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trials and tribulations : wet basement

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Rivers running through our basement.

The least pleasant discovery about our house has been the amount of water that comes into our basement during heavy rains. Least pleasant both because it makes the basement a dirty dank mold-growing hovel, as well as because it makes it hard to let go of our anger at the previous owner for his fraudulent misrepresentation of the house during the sale. As much as we repeat to ourselves, It’s our home now, nothing to be done, move forward from here, we are not in actual fact the Buddha and our chains are righteously yanked when this happens.

After the flooding last spring, when we devised our super high tech move-the-lintel-and-let-the-water-flow-under-the-door-to-the-drain solution, we were hopeful both that only fluke high rains would bring the river inside and that we wouldn’t get those rains too often. This turned out to be a pipe dream, as we live in an area that gets ‘fluke’ high rains every spring and floods easily. Add to the equation last year’s drought, and it becomes apparent that we’ll need to address the problem sooner rather than later if we hope to use the basement in the future. Everything we’ve read and all the people we’ve consulted agree that an interior drain system connected to a crazy strong sump pump will keep the water seeping through our porous walls from coming up over the foot of the foundation and out onto our floors. This should also relieve the amount of water under the house, and diminish the chance that cracks reform in the floor once we repair them. Completely reasonable in the abstract; godawful expensive and disruptive in practice to jackhammer up the floor and trench a pipe to the alley for the sump to drain.

Another factor is, of course, the amount of water around the exterior of the house. We have been lax in cleaning the gutters on the original house, as they are really high up in the air and we have yet to invest in a 20-foot ladder. Plus, I’m a chicken about heights like that, so it’s not clear I would be able to actually make myself use the 20-foot ladder even if we had one. So we need to hire someone to do that. We suspect that the buried drainpipes are also clogged and/or broken; they drain water but not the volume that we think they should. Finally, we also have no grading around the house foundation, and water flows downhill from our uphill neighbor directly to our house. We’ve always known we need to grade, but there are a lot of foundation plantings and I have been loathe to either kill them or go to extreme efforts to lift and move them; I’m thinking in particular of the 50+ year old azaleas which have shallow root systems. It’s not clear that will even be possible for the trees, which might just have to go. So, yes, I concede: sentimental attachment to plants is keeping me from doing everything I can to keep water out of my house. I’m working on getting over that and just sucking up the potential loss of the plants.

Knowing that it will be at least several more months before the work is done, I am doing my best to relate to the house as a metaphor for what I need to learn in my life. Creating a strong foundation, clearly defining boundaries, clearing out old junk that’s just been sitting around for years: these are all things we’re physically doing in the house that we are also intangibly doing in our lives. It can be hard to see water and mold as an opportunity, but I know that it’s forcing us to undertake other projects we might have put off indefinitely. In order to relocate our belongings from the basement we’re cleaning out the attic: removing the 50+ year old insulation from the rafters of the roof and cleaning out the assorted bits and pieces of trash left up there. Since our belongings will be moving into a nice empty new space literally hanging over our heads, I’m working to be selective about what we keep and transport upstairs, which means pitching out a whole bunch of stuff that we just stuck in the basement to be faced later. Later is now, and I hope that we — and our house — will be the better for it.

In the meantime, boxes of my childhood belongings are once again stacked in my study and the many suitcases we’ve acquired during our years of international travel are piled in the living room with our artificial Christmas tree. I just keep repeating, it’s a process. We’ll get there.

trials and tribulations : wet basement

trials and tribulations : EasyClosets not easy (for plaster walls)

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Following the glowing recommendation of friends who used EasyClosets systems to maximize the storage space of their San Francisco condo, I ordered shelving to convert our small hall closet into a pantry. We have a larger closet in the family room that we use for coats, and the hall closet is directly across from the (also small) kitchen. My hope is to move the collection of small kitchen appliances out of the dining room and off of the kitchen counters, along with the canning supplies currently in my office and the stocks of rice milk, paper towels and distilled water that are stashed here and there under counters and at the backs of cabinets. I’d like to remove the bookshelf from the dining room entirely, relocating the cookbooks to the nearest shelf around the corner in the living room.

At any rate: EasyClosets. Nowhere on their website does the word ‘plaster’ appear, nor is there any warning statement indicating that the hardware and mounting system — set up to drive the weight of the shelves against the wall and down toward the floor — is suitable only for drywall. Nor does any such warning or distinction appear in the instruction booklet accompanying the materials. Nonetheless, the anchors are readily identifiable as drywall anchors (once you have them in front of you), and the E-Z Toggle website clearly states (when you go searching for clarification), Since plaster has a different composition than drywall, E-Z Ancor® products cannot be used.

So. Here we are with a living room full of particle board, a dining room full of the stuff that we took out of the closet to prep it plus the tools we assembled for the installation, and no pantry. I called EasyClosets and am hoping that the guy who’s ‘done a lot of installations,’ but wasn’t at his desk just then, will call me back with instructions for mounting the shelves into plaster. I’m sure they would rather do that than pay to ship the particle board back to themselves because they don’t make it clear that their system is drywall only. I, of course, would rather have mounted shelves in the closet than not, so a hardware alternative would work for everyone.

Our own research didn’t leave us very hopeful; from what we could tell, the approach for mounting wall units into plaster is nearly completely opposite that of mounting them into drywall. With drywall, you use anchors to distribute the weight across the wall as evenly as possible, and the surface takes the force. With plaster, it seems that you drive as much of the weight into the studs as possible and away from the wall itself. As our closet is adjacent to the original exterior wall, we have only the first stud off the wall to work with, smack in the middle of the space; the closet is not wide enough to span two supports. The other alternative, of course, is to install freestanding shelves that are anchored to the wall for balance only, but I can’t tell you how sick I am of that type of setup. I believe my exact statement on that topic was ‘I want a pantry, not another gosh-darn bookshelf in a closet!’ It was late, I was tired, but the sentiment is the truth (and if you know me I’m sure you can guess that by gosh-darn I mean a whole bunch of other stuff not suitable for prime time).

Hopefully EasyClosets will pull a bunny out of a hat for me and save us from having to have another gosh-darn bookshelf in a closet.

trials and tribulations : EasyClosets not easy (for plaster walls)

patchy DSL

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Last month we started the process of switching our DSL from Verizon to Speakeasy, with the intention of trying Speakeasy’s VOIP service. After a year of being harassed via evening calls by Verizon trying to sell us FIOS — each time being told by their customer service people that ‘it takes a while to get off the list’ and ‘we don’t control the list’ and being promised that I wouldn’t hear from them again — I decided I was done with Verizon. We had Speakeasy DSL for two years in the District and had changed to Verizon when we moved out here because it was less expensive. In terms of DSL service, the Verizon service was comparable to what we’d had from Speakeasy, with only slightly more frequent modem reboots required for line drops.

Since we got our new dedicated line installed we’ve had nothing but difficulty. The line has trouble locking on a signal, it bounces all over creation, it only works consistently in safe mode — with about half the speed we’re paying for — and even then it drops in the evenings and on the weekends. This makes it a little difficult to follow up on all the communications we have in progress with basement repair companies and caterers, to say the least. I certainly have no intention of transferring my phone to a completely unreliable service.

For the most part Speakeasy has been responsive. They’ve taken our calls and tested our line many many times; I think we currently have five or six open service tickets for various aspects of the problem. They have agreed that our line is not yet installed. They just haven’t fixed it yet. Granted, they are limited by our schedule (going out of town for a week stalled the process) and the schedules of the people who maintain the physical systems and have not been available to swap out circuit cards and the like on weekends. Still, it’s been a month and we’ve had only craptastic to nonexistent DSL service with no end in sight. If I weren’t switching from Verizon because I believe the company to be the spawn of satan, I’d be entirely inclined to stick with what I had.

I’m sure all this is just a fluke of a series of poor mechanical connections and I’m hopeful that the service techs will be able to locate and fix the problems this week. In the meantime, I’ll continue to do a lot of things around the house that are generally neglected for lack of time and conduct my business by phone (which is my least favorite way to communicate after spending six years in a long-distance relationship). We do what we must.

patchy DSL

updated lifelist

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I’ve updated my lifelist to reflect the sightings of the past month or so. I still need to find usable photos (e.g. those in the public domain or licensed for non-commercial use) and enter a bunch of latin names, but the list of birds itself is now complete.

Through doing this update I’ve realized that I’ve crossed the 200 bird mark! This number includes all birds sighted everywhere, i.e. the 27 birds I saw in Ireland (the Ring-Necked Pheasant is the only bird that appears in both places). It’s my goal to reach 200 birds in North America by the end of the year. I would say ‘no problem, I’ve been going gang-busters since the beginning of the year!’ except…. Except I’m trying to be realistic: it’s been the spring migration and that’s no way to gauge how the rest of the year will go. Nonetheless there are still whole categories of birds I’m completely weak on — owls spring readily to mind — and more that are common in the right habitat. I’ll be traveling north again toward the end of the summer, and with a little luck I’ll be able to pick up some more locals in other places.

Twenty-four (more) new birds before the end of the year seems daunting, but I remind myself that I’ve already seen fifty-two new birds this year. Fifty-two! I had no idea it was that many until I tallied them up just now. I’m kind of impressed with myself. So there you go.

updated lifelist

garden log : what a difference a week makes

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Blooming row of yellow daylilies at the top of the front bed.

We returned from our trip this week to the sight of our yellow daylilies in full riotous bloom. They had started to bloom before we left, but the five days of rain and sun did them good and they are magnificent now. At some point I’m sure they’ll need to be thinned and I might break up the monotony with some other plants, or at least different varieties in various shades of yellow and orange. For now, though, I’m just enjoying the bright swathe of color. There’s really no comparison to how they looked last year; this spring’s rain and the additional year to become established have made them into a veritable wall of flowers.

Our days away have also made it possible to see the impact of the herbicides on the patches of poison ivy that we’re working to eradicate from the yard. Not much, as the case may be: we’re definitely going to need to reapply, possibly several more times through the summer. Ah well. Despite the claims of the label — and the exhortations to phone poison control of any of the spray whatsoever comes into contact with any part of my body — I suspected that our ivy might not be so easily vanquished. No rush, though. If not this year, next year; poison ivy is nasty enough that I won’t be giving up so easily.


Three blooms on the Louise Odier rose.

Sadly, our week away meant we missed the last of the wonderfully fragrant Louise Odier blooms. Perhaps the bush will bloom again later in the season; this will be summer I learn as much as I can about the roses I’ve inherited. I plan to pick the brain of a gardener acquaintance on the verge of retirement, during the three days per week he’ll be at home. Hopefully between his advice and books from the library I’ll be able to develop a strategy for moving the bushes without killing them come autumn. For now, I enjoy the multitude of blooms on the Blaze bushes and work on sketching out plans for my little island bed of herbs.

garden log : what a difference a week makes