MEEZPOPS and Other Discontents

Well, we’re not skirmishing just yet. Still reconnoitering in the kitchen. This is an appendage of the heating system of the house. An appendix, I think. I’m not a doctor, but it was full of nasty stuff, and had burst, so that certainly sounds like an appendix. The house had an elderly oil-fired boiler, and miles of baseboard radiators running hither and yon and to and fro. They weren’t toasty, but they certainly were toast. The house had sat vacant while the bank foreclosed on it, and all the water in the copper pipes had frozen. This caused them to burst. The jacket of the boiler also froze, and cracked. It does get cold here. In most places, a frozen pipe just gets kind of slushy, and you thaw it out and you’re back to rinsing dishes in the sink. In western Maine, the temps get substantially below zero, and stay there, and you get ice as hard as figure skating with a peg leg. The pipes split wide open. Every mile of the radiators would have to go. I’ll miss the razor sharp exposed fins on the pipe, said no one ever.

But on the bright side, the floor sure was shabby. It’s birch tongue and groove strip flooring, the kind of floor that renovation TV hosts ooh and aah at when they discover it under the shag carpeting from the seventies. I certainly oohed and aahed over the kitchen floor. Ooh, it’s birch, I said. Aah, the hell with it, we’ll have to cover it up, I said, ten seconds later. It’s got holes drilled all over it, eleventy layers of adhesive stuck to it, gigantic patches in it where you could espy the ghosts of the original cabinetry in it, and a dished out area in the middle that feels like an empty kiddie pool when you walk over it. I know that doesn’t sound like any kind of bright side, but there was no scintilla of an inkling of a chance I could refinish it effectively, so it sounded great to me. It was a relief to not have to even try.

The electricity in the room was interesting. The overhead light was served by knob and tube wiring, the original equipment in the house. The electric stove had a more modern hookup, with a 220v forty-amp plug, with a bit of bare wire showing to give you a tingle when you tried to retrieve a Nerf gun dart from behind it. The plugs on the wall were wired by a cavalcade of inebriated electricians and ill-informed handymen, or the other way around, it’s hard to tell. There were of course, no cover plates on the plugs, because no one knows how to fit cover plates on a shingled backsplash. Go ahead, search for it on Google. They’ll probably send you here, to be told you can’t do it. The electrical box directly over the sink didn’t have a cover plate, either. Only one side of the duplex box was filled, with a light switch for an undercabinet light fixture with no bulb in it. You could probably put your finger in the socket and flip the switch to get your arrhythmia sorted out after a brush with the back of the stove. Someone had helpfully put a piece of electrical tape over half of the open hole in the junction box. You know, for safety.

I’m informed there may be as many as 330 million persons living in the United States right now. I’m surprised that we got the numbers that high with my sink/plug arrangement in use. I figure about half of ’em would have been killed by it in the last 20 years alone. Only a bath toaster could have been more effective in the MEEZPOPS (Maine Electrical Zero Population Scheme).

Here’s the original equipment back door, that leads out to the back porch. There was once a catwalk leading to the porch from the front of the house, and it appears everyone came and went through this door. And about 700 dogs, by the depth and number of the gouges on the door and frames. That metal plate on the door is a telltale sign, and not a sign of something good. The door was built like a tank, but some human bazookas used to live here. The door had been nibbled away over decades by numerous attempts to pry the door open with anything but the key. By the splintered look of the hole behind the plates, the crowbar-ier the better was the decision tree for forced entry. There’s no crime where we live, so I assume it was just the fire department coming to the rescue, over and over, and extinguishing the occupants every time they reached for a dropped spatula behind the stove, or tried to turn on the light while washing dishes.

The kitchen had two, big windows facing south, looking out over a garden gone to seed, some fields, a distant roadway, a grass airport, some mountains, a forest, and a big, winding river. Other than that, there was nothing to look at. The windows were total losses. The roof had been leaking into the wall cavity for years, and soaked the windows over and over. There was a plastic cup on one windowsill to catch the overflow. When it rains indoors, you should take the hint and fix the roof, but no one ever took any hints in this place. The windows would have to be replaced. Windows that big cost beaucoup bucks. Pretty much everything in a kitchen costs dearly. But I wasn’t worried. Because we had no money, we never had to worry about what things cost. If the answer to, “How much is it,” is a number of any kind, you can ignore the answer. It’s easy and restful to be poor.

[To be continued]

Hang On Slopey, Slopey Hang On

Well, I guess I have to get around to fixing the kitchen in our $24,000 house, n’est-ce pas?

I’ve already fixed it, of course, but I haven’t belabored the internet with the details yet. So, gird your loins, here it comes. As is usual, photographs of the work will be in short supply. I’m not making a show for home and garden television here. If I were, you’d have excruciatingly detailed video and photographic evidence of me hanging GATHER signs on the wall, while workers unencumbered by trivialities like citizenship do all the scut work wherever the cameras aren’t pointed. Sorry, but you’re stuck with just me and my family banging on the house like a rental car.

Also, if you’d like a timeline for this project, you’re out of luck. I can’t remember when I did what, and even if I could, it would require one of those charts I recall from grammar school spangled with words like Mesozoic and Igneous and Walking Upright and stuff like that. Let’s just say it took a long time to fix the kitchen, and leave it at that, because if my wife gets to ruminating on how long it actually took, she might start calling lawyers and asking for estimates. I can’t afford a plumber, how am I going to afford a lawyer? After some reflection, I realize that lawyers make less than plumbers, but the point stands. I can’t afford anyone.

So let’s you and I take a walk down memory lane, and review just what we bought, kitchen-wise, when we lost our minds and moved here.

Well, there’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get jiggy with it.  Yes, the backsplash in the kitchen is cedar shingles. If I sat up all night taking captagon and coffee and tried to think of a less suitable substance for a kitchen backsplash, I bet I’d fail to top that. Even the backsplash behind the stove was cedar shingles.

If you’re unfamiliar with cedar shingles, let me explain that a cedar shingle is a thin slab of gasoline, masquerading as wood. I start fires in a woodstove with busted up shingles. They’re easier to light than newspaper. Of course, it’s also impossible to clean a cedar shingle, so those slabs of gasoline were also saturated with grease from cooking over the years. If you mixed napalm and painted it on, you could up the ante, but otherwise you’d have to fold or call.

If you think I’m a bad photographer, you’re right, but that’s not the problem on display with the angle of these pictures. I’m not holding the camera crooked. The floor sloped about four to six inches towards the back of the house. It was like taking pictures on a windjammer cruise in there, at least until we jacked up the back of the house and slipped a foundation under it.

If you look at the toekicks under the cabinet runs, you can see the shims the former denizens kept slipping under the boxes to make up the difference as the house pitched and yawed. The slopey floor caused all sorts of scheduling headaches for renovations. Kitchens are expensive, no matter how cheap you are, but they’re important. We had to postpone major renovations on the kitchen until we lifted up the back of the house, because a lot of the work would have hopped off the walls if we’d gotten ahead of ourselves. We had to set up shop as best we could in this mess, and live with it for a good, long time.

Hey, how about that plumbing! By the pricking of my thumbs (on a stray staple in that chintzy cabinet frame), something leaky this way comes. A telltale sign is the smiling bottom panel on the cabinet, and the mouse highway it opened up. If you’re some sort of plumber reading this, you’re looking at that arrangement and your eye is twitching. It has two items I’d never encountered outside of Maine. Instead of a “P” trap, Mainers like to use drum traps, that weird two-part cylinder you see in the middle of the concatenation of plastic pipe on the way to the drain pipe. The drain pipe features that other Maine plumbing novelty, the AAV (air admittance valve). It’s that black party hat on top of the pipe. Instead of a vent pipe leading up to larger vent pipes and eventually poking out through the roof, air is admitted into the drain with a flapper valve inside the AAV. It’s not supposed to let (stinky, sometimes lethal) air out of the pipe, just fresh air in.

Neither of those things were ever allowed anywhere else I’ve built things. Plumbing inspectors would have a fit if you mentioned an AAV in Massachusetts, for example, even though it’s about the only sane way to vent a sink in an island. No soap no how, jack. But western Maine doesn’t have plumbing inspectors and it’s survival of the fittest and Hobbesian nasty, brutish, and short plumbing shortcuts all day long out here.

The AAV valve was broken, by the way. The rotten egg smell was unmistakable.  I knew I needed to fix it right away, but I wasn’t prepared to completely replace all the plumbing in the kitchen on day one. I figured finding an AAV was going to be like trying to find a back alley abortionist or buy ivermectin or something. I went to the local lumber yard, and bought some stuff, and made small talk, and when I was fairly certain that the clerk wouldn’t narc on me, I leaned over the counter, beckoned him closer, and whispered that I wanted an AAV. Did he know a guy? Is there a parking lot we could meet in, late at night, and make a deal?

The clerk scratched his head, like he’d do a thousand times after he talked to me, until he was near bald, and simply pointed to a giant bin full of them on the wall. They were right next to the even bigger trough of drum traps.

[To be continued. If you’d like to support Sippican Cottage, keep reading, leave a comment, and tell a friend about our little palace of pixels here on the intertunnel. If you’re feeling wealthy, hit the tip jar, and if you’re feeling literate and wealthy, buy a book. Thanks!]