Thwarted Again

Our connection to the electrical grid was restored in the early hours of this morning. We got a text message from Austin Energy at 4:00AM saying a crew had been assigned to our outage and the generator switched from “running” to “ready to run” at 4:35AM. On one hand, it’s a bit frustrating that we were off-line and running the generator for almost 110 hours for something that could have been fixed in a half hour. On the other hand, obviously when you have hundreds of thousands without power and they’re organized into a couple of thousand discrete outages, you can’t just know off-hand which will be quick to fix and which will be miserable slogs.

So, whatever, we rode it out, deafened a few squirrels and neighbors and we didn’t lose 10 months of pumped milk. It all seems to have worked out, at least until the gas bill comes.

The monitoring for the generator is pretty light on details. I wish it would report a little more to the app. I also wish it had an API that could integrate with Home Assistant but them’s the breaks. There are, of course, DIY projects for such but I’m about out of spoons for IT support on this stuff. I already run around the house changing batteries in sensors more than I’d like.

Like I say, the thing is very loud. I would like to construct some kind of sound abatement hut over it. I could make it look like a miniature version of the workshop. I need to look into where air needs to come in and exhaust out and all that but it seems doable. Of course, there are already a billion things that need doing around the house all the time so I doubt this bubbles up to the top of the list any time soon.

I’ve been idly looking at more substantial home power solutions. The thing that seems to be the sweet spot for me is the Enphase system. A complete system with solar, micro-inverters, combiner, batteries and controller would have some nice advantages.

• Instant switch from utility power to local “micro-grid” power. Basically a whole home UPS.
• Can use power from solar, battery and generator at the same time.
• When the utility is off-line, the system is smart enough to only start the generator when the battery drops below a threshold (e.g. 20%). And will run the generator until the battery is above a threshold (e.g. 60%). It can also be told not to run the generator during “quiet time” unless the battery drops below a threshold.

There seem to be some limitations regarding power handling.

For system using an IQ System controller 2, the maximum generator current is limited to 64A continuous (80A overcurrent protection) to protect the associated power relays in the IQ System Controller 2 for the generator position.

Generator sizes beyond the values mentioned above will not result in any improvement in terms of current or battery charging speed.

The generator can make 81A continuous on natural gas but presumably the System Controller won’t allow that full amount?

Also this stuff is all quite expensive. I put together a system with their system builder and then dialed it back to a slightly less insane configuration. It wants 36 solar panels which I will estimate at $20,000. 36 micro-inverters at $6000, 3x 10kWh battery banks which don’t have a price but I’m finding other brands around $4000 per for that size so let’s say $15,000? Plus a controller (no price), a combiner (no price), and a bunch of ancillary stuff like breakers and mounting kits, etc. Let’s call that another $5000? So we’re at $46,000 in parts and we haven’t talked about installation. There is the matter of putting all that on the house, running all the conduit and cabling, doing all of the panel work, etc. I’m guessing that’s another $15,000-$20,000. So let’s call this a $65,000 project. And for what? To be quieter? To achieve energy independence? Meh. To reduce our fossil fuel energy usage? To reduce strain on the grid? Slightly more compelling but that’s a pretty big spend.

It just doesn’t pass the sniff test right now. I believe there are tax incentives and such for systems like this but it’s at the point where I’d need some professional advice and I’m not close enough to ready to do this that I’m going to talk to a business about it.

So that’s it. We managed to survive another winter storm. It got named “Mara”, so that’s nice. It’s supposed to rain for a couple of days. If someone starts loading animals in a boat I suppose we’re boned because I didn’t put “Ark” on my apocalypse survival punch-card.

So much for best-laid plans for posting more regularly. We had another kid and that tends to consume all available free time. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened in the last year but the thing I want to talk about today is the 2023 Ice Storm. I don’t know if they named it but it has really done a number on the city. More than 30% of the Austin Energy customer base was without power at its peak. The freezing rain started Tuesday night and the power outages not long after that. Our power held until 2:49p on Wednesday, February 1st and then it went down.

Back during “Winter Storm Uri” aka “Snovid” we lost power early in the storm and had to stay in a hotel with our one year old during an OG Covid surge. Our power came back after a while and we were able to come home just before the major outages started happening and the grid almost collapsed. However, we decided at that point we were going to have a standby generator installed. It took almost a full year to get it bought, delivered and installed. That’s covered in a previous post.

Over the summer we had a thunderstorm that knocked out our little corner of the neighborhood for nine hours in the evening and early morning. The generator worked great but I noticed then that it’s a bit on the loud side for my comfort. During the storm I also noticed that the neighbor’s paper mulberry tree that is busy destroying the roof of their shed and sending runners into my backyard was swaying back and forth hard enough to knock into our electrical service drop and cause our power to flicker.

I have an arborist come out every year or two to clean up our trees and I have had Austin Energy come out to clear stuff off the power lines. I called AE about the neighbor tree and they came out, talked to them, and then, instead of just removing it like should be done, they whacked the top off. So now it’s an angry, ugly 20-foot-tall stump wrecking the neighbor’s shed but it’s mostly not threatening my electrical service.

Time marches forward and we arrive in late January, 2023. Another big cold wave is heading down toward our area. The internet is busy making well-earned fun of Texas’s ability to manage its power grid. And people are mostly reacting like it’s not going to be a big deal. It certainly didn’t seem like it was going to be based on the forecast. The NWS forecast didn’t even say it would actually freeze. But the cold and rain came in the evening of January 29th but then it stayed cold and started raining again around 1:30am February 1st. That’s when ice began accumulating on the trees and power lines.

The city has had issues with keeping the power lines clear for a while. It was already a problem in the 2021 storm but this year the ice just overwhelmed an already ragged arbor. Trees all over the city started shedding huge limbs or just completely falling over or breaking off. There was a 15″+ diameter live oak in a yard up the street that just snapped off two feet from the ground and a big tree on the state property nearby that was completely uprooted just by the ice accumulation. There wasn’t even much wind.

By mid-day on the 1st fully 30% of the city was without electrical service and there it stayed until temperatures climbed above freezing on the 3rd. Crews were restoring power but they couldn’t keep up with the amount of new outages. The ice had to melt before they could start catching up.

We lost power at 2:49pm on February 1st and the generator started up and took over about 20 seconds later. Since then, it has run for more than three days and I’m guessing we have another day or two to go at this point. The number of “customers”, which I take to mean meters, without power is currently around 54,000 (9:30pm 2/4/23) down from the highest number I saw which was over 165,000. Austin Energy claims that they have restored power to over 265,000 customers but some of them they must have had to do more than once. We’re still offline, making our own electricity and there’s big chunks of the neighborhood still dark.

I feel bad about how loud the generator is. It’s really unpleasant to be outside near it and the constant drone inside wears on you. It’s not too bad in the kids rooms. The nursery is actually pretty insulated from it so I think we did good there. I’m thinking about building a little sound proofing hut over it to be neighborly but that’s a big time commitment and I’m hoping not to have to run this thing like this very much. I guess we’ll see if that bubbles up the project list at all.

That said, it was totally worth the cost. Three days without power or off in a hotel or whatever with two small kids in freezing weather would have been awful. They’re just getting over the latest round of thankfully not-Covid daycare crud and the dog has actually been sick as well with a UTI. Plus all the refrigerator food and the last year’s worth of milk for the baby would have all been a loss as well. I don’t like that it has basically come to us playing prepper but I’ll be damned if it didn’t pay off in spades not even two years later.

The light in the downstairs half-bath is one of the original fixtures that marked the point where the builder of this house decided they had spent enough money making it Nice and were now only going to spend as much as necessary for it to be Done. There were three of these in the house, possibly originally four, and they were outdoor fluorescent sconces from IKEA that had been mounted horizontally instead of the expected vertically.

The ballast in these things was Old School and would flicker and ping for at least a second before lighting the bulb. The two in the master bathroom I replaced years ago because I hated them. The last one in the 1st floor bathroom I left because I didn’t want to spend the money at the time. It finally started failing this week.

Rather than find a replacement bulb for this miserable shit, I got a new fixture that takes two real light bulbs e.g. A19 / E26 and which matches the design of the fixtures I put in the master bathroom those several years back. So now, instead of poopin’ in a Silent Hill set piece, you can enjoy 120W equivalent of LED artificial sunshine.

A brief interlude in between complaints. A few nights ago at dinner my daughter was eating and talking and squirming around like she usually does. She said “I love you, Mama, all the time!” Then out of nowhere she does this grunt / groan thing and announces “uuuuunnh! POOPIN’ SO HARD!”. She hadn’t actually done that but it was pretty hilarious at the time.

Also this morning she informed me, as I was getting her out of bed, that babies like milk, toast and sauerkraut. I took that to heart and gave her that for breakfast. She ate the french toast and some bacon. I don’t know how much sauerkraut she actually ate. She also dumped most of a little cup of milk in her lap so not the most successful meal we’ve had but she seemed happy.

I changed her outfit and we put her in a fluffy, fleecy top with a reindeer face embroidered on it so we could go play in the back yard. The back yard was off limits while the utility trench was open because a 20″ deep trench bisecting the entire yard is probably one of the more kid dangerous things I could think of to put back there. It’s all filled in now though so she can run around as she likes. I’m hoping to get some grass seed planted once the last of the projects is buttoned up which is getting close now.

Addendum: Today after eating two servings of buttered peas she filled her diaper, sat down on her little Ikea bookshelf thing and declared “Poopin’ books”. I think we’re developing our toddler sense of humor.

Jiggety jig. We left the Airbnb yesterday morning and then I went back and loaded up all of our stuff and brought it home too. And then I went back again two hours later and loaded up the stuff I forgot (kid table and chair). And even after all that I think we forgot JR’s Nutkin toy. I haven’t found it in anything I’ve unpacked but the host didn’t find it when they were there yesterday after we checked out. Fugitive squirrel.

The house looks good. I say good. It looks fine. It looks more like how it looked when first moved in. All of the old minor complaints still apply. Recessed ceiling light fixtures that aren’t seated properly, that kind of thing. Time will tell how weather-proof all this work is but presumably it will last a little while.

The construction crew cleaned up as much as you’d expect. There was no large debris but there was a fine white dusting of drywall and texture on most of the flat surfaces. I spent a few hours yesterday, after we got back and during the kiddo’s nap, cleaning and mopping. Then I had to put all of the furniture and rugs and toys and such back where they go. It’s nice to have the place clean though. It’s hard to get to a lot of nooks and crannies these days because of all of the toys and baby fences and the arrangement of furniture. I removed one entire dogs worth of fur drifts and dust and such.

I’m not quite done. The kitchen bookshelf has to go back to its home. Some art has to be hung back up, including a few pieces where the original hanger spots are now gone. Also one roller shade and two curtain rod brackets need to be reinstalled. All that said, it’s nice to be done. I hope to have the new-AC project (which I haven’t gotten into here yet) done today finally. Also, the final plumbing inspection for the generator is today, at which point that thing can be used, though it still needs its run-in.

The wife is at the doctor this morning and her semester starts today also so I’m on duty with the kiddo. I’m going to try to work and parent at the same time today. Tomorrow and Wednesday also. And then Thursday Grandma is back to help again. We’d hoped to have started daycare this week but then we had this Omicron surge and that put that plan to rest.

The 7-day average of new cases in Travis county was 3400 on Friday. The high water marks in the previous winter surge and the Delta surge were 622 and 526 respectively. The 7-day average for the entire country was 718,000. The test positivity percent for Travis was 30% and the national rate was 29% so all that means is that there isn’t enough testing and that’s due in part to there just not being enough tests. Also a lot of vaccinated people are asymptomatic carriers.

Just dropping that in for posterity so when I find this post again, years later, I’ll remember. We’re not out of the woods yet, pandemic or house repairs, but a lot of the big things that came up in 2021 are resolving and it’s good to be able to set them aside and focus on the new baby situation. There’s plenty to do for that and we have seven weeks left as of today.

The pandemic has shaped a lot of the decisions we’ve made as a newly-minted family and not always in a happy way. When the first wave of the storm hit it took down power all over the city. Most of that first wave of outages was ice dropping branches that should have been pruned years ago onto overhead power lines.

Our house lost power on Saturday, February 13th around 10:45AM and it was off all day. Late in the afternoon we got a hotel room. We didn’t want to try to manage the 1-year-old situation in the dark and increasing cold, hoping the power would come back before the house became uninhabitable. So we drove through the ice to a nearby hotel and just hoped we wouldn’t run into a situation that might be a big Covid risk. Having to go to a hotel during a pandemic was something that we were very unhappy about and we hope to not have to do again. It’s part of why we’ve spent the last few days in this Airbnb house. We can remain isolated in a house which we can’t do in a hotel.

We were fortunate that most people hadn’t lost power yet and the hotel was lightly attended and we were able to get in and out without significantly exposing our daughter to anyone. We were also lucky in that we had an HEB curbside order already in for Sunday morning. Our power was restored by the line crews, who hadn’t yet been overwhelmed, by early Sunday morning. I took the family home, went and got groceries and then we hunkered down.

Starting that Sunday, the Texas electric grid started failing and entire circuits were “load shed” to keep the grid generation from losing sync. A loss of sync would have meant a grid restart from nothing which could have taken weeks or longer. After the storm it was determined that the entire grid was about five minutes from total collapse at one point.

Our house was spared that second failure. We are on the same circuit as three hospitals and there is not enough granularity in the power distribution to shut off individual customers in those kinds of situations. We retained power through the worst of the storm and also never completely lost water though many parts of the city did for days after the power outage. Our natural gas supply was fine the whole time so we were able to keep the house warm. The main house furnace is gas fired so we only needed enough electricity to start and run the blower.

Austin Energy repeatedly asked people who had power to use as little as possible. As such, I had everything unplugged or off at the breaker I could. We used one light in the house at a time. Kept the house as cool as we could while still being safe for our daughter and only used the gas for cooking. If I remember correctly we were averaging about 300 watt-hours for two or three days.

Once the storm was over and the grid had recovered there was a lot of talk about what to do. One of the things on that list was to improve the various utilities’ ability to turn off individual customers. The threat then being that next time we would not be spared the rod.

Power has always been surprisingly inconsistent at this house. It will randomly go out for two to three hours in the middle of the day. The neighborhood is older than most in the city. The utilities are all overhead on poles. No one maintains their own trees and few call Austin Energy to do the free pruning. Hell, my neighbors have a giant wild grape that has grown all over everything again after it was cut back for being on the power lines two years ago.

This brings me to the point of all of this. We, along with many, many others, have purchased a home standby generator. Like the previously discussed gutter project, I started working on this one in late spring. I got three proposals from late May to early June and we selected one and got the ball rolling. On July 15th, a 22kW Generac was sitting on a pad in my back yard.

Here’s where Austin Energy comes in to help again. The date I was given for the power shutdown so the meter work could be done was December 30th. That is a six month queue. Astonishing. And I had to hassle a bunch of people to get that work scheduled.

So while all of the other house repairs have been progressing and I’ve been wrangling all of that, I’ve also been repeatedly following up with the electrical and plumbing managers at my vendor to make sure everyone knows what’s going on and we have dates scheduled for everything. It would be a real shame to have done all of this and not have the generator useable when we need it after a full year.

The trenching in the back yard was done Dec 20th. The plumbing was completed the next day, Dec 21st. The electrical work was done on Dec 30th. Electrical inspection passed this week, I think on Jan 5th but I’m not sure because I wasn’t home, and the trench was refilled.

The final plumbing inspection is this coming Monday, Jan 10th and if that passes we can have our test run and break a bottle of champagne over its bow or something.

The electrical conduit and gas line just kinda stick up out of the ground next to the generator so I’m going to have to do some child-proofing around it. I have some other small fencing I’d like to get done so maybe that can turn into a future project. We have a fence company we use now which is a story that will probably be its own smaller post. I’ve a mind to get some signage made to resemble the old Seaholm Power Plant Light and Power signs and have them put up as part of the child barricade. I think that would look nice. Little red LEDs behind some deco lettering. Real classy.

The house has a roof top patio at the top of the stairs to the third floor. If you turn left you go into the master suite and right takes you out a door onto the patio. This sounds like a nice idea. Cocktails on the roof in the evening. Dining al fresco. Container garden. It’s even plumbed for and built to support a hot tub in theory. The reality is that it’s a flat roof with a tile floor that gets insanely hot in the long Texas summers and it’s a hassle to drag anything up there to eat or drink because it’s up two flights of stairs. So basically wasted space. But wait! The bonus is that flat roofs are notorious for failing, leaking and needing repairs. In the case of this one, there is also no eave or overhang so, without a gutter on the end, water runs off and straight down the back of the house. A well operating gutter is fundamental to the integrity of the house. Especially since more than half of the master suite roof drains right onto that patio causing it to catch more than twice the water it would otherwise.

I didn’t really grasp this issue in its fullness. Occasionally the gutter would back up with leaves and overflow. I’d go out with a broom handle and push stuff around until it was flowing again. We had a little water get in every once in a blue moon because of that. There were little chunks of thinset in the gutter sometimes which were flaking off of the underside of the tiles. There was some staining on the trim on the back of the house where the gutter seam was leaking. No big deal. A fix for the future. And then, in February of 2021 we had Winter Storm Uri.

Central Texas really doesn’t get weather like this. People were calling it a 100 year storm though, given the whole climate change thing I think that’s a bit optimistic. We had a lot of ice and snow build up on the house, especially on the patio. When the snow started to melt it came in over the attic door threshold on the far side of the patio and leaked in the ceiling of the little loft space in the house. I spent a half hour shoveling snow and ice off the patio to stop that.

It also accumulated in the gutter and really accelerated its collapse. The north side wouldn’t drain to the downspout at all anymore, leaking out of the wall-side corner seam and onto the second floor window trim below it. The center seam also leaked badly and was doing the same to the big windows in the center of the back wall of the house.

After a fairly wet spring, water started coming in that second floor window below the gutter corner pretty badly and the drywall there became increasingly stained and damaged. I decided to have someone come replace the gutter. And I figured while I was at it I would have them add gutters for the master suite roof and for the front of the house to help with potential damage from those sources also. I started working on that June 1st.

After a few visits I selected a company and signed a contract on July 15th. However, that contract specified that the fascia and drip edge off the back of the patio was badly damaged and had to be repaired before the gutter installation or the work would not be warranted. So now the question is, is a roof-top patio a roof or a floor? Something else? The roofing company I’d used previously, who had been subsequently acquired by a big national chain, said it wasn’t a roof but if I wanted them to do some other roof work just let them know.

The gutter company suggested I contact a home and commercial general purpose / handyman company which I did. They originally said it would be two days work to replace the fascia, drip edge and first row of tile and substrate. Then later increased that to three days. At this point it is the end of July and the work is scheduled for mid September. When the handyman arrived he looked at the work and said it was a bigger project than three days of him working and that I needed to have their estimator come out, look at it and bid a full project. So I scheduled that, and in the mean time contacted a local design/build firm to give me a second opinion. I also pocket dialed my realtor on my birthday and ended up talking to him about the problem and he put me in touch with the guy he uses for this kind of work.

The first handyman company took a long time to get a proposal to me and ended up not being what I wanted so I went with my realtor’s contractor. I signed off on that work the second week of October, which included complete replacement of the patio tile, the drip edge and some of the rotted trim, plus replacing the bad drywall in the window and the ceiling where the water had leaked into the loft.

Work on the patio replacement finally started the second week of November and finished in a week. It’s ok. Several of the tiles aren’t laid perfectly flat and even but it appears to be water tight which was the important thing.

Next the construction crew came and started repairing the trim at which point they found that the OSB sheathing underneath was also rotten.

Change Order #1 was approved to remove the trim, siding and sheathing under the north gutter corner and replace them. That work was completed and the new drip edge was added and the old gutter removed. That drip edge is installed differently. It’s not under the tile substrate but rather over the edge of the tile and caulked down. We’ll see how that does in the long run.

At this point it was Thanksgiving and the crew was off, there was no longer any gutter on the edge of the patio and then it rained. The rain ran off the side of the patio and down the back of the house and started coming in all of the windows and the sliding door. I spent all day changing towels and catching water.

Change Order #2 was approved to replace the trim, siding and sheathing for the rest of the wall under the patio. This took another week or so. With the outside finished, I finally got the gutter installation scheduled.

The gutters were installed on December 14th, six and a half months after I first started calling gutter companies. This is a theme with this year.

However we’re not done yet. We’re staying in an Airbnb this week because the interior work is being done on the house. This is right in the middle of the biggest Covid surge of the pandemic: the Omicron variant. We’d probably have to be out of the house anyway. It was not adequately explained to me how inhospitable the house would be this week. We’d planned to go home to sleep, being away during the day only. However, the first and second floors are covered in plastic and paper drops cloths and all of the furniture is pushed up against the walls rendering the space useless to a toddler. The bedrooms are fine but that doesn’t make for much of a living arrangement. And it’s just as well we’re out because apparently the aerosol Covid can linger for hours, especially if the air isn’t being filtered or exchanged.

It froze again last night, though not badly, 29F. The main house HVAC is off because it sucks the plastic up against the returns when it runs which is bad for the equipment and dangerous with a gas furnace. It would be a real shame to burn the house down as we’re finishing this project. That means it was 59F in the house this morning. My contractor called to tell me they’d need another day. The ceiling texture didn’t finish drying overnight, presumably because of the cold and lack of the drying effect of central heat.

So one extra day trapped in the temporary house until we can go back to the one we’ve been trapped in for two years. Every time I turn around this project costs more. More dollars, more sanity, more risk to health and safety. The extra night rental is a drop in the bucket, literally less than 1% of the total cost but I’m exhausted with the whole process and I really want it to finally be over.

I’m sitting in the living room of an Airbnb rental, five blocks from my house, working remotely. My wife is reading to my daughter in the chair across the room and our dog is standing on the foot of the same chair so she can let us know whenever a dog walks past. We’ll be here until Friday (hopefully) at which point we can return home.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph and it will probably take more than one post to do it. But I may as well get started. I picked this up again because I was thinking about how I spend a bunch of time complaining in Slack, etc. about all of the various challenges we’re facing and I think I’m kind of spamming my friends. So, I’ll start updating the blog again for a while and we’ll see if that helps with my need to vent without monopolizing the conversation elsewhere.

I’ll start with a good thing. I got married. Last time I posted was August, 2016 and I’d been dating someone for a few months. Later that month we went camping at Big Bend and then to a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory. Around then was also when her lease was up at her apartment and the apartment had had a bunch of maintenance issues including flooding because the parking lot funneled rain water run-off at her front door.

I asked her to move in with me and she agreed. Those book shelves in the previous post are completely full and we have three more like them I made when I took a welding class. Plus her four tall book cases and a barrister’s bookcase and a couple of 4×2 Kallax shelves in the two other bedrooms (kids bedrooms now, more on that later). We have a lot of books these days, most of them hers but a growing percentage for kids.

We visited New York in December of 2017 and when we got home I proposed. We were married in February of 2019 and our daughter was born in January of 2020. You’ll probably notice the timing of that last date as it was the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic. I went back to work after my two weeks of parental leave and then came back after we were all sent home to work in March. We had family stay with us for a while but once I was home again and the disease was running rampant around the country we holed up and it was just the three of us for a long time.

We ended up taking turns in nursery with the baby at night. Sleeping in the glider chair caused a herniated disc in my lower back. PT and a cortisone shot got me back to the point I could be useful again after a couple of unpleasant months. My wife’s job started flirting with the idea of bringing everyone back in the fall of 2020 and then again at the start of 2021, summer of 2021, fall of 2021 and now again at the start of the spring semester 2022. The vaccines came and it looked like fall of 2021 was really going to be it but then the Delta variant spread and we stayed home again.

I say the vaccines came but there is still no vaccine for kids under 5 years. Ours will be 2 years in January, having spent her entire life cocooned in the house. We’ve thought about putting her in daycare a few times as the case load has dropped and it looked like we might be in the clear for a while but it never came to pass. My mother-in-law came in the fall of 2021 to help us which was greatly appreciated and she’s coming back in a week or so because it looks like it’s finally back to campus for real next week never mind the giant Omicron surge. She’s coming back because we need the help with child care and work but also because we’re expecting our second child at the end of February.

In the mean time a bunch of things went wrong with our house. In 2020, our refrigerator and water heater failed. Due to the pandemic and increasing supply chain issues getting replacements took a while but we managed. February 2021 was the great Texas grid collapse during Winter Storm Uri (Snowvid). We had a ton of snow and ice and our infrastructure wasn’t prepared. Power failed at home which put us in a hotel during the pandemic during the winter holiday surge of vanilla Covid. That also caused a bunch of minor issues with the house to become more serious. The back gutter failing on the back of the house, water starting to leak in the windows below it, accelerated rot on the exterior trim and the sheathing underneath.

We initiated a project to install a whole home stand-by generator. This project is finally nearing completion with only one more inspection and the initial test run happening in the next week or so. It took almost eight months from start to finish.

Late this spring the HVAC unit in the master suite finally gave up for good, dumping water on the floor and other excitement. We replaced it with a multi-headed mini-split system. That system added smaller wall units into the two second floor bedrooms which solves the issue of the nursery room being too hot in the summer / cold in the winter. But it meant we had to evacuate the house for a day to avoid exposing the kid to potential disease.

I found someone to replace our gutter and add additional ones but they said the back edge of the roof-top patio needed to be repaired or they couldn’t warranty the work. So I found someone to do that only to have them say it was a bigger job than they thought and back out. I finally found someone to do it after a month or so and several tries and that project exploded into replacing the entire patio, the trim and sheathing on all of the house below the patio, and now a bunch of damaged drywall on the inside of the same wall.

All of which brings me to today. My very pregnant wife, not-quite-two daughter and I are staying in an Airbnb for four days while a bunch of drywall work and painting is done in our house. Hopefully everything goes well and we go home Saturday to the house-of-Theseus.

It’s been an interesting five and a half years. It has been some of the hardest times in my life but also very rewarding. I suppose I’ll have more to say if I stick with this but that’s a starting place and I can fill in back story as things come up.

I actually finished a project. The new bookshelves are done and have had many book boxes unpacked upon them. The unpacking isn’t quite done and, naturally, I find myself in need of additional storage for the various piles of non-book office junk. A lot of that also needs to be culled but that can happen as the unpacking proceeds.

Here are a few pictures with the boards unfinished.

And here is a picture with the finished boards during the unpacking and shelving.

This weekend I started preparing the metal shelf frames. I have a box of Scotch Brite pads and I’ve been spraying the frame with WD40 and then scrubbing off the black oxide coating. The black oxide protects from corrosion but I’m looking for more of a bare steel look. Once I’ve removed as much of the coating as is reasonable by hand scrubbing I wipe it down to remove as much of the debris as I can and then apply a coat of Johnson’s Paste Wax. Let that dry and then rub it down and it’s sealed and ready to go. The problem is that this process takes about 2.5hrs and is physically exhausting. I did one on Saturday and one on Sunday and I’ll do the last one probably next weekend. I might be tempted to do it during the week but I’m cat-sitting again while the girlfriend is in Houston for a conference and I don’t want to risk the cat getting into the chemicals, powder or getting hurt if the thing falls off the saw horses.

The next step is to rough cut the plywood and then cut each piece to fit a shelf space. After that I’ll have to start the finishing work which will be it’s own challenge. I’ve figured out what I’m doing about drying space. I had some wall-hanging metal shelves in the garage in the old house. I think they were Rubbermaid but I’m not 100% sure. It has a track you screw to the top of the wall and hang standards from and the shelf supports slot into the standards. I think if I get more of that I can put the boards on those to dry and then use them as garage shelves for all my stuff when I’m done.

My buyer came back to me with some requested repairs which, technically, we were agreed not to do and it’s for a pittance, and he said he’s planning to renovate the whole place so it seems kind of petty but it’s also not much and I’d like for this to get done so I’m agreeing to it. A small amount clawed back and sending my HVAC guy out to service the A/C isn’t too bad. Option period is up tomorrow and then we’re on to the next set of tasks.