What an absolutely appropriate climax to this bleeping year.
During the summer I had a builder in to do three jobs: repair the roof shingles, replace the back door (the frame had gone rotten but the builder wouldn't consider a repair so a new pre-hung door was to be installed) and add an awning to the back of the house to ward off another rotting event.
The shingling went well. The back door was installed incorrectly by a guy who conveniently only spoke Spanish when I tried to speak to him. The awning looked good at first, but I discovered that the siding had been cut to accommodate the new roof line and not proprly finished, allowing water to run down the sheathing of the house.
I only discovered how bad the the door problems were when I tried to re-install the burglar alarm sensor, and the siding problem was revealed weeks later during a storm. More on that later.
Naturally, the builder, once paid1, refused to respond to emails or calls, so I had to get on the roof with a length of aluminum pre-bent to shape to form the rain-channel2, a coil of aluminum, some shears and a pop-riveter.
Lesson learned.
The problems with the door are annoying and very inconvenient. The frame was installed a half-inch out of position on the lockset side and the door did not close properly. The Spanish expert apparently did not know how a security lockset was supposed to engage in the mortise, and simply ignored the instructions his boss relayed to him about how I wanted the frame positioned in the oversized hole for it in the house, which meant that the storm door, and expensive new item that cost more than the actual door, did not seal properly and there was no room to re-install the alarm sensor without extensive chipping away the kitchen wall - all unnecessary if my simple requests had been followed.
I "fixed" these problems one by one, having to move the top corner of the frame out about a quarter inch and re-shape the mortise so the door would lock securely. What actually needs to happen is the whole frame needs moving and tilting, but that can wait until next year as the spanish expert glued the door to the sill with silicone so it is stuck fast right now.
Then came the storm.
I've mentioned before about the fence and how I storm-proofed it "for a bit" by propping it up with an improvised A-frame made of older snapped-off fenceposts on the south side, reinforcing it against southerly winds by sinking a dog-stake3 at the foot of this frame and putting the vertical post/angled post bodge under tension with ropes wrapped from the top of the vertical post to the foot of the angled one to form an awesome pulley of tension multiplication and weren't you listening in class for Azathoth's sake? It looks like the cabling on a crane4 or a corset lacing 5and does the same job of multiplying the applied force. So the wind blows from the North, the angled post holds the fence up by pushing. When the wind blows from the south, the ropes hold the fence up by pulling. Physics!
And it worked, holding up the much bashed and smashed fence for much longer than the one season I had planned.
Until the storm.
I looked outside during the height of the storm, alerted by an odd noise, and saw the whole fence slamming back and forth, and about to disintegrate from it all. I dashed outside into the teeth of a gale the likes of which drowned George Clooney and sank his trawler, and determined the odd noise was coming from the other side of the house. One problem at a time.
I ran round the house to the fence destruction in-progress and found that all the ropes had snapped. Actually, only two of the three stake-ropes had snapped. The trouble had obviously started when one stake had pulled out of the ground that had become so waterlogged it was like choclate pudding.
I had a quick think about where to source rope in the middle of the night in a storm, then remembered that I had a whole spool of the stuff I used to hoist the repacked Xmas Tree into the garage loft space once the merriment was deemed over, usually sometime around Easter.
I ran round the house again, opened the garage6 and grabbed the rope which was for once where I last saw it. It was then a simple matter of running back around the house, re-driving the torn-out stake in a piece of dry ground, cutting away the old ropes as the wind repeatedly moved the fence out of reach, rigging a new line form the new rope, dragging the fence back upright as the wind pulled me across the lawn and attempted to throw me onto the fence while I chanted the Magic Words of Fence Straightening, hauling on the re-rigged lines as the wind and rain howled round me in a manner not unlike that depicted in the storm scenes of Mutiny on the Bounty (absent, of course, the encouraging words of Charles Laughton), securing the rope and doing it all twice more. Job (eventually) done.
Then I ran round the house again and climed up the rotten ladder to the Stevieling's tree-house so I could gain line-of-sight to the bit of decorative flashing trying to tear itself from the roof-line.
I cried out some appropriate Class Two Words of Power, then upshifted to a reserve of Class Ones when the ladder 'neath my feet disintegrated into a shower of rotten, waterlogged wood shards and me.
I ran to the garage and grabbed my lightweight ladder (metal, to add to the excitement of what was to be honest a somewhat boring job by introducing the chance that the lightning zooming hither and yon might give it a poke or two), a hammer and some aluminum nails, and ran back and propped up the ladder on the new awning right where the weather was doing its worst. I grabbed a handful of nails, ascended into the heavens, folded the flashing back to an approximation of where it was supposed to be and briskly hammered my fingers flat.
It was during this exercise that I discovered the builder had not properly finished the siding when he cut it.
A quick digression. For siding to do it's job of keeping the rain out of the house walls, the places where it meets a roofline must be "flashed" so that water running down the siding is directed outward onto the roof and no allowed to run down the interior cladding. By simply cutting the siding where the new roof line of the awning met the wall the builder left a gap where water could (and did) get in.
The correct technique is to add aluminum flashing to the cladding out onto the new roof, apply shingles over the flashing, install decorative flashing (colored) with an integral rain channel to the wall at the join to the shingled roofline and add siding from the bottom up, locking each panel to the one below. In this way weather has no way of getting inside the lapped joints unless it goes up.
The builder should have removed part of the siding to achieve all this, but didn't because it would add hours to the job and he only worked when he felt like it (which was why a four day job took three weeks to finish).
What I should have done is rip the builder a new one until he did the job right, but as I said, he vanished. What I should have done in that event was remove siding and add the decorative flashing myself, then try and install the removed siding in reverse, an extremely tedious and problematic job as an event one Martin Luther King day demonstrated.
So what I actually did was add the flashing over the siding, riveting it to the siding panels and sealing all the wrong-side-out lap joints with silicone sealant. This involved breaking out the big ladder so I could extend it way beyond the roof edge and enable me to simply step off the ladder onto the roof with only some normal whimpering and trouser-wetting excursions onto an untested surface constructed by a demonstrably untrustworthy builder should evince. Liberating the ladder was an epic in its own right, but I'm too overcome with ennui and lack of sleep to go into it. Suffice to say that the garage is as cluttered as the rest of our house and leave it at that.
I prefabricated the rain-channel using an improvised (and hence totally inadequate) bending brake7 and installed it by riveting it to the siding. I patched any remaining holes by cutting small sections of aluminum flashing to fit and riveting them in place. Then I sealed the joins with silicone and got the hell off the roof.
A couple of small rainstorms proved my work good so I moved on.
I installed the Christmas lights on Thanksgiving. The timer and extension cords were in place and had been for years. All good. Lights on, decorative vignette of happy snowmen with Christmas tree8 inflated and looking good.
I decided to test-fire our emergency gear, so I started the generator, a matter of pulling the starter cord four or five dozen times while chanting the Magic Start Words. Then I plugged the starter of Troll, The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness into an extension cord attached to the genny and pressed the starter button. Normally this provokes a chugging noise followed by the mighty Briggs and Stratton firing up in a cloud of blue smoke. This time there was no noise, and the smoke was white and coming out of the wiring box for the starter.
I used a couple of Class Three Words of Power, then figured that maybe both the socket of the extension cord and the pins on the starter motor connection were corroded and had gone high-resistance, cooking off the wiring with the high current draw9. The proper fix would be to replace the extension cord and clean off the starter pins but that would involve a cord I didn't have and dismantling the starter to get at the pins which were shrouded.
I decided to simply add the proper starter cord, which I rarely used and hence wasn't corroded, to the end of the old extension cord (the new one wouldn't reach the genny) and hope the good-to-corroded connection would be better than corroded-to-corroded. It was and Troll burst into life with the proper color smoke coming out of the right places. This would prime the carburetor so that when I needed to start Troll in an emergency it would start relatively easily.
The snowstorm blew in a couple of weeks later, requiring Troll to clear it all up. However, my Christmas lights all went out because the wet triggered the GFCI.
So, in order to make the whole thing worthwhile I replaced all the extension cords and taped all the plugs after drying them out. The ones that would be in very wet places I wrapped in cut-up old rubber gloves and more tape. I had to replace the timer stake because I fell over the old one and broke off the stake. I ended up using it as a power strip as the new power stake only has three outlets and I needed four. Everything worked as planned and the lights worked nicely thank you very much.
On December 23rd my inkjet printer made a funny noise when asked to print something and from that moment refused to complete its power-on test. No color printer and scanner, then. I went out on Christmas Eve and bought a replacement, not as hefty but would do the jobs we needed it for. Upon opening the trunk of the Steviemobile I discovered that a near full bottle of windshield washer fluid I had placed there a couple of days before had split a seam and inundated everything.
Five hours of messing about with the new printer and I had connected it to my network. The software installer claimed it could see the printer, but it wouldn't install no matter what I did. I've had problems with wireless printers before, but never so persistent. So that was that. I face an interesting day on Saturday attempting to return the blessed thing.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I retired at midnight Christmas Eve, but was woken by howling winds at 1:30am. I looked out of my window and sure enough, the fence was repeating it's mutinous behaviour of the summer.
I grabbed some clothes10 and waded out into Hurricane Zelda to assess the problem. This time there were no broken ropes, but all the stakes had pulled out of the waterlogged ground. So this time I had to untie the ropes as the gale pulled me hither and yon. All I could do was pull as hard as I could and wait for the wind gusts to drop so I could get enough slack to untie the dangling stakes. I couldn't cut the ropes because I didn't have any more to spare.
Somewhere around 2am I had all the stakes11 back in the ground and the ropes re-rigged. The wind was getting even stronger and I didn't sleep well once back in bed because I was worried that the wind would pull bits off the house.
Which by some miracle didn't happen. Even my naff siding repair held fast. Only my carefully waterproofed lights were shorted out again. There must be a plug somewhere I missed. Those hours of effort were not wasted then. So that was my Christmas.
Over before it started.
- It took me some small time to appreciate the nature of the problems and I paid up foolishly thinking all was OK↑
- And I don't possess the bending tool needed so that was a pain↑
- Looks like a giant corkscrew with a loop at the non-twisty end↑
- But not much↑
- But not as interesting↑
- Funny story: during the painting of the new yet uninstalled back door frame, done in the garage, the lock of the garage had fallen to bits requiring me to lock myself inside, figure out how it all worked, remove the casing, recover all the teenytiny works off the floor, put them all back again and then invent a way of screwing it all back together from both sides of the garage doors. It was all very trying.↑
- And this is where my rage became my master as the bloody builder had a magnificent bending brake he brought round and left for four days, worth at least a couple of grand. Why he couldn't bend up a few inches of aluminum and finish the job is beond me. Would have taken literally minutes.↑
- A revenge gift from the Canadian Contingent of La Famile Stevie↑
- V=IR and W=IV so if W stays roughly the same and R gets big, V drops and I soars. This is how the 2004 blackout started↑
- Won't make that mistake again↑
- I really must look into acquiring some proper hurricane anchors. They grip better than dog stakes, I'm told↑
