A mouse in the house

Shortly after Christmas, one of our cats escaped out the basement door. Not-so-coincidentally it was the same day this happened. In the commotion of dealing with the water and having the plumber over, the door was left open for a couple of hours. The snuggly kitty stayed in and the mouse-killing-always-trying-to-escape kitty left (we did get him back about a month later, fortunately).

Unfortunately, while he was away a mouse got in the house. I came down with the brave new toddler early on a work day. The snuggly kitty was acting very odd, hunkered down in front of the oven. With a heavy heart, I looked under the oven with a flashlight and .... yeah.

Obviously the mouse didn't get into the house from that area - otherwise he would have disappeared. Since we had one potentially effective cat in the house, I pulled the oven away from the wall. Snuggly kitty rushed in. 30 seconds of squeaking later he came out with the mouse! Then he jogged to the dining room table, released the mouse to play, and promptly lost it. Idiot.

But I did see where the mouse went - it bolted to the corner of the dining room where the baseboard heating pipes run. After waiting a few minutes, I stuck my face in the corner. It certainly had at least an inch of space and was quite drafty. The quick solution was to fill in the corner with steel wool and seal the entire length of the wall with expanding foam.

It doesn't look too good, but it's a bit less drafty and hopefully more mouse proof. I may try to razor off the excess foam in the future and see if it's paintable. If I could paint it black, it would be invisible.

Snuggly cat was disappointed with the solution, though.

Squeaky clean

Excuse the delay! We left you a month ago with some indecision over whether to get a new dishwasher. Perhaps you thought our silence meant that we weren't sure what to do. Well that is definitely not the case. In fact, we'd practically hit the order button by the time I posted the blog update, and we were schedule for delivery 4 days later (and on a federal holiday, even better!).

So this guy was on the way out:

In all its grungy glory (since the water wasn't heating, the walls and seals of the dishwasher were starting to look pretty disgusting):

So a few days later thanks to a Best Buy sale that included free shipping AND installation (and removal of the old machine), we were on our way to getting a Bosch 500 series in our kitchen. We'd read some negative reviews but they were all related to some features of a "European-style" dishwasher, mostly because they don't heat dry the dishes. But since our previous model was a Bosch that heated the same (less effective but less energy-sucking) way and we liked it, we figured the new one would be fine.

Out with the old:

In with the new:

It obviously is no bigger than the last one, but somehow, it just gobbles up all our dishes and silverware and still doesn't get full. The third rack is nice, but that doesn't even seem to be the reason - we think the interior space is larger. Maybe the walls have gotten thinner? No idea, but we love it.

 Buttons and a countdown for different cycles:

And a floor light to tell us when it's on since it's so quiet (actually, it really isn't much more quiet than our previous one, but it certainly isn't noisy).

Most important, our dishes are clean and residue-free and the dishwasher seems to be heating everything nicely. For once, a fast decision on a home purchase seems to have been the right way to go.

It's (Not) Getting Hot in Here

I think we've probably been in denial about this one for a few weeks (or more). Lately our dishes haven't seemed all that clean when they come out of the dishwasher. They don't have food on them, mostly. They just seem to be foggy. Of course we refilled our Jet-dry, but that didn't help. We cleaned everything out and ran a load of vinegar and baking soda. No luck. We splurged on fancy liquid detergent instead of Target brand powder. Nope. We even tried the power breaker and resets.

In fact, after the excellent suggestions from my mom that maybe it wasn't heating enough, we decided to finally run a load when we were home and awake enough to pay attention (it seems like we usually run it as we are going out for the day or when we are going to sleep).

Cool. Uh oh.

Usually our dishwasher heats up to probably just under boiling.

Searching fixes for this suggests that a repair will run us at least a couple hundred and that it is not, unfortunately, a do-it-yourself type job.

We looked up our dishwasher to learn more about it - turns out, our Bosch is quite a pricy model (or it was). It's been very good to us for 6 years - no complaints until now. And we don't want to downgrade to something cheap, especially if it doesn't do a good job of cleaning dishes, which so many of our friends and family seem to find with their own dishwashers.

Fortunately, our favorite home review website, The Sweet Home, highly recommends another Bosch. The reviews on pretty much every website for it are astoundingly high. With delivery and installation, it would run around $900. We also have the option of "cheaping out" and buying one step down for about $600 and lose what appears to be a magical third shelf at the top (this seems like it would have been amazing when we were still washing bottle nipples and other tiny parts, but still looks pretty cool for silverware, etc.).

Is it irresponsible to think that this might make more sense than throwing money away hoping to fix the old one? This feels like the standard used car dilemma - how much money do you put in before you give up and get a new one (not that we've put money into this dishwasher before, but still)...

And also - black or stainless? The fridge is stainless but the microwave, oven, and current dishwasher are black. We are leaning towards black if we buy at all, since the fridge is separate enough from the rest of the appliances that we feel like it can be an outlier and we don't have to work our way to full-stainless.

D has found one on sale for $800 (including installation) at Best Buy in the time it has taken me to write this post. We might have already made our decision...

Edited to add this nifty flow chart D found, that is helping us slide towards replacing:

Very Alarming

Almost exactly one year ago, we blogged about some fancy smoke detectors that we had installed when one of our three old ones died and we realized how old they all actually were. We spent a lot of time researching the difference between the various sensors, batteries, etc.

Well one thing we have since learned - don't bother getting a 10-year battery because it will start spontaneously going off in under a year.

Our Home Depot alarm that is on our main floor, arguably our most important smoke detector, kept going off uncontrollably and with absolutely no cause. It quieted down when we took it outside. The problem was that with an unremovable battery, there was no way to keep it quiet. After leaving it outside for a few days to "reset" (or so we thought) and then leaving it sitting up high on a shelf for a few days to see how it would react, it managed to stay quiet. We thought we were safe. And so we put it back up where it belonged.

Only to come home two days later to it going off (all day apparently - more on that later). I couldn't get it to stop beeping, even by holding down the reset. I finally tossed it outside until I could calm down my poor scared toddler.

When it finally stopped and D tried to bring it back in, it immediately began its shrill alarm just by him picking it up. He finally had to fully turn it off (which breaks it in the process) and out it went.

I ordered a basic $7 one that requires a 9V battery. It's not fancy but it's definitely better than having nothing installed on our main floor at all. I wonder if we got a dud or all the "10-year" ones die so quickly.

New Year's Resolutions

New year, new home improvement plans - here are some of ours for this year. Do you have any?

1. Major project: remodel the breezeway into an indoor space:

We plan to start talking to contractors and possibly an architect soon. This is beyond the scope of anything we've done to the house before (ugh, we will actually need permits...). Wish us luck and stay tuned.

2. Hire cleaning help. Not so much an "improvement" for the house but for our life. We decided to try to budget for someone who will come in every week or two to clean, and plan to start looking for someone soon.

3. Reach goal: convert to natural gas. More on this to come but it seems that we would have to make some major fixes so that a natural gas water heater could vent out correctly from the basement. We thought converting would be a relatively minor upgrade, but now we think this might have to wait a while longer yet (and possibly be pushed off indefinitely if we should have to unexpectedly replace a major oil- or electric-powered appliance)

4. Replace some doors. This has been on the to-do list since 2013 so obviously it isn't particularly pressing. But I want a new basement door and new hallway doors, if we ever find a good general contractor.

For most of these, our big hurdle is that we don't have very many "go-to" people to call to work on the house. Our lack of time and the increasing complexity of the projects makes us want to turn to professionals. However, our lack of time isn't helping us launch the starting phase that involves doing research and getting quotes. If you're a local reader and have recommendations, let us know!

The cup overflows

When J went to the basement, she heard some odd dripping noises. She asked me whether something was wrong with the dehumidifier. I headed into the basement and quickly saw the problem.

The drain at the base of the exterior stairs to the basement had clogged. With the endless rain we have been getting, water had gotten high enough to go over the sill and creep into the house. I took this photo after I spent a couple of minutes with the very useful bilge pump to get some water out. I did get sprayed several times before setting it up correctly. Crucially, I had to put a log over the hose so it wouldn't flop into my face.



After doing that I could get most of the water out in about five minutes. The problem was that in 10 minutes, the water filled back in again. Water apparently was seeping through the walls.

I was putting so much effort into the pumping because it was very uncomfortable to stand on the stairs while trying to manipulate the snake. I first tried the toilet auger, because the clog usually is in the first couple of feet. But I couldn't make any progress. I then moved onto the 25 foot snake. After I ran about 10 feet into the drain with no effect, I decided to call a plumber. I then tried the auger again. Not working. By now the water had filled up to the sill again, so I re-drained it with the bilge pump. Seriously, it is amazing. Buy one if you ever think you need to drain something quickly by hand. The plumber still had not shown up, so I decided to try the snake until he showed up. Well, I beat the plumber.

I have not measured it yet, but I think it took about 15 feet of snake to clear the clog. Ugh. I think I may buy a drill powered snake to speed the process up in the future. It's a huge pain to hand feed that much.

Holiday Cheer

It feels like October but the holidays are upon us. This year the decorating is similar to previous ones, but we made a few tweaks.

Like last year (when, apparently, I forgot to take a picture) our tree is nestled between both sofas, tucking it a bit more out of the way so that the toddler can't do too much damage and it can't get knocked over by cat or child. We've now had the tree in all 3 available corners of the living room over the last few years - I like that we have some choice on where to put it.

We bought new lights this year, too, based on a review on The Wirecutter, our go-to place before we shop these days. and bought GE Colorite LED lights. I know they're energy efficient but no, they still don't look as nice as the old fashioned kind. Also we found it weird that there is so much purple in there, a color they don't usually include in colored lights. But as it's our toddler's favorite color, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The fireplace looks mostly the same except this year we used live greenery we bought at a fundraiser, instead of the plastic one (ugh look at all those toys!)

Now I remember why we use artificial - needles everywhere!!

I went all Martha Stewart and made a felt tree for the toddler to decorate, though mostly she just wants to tear off the gingerbread man's eyes...

We skipped the outdoor lights this year - it seems I only have the energy for them alternating years (I did it last year. But we do have a new wreath and some more greenery.

After looking around our neighborhood, I decided I want to put wreaths in both upstairs windows. Of course my new front door wreath (that I bought last year on sale) does not seem to be for sale anymore, so I won't be able to create a matching set - or even anything complimentary, from at least a quick glance at all my usual stores. So I might need to start fresh next year. If I do, I'll have to remember to buy a thinner wreath - this one is so fat that we had to put it on our storm door since putting it on our front door pushed the storm door out a few inches.

Now we just need a little snow to add the real finishing touches on the making the house feel Christmasy.

A Place for Everything (and everything in our place)

It's that busy time of year when we don't actually have time update the blog because we're too busy decorating, raking, or shopping. None of those are really blog-worthy anyway.

But one lingering conundrum we're having in this season of gifting - TOO MUCH STUFF!

Our living room AND basement are loaded up with toys - both annoying small ones that come in pieces (blocks, crayons, puzzles, doctor kit, train) and big ones that take up a lot of space (foam wedges, slide, basketball hoop).

We're trying to figure out the best way to take our rooms back. A longer term plan, that we'll start looking into this winter, is to convert our sun room into a finished playroom. But for now, we'd just like our floors clear. We clean up every night but even when everything is "away," it's still cluttered.

We cleared a shelf in the office and started putting at least some of her toys there - trains on the right, doll accessories and puzzles on the left, plus some of her favorite books (the rest are upstairs in her room which is full to the brim with toys too).

Thanks to a disciplined daycare, the toddler understands the idea of "cleaning up" and we're working on taking out just one thing at a time. But there's still the matter of simply not having enough space (or at least not enough hidden space). We don't have the room or inclination to buy a separate piece of dedicated toy storage like this, since we want it to blend into our decor, but we could use some ideas.

Moms and dads out there, what works for you (besides just owning less stuff, which is also a very good option but rather impossible thanks to too many generous grandparents)?

Still a Few Surprises

Most time when a house surprises you, it's not good. Bad wiring, a busted pipe, etc. And after living here 6 years now, there are not too many surprises left. But recently, we found one.

For all this time, going up and down the basement stairs several times a week at least - to clean the kitty litter, do laundry, run on the treadmill, etc. - we blindly assumed that this was an AC vent. It looks like an AC vent, and was not in a completely illogical spot, given that our upstairs intake is on the wall on the stairwell.

But when we worked with the HVAC company this summer to optimize our new AC, we realized that it was not hooked up to the house's ventilation at all.

We finally popped off the vent. And found a lightbulb socket! Pop in a new bulb and...

Ta-dah! Operated on the same switch that turns on the overhead light in the stairwell:

Minor, true. But still a fun little surprise. The toddler now claims it is "sunny" when she climbs up and down the stairs.

A Tale of Three Trees

We have a new member of the family - 10 days ago, a Zelkova errata arrived in our yard, to one day create some of the shade lost when our white oak was removed. We didn't want another white oak because they are very slow growing (we are impatient) and can grow to be gigantic, as we knew from experience, which would not work well in this new home across the driveway from the old one. And honestly I don't think I'll miss the acorns and baby oaks (or the leaves, at least for a while - this year our front yard is so  empty compared to previous autumns). And so here is our little zelkova, may she grow big and strong.

In other tree news, our hawthorn did what it was supposed to and turned a lovely shade of orange with bright red berries.

I've been busily spending my evenings - or at least my evenings until we set our clocks back and it got too dark - pulling out more ivy from the backyard. I forgot a "before" picture but I think the giant circle of brown makes it pretty clear where the ivy used to be. We tilled the soil and put some grass seed down, though it might be too late for this year.

It's been a long time since I worked on this - 2011 according to this post. After clearing so much of the yard, the last little circle just wasn't that annoying. But now I'm ready to convert the whole thing to grass (with a little bare soil/mulch around the tree). With a little one who wants to run around and play in the yard, we might as well get as much yard as we can. Plus the tree will probably be a lot happier without being choked by ivy.

Speaking of little one, we got behind with leaf clean up when it seemed last week like the trees dropped all the leaves at once. She kindly agree to help us out:

No surprises here, but we didn't get very far. These leaves are definitely a multi-day process.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from our spooky motion-sensor spider:

Seriously this guy just will not go away and sends us cute little "hey, I'm still here" emails from our camera every 20 minutes all night long. At least in late October it is seasonally appropriate.

And we found a temporary use for our former-tree mulch pile:

Good place to store a body. Or parts of a body.

Have a spooky day (and night)!

Gone, part 2

Last week I mentioned some "other complaints" about our tree removal service. I was actually pretty furious with them when I showed up as they were finishing the job. I left a mean voice mail at their headquarters and planned to leave them bad reviews. Our neighbor, however, a retired arborist who knows a thing or two about yards and trees, said they actually did a great job (and for a great price). The damage, he said, was pretty minimal and was to be expected when taking down such a big tree. So I felt better, and was a lot nicer when I eventually talked to the company. Still not too thrilled about them though, so any recommendation would come with a lot of caveats.

First though, some more pictures of the removal that our neighbor took for us. A sad and naked trunk:

So remember last week, I mentioned one complaint was how they didn't leave us with the wood we asked for. We were so disappointed, but couldn't say too much, since it was never in the contract. The other stuff though, was a bit more legitimate.

First, a branch came down and hit our power lines. Fortunately, it didn't knock out the power, but it did break the steel inner wire that holds all the lines secure:

My frustration wasn't with this, per say (I know accidents happen), it was their nonchalant way of dealing with it. When I showed up, the crew said they weren't sure if we had lost power, so they were glad I was home to check (um, ok, I know you had my phone number because you called me in the morning, so it might have been nice to call and let me know this happened so I could have the chance to come home and make sure). Then they hemmed and hawed about calling our power company and expected me to do it. Finally they told me that the foreman was going to call later. The next day when I talked to the company, they were completely clueless. The foreman did claim that he alerted the power company, but after a week and a half of no results (and more phone tag with the tree people), we called the power company ourselves. And that same day:

Fixed! I'll give the company the benefit of the doubt because the power company claimed that a work order had been put in and then inexplicably cancelled, so who knows what happened there.

Next on the list, our poor front lawn and garden:

A lot of grass got uprooted from the falling limbs and they just laid it back down, like detached sod clumps. It was so bad that I felt at risk of twisting my ankle walking across my yard, thanks to all the divots. The damage was especially frustrating since the foreman had originally said they would not be taking the trunk down in one giant piece because it would do too much damage to our yard (well they did and it did...).

But this too, they resolved. After I complained, they came back the next day to lay topsoil and grass seed:

Final complaint on the list, the giant pile of stump chips. The contract said clearly that they would "leave grindings in hole" when they hollowed out the stump. To me, that meant that they would level the ground with the grindings to avoid leaving a gaping hole where the trunk was. Instead, they left this:

A 2.5 foot mound of wood chips, covering all my plants. Because the crew was still there when I arrived, I questioned them on this before they drove the big dump truck away and tried to insist that they haul this away too. They argued that they always leave the work site in this condition and that this was according to the contract. I told them I was really unhappy and they shrugged and left.

Fortunately, our neighbor came to the rescue, offering to take it all back to his yard, where he could use it as mulch. And so away it went:

I had to do a little more leveling (and stomping, to try to compress it) and it's still a small hill, but that should settle over time. Leaving grindings in the hole seems pretty different than leaving a giant hill, but maybe this is normal for tree companies? I'm hoping that I won't have to find out any time soon - I don't want to have to remove any others from our yard if I can avoid it.