Thornes: 2, House: 1

There comes a time in the life of every home owner that you have to roll up your sleeves and do battle with the forces of home-entropy. Oh, sure, you clean up around the house, you mow the lawn, yadda yadda. These are skirmishes. Impolite encounters. No, the real hostilities commence when something breaks. And I'm talking about something with water in it.

Home Emergency #1
This happened and was mentioned in Mel's July 13 entry. We didn't blog about it in more detail because we didn't realize it was about to become a trend. I'll rectify that now, just so we can all draw our own conclusions about how handy the Thornes will be becoming over the period of their home ownership.

We noticed the kitchen drain peeing when I offered to show some friends our alternate toilet in the basement. I opened the door to point out that one could relieve themselves here should the other restroom be in use only to notice greasy water raining down from the joists. A couple of days later when Mel and I had time to actually begin to address the situation I was on the way out to the garage to get some tools to begin tearing stuff apart. As I passed through our back yard our neighbor Brandt spoke to me: "How's it going?" I complained of our situation, and Brandt began to tell me all the things I should do. 'Well, you TALK a pretty good game,' I thought. "Wanna come in and have a look?" As soon as he had a chance to check it out he started talking about how I need one of these, and some of that, and just do this... and he had tomorrow afternoon off and how about he just pick up the parts? I must admit that I felt a bit odd about this development. But he showed up with all sorts of PVC plumbing stuff. While I was out getting a tape measure Brandt pulled about a 5 ft section of pipe off of my basement ceiling. Don't leave Brandt alone in your house. But we managed to fit in the replacement PVC with some rubbery joints to mate it to the existing metal pipe. In the future I'll have an idea about how to accomplish this sort of thing, but choosing which joints to use and how to place them to connect two non-rectalinearly oriented bits of pipe seems like a question of instinct. This one might actually be "Neighbor Brandt: 1, House: 0"



Home Emergency #2
This one showed up Sunday night. Mel was doing laundry. I was slacking. Or maybe I was being useful, I don't remember. But Mel came up and asked me why the spin cycle might not work on our laundry machine. "The load is probably unbalanced," I said, wondering how my wife might not know this. Relief is not what I felt when I learned that the problem was not an unbalanced load. In a clothesless test run the washing machine fills up with water and then makes noises like it's running, but the agitator turns not. Thankfully the machine is capable of pumping the water in it back out, at least. We get out our 'fixin stuff in yer house' book (and the samurai fixit website linked by Mel) and have a look. Tilting the beast forward we are able to get a look at the intimate bits of our major appliance. There was a lot of shredded plastic laying under it. We were able to discern that the coupler - isolation disk - coupler assembly between the motor and the transmission had shredded itself. A few days later, about $16 dollars bought us a new assebly for our Whirlpool Cleantouch washer at Dey Appliance Parts.

BTW, even if your washer is called "Cleantouch", don't open it unless you must. The filth that you will find residing mere inches from where your clean clothes swirl was super super gross. I dunno, maybe your basement is cleaner then ours has been, but we were totally grossed out.

But that didn't stop us from fixing it. No, 2 hours was enough time for us to unhook everything, flip up the control panel and then pull forward the main housing, unhook and remove the water pump, then the main motor. This exposed the two coupler plates and the empty space where our isolation disk had been before being shredded to it's component quarks. We got some nasty brown grease on our hands, and what seemed to be dog hair as well (we have no dog - yet!), but we replaced the busted bits. Clearly, this brings the score to Thornes: 2, House: 0 (Brandt counts as a substitution). Shove it back into place and we'll get some laundry done, right? All we have to do is stick the drain out of the washer into that sink, and then hook the water inlets to their dedicated faucets, right? RIGHT?

Home Emergency #3
Can you guess what this is? I'll blog more about it when I've fixed it. Grrr.

Love in the time of Dirty Laundry

Remember that old song about which chores you did on which days? It was popular about the same time that we were still boiling laundry in the backyard. Which is what I'm anticipating doing soon, since our washing machine has stopped agitating. The good part is that we know what broke, and we're reasonably sure that we can fix it. The frustrating part is that nobody wants to sell you parts for your washer on Sunday night, which means that I don't know exactly when the clothes will be able to become clean. Good thing our jobs have office casual dress codes!

I did find this site when looking for troubleshooting your washing machine. This contains exactly the amount of scorn that you'd expect from anyone dealing with appliance morons like me, so it's quite funny. Read the very last yellow entry, which actually gives you a good idea about what my dad used to sound like on the phone when troubleshooting for his clients.

We did manage to get the spaghetti sauce into the crock pot last night, so this morning the house smelled fantastic.

Housewarming is easy to do in Summer

Hello, Friends! Here it is, the long-awaited invitation to our housewarming party! (Well, some ofyou were waiting without knowing it, but isn't it much easier that way?)

When: Saturday July 30, 6pm to late
Where: Thorne House

What: An Open House
Come and enjoy our yard! There will be croquet and bocce ball. Significant others, kids and well-behaved dogs are also welcome. If you bring your kids, please bring a leash. No, no, I mean if you bring your dog, please bring a leash. Yes, that's what I meant.

Come and eat dinner with us! We have a small gas grill and a small charcoal grill. We will provide condiments and utensils, as well as chips and soda. Please BYO whatever else you'd like to eat or drink.

Come and tell us what color we should paint our living room! We don't have a lot of furniture yet, so you'llbe able to have an uninterrupted view of our walls. Be warned--you might be invited to put your muscles where your mouth is. :)

Come and enjoy the fruits of your labor! A big thank you to everyone who had to listen to us talk about the entire house buying process ad nauseum. An even bigger thank you to everyone who helped in the (extended) moving process. You rock! Now come and relax with us!

Please note that gifts are not expected; however, if you are feeling generous, a small giftcard from your favorite home improvement store would not go unappreciated.

Little Bunny Fufu (or, Josh, to some)

There really is a bunny in this picture. He's just a little bitty bunny, and he lives in our raspberry patch. It's fun to look for him in the morning when I leave for work; sometimes he's out then. I scared him the other day, and he's too young to really know what to do, so he just kind of jumped spastically in circles for a minute.

Our raspberries are growing and growing. Thank goodness for Greg and Sara Feinburg, who gave us a short primer on what to do with them in the fall. Greg also spent some time telling us which plants were weeds. Handy folks, those Feinburgs.

It's been much too hot to do anything but the most pressing house projects. Like, fix the leaky drain pipe so that it doesn't dump dirty water all over the basement. That will get fixed tomorrow, and then we'll be able to wash our dishes again. Hurrah! Thankfully, the bathroom sink still works fine, so when I need to wash red wine out of my white shirt, I can do that. It's times like this that I really miss the backstage work. Red wine + black shirt = who cares?

All neighbors are independent, but some are more independent than others

I don't think that we need to worry about North Korea anymore; I think Kim Jong Il sold his arsenal to our neighbors across the street. They commenced setting off fireworks on Friday at 5pm, and stopped Monday night, sometime after midnight.
Now that's freedom, baby.





We had a very nice 4th of July, ending with the fireworks up at the park. We could see the fireworks by the Stone Arch Bridge, which started at 10pm. The Powderhorn fireworks started about five minutes later, but then ran at least 15 minutes longer. It was a good display, and I was glad that we had gone. It was much more relaxing to be able to walk there, and walk home, and avoid the crazy traffic. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the house to visit!

Love in the time of Little Tables

We had a successful run to Ikea today. We found little tables to use as night stands. We found a little table for the living room computer. And we found a neat little kitchen cart for a mobile island in our kitchen. Which will save me from continuing to use our step stool as counter space.

We also found, as you always do, various random things that induce thoughts like, "Oooh, look. We could put that in the bedroom. Oooh, look. We could put those on the front porch. Oooh, look. It's only $1.99. Let's get three." Thankfully, we were there long enough to become exhausted by the options, and give up on anything that was not a little table.

*photo credit: Sara M Ochs