This is Sippican, tattered and torn     That kissed the missus all forlorn     That flushed the toilet one fateful morn     That flooded the floor and smelled like scat     That filled the blog with a monologue     About fixing the house that Jack built. I don’t know who built my house. I imagine it was constructed by a great big crew of rough-and-tumble guys. In 1901, power tools were scarce, and ‘strong backs with weak minds’ were plentiful. I’m sure any number of them were named Jack. Of course the old expression about ‘strong backs and weak

My house, just as I found it. The bad news was that Winter was coming You know, I’ve been talking about this sewer line fix for three weeks or so. One of the reasons I found the whole thing so durn interesting is because the exploration and repair of one problem solved a zillion other problems I’d been turning over in my mind. This busted sewer pipe really was the key to life, the universe, and everything — at least everything to do with my house. My house cost less than $25,000 when I bought it. I wasn’t expecting a

Honestly, this is the “before” picture. Our clean out was capped, so we moved on to reworking the transition from the vertical DWV pipe to the sewer pipe under the floor. Blessedly, we could throw away seven feet of concatenated strangeness that came with the house, and we replaced the whole mess with plastic pipe. I’m not a vice president without portfolio for any of the large tech companies that litter the Fortune 500 these days. I have no plans to freeze my head when I die, or upload my synapse drippings into a computer. When I’m dead, I’m gonna

Cover me; I’m going in. So we had this plumbing thing on the run once it went Sploosh. We were all jazzed up on Ferncos and plastic plumbing and fumes. Ferncos require you to give them a clean end to attach to. Don’t misunderstand. Clean is just an expression. Even if you bought everything brand new, by the time you’re done mucking around in the ground, it’s all dirty. Like an HBO series, our only obligation is to make sure it remains a certain kind of dirty. We can’t allow the pipes to get filled with dirt, or rocks, or

I like modularity. I feel like I’m pretty much alone in that nowadays. Everyone seems to be dreaming of some kind of unitary system for everything. The best example of this phenomenon I’ve seen lately is the quixotic quest to automate light switches using phones. To a person like me, that idea lives 167 miles past stupid in the land of Moron. I’ve installed every kind of light switch in a house. The house I currently live in still had some rotary switches hooked up to knob and tube wiring. I think Edison installed it when he was still moonlighting