Hot and Cold

You're kidding, right?

On Wednesday afternoon the guys left, they had completed the job and left the place if not spotless at least tidy. I was so glad to see the last of them. Not that I found them unpleasant, just that I was glad to finally emerge from over six weeks of renovation and all that that entails. Bobby and I had a long conversation about single life, grandchildren, and retirement plans (he says he's going to get himself a motorcycle and tour Newfoundland). I had pizza and beer for supper. I laid Hapi's bed on the nice clean and reasonably empty basement floor and invited her to try it out.

She said, Are you kidding me? You want me to go down there?

She wouldn't go down, she slept outside that night. Thursday was delightful, I was so happy to finally have the place to myself. I decided not to tackle cleaning up the basement right away, instead I bought a few things for the bathroom, baked some bread, took Hapi for a long leisurely walk, and did some laundry. Just a nice boring day.

Late in the afternoon I ran a bath for myself in the brand new soaker tub. Earlier in the day I had turned up the hot water heater thermostat because the new tub is twice as big as the old one, so the water that comes out of the faucet is much hotter now. There was no cold water. Went down to the basement and opened the cold water shutoff valve that the guys had forgotten to turn back on. Now there was a little cold water, but only just a little. Not nearly enough to cool the now scalding hot water from the hot water tank. I ran as much cold water as I could but still the tub water was only just bearable. I learned that a very large tub of hot water takes a really long time to cool off and my body can adjust to a small tub of hot water but not to a very large tub of hot water. It was not a pleasant experience.

So after getting out of the tub (after a quick bath rather than a long leisurely soak) I called Bobby. He said the shutoff valve must be corroded and he'd come by on Friday to replace it. I had my writing group meeting on Friday morning so I hung around the house just long enough to let the guys in and then went off to the three-hour (usually) meeting. When I got home afterwards they were still there.

Uh-oh, I thought.

Bobby told me a long saga about trying to obtain a new shutoff valve, they had only just finished installing it.

He said, If you don't like swearing you better leave now.

After they installed the valve they tried the bathtub faucet. Still no cold water. Must be the cartridge he said.

So off they went in search of a new cartridge. I puttered around tidying things in the basement until they returned with the cartridge. Bobby installed it and turned on the faucet. Still no cold water. Now he was mad. He went down into the basement and peered into the closet where he could see the pipes under the bathtub, muttering to himself all the while. Not sure what he was saying, but apparently the next step was to tear out the ceiling below the tub and search for a kinked tube, something he really did not want to do. I was almost beside myself. Thursday had been so wonderful and Friday was turning into a nightmare.

Bobby decided it was time for a coffee and I seconded the motion. So the guys left for the local Timmy's and I made a quick lunch for myself and took Hapi for a walk. We were out for almost two hours. I was thoroughly stressed out about the guys being back in the basement and poor Hapi got a forced march as far out on the dykes as I could manage. Not too cold but very windy. She found some nice mud and waded into it up to her chest. Oh boy. Dyke mud is very stinky.

By the time we got home we were both exhausted and Bobby's truck was not in the driveway. There were small signs that they had been there (a screwdriver that had been in the bathroom was now in the kitchen) so I went straight to the bathroom and turned on the faucet. Lots of cold water! But no hot water!!

You have got to be kidding!!! I thought to myself.

I phoned Bobby and told him. He said he'd be back on Saturday to fix it. An easy fix he said.

Which is what he said when I called him on Thursday about the lack of cold water.

No Boundaries

This week they moved to the upstairs. They are still working in the basement, they just expanded the worksite. Since the business end of the bathtub backs onto my bedroom they had to move furniture to cut a hole in the wall to access the plumbing, so I now have no safe haven from the dust and noise and workmen and tools strewn about. Plus, they found mould in some of the basement gyproc immediately below the upstairs bathroom (see photo above). The bathroom sink was leaking and I knew that, I just didn't know how long it had been leaking. Obviously long enough for mould to take hold.

Upstairs bathroom

They cut holes into the gyproc in my bedroom and in the basement ceiling to access the plumbing. All of the sinks except the one in the kitchen are disconnected, so the painter washes his tools there each evening. I brush my teeth there too. I thought it would only take a couple of days to remove the old bathtub and install the new one, but after a week it is still not plumbed in. Consequently I took a shower in the basement shower stall. But since they were painting in that room the curtains had been removed from the window, which is in plain view of the male student's bedroom window next door. There were no cars parked in their driveway last night so I took a chance. It's study break.

Downstairs bathroom

Bobby likes to spend his weekends with his grandkids so he tries not to work on Saturdays, but he said yesterday that he might come by this Saturday to do a bit of work. Oh joy. Once again, he thinks another two days and they will be done. Which is what he said a week ago. Since they are working in both bathrooms, I now know where all the publicly accessible bathrooms are in town. Washing up is a problem, but as long as I plan ahead I can make it to a reasonably private toilet.

Meanwhile back at the ranch my email to my financial guy to transfer money to my bank account landed in his spam folder and he didn't see it until I sent a follow-up email a week later. So I was unable to meet Bobby's weekly ransom demand.

The news both north and south of the border is crazy, but since my personal life is kind of off the rails the craziness in the world out there is just part of the scenery. Last night a friend called me to see how I was doing. When I told her that I have burned through most of what I thought of as my lifetime discretionary money fund, she asked me if any of the workers smoked. I told her that one of them does so she suggested that he might burn the house down and I could collect the insurance money.

She also told me that another friend of hers just pulled a live tick off her dog after a walk in the woods. In February. It is that warm now. She thinks it is just winter delayed, that sometime in March all hell will break loose weather-wise. I think she's wrong, that this is the new normal.

She says, Fine then, after the next big blizzard you can lead the Naked Yoga class in the school parking lot.

Basement Saga continued

Backyard visitor

Mid-February, no snow on the ground, no snow in the forecast. Every time it snows there's rain right afterward and the snow is washed away. Weird winter.

The guys are putting my basement back together again. It has been a long haul, they've been here for so long I feel like I should be charging them rent. Everything that could go wrong did.

Now I have a cold, I'm hoping it won't last too long. The guys figure they have one more day of work down there and then I can start putting things back where I want them, but with this cold I have no energy for it.

Hapi is quite discombobulated by the change in sleeping quarters. Usually she sleeps in the basement but she can't now so every night she has to decide whether to stay indoors upstairs or go outside. Usually she chooses to go outside. I don't mind, but it seems that all our rain is happening in the night and I know she doesn't like being in her doghouse in the rain because of the noise of the rain on the roof. And if I'm asleep I can't let her inside, so she goes out into the rain and finds the muddiest spot available to lie down in. By morning she is soaked and covered in mud, then she wants to come inside. All her white fur is brown now.

The last few days they've been cutting laminate flooring to fit back together again; the dust from that goes everywhere. There's no point cleaning it up until they're done, which I'm hoping is tomorrow. Then they're going to come upstairs and do some work on my bathroom. They think it will only take a couple of days, but I remember a month ago Bob thinking the basement job would just take a few days. You just never know what kind of disaster you're going to uncover when you start taking things apart.

I went to an amazing house concert over the weekend, a woman who sings Edith Piaf. She's very talented, plays multiple instruments and has a gorgeous voice. Her partner plays guitar and he is amazing as well. It was enthralling. The concert was at her mother's place. The couple now live in Montreal and they came back home for three Valentine's Day performances. I really hope their talents are rewarded.

Last night I went to a talk and slide show about the railway children of India. The mother of the singer went to India over Christmas to visit Father Abhi who works with the railway children of Varanasi. They have a centre there where they house some of them and arrange for them to go to school, also they help find adoptive families or reunite children with their lost families. Most of them are girls, their futures are not good. Father Abhi heads up an organization (DARE) that does this work and also he travels India and the world to drum up support.

There is a small network of groups in Nova Scotia, Belgium and one other place that I forget. When he needs money for his projects in India he tells the network. Usually it is something very specific, say a small bus or some piece of necessary equipment. Then the network raises the money and sends it to him. Sometimes it can take a couple of years to raise the money. It is complicated, there are rules governing how money can be sent overseas and also how money can be received by organizations in India. By being very specific they handle the complications. So my little town is part of that international network, to help the railway children. Of course it is just a drop in the bucket, but I guess every little drop helps.

The slides we watched were very colourful, the presenter was quite fascinated by the brightly painted trucks in India and also by all the dancing. The children are taught amazing dances and they love it. Father Abhi has all these paintings and statues of an Indian Jesus, he looks like a Hindu guru or a buddha. The Christmas celebrations were extremely colourful and full of dancing and coloured lights and flowers. It was beautiful and strange at the same time, Christmas celebrated in a Hindu way.

Thinking out loud at six in the morning

When I moved back to Nova Scotia in 2010 I bought back my old house. It happened to be on the market when I was looking for a place and, well, it was hard to resist. I knew the house had problems but I thought, "Better the devil you know..."

The main problem I foresaw was that the man who bought the house from me finished the basement. It had been an unfinished basement with water leaks, he fixed the leaks (or so he thought) and completely finished the area, putting in a full bathroom, a bedroom and a rec room. He also took out the old floor furnace and put in a full furnace with forced air venting into all of the upstairs rooms. He did a lot of work on that house, most of which I thought was a big improvement. But finishing that basement seemed to me kind of risky. I bought the place anyway, thinking that if it came to it I would tear out the work he did there.

As of last week, it has come to it.

This past year has definitely been my year to battle the element of water. I live in a province of weird geology and waterlogged soils, with as much water below ground as above, and plenty of it falling from the sky in one form or another. A building contractor once said to me that all of the houses on my street are really just little boats bobbing on an unseen river. Every time someone digs a hole in the ground, the river changes course, and there's always someone digging a hole in the ground.

Anyway, there was a soft spot in the laminate flooring in the rec room which I thought meant that there was a bit of rot in the subfloor due to the now-fixed water leak in the nearest basement wall. This past fall I found an excellent contractor who has done some work for me and I asked him if he could fix the soft spot. He said he could. He removed the laminate carefully so he could replace it after fixing whatever he found underneath and sure enough the subfloor was rotten, very rotten. He had a bad feeling about it and we discussed it, I gave him the go ahead to remove more laminate to see how far the problem went. In my heart I knew it was going to be bad, the time had finally come. So I was not as shocked as he had expected me to be, more resigned to the inevitable.

In a couple of days they had removed all of the floor in the rec room. They swabbed it down with bleach and said they'd come back when it was dry to rebuild the floor. That was three days ago and it is still not dry, in spite of fans and heaters. Bob the contractor came back yesterday to take a look and we discussed what to do next. I am sceptical about rebuilding, the thought of covering over that floor and not being able to see whether it is leaking or not scares me. Bob thinks he can fix it so it won't leak, he thinks it will be safe to rebuild. To that end he has saved as much as possible of the unrotten materials to reuse. But he also thinks there is more rot under the bathroom that will have to be dealt with.

Right now there is nothing to be done about that because all of the furniture and salvaged building materials are being store in there and the other two small rooms of the basement. He thinks the other two rooms are safe, it's just the bathroom that looks bad, and that can't be torn apart until all of the stuff stored in there (plus the bathroom fixtures and washer and dryer) are removed. But since there's no place to remove all that to, the bathroom will remain in place until the rec room is dealt with one way or another.

And then of course there is the small matter of money to pay for all this. The way I am looking at it is that eventually I will have to sell this house, I don't see it as my last permanent home. Having a basement in reasonably good shape is a good thing, the cost is an investment that will eventually pay off. Bob is a good person who does good work at reasonable prices, he has a lot of experience and I trust his judgement. I've had him do enough work for me that I trust him beyond simply doing a good job. So the timing of this disaster is not so bad, I at least am not scrambling to find someone to fix this problem and I did know that sooner or later this was coming.

Nevertheless it is not pleasant and I am losing sleep over it. I wish I could talk my brain into relaxing. I almost made it through this past night, but I woke at 4.00am with a severe leg cramp that forced me out of bed and that was the end of sleep for me.

What really worries me is exposure to mould, there is simply no way to close off the basement from the rest of the house until the job is completed. I owned and lived in a leaky condo out west and the exposure to mould caused a severe illness that lasted half a year, during which time I could not work or do much else; at its worst just getting from the bed to the toilet was a major effort. That scares me. The smell coming up from the basement scares me. The thought that this has been going on for years, probably since before I bought the house, and that I've been living over it all that time scares me. The fact that Bob's breathing changed within hours of setting foot in my basement scares me. Scares him too, he can't afford to get sick.

So sleeping is difficult.