Sheer awesome

Man, I can't even tell you how much I've missed cooking with gas. I also can't even tell you how much of a piece of shit the old electric stove was - but I'm sure going to try!

So, the stove that Frank left us was probably original to the house. Which means it was installed in the middle of the 80s, and was not exactly pampered, if you know what I mean. For example, to set the clock, we had to hold down the "Clock" button, and then press and hold the up arrow until it reached the time we wanted. Simple enough - provided the clock button actually worked, which, of course, it didn't. I had to lean hard on the clock button and kind of roll my thumb around until it engaged, and then whale away on the up button until the time started to move, and hope that I got the time set before my thumb moved off the sweet spot.

And then there were the burners. Not one of the damn things was even close to level, which meant that pots and pans wouldn't sit flat on the burners. To heat up oil in a pan, for instance, we kept having to turn the handle of the pan to make sure we got an even heat. It also meant that using the wok was an exercise in frustration, as it wouldn't sit flat on the big burner, so we'd get hot spots in different places, depending on which direction the handle was facing.

Also, I had started to notice that things in the oven cooked faster on the right side, closer to the door. Which meant that every time I baked or roasted something, I had to turn the pan halfway through cooking to make sure I got an even cook.

But not anymore! The same guys that hooked up our gas fireplace came back last Wednesday and installed the new gas stove. (I took the old electric crap-pile up to Hartland on Saturday and drove away without a second glance. We would have sold it or given it away, but neither of us really felt comfortable having anyone we knew actually use the damn thing.)

Here's the most awesomest stove in the world, nestled tight up against our favorite Frank-artifact (Fartifact?), the What About Happiness label:



It looks a little different than our old friend, but it's pretty much the same model, just five years newer - and with more glowy lights!



And just to prove that we're using it to make awesome food, here it is baking my world-famous Panko-and-herb sockeye and rosemary potato wedges:



First time using the oven, and rest assured - it kicks ASS. Seriously awesome appliance.

Whew.

Well, after that, anything I post will be a let-down, I'm sure, but I do have some other progress to report, and it's pretty awesome, too.

I was out in the garage on Saturday, putting a cat flap in our bedroom door (that's for the next post, that one is), and my Crazy Neighbour™ came wandering over. Seems like his wife had gone out for the day and he was bored with sitting around the house. So he figured he'd come over and maybe do some work on our place for a while. (Seriously - I didn't ask him. He volunteered. Because, as I may have mentioned, he's crazy.) Well, he took one look at the big mess of concrete where the lamp standard used to be, and that was it: that thing was coming out.

So he brought over a whole mess of tools and started in on it. Well, I couldn't very well stand there and let a guy going through chemotherapy tackle such a big job on his own, so I put my project aside and went out to help.

Now, I realize the picture isn't all that impressive, but let me tell you: there was a full metric shit-ton of concrete underneath that light. It took the two of us the better part of an hour-and-a-half to get it out of the pit and we didn't even break any sprinkler pipes while doing it. When we did get the lump out of the hole, we had to beat it apart with a sledge-hammer to get it small enough to lift into a wheelbarrow. I put most of the rocks we knocked off back into the hole and threw some mud over it:



The pipe sticking out the side is the "conduit" (i.e., sprinkler pipe) that Frank used to run the electrical. And yes, it was FULL of water.

Anyway, emboldened by our success, we turned our attention to the second of the two stumps left when we removed the big cedars from the front of the house. I had actually got the first of the two out the weekend before.

Before:


After:


And yes, I DID break a sprinkler pipe while doing that, but given that there are THREE of them right there, I figure one out of three ain't too bad.

Anyway, we managed to get the bulk of the thing out yesterday, and I went back out and tidied it up this afternoon.

Before:


After:


After all, it's not like we could mow the lawn, given that it was RAINING AGAIN. Seriously - there has not been a single day this entire spring that we could call the relatives and Toronto and laugh at them. (Although, to everyone living in Calgary, I have to still say, HA HA!) We STILL haven't mowed the lawn this year.

Looks like hell, too, but what can we do?

Anyway, I've got more, but it's late, and I want to save a little for the next post. Who knows, maybe I'll post something in the middle of the week! Oooh! Tricky!

A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.

Vote or die!

According to certain members of the household, I was mistaken: there IS some debate over which light fixture is the ugliest.

It seems the War Department is under the impression (mistaken, as you shall no doubt see) that the ghastly light of roses in the front hall is the ugliest light in the house. I had dubbed it, perhaps prematurely, the second-ugliest, with an apparently ill-considered certainty that the light I had fingered as the ugliest was far and above anything remotely resembling even kitsch or camp value.

Not so, says the War Department. And not so, says another voter (who shall remain nameless): the four-globed monstrosity in the breakfast area is certainly in the running.

Well. There's really only one way to settle this, isn't there? It's time for the first-ever Don and Amy's Broadmead Reno POLL!

Bring on the contenders!

Contestant Number One: Pink Rose Monstrosity

This gets the War Department's vote as the ugliest light fixture in the house, and I can certainly appreciate her point-of-view (even if I don't agree). Whether the worst feature is the dusty pink ceramic roses, the cheap little crystals, or the badly gilded chain I have no idea, but this light is the complete package: an offensively ghastly package.

Contestant Number Two: The Four-Globed Nightmare

This abomination was my pick for the bronze medal in last week's post, but apparently some feel it deserves a shot at the title. So here it is in all its cobweb-infested-chain and badly-plated-bronze-bits glory crappitude. Kinda looks like it's made out of recycled aquarium parts and a bag of used hockey pucks, doesn't it? It really doesn't have a lot going for it, I must admit, but don't let the completely-exposed compact florescent bulbs sway you just yet - we've got more contenders..

Contestant Number Three: Three Plus One Equals Crap

This fine specimen from the kitchen ceiling illustrates yet again that having exposed florescent bulbs is just a bad idea. Granted, it wasn't exactly designed for them, but still.. The combination of smoked glass bowls, the faux-antique brass mount, and the etched flowers is just ... well, bad. But not that bad, really, in comparison to some of the other contestants, right?

But wait, what's this over here by the sink?



I guess this fellow isn't allowed to hang with the cool kids. Having one of these things in the kitchen is bad enough, but two? That MUST be enough to garner it a few votes, no?

Contestant Number Four: The Faux-Bling Chandeliers

This lovely cheap construction of delicate cheap brass-plated tin and fine cheap crystal plastic wouldn't look out of place in the classiest cheapest fine-dining establishment Denny's.

But wait! It ALSO has a friend:



(For what it's worth, both of those fixtures are already sitting in a cardboard box with the rest of the recycling, waiting for the next trip to Hartland.)

Contestant Number Five: Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT?

There's a common misconception that the phrase "Oh, the humanity!" was spoken by a radio announcer upon witnessing the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937. This is only partly true: yes, the announcer was at the site of the Hindenburg, but he uttered the infamous phrase when he inadvertently caught a glimpse of this thing out of the corner of his eye:



Rumor has it that this exact light was used by the Caliph of Bujran to subdue overly-feisty concubines - just by threatening to turn it on.

Yes, that's a tension rod holding it in place - JUST IN CASE you thought another room in your house just wasn't quite horrifying enough, you could move this beast around whenever you wanted, and inflict it on a new location.

But wait, you say, this can't possibly be a real light - can we get a close up?

Hey, I say, they're your retinas, you wanna burn them right out of your head, who am I to stop you:



Shudder. That thing is made of sheer malevolence. It was also the only light fixture in the entire house that had regular incandescent bulbs in it - not even Frank was crazy enough to actually open it up and release the demon spirits trapped within.


I think you can probably guess what my pick is. So, what are you waiting for? Vote already!

What about happiness?

When you move into an older home, and as you explore the new house and get to know its quirks and foibles, I think you can't help but start to get a sense of the people who lived there before you.

Were they packrats? Did they tend to use some rooms more than others? Did they have a tendency to delay necessary maintenance? Did the neighbours like them? What sorts of things were important to them? What was their colour and design sense like? Were they consistent in their choices?

It's amazing how these and other questions (even the ones you didn't necessarily want to ask) can be answered by the little traces they leave behind.

As you start to construct the personalities of the previous owners, I think this process becomes significantly easier - despite how hard you may try NOT to learn any more than you have to - if the person who lived in your house before you was the kind of a person to leave a LOT of clues...

In our case, the previous owner left a whole slew of things (even besides the statues) that really make us wonder just what was going through his head. For one thing, the guy was obsessed - OBSESSED - with temperature. There were no fewer than six different thermometers mounted either on the outside of the house, hanging on the walls inside, or, in at least one particular case, hanging on the wall inside with a wire lead drilled through the wall to a sensor on the outside so it could display both temperatures at once. In addition to the many thermometers, almost all of the thermostats are marked up with liquid paper, pencil lines, or even Sharpie annotations.



The amount of time he must have spent fiddling with the thermostats and heaters and comparing them to all of his thermometers and whatnot is remarkable. It's especially noteworthy when you realize that despite all of the analyzing and double-checking, he never actually replaced any of the heaters or thermostats. He seemed to be content to just make his little marks with the liquid paper and pencils and trust in his dollar-store thermometers to let him know whether it was warm enough or not.

I think another facet of the temperature obsession was something of a fixation on energy. With the exception of the three bulbs in the ghastly lamp in the hall (two of which were burnt out when we moved in), every single light in and out of the house had a compact florescent bulb in it - including all TWELVE sockets in the gruesome bathroom fixtures. The ones in the garage are particularly irksome because a) they take a couple seconds to turn on when you flick the switch, and even then they take a couple more minutes to warm up to maximum brightness; and b) we need a ladder to change them out, but there's so much crap in the garage that there's nowhere to put the ladder so we're stuck with them.

Every time we go to Home Despot, we drop off a couple of the CF bulbs in their recycling bin and buy a few more incandescent bulbs - the CFs just don't give off any light!

Frank (I figure I might as well just use his name at this point) also seemed to dislike most colors. That, or he had a violent aversion to painting anything. When we moved in, there wasn't a wall in the house that wasn't white. Well, except for the enormous mural of the mountain valley on the back wall of the garage, but that's different, and the subject of another whole post, I'm sure. Everything that was painted was painted white. The untextured ceilings were white, the walls were white, the trim was white, the doors were...

Actually, the doors aren't white. Not exactly. They're all sort of this yellowy-off-white color that's singularly unattractive. It's like teeth-that-haven't-been-brushed-in-a-week non-white. A painful non-color. As a matter of fact, they all look like they've only ever been primed with builder's primer and have never actually been painted. Which, we realized when we started taking down the closet doors so we could start on the floor, is exactly the case. Every door in the house, with the exception of the front door was installed straight from the factory and never painted.



That picture really shows the difference between the nice white trim paint and whatever botched attempt at an actual color (sun-bleached-buzzard-skeleton-yellow?) builder's primer is supposed to be.

Now it should be mentioned that Frank is by no means solely responsible for all of this - or even any of it for all we can say for certain. After all, he wasn't the original owner of the house - he may not have even been the second for all we know. Then again, we know enough from talking to the neighbours that Frank had lived in the house for at least fifteen years, so we're fairly sure we can lay at least some of the blame on his shoulders.

We also know from talking to the neighbours that Frank had a bit of bad habit in terms of letting people take advantage of him. For instance, he once paid a guy to pressure-wash the driveway and, when the guy offered, to power-wash some of the moss off the roof. One of the neighbours had to run across the street and tell the workman to stop power-washing UP against the grain of the roof and taking the shingles off along with the moss. Frank had no idea.

So it may not have been Frank necessarily - it might have been a friend, or a hired handyman, or somebody else - that spread mayonnaise all over the walls in an attempt to patch the holes left by picture hooks or whatever.





Okay, so it might not be mayonnaise, but I'll be damned if I can say for sure what it REALLY is. I thought at first it was just unsanded drywall patching compound or PolyFilla, but it's not that. Someone else suggested it might be toothpaste, as they had heard somewhere that it was supposed to work for that kind of thing, but the stuff on our walls doesn't have a minty flavor. Then someone else pointed out that it looked a lot like shiny, dried-up mayonnaise and for want of a better suggestion, that's what I'm calling it. It even shares pride-of-place with the world's most forlorn valance on the wall above the bed in the master bedroom:



It's freaking EVERYWHERE in the house. Every wall, every room, every conceivable place you could find a hole, there is one - stuffed with mayonnaise. Hell, Frank (or somebody else) even used it to seal the wire for the doorbell to the inside of the door jamb where it comes in from outside.



Apparently, mayonnaise paints up pretty nice, too, as you can see from the outside portion of that same wire.



And while we're outside, it's not really clear what we should make of this sign hanging right by the front door:



I'm not going to tell you what Frank's last name is, but I will say that it is NOT Molldara. Which maybe tells us more about Frank than his real last name would... although perhaps not as much as the stuff he left in the drawer in the master bathroom:



No, we didn't inventory that. We dumped it out into a garbage bag and scrubbed the drawer out with bleach. Twice.

This house has two fireplaces: one with a wood stove insert in the family room and the other a normal, wood burning fireplace in the living room. Straightforward enough, except.... well, the wood stove in the family room cost us almost $2000 to have it brought up to code. The guys doing the work said it looked like the only thing ever burned in it was paper. And the one in the living room, well, it sort of had an insert of its own. Behind an over-sized, brass-plated fireplace screen with glass doors was this thing:



Huh, we thought. An electric fireplace. Then we flipped it over:



I... I'm at a loss for words. Really. You just have to look at it and figure it out for yourself. The truly odd thing? Aside from hosting that electric thingy (which is now resting comfortably at the bottom of the Hartland landfill) the fireplace had never been used. For anything.

When we moved in, Frank had helpfully left four remotes for the garage door sitting on the kitchen counter. The weird thing was that each remote had three buttons on it. Obviously, the biggest of the buttons was for the garage door, but we had no idea what the other three buttons were for, or if they even worked. One of the remotes had something written on the buttons (in Sharpie, of course), but aside from "gaRagE", I couldn't really decipher what they said. One looked like "ouslde lanB", and the other was simply labeled "Fp". After thinking about it some more, and wandering around the house clicking the buttons at random, I figured it out.

"Fp" stood for fireplace. The cord from that hideous contraption up there came out from the side of the screen and was plugged into a weird device that was, in turn, plugged into a wall socket. Sure enough, the button on the remote triggered the device, and I could turn the "fireplace" on and off from pretty much anywhere - even out in the driveway.

"ouslde lanB" was a little harder. It wasn't until I noticed this ungodly scar on the wall below the front window that I realized what it was for:



Yes, that is a piece of linoleum and a metric shit ton of mayonnaise used to patch the drywall, but whatever; the important thing is that "ouslde lanB" stood for outside lamp. The third button on the remote turned the carriage lamp at the side of the driveway on and off. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the wiring for the lamp was run through a piece of irrigation tubing buried in the front yard. No, that's not up to code, or even remotely safe, and yes, there are at least two other places where he's done the same thing for electrical service for the pumps in the fountains. (Our home inspector noticed the switches and whatnot, but Frank assured him that all the wiring had been done by a professional electrician. Shyeah, right.) I'm not even going to go into how wobbly and just plain bad the carriage lamp is (which is too bad, because it's arguably the nicest light fixture on the whole property), but suffice to say we'll be either pulling it out or redoing it.

Speaking of light fixtures, I believe I mentioned in my first post that the ghastly thing in the hall was the second-ugliest light fixture in the house. While there's absolutely no question about which fixture is the ugliest, there's some debate about the third-ugliest. So how about we put it to a vote?

The War Department gives the bronze medal for ugliest to this pair of flying saucer-inspired pieces of shit in the family room:



The only light those bastards give off is straight down; they seem to be utterly incapable of illuminating a closet, let alone a family room.

That's a solid contender, I must admit, but I still say the bronze should go to this abomination from the design-hell that was the mid-eighties:



That thing wouldn't even look good with incandescent bulbs in it; with the CFs, it's enough to make you shut your eyes and wish it would just go away. It never does, though. Oh no, it's always still there.

Judges?

Oh, and while we're talking fixtures, let's discuss plumbing fixtures for a second. I've alluded to this several times, but it really does need to be seen to be believed. Without further ado, I present to you a master bath, inspired by Saddam Hussein himself:







Those accessories had to be put in purposefully and deliberately, by the way: the tiles by the window had to be replaced, and a hole cut into the ceiling of the family room underneath just to install the taps and drain for the tub. (And yes, that's the same master bath that had the carpeted floor.)

So what have we really learned about dear old Frank? I can't say; I'm too busy worrying about what the new owners of OUR old house have figured out about US.

Anyway, I could go on and on here, but this post is already in the running for most excessive ever, so I'll just close with one last thing. I'm not going to offer any comment on this; I'm presenting it merely as it is, a disturbingly existential pondering encapsulated on a clear plastic label, affixed firmly to a drawer in the kitchen: