Thatch-her, I hardly know her!

OK, that title sounds a lot funnier out loud than it looks on screen. Today's post is about a little experiment in lawn care. D recently rediscovered the thatcher my parents gave us (he used it last winter to try to spike the ice off the roof, but it has only just now been put to its real purpose). He decided to try to clear out the crud in the front yard. It's full of dried dead-looking brown grass and moss. The living grass looks like it's clinging to life.

At first he thought he could do the whole front yard, but after working a very exhausting hour and two full trash cans, we decided to only do one half and see if we could notice the difference in a few weeks.

D found his rhythm and thatched neat little rows into our lawn. My job (in addition, as usual, to taking pictures, was to scoop the crud into the trash.

The difference quickly became obvious to us, though it's not as clear on camera (and so I'm helping you cheat by drawing in a red dividing line). The thatched area is darker because more dirt is exposed and because a lot of the light brown dead grass is gone. Honestly even with the holes, it already looks healthier.

 Giant clumps of dead grass and moss (the most surprising thing, since our front yard is sunny and south-facing) came out. Theoretically, clearing this away will make room for healthy grass to grow. After we had finished thatching, D spread grass seed and we watered. I am against watering, so we put some down today to help the seed stick to the ground but since it is generally rainy this time of year, we're leaving the seed to fend for itself from here on out.

So just from doing half the front yard (to our front walk in the background), this is the how much dead stuff we pulled from the ground. I was surprised to see that none of the live grass (what little we had) came up, which had been my main concern when we started thatching. Apparently the roots are stronger than we though. Hopefully now that we've given them some breathing room, they'll do even better.

We won't get to the other half of the lawn for a couple of weeks, so it will be interesting to see if we can notice the difference.

The Good Kind of Audit

You may remember that about a month ago, we had our scheduled energy audit. Even after doing some research, I didn't really know what to expect, but it turned out to be a pretty thorough look at our house that gave us a good idea of what we need to do to make the place more comfortable.

The audit seemed to consist of 3 parts. The first (and longest) was the visual inspection. Our auditor circled the outside of the house and then went through every bit of the inside of our house, looking for problems. He went into our crawl space, our mini-attics (apparently called knee walls--I learned all sorts of great things from the audit report), and everywhere in between. He occasionally stopped back in to the dining room where he had parked his laptop and jotted down some findings.

The second part of the audit, done in conjunction with the first part, was the infrared reading. Unfortunately, our audit ended up taking place on a day where the inside temperature and outside temperature were almost identical. So even though we were hoping for something dramatic like this:

Link to original
(Not our house)

We didn't get any cool pictures to show off. Our auditor said that the results were not particularly helpful, though in the end a visual inspection is often all that's necessary to determine problem areas.

The third part, by far the most exciting, was the blower door test. Our auditor installed this funky-looking contraption in our front door, started the blowing, and then wander around the house opening and closing door.

He wandered in periodically to check the gauges. He was very patient with me as I continued to snap pictures.

And that was it! The whole thing took almost 4 hours but didn't involve us much. In the end, he talked to us about his initial findings and what to expect next, and then he sent us our formal audit report a few days later by email. Fast forward a couple of weeks and we had a contract with the same company to do our repairs and a lot of forms filled out with the state and our electric company that will ensure we are eligible for rebates. (There are a lot of rebates out there for energy savings--the government wants us to make our homes more energy efficient. Our audit should have cost $400 but after the two rebates we were eligible for it was free! And our repairs will only cost us 50% of their actual cost.)

The audit pretty much confirmed all our suspicions and gave us ideas of what we need to do to fix them. We got a score of 32 out of 50, scoring worst on air exchange, attic insulation and best on system upgrades and energy management. The most telling figure on how awful our house holds its heat (or cool) came from the blower test, which measures air leakage. An "optimal" house leaks about 2000 cubic feet per minute. Ours leaks almost 7000 cfm. So everything that the contractors do is designed to help stop the air from getting out (or in), mostly in the basement and the attic. We're aiming for about 4000 cfm (because any better is pretty much impossible in our old house without starting from scratch). I'll post more about what exactly we're having done when I blog about the repairs. I'm hoping to get a lot of crazy pictures too!

100 Pound Footrest

This is an oldie but goodie--back before Christmas, we had an interesting experience ordering a coffee table for the living room. After hunting for a while and finding things we liked at much-to-expensive stores like Pottery Barn, we came across something we really liked from Overstock.com*. Unlike some things on Overstock that aren't traceable back to an actual product, this one even had its own website:Elia Coffee Table by C F Oakton.

It showed up very promptly at our door and shipping was less than $3. It weighed 92 pounds!!

I got home first and told D it had arrived. I managed to lug it inside (also with the help of a totally awesome UPS guy who happened to show up to deliver a much tinier package and gave me a hand crossing the threshold). I tried to unwrap the many layers and eventually gave up until D came home to help.

We loved it! It was a lot heavier than our last table, because of all the drawers (a negative, since we like to move it out of the way regularly to play on the Wii) but it really fit our living room.

The drawers were exactly what I wanted--a place to hide remotes and other ugly clutter.

But there was a small problem--even though the thing was packed like sardines in a can, it somehow got damaged. Nothing major, but some nicked wood on the corner and a slice in the veneer.

D contacted Overstock for the heck of it and they offered him a 15% refund. We agreed to it. Then out of the blue, they decided to ship us another table. We didn't really want it because it didn't seem worth the effort. But it arrived right around Christmas and D's family helped us get it unpacked (much harder this time because we had to keep the packaging in tact to repack the damaged table). It was quite an ordeal (and mostly I just watched and took photos, as always).

All that, only to discover that the second table was actually more damaged than the first!! So we alerted Overstock and they came back to take away the second table, which we managed to repackage in some sloppy fashion. In the end, we got our 15% refund because we decided not to try again with a third table.

In all, we ended up with one nice, heavy table and a good impression of Overstock's customer service. The products may be a little lousy, but they seem to stand by them if you're unsatisfied.

*By the way, have you noticed that we've branched out from Ikea lately? I am proud of us.

Oh Pottery Barn!

You've gone and done it again: create a perfect piece of furniture or other that I like and then overcharge for it. First, it was a bed. Last time, it was a coffee table. This time a nice piece for our living room, just like this one:

Daniella Chest

So I guess the real problem isn't that there are no options, but that they aren't in my desired price range. But the hunt is helping me refine a few terms. This piece refashions Queen Anne legs and a traditional bombe structure, so those words are ones I will keep an eye out for. And so will you, right?

Fire Hazard No More

When my parents visited a couple of weeks ago, we really put them to work! I asked them to help us dissect our dryer and dryer vents to clean out the lint, a project on my New Years to-do list. They came prepared, bringing with them a kit from Lowes with all the parts necessary to make everything good as new. (This is the kit--I can't seem to find it on Lowe's website.) It was good to have the extra help, since this turned out to be a 4 person job (or 3 person plus 1 person to take the pictures....). I'm here to tell you that it wasn't as hard or scary as we thought--actually, it was kinda cool--and it's something you should do to make your dryer run more efficiently (we've noticed an incredible difference in drying times) and safely.

First we unplugged and detached the dryer from the vent and pushed it away from the wall. We tipped it back and propped it up on some food cans, which are conveniently stored in the basement not far from the dryer. D got to work prying the front off the dryer.

 With the front detached, we went to work on the dust and lint. We'd already removed the lint trap and shoved a brush in there to dislodge the lint that remains stuck inside. Now we went at it from the bottom.  See all the dust coming out on the wire brush? In addition to the brush, we used the handheld brush attachments on our vacuum to really get the surfaces lint-free.

Next we unscrewed the black case from the picture above, to clean inside it. You can see how nasty that is. We have no idea when this was last done, but it's been at least a year and a half that we've lived here and it's pretty unlikely that the previous owners went through all this trouble right before they sold the house.

 Die lint! Die! Feel the wrath of my vacuum!

With the dryer lint-free, it was time to attach the vent. The kit included a rotary brush that attaches to a drill with screw-on extension tubes to make the brush be able to run the entire length of the vent. You're supposed to tape the extension tubes and make sure never to rotate them in reverse, to make sure they don't come unscrewed inside the vent. With the extension tubes attached, D started feeding the brush through the vent hole.

As a side discovery to this project, we realized our vent hole doesn't seal completely when not in use. It's supposed to have a little trap door that closes when the dryer isn't blowing air out and that the trap door is broken. Also the vent isn't very well sealed to the house. We need to buy a new vent to keep the cold air sealed out of the basement (score one for increased energy savings), so stay tuned for a future post on that repair.

At the same time D was running the brush through the vents, my parents attached the shopo vac to the bottom of the vent (with a connector that came in the kit) to suck up all the lint that D was dislodging.

Despite all the L turns in our vents and thanks to a little coaxing, the brush made it all the way through the system.

 Here is D pulling the brush back out--but not with the drill in reverse!

Next we ran the brush up from the bottom, just to make sure that everything was clean. Another special connector in the kit lets you run the shop-vac and the brush through at the same time. Again, no trouble getting through those sharp turns.

The hardest part turned out to be reattaching the dryer to the vent. Armed with foil tape, a new flexible tube, and a ring connector, D struggled to get everything back together. Since the dryer was already much closer to the wall by then, all the pictures just looked like a guy trapped behind a dryer, so I'll leave that to your imagination. It is unfortunately a one-man job, so the rest of us just started putting everything else back together. One glance at the contents of the shop-vac (not to mention the regular vacuum, which we used for the more precise clean up for the front of the dryer) proved that it was a good thing we had cleaned everything out. It was pretty full of lint and dust. And now we know we are good for 2 to 3 years until we have to do it again.