Snow Day

The second mammoth storm of the season slammed into Philly and the rest of the East coast last night. My friends have been calling this Snowpocalypse II (giving due respect to the storm that almost stranded us here before the holidays) or The Son of Snowpocalypse. Funny, but a bit melodramatic, don't you think? Like most Mountain Westerns, I scoffed at the panic from the masses. They don't know what a big storm is, the amateurs!

And then I woke up and looked outside. I thought of my puny snow shovel. I groaned. So far about two feet of snow has fallen and the dorky weather dudes expect more. It is hard to comprehend how much snow that is, so to illustrate here are two pictures of Leah's car.

In picture one, you can see the snow as it fell last night and this morning


And here it is when I shoveled off some of it.


That's about where I stopped. I cleaned off the stairs, the sidewalk and part of the driveway, But I gave up when I saw how much effort it would take for me to dig out to the street. Instead, I went inside for a nice cup of hot chocolate and a marathon of 30 Rock episodes courtesy of Netflix.

Heck, it's a snow day. Nobody should be expected to do any serious work in weather like this.

The Next Big Project

This past weekend, we installed a sink and toilet downstairs, which means we could destroy the outdated upstairs bathroom. So say goodbye to the gray and pink tile one last time.

We spent 50 bucks to rent an electric heavy-duty chipping hammer. That may sound like overkill, but in this old house, the tile was laid on top of two inches of concrete attached to the wall with a metal lathe. The wall laughed at me when I hit it with the sledge. It didn't laugh at the chipping hammer.




Now we have a front yard full of old tile slabs and about 15 bags loaded with tiny chunks of construction debris. We are still trying to figure out how we get rid of it all.

After about eight hours with the chipping hammer, we took care of the walls and the floor. The bathroom now looks like this.

A Watery Mess

Turning the water off to the house and then cutting a pipe always makes me nervous. What if we can't fix it? No toilet, no shower. Uh oh. But this morning it all went rather well. I cut the toilet supply line and Leah installed a new shut off valve. I turned the water back on and BAM. Nothing happened. Everything worked as it should. No disasters.

Unless you call the water dripping from the garage ceiling a disaster. What made it even more unnerving is that I knew no pipes were in the vicinity. Leah blamed the drip on the water that sloshed out of the toilet as we moved it from the bathroom upstairs (which we just started remodeling) to the bathroom downstairs (which we are almost finished with).

I didn't buy it. It seemed like a pretty persistent drip to come from a cup or two of water. While Leah remained optimistic, I went straight into panic mode. I envisioned having to call a plumber who would rip apart our garage ceiling, our walls, our floorboards to find the leaky pipe.

I needed a drink and stormed off to the fridge to tap into our water pitcher. It was empty even though I had filled it just this morning. Wait a minute?

Sure enough water sloshed around the bottom of our fridge and when we pulled it back from the wall the entire floor was wet. I must have returned the pitcher with the spout slightly open. It probably leaked all day long. The water pooling and then finding its way through the floor into the garage below.

YES! The plumbing is fine.

I've never been so relieved to clean up a mess, but how ironic that this happened on a day we were messing with the pipes.

The Highs and Lows of Fandom

Yes that is me sitting on the court at a Jazz game. And yes it is extremely cool to be able to hear them communicate, see how fast they move and how hard they slam into each other.

And yes, that is a rather unexcited look on my face. The Jazz lost ... again.

Holiday Home Improvement

Got in some nice home construction work on our break. Leah's folks are remodeling a bathroom and we helped them with the demo (often my favorite part of any job).

At first, I wanted a sledge, but couldn't find one. Good thing too. When I used a hammer to try to smash out a few tiles, I ended up damaging the drywall on the other side of the wall. If I had a sledge, I may have went straight through. Oops. Luckily, their kind neighbor stepped in and wisely suggested I use his impact hammer, which is pretty much a tiny jackhammer in gun form.

It did the trick, but only a few tiles came off easily. Most exploded in chunks of white ceramic. I blame Leah's dad. He tiled the shower originally and when he does a job, he does it to last a lifetime. Slowly and surely, I made progress, that is until the horrible Big Joe attack of New Year's Eve.

I blame the tomato. Leah blames the beef. Either way, I ate a burger and got a nasty case of food poisoning. I sat in bed, nursing a ginger ale and some saltines to ring in the new year. And then on the first, I finished the tile destruction.

Three thoughts:
1. I look good in a pink bandanna.
2. I need to get me one of those impact hammers.
3. I can't wait to see their newly remodeled bathroom.

Unnatural Pizza

Somewhere in an exotic place on an exotic farm grows the elusive "natural" pizza, which is obviously far superior to the totally unnatural and processed pizza most of us know and love.

I wonder if it grows on a tree like an apple or a vine like a pumpkin?

Leah and I made a venture to our favorite grocery store with the hopes of trying one of these fancy natural pizzas. But in the end we buckled and went with a tried and true pepperoni from the standard "pizza" section.

New Year's Resolution: I've heard from a few of you and I will do my best to put more inane stuff on this blog. Sorry to have been a slacker.

The Tedium of Tinkering

The shower works! But I'm still toiling in the basement bathroom and it looks like I'm going to be down here for awhile. We've reached the rather tedious stage of remodeling. Over the past few weeks, we've repaired drywall, replaced broken bead board, hung molding and, as you can tell by the picture, built a closet.

Next up, we get to paint and I get to figure out how to router doors. Wish us luck.