You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2006.
Before we start telling you about the way we almost poisoned ourselves, let’s lay the scene (ooohh…foreshadowing):
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, we began the process of testing our well. We’d meant to test our well long ago, but we had to go get a test kit from the plumber and then make the time to bleach the pipes and…well. It just kept falling off the to-do list in favor of walls, okay?
However, testing the wellwater is a requirement for converting our construction loan into a mortgage. And it is a darn good idea besides. One never knows what might be lurking 225 feet down in the ground. It could be something deadly (cue ominous music). So we finally got ourselves organized to do it.
Before we could draw water for testing, we had to bleach the well to remove contaminants from our pipes. Here’s the system for bleaching a well: pour two quarts of bleach into the well. (Before you do this, make sure you are showered, have run the dishwasher, have drinking water on hand, and are basically set on water usage for 24 hours or so. Unless you really like to smell like bleach.) Run the water in the house until you smell bleach. Turn it off and let it sit in the pipes overnight.
Get up the next morning. Run the water as long as you can stand it. Turn it off. Wait a bit. Turn it on again for as long as you can stand it. Turn it off. Repeat until you can no longer smell bleach. This took us two days and we needed to pee the entire time.
Then, assemble this:
Two sterile bottles for water collection. Form from the water testing company with stern instructions for drawing a sample. Approved box with prepaid postage for shipping. Running water with the filter from the faucet removed. Oh, and a checkbook ’cause you gotta pay to play. Really messy sink and drywalling supplies optional.
Then channel your middle-school science lab self and fill both bottles WITHOUT TOUCHING THE LIDS OR LIPS OF THE BOTTLE TO ANYTHING. If you contaminate the lids or bottle, the person who felt so passionately about keeping things sterile that they WROTE THAT INSTRUCTION IN ALL CAPS will come beat you up. We assume. Because they seem pretty high-strung.
Then we went merrily away on vacation. Actually, it was less than merrily because the whole dormer disaster happened in between. But anyway.
We got our test results back after returning from vacation. We had been worried that our water might have too much copper. It didn’t. We were also worried the pH might be high. It wasn’t. The nitrates were fine, the chloride was fine, the iron was fine, there was no e. coli, it wasn’t too hard or too soft. We had, in a word, perfect water.
Except for, you know, the arsenic.
Yeah, we said arsenic.
The arsenic that was in the water that we’d been drinking for two months.
We imagine that people might have some questions about that, so we’ve compiled a handy list of
Questions we imagine a reader of this entry might ask us:
Let me get this straight, you drank the water from the well for over two months without testing it?
Yes. Yes, we did.
That was kind of dumb.
Yes. Yes, it was.
How much arsenic are we talking here?
Just a smidge above the legal maximum. The state (and newly approved EPA) limit is 10 parts per billion. Ours was 13 parts per billion.
How did it get there? Are your neighbors trying to do you in?
Arsenic occurs naturally in rock and leeches into groundwater. Nothing shady going on here. At least with the well. They may try to do us in some other way, though relations have been better since we stopped running the generator and chainsaw at all hours of the day and night.
Doesn’t arsenic build up in your system?
Yes. As any good Agatha Christie reader knows, arsenic is an odorless, colorless poison that will slowly build in your system over time. It is linked to many health problems, including kidney and liver failure and various cancers.
Are you going to die?
Eventually, yes. From arsenic poisoning, no.
Are you sure?
Yes. At the extremely low level that we were ingesting, we would have had to drink the water for years and years before we suffered any ill effects. We’re fine. Dumb, but fine.
What now?
We have several choices for clearing the arsenic out of the water we drink. An Absorptive Media system pulls the arsenic out of the water by filtering it through an absorbing material. A Reverse Osmosis system runs the water through a membrane which traps the clean water on one side and contaminants on another, then disposes the contaminants into our septic. An Anion Exchange system pulls the arsenic ions out and replaces them with more favorable ions. We can filter either at a house level or just at the kitchen sink. We are currently exploring our options with our plumber. More info on all of this written by people who understand it better than us is here.
What’s the immediate plan?
We are drinking bottled water. We’re not complete idiots.
We are back from our whirlwind, take-no-prisoners, soak-in-some-sun-to-get-us-through-the-winter Thanksgiving trip to Florida. And we managed to prove that it is possible to eat your own body weight in starchy food, though you will regret it later.
We’ll write about the trip later. First, let’s take a look at why we ran for that airport like a turkey with its butt on fire.
This:
That is the wall and floor in the second bedroom. That black thing is a drywall sponge. The yellowish is stuff are bits of wood. But that weird discoloration and the gray blob? That is a leak. Behind the drywall. Spilling out onto the floor.
Michael discovered it on Wednesday when he went to put on another coat of drywall mud. If Cherie had been there, there would have been much swearing and tearing of the hair and general woe and misery, because that is what she does.
Because Cherie was not there, but instead was at work, Michael did what he does and went about finding and solving the problem. The problem was this:
That’s the dormer in the second bedroom. We left it as a cathedral ceiling to open up the room. We also didn’t vent it, because we didn’t think we needed to. Venting serves a very important function in our climate. Namely, it keeps the warm air inside the house separate from the cold air outside the house. Because when warm air and cold air meet with wood in the middle, condensation forms. Condensation means water. Water runs down the studs and out onto the floor, which is a very sad thing to see in your house. It’s been cold recently, but our nicely insulated house has been toasty warm. The result? The wood was soaked and the insulation was dripping, but except for that tiny little stain that will be covered by trim, the drywall was okay.*
So, instead of getting a whole bunch of work done on his day off, Michael pulled out all the insulation, installed the venting channels, climbed on the roof to install the roof vents, put the insulation back in the northern side, and propped the insulation from the southern side up to dry. Then he explained the whole thing to Cherie when she came home. She immediately got a beer while he made calming arguments that we found it right in time, there was no permanent damage, and we hadn’t put the beadboard on the ceiling yet so nothing expensive was ruined.
Immediately after that, we decided we’d had just about enough of this fun housebuilding adventure for the moment and left this behind to dry:
And went to Florida.
*The grey things in the bays are the newly -installed styrofoam venting channels. On the outside of the wall, vent holes are drilled into the walls, bringing cold air into the house. The venting channels then carry that cold air up the roof and out again through the roof vent. That’s all we had to do, but we didn’t do it. Lesson learned: don’t be lulled into complacency, vent the darn dormer. (Interesting fact proving the efficiency of solar power: only the north-facing side of the dormer roof had this problem. The south side, which has sun on it all day, was perfectly fine.)
We tried to keep our motivation from last week going, except that Michael had a side job to go to Saturday afternoon and worked all day Sunday as well. Motivation – the person in this house who knows what we’re doing = not so productive.
But Cherie finished insulating the basement and has the head injuries to prove it because she just can’t remember to duck. So bring it on, Winter! Well, actually, take your time, Winter. But we’re ready when you get here.
Also, we did manage to build these:
Those are the very beginnings of cabinets. The carcasses, they are rather gruesomely called. Things of beauty they are not, but they increased our counter space by about 300% and the coffeemaker is no longer on the floor, so we’ll take it! (Michael’s family, please take note that the Dr. Pepper was the very first item put into the cabinets. Would you expect anything else?)
The kitchen cabinets are going to be ridiculously beautiful. We were dithering on what exactly we wanted them to look like (dithering? Us? How odd) for months until like magic the July/August 2006 issue of Fine Woodworking arrived. And there were our kitchen cabinets.*
Ours will be painted because of Cherie’s fear that wood floors and wood counters and wood cabinets will just be too much wood, but that’s what we’re building. We sketched out a design to fit our kitchen, and we’re off.
What? It doesn’t look the same? Have faith.
And no, we don’t what those stains on the sketch are. That’s just the way we roll around here.
When we mention to people that we are building the cabinets, many of them are shocked. Most people these days do buy their cabinets pre-built, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It’d be a heck of a lot faster. But, Michael is a finish carpenter. This is what he does. Installing pre-built cabinets would be like telling an artist that they get to build the frame, stretch the canvas, and prime the surface, but the actual painting will be done via a paint-by-numbers kit. After doing all of the framing, drywalling, mudding, and painting, Michael finally gets to make beautiful things out of wood. This is why we are building a house.
*We aren’t sure of the legality of posting these pictures, but are hedging our bets by showing a photo of the magazine (as opposed to a scan)and at a distance so you can’t read the copy. If Fine Woodworking complains, we’ll take ‘em down.
It really didn’t happen by magic.
The entryway has been an ongoing project. It was drywalled back in September, when Michael’s brother Greg came to visit. We picked away at the mudding for a few weeks when we had the time. We tried in vain to tile a few weeks ago but were thwarted by a power outage (no power=no wet saw). After we finally finished the tile, grouting this tiny space took two days because weren’t sure how the tile would react to the grout. In short, despite the fact that we haven’t really talked about it and thus it probably appears that we’ve made huge progress all at once, in reality, this wee little room has been a long time a-comin’.
Let’s start with the philosophy for the entryway. We live (you may have heard) in Maine. The Maine climate has some pretty obvious disadvantages, but one of the major ones is that you need a place to put all of the "stuff." "Stuff" includes coats (in weights varying from "chilly" to "subarctic"), hats, mittens, gloves, rainjackets, boots, scarves, snowpants, and all of the other accoutrement needed to get us through a year of Maine weather. Not only do you need a place to put this stuff, but you need a way to dry it. Every Maine resident is intimately familiar with the smell of wool drying on a heat source. It’s a smell that’s as much a part of the state as pine needles and ocean air are. So, yes, we needed an entryway.
Plus, we just like the concept of an entryway. We like the formal progression from outside to inside. We liked the opportunity to set the vision for our home–warm, classic, influenced by nature, and practical–right from the start. Like everything around here, it’s a little rough around the edges, but…
Welcome to our home. Here’s a spot to hang your coat, drape your mittens, and dump your boots. Actually, there isn’t a place to hang your coat because we haven’t put the closet rod up yet. Oh, and careful where you put those boots, we’ve got extensions cords everywhere. And now that we think of it, there isn’t really a place for the mittens… just throw them on the floor. Never mind all that. Would you like some hot cocoa?
There was no way to get the whole door and the floor in the picture. Sorry.
We used slate for the floor. Slate absorbs water. Thus, with the radiant heat underneath, it is the perfect place to put wet boots.
When we first ordered the slate, we were under the impression that it would be grey. When Cherie opened the box and saw grey and yellow and apricot and red she just about had a heart attack. But we were too quick to judge. Laid out, it looks beautiful.
(See that nice wide closet in the back there?)
And please check out the door hardware. The inside:
And the outside:
So we are all ready to bring some guests in. Except that when you open the door, this is what you see:
Some might call this a hazard. We call it adventure.
Now bring us our boots!
We understand that we are pushing the limits of the "Weekend update" schtick by not posting until Wednesday, but truthfully it has taken us that long to recover from the sheer amount of work we did over the weekend.
What, don’t believe us? Have we shaken your faith so badly? After weeks and weeks of procrastination, do you find it so hard to believe that we could actually accomplish something?
Well, believe it.
We turned this:
Into this:
And this:
And this:
And do you see what’s shining there in the corner of this picture? And hanging there in the middle of the picture above?
Those are lights. And they are actually wired in. No, they aren’t the best looking lights out there and they may only be, in the technical sense of the word, light bulbs, but they are lights. And they come on when we flip a switch. And that’s a pretty darn nice thing.
There’s more to show, but we’re going to stretch it out over the few days. Purely for dramatic effect, you understand. Next up: the entryway–yet another room that is kind of, sort of, maybe-if-you-squint-and-tilt-your-head-a-little-to-the-right finished. (We know how excited you are. You don’t have to pretend with us.)
We didn’t do anything on the house this weekend. Let’s just get that out of the way up front. Nothing. Nada. Sure, Michael slapped up a coat of tape and mud in the guest room on Friday night, but that really doesn’t count.
Oh, and we realize that it probably seems silly to be finishing the guest room next (especially since our guests are clearly willing to put up with all manner of abuse), but there is a logic to the madness. Since the living room will be our woodshop for the foreseeable future, and, hence, won’t exactly be that comfy place where you can kick off your shoes and relax (unless you like to relax in a pile of sawdust–and some people just might, who are we to judge?), we have determined that the upstairs guest room will serve as temporary living room. We need to not be in one room all the time. Period. It turns out that we really just don’t like each other that much. (Just kidding.)(Sort of.)
But back to the weekend. Yes, we procrastinated again but we swear that it’s for the last time. And it was for a really good reason, we promise. We took a little mini-vacation down to the island of Vinalhaven to visit with some friends. It was a great weekend, and we certainly aren’t mourning the fact that instead of mudding drywall we were drinking wine and laughing our butts off and reconnecting with folks that we haven’t seen in a while in one of the most beautiful places on the Maine coast.
Our kindly hosts, Heather and Adam, are just beginning to build their own house (see? It’s catching) in a pretty spot with a stream running through it. As we stood at the edge of their little mud pit, talking through where the kitchen and living room would go and trying to visualize landscaping where there was currently just a pile of dirt, we flashed back to when our house was just a big ol’ hole in the ground. Back then, we were so wide-eyed and hopeful. We were going to work non-stop until this place was the little gem that we could see in our mind’s eye. Since then, we dressed in endless layers to clear trees in January, we sloshed through mud in March, we sweated through tree-clearing in July, and we fought an epic battle with the power company in September. It’s been a long and winding road, and we just have one thing to say to Heather and Adam:
Glad it’s you and not us.
Okay, yes, living in the house while building it has slowed our momentum. And trying to cook without actual counters is getting a bit old. And it was a little embarrassing that time we were showing a friend around and she said, "Where’s the bathroom sink?" and it took us a full minute to remember that we were supposed to have one.
But there are benefits to living here, as opposed to our rental place. To wit:
1) It is logistically much easier to work on the house in the evening, as we no longer have to worry about getting home, exercising the dog, and getting over to the job site before it gets dark.
2) We no longer have to worry about exercising the dog, period. Who needs walks when there’s woods to run through and deer to chase?
3) Small projects are easier to knock off the list, as we can do them while dinner is cooking or in between dinner and settling down for the evening. Also, it’s much easier to focus now that we are on standard time. Pitch black and cold at 5PM means not being tempted by evening walks or other outside pleasures.
4) No more budgeting to handle mortgage plus rent.
5) No more budgeting to handle mortgage plus rent. (That’s worth saying twice.)
6) The fat cat has lost some weight from her time spent wandering through the trusses.
7) We’ve learned how to survive on a minimum of stuff, since most of ours is in storage. It would be nice if we could find the box with Cherie’s sweaters in it, what with it being November in Maine and all, but that’s a minor quibble.
8) We have a real, tangible excuse to not have people over. Actually, we have excuses for lots of things: wrinkled clothes, being late, grumpiness, bad hair…
9) The lack of cable and internet access means that we’ve both been getting to bed earlier. (See also: dark at 5PM.)
10) We’re one cozy, cozy family unit what with the living in one room thing.
So there you have it, 10 delusional reasons to look on the bright side. Any other suggestions?
