There's now a small pile of unfinished floor boards sitting in our front room. The builder & floor sub are going to do something about the countless large gaps in the floor, what that might be is beyond my intellect - I look at the floor and I see a huge, uninterrupted, swath of boards. The whole first floor, except for the tile in our bathroom, is one solid interlocking mosaic of oak boards. So how are they going to fix gaps that run 30 feet down the middle of the first floor without taking up all the boards all the way to one of the exterior walls (which means going down all the hallways and side rooms to get there) ? They can't just take out boards in the living room to fix the living room gaps, because the living room is adjacent to our bedroom, and there is no break in the floor between them. Pushing the boards towards the north exterior wall to fix a gap in the middle will create a new gap on the south side. And how can they fix the huge sagging gap in front of the closet without going all the way across the bedroom? And how are they going to finish the new boards to match?

I'm very, um, curious to find out. But, I have low expectations.

Saw people snooping around on the empty lot next to us last PM - a realtor and potential buyers. Scares me. We moved to this spot to be away from people. And we thought two acres would be more than enough to do it. But, two acres is actually a lot smaller than you might think. When there were no houses on the neighboring lots, our two acres seemed endless. Now, we're buying curtains and planting trees, for privacy. Now we know.

But, we're getting some landscaping help. And I'm growing my first real garden: peas, cukes, peppers, Brussels, Swiss chard, tomatoes, onions, and some flowers. All except the tomatoes are rocking. I built a little 5x5 wooden box, put some garden paper underneath, to stop weeds coming up from below, and filled it with dirt. Put a 40" steel wire fence around it, to keep the critters out. Deer got in there one night, when I didn't close the fence securely, and dug around. There wasn't anything big enough to bother eating, at the time, so no harm done. Planted a pink dogwood tree out in a little clearing in the woods. Should be awesome in a few years. A dogwood blooming in the woods is one of my favorite things.

Our national nightmare is over. After four months. After watching all of The Sopranos, the first three seasons of Eastbound And Down and Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the first seasons of Space Ghost, Gilligan's Island and Homeland, the first two seasons of Boardwalk Empire, season three of the X-Files and countless movies on DVD ... we have cable! and internet!

Whewww!

It's not completely finished yet, though. What we have now is a temporary line. Because the guy today didn't have the equipment needed to bury the line (or to sneak it under our driveway), the cable is laying on the ground. It runs 200' up to our house, then waaayyyy around the house on the side opposite the driveway, around the back, then up to the cable connections. Whatever. As long as the mice don't nibble through it. Mice? Yes, lots of mice. We built a big house for lots of mice to live under.

Buyers still haven't backed out of the deal, so there's a chance we will actually sell that old house. Before we do that, though, we have to fix all the items on their 'fix it' list. The list includes some reasonable stuff: re-caulk some of the siding, fix a broken window (that we didn't know about), install a GFI outlet in the kitchen, electrically insulate the water pipes from the gas pipes (??). It also included "put a light bulb in the crawlspace light fixture". Mmm... I honestly didn't know there was a light fixture in the crawl space.

The list also says we have to replace the weather strip on one of the windows. That weather strip was something I added one winter many years ago, and which lasted until the first time someone opened the window. It isn't original equipment. But they want it replaced. Fine. Whatever.

In other house news: still no cable. They never came back to finish what they started two weeks ago.

And here's my new favorite fuck up: when we moved, we submitted a Change Of Address form with the US Post Office to get our mail forwarded to the new house. That's a simple process. Unfortunately, because our new street is still not in the USPS's official list of streets, mailers have started addressing our mail to a truly non-existent address: combining our new house number with the name of the closest known street. The USPS has even started putting stickers on our mail, telling us to "Notify Senders Of The New Address" - with this new wrong address on it. Luckily, the mail carriers who actually bring the mail to our house know how to handle this, and so our mail still gets delivered.

There's a fox in our neighborhood. Last week I saw him/er take a leisurely stroll around our house, down our driveway, and up the road out of sight. The cats freaked out. I pointed at the fox and told them: that is why you aren't allowed outside! Pepper responded by cleaning her foot. Tricksey tried to claw through the front door.

In the new house, our his & her master closets combined are much smaller than the one ginormous closet we shared in the old house. This has become a problem. Now, my own closet requirements are pretty low; a single rod and a space on the floor for a few pairs of shoes will do. What I really need are a few huge drawers for my infinite T-shirt collection. But Mrs. has shirts that need hanging, shoes in shoe boxes, pants that she doesn't want wrinkled, dresses of all length, etc.. Sure, she can use all the room in mine that I'm not using, but that's not optimal. And, it really doesn't fix the problem. For, not only is her new closet small-ish, the layout of the shelves and hanging rods in the new place was a) not chosen by us and b) really rather poorly thought out. Rods and shelves overlap, vertical spacing is too short, not enough shelves, etc.. Lots of wasted space. This has been a sore spot for her.

So, after a couple of months of struggling to make it work, Mrs went out and hired a closet designer to come in and redo her closet. Took them just a few hours to rip out all of the old stuff and install a new system of movable shelves and rods that gives Mrs more (and hopefully enough) places to put all her stuff. Now, it's definitely better laid-out, and it's flexible if she wants to change.

So... if you're building a house, and someone in your family is more demanding of closet space than I am, it's probably worth it to spend some time with someone who knows what they're doing, when it comes to designing the closet space.

So, I spoke too soon. Tuesday, the cable-burying people did come out and start burying the lines for our cable/internet. But they left the job unfinished and never came back. So, there are impotent ends of underground cable lines sticking up out of the ground every couple hundred of feet, next to unconnected cable distribution boxes. And there's a giant spool of orange cable sitting in the mud next to the road, taunting me.

Interminable.

In happier news, the buyers haven't backed out of buying our old house, yet. So that could still work out smoothly. Which would be a nice change.

Some durn fool made us an offer on our old house. We may soon be done with it! Only thing is, he offered $15K less than what we were asking ($10K + $5K closing costs), and that's a lot of clams. So, now we have to play the counter-offer game.

But, assuming our counter doesn't scare him away, we're one step closer to opening that bottle of Veuve that we reserved for the day we sell the house.

Update:
Counter-offer accepted. Glorious success.

FYI

We had a decent ice storm here Friday afternoon. It wasn't huge, but it was enough to get me out of work early. So, we're sitting around, munching on our dinner, drinking on our wine, watching some "East Bound And Down" DVDs, when I hear a thump-thump-thump-thump-thump from one of the AC units just outside the kitchen window.

AC units making noise during an ice storm?

Why is the fucking AC unit doing anything when it's 18 degrees outside?

So, I bundle up, grab a flashlight and go see what's happening. As I suspected, the fan blades are spinning, but are covered in ice, throwing the whole thing off balance. It's shaking like a washing machine. It stops spinning, so I grab a screw driver and a metal tomato stake and knock the ice off the blades. I fuss around with the thermostats inside and determine that the AC unit is tied to the upstairs heater somehow, and that the ice was the cause of the thumping. Minor problem solved.

Then I'm back to the important question: why is the fucking AC unit doing anything when it's 18 degrees outside? After the long list of things that didn't go right with the construction of this house, I'm fully confident that the heating/AC people have screwed up the upstairs heating system and that we're simultaneously heating and cooling the house, that we're spending a fortune on power to make it happen, and yet despite the hot and cold air streams blowing around there are no mini-hurricanes flying around the stairwell! At least that would be entertaining! But, testing with my expertly-calibrated back-of-hand thermal energy detector confirms that there is no cold air blowing upstairs; it's all hot air.

Hmm. And then I remembered something that the builder mentioned many months ago: the phrase "heat pump".

Google, google, wiki: oh, so that's what a heat pump is!

Reversible heat pumps work in either thermal direction to provide heating or cooling to the internal space. They employ a reversing valve to reverse the flow of refrigerant from the compressor through the condenser and evaporation coils.

In heating mode, the outdoor coil is an evaporator, while the indoor is a condenser. The refrigerant flowing from the evaporator (outdoor coil) carries the thermal energy from outside air (or ground) indoors, after the fluid's temperature has been augmented by compressing it. The indoor coil then transfers thermal energy (including energy from the compression) to the indoor air, which is then moved around the inside of the building by an air handler. Alternatively, thermal energy is transferred to water, which is then used to heat the building via radiators or underfloor heating. The heated water may even be used for domestic hot water consumption. The refrigerant is then allowed to expand, cool, and absorb heat to reheat to the outdoor temperature in the outside evaporator, and the cycle repeats. This is a standard refrigeration cycle, save that the "cold" side of the refrigerator (the evaporator coil) is positioned so it is outdoors where the environment is colder.
In cooling mode the cycle is similar, but the outdoor coil is now the condenser and the indoor coil (which reaches a lower temperature) is the evaporator. This is the familiar mode in which air conditioners operate.

Learning. Always learning.

Water is dripping out from under the siding boards on our (covered) front porch. So, the roof above must be fucked up somehow. Awesome.

Update:
Met with the builder's foreman this AM. He knew exactly what I was talking about, said he noticed the problem himself, months ago when the house was still under construction, and that he told the roofing people, at the time, to find and fix the leak. Said he'll get to it in a few days. Hmm.

Couldn't sleep last night; couldn't stop thinking about mold growing in the months-damp walls.

Eight weeks after we moved in, we have a street sign! The temporary posterboard sign Mrs. made lo these many months ago was starting to get a little saggy, but could've gone another month or so, I imagine.

Developer says we should have cable in the next "two or three weeks". I will believe it when I see it. We have only a single season of The Sopranos left, and I doubt it will last us more than a week. It's been a long time since we last watched the whole series, and I'm surprised at how vile Tony comes across, and how horrible Janet is, and how spoiled the kids are, and how much of a role Johnny Sack has, and how 1990s the whole thing feels. I'm also surprised at how little I remember of the later seasons. It seems like everything I remember happened in the first two seasons. All this season five stuff (the Buscemi season) is unfamiliar. We'll probably have to buy the BSG box set to get us through the interim.

I haven't washed my car since we've been in this house because our road is completely covered in mud, all the time, because of the constant construction on neighboring lots. Got new tires today and they look ridiculous on my muddy little car.

Old house got four showings this last weekend, and there's another one today. Still no buyers. We're debating if we should paint the interior or not. The old paint looks a little beat up - nail holes, fading, ugly patch jobs, etc.. Tough call. $2K is a lot of money for paint that will likely just get painted-over by the next owners. Seems like a waste.