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home log : new toilets

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The new Toto Drake in our snazzy yellow master bathroom.

As part of our long-term plan to never go on vacation again, we are slowly fixing up our house. ‘Fixing up’ is probably too strong, as the house was fundamentally sound and generally nice-looking and functional when we bought it. It is by no means a classic fixer-upper: we are not rewiring, replumbing, taking out or putting in walls, et cetera. It is, however, a treasure chest of hidden defects, mostly in the form of (1) necessary maintenance deferred for 20+ years by the cheap former owner or (2) barely functional antique appliances and fixtures never replaced by the cheap former owner. The toilets commodes in the house were a happy combination of both: high-flow models that were no doubt installed when the house was built in the 1930s, with tanks held together by judicious amounts of caulk, that leaked and dripped when they weren’t lowering the water table with each flush. Clearly, they Had To Go.

Since we participate in the Maryland Heritage Preservation Tax Credit Program, we seek preapproval for each home repair project we undertake. The lag time between our proposal and their approval gives us plenty of time to make final decisions about what we are going to do. In this case, we spent months deciding whether we were really ready to spend $400 on a toilet (it certainly sounds more reasonable if you call it a ‘commode’). In the end, I successfully argued that reliable flushing was not a ‘luxury’ in a commode, and while it was a darn shame that other manufacturers had not yet created good low-flow models, I was not willing to compromise on that point. Which means that we decided to go with the low-flow commodes the internets and personal experience told us worked: those made by Toto.

Having made that first round decision to take the plunge, we researched different models and decided on the Drake, mostly because (1) an online guide to installation made it look easy, (2) we wanted something basic that would blend in with our older home, and (3) we weren’t sure we could fit the one-piece Ultramax into our smallish car. I knew that the Gmax flushing system was what I wanted, and I also knew that I wanted at least one ADA model in the house, for all the tall people with joint trouble who might be using it in years to come. With a little searching, we were able to find a dealer and inspect the pieces in person; we probably could have saved a little money by finding a way to order them online but I was nervous about breakage during shipping and happy to support a more local business.

Two trips to the store later (we wanted to test the smaller size in one bathroom before committing to the taller elongated models) and we have two new commodes installed and one on deck for tonight. Between the online guide I found and the instructions in what we fondly refer to as ‘The Man Book‘ the installation was a piece of cake. Wrestling the old toilets out to the alley for pickup (thank you, public works!) and cleaning up the nasty spaces underneath, though? Let’s just say there wasn’t enough beer in the house and leave it at that. The third one should be easier to remove — it’s on the first floor — and I’m hoping to donate it to Community Forklift since it still functions; maybe someone with more skills and patience than we have can rig it up to make it lower-flow.

After tonight, the final commode-related task is to have a plumber come out to remove the toilet from the basement and cap the sewer line. All the houses on our block have little shacks in the basement that include a toilet only, the 1930s version of a port-a-potty. I have no idea if the toilet even works, but I want it gone. The long-term plan is to remove the walls of the shack, address the basement water problems, and eventually put in a darkroom using that outgoing pipe.

For now, though, I’m just looking forward to next quarter’s water bill.

home log : new toilets

trials and tribulations : resolved!

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This calendar year has been a bit one-thing-after-another and when-it-rains-it-pours, which has led despite my best intentions to quite a bit of kvetching and moaning around our household. I’m happy to report that our various unfortunate developments have all been resolved quite nicely.

Most recently, Carefirst has correctly reprocessed the remainder of my claims and sent me a letter clarifying that there is not and should not have been a waiting period on my account. It required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau: while Carefirst wouldn’t discuss my actual medical coverage with them, filing a claim led to contact with a real live person at Carefirst with the authority to just make things happen correctly. I appreciated that, was (I hope) very polite to her on the phone, while being grateful that she was very polite back to me. That’s all taken care of, without me needing to file a claim with the Maryland Insurance Administration as well, and I’m now established with Kaiser. Let’s hope I never have to return to the BlueCross network again.

Just before that came through, we successfully challenged the charges Speakeasy levied against our credit card for the failed installation of our DSL service. Thanks to my partner’s compulsive saving of webpages via the CutePDF Writer, we had access to the trouble logs after our account and its attendant access to Speakeasy’s website was discontinued. When we formally disputed the charges we could therefore submit some 60 pages documenting our communications with the company (wherein we explicitly decline to accept the service as satisfactorily installed no less than four times over the course of six weeks). Not surprisingly, the credit card company found in our favor there.

And, some months ago now, we did manage to successfully install the EasyCloset system to convert our small hall closet into a pantry of sorts. It still wasn’t easy, and I don’t recommend the system for plaster walls unless you have a large closet such that you can’t just get a standard bookshelf and plunk it in there (which is effectively what we ended up doing, with a lot of cutting and remounting to fit the shelves in around the mouldings). The company did, however, exchange the uprights for longer ones that would sit on the floor at no extra cost to us, for which we are very appreciative.

While all that was going on, I arranged to have my grandmother’s dining room furniture shipped internationally, with much help from my aunt and uncle up north. The furniture arrived safely this past week, so that’s one less worry outstanding. For the last few weeks of summer I’ll work on wrapping up my remaining tasks in progress: mailing out marriage announcements, writing thank you cards for the receptions, submitting newspaper notices, and ordering and installing new toilets commodes for all three bathrooms. Good times.

trials and tribulations : resolved!

trials and tribulations: BlueCross

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I never thought I would reach the point where I would be telling people to run the other way from BlueCross. Yet here I am: after 6 years as a BlueCross subscriber, I recommend getting any other coverage available to you. Which is saying a lot, given that they have one of the largest networks of health care providers and offer some of the most extensive PPO plans around. To be fair to BlueCross, the first two years were great. The customer service people were helpful, the prescription coverage was excellent, and claims were approved and paid in about two weeks.

About three years ago something changed, and everything positive about the company disappeared into the ether. Customer service became just like every other company: a complete crap shoot. The prescription coverage became worse and worse, until my out-of-pocket cost for my daily medication had eventually increased twenty-fold. And, most frustrating of all, BlueCross began to make errors on every single claim I submitted. The process for being reimbursed for covered services became a nightmare of calling again and again, providing the same information over and over (provider name, diagnostic, medical license and tax identification numbers), and endless resubmitting.

Honestly, I would have continued to live with all of that had BlueCross not started, in November of last year, to deny me coverage based on an internal BlueCross employee error. In October, I switched from my COBRA coverage to paying as an individual subscriber for the same plan. At the time, I had to demonstrate that I’d had continuous coverage for the previous 4 years in order to remove the standard waiting period for coverage of preexisting conditions, which I did. Hunky dory, everything’s fine, we truck along with the same frustrations already enumerated above. In November, someone at BlueCross did something — trust me, if I could get a clearer or more specific explanation out of them, I’d share it — that changed my starting date of coverage and activated a waiting period. I promptly received a nonsensical bill from them and my claims starting being denied. I called, they told me I needed to get a statement from them and fax it back to them — major errors resulting in the wrongful denial of service can apparently be made but not corrected internally at BlueCross — and then they would remove it. I did so, they did so, hunky dory, right? WRONG. Despite being assured over the past six months by a half dozen customer service agents and managers that the waiting period has been removed, it is in fact still active, and my claims are still being wrongfully denied. As of today, I’ve been waiting two weeks for a return call confirming that it’s been corrected. I’m not holding my breath.

I, of course, have done what any sane person would do in this situation: changed my insurance company and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Next up: the Maryland Insurance Administration. I’ll keep you posted.

trials and tribulations: BlueCross

DIY : earth boxes

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One of our homemade ‘earth boxes.’

I’ve never really been a master of DIY projects. There are plenty of things I do for myself or the house, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I tend to learn to do the things I want to learn to do and leave the things I don’t want to learn to do to other people. Whether I could do it myself doesn’t always factor into it, and I have never really been motivated to undertake projects specifically to see if can or to save money. Again, unless it’s something I like doing myself (like painting). Which is all to say that on my own I would have simply not planted tomatoes before I either (1) spent the money on actual Earth Boxes or (2) learned how to make them myself.

I’m not on my own, though, and the siren call of free tomato plants — started by our neighbor across the street who did spring for Earth Boxes and my partner’s boss’s boss who has an enormous garden on a farm about an hour away — was too much to resist, even before all the hullabaloo about salmonella. For once I was the voice of the wet blanket (‘But you don’t even like tomatoes! But we’ll already be getting tomatoes from our farmer in the summer CSA!’) and he was the not-to-be-deterred optimist (‘We’ll make sauce! We’ll give them away! It’ll be fun!’). With a small passel of wee tomato plants on our porch, and some pepper plants thrown in for good measure, he decided to go the DIY route, relying on the instructions of those who had already tried this at home as guidance.

In the end, the most difficult part of the project was mixing the dehydrated compressed potting mix with water, something I did by hand. I got lazy the second time around and overdid it with the hose, ending up with what could only be described as a big muddy mess in two boxes. To get the dirt back to wet-but-not-sloppy, I transferred mud into the small ceramic pots I was using for herbs and into the fourth box, and then (re)introduced dry mix into all three boxes. This worked in the end, but I ended up doing just as much hard hand-mixing as I would have, so I’d recommend taking it easy with the hose. It also remains to be seen whether I have irretrievably clogged the drainage holes and/or introduced too much soil into the reservoir; it’s not clear this last is possible, but not having read the actual instructions (Not My Project) I don’t know for sure.

Having assembled the boxes and planted the plants, we are now waiting to see whether following the fertilizing recommendations — which seemed a bit extreme to me — will result in lovely big plants or poor wee things with their roots burned to death. So far it looks like we have five plants that are loving it, one plant that’s gone the way of root burn, and two that took a licking and kept on ticking. I planted basil in among the tomatoes and the peppers seem to be happy in their own pot (the first one we assembled, from a larger bin, where the base fits more snugly into the box and the side holes drain better). Now all we have to do is water them every day and wait.

DIY : earth boxes

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