House & Yard

So the Phoenix area’s actual, real employee of Bosch showed up to inspect the ailing dishwasher. He managed to moot the service call charge by changing out the control panel on a recall (which already had been done, but we won’t mention that…). He thought the late, great repairman’s scheme to “solder the connections” in said control panel — don’t think I told you about that refinement, it being too absurd even to discuss — was pretty hilarious.

However, he did agree that the thing needed a $350 repair: not to fix a spurious “impeller” but to replace the circulation pump. Further research in the Giant Encyclopedia of the Internet (i.e., Google) appears to confirm that.

This guy said he did not feel it’s worth putting $350 into a nine-year-old washer. Because, said he, the cost of dishwashers has dropped since I bought the one in the kitchen. Retail price for a perfectly fine machine of any brand is around $500, but he thought I could find one for significantly less at Sears or Lowe’s. He added that machine’s three pumps have approximately the same lifetime, so when one has to be replaced, there’s a good chance another one will die soon — to the tune of a similar repair bill. He also said his company would be happy to sell and install a new one, but he recommended looking at local retailers, which usually do better on the price.

And he’s right: Sears is advertising a comparable Bosch, online, for a little under that price — absent the usual array of discounts and scams you can extract from that outfit. Soooo…tomorrow I’ll have to traipse to the Sears Outlet, where sometimes one can score a true smokin’ deal (sometimes not), and then if they don’t have what I want, trudge around the city in search of a new washer.

Like I have nothing else to do with my time and money. 🙄

So yesterday I went completely off the deep end. Damn near kilt myself with overwork.

Monday is vacuuming day. Check.

Tuesday is steam-mop day.

Well, it’s been quite some time since I steam-mopped the 1680 square feet of tile in this house. As a stop-gap, I’ve been wet-mopping the dirtiest floors, which usually are the kitchen, the hall, the dining room, and the living room. Wet-mopping doesn’t really get the floor clean; it just pushes the dirt around.

Steam-mopping lifts the dirt off the floor…within limits.

Yesterday, it became clear that the limit had been reached and surpassed long ago. Every microfiber rag I attached to the steamer — quite a few — came up tar-black. I figured I’d better go over the floors twice. Rags were still black, and by the time the job was done, the floor was streaky. Decided to run the steamer over the kitchen floor again. The result: streaks.

The floors were so filthy, the steam-mopper couldn’t clean them. The grout, which in fact is not grout but this paint-on “sealer” stuff Satan & Proserpine applied, in a light gray color called “oyster” (what were those people thinking?), had turned dark brown with dirt.

I’d already been thinking I needed to get down on hands and scrub the damn floors.

But hold the Simple Green, which I suspect of being part of the problem, it having been applied in the wet-mopping. Instead of detergent, I used clear water, a stiff scrub brush, a scouring sponge, and rags; for the grout, I applied DIY glass cleaner — a mix of alcohol, ammonia, vinegar, and water.

It worked. In fact, it worked swimmingly. Here’s a before…

(Click on the image for closer inspection.)

And here’s an after…

The problem was, it worked altogether too well!

The project quickly turned into an absolutely crushing job. With back and hips already hurting, hunkering down on hands and knees and applying all the weight and strength of your upper body to scouring tile and grout is not much fun. And it took hour after hour after pain-enhancing hour. The problem was, I couldn’t stop! The difference between the cleaned space and the still-dirty tiles was eye-popping:

And I knew that if I stopped, there was no way in Hell I would come back the next day to finish the rest of the floor. It was a matter of do the whole job now or don’t do it at all.

Making this manageable entailed scouring two rows at a time, crosswise across the room (that is, taking the shortest distance, which in this case was from that bookcase to the wall opposite it). After just two rows, the water would turn almost black:

Actually, I had to get up and change the water more than once per two-row cycle. But you get the idea…

Ugh. After scrubbing the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hall floors, I thought I was gunna die! It was about 5:30 by the time the last bucketful of brown water was poured down the drain and a giant pile of rags went into the washer. Since this project began in the middle of the morning, I’d been on hands and knees for about 6 or 7 hours.

Fell into bed around 6:30. Woke up at 10 p.m., swilled down some puréed ginger root in tonic water — both traditional muscle-pain remedies, since I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, & acetaminophen (it actually worked, believe it or not!) — got back to sleep around 1 a.m., and was out cold until 6 a.m.

By light of day, the floor looks awesome! It hasn’t looked this good since I moved in here. The clean floors make the rooms look a lot brighter and bigger. Very nice.

And all in all, today I don’t hurt an awful lot more than I did yesterday morning, before plunging into the crazy project. Which isn’t saying much…except that things could be worse. A lot worse.

Problem is, all that flooring represents, ohh….maybe a third to almost half the total square footage of tilework. There are still four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the family room that need to be cleaned.

The remaining parts of the house were tiled by my guy, Mike the Bosnian Godfather. Of course, we couldn’t buy the same tile — it was long gone. But Mike found a much better grade of tile that, incredibly, picked up all the colors of Satan & Proserpine’s choice. Its surface, though textured to ape stone, is harder and less porous-feeling than S&P’s, so dirt dust-mops up more easily.

Mine, not theirs!

And I have better sense about grout than those two did: IMHO the grout for floor tiling should be the color of dirt at the outset. It’s actually a little lighter than I would have selected on my own, at Mike’s insistence — he felt true dirt-color would have contrasted too much with the existing tile’s off-white grout.

But still, it’s dark enough that it doesn’t look just terrible after five or six years of wear and tear. I’m thinking that, at least for the nonce, I can go over it several times with a new mop-head dipped in clear, unadulterated water. If and when I work up the energy, I’ll scrub the tiles in the office (Cassie and I spend most of our time in the kitchen and the office) and then let the rest of it be.

Homeownership. What a joy!

😀

Lest you thought I was kidding, here’s how the pool looks without the pump roiling the water:

This is after the pump has been running for three hours and I’ve scooped most of the sunken leaves and twigs off the bottom with a basket on the end of a long pole.

LOL! Harvey will have to suck up the remaining shrubbery and all that dirt. And by the time he’s finished doing that, the filter will have to be a) backwashed and b) probably taken apart, cleaned, and recharged, a job for a strong man.

Click on the images for better quality. 😀

Wow! Last night we got a dirt storm of the sort that usually occurs in late July and August around here. That, plus spitting, dirty rain. Thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour winds picked up tons of disturbed topsoil — all those half-baked housing developments that never got built left the desert all torn up — and dumped most of it into my swimming pool.

It was still raining at 3 a.m., when I got up and did a couple of hours of work on the Project That Will Not End. Went back to bed around 5:30; at 7 when the dog and I rolled out of the sack once and for all, rain was still falling. It stopped at Cassie’s command — the Queen of the Universe, Who hates to get wet, needed to use the facilities — and it hasn’t started again.

By light of day, it became evident that the pool is no longer filled with water. Mud is what it contains. I’ve never seen so much dirt in the pool, not even after the Great Dust-Up of 2011.

This was after I’d swept the steps and walls. The water’s roiled because the pump’s running. After a couple of hours, it will have pushed the sunken leaves and debris into a couple of mounds on the north side of the pool, making it easy for me to scoop them out so they won’t choke Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Once the worst of the trash is lifted out, Harvey will have to go in and vacuum up the mud that’s settled to the bottom — that brown streak to the north of the steps is dirt that’s settled out of the water, and the dark patches are just some of the leaves, twigs, and spent blossoms that are already beginning to coalesce.

First, though, the pump will have to run for several hours to pull as much of the dust-laden water through the filter as possible. And that, of course, will clog the filter, so that, after having blown my diddle-it-away savings on a birthday present for M’hijito, I will have to call the service guy and have him take the thing apart and clean it out. Whoop-de-doo.

Running the pump without Harvey connected will also skim off the floating debris. This is after the big stuff was lifted out:

All…over…the…surface…of…18,000…gallons…of…water…  What a mess!

Dumped an extra load of chlorine in there.

One thing that has to be said for the strategy of changing out the water every two years: The $200 cost more than pays for itself in chemicals and service calls. Over the past year, I’ve bought one, count it (1), Costco container of chlorine tabs to the tune of $80, and there’s still about a third of them left. I’ll have to buy another boxful in a month or so. You need to dump a lot of acid in until the water is stabilized — chlorine tabs, I’m told, contain stabilizer, but it takes several weeks for them to kick in. Acid, though, is very cheap.

And instead of hosting the pool repair guy every few weeks, I think I’ve had the new guy in here twice over the past year or so.

Since I’ve started draining and refilling the pool every second year, the thing has been practically maintenance-free…especially after I got rid of the devil-pod tree. Never thought I’d exult at cutting down a shade tree, but I must say, that was the messiest tree I’ve ever seen, even more so than the three eucalyptus trees I once planted to protect a house from a 30 percent rate increase by Arizona Public Service.

Heh. My neighbor never stopped bitching about those things!

It looks like this kind of weather is going to be the new normal, along with increasingly extreme heat during the summer. Used to be that 108 or 110 was a very hot day, indeed. Now 110 is par for the course from June through September, and we often get 115- to 118-degree days. In Sun City, where all the landscaping is gravel and people erect those trailer-courtly metal overhangs as patio covers, SDXB routinely reports 120-degree temps on his back porch.

The guy writing for the L.A. Times who predicted this area will become unlivable within the next few decades is probably right. Between the drought, which is not expected to end anytime in the foreseeable future, and the steadily increasing heat, the capacity of this land to sustain 1.1 million-plus residents is questionable. To put it mildly.

I expect about the second summer of 120- to 125-degree days will inaugurate an exodus. Some things are worse than higher property taxes and snow.

Me, I’d like to move to Oregon, since I can’t now and never will be able to afford the Bay Area. At least they have humane end-of-life policies there.

Okay, so some time has passed since the repaired and refinished furniture came back to my precincts. Today I’m feeling quite a lot better about the stuff.

Polishing the refinished Ethan Allen table with paste wax and then with Old English and Weiman’s  lemon oil actually did resolve the problem. As these products kind of sank in to the grain, that table began to look pretty darned good. The foggy and spotty effect has gone away, and what remains is a richly glowing natural grain. The tabletop consists of narrow planks that were joined together without regard to how the wood grain might match — because of course Ethan Allen would stain it a brown so dark as to be almost black and then apply a high-gloss varnish, obscuring the grain. But in a way, the randomly variegated grain creates an interesting and handsome effect.

So that turned out to be pretty good.

As for the chairs:

They’re a little lighter than I’d like.

However, the Watco oil with the “cherry” stain in it was a little more ridiculous than I’d like… “Cherry” turns out to be approximately the shade of that fake redwood stain people paint on their outdoor decks. Decided applying that stuff would be ill advised.

Before driving up to Home Depot to look for another color, I called the furniture repair guys and asked how they’d finished the pieces, dissembling my reason for inquiring by saying I wanted to know how best to care for the stuff. Manny said they’d applied paste wax to all three pieces.

Thought so.

The prospect of bathing both those chairs, each with 13 spindles, in mineral spirits did not appeal.

Really did not appeal.

By light of day (or was it light of reason?), I realized the color wasn’t that far off from the older chairs that had been refinished some 35 years ago.

Naturally, those chairs would have darkened over time. These probably will, too. Not that I’ll live another 35 years to see it.

Speaking of this, my son and heir dropped by last night. And — get this! — he didn’t notice the difference!

{chortle!} I pointed out the refinishing job to him without editorial comment. He thought the stuff looked great! And apparently he truly couldn’t tell much difference in the chairs.

If the de facto owner thinks they look fine, who am I to complain?

I laid on a layer of butcher’s wax, followed by three coats of furniture oil. And they look OK. Considering how old they are and how violently they’ve been abused, they’re probably as good as they’re gonna get. With the Navajo rug draped over the one chair that resides in the dining room, it looks just fine. And since only the dog visits the bedroom, where the other one lives, WGAS?

All this thrashing around delayed another project: I’d agreed to do a webinar on editing for a local publishers’ group, as a freebie — a favor to a friend. Though what needed to be done was all mapped out, I still needed to create a slide show and a script.

Because I found the prospect of oiling furniture a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting in front of a computer for god only knew how many hours, I got sidetracked from PowerPoint.

When I finally sat down to work, I just turned on the computer and PLINK! The power went out.

They’re building the damn lightrail up the main drag just to the west of us, creating vast chaos. I figured the workers had hit an electric line — when they ran the thing past my son’s house, the power, water, and gas were constantly going out.

Exceptionally annoyed, I felt a bad thought enter my mind: I had never violated the city’s laws by carrying an alcoholic drink into the park. So I poured a bourbon and water into a coffee mug, lashed up the dog in a collar and leash, and headed out.

The streets — all of them! — were overrun with traffic. Apparently they were diverting people off said main drag, or so I thought. Stopped to chat with the neighbors. Moved on.

Cassie didn’t want to go in the direction of the park, and neither did I, since it didn’t look like we could make our way across the roads clogged with hordes of confused and angry-looking drivers. So instead we wandered into the neighborhood to the south.

There, in the quietest and most dead-end corner of the ’hood, what should we come across but these people standing by the side of the road, looking stressed and unhappy. Incredibly, a car of genteel-looking old folks had crashed into a lawn dude’s truck and trailer. This encounter smushed in the front end of the old folks’ vehicle; barely scratched the Sanford & Sons-style truck. They were unhappy because the lawn dude didn’t have a driver’s license (and, you can bet, didn’t have insurance, either). He was unhappy because he was no doubt about to be deported.

How can you run into each other on a tiny neighborhood lane where you have noplace to go — it’s not a through street, for godsake — and where you should be driving about 10 mph??

At any rate, they reported on the cause of the power outage. They were on Northern when they witnessed a wreck: “When we saw the power pole coming down, we thought it looked pretty bad.” All the people charging through the neighborhood were being diverted off Northern, one of the busiest streets in the city.

By the time Cassie and I wandered back to the house, the lights were back on.

Powered up the iMac, which came on without much complaint but was a hassle because Word recovered all or most of the files that were sitting open and re-opened them with no names. Takes forever to figure out what they were called and where they were stashed and resave them under the correct filenames.

But the MacBook, which I wanted to use so I could sit in an easy chair because my back and leg hurt like hell every time I sit in this desk chair, would not come on!

It just sat there whirring its goddamn gear-shaped mandala.

This was a problem, because the most recent version of a document I needed was on that computer, and because it wasn’t coming up on DropBox.

Finally I gave up trying to reboot and just let it sit there and whir away while I wrestled with Word, Excel, and Preview files.

About then the phone rang: M’hijito. He wanted to take me to dinner!

I never say no to an offer like that. Besides, he couldn’t have called more serendipitously: here was a man who could get the MacBook running again, if anyone this side of the Genius Bar could.

By the time my son showed up at the door, the laptop had come back on…but it had lost its wireless connection. He got it back online, and then we headed for a restaurant.

So I didn’t get started until after dark. And it was quarter to one in the morning by the time I finished the twenty-slide PowerPoint presentation and its accompanying script. I have NO idea how long it will take…went to bed before rehearsing it.

I doubt if we’ll get any business from this. Unless I’m mistaken, this group consists pretty much of the same set who made up the defunct Arizona book publishers’ association, whose members are not prepared to pay a living wage to contract editors. That’s why we’ve been targeting corporate work: Tina and I need to put food on our tables. But things are pretty slow just now — for reasons I don’t understand, all the work comes in at once, so we’re invariably faced with a gigantic crush, and then we have a month or two with nothing to do. So I can afford to donate my time.

Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.

Meanwhile, though, I’m feeling a lot better about the furniture. That’s something.