Recently in Home Life Category

I've lived in downtown Madison since 1995. I've loved every minute of it. The different lifestyles, protests, bars, University, and even my work were just steps away. At one point, we joked that we were a one-car, four-bike family. There just wasn't a need to have a 2nd car for us; sometime it would sit for several days at a time.

When we decided to grow up and buy a house, our search wasn't yielding much in the downtown that we could afford. It was the height of the market, and anything worthwhile was getting snapped up and (now) ridiculous prices. Then one night, a house come on the market with an open house the next day. Since it was close by, we went over to check it out. The outside looked pretty bad.

But, when we went to the open house the next day, much of the interior was remodeled. We wanted it badly. After a 2nd walk-through that same day after the open house, we put in an aggressive offer with a quick turnaround. Within six hours, we had an accepted offer. A month later, we moved in.

In the five-plus years we lived there, not one room hasn't been improved. The entire exterior was replaced and improved. We grew from a family of two to three, hosted numerous friends, trained long hours in the basement, but ultimately grew out of its quaint size.

We were so naive about owning a home, let along a hundred year-old one at that. From a leaky roof to asbestos siding and a rotting porch, we learned that nothing is square, plumb, or otherwise is as it should be expected.

I didn't think I'd be emotional as I got as we cleaned out the last of our things last night. Going from room to room, it hit me just how much energy, blood, sweat, and tears where shed maintaining and updating our first home. Lots of memories are tied up in each drop (sometimes gallons) of those blood, sweat and tears.

It's bittersweet moving. Bitter because we'll be further from the downtown we love, but sweet because a new owner will enjoy this one as much as we did. Her excitement at the closing today reminded us of the excitement we had.

Good bye house, we'll see you again soon.

Here's some updates:

Health: My stitches were taken out a week ago. The chin is still sensitive if I knock it into something, and the scar tissue will make it a bit of a bigger scar. Shaving will introduce some new challenges. I saw my regular doctor the next day and he completely blew me off. "Some people have a tendency to faint," and "Don't stand up so quickly" were direct quotes in response to my questions about what happened. So that was my last visit with him.

I got in to see a physician's assistant yesterday and he ordered a bunch of lab (blood) tests as well as a Holter monitor. After I wear that for 48-hours, I will review the results with a heart rhythm specialist. The thought is that since my resting heart rate is well below normal (like ~40 bpm), I might experience times where I don't have a beat for 3-5 seconds. I don't think that's the case, but who knows?

Evotri: We're getting a new sponsor, which means there's going to be a new toy in the house soon! Can't wait for it to get here, even though I won't have any time to play with it.

Everything else: Life right now is crazy! I'm in El Paso later this week, then announcing at the Centurian Wisconsin, then the heart monitor stuff, then vacation, then we pack and (fingers crossed) close on our current home, all the while look for a new home to move into. Don't forget about the day job!

Elsa's now over a year old. Some might even call her a toddler. (I'm not ready to just yet.) But, it's been a crazy, wonderful, challenging year watching her grow tremendously and develop at a rate that's unfathomable. Along the way, I've learned a few things:

1) Babysitting does not apply when it's your own kid.
The first time I said, "I can't [do that activity], I have to babysit my kid," many existing parents quickly chided me and corrected, "When it's your kid, it's called 'parenting.' Babysitting is something you do for other kids." Note that non-parents never even flinched at the term upon getting the rejection, they were more let down that I couldn't hang out with them and usually called me "lame."

2) Those semi-decent-song-that-you-don't-quite-know-all-the-words-to that are always stuck in your head turn into music from your kids' toys.
I know that it's important for their development, but the repetition of some of the songs in toys can really get annoying. The worst is catching yourself humming the tune of a particular toy, only to remember a small portion of the song. Elsa has one particular toy that she enjoys, it's like the big wheel on The Price is Right, but has a spot for every letter of the alphabet that's represented by an animal. "Spin the wheel..." Just writing about it makes me cringe. I can't wait until she starts watching TV.

3) Everything that you said you weren't going to do as a parent, you will inevitably do.
As non-parents, it's so very easy to convince yourself that when you become a parent, you will not do what those parents are doing. It becomes more prevalent when you're expecting, and then downright nasty as you near the due date. The parents even tell you, "Don't say that you aren't going to do certain things," but without fail there are times when you judge even your closest friends parenting. (Not babysitting!) I fell victim to this already and we haven't even gotten to any terrible twos or threes, yet.

4) Just when you get the coat, hat, and mittens and are set to leave, they poop.
For some reason, Elsa is very good at this. When dressed in her jacket, hat, mittens, and stuffed into her carseat with her arms hanging out like Randy from 'A Christmas Story' Elsa feels it's best to move her bowels right then. Simply put, with a child, you cannot plan out your activities and expect to be on time. Your plan ≠ reality. In the first few months, if we arrived within an hour of our scheduled time, it was a success. Granted, Kris was on crutches, but preparing a child for an excursion requires an inverse amount of time compared to the time spent on said excursion.

I'm sure there's more, and I'll add them as they come to me. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

We've been finishing up a bunch of projects this week in anticipation of getting the house assessed to refinance our mortgage. In the closet that had the leak that started it all, I got around to finishing the mudding, while Kris finished painting a corner that had gone naked since we moved in almost three years ago. I repaired the wall from our new bathroom window and Kris painted it. I just got done replacing trim that the previous home owners seemed to have forgot. We hired someone to repair the wall damaged during our front door replacement. And then, we hired someone to fix the cracks and paint the high walls of our stairs.

Day one was promising with some cracks replaced, but others were missed. Day two included the missed cracks and sanding. I could tell they sanded because of the grime that was left behind. It was everywhere. No one closed doors to rooms that weren't being worked on, and it was obvious that no covers nor plastic had been placed at strategic locations. A chat with the painter revealed that they had in fact cleaned (at least that's what he said.) Nonetheless, I spent two hours cleaning up everything that was left behind.

This really makes sense given the outward appearance of our hired painter. Constantly smelling of smoke (you would think working in paint fumes would be enough) he doesn't carry himself like an organized man would. He nearly forgot his jacket within our house on a 10-degree night. Notes are lost or left at home. Paint colors are forgot.

Owning a home and keeping up with the maintenance teaches many lessons. The most recent is that if you interview a someone that doesn't look like they can keep their own house clean, chances are they won't keep yours clean either.

We went from this:

to this:

In the second shot, you can see that there was a bay window that was removed and replaced with two regular windows. Our best guess is that when the street was widened, the sidewalk was moved closer to the house and the bay window was a casualty. The other small discoveries included (original?) brown paint, and a whole lotta bug nests and spiders behind the tiles. This is all in prep for the insulators coming this week, and new lakeshore fern (siding) the following week.

And of course, every hard day has to end with a relaxing beer or two:

You can see some more shots of the day here.

I have the pleasure of introducing Stephen the Squirrel to the world. Everyone, meet Stephen.

Stephen had the pleasure of living in our attic and walls for about 36 hours. I don't think he liked it. At least, he told me as much through hisses and teeth chomping when I finally met him face to face. The tricky little guy snuck into the hole left by our broken gutter. Dad and I did a fine job replacing the wood that fell down with the gutter.

Turns out, we did too good of a job since Stephen, who snuck in when we weren't looking, couldn't find a way out. He scratched, clawed, and explored every nook and cranny in the house. Up walls, down walls, in the ceiling, below the floor, all over.

Kris did some hunting herself and found a small Havahart live trap, and I set it up with some peanut butter and put it in the attic. I left it on the insulation and crossed my fingers. I checked on it this morning and found it tipped on its top, set off, with no Stephen inside. So I cleared off the insulation, found some old, empty mouse poison cases and an old cane. So I through the poison cases away and used the cane to prop up the insulation and clear a nice spot for the trap. Then I left for a run.

I entered the house after my run and listened. (Stephen was most active when we were away.) I hear a bunch of clunking from the attic. Success! He wasn't too pleased with me though. But I did have a heart and let him go in the schoolyard across from the house. The first thing he did was bolt for a puddle of water, took a few hits, and then to the nearest tree and he was gone, (but not forgotten.)

How energetic is your home? Ours isn't. Ours is old. Nearing the century mark, this year's extreme winter did quite the number on our exterior. One hundred plus inches of snow will do that. You may be familiar with ice dams. Well...there's ice dams, and there's there's gutter busters. We had a gutter buster:

I found that walking home from a long week of work on a Friday night. Guh. Shortly thereafter, we noticed water damage to the walls in the closet directly under the roof with the now defunct gutter. I carefully peeled some pieces of plaster off, and saw the sun! Yup, no insulation whatsoever in the closet. More plaster started to fall away on its own.

I was comparing energy consumption with friends who noted that their bills were half of ours with twice the house. Hmmm...something's not right here. So I took the last years worth of our energy bills and compared them to the national average. We scored a 2.8 out of 10. Ouch. I followed some links and found a home energy efficiency inspector. We met this morning and talked about all sorts of issues with our house. He had two tools that were quite revealing.

The first was a thermal imaging camera. The results were like results promised by X-ray goggles promised in kids' comic books. We could see studs, beams, and the immense lack of insulation in our second floor. The only way you can see the beams is b/c they are a different temperature than the insulation between them. On our second floor, our beams were lost, and the lathe behind the plaster showed through. Meaning: No Insulation Whatsoever. Ugh.

His second tool was a big blower that he put in our front door. He used that to put a 50 Pa pressure difference between the inside and the outside. At that pressure difference, every minute there was 3800 cubic feet of air blowing out of our house. With all that air blowing out, laws of physics say there has to be air to replace it. With the fan on, air was streaming into our house through "thousands" of holes. We could feel drafts throughout the whole house; windows, doors, wall outlets, and the gaping hole in our closet. Turns out, the target for a house is to get lower than 1000 cfm. A recent award winning house in Wisconsin reached less than 300 cfm. We've got a long way to go.

So now we turn to removing the old siding, blowing in insulation upstairs, and then layering more insulation to the outside and reside the house. Throw in a new porch at the same time and it'll be a busy summer. Looks the like reroofing project is on hold.

Bottom line, when purchasing an older home, get a home inspection that includes thermal imaging. It may cost a bit more, but worth it.

I started with this YouTube clip about elitist bicyclists. (So true.)

Which led me to this clip of two professional cyclists fighting.

Which led me to this clip of two guys racing in their cars. (I drive a Focus, though not like that.)

Which led me to this clip of a car vs. bike crash. (Whoa.)

Which led me to this clip of another car crash. This time with a scooter. (I can't believe how he gets up after that.)

Which led me to this clip of another Greek driving lesson.

Which led me to this clip of another crash, set to really bad music.

Which led me (finally) to this clip of one more crash.

Which I didn't watch because I remembered the macaroni noodles on the stove that now had been cooking way too long and were totally soggy.

Damn Internet.

It's gotten so cold here, school was canceled. Here are some examples what happens when it's this cold:

• Bottles of wine in the non-insulated back porch froze, popping the cork on one bottle, and nearly popping it on another. (Not the best quality stuff.)
• I washed a load of workout clothes and three them into the dryer and went to bed, thinking they'd dry. However, I checked on them the next morning to discover that not all the clothes had not dried completely. It was easy to tell which ones hadn't, because they had ice and crunched when they moved.
• I drove the car into work today, mainly to warm it up. It sits outside 24-7, and it sounded worse and worse every time it started. It barely started this morning, but begrudgingly did. As I drove up the street to the office, I noticed the car wobbling. The tires had froze where they were resting overnight and the flat spots caused the wobble. I could almost hear the car sign as I parked it in the heated garage under my building.

If you're really bored in the cold, you could always boil water and throw it up in the air and watch it rapidly evaporate.

One more thing: When it's this cold, chances are that your car and all the meal parts inside it are just as cold. So, when you shut off the car and take the key out, do NOT put the key in your mouth to gather your stuff from the car. The cold, metal key will stick to your lips and tongue and it will not feel good. Just ask Flick.