I just bought the Carpenter's rap album on iTunes. It's very angry.

Okay, some updates and such...

It's snowing right now. Pretty much anything could go wrong and it would be mostly okay because of the snow.

Our basement is nice and dry now. Betsy and I just watched Parks and Recreation down there and we felt no dampness whatsoever, so it's safe to say that our $1000 insurance deductible was well spent. Tomorrow some guy is gonna come by with some floor samples and we're gonna pick the cheapest one and then our bathroom is gonna get fixed and our basement is gonna get somethinged. I'm not really sure what the plan is but some very professional-type worker guys are going to look at it knowingly and they'll probably nod and point and grunt back and forth and then they'll fix it... whatever "it" is. I have faith in them.

The main order of business currently is the attic. Considering the fact that we have more square footage of storage in our current house than we had in our entire first house, theoretically, the attic is completely superfluous. I ventured up there anyway and discovered that, maybe, the previous owner wasn't quite done moving out. I have so far filled four 39-gallon trash bags. I'm guessing that's about a third of the job done. Here's a brief list of some of the things I've found:

One (1) gi-NOR-mous hamster ball (presumably for a morbidly obese North American hamster),
three (3) screen doors,
a few (3-5) samples of carpet, some in rolls, others just piled up,
one (1) throw pillow that I'm a little afraid to touch,
one (1) purple Teletubby (also afraid to touch),
three (3) small, ceramic unicorns,
one (1) artificial 6-foot (1.8288 meter) tall Christmas tree,
one (1) broken electric football game,
one (1) red Venetian blind,
one (1) garlic press,
and an astonishingly wide assortment of files, papers, stuffed animals, and home-improvement flotsam and jetsam.

You hear about people moving into a house and finding a box of old photographs taken in Paris during World War II or a complete collection of Depression glass or a working antique mimeograph (there are still several piles up there to be moved, so my fingers are totally crossed for that mimeograph), but I'm just thanking the good Lord that I haven't stumbled across any Tupperware containers filled with squirrel testicles, as awesome as that would be.

So, I go up there every day and fill a couple of trash bags and then get all discouraged and quit for the rest of the day. I guess when you take into account all of the other projects around here that need attention (the questionable boiler, the twenty-five year old water heater, the chimney that needs repaired and cleaned, the water spots that keep growing on our bedroom ceiling, the windows that might actually fall out, the giant spider which, I was just informed, has taken over the basement, the approximately eleven trillion leaves that refuse to rake themselves, etc.) a clean attic isn't that big a deal. But it's something I can do without great risk to the rest of the house. That's good to know.

Although I was up there earlier today and noticed that, unless I step very lightly, the entire attic floor shakes in a rather alarming manner.

Thank you,
      Matt Beers

DISASTER!

I'm not typically one of those guys who looks at a thing he's never done before and says, "Oh, yeah! I can do that! Bring it on!" I might say that, but when faced with actually doing it, I almost always back out, and it's served me well for thirty-three years. But at some point in the last two days I developed an over-inflated sense of self-confidence. I decided, having never done, seen, or read any detailed instructions on how to do so, to install a pedestal sink in our 1/2 bath.

This is the result...

That is the friendly Carl Clean-Up (not really). He comes around with industrial-sized blowers and dehumidifiers when some know-it-all jack-hole breaks a hose while trying to shut off the water, flooding his entire basement as a result. In this photo we can see Carl taping plastic over the doorway into what was once our very adequate downstairs bathroom. He has to cover the door because the bathroom no longer has a floor. Well, it has a floor, but if you step on it there's a very real possibility that you could find yourself taking an abrupt and unexpected trip to the basement where you'll more than likely land in something wet. While you're in the basement please note that a number of ceiling tiles are missing. Don't be alarmed. They were simply washed away in the flood that rained down from the bathroom.

The greatest and most upsetting casualty of this most recent home-improvement debacle was Betsy's craft room. The total extent of the damage has yet to be determined, but several hundred photos were saturated and quite a lot of very well organized crafting materials were dampened. Also, we discovered that something is living in one of the walls. It sounds like it wants out. Hooray.

Thank you,
      Matt Beers

One man's trash is more often than not actual trash.

Brew Hampshire is our third house. It's also our oldest. Our first house was only fifteen years old when we bought it. We lived there for three years. Our second house was brand new. We lived there for seven years. Brew Hampshire is forty-three years old. I hope to be buried in the backyard, hopefully not by accident.

When you buy an older house you discover all sorts of interesting things. For example, you might discover, like I did, stacks and stacks of unused U.S. Postal Service boxes in a basement storage room. Or you might discover roughly one (1) nautical mile of coaxial cable running through the walls of your new home. (If anyone knows of a coaxial resale business, please give me their number.) The discovering seems to go on forever.

Random odds and ends left on window sills, high closet shelves, buried beneath a swing-set... When you buy an older home, you learn a lot more about people than you do about buildings. You learn that at some point in the past, someone painted over a lot of rotten exterior wood and then moved. You learn that a previous owner had heard of, but had never seen, a workbench when they decided to build the one that is falling over in your garage. You learn that paint will only hide the water damage in your bedroom ceiling long enough for the house to sell. The adventures never end.

Betsy and I have no intention of moving away anytime soon, so any repairs we make will be done properly... by other people who know what they're doing. We will have the boiler inspected regularly, the chimney cleaned yearly, the yard mowed bi-annually, and the leaves raked whenever the neighbors complain.

I've already replaced one light and hung a chandelier over the dining room table. We've had the locks re-keyed (one of them fell apart the first time we used it... the locksmith is on his way over right now to fix it) and the gutters should be repaired sometime next week. I've added a swing-set to the backyard (for a grand-total of three rickety play-structures) and removed a fountain that was a safety issue for the daycare kids.

The discovering goes on. What wasn't done right in the past, how far we're willing to go to do the job right, what was important enough to buy, but was nevertheless left behind...

I haven't even been in the attic yet.

Thank you,
      Matt Beers