press for making small 3×5 card documents, but it too heavy and too rusted for us to move out of the crawl space. Click the photo below to see all or our findings.

When we first moved in, we noticed alot of mouse droppings in kitchen cabinets. After some thorough cleaning, we thought the mouse was gone. But in the past few weeks, there’s evidence that the mouse has returned and he’s starting to cause problems for us.

A few months ago, we started to notice a few mouse droppings from Henri(that’s what I call our mouse) in a kitchen cabinet, so we set up a “humane” mouse trap- the sort of catch and release type of trap. I would check the trap every other week to see if we caught anything, but no mouse.

Recently, Henri has been spotted by both my wife and I. Once, she spotted him on the stove top, but he quickly scurried away. I saw him one night behind our toaster oven; he then dashed into the corner and hid behind some wine bottles. I was looking around to for something to catch the mouse in and found a coffee can; I started to move toward the kitchen corner with the coffee can in one hand and the lid in the other. As I moved in to catch him, Henri ran out from behind the wine bottles and hid under the stove.

The next day we checked our trap only to find out that the mouse was able to get into the trap, eat some of the bait (peanut butter) and get out.

And now he’s getting bolder about what he eats and where. The other day we found little nibbles out our stick of butter. Another time we found a mouse dropping on our salt container. That will not be tolerated in this house. We’re probably going to buy a new trap this weekend and we’ll probably go with a different “catch and release” trap instead of the “murder, death, kill” trap.

Two nights ago a heavy downpour moved through Lexington and I was afraid that our broken gutter would finally fall off the house. Well that didn’t happen, but something else did.

If one were to call our house, one would not reach us. You wouldn’t even get our answering machine because of a short in a telephone wire somewhere in our house. Our cordless phone reads “Extension is Use” which usually means if the answering machine is on or if someone is on the line upstairs.

I unplugged the answering machine-”Extension in Use”
I unplugged the upstairs phone-”Extension in Use”

This happened once before and we made a service call to Alltel to fix the problem. They fixed the problem and said that it may have been caused by metal staples holding one telephone cord to the baseboards. But this is the second time this has happened -both after heavy rain storms.

I took a look at our upstairs telephone line, traced it to the wall, then into the other room and finally to it’s endpoint in the interior of the house. The telephone line ends at a window where the previous owners drilled a hole through the window frame, then ran the rest of the line along the roof then down the side to the telephone box on the first floor.

It’s only a guess, but I’m thinking that problem is somewhere on the exterior of the house. Something like a squirrel or a racoon probably chewed or scratched the line and now it shorts whenever it rains.

But that’s only a guess and we’ll hopefully have the Alltel experts come out and take a look at the problem for us, again.

A couple weeks ago, a small but violent storm ran through parts of Lexington knocking large trees and power lines. Our house was mostly spared from the destruction except for two things: A large limb broke off a tree in our backyard and this:

The winds were powerful enough to almost rip one of the gutters from our house. Guess what house project we’re doing this summer?

My goal was to redesign this site in time to submit it for the CSS Reboot event that happened on May 1st, but that didn’t happen. I’ve been wanting to change the look for a few weeks, but couldn’t find the time or energy to do it until this morning.

Why a mouse trap? I just set my first one this morning. I wasn’t hurt when setting it and the mouse won’t be hurt either–it’s a humane trap.

Saturday night, when I let the dogs to do their business, little dog (Spike) disappeared into our backyard. It took me a while but I found him in the corner of our backyard. After telling him a couple of times to get back in the house, Spike finally left the corner and returned to the house.

The next morning I let the dogs out and again Spike went into the same corner. I tried to call him out again, but he wasn’t coming out. I went back into the corner to find my dog sniffing around a huge pile of crap!

I have no clue who’s animal been making deposits in our backyard. I asked my wife if she had seen it before. She said she noticed a hole in ground a few weeks ago when raking, but it wasn’t filled with feces.

We know it’s not our dogs, and it’s not the cats next door, the best we can guess is maybe it’s from raccoons. It’s a mystery.